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A moment later Haritaizt returned
and with a double bob of his head announced, “My great uncle is delighted to
welcome you,” he told them happily and held the door open wide. They entered
the broad antechamber and, after closing the door, he led the way back into the
house. Marisea half expected the interior of the home to be as hard to navigate
as the city outside, but the floor plan was modestly simple.

There were three doors leading
from the antechamber, but they walked the length of the room. Marisea later
learned that the first two doors led to the rest of the house’s interior, but
the third door let them out into a spacious garden. The arrangement was unique
in Marisea’s experience, but Park and Iris thought it looked like a classic
Roman home.

“McArrgh!” a deep voice boomed
from off to their right. “I thought I might go through the rest of my life
without seeing your ugly face and yet here you are in my very home!” They
turned to see an elderly Iztapellian hobbling his way toward them. “Welcome!
Welcome!”

“Thank you for seeing us,
Metipaetzel.” Park replied with a close approximation of the same double head
bob Haritaizt had performed. “We were in the neighborhood and I thought we
should stop in.”

“Hah! Good one,” Metipaetzel
laughed. “And you brought your lovely wife and ward too I see; a delight to
have you here, my dears. But seriously, what brings you to Iztapel?”

“We were chasing a Dark Ship,”
Park explained.

“They’re back?” Metipaetzel
asked, concerned.

“I’m afraid so,” Park nodded, “at
least one of them is and this time even we had trouble seeing them with our
sensors. I don’t know how visible it was to your ships.”

Haritpaezt spoke up, “I doubt we
would have noticed it had it not been for your ship chasing it.”

“I was afraid of that,” Park
replied. “Well, before we leave we’ll let you know how we retuned our own
sensors. If the rest of the Alliance won’t even see the Dark Ships coming we’re
all in a lot of trouble. But I didn’t come here to discuss Dark Ships. Once on
Owatino you complained about the quality of the Iztapellian wines that
restaurant had in stock. You promised me some of the real stuff if I ever visited,
so…”

“Our wines do not travel well,”
the former ambassador admitted. “Personally, I think they react with
Hyperspace.”

“Is that possible?” Iris asked.

“The scientists deny it,”
Metipaetzel gave her the Iztapellian rendition of a shrug, “but wines just
don’t taste the same after travelling to another world. But now you can taste
for yourselves.”

They spent the rest of the day
visiting with Metipaetzel, but after sunset, the old Iztapellian was confronted
by his private nurse who insisted it was well past his bed time. “You see what
it is like to get old?” he told Marisea. “Try staying young. That’s my advice.”

Haripaezt escorted them back to
the spaceport qnd wished them well. “I think you did Great Uncle a world of
good, even if the excitement did tire him out. He’s been somewhat depressed
since returning to Iztapel.”

“He’s been bored,” Park remarked.
“Metipaetzel has a done a lot in his very long life; soldier, artist,
businessman, politician, teacher, diplomat. You cannot just expect him to want
to laze around the villa all day now. Find him something to do with his
remaining years and if you can’t, bring him to Earth. He can teach in our
school at Van Winkletown and do what he likes with the rest of his time.”

“I’ll suggest that,” Haripaetz
agreed. “At first he was too sick to do much of anything, but lately… You’re
right, he is bored. Thank you, Parker Holman.”

They boarded
Independant
and Tina wasted little time getting them back into
space. “This little side trip just ate up over two weeks, you know. Arn’s going
to be frantic with worry by the time we get back to Earth and so far we’re the
only ones who know the Dark Ships are back.”

“Not so,” Park shook his head. “I
made sure the Iztapellians sent a courier straight to Owatino to break the
news. Oh oh! We forgot to give them the new frequencies for their sensors.”

“No, we didn’t,” Iris told him.
“I sent them from here while you and Haripaetz were talking just outside the
hatch.”

“Good,” Park nodded. “So, let’s
get ourselves back home to Pangaea.”

“Where the hell have you been?”
Arnsley Theoday demanded when
Independent
finally got to within a few light-seconds of Earth.

“Nice to see you again too, Arn,”
Park smirked at the holographic image that floated in the center of the bridge.

“Uh uh! Not this time,” Arn shook
his head. “Your ship was spotted entering the system and then just a few hours
later you winked out for parts unknown.”

“Iztapel, actually,” Park
supplied, “and she’s not my ship. I’m just a passenger this trip. In any case,
we were chasing down a Dark Ship.”

“What?” Arn mixed his anger with
fear and incredulity. “They’re back?”

“You didn’t think they had gone
away for good, did you?”

“A man can dream,” Arn remarked.
“But you still should have been back sooner. If the Dark Ships are back they’re
a danger to the entire Alliance, but especially to Earth. You know that.”

“Sure, we’re their new ‘Special
Friends,’” Park retorted. “I get it, but it was just as important to show them
we weren’t quite ready to forgive and forget. Chasing them out of the system
may have accomplished that. If nothing else, it showed they still can’t sneak
up on us.”

“Perhaps,” Arn grudgingly
admitted, “Prime Terius is on a tear.”

“Is that a pun, Arn?” Park
laughed. “I didn’t think you had it in you.”

“What?” Arn asked, then realized
what he had said. “I mean he expected to debrief you weeks ago and has been
calling here twice a day for news of your arrival. The entire Council of Primes
is getting in on the act lately demanding to hear you report on your tenure as
ambassador.”

“See?” Park commented to Marisea.
“That is why I didn’t want the job. Too many bosses.”

“Right, Park,” Marisea smirked.
“Never take orders from anyone.”

Park ignored that. “Arn, invite
the lot of them to Van Winkle then. We’ll be there late tomorrow night and I’ll
let them question me for a hour or two when I manage to wake up.”

“I’ll tell them your curtain time
is Two in the afternoon,” Arn decided.

“A matinee performance?” Park
chuckled. “Mother would be proud.”

“But I’ll take your report
 
first thing in the morning at the usual
place,” Arn warned him.

“Don’t forget the coffee and
Danish.”

There had been a lot of changes
to Van Winkletown during Park’s absence. Looking back he realized it probably
was no different that the rate of change that had taken place two years prior
to his stint as ambassador, but he had been there to see it happening. To see
it all as the sun rose that morning staggered him.

“What’s that skyscraper doing
there?” he asked Arn as they sat on their customary meeting place on top of the
hill that covered most of the original Project Van Winkle Base.

“Blocking the sun,” Arn grumbled.
“I’ve been thinking of erecting large billboards around town with numbers on
them. We could use the shadow like a giant sundial.”

“I like it,” Park grinned, “but
really, why is it there?”

“It’s part of the University,”
Arn explained. “The Atackