The Artifact Business

by Robert Silverberg

The Voltuscian was a small, withered humanoid whose crimson throat-appendages quivered nervously, as if the thought of doing archaeological fieldwork excited him unbearably. He gestured to me anxiously with one of his four crooked arms, urging me onward over the level silt.

“This way, friend. Over here is the Emperor’s grave.”

“I’m coming, Dolbak.” I trudged forward, feeling the weight of the spade and the knapsack over my shoulder. I caught up with him a few moments later.

He was standing near a rounded hump in the ground, pointing downward. “This is it,” he said happily. “I have saved it for you.”

I fished in my pocket, pulled out a tinkling heap of arrow-shaped coins, and handed him one. The Voltuscian, nodding his thanks effusively, ran around behind me to help me unload.

Taking the spade from him, I thrust it into the ground and began to dig. The thrill of discovery started to tingle in me, as it does always when I begin a new excavation. I suppose that is the archaeologist’s greatest joy, that moment of apprehension as the spade first bites into the ground. I dug rapidly and smoothly, following Dolbak’s guidance.

“There it is,” he said reverently. “And a beauty it is, too. Oh, Jarrell-sir, how happy I am for you!”

I leaned on my spade to recover my wind before bending to look. I mopped away beads of perspiration, and thought of the great Schliemann laboring in the stifling heat of Hissarlik to uncover the ruins of Troy. Schliemann has long been one of my heroes—along with the other archaeologists who did the pioneer work in the fertile soil of Mother Earth.

Wearily, I stooped to one knee and fumbled in the fine sand of the Voltuscian plain, groping for the bright object that lay revealed. I worked it loose from its covering of silt and studied it.

“Amulet,” I said after a while. “Third Period; unspecified protective charm. Studded with emerald-cut gobrovirs of the finest water.” The analysis complete, I turned to Dolbak and grasped his hand warmly. “How can I thank you, Dolbak?”

He shrugged. “Not necessary.” Glancing at the amulet, he said, “It will fetch a high price. Some woman of Earth will wear it proudly.”

“Ah—yes,” I said, a trifle bitterly. Dolbak had touched on the source of my deep frustration and sorrow.

This perversion of archaeology into a source for trinkets and bits of frippery to adorn rich men’s homes and wives had always rankled me. Although I have never seen Earth, I like to believe I work in the great tradition of Schliemann and Evans, whose greatest finds were to be seen in the galleries of the British Museum and the Ashmolean, not dangling on the painted bosom of some too-rich wench who has succumbed to the current passion for antiquity.

When the Revival came, when everyone’s interest suddenly turned on the ancient world and the treasures that lay in the ground, I felt deep satisfaction—my chosen profession, I thought, now was one that had value to society as well as private worth. How wrong I was! I took this job in the hope that it would provide me with the needed cash to bring me to Earth—but instead I became nothing more than the hired lackey of a dealer in women’s fashions, and Earth’s unreachable museums lie inch-deep in dust.

I sighed and returned my attention to the excavation. The amulet lay there, flawless in its perfection, a marvelous relic of the great race that once inhabited Voltus. Masking my sadness, I reached down with both hands and lovingly plucked the amulet from the grave in which it had rested so many thousands of years.

I felt a sudden impulse to tip Dolbak again. The withered alien accepted the coins gratefully, but with a certain reserve that made me feel that perhaps this whole business seemed as sordid to him as it did to me.

“It’s been a good day’s work,” I told him. “Let’s go back, now. We’ll get this assayed and I’ll give you your commission, eh, old fellow?”

“That will be very good, sir,” he said mildly, and assisted me in donning my gear once again.

We crossed the plain and entered the Terran outpost in silence. As we made our way through the winding streets to the assay office, hordes of the four-armed, purple-hued Voltuscian children approached us clamorously, offering us things for sale, things they had made themselves. Some of their work was quite lovely; the Voltuscians seem to have a remarkable aptitude for handicrafting. But I brushed them all away. I have made it a rule to ignore them, no matter how delightful a spun-glass fingerbowl they may have, how airy and delicate an ivory carving. Such things, being contemporary, have no market value on Earth, and a man of my limited means must avoid luxuries of this sort.

