The Secret Life of Gods

By Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff

“I’m telling you, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Not only is this one of the most exciting archaeological finds since… since…” Rhys Llewellyn’s hands searched the air for a suitable comparison.

Danetta Price, CEO of Tanaka Enterprises, settled in her chair and propped sneakered feet atop the coffee table in the small lounge/mess of Rhys’s corporate schooner, Ceilidh. She was wise enough not to try to finish the sentence. That would be sure to send him off into a litany on the accuracies and inaccuracies of her choice. “I get the picture,” she told him dryly. “Now, would you kindly stop pacing and tell me—”

But he’d gotten himself unstuck and was off again. “And of course, to work with Dr. Burton… I did tell you I studied under him at Edinburgh?” Seeing her nod, he forged on. “I was in awe of the man, Danetta. Sheerly and purely in awe of him. He’s been more influential in my life as an archaeologist—”

“I hear you, Rhys!” Danetta chuckled and peered at her chief negotiator between the toes of her sneakers. “How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

Rhys ran a hand through his unruly red hair and grinned ruefully. “Sorry. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone precisely—” Reading her frown, he added, “But no more than a month or two at best.”

“At worst you mean.”

“I have the time coming.”

Danetta raised a restraining hand. “I know. You have months of leave coming. I’m only selfishly concerned with the state of our negotiating team without you and yours on it. I don’t suppose you intend to leave Yoshi and Rick out of this little junket.”

Rhys scratched behind his ear, a gesture Danetta knew meant he thought he was asking for the Moon. “Well, actually, I thought they’d enjoy the break. It’s been a while since any of us has worked in the field. Not that I’m belittling your efforts to keep us in trim. That conference on xenoanthropology last month was marvelous. But we all miss the field work—and this, well—”

“Yes, I know—once in a lifetime opportunity, greatest dig since King Tut, close company with the God of Archaeology.”

Rhys flushed. “Please, Danetta, I don’t worship the man, but I’ve the deepest respect for his accomplishments. And I said not one word about ‘King Tut,’ which, as you ought to know, was a find of very little historical significance—”

“OK, OK. Saint Burton, then, and you can pick your own dig.” Danetta uncrossed her legs and stood, straightening bright silk shorts around her hips. “As if I’d ever say ‘no’ to you, Rhys McCrae Llewellyn. Go on your little sabbatical, with my blessing. We don’t have any major bids in the offing that our regular crew can’t handle. If Yosh and Rick want to tag along, they’re certainly entitled. They’ve got as big a backlog of leave as you have. It’s not my idea of a dream vacation, but, to each his own. Now…” she glanced purposefully at the door to the companionway. “If you don’t think me rude, I’ll just take my little cutter and shift on back to the home world, “It’s been about two months since I’ve seen my beloved husband. And the changes on Tson are happening just about as fast as he can handle them.” She circled the table, caught Rhys by the upper arms and gave him a solid kiss on the cheek. “Bon voyage, Professor. Have a nice dig.”

Rhys waited a restrained five seconds after the lounge doors closed before executing a four-foot-high pirouette and a clan McCrae war whoop. He’d landed and was going up for a second revolution when Yoshi Umeki poked her head into the room from the adjoining galley. “Sir? Are you all right?”

He caught himself on the back of a chair, narrowly avoiding a trip to the floor, and straightened his flight suit. “Are you all right, Rhys,” he corrected.

Her smile was brief and bright. “Are you all right, Rhys?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” He rubbed his hands together briskly, a gesture which Yoshi knew was usually followed by some outrageous suggestion. “How would you like to go on a little vacation?”

The “little vacation” began with the passengers and crew of the Ceilidh in an induced sleep, preparatory to a shift to the distant precincts of a star its human visitors called Leguin. They would travel simultaneously through space and time—outward through one, backward and forward through the other—to arrive at their destination within a week of when they had left their point of origin. The week of travel time was composed entirely of inter-shift stops to reorient the ship for its next jump and check the health of its passengers; the temporal shift itself was virtually instantaneous. Backward and forward went the Ceilidh, safeguards built into her temporal grid dictating that she ascended through time exactly as far as she had descended. Rhys, as always, slid toward sleep imagining what it would be like if they were only allowed to take a detour now and then.

A week later, the Tanaka Corporate schooner Ceilidh slipped out of time-altered space, settled into synchronous orbit around Leguin 4, and delivered its passengers into what a groggy Roderick Halfax immediately dubbed “Fort Stinking Swamp.” It wasn’t so much a swamp as it was a rain forest, Rhys told him—as if he didn’t already know the difference—nor did it stink, strictly speaking. The equatorial forest on Leguin 4 was a place of pungent and warring perfumes, rather like, Yoshi commented, what happened when all the Umeki and Sakai aunts gathered for tea on a muggy Hagi day. Rhys had to admit the cloyingly sweet smell of blooms might grow tiresome. He said that, then forgot the blooms and their odiferous presence the moment he set eyes on Professor Sir Drew Burton, K.N.B.E., and his mammoth find.

It was a complex of buildings still half-buried in green and burgundy plant life that brought to mind Angkor Wat, Teotihuacan, and the ziggurats of Baroosh at Wan, all at the same moment. Walls of massive granitic block rose from a froth of shrub and vine to a height of about five meters. They were interrupted by a rectangular gateway that extended another two meters above that. The lintel evidendy held something of interest, for a scaffold covered it from edge to edge. Above that rise of native rock Rhys could see the top of a thick spire whose rounded sides were cloaked in mosses of varying hues. So overwhelmed was he by the sheer magnitude of the place, he barely noticed that the patron saint of archaeology was vigorously pumping his hand.

“Professor Llewellyn,” the older man enthused, “you have no idea how pleased I am that you and your associates could join us here. You’ve done well since leaving University, sir. Your reputation precedes you.”

Rhys caught himself back from the dizzying sight of the tower looming above its encircling walls, swatted an insect and murmured, “Sir, your reputation overwhelms me.”

Burton laughed, showing pleasant crow’s feet and gleaming, even teeth. “Flattery will get you anywhere. You know, I have to admit, I was dubious when I heard you’d gone into corporate service. A little disappointed, if you want the honest truth. But it didn’t seem to slow you down in the ‘real’ world, eh? You practically wrote the book on alien antiquities.”

Rhys flushed pleasantly. “Correction. I wrote one book on xenoarchaeology; you’ve written dozens on every conceivable subject.”

“Twenty… but really, I thought your analysis of the Poclar culture on New Scotland was quite insightful. I’ll be interested to see what you think of our work here.”

They were moving now, beneath the great stone arch and into the embrace of the ruins. Rick Halfax, falling in beside Yoshi, caught her eye and made a face. “Look at ’em, Yosh. Two peas in a pod and happy as clams. I think the professor has found a soul mate.”

Yoshi, to whom colloquial English was a third language at best, and who had always thought of herself as Rhys Llewellyn’s soul mate, gave her companion a wrinkle-browed look of puzzlement. “Isn’t that a mixed metaphor?”

“They’re not metaphors; they’re cliches. Mixed? I dunno. I’d eat peas with clam.”

“Well, I’ve never understood that saying. How can you tell a clam is happy?”

Rick rolled his eyes. “Never mind.” Yoshi shrugged and lengthened her strides so she could hear what the professors clam were discussing.

“The Leguini are rather an odd bunch of philistines,” Dr. Burton was saying as he led the way among the lichen-encrusted buildings. “They don’t seem to care two figs for their distant past. Anything over 500 years old is completely uninteresting to them. Scott—that’s our master digger—insists that’s pragmatism. I personally think it’s laziness. I suppose I ought to consider us fortunate; if they weren’t so ‘pragmatic’ the Leguini would probably be out here making our lives hell.”

Yoshi doubted Rhys even heard him. He was turning in a slow, unsteady circle, an expression of complete rapture on his face, his eyes drinking in the ruins that now surrounded them. The tower was the most outstanding feature in the group. It sat at the locus of the cluster of buildings, its spiral rising, vine-draped and majestic, out of a hill of detritus which was still being cleared away by a team of grimy diggers. Though the top several tiers had crumbled, it stood high above the surrounding walls, a veil of steamy mist cloaking its highest levels. A huge tree had grown up right through the middle of it, and spread its branches out over the mountain of masonry like a fantastic parasol. To Yoshi it looked like a many-tiered cake with green and burgundy icing and a giant florette ornament. She grimaced at the lack of professionalism in that comparison—her anthropology professor father would despair of her.

Flanking the tower on either side were two low, massive structures —two, maybe three stories tall. They were windowless, but had several huge doors apiece set at regular intervals along the facades. They appeared to be identical. A glance back toward the gate showed the one apparent difference; the building to the east had a square annex at its northern end that had tall, rectangular windows and a door of normal proportions. Only now did Yoshi notice the accouterments of archaeology—the ranging pegs, the spades, the finds trays and canisters that she suspected would always clutter a dig no matter how much technology evolved.

“This is incredible!” Rhys’s voice oozed out in hushed awe.

Burton was nodding, smiling. “Isn’t it, though? Reminds one a bit of Caracol. Except, of course, for the burgundy foliage. We call it Sper-ets —that’s Temple of the Moon, in the local parlance.”

They took a whirlwind tour of the major features of Sper-ets—whirlwind, because Leguin was sinking toward the horizon of its fourth planet, and night, according to their host, was not a safe time to be poking about among the stones.

“Nocturnal nasties,” he explained. “Leguin 4 is home to a lovely assortment of poisonous creepy-crawlies. An entomologist’s paradise.”

“So, everything just closes up around here at night?” Rick asked.

“Around here, yes. Rural Leguini wear ‘night suits’—hip-waders made of some tough but flexible synthetic; a cowling that reaches almost to the waist. Of course, we’ve taken the precaution of connecting all the tents and cabins in our camp complex with slatex tubing.” He glanced at Rhys. “I hear you’re partially responsible for the increased availability of that commodity.”

Rhys smiled, pleased that Burton knew of his previous year’s coup in the slatex market. His pleasure was immediately dampened by the regret that the coup hadn’t been archaeological instead of commercial. “I don’t suppose you’ve heard of the recent developments on Tson?” he asked hopefully.

“No, sorry, I haven’t. But you can catch me up over supper.”

They dined in the camp commons, a large portable cabin that would, Dr. Burton assured them, be proof to the local fauna. There they sat at a table with Burton’s associate, Nyami Deer-Walks-Here; his dig master, Scott Buchanan; his apprentice, Wayne Bell; and a Xthni named Tzia of Qltrel, a specialist in restoration who also served as finds assistant. There were others, as well, diggers and apprentices (mostly students from Collective universities), scientific specialists from a variety of disciplines. But Sir Drew Burton was undisputedly the crowned head of the gathering, and Rhys felt rather like the starry-eyed traveler who finds himself assigned to the captain’s table for a galactic cruise.

The only sour note of the evening played when Yoshi stopped Wayne Bell in the middle of a joke to say, “I notice you keep referring to the aboriginal population as the ‘Linguine.’ Why is that?”

Bell shrugged and smiled, eyes kindling in a manner that made Rhys suspect Yoshi was the only person at table he’d not resent for interrupting a punch line. “Leguini—linguine. You can see how it sort of lends itself to the word play.”