The assay office was still open, and, as we approached, I saw two or three men standing outside, each with his Voltuscian guide.

“Hello, Jarrell,” said a tall man raucously.

I winced. He was David Sturges, one of the least scrupulous of the many Company archaeologists on Voltus—a man who thought nothing of breaking into the most sacred shrines of the planet and committing irreparable damage for the sake of ripping loose a single marketable item.

“Hello, Sturges,” I said shortly.

“Have a good day, old man? Find anything worth poisoning you for?”

I grinned feebly and nodded. “Nice amulet of the Third Period. I’m planning on handing it in immediately, but if you prefer I won’t. I’ll take it home and leave it on my table tonight. That way you won’t wreck the place looking for it.”

“Oh, that won’t be necessary,” Sturges said. “I came up with a neat cache of enameled skulls today—a dozen, of the Expansion Era, set with platinum scrollwork.” He pointed to his alien guide, a dour-looking Voltuscian named Qabur. “My boy found them for me. Wonderful fellow, Qabur. He can home in on a cache as if he’s got radar in his nose.”

I began to frame a reply in praise of my own guide when Zweig, the assayer, stepped to the front of his office and looked out. “Well, who’s next? You, Jarrell?”

“Yes, sir.” I picked up my spade and followed him inside. He slouched behind his desk and looked up wearily.

“What do you have to report, Jarrell?”

I drew the amulet out of my knapsack and handed it across the desk. He examined it studiously, noticing the way the light glinted off the facets of the inset gobrovirs. “Not bad,” he said.

“It’s a rather fine piece, isn’t it?”

“Not bad,” he repeated. “Seventy-five dollars, I’d say.”

“What? I’d figured that piece for at least five hundred! Come on, Zweig, be reasonable. Look at the quality of those gobrovirs!”

“Very nice,” he admitted. “But you have to understand that the gobrovir, while attractive, is intrinsically not a very valuable gem. And I must consider the intrinsic value as well as the historical, you know.”

I frowned. Now would come the long speech about supply and demand, the scarcity of gems, the cost of shipping the amulet back to Earth, marketing, on and on, on and on. I spoke before he had the chance. “I won’t haggle, Zweig. Give me a hundred and fifty or I’ll keep the thing myself.”

He grinned slyly. “What would you do with it? Donate it to the British Museum?”

The remark stung. I looked at him sadly, and he said, “I’ll give you a hundred.”

“Hundred and fifty or I keep.”

He reached down and scooped ten ten-dollar pieces from a drawer. He spread them out along his desk. “There’s the offer,” he said. “It’s the best the Company can do.”

I stared at him for an agonized moment, scowled, took the ten tens, and handed over the amulet. “Here. You can give me thirty pieces of silver for the next one 1 bring in.”

“Don’t make it hard for me, Jarrell. This is only my job.”

I threw one of the tens to the waiting Dolbak, nodded curtly, and walked out.

I returned to my meager dwelling on the outskirts of the Terran colony in a state of deep dejection. Each time I handed an artifact over to Zweig—and, in the course of the eighteen months since I had accepted this accursed job, I had handed over quite a few—I felt, indeed, a Judas. When I thought of the long row of glass cases my discoveries might have filled, in, say, the Voltus Room of the British, I ached. The crystal shields with double handgrips; the tooth-wedges of finest obsidian; the sculptured ear-binders with their unbelievable filigree of sprockets—these were products of one of the most fertile creative civilizations of all, the Old Voltuscians—and these treasures were being scattered to the corners of the galaxy as trinkets.

The amulet today—what had I done with it? Turned it over to—to a procurer, virtually, to ship back to Earth for sale to the highest bidder.

I glanced around my room. Small, uncluttered, with not an artifact of my own in it. I had passed every treasure across the desk to Zweig; I had no wish to retain any for myself. I sensed that the antiquarian urge was dying in me, choked to death by the wild commercialism that entangled me from the moment I signed the contract with the Company.

I picked up a book—Evans, The Palace of Minos—and looked at it balefully for a moment before replacing it on the shelf. My eyes throbbed from the day’s anguish; I felt dried out and very tired.

Someone knocked at the door—timidly at first, then more boldly.

“Come in,” I said.

The door opened slowly and a small Voltuscian stepped in. I recognized him—he was an unemployed guide, too unreliable to be trusted. “What do you want, Kushkak?” I asked wearily.

“Sir? Jarrell-sir?”

“Yes?”

“Do you need a boy, sir? I can show you the best treasures, sir. Only the best—the kind you get good price for.”

“I have a guide already,” I told him. “Dolbak. I don’t need another, thanks.”

The alien seemed to wrinkle in on himself. He hugged his lower arms to his sides unhappily. “Then I am sorry I disturbed you, Jarrell-sir. Sorry. Very sorry.”

I watched him back out despairingly. All of these Voltuscians seemed to me like withered old men, even the young ones. They were an utterly decadent race, with barely a shred of the grandeur they must have had in the days when the great artifacts were being produced. It was odd, I thought, that a race should shrivel so in the course of a few thousand years.

I sank into an uneasy repose in my big chair. About half past twenty-three, another knock sounded.

“Come in,” I said, a little startled.

The gaunt figure of George Darby stepped through the door. Darby was an archaeologist who shared many of my ideals, shared my passionate desire to see Earth, shared my distaste for the bondage into which we had sold ourselves.

“What brings you here so late, George?” I asked, adding the conventional “And how was your trip today?”

“My trip? Oh, my trip!” He seemed strangely excited. “Yes, my trip. You know my boy Kushkak?”

1 nodded. “He was just here looking for a job. I didn’t know he’d been working with you.”

“Just for a couple of days,” Darby said. “He agreed to work for five per cent, so I took him on.”

I made no comment. I knew how things could pinch.

“He was here, eh?” Darby frowned. “You didn’t hire him, did you?”

“Of course not!” I said.

“Well, I did. But yesterday he led me in circles for five hours before admitting he didn’t really have any sites in mind, so I canned him. And that’s why I’m here.”

“Why? Who’d you go out with today?”

“No one,” Darby said bluntly. “I went out alone.” For the first time, I noticed that his fingers were quivering, and in the dreary half-light of my room his face looked pale and drawn.

“You went out alone?” I repeated. “Without a guide?”

Darby nodded, running a finger nervously through his unruly white forelock. “It was half out of necessity—I couldn’t find another boy in time—and half because I wanted to strike out on my own. The guides have a way of taking you to the same area of the Burial Ground, all the time, you know. I headed in the other direction. Alone.”

He fell silent for a moment. I wondered what it was that troubled him so.

After a pause he said, “Help me off with my knapsack.”

I eased the straps from his shoulders and lowered the grey canvas bag to a chair. He undid the rusted clasps, reached in, and tenderly drew something out. “Here,” he said. “What do you make of this, Jarrell?”

I took it from him with greet care and examined it closely. It was a bowl, scooped by hand out of some muddy-looking black clay. Fingermarks stood out raggedly, and the bowl was unevenly shaped and awkward-looking. It was an extremely uncouth job.

“What is it?” I asked. “Prehistoric, no doubt.”

Darby smiled unhappily. “You think so, Jarrell?”

“It must be,” I said. “Look at it—I’d say it was made by a child, if it weren’t for the size of these fingerprints in the clay. It’s very ancient or else the work of an idiot.”

He nodded. “A logical attitude. Only—I found this in the stratum below the bowl.” And he handed me a gilded tooth-wedge in Third Period style.