Yoshi, missing both the humor and the humorist’s intent expression, shook her head. “Leguin is what we called the star before we realized there was anybody here. They call it Etsa, which means ‘light-giver.’ And they call their planet Etsat, meaning ‘child of Etsa,’ and themselves Etsatat, meaning children of the child of Etsa.’ ”

Bell’s brows raised. “You’ve certainly done your homework.”

Yoshi toyed with her braid. “I find the Etsatat culture interesting. It has striking parallels to nineteenth century Earth. Of course, on Etsat, there are no significant subcultures to compare with Earth’s aboriginal groups. In some ways that makes it all the more fascinating. A singularly unfragmented global society.”

“Yes, well, I fail to find them the least bit engaging,” interjected Burton. “They’ve lost touch with their past. So much so that they’re absolutely useless as guides. They’ve no knowledge of the way their ancestors lived, how they thought, what they loved.” He shook his head, obviously finding that a difficult thing to grasp.

Nyami Deer-Walks-Here nodded in agreement. “Drew’s right. The Etsatat are a singularly future-oriented people. What’s past is past, what’s buried might as well stay that way. I have to admit, I found that very disconcerting when we first arrived. ” She chuckled. “When we told the regional governor what we wanted to do out here in the wildy woods, he thought we were insane. Just a bunch of rusticating lovers of antiquity, eh, Drew? I sometimes think we’d be content to live life backwards.”

Burton harrumphed. “Well, there’s to be a balance, I’m sure, but dammit, Nyami, these people have been so bloody unhelpful. Can’t tell us anything, because they’ve never bothered to explore.” He leaned toward Rhys across the table. “Do you know, we’ve never found the slightest evidence of latter-day looting? No one has been in these buildings since they were abandoned.”

“Except for the vermin,” amended Bell.

“Except for that. And this is by no means the only site we’ve been working. There’s a village about five klicks from here, and temple complexes like this one—” He thumbed toward the dig, “—are all over the map. But the Leguini have absolutely no record of any of them.” His eyes wandered to the dark outside the cabin windows—a dark lit by plasma torches on tall poles. “The treasures that have lain buried here for countless centuries…”

“Are still here for you to find,” Rhys finished, grinning.

Burton returned the grin. “You count my blessings for me. And tomorrow, you’ll get to join in the finding. Now, before we all turn in, I want to give you a preview of what’s in store for you.” He rose from the table and disappeared into the connecting tube that led to the Finds tent. When he reappeared two minutes later, he carried a wrapped object in his hands. Setting it on the table, he carefully peeled away the soft swaddling. Inside was a statuette approximately thirty centimeters in height.

That the person portrayed was Etsatat was obvious, though the statue was somewhat stylized. Vaguely humanoid, it had the characteristic wide face with the tiny, pointed chin, low set, over-sized eyes and wide thinlipped mouth. One long-fingered hand clutched a staff of some dull metal, the other was raised to a necklace of large rectangular bangles that hung around the effigy’s neck. Atop the staff was a vaguely crescent- or fan-shaped cap. Whether it was a scepter or weapon wasn’t readily apparent. The Etsatat’s oddly jointed legs seemed to be encased in boots of a different material than the body and, on second glance, Rhys realized the hands and forearms were also sheathed in the same stuff. A long, flat apron hung from beneath the necklace and seemed, on closer inspection, to be part of a stole that covered the figure’s shoulders completely. Taken all together it looked to be protective gear—armor perhaps, or protection from Etsat’s “nocturnal nasties,” or yet again, ceremonial garb or uniform.

By far the most outstanding bit of apparel was the figure’s elaborate headdress. Fitted to the wide, shallow skull, was a helmet of the same metal as the staff. Atop it was a flat, gleaming silver crest that was a larger twin of the one mounted atop the staff. It reminded Rhys much of a figure found on Earth at Teotihuacan in the late twentieth century.

“Meet the Moon God, whose temple this appears to be. We call him Etseket, which is Etsatat for Moon God, naturally. As you can see, he’s a warrior deity of some sort. Or the priest-surrogate for same. We haven’t found out quite as much about him as we’d like, but this entire complex, as I said, appears to be dedicated to him. We re not quite certain of the purpose of the buildings on site—although they seem to be depositories for treasure, tribute, perhaps burial goods. The tower… well, there’s a mystery. The hole in the roof is the only obvious access point—though that giant conifer’s clogged that up pretty effectively. We’re fairly certain there’s an entrance hidden in that mound of spoil around the base. Scott and I are all for cutting the tree out chunk by chunk, but Nyami here will have none of it.” He afforded her an indulgent glance to which she replied with a shrug. “So, it’s dig we do.”

“There’s an accretion of ash on one side of some of the bricks we’ve collected at the top of the tower, ” Scott Buchanan offered. “It’s possible the apex of the tower served as a sacrificial altar.”

“We suspect it might be the tomb of this fellow.” Burton patted Ets-eket on the headdress.

“Of course, we’ve not found any humanoid remains yet,” said Tzia, entering the conversation for the first time. “Just small animal bones.”

Burton cleared his throat. “The sheer volume of animal sacrifices we’ve found in the pits at the southern end of the complex is astounding. I’ve never seen anything to compare with it.”

“Of course,” said Tzia, “you have to sort the newer leavings—dead vermin and the like—out, or the data become skewed.”

“The data,” said Burton, voice sharp with irritation, “are as accurate as they can be.”

Rhys barely heard the exchange, so intent was he on the figurine. Drinking in every detail, he lifted tentative hands to it, then glanced at Burton. “May I, sir?”

“What? Oh, of course.” The older man made a sweeping gesture of welcome.

Rhys explored the figure with hands and eyes, memorizing every texture and nuance. “Marvelous! How old?”

“At least 5,000 years, yet even the softer metal is intact.”

“Where did you find him?”

“In the Chapel. That’s what we call that small annex to Temple One. He was still in his little carved niche beside the door. Wish we knew the Etsatat name for him, but well, they haven’t got one.”

Rhys opened his mouth to ask more, but Burton forestalled him. “Keep your questions for tomorrow. Time to turn in. The day starts very early around here, Professor Llewellyn.” He rose and extended his hand to the younger man. “Wayne will show you to your cabin.”

“I am completely and utterly happy.” Alone with Rick and Yoshi in the cabin they’d been assigned, Rhys stretched full length on his sleep mat, luxuriating in the fine, rare sensation that rolled over and around him. The bleat of a night avian, the muted whistles and twitters of insects, the humid, warm air against his skin, the velvet quality of the darkness beyond the large windows. It was magic; it was medicine. He could feel the site out here waiting for him like a new friend, well met. The buzz of excitement he’d felt since setting foot on Etsat—no, since receiving Drew Burton’s invitation to do so—faded pleasantly to a balmy whisper of contentment.

Rick shot Yoshi a wry grin and saw an answering flash in her eyes, even in the unreliable light of the single large moon filtered through copious foliage. “It is nice and peaceful here,” he said.

Rhys snorted “Peaceful? Is that all you can manage, Roddy? Peaceful? You’re in the presence of a legend, I’ll have you know. Professor Drew Burton has done more to advance xenoarchaeology than any other single researcher, just by moving into the arena. Since he’s been involved in extraterrestrial research, he’s brought more attention to it, more sponsors, than it’s ever had. I expect his published works in the field will soon define it.”

“I thought his paper on the aboriginal cultures of Mandrorin was good,” Yoshi said, paused and added, “but I found some of his views a little biased.”

“Nonsense, Yoshi. Dr. Burton is a brilliant researcher. Look how much he’s done here already. Do you realize they’ve been at this dig for only four months?”

After a moment of silence, Yoshi murmured, “I didn’t like the way they called the Etsatat Linguine.’ ”

Rich snorted. “You take things too seriously, Yosh. It was a play on words. Human words. Burton’s just pinched because the Etsatat aren’t as agog at his discoveries as we are. I kind of think he imported us because he wanted to impress Rhys.”

Rhys frowned into the dark. “Why in heaven’s name should he care to impress me?”

“Because he respects you?” countered Rick, and Yoshi could almost feel the heat of Rhys’s embarrassment beating against her cheeks.

“Good Lord, Roddy! Why should he respect—?”

“Maybe because you’re the man who brought the White Temple of Tson to light after it had been buried for two millennia. Oh, not to mention that you were the first human to establish meaningful communication with the Tsong Zee.”

“I didn’t do anything that important. The Tsong Zee found their Shrine, and they established contact with us.”

“He said, ‘communication,’ not ‘contact,’ ” argued Yoshi. “You were their Key Master. You were their eyes. They couldn’t have found the Temple without your help.”

“Arguable. And irrelevant. Drew hadn’t even heard of Tson.”

“Then I guess he doesn’t use his own camp library. It contains a number of major articles covering your discoveries there, and someone’s been accessing them.”

The silence hooted and whistled. Rhys yawned, rolled over and feigned sleep, but the burning of his ears kept him awake for hours.

Breakfast was a necessity Rhys would gladly have done without. But he ate, his ears barely catching the conversations at table, his eyes going again and again to the tower rising out of the mist-draped forest. The steamy veil had begun to break up a bit by the time they approached the temple complex. This time, Rhys vowed, he’d keep his wits about him enough to take professional, objective note of things.

“The village,” Burton explained as they drew up to the great stone gate, “isn’t nearly as well preserved as this site. We actually started our work there. There’s still a team at that site, but I moved the base camp here because this—” He made a sweeping gesture at the lichen covered walls, “—will likely yield much more fruit. Has already, in fact. Nyami’s more interested in the village than I am. It’s the cultural anthropologist in her.”

Rhys nodded, studying the scaffolded archway above them. Made of large blocks of ruddy-mellow stone, its sculpted haunch served as the centerpiece of the cool-toned front wall. Behind the scaffolding that partially covered it, Rhys could just make out a large, central figure. “Ets-eket again?”

Burton smiled. “Indeed. Flanked by a fine bas relief. And it’s in as remarkable shape as everything else here. You’ll find Ets-eket is well-represented hereabouts.” He led the way beneath the arch into the central plaza and Rhys was struck again by the sheer magnitude of the place.

Workers were already crawling over and around the buildings, carrying tools, instruments, finds trays. Rhys brought his eyes back to the tower where Scott Buchanan directed traffic for the group digging away the fall of soil and humus at its base. “That’s brick, isn’t it?”

Burton nodded. “Kiln fired, too, not Sun dried. We’re hoping to find the entrance within the next week or so.”

They toured each of the buildings in turn. What Burton called the Chapel had apparently been divided into several small rooms; the niche in which he’d discovered the Ets-eket icon was halfway up a broken wall next to a ruined doorway. The larger buildings—Temples One and Two, for the sake of identification—had been partitioned sparingly. Several small rooms ringed the perimeter of the huge main chambers which were buried in centuries of compost and littered with debris from the fallen roofs and overshadowing forest. Among the detritus of ages, diggers worked in their gridded areas, taking a decidedly horizontal approach to the site.