“This was below the bowl?” 1 asked, confused. “The bowl is more recent than the tooth-wedge, you’re saying?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. He knotted his hands together. “Jarrell, here’s my conjecture, and you can take it for as much as you think it’s worth. Let’s discount the possibility that the bowl was made by an idiot; and let’s not consider the chance that it might be a representative of a decadent period in Voltuscian pottery that we know nothing about.

“What I propose,” he said, measuring his words carefully, “is that the bowl dates from classical antiquity—three thousand years back, or so. And that the tooth-wedge you’re admiring so is perhaps a year old, maybe two at the outside.”

I nearly dropped the tooth-wedge at that. “Are you saying that the. Voltuscians are hoaxing us?”

“I’m saying just that,” Darby replied. “I’m saying that in those huts of theirs—those huts that are taboo for us to enter—they’re busy turning out antiquities by the drove, and planting them in proper places where we can find them and dig them up.”

It was an appalling concept. “What are you going to do?” I asked. “What proof do you have?”

“None, yet. But I’ll get it. I’m going to unmask the whole filthy thing,” Darby said vigorously. “I intend to hunt down Kushkak and throttle the truth out of him, and let the universe know that the Voltuscian artifacts are frauds, that the real Old Voltuscian artifacts are muddy, ugly things of no aesthetic value and of no interest to—anyone—but—us—archaeologists,” he finished bitterly.

“Bravo, George!” I applauded. “Unmask it, by all means. Let the greasy philistines who have overpaid for these pieces find out that they’re not ancient, that they’re as modern as the radiothermal stoves in their overfurnished kitchens. That’ll sicken ’em—since they won’t touch anything that’s been in the ground less than a few millennia, ever since this revival got under way.”

“Exactly,” Darby said. I sensed the note of triumph in his voice. “I’ll go out and find Kushkak now. He’s just desperate enough to speak up. Care to come along?”

“No—no,” I said quickly. I shun violence of any sort. “I’ve got some letters to write. You take care of it.”

He packed his two artifacts up again, rose, and left. I watched him from my window as he headed across the unpaved streets to the liquor-dispensary where Kushkak was usually to be found. He entered—and a few minutes later I heard the sound of voices shouting in the night.

The news broke the next morning, and by noon the village was in a turmoil.

Kushkak, taken unawares, had exposed all. The Voltuscians—brilliant handicrafters, as everyone knew—had attempted to sell their work to the wealthy of Earth for years, but there had been no market. “Contemporary? Pah!” What the customers wanted was antiquity.

Unable to market work that was labeled as their own, the Voltuscians had obligingly shifted to the manufacture of antiquities, since their ancestors had been thoughtless enough not to leave them anything more marketable than crude clay pots. Creating a self-consistent ancient history that would appeal to the imaginations of Earthmen was difficult, but they rose to the challenge and developed one to rank with those of Egypt and Babylonia and the other fabled cultures of Earth. After that, it was a simple matter of designing and executing the artifacts.

Then they were buried in the appropriate strata. This was a difficult feat, but the Voltuscians managed it with ease, restoring the disrupted strata afterwards with the same skill for detail as they employed in creating the artifacts. The pasture thus readied, they led the herd to feast.

I looked at the scrawny Voltuscians with new respect in my eyes. Obviously they must have mastered the techniques of archaeology before inaugurating their hoax, else they would never have handled the strata relationships so well. They had carried the affair off flawlessly—until the day when one of the Earthmen had unkindly disinterred a real Voltuscian artifact.

Conditions were still chaotic when I entered the square in front of the assay office later that afternoon. Earthmen and Voltuscians milled aimlessly around, not knowing what to do next or where to go.

I picked up a rumor that Zweig was dead by his own hand, but this was promptly squelched by the appearance of the assayer in person, looking rather dreadfully upset but still living. He came to the front of the office and hung up a hastily-scrawled card. It read:

NO BUSINESS TRANSACTED TODAY

I saw Dolbak go wandering by and called to him. “I’m ready to go out,” I said innocently.