Rhys peered over shoulders, chatted with workers, and took notes on everything. In Temple One, he commented on the series of large rectangular depressions along the back wall. Burton immediately led him to one that was being excavated. The trough was lined with finely planed slabs of the native granite and looked as though it may have had at one time a highly polished facing. They ’d already dug down about four feet and had discovered literally hundreds of potsherds.

“We suspect this was a storage area,” Burton told him. “Possibly for foodstuffs the priests ate or used ritually. Or perhaps a burial cache of goods for the next life.” He shot Rhys a sharp glance. “We will find a burial.”

“The burial of Ets-eket?”

“Or of his mortal stand-in.”

“You think he’s a local or regional deity, then, rather than a ruler of some sort.”

“He could be both. Think of Osiris and his relationship to the pharaohs of Egypt. But Ets-eket’s influence is hardly regional, Doctor. There are ruins half a continent away with these same structures and images. Generally they’re in much worse shape —too bad, because it seems some of them were built on a grander scale even than this. But the cult of Ets-eket evidently extended to most of the inhabited regions of this planet.”

Rhys raised a flamboyantly red brow. “That’s amazing. In fact, it’s unprecedented.”

Burton grinned from ear to ear. “Now you understand my excitement over this find.”

“Well, if it’s that wide-spread, that rather removes it from cult status. It’s more likely you’re looking at the relics of a major world religion.”

“Dear boy… Yoshi, at Rhys’s shoulder, cringed at the patronizing note of rebuke in the professor’s voice, “we’re talking about the icon-ridden worship of a nature deity. I’ve read your treatises on xeno-religion. I don’t mean to sound disapproving, but they reek of cultural relativism.”

Rhys blushed to the roots of his hair. “I’m sorry you disagree so strongly with my theories.”

“Theories?” Burton laughed heartily and clapped Rhys’s shoulder. “My dear boy, theories can be supported by evidence. Your abstractions on the common roots of alien and human religion are dabbles in philosophy. Ah, but it’s engaging reading, Rhys! You’re a damn fine writer. Now, come, I want to show you the relief over the front gate.” His arm around the younger man’s shoulders, Sir Burton drew him away into the full sunlight of the outer plaza.

Yoshi, lagging behind, bit the inside of her lip to keep from saying something she might later regret. Rhys’s work in xeno-religion, she knew, was the heart and soul of his anthropological world. It was clear Burton had no idea how close to his colleague’s heart of hearts he’d stuck his egoistic dagger.

Watching her, Rick leaned in close to her presently red ear. “I heard that stream of mental abuse. Come on, Yosh, don’t blow a sealant ring. I think your ‘big brother’ can probably defend himself if verbal fisticuffs break out. I thought he took all that wallah pretty well, don’t you?”

“He shouldn’t have to defend himself. Not to Dr. Burton. He has nothing but respect for that man. He doesn’t deserve to be patronized.

“Respect?” Rick steered her out of the Temple One and into the plaza. “I’d say he idolizes him.”

“Yes, I can tell. I’m not blind.”

“Ouch! Yoshi Umeki, you, of all people, should understand that a little hero worship can be good for the soul. And for the career. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t made a hero of a certain Scotsman.”

“It’s not at all the same thing. First of all, I was sixteen when I met Rhys, and a sophomore in college. We have a student-mentor relationship because that’s what I am until I earn my doctorate—his student. Rhys is a grown man and has a double degree of his own. He’s at least Burton’s equal, but he doesn’t see that and Burton’s not about to encourage him to.”

“So let me get this straight. You hate Burton because you think Rhys likes him too much.”

“I don’t hate him. I don’t even know him. I just don’t believe he’s bigger than life.”

“Uh-huh. Which is why you snarl secretly every time he opens his mouth. You know what I think? I think you’ve become overly protective of our dear professor of antiquities. And I’m beginning to think it goes a little deeper than that pseudosibling defense mechanism you’ve been packing for the last three years.”

“Where’d you get the degree in psychology, Doctor Halfax? More Fool U.?” Her golden skin suffused with rose, Yoshi pulled out of his light grasp and strode ahead of him.

At the great stone gate, they joined the two archaeologists conversing below the scaffolded facade. “As you can see,” Burton was saying, gesturing to where several people worked next to the carving of Ets-eket, “flanking the icon are twin reliefs. We’ve got a four-foot-panel pretty well restored.” Waving, he caught Tzia’s eye. “Why don’t you all make room up there? I’d like to show off for our guests.”

Tzia gave a peculiarly reptilian version of a human nod, her entire head rising and falling, and shooed her crew of three off the scaffold. Burton had just set foot on the bottom of the access ladder when his comlink chirped. It was Wayne Bell, calling him to the Chapel. He bid the others continue and left, promising to return quickly.

Rhys climbed the ladder eagerly with Yoshi close behind. When she glanced back at Rick, he shook his head and stuffed his hands in the pockets of his khakis. “That scaffold looks like my worst nightmare. I’m going to go prowl around those big square pits in the back of the complex, see what’s being dug up there.”

Yoshi shrugged and scrambled up to the fiberboard platform where Rhys and Tzia were already engaged in a close inspection of the wall to the right of Ets-eket. She hunkered down behind to peer between their heads. Rhys was running his fingers over the slightly elevated surface of the relief, which depicted rank upon rank of men dressed in garb similar to that worn by the Ets-eket effigy. The main departure from his styling was their headgear, which was drastically understated in comparison. They did look, Yoshi had to admit, like helms of war. Some of the men in the relief carried staffs topped by the same fat crescent or fan Ets-eket’s sported. She supposed they could be weapons of some sort. She was honest enough with herself to recognize that she didn’t want to see war helms and weapons because that’s what Burton saw. She sighed. Bias made objectivity tough.

“This is amazing, ” Rhys murmured. “There’s actually still a tiny bit of pigment left in these. The state of preservation is… exquisite.”

“The elements on Etsatat are merciful,” said Tzia. “The forest root systems have done the most damage.” She shifted so Rhys could see the four-foot section to the left of the central figure.

Rhys scooted closer. “Looks like a wagon train. Goods for the god?”

Tzia affected the Xthni equivalent of a smile. “We’re not exactly in agreement on this one. When Dr. Burton looks at it, he sees a train of tribute and an army of sacrificial victims or slaves.”

Rhys studied the two slabs for a moment. “And what do you see?”

Tzia hesitated, her neck frill rippling with thought, then said, “I’m not certain. But I don’t see slaves or victims. Where are their manacles? And notice that they seem to be wearing the same basic clothing—uniforms, one might say—that their so-called guards are wearing.”

Rhys nodded. “Except for the crested helmets and staffs.”

Tzia’s head rose and fell. “Not only that, but those staffs look like dreadfully ineffective weapons. More like… ceremonial objects, symbols of power or rank.”

“How does Professor Burton explain the anomaly?”

“There’s no anomaly to explain,” said Burton’s voice from the scaffold ladder.

Tzia jumped guiltily, her sagittal frill flattening, and moved to put Rhys and Yoshi between herself and the other archaeologist. Burton pulled himself up onto the platform, his face a furious red.

“Tzia’s mistake is that she has read the symbolic as literal. She tends to view archaeological evidence in the same way many people read mythology scripture. How many different literal interpretations of the Revelation of Saint John existed before hindsight rendered interpretation irrelevant? No, we must read this as we would read any religious script. To do otherwise would be to stumble into lazy and simplistic thinking. This is the symbolic record of a primitive people. If you want to see the meaning of the group, look to the representative figure.” He rapped Ets-eket’s stone kilt with the tips of his fingers. “Here is your warrior-king, armed with spear and scepter. Here is your man-god, wearing the crown of lordship. I’d appreciate it, Tzia, if you would leave the search for archaeological truth to those uniquely qualified to perform it—those with the human quality of imagination.”

Neck frill rigid, sagittal frill completely collapsed, Tzia dipped her head in a gesture of defeat. Appalled, Yoshi glanced at Rhys. For the second time that morning, his face and hair matched.

“Professor Burton,” he began, but the older man cut him off with a gesture.

“Come, Rhys. They’ve made another find in the Chapel.” He had gone over the edge of the scaffolding before anyone could react to the news.

Rhys glanced apologetically at Tzia. “I’m very sorry. I… I thought your commentary was perfectly reasonable.”

Tzia offered a thin-lipped Xthni smile. “Thank you. But you should not let Professor Burton hear you say that. He… does not like my unlaundered ideas.”

Rhys frowned and started to ask what she meant, but Burton interrupted from below. “I say, Llewellyn! Are you coming or not?”

He gave Tzia another apologetic look and hurried down the ladder.

“What did you mean,” asked Yoshi, as they watched the two men disappear beneath the arching gate, “unlaundered ideas?”

Tzia uttered a sigh that needed no translation. “When first we saw what this relief depicted, it was yet early in the dig. I did not then know it was wise to… advance my theories through Professor Deer-Walks-Here. Now, I am more careful.”

“But surely Professor Burton respects your skills, otherwise he wouldn’t have included you on his team.”

Tzia’s laugh was a thin trill of sound. “He respects Nyami. For his dig, Nyami he must have. I, Nyami, must have. So, to get Nyami, he gets me.”

Yoshi caught up with the others in the large rear chamber of the Chapel. Rick sidled up to her, a puzzled expression on his face. “You all right? You look like the bluebird of doom.”

“I’m fine.”

“What happened up on that scaffold? Rhys looks like he ripped his favorite kilt and Burton’s all red in the face.”

“I’ll tell you about it later,” Yoshi murmured. “What’d they find?”

“Looks like their first real treasure trove.”

It did indeed. The abundant coinage was rectangular and cut from some soft stone. The diggers had found it in a deposit in the far comer of the room, where Rhys and Burton were already hunkered down between photonic grid lines. Next to them, the three diggers assigned to the room stood and beamed. A fourth worker recorded everything with a holocam.

Burton’s pale eyes were exultant as he held two of the coins up for the camera. “As you can see each one is embossed with the image of Ets-eket on one side and a sacrificial altar on the other. Further evidence of his pervasive force in this society.”

“Looks almost like jade,” murmured Rhys, turning a piece over in his hands. He ran an exploratory finger over the sculpted surface, noting the neatly cut hole in the center of Ets-eket’s headdress.

There was more. Further digging unearthed what appeared to be a calendar. It had four rows of nine squares each; most squares embossed with one of three symbols—the tower with what appeared to be a flame dancing atop it, a rectangular object that looked like a wagon with spoked wheels, and a second rectangle which may have represented an altar, as Burton suggested, or anything else that was boxlike in shape. At the top of the stone slab was one of the ubiquitous carvings of Ets-eket. The symbols appeared in regular alternating order, except for the last three squares of each row, which contained circles.

Burton was thrilled with the discovery. “To find a religious calendar of this type is extraordinary luck. This will tell us much more about the nature of the religion practiced here.”

The day continued to go well for the archaeologists. By evening the team working in the quartet of pits along the southern wall reported that the detritus was exceptionally full of humus and animal bones abounded. Outside of these areas, bone finds were limited to partial skeletons or the carcasses of local vermin. The character of the bones was also of interest; most of them had been broken, many had even had the marrow removed and a great many more showed definite gnaw marks and cuts. Meanwhile, the team in Temple One turned up an incredible variety of ceramic—pieces of plates, bowls, ewers and cups from the plain to the ornate.

“I think we’ve found the banquet hall of an Etsatat Henry the VIII,” joked one of the diggers.

The evening meal was taken in an air of celebration. Everyone, Rhys included, basked in the glow of discovery. As the glow faded and exhaustion from the busy, discovery-filled day took over, Rhys excused himself and went to the Finds tent. Yoshi was already there, poring over coins and calendar in the steady glow of the camp lights in the empty room. Rhys sat down opposite her at a sorting table, watching her make notes in her field journal. Eventually he began a lazy examination of the calendar.

“Rhys?”

Rhys raised his head. Yoshi had laid five coins in a row before her and was studying them intently. A sixth stone rectangle was in her hand. “Do you agree with Dr. Burton about these markers? That they were coins paid in tribute to Ets-eket?”

“Markers?” Rhys repeated, rubbing his eyes. “Dare I suppose your use of that term means you don’t agree with him?”

Yoshi shrugged. “I’m not sure.” Her mouth twisted wryly. “No, sir, I don’t believe I do. Look.” She pushed her journal toward him. An enhanced image of one of the coins was displayed in its flat hologrid. “This is the first marker in this set. The back of it. See the scroll design under the little building?”

“The little building? Not a sacrificial altar?”

“Well, that’s what it looks like to me.” There was a definite note of defensiveness in that. “Frankly, I think it looks more like a… a transport shuttle than it does a sacrificial altar.”

Rhys smiled crookedly. “Whatever. Aye, I see the scroll work.”

Yoshi brought up a second image on the journal. “This is the second marker. Same area.”

Rhys concentrated on the play of looping lines below the squat, raised rectangle Burton had dubbed an altar. His brow furrowed of its own accord before he realized what he was frowning at.

“It’s different,” Yoshi prompted. “A different pattern than the first. And here’s the third…

That scroll, too, was slightly different than either of the others. Rhys rubbed a finger over his lower lip. “Well, they are hand carved. Could be minor variations.”

“Some of them aren’t so minor. There’s a second set with the tower on the back. The scroll work on those is also unique to each piece, almost like a signature. But look….” She adjusted the display so it showed the flip side of the coin. “Here’s marker number one… and number two… and number three. And here’s one from a tower set. The effigies of Ets-eket are identical. Any variation could be accounted for by wear—it’s fairly soft material, almost like, oh, soapstone.”

Rhys picked up the journal and examined it closely, rotating the image on its display. The flame of fascination kindled in his weary brain. “They are identical. These aren’t hand carved, they’re… pressed. Good God, look! Here’s a mold mark!” He ran his finger along one edge of the 3-D image.

“That’s another thing,” said Yoshi, her eyes gleaming, “they’re not stone. But they’re not synthetic either. They’re… smeltered composites. Maybe that’s what the tower was used for. ”

“Or this could be a hoax.”

Yoshi shook her head. “I dated some of these myself. They’re anywhere from 4,500 to 5,000 years old. The Etsatat evidently had some low level technology even then. I suppose they’d have to—they moved those building blocks of theirs from a quarry ten klicks away. There’s something else, too. These ‘wear marks’ of Dr. Burton’s?” She pointed out the feature in the journal image with the end of a tiny scraping tool. “I don’t think they’re wear marks. They’re too… regular. I think these markers were intentionally scored. And I also think they were worn or carried on a thong of some sort. Look how the holes are worn at the top edge.”

Rhys took the coin she offered him and peered at the top edge of it. She was right, it did seem to be scored, if randomly. And the hole in Ets-eket’s headdress was indeed elongated toward the top. He picked up a second marker. This one bore the same scratches along the top edge, but unlike those on the first coin, they continued down one side edge as well. A third specimen had score marks almost all the way around it. Something ticked at the back of Rhys’s mind. “Record keeping,” he murmured. “Not coins, but punch cards?”

“I don’t know, sir. But that would make sense taken in context with the calendar. Maybe the scores represent days.” She nodded to the tablet of stone that lay between Rhys’s forearms.

He glanced at her sharply, then turned his eyes to the calendar. “If you don’t stop calling me ‘sir,’ I’m going to have to cast a spell on you.” His right hand gave an absent tug on the thong of the Pa-Kai spirit bag that hung, always, around his neck. “And don’t think I can’t. It’s well within my shamanistic abilities.”

Yoshi, the words “yes sir” on her lips, blushed and fell silent.

Rhys was fingering the series of representations on the flat hunk of carved rock. “OK, we know these things: Etsat’s rotation is 31.2 hours. The current Etsatat week is divided into nine days and the month is four weeks long; intercalary days are added once a year at new year.” He ran his finger down one side of the tablet. “I’d say that we’re looking at basically the same calendar here.”

Yoshi nodded. “The calendar—if that’s what it is—seems to show one Etsat month.”

“So,” Rhys continued, “Burton thinks the altar represents worship days, the tower and flame represent sacrificial days, and the wagons, days when tribute is collected.”

Yoshi raised dark eyes to his face. “Three sacrifice days, three tribute days and three worship days in every week? Doesn’t that seem…” The word twitched, uncertain, on her lips, then she dropped her eyes.

“Excessive?”

She shrugged one slender shoulder and Rhys knew that had not been what she had been going to say.

“There is the matter of the tribute train depicted on the gate.”

The other shoulder shrugged. “And the dancing slaves?”

Rhys was momentarily speechless. In the three years he’d known her he had never heard Yoshi use that sarcastic tone of voice. “You really don’t like Professor Burton, do you?”

She was toying with the end of the blue-black braid that fell across one shoulder. “Is it necessary that I do?”

“It… it distresses me that you don’t. Drew Burton is an important person in my life. Why don’t you like him?”

The braid’s thong loosened under Yoshi’s nervous fingers. “I suppose… he… reminds me of… Uncle Kenji.”

Rhys listened for a moment to the antiphonal tag team of night insects, using that sparse cover to regroup. “Yoshi Umeki, I don’t believe you’ve ever lied to me before in your life.”

Her hands jerked, the thong disappeared and her unbound hair washed about her shoulders in a black tide. The look she gave him was both tragic and defiant. “I’m not lying! You remember Uncle Kenji. Father’s eldest brother. An odious man—”

“I remember him. What particular odious trait of Uncle Kenji’s comes to mind in this case?”

The insect chorus swelled into the pause. “He was a xenophobe.”

Stunned, Rhys murmured, “Actually, he was a bigot. Your father’s words, I believe.” He got up and went to pour overly-strong coffee into a blue metal cup.‘He didn’t return to the table, instead moving to stare out into a stygian forest night that was interrupted only briefly by the golden glow of camp lights. Funny, how some cliches of dig life were allowed to perpetuate themselves regardless of technology’s advance. Dr. Burton’s camp was like a slightly off-kilter reproduction of its ancestors—indus-trial-strength coffee in tin-enameled cups, camp lights that flickered as if a fuel-powered generator drove them and not the photon core of a time-altered spacecraft. He sipped the coffee; it was comfortingly bitter.

Behind him, Yoshi stammered, seeking innocuous words. “Uncle Kenji… Uncle Kenji was a man with strong feelings about his place in the world. I’m surprised he ever left Japan.” That much, she comforted herself, was true.

“And Dr. Burton is also a xenophobe, is that what you’re saying?”

Well, there it was. Yoshi set her chin. “I deplore the way he treated Tzia this morning. As if she were a rank novice. As if she didn’t have Nyami’s respect and a Stanford degree in archaeology. As if she were—”

“As if she were an alien?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Tsk-tsk. Remember the spell, Yoshi.” Rhys tapped his spirit bag. “I have to admit, I didn’t want to read the incident that way, but…” He shook his head. “I suppose I could say he’s an old man. One who’s only recently been exposed to other races of men.”

“That would be excusing him. He doesn’t deserve your defense.”

Rhys turned to look at her, eyes narrowed. “This goes pretty deep, doesn’t it?”

“It’s not just Tzia. It’s his whole attitude toward this planet, its people. The living cultures of Etsatat are repugnant to him. He’s only comfortable with the dead ones.”

“Mercy. And I’d’ve thought that impossible for an archaeologist.” He came back to the table and laid his hand, palm down, on the calendar. “It’s the love of my life, Yoshi. Looking at these little bits and pieces of the past and trying to see how they relate to the present—to the future. Looking at a dead culture in the hope of snatching a glimpse of its living shade. We’re ghost hunters, Yoshi. Mediums.” He smiled. “Shamans. Holding vast, expensive seances in the hope that maybe, just maybe, the dear departed will put in an appearance and solve her own mysteries. I thought we were all like that.”

“You mean you thought he was like that.”

“Ah, yes. Because when I sat in his lectures, read his works, studied his field journals, I thought, “Here’s a kindred spirit. A mentor. An icon.’ ”

Yoshi gazed up at him with honest pain in her eyes. “I’m sorry, Rhys.”

He directed a wry grimace at his own naivete. “I’m too old for heroes and role models, I suppose. But a kindred spirit would have been nice.” He glanced at Yoshi’s suddenly still face and experienced a twisted epiphany. “Aye well, maybe one kindred soul is enough, after all.” He lifted her hand from where it lay beside her field journal and raised it to his lips. “I’ll clean up here. You go settle in and get some sleep.”

Face rose-gold in the camp light, Yoshi stared at him, her hand suspended between them. He retrieved it and tugged her to her feet, jerking his head toward the tube to their cabin. “Go on. You’ve got smudges under your eyes. In the morning, you’ll be dead on your feet and blaming me.”

She got up and moved to the access tube, her every move tentative, as if she’d only just learned to walk. At the door, she turned back to look at him, but he was already packing away the finds, intent on his work. Fingers curled into a fist against her chest, Yoshi ducked into the tube.

In the morning there was still no access to the tower. Scott Buchanan suggested they break out the last cutter and go in through the side, but Burton and Nyami argued him down. It was as good a day as any, Burton said, to visit the village.

It was at least a town, Rhys decided. The word “village” seemed too primitive to describe the ruin that lay at the verge of the forest, its toppled buildings blending with toppled trees. The site was in nowhere near as good condition as Sper-ets; its walls looked as if they’d been chewed on by some massive grazer, its stone streets could almost have been mistaken for the random strew of an incontinent glacier. But among the trees were mouldering buildings which, if built to a less grand scale than Ets-eket’s temples, were yet impressive and willing to yield fruit.

Of particular interest were the stelae that appeared to have dotted the single main avenue and its various cross streets. Many of the ruins had one or two nearby, seeming to establish a relationship between building and statuary. Even here, the image of Ets-eket appeared, apparently in connection with a building on one of the side streets.

Burton’s smile increased with every utterance of amazement and delight his ex-student made. “A year from now, these stelae will be touring the museums and universities of Earth and the colonies,” he enthused, lovingly caressing the shoulder of a female Etsatat frozen eternally in the act of pouring water from ewer into a pool. “No doubt the Leguini will thank me for removing them. Come, look at this one.” He led them to a stele half fallen against a low wall. It showed another Etsatat woman sitting or squatting (it was hard to know what to call it with the odd jointing of the Etsatat legs) before some sort of rack. “A merchant’s pack, wouldn’t you say?” asked Burton.