He looked at me, pity in his lidless eyes. “Sir, haven’t you heard? There will be no more trips to the Burial Grounds.”

“Oh? This thing is true, then?”

“Yes,” he said sadly. “It’s true.”

Obviously he couldn’t bear to talk further. He moved on, and I spotted Darby.

“You seem to have been right,” I told him. “The whole business has fallen apart.”

“Of course. Once they were confronted with Kushkak’s story, they saw the game was up. They’re too fundamentally honest to try to maintain the pretense in the face of our accusation.”

“It’s too bad, in a way,” I said. “Those things they turned out were lovely, you know.”

“And the Piltdown Man had an interesting jawbone, too,” Darby retorted hotly.

“Still,” I said, “it’s not as if the Voltuscians were being malicious about it. Our peculiarities of taste made it impossible for them to sell their goods honestly—so it was either do it dishonestly or starve. Weren’t we caught in something of the same trap when we agreed to join the Company?”

“You’re right there,” Darby admitted reluctantly. “But—”

“Just a second, friend,” said a deep voice from behind us. We turned to see David Sturges glaring at us bitterly.

“What do you want?” Darby asked.

“I want to know why you couldn’t keep your mouth shut,” said Sturges. “Why’d you have to ruin this nice setup for us? What difference did it make if the artifacts were the real thing or not? As long as the people on Earth were willing to lay down real cash for them, why rock the boat?”

Darby sputtered impotently at the bigger man, but said nothing.

“You’ve wrecked the whole works,” Sturges went on. “What do you figure to do for a living now? Can you afford to go to some other planet?”

“I did what was right,” Darby said.

Sturges snorted derisively and walked away. I looked at Darby. “He’s got a point, you know. We’re going to have to go to another planet now. Voltus isn’t worth a damn. You’ve succeeded in uprooting us and finishing the Voltuscian economy at the same time. Maybe you should have kept quiet.”

He looked at me stonily for a moment. “Jarrell, I think I’ve overestimated you,” he said.

A ship came for Zweig the next day, and the assay office closed down permanently. The Company wouldn’t touch Voltus again. The crew of the ship went rapidly through the Terran outpost distributing leaflets that informed us that the Company still required our services and could use us on other planets—provided we paid our own fares.

That was the catch. None of us had saved enough, out of the fees we had received from the Company, to get off Voltus. It had been the dream of all of us to see Earth someday, to explore the world from which our parent stock sprang—but it had been a fool’s dream. At Company rates, we could never save enough to leave.

1 began to see that perhaps Darby had done wrong in exposing the hoax. It certainly didn’t help us, and it was virtually the end of the world for the natives. In one swoop, a boundless source of income was cut off and their precarious economy totally wrecked. They moved silently through the quiet streets, and any day I expected to see the vultures perch on the rooftops. Honesty had been the worst policy, it seemed.

Three days after the bubble burst, a native boy brought me a note. It was from David Sturges, and it said, briefly, “There will be a meeting at my flat tonight at 1900. Sturges.”

When I arrived, I saw that the entire little colony of Company archaeologists was there—even Darby, who ordinarily would have nothing to do with Sturges.

“Good evening, Jarrell,” Sturges said politely as I entered. “I think everyone’s here now, and so we can begin.” He cleared his throat.

“Gentlemen, some of you have accused me of being unethical,” he said. “Even dishonest. You needn’t deny it. I have been unethical. However,” he said, frowning, “I find myself caught in the same disaster that has overtaken all of you, and just as unable to extricate myself. Therefore, I’d like to make a small suggestion. Accepting it will involve use of some of the—ah—moral flexibility you decry.”

“What’s on your mind, Sturges?” someone said impatiently.