A loom, thought Rhys, but was reluctant to commit himself to an interpretation in front of the older archaeologist. Still, in the cause of acknowledging Burton as a man rather than an icon… “It could be a loom. See, the shuttle in her hand, this line of scoring from her hand to the structure, a bit of thread or yam. Notice, too, the pattern between these uprights could represent the pattern being woven into the fabric.” Rhys only just kept his voice from rising questioningly.

Burton shot him a sideways glance, then bent to peer at the stele’s chipped and worn surface. “Well, hard to tell with this much erosion, of course, but I suppose you might be correct. She might be representative of the domestic arts—-a goddess of hearth and home. Personally, I think she’s a merchant deity. You know it’s a very odd thing, Llewellyn, but nowhere in any of this wealth have we found anything resembling a fertility goddess. I can only suppose that Etsatat were more clever than most primitives and understood the role of the male in reproduction. In fact, I believe that the Ets-eket cult may be, at its root, a fecundity cult.”

Rhys frowned. “What makes you say that, in particular? The connection with the moon?”

“That, and the rather obvious phallic appearance of the tower. I’ve studied the modern Leguini enough to know that’s relevant. There are other details too, of course. If you’d like, I’ll make my field notes available to you. I think you’ll find them of interest.”

“I’d like that.”

“Hey, look at this one!” Rick beckoned from where he crouched next to a low vine-draped wall, holding a bundle of trailing greenery out away from the stones. What he had found was a carved panel, chipped and timeworn, that seemed to be part and parcel of the wall. It depicted four figures, seated in an uneven row, their legs bent double in that amazing and uniquely Etsatat way. They appeared to be eating and talking; hands gestured and ferried food to open mouths.

“Four guys selling pizza,” announced Rick irreverently.

“Looks like a tea party,” suggested Yoshi.

“Very good, Ms. Umeki,” Burton praised her. “Though I think ‘party’ isn’t quite the right word. Perhaps a tea ceremony? The ritual partaking of food is quite common in cultures dominated by theological concerns. Take the Christian communion, for example.”

“Do the modem Etsatat have any sort of rituals you could use for comparison?” Yoshi asked.

“Not that I know of. But I doubt that would tell us much about the culture we’re looking at here. The modem Leguini—that name suits them better, they bear so little resemblance to their ancestors—have no giant temple complexes, nor do they have a priesthood or icons.”

Shame, none of the fun stuff, Rhys thought ironically, then cringed at his own cynicism. Aloud, he commented, “But then the religion of the Etsatat has become so ingrained in their daily existence, it hardly seems to matter. They may not feel the need to build and maintain centers of worship over many centuries. Perhaps they’ve evolved beyond the symbols and can face the reality head on.”

“Well, whatever the reasons,” Burton said, “we’ll get no help from that quarter. As regards this particular piece, my reasoning is laid out in full in my field notes.” He rose then, and led them off to look at what he referred to as the village amphitheater where, he postulated, ritual sacrifices took place.

Rhys slipped the card containing Professor Burton’s field notes into his own journal and settled back to digest them. Yoshi joined him, her own notes close at hand, while Rick wandered off to see how far the tower dig had progressed. There were extensive entries on the town, as Burton had promised, and that was where Rhys started.

Shta-ets—the City of the Moon—is in reality a large village whose artistry fills a narrow forested valley 130 kilometers northeast of the present day metropolis of Shta-vater. Stepping from my shuttle into the moist air of the forest fringe. I was amazed at the state of preservation of these very ancient ruins…

Rhys skipped the preliminary comments about measurements and soil acidity and paged to the first descriptions of local landmarks.

The village amphitheater sits at its extreme eastern end—the direction in which both Leguin and the planet’s largest moon rise. It was here that the ancient Etsatat may have sacrificed victims on the huge central altar before the eyes of rows of onlookers.

Rhys ran a hand through his thick, red mane and sighed, unconscious of the gesture.

“Me neither,” murmured Yoshi. When Rhys glanced at her she shrugged. “I think it’s more likely they mimed sacrifices there than actually performed them. I’d guess it was a theater and his big altar was a stage. Look at the dimensions.”

Rhys nodded. “Normally I’d agree with that, but surely Dr. Burton has seen something—”

“Something you missed? You noticed that there are patterns of very shallow ruts in that slab. You noticed that they were too regular to be weathering. He didn’t notice that regularity.”

Rhys’s eyes went unfocused momentarily as he called the feature to mind. “Very odd that. Almost as if the same rites were performed over and over again.”

“Or the same dances. Or perhaps a highly ritualized form of theater.”

“Like Noh?”

Yoshi nodded. “I don’t believe it’s an altar. I could be wrong, but I don’t think it is.”

Without further comment, Rhys paged to the next image with its attendant description. What he saw was a selection of village stelae and a paragraph about the main street.

Leading west from the place of sacrifice, the main avenue of Shta-ets is lined with buildings whose purposes may always be mysteries. Except for a granary, a metal-smith’s and a kiln, we know little about what went on within these walls. What we do know is that many of them were dedicated to the gods of the Etsatat. The images below, clockwise from left: (1) Four warrior gods or chieftains share a ritual meal; (2) The Goddess of the Waters fills the world ocean; (3) A merchant goddess with her splendid pack; (4) Statue of Ets-eket sits outside a small temple within the village.

“What does he say about Sper-ets?” Yoshi asked, eager to move on.

“Ah, yes, here…” He read aloud. “ ‘From its composition, to the dimensions of its structures, the Sper-ets complex is reminiscent of Caracol, still one of the most beautifully preserved sites in all of Mesoamerica. From the broad, once-cobbled Avenue of Tribute, to the towering central ziggurat to the massive temples flanking it, it reminds one insistently of the majestic cities of the ancient Maya.’ ” He skipped a couple of passages, then picked up the narrative again. “ ‘That Ets-eket is aptly named is apparent from the crescent shape repeated over and over on helmets, staffs and scepters. That he is an important deity is obvious from the sheer ubiquity of his image. Even beyond the confines of the many places of worship dedicated to him—sites which are spread over Leguin 4’s several continents—Ets-eket’s image appears on buildings and stelae in every locale where we have conducted even the most cursory research.’ ”

“In which.”

“What?”

“In which we have conducted even the most cursory research.”

Rhys wagged his finger at her. “Now, Yoshi. Don’t be overly critical. I begin to think you’re just immensely prejudiced against the old professor. And I can’t imagine why. Even as many years of exposure to Uncle Kenji as you had—”

“I’m sorry. I’m trying to be objective, but he makes it so hard. He’s so sure of himself, so smug in his interpretations.”

“He’s one of the foremost experts on just about any phase of archaeology you’d care to name. I suppose one might get a little… sure of oneself under the circumstances.”

“It goes further than that. Whatever he looks at, Dr. Burton sees exactly what he wants to see. He can’t stand it when you advance a reasonable theory before he does. He has to point out what you missed or… or… debate it point by point. He treats you as if you were still his student.”

“In some ways, I suppose I am.”

“You shouldn’t be, Rhys. Not in this field.”

He chuckled. “Well, I may have lost points with Drew Burton, but at least I’ve got you calling me by my given name.”

“You’re evading the issue. The issue is Dr. Burton’s cultural bias.”

“Yosh, questioning every theory that’s put forth—that’s what scientists are supposed to do. But I will grant you this—he certainly doesn’t seem to question his own conclusions as thoroughly as he does everyone else’s.”

“Well, that’s something,” Yoshi muttered under her breath.

Rhys gave her a reproachful look and turned back to the field notes.

The week progressed predictably. To Rhys’s growing chagrin, Burton lauded all efforts except the hapless Tzia’s, debated—no, argued—every opinion Rhys advanced that either preceded or differed from his own, and continued to treat the alien dig as if it sat smack in the middle of the Yucatan peninsula. Questioning the great man brought anything from sweet condescension to gentle scorn. As when Rhys suggested the deposits of animal bones might be from something other than sacrifices.

“Really?” Burton responded, gold and silver brows ascending like the wings of angels. “I’d be interested in hearing your views, Dr. Llewellyn.”

“I have no strong alternate opinions about the deposits, although I suppose the site might have served as a bam or a corral.”

“No excrement.”

“Or a larder. The bones might still be there because the larder was well-stocked when the complex met whatever fate it met. The deposits are concentrated in the southern pits and they’re largely the bones of animals present-day Etsatat consider meat animals.”

Burton raised a calloused finger. “Exception proves the rule, Llewellyn. Exception proves the rule. There are also the bones of small creatures which are definitely not part of the modem food chain. Wild nocturnals—”

“Which could be vermin or scavengers that raided the building after it was abandoned.”

“Which could also be small animals especially dedicated to Ets-eket. They are almost exclusively night-stalkers of one sort of another.”

Rhys nodded. “All right. Nocturnal scavengers dedicated and sacrificed to a moon god—possibly. But why would they leave them around to clutter up the place?”

Burtons linger pointed skyward again. “Charnel houses have existed in many other cultures.”

“For animals?”

“Why not? If the animals are considered sacred—”

“Sacred enough to eat?”

“Ritually, yes.”

“Pet cemeteries?” interjected Rick.

Both men ignored him.

“Taxidermist?” This time Burton glowered and Rhys cracked a smile.

“You’re wrong, Llewellyn,” Burton said with finality. “These are temples. Places of worship, sacrifice and tribute. Everything we’ve found suggests it. No, confirms it. The animal bones, the potsherds, the metal tools and coins. I realize, of course, that it’s only your relative inexperience speaking,” he added and shook his head, thereby missing Yoshi’s furious but silent retort. “If there were only some way I could prove it to you.”

“What are your opinions about all this?” Rhys asked Nyami and Tzia later, when the professor had retreated to his cabin to work on his field notes.

The two women shared an enigmatic glance, then Nyami answered for both of them. “We’re not paid to have opinions. At least not outside of our respective areas of expertise. That means I boss the crew and Tzia restores artwork. All of us,” she added, glancing at Tzia again, “arc keeping our own journals. And some us will be writing our own books.”

“You’ve seen his field notes, then?”

“Of course.” Nyami chuckled, brushing graying hair back from her forehead. “Drew sees gods and goddesses everywhere. ‘Water goddess filling the world ‘ocean.’ Heck, I think she’s probably running the local bath house.”

Burton’s team located the entrance to the tower at the beginning of the next week. That the building was hollow but for its organic centerpiece was no surprise—that feature had showed up clearly in the sonic profile. What came as a surprise was that the conical tower was lined with a tough amalgam of plant liber and ceramic Rhys suspected would make a great material for orbital spacecraft and re-entry shuttles. This, in turn, was covered with a thick deposit of ash and soot. The floor was so deep in the stuff, a misstep could leave one covered to the neck with a fetching coat of powdery gray.

“Ashes to ashes and dust to dust,” murmured Rick when they had spent the better part of a day sifting and digging through thick layers of invasive soot and char that hung in the humid air and clung to clothing, hair, and skin.

Burton, occupied with running a sample through the Field Remote Analysis Unit (known affectionately among diggers as the Frau), looked up sharply. “Are you suggesting this was a crematorium?”

Rick blew a lock of lank brown hair out of his eyes and gave the professor a bland stare. “I’m in a deep hole, up to my elbows in fine gray soot. I just thought it was an appropriate comment.”

Burton looked thoughtful. “An interesting one, Roddy. You may have unwittingly stumbled onto something. Although, I think the crematorium was likely sacrificial in nature. You recall the biblical story of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, of course.”

Rick opened his mouth to tell Dr. Burton that he had never heard of Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, and that further, only Rhys Llewellyn called him “Roddy,” then thought better of it and asked, “Have you found evidence of any Etsatat bone fragments or DNA during your analysis?”

The question, neutrally posed, caused Dr. Burton to redden perceptibly and cast a sideways glance around the tree trunk at Rhys, who was digging with Tzia along one curved, fire-blasted wall. “No, actually. What I have found are laige amounts of coal and some cellulose, trace elements of other organic compounds and carbonized bits of rock. Altogether a disappointment, I admit. I had hoped we’d discovered a burial vault. The modem Etsatat inter their dead…” His voice trailed off as he read the data spilling onto the Frau’s small display.

“Don’t give up yet, Professor.” Rhys straightened from his work, holding something out on the palm of his hand.

Burton pounced on it as an aging tabby might pounce on an unwary mouse. “Air! Air!” he cried, accepted an air bulb from Nyami and feverishly cleaned the object. The entire work crew ceased digging and gathered around in the glare of palm lights and overheads.

“It’s some sort of jewelry. A brooch, by the look of it, or a medallion. And there’s a jewel in it, too. I’ve never seen the stone before.” He looked up at Rhys, fire in his pale eyes. “You’re in charge here, Llewellyn. Nyami, you and I are going to subject this to full analysis. Right now.”

Within seconds, the two archaeologists had disappeared into the entrance shaft and Rhys and the crew had returned to work. Three hours later, Rhys and Tzia had unearthed (or unashed) three more pieces of jewelry and a crude stone figurine. Scott Buchanan turned up a glob of interesting slag and one of the other diggers found a second partial figure made up of heavily carbonized hardwood. Eager for a report from Burton and Nyami, Rhys ordered the crew to “clear up their loose,” then, with their artifacts in a finds canister, he led the weary team of grimy, sweat-soaked archaeologists back to camp.

Burton was still hard at it and Nyami nursing a bottle of cold tea when the diggers filed up to the Finds tent. She moved to intercept them, cutting Rhys off before he or anyone else could enter. “I wouldn’t interrupt him yet,” she told them.

Buchanan’s ashy blond brows furrowed. “How does it take three hours to analyze a piece of jewelry?”

Nyami studied her squeeze bottle. “He’s run the same battery of tests five times. I did the first set. He didn’t like the way I did them, so he did them again…” she looked up at Rhys, “…and again and again.”

“Whatever’s the matter?”

“It’s not precious metal for one thing, just an odd, rather impure alloy. And the stone? It…” She licked her lips and Rhys couldn’t tell if the gesture concealed a smile or grimace. “It’s not stone. It’s man-made.”

Scott Buchanan’s brows rode halfway up to his receding hairline. “A fake stone? What’s he thinking—that this is a hoax? That the Leguini have been hoaxing us?”

“He’s thinking…” She shrugged. “I don’t know what he’s thinking. But the stone is a hunk of very hardy glass which dates to about 5,000 B.P.”

Rhys expelled a rush of air. “Can the Etsatat have found a way to foil our dating techniques?”

“Who knows? Maybe the ancients had junk jewelry.”

“Look, I’m going to take this assemblage in to Professor Burton. Maybe I can help him make sense of this.” Rhys tucked the canister under his arm and entered the Finds tent warily, his eyes on Burton’s back. As he moved to lay the canister down on the sorting table, Burton glanced up at him, sweating even in the well-ventilated cabin.

“What’ve you got there, Rhys?”

“More jewelry. A couple of figurines—wood and stone.” He unpacked the canister as he spoke.

Burton was at his side in a second, poring over the finds. “This is more like it! Yes, this clarifies the situation considerably. What we’re looking at here, my boy, is a single cremation. There’s may be no significant Etsatat DNA because the cremation involves only that one individual. These—” He held up a corroding brooch and the stone figure, “—are tribute, as I theorized previously. I predict that if we continue to dig, we will find the remains of one man—Ets-eket, himself—or his mortal proxy.”

“What’s your evaluation of the brooch?”

“Ah, well, originally I thought it a rather poor specimen. The metal is sturdy but hardly precious, the stone is, em, rather an enigma. But the style!” He put the thoroughly cleaned piece into the photonic bath and switched the perfect 3-D image to the holotank. “See the intricate detail, the precision of the scroll work? The Leguini haven’t produced anything this fine since.”

“What?”

“Well, you’ve seen their primitive-looking ornamentation. Ye gods, the shops are full of it, even on Earth!”

“Professor, that’s a current fashion, like art deco on early twentieth-century Earth, or the turn of the century trend toward aboriginal art. There’s no grounds upon which to compare it to this.”

Burton’s face turned to stone. “Llewellyn, you have argued every single find with me since you arrived. Where do you get the gall?”

“From you, I’d like to think, Doctor.”

“You were my favorite student, you know. When I brought you here, I thought you’d be appreciative.”

“I am, sir, I—”

“Then why are you playing dog in the manger?”

“Sir, I’m not. I just happen to have formed some opinions about these sites that don’t cozy with your own.”

Burton went white and red in swift turns. “What makes you think your opinions are worth anything, Llewellyn? I’ve been in this field for decades. You’ve been out of the field since you left that classroom in Sophia to go commercial. Corporate anthropologist!” he snorted. “Corporate toady is more like it! How can you presume to think your opinion carries more weight than mine?”

Reeling from the verbal lashing, Rhys struggled to right himself. “I’m not presuming anything of the sort, Professor. But I have had a good many years of training and experience, and regardless of what you think about my association with Tanaka Corp, it’s given me experience you haven’t had. Your decades have been spent in Terran archaeology. My few years have been spent out here, on other people’s worlds. When it comes to xenoanthropology, I think the playing field is much more even.”

“Do you?”

“Yes sir, I do. And I think…” He paused, losing the will to continue.

“Well, whatever it is, Llewellyn, say it. Don’t add cowardice to your arrogance.”

Rhys sighed, feeling wretched. “I think you may be culturally biased.”

“Culturally biased?” Burton’s white hair looked shockingly bright against the near purple of his face.

Rhys lowered his voice, trying to keep his tone gentle. “This isn’t Caracol, doctor. It’s Sper-ets. Hell, it may not even be that, really. The fact is, you can’t know. You can’t know whether a thing is a coin or a… a punch card unless and until you have some sort of cultural context to put it in. We don’t have that context yet for these sites because we haven’t built one.”

“The context is a wide-spread cult dedicated to the worship of the moon. That is the context.”

“On the surface, a reasonable conclusion. But we re supposed to get below the surface to the details. And the details here don’t support many of your conclusions.”

“Name a few.”

“All right. What you call coins are identical because they were smeltered and molded. That’s not stone they’re made of, but a clever native composite of malleable ores. They ’re molded, yet they all have obviously handmade scoring along the edges.”

“Denominations.”

Rhys shook his head. “The number is totally random. Anywhere from zero scores to a complete circuit of the edge. Like a punch card. Then there’s the relief on the gate lintel. You interpret as prisoners and sacrificial victims people who are in no way bound. You ascribe warrior status to men without weapons or armor. You make moon crescents out of shapes that bear only passing resemblance to any stage of Etsat’s moon. And the village—your massive sacrificial altar could just as easily be a place where people went to be entertained, not ritually murdered. Think about it, Professor, assume for a moment that we stumbled across… the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with no cultural context. We knew nothing of the Renaissance —we’d never heard of Michelangelo. Without that context, you and I would very likely interpret the Last Judgement as depicting a warrior-priest in god’s clothing surveying his sacrificial victims.”

“You mean I’d interpret it that way. I’m sure you’d draw other conclusions.”

“I don’t have conclusions, Doctor. I have theories. Day’s too young for conclusions. I talked about building a context and I meant it. The present day Etsatat hold the key to this place, whether they realize it or not. Look at their culture if you want to advance toward conclusions.”

“Preposterous. I hadn’t realized you’d become such an iconoclast.”

“I’m not an iconoclast. I simply suggest that if you’d try to envision the village ruins as a living Etsatat town, you’ll see some of these artifacts in a different light.”

“What I see, Dr. Llewellyn, is that you and your associates are disrupting my dig and undermining my authority. I request that you leave. In fact, I demand it.”

Rhys felt the blood drain from his face. He suspected that if he looked in a mirror, he’d find the color had drained from his hair, as well. “I… wish you’d reconsider.”

“I don’t think so, doctor. Now, if you’d kindly let me get back to my work?” He gave Rhys a curt nod and returned to his study of the holotank.

Back aboard the TAS schooner Ceilidh, Rhys tried to banish his black mood without success. He’d just blown a huge hole in his personal history and, glancing backward, saw a void where there had once been a professional relationship, a wall of regret where there had once been pleasant and important memories. His mental landscape was Scotland in winter—break, gray, cold. Neither Yoshi nor Rick could pierce the veil of sorrow that hung over him like a mountain-topping cloud.

“I’ll get over it,” he told Yoshi when he felt her eyes on him for the thousandth time since they’d left the surface of Etsat. “You were right, you know. I did idolize the man. I suppose… I suppose it’s best that I’ve been reminded painfully of his humanity… and mine.” He shook his head ruefully. “I couldn’t believe he could be so… biased. I assumed that whatever expertise he applied so successfully to the Terran field, he’d apply to the broader field of xenoarchaeology and become the authority there, as well.”

Yoshi looked down at her tea cup, held in hands that were as relaxed as she could make them. “You’re the authority in xenoarchaeology, Rhys. And I think that bothers Dr. Burton more than he’ll admit.”

“Rhys?” Rick’s voice floated over to them from the intercom. “You’ve got a communication from Dr. Burton. I’ll patch it through to the mess comlink.”

Rhys made a face, his eyes meeting Yoshi’s through the steam of tea. “I guess he hadn’t quite finished flaying me.”

But Burton apparently was no longer in a flaying mood. His face, filling the comlink’s flat screen, wore a shining cloak of joviality. “Rhys! I’m glad I caught you before you left. I, em, I’d like to apologize for losing my temper earlier. It was unprofessional in the extreme. Unfoigivable, really. I’d like to have you to a bit of a send-off party aboard our cutter—a bit more plush than the cabins at the dig.”

Caught completely off guard by the older man’s conciliatory tone, Rhys could only stammer out his acceptance. Several hours later he, Yoshi and Rick ferried over to the Feathered Serpent for the send-off. Burton greeted them in the docking bay with Wayne Bell at his side. He seemed cordial enough, but Rhys caught an undercurrent of nervousness and found it impossible to relax. The slightest misstep, he feared, would bring on another fit of professional vituperation.