“This morning,” he said, “one of the aliens came to me with an idea. It’s a good one. Briefly, he suggested that, as expert archaeologists, we teach the Voltuscians how to manufacture Terran artifacts. There’s no more market for anything from Voltus—but why not continue to take advantage of the skills of the Voltuscians as long as the market’s open for things of Earth? We could smuggle the artifacts to Earth, plant them, have them dug up again and sold there—and we’d make the entire profit, not just the miserable fee the Company allows us!”

“It’s shady, Sturges,” Darby said hoarsely. “I don’t like the idea.”

“How do you like the idea of starving?” Sturges retorted. “We’ll rot on Voltus unless we use our wits.”

I stood up. “Perhaps I can make things clearer to Dr. Darby,” I said. “George, we’re caught in a cleft stick and all we can do is try to wriggle. We can’t get off Voltus, and we can’t stay here. If we accept Sturges’ plan, we’ll build up a cash reserve in a short time. We’ll be free to move on!”

Darby remained unconvinced. He shook his head. “I can’t condone counterfeiting Terran artifacts. No—if you try it, I’ll expose you!”

A stunned silence fell over the room at the threat. Sturges glanced appealingly at me, and I moistened my lips. “You don’t seem to understand, George. Once we have this new plan working, it’ll spur genuine archaeology. Look—we dig up half a dozen phoney scarabs in the Nile Valley. People buy them—and we keep on digging, with the profits we make. Earth experiences a sudden interest; there’s a rebirth of archaeology. We dig up real scarabs.”

His eyes brightened, but 1 could see he was still unpersuaded. I added my clincher.

“Besides, George, someone will have to go to Earth to supervise this project.” 1 looked around the room. “We’ll have to pool our cash, won’t we, to get a man down there?”

I paused, caught Sturges’ silent approval. “I think,” I said sonorously, “that it is the unanimous decision of this assembly that we nominate our greatest expert on Terran antiquity to handle the job on Earth—Dr. George Darby.”

I didn’t think he would be able to resist that. I was right. Suddenly, Darby stopped objecting.

Six months later, an archaeologist working near Gizeh turned up a scarab of lovely design, finely-worked and inlaid with strange jewels.

In a paper published in an obscure journal to which most of us subscribe, he conjectured that this find represented an outcrop of a hitherto-unknown area of Egyptology. He also sold the scarab to a jewelry syndicate for a staggering sum, and used the proceeds to finance an extensive exploration of the entire Nile Valley, something that hadn’t been done since the decline of archaeology more than a century earlier.

Shortly afterwards, a student working in Greece came up with a remarkable Homeric shield. Glazed pottery reached the light in Syria, and Scythian metalwork was exhumed in the wilds of the Caucasus. What had been a science as dead as alchemy suddenly blossomed into new life; the people of Earth discovered that their own world contained riches as desirable as those on Voltus and Dariak and the other planets the Company had been mining for gewgaws, and that they were somewhat less costly in the bargain.

The Voltuscian workshops are now going full blast, and the only limitation on our volume is the difficulty of smuggling the things to Earth and planting them. We’re doing quite well financially, thank you. Darby, who’s handling the job brilliantly on Earth, sends us a fat check every month, which we divide equally among ourselves after paying the happy Voltuscians.

Occasionally I feel regret that it was Darby and not myself who won the coveted job of going to Earth, but I reconcile myself with the awareness that there was no other way to gain Darby’s sympathies. I’ve learned things about ends and means. Soon, we’ll all be rich enough to travel to Earth, if we want to.

But I’m not so sure I do want to go. There was a genuine Voltuscian antiquity, you know, and I’ve become as interested in that as I am in that of Greece and Rome. I see an opportunity to do some pure archaeology in a virgin field of research.

So perhaps I’ll stay here after all. I’m thinking of writing a book on Voltuscian artifacts—the real ones, I mean, all crude things of no commercial value whatever. And tomorrow I’m going to show Dolbak how to make Mexican pottery of the Chichimec period. It’s attractive stuff. I think there ought to be a good market for it.

Content

The Artifact Business
by Robert Silverberg