What actually happened was much stranger. They were passing through the row of crew’s cabins with Burton leading and Bell bringing up the rear, when the professor stopped in midcorridor and slid back one of the cabin doors. “Dr. Llewellyn, if you and your associates would kindly enter and prepare for transport?”

A terrible shaft of cold shot up Rhys’s back. “Excuse me?”

“I fibbed a little about the send-off. This is more in the nature of an educational field trip. I’m going to prove to you, beyond any doubt, that my theories about this dig are correct.”

“I don’t understand—” Rhys started to say, but suddenly he did understand. “You’re taking us back in time.”

“I am indeed.”

“But this ship must have temporal grid limiters—”

Burton shrugged. “Easily disabled by someone who knows what they’re doing. Did I mention that Wayne here worked his way through his first three years of college as a temporal engineer at QuestLabs?”

Rhys glanced back over his shoulder. Yoshi’s eyes were big as saucers, Rick was looking positively ill and Wayne was holding a fuzz gun. He jerked back around to face Burton. “Doctor, what you’re contemplating is illegal, not to mention unethical.”

“Ah, for the casual time traveler, perhaps. But this is far from casual. We’re on a mission of sorts—a search for truth.”

“Professor, I protest. You can’t do this.”

Burton chuckled. “Watch me. I can play Indiana Jones as well as the next man.” He leaned closer to Rhys, pinned him with over-bright eyes. “This is important to me, Rhys. I have to prove this to you. To myself. Now, if you’ll kindly enter your cabin. ”

“Professor?” Rick was looking at Rhys with panic in his eyes and sweat beading on his upper lip.

Rhys swung back to Burton. “Roddy has severe temporal displacement syndrome. If we time shift, he’ll become critically ill.”

“Ah, so 1 should abandon this crazy idea, eh? Or send the young man back to the Ceilidh. I think not. Several of my crew have TDS. I know the precautions. Trust me—Roddy will be suitably sedated.”

“I can’t talk you out of this?”

“No, young man, you cannot.”

Rhys glanced at Bell. “And you? How can you allow him to do this?”

“The professor taught me everything I know, Doctor. Unlike some, I’m not likely to forget that. You impugned his integrity. I think he deserves the chance to vindicate himself.”

They shifted within the hour, moving millennia in time, but infinitesimally in space. It was a long shift, one which required every human aboard to be sedated against the displacing effects, though none so deeply as Rick. In the darkened cabin, wearing shift goggles and respirators, Rhys and his two companions slept while ages rolled back around them.

Rhys woke to total darkness and thought, for the briefest moment, that he was dreaming rather than conscious (or dead rather than alive). But Yoshi stirred and murmured on the bunk opposite his and he came completely awake on a surge of memory and adrenaline. If Burton’s disabling of the ship’s temporal grid limiters had worked, he was now orbiting a younger Etsat. About 5,000 years younger, if their dating was correct. He had called on the lights and was helping Yoshi to sit up when Burton appeared, his eyes bright with exhilaration.

“We re here. We’ll shuttle down when the site is in darkness. That will mean turning off the running lights but there shouldn’t be any other airships to collide with, should there?” He chuckled, obviously enjoying the extraordinary situation. Leaving the deeply sleeping Rick in the darkened cabin, he led Rhys and Yoshi to the mess for a pre-descent meal.

The squat, boxy little shuttle carried four people—Rhys, Yoshi, Burton and Bell, who acted as pilot. In the deepest part of the local night, they brought the craft in on instruments. A clearing in the comparatively sparse forest of a younger world afforded them a landing site with adequate cover between the village and the Ets-eket complex. Or so Rhys hoped. The thought of bumping into the Etsatat’s ancestors filled him with mortal dread. Whatever else they did during this madcap adventure, they absolutely must avoid changing Etsatat history.

As the shuttle descended into the trees, Rhys saw a few points of firelight in the direction of the village and sighed deeply. He was tom about this “mission,” and knew he shouldn’t be. He should be outraged at Burton, but the thought of seeing first hand what he before could only theorize about made his heart hammer with pure excitement and his breath come quick and shallow. He often daydreamed about what it must have been like during those brief halcyon days when scientists could, and did, use QuestLab’s Temporal Grid technology to study the past. He had read the field notes of those early time travelers. He had seen the video journals. He had, in his personal library, the private diaries and logs of one Arthur Llewellyn, the man directly responsible for the ban on what his great-great-grandnephew was presently doing. It would be painful irony, indeed, if ill came of this.

“Rhys, look.”

Rhys tugged his thoughts back to the surface and followed Yoshi’s gaze through the starboard canopy of the shuttle. There was light in the direction of Sper-ets, too, a ruddy, volcanesque glow that lit the low clouds and smoke that lay like sleeping sheep above it. The tower, Rhys suspected, and felt a guilty tingle of anticipation. He felt eyes on him and glanced forward to find Professor Burton watching him with an odd little smile on his lips.

“You wouldn’t stop this now if you could, would you?”

Rhys declined to answer that, but knew in his heart of hearts that Burton was right.

Dressed in forest camouflage and packing a proximity scanner, they used the still predawn hours to set up an observation post up slope from the village in the branches of a massive, gnarled tree. Sunrise gave them a clear view down the main avenue from almost directly above the amphitheater. What was only marginally apparent in the ruin was highly visible in the living town. There was one main street; all other avenues—there were ten of them—crossed it at a precise ninety degree angle. As the sun climbed, the denizens of those streets came out and began their daily routines, unaware of the alien presence watching them from the east through long-range optics.

As expected, the market plaza was soon aswarm with buyers and sellers of produce. Traffic sprouted in the streets; carts and wagons appeared, most pulled by domestic animals called tirzen. Contraptions that looked like rikshas and handled like bicycles wove in and round larger conveyances. People wandered the avenues, popping in and out of buildings.

Rhys barely knew where to look first among such visual riches. Finally, he opted for a systematic survey of each street, beginning with those nearest his vantage point. He was focusing on the side of a large building adjacent to the amphitheater when Yoshi interrupted him.

“Sir, look at the stelae. They’re painted.”

They were, indeed. Rhys brought his own field optics to bear on the grouping they’d surveyed only four or five days ago. (Or was that five thousand years and five days ago?) The “Water Goddess” was done up in shades of turquoise and blue. The building she fronted was, likewise, awash in aquatic tones. Rhys supposed it could be either temple or bath house; the only evidence either way was that some of the people entering seemed to be carrying clothing draped over their arms or carried in baskets or bundles.

“Now scanning building 1A,” murmured Burton.

Rhys turned to find the elder archaeologist had mounted a holocam on his optics visor and was recording the street scenes. Or rather, he was recording the buildings—the people seemed to be of little interest to him. “What are you doing, Professor? You’ll never be able to show that to anyone.”

“Ah, but you and I will know, Rhys. You and I will know. Now, building 1A has before it a stele depicting a merchant goddess and her pack—”

“It’s a weaver’s shop!” Yoshi broke into the narrative.

“What?” Wayne Bell glanced from the holotank showing a Burton’s-eye-to-view to a view through his own optics.

“See. That woman in the red halter went in unencumbered and came out with a little carpet or something draped over her arm. And there goes someone with a basket of yam.”

Sure enough, a female Etsatat came to the doorstep of the brightly colored building and held out the basket to someone just inside the door. She then set the basket in a sunny spot on the patio behind the stele where the colors of her wares shone like jewels. In a moment, a second woman joined her from inside the building and began to pick through the jumble of richly hued spools. In the end, she wagged her head and made a series of intricate hand gestures. Then she pulled several rings of bright metal from her necklace and handed them to the other woman who bobbed, turned, and left the yams, basket and all, in the six-fingered hands of the newcomer.

Rhys glanced at Burton. He had stopped recording and had moved his holocam to another target. Rhys glanced at the locational grid on the holotank then adjusted his optics to find the building visually. There was the wall relief Rick had found so amusing. It was part and parcel of a shoulder height stone wall that enclosed a paved piazza. Wall and building were done in succulent colors overlaid on gleaming, white granitic rock. A woven awning stretched over the patio, undulating gently in the breeze. Beneath it sat five rows of low wooden platforms, two of which were already populated by kneeling and squatting Etsatat who seemed to be engaged in lively conversation. They used their hands much as they talked, all the while dipping into bowls and baskets of food spread before them. All in all, Rhys thought, they looked very much like the quartet of brightly painted fellows in the relief on the encircling wall.

“Four guys selling pizza,” murmured Yoshi, hiding a giggle beneath her whisper. “I wish Rick were here.”

Burton moved his focus yet again.

Wayne Bell frowned at the blur on the holotank. “Do you want me to do that, Professor?”

There was no response.

“I realize we’re not supposed to be here, but I really think we should be recording this.”

“It’s only a bistro,” muttered Burton. “A stupid, mundane bistro.”

“Professor,” breathed Bell. “With all due respect—it’s a 5,000-year-old alien bistro.”

The day continued in much the same way. Wayne Bell eventually took over the recording, Rhys and Yoshi catalogued buildings and cultural features and Burton pouted, insisting that he’d never been as interested in the village as Nyami had been and grumbling about not having gone straight to the Sper-ets complex. By late afternoon, they had located two metallurgists or smiths, a spinner, a dyer, two mercantiles, an apothecary, two doctors or shamans, a wagon wright, a second bath house and two smaller eateries. There was also a building Rhys thought was an inn and a place south of the amphitheater that seemed to be a school.

There were homes as well, none over two stories tall. The only edifice taller than that sat just north of the amphitheater. It was different than the other buildings in town from the height of its facade to its shape and the character of its ornamentation. The curved face was taller than the roof behind it, giving the impression that the building wore a crown or tiara. The roofing was a tile of such deep indigo that it seemed to suck sunlight from the sky. Unlike other buildings, it had no paint upon either face and visible sides or around its many round windows. And into this building people did not go.

Until the sun began to set. But as the light mellowed and washed the white walls rose-amber, it seemed to become a magnet to the people of the little city. They came from every direction, many of the shopkeepers carrying colorful baskets, which they set, one and all, in a comer of the market plaza before crossing the street to the blue-roofed building.

Burton perked up. “What’s this? They seem to be leaving offerings.” He glanced at Rhys. “At sunset. Need I remind you what will follow the Etsat sunset by approximately fifteen minutes?”

“Moonrise,” Rhys observed.

“But you don’t suppose we’ll see a worship ceremony of some sort, do you?”

“Professor, I’ve never denied that these people may have a nature-based religion. In fact, I’d be dumbfounded if they didn’t have ritualized beliefs of some sort. What I doubted was that they consumed the entire culture, dominated every event, and produced every artifact from clothing to art.”

In the dying light of day, the crowned building filled with Etsatats; the sun set; the moon rose, huge and white in the indigo sky. When it came over the top of the mountain due east of the watcher’s tree, it struck a round patch of reflective material in the roof of the building and came face to face with its mirror image.

“It’s a window!” breathed Yoshi, and at that exact moment, there arose from the building below a great ululating song of rapture. It was tunefully alien and did not stop until the orb of the moon had moved completely from the reflective round. Then the temple erupted from within with a blaze of pale light. Almost immediately, the worshipers began to emerge. Many of them carried torches or lamps that gave off a lunar gleam.

“Bio-luminescence?” Rhys wondered aloud.

“Look, they’re filing into the amphitheater,” murmured Bell.

Indeed they were. In an atmosphere of festivity, the crowd took seats on the terraced stone benches while torchbearers formed a corridor. Down it passed a small group of their fellows dressed in vivid costume.

Burton sat forward. “These will be the priests, I imagine.”

The bright gantlet dissolved when the last “priest” had stepped to the edge of the large, flat dais. The torchbearers set their lights about the dais while the costumed ones divided into two groups. One took to the raised platform, the other formed a semi-circle to one side.

“The victims, perhaps,” Burton whispered.

Yoshi ground her teeth. “The band, perhaps,” she gritted, and before Burton could retort, lively atonal chords were indeed struck, and the “priests” began to dance and sing and chant.

Rhys found he could actually understand a few words and phrases that had been passed down to the modem Etsatat language of the region. The audience responded with hoots and chirps and pounded their oddly jointed knees in applause. Professor Burton withdrew so far against the trunk of their tree that Rhys almost forgot he was there.

Just before dawn they had packed up their blind and prepared to move out, when Burton, still on the supporting platform, uttered a startled grunt and manhandled the holocam into operating position.

Rhys, sitting at the platform’s edge, scrambled to his feet. “What is it?”

“Put your glasses on, Dr. Llewellyn. You should be interested in this.”

Rhys did as told and saw immediately what had Burton so excited. A wagon had come down the broad main avenue of the Etsatat town and pulled to a stop in the market plaza right next to the neat stack of baskets. Two men in uniforms garish even in the moonlight debarked and carefully lifted the baskets into their wagon.

“Recognize the costume?” Burton asked.

Rhys nodded. “From Sper-ets. The fellows on the gate lintel, if I’m not mistaken.”

“Having second thoughts about that tribute train theory?”

“Maybe.” Rhys watched as the wagon turned and rolled away. “Do we follow?”

Burton grinned fiercely. “What do you think?”

They trailed the wagon at a discreet distance, optics set for night scanning. It was a long trek through hilly, forested countryside, but all four of them were in good physical condition and the wagon, heavy and heavily laden, moved slowly. At one point, Rhys had stopped to refasten his boot closings when Burton let out an exultant cry and thumped him soundly on the back. When he picked himself up and reoriented his optics, he thought for a moment Burton had given him a concussion. Where there had been a wagon there were now two ponderous vehicles making their dusty way toward the complex. In another half mile or so, a third wagon appeared from a rutted side road and joined the caravan. By the time they drew within sight of Sper-ets’s gated walls, there were six wagons, each with its uniformed drivers, each with its load of brightly dyed baskets, and Rhys had to allow that Burton’s tribute theory looked very good, indeed.

The sun was rising as they worked their way up into yet another huge and bulbous tree (ficus frogus, Rick called them). They could hear the rumble of the wagons, the calls and shouts and whistles of the uniformed men, the roar of the fire in the tower’s hot core. In the broad plaza below and between the lavishly painted temples, the baskets were unloaded from the first wagon and grouped according to color. When the task was complete, a commanding figure appeared in the doorway of the Chapel.

Burton grasped Rhys’s shoulder painfully. “It’s Ets-eket himself!”

The warrior priest, his elaborate headdress making him stand head and shoulders above the other men, strode from his abode to meet the wagoneers. From each he received what appeared to be a necklace of the rectangular coins.

Rhys brought his optics into tight focus on Ets-eket’s hand. The coins were strung on a thong, much like the one around Ets-eket’s neck. The priest pulled a thick-bladed knife from his belt and proceeded to score each rectangle. He then returned the string of coinage to the driver who settled it around his own neck before returning to his wagon and driving away. This process was repeated for each driver, the only variation occurring when Ets-eket paused to remove several rectangles from the driver’s thong to string them on his own. This done, he replaced them with new coins from a bag on his hip.

Out of the comer of his eye, Rhys saw Yoshi put her hand over her mouth.

A quick inspection of the baskets was next, which Ets-eket ended by clapping his hands together. A host of uniformed men poured from the Chapel and the two temples and began hoisting baskets with chaotic dispatch. A method emerged from the seeming madness: Blue and green baskets went to the eastern temple; brown and blue ones went to the western temple; the few red baskets found their way into the Chapel; and yellow baskets were set at the foot of the tower where uniformed men scurried to open them and spill their bundled contents to the earth.

Yoshi began to giggle.

Burton shot her an annoyed glance. “Really, Llewellyn, if your assistant can’t control herself—”

Wayne and Rhys gasped simultaneously, jerking Burton’s attention back to the tower where, at that very moment, the stone doorway was rolled back by a quartet of huge, sweating Etsatats, revealing a blast furnace interior. The four big men then took up crescent-topped staffs from a rack and proceeded to use them to scoop up the “tribute” and fling it into the fiery maw.

Yoshi’s giggles collapsed into wild hiccups.

“It’s a… a garbage dump!” whispered Bell.

“And recycling center,” added Yoshi, punctuating the sentence with a hiccup.

Burton sputtered. “Impossible! What about the stone icons! The… the potsherds, the animal bones…” His voice trailed off dismally.

Rhys sat back against the ficus frogus’s gnarled trunk. The gnawed animal bones. Of course. It made perfect sense, but even he had been too smitten by the romance of archaeotheology to see that any well-organized group of people must have some way of dealing with their discardables. “Don’t feel too badly, Professor. I’m as stunned as you are.” He shook his head. “And the evidence was all there, too, if only we’d been open-minded enough to read it. The small animal carcasses, the large caches of gnawed bone, the cellulose deposits, the extreme concentrations of potsherds, the tally cards.”

Yoshi sighed, pulled off her optics and wiped tears from her eyes.

“Shovels,” muttered Burton. “They were carrying shovels. Garbage scoops.” He uttered a low growl that dissolved into a wheezing chuckle. “Staffs of office, indeed!”

“Well,” said Bell philosophically, “I swear I’ll never look at a potsherd the same way again. ”

“Pass the canteen,” said Burton. “I need a drink.”

Yoshi fished it out of the field kit. “It’s only water, sir.”

Burton gave her an arch glance. “Indeed. Well, I seem to have enough imagination for two men. I’ll just pretend it’s something stronger.”

They had to spend the day perched in the great tree overlooking the dump. The time passed easily enough; they were shaded, relatively cool, had enough food and water for two days and plenty of activity to feast their eyes upon. By the end of the day, the system was quite clear: organic wastes went into the southern pits, broken stuff such as potsherds and glass went into the eastern “temple,” and recyclable articles went to the west, burnables were sent straight to the fiery furnace. The “icons” they had found there, they reasoned, might have been toys that made it into the yellow basket by mistake.

After dark, they hiked the five or six kilometers back to the shuttle, their shadows cast indigo against the ground by the intense moonlight. Their departure from the planet was silent, the homing lock on the cutter’s temporal grid transporting them in a blink through space and time to its shuttle bay. There was little conversation as they prepared for the shift forward. No mention of illegalities or arrests. Rhys knew without asking that Burton would bring the Feathered Serpent into synchronous orbit over the village exactly 5,000 years to the minute of when they’d left. It would be a matter of Rhys’s word against his if accusations were made. He decided accusations would serve no one.

Five thousand years later they stood in the Serpent’s docking bay. Rick was safely stowed aboard Rhys’s shuttle and would likely sleep for another day or two—long enough for a return trip to Tson where Danetta Price would listen with feigned interest as they described their “vacation,” omitting one important detail.

“Well, Llewellyn, I don’t suppose I could talk you into staying on a bit. Helping out with the dig?” Burton was looking at the wall of the bay, not at Rhys’s face.

Rhys felt a tingle of the same joy he’d experienced when Burton had first invited him to Etsatat. Still, he said, “I don’t know sir. I suppose that depends on what you intend to do about… certain matters.”

“Well, I’ve, em, rethought my position on some of the artifacts, if that’s what you mean.” He glanced at Rhys with a glint of humor in his pale eyes. “In fact, I’m thinking of completely rewriting my journal. I think it might benefit from a different point of view. I have the feeling that if I study the Sper-ets collection from a slightly more… pragmatic perspective— perhaps contrast and compare modem Etsatat cultures—I might even advance some new… theories.”

“I rather think,” Rhys said carefully, “that your relations with non-human colleagues could also benefit from a different point of view.”

Burton had the good graces to look uncomfortable. “I’m an old dog, Rhys. You know what they say about old dogs. I’m not unaware of my bias.”

“Prejudice,” murmured Yoshi.

Burton glanced at her. “Prejudice,” he agreed. “I can only plead that my lack of exposure to… other races of men has ill-prepared me to deal with them. I have never liked reptiles. The sight of a six-foot-tall lizard gives me goose flesh. But I suppose if I closed my eyes, Tzia would seem as human as the next qualified archaeologist.” He met Yoshi’s eyes. “I will try to listen to her without looking.”

Catching Yoshi’s barely perceptible nod, Rhys bowed to his mentor. “I believe we’d be interested in renewing our collaboration under those circumstances. I’m glad you’ve had a change of heart.”

Burton snorted. “Change of heart? What was it Wayne said—that he’d never again look at a potsherd in the same way? Let me tell you something; I have immersed myself in Mesoamerican antiquities for over forty years. After our little jaunt, I shall never look at Caracol or Tikal or Teotihuacan the same way ever again. I shall wonder about every pyramid and stelae, every mural and icon. Dear God, do you realize that the statue of Chac Mol at Chichen Itza might have been an advertisement for Lamaze classes?” Finding that thought supremely amusing, he rolled away from his guests leaving a trail of guffaws.

Rhys looked after him for a moment, then put his arm around Yoshi’s shoulders. “He’s right, you know. If this escapade has served a purpose, it’s been to make us question our assumptions. About a lot of things… Now, let’s go collect our duffel and hie down to the surface. Rick can sleep it off in the shuttle.”

Yoshi nodded, her brow creased with evident concern. “Sir,” she said, and he sighed inwardly. “Is this a good time to tell you about the graffiti on the side of Dr. Burton’s shuttle?”

He stared at her. “You put graffiti on his shuttle? Good Lord, Yoshi, I realize you don’t like the man, but—”

She was shaking her head. “No. I didn’t do it. I only noticed it when we debarked just now. It wasn’t there when we went down.”

“Do you realize what you’re saying?”

She nodded, eyes glinting. “That there’s a reason one of the calendar symbols looks like a little shuttle.”

“No.” Rhys steered her through the open hatch of their own lander. “I will not buy into this. You’re having me on, for reasons known only to yourself.”

She craned her head to glance back into the bay. “You’re not even going to look?”

“No. Most emphatically not. We are not space gods, we did not interfere with this culture, and no one painted graffiti on Dr. Burton’s shuttle.”

Yoshi smiled—wickedly, Rhys thought. “OK, but I bet when we get back to Etsat you’re going to look at a lot of things very differently.”

She was right, of that much he was certain. He would look at everything differently. And Yoshi, he thought as they reboarded and battened down, I believe I shall start with you.

Illustrations by Nicholas Jainschig

Content

The Secret Life of Gods
By Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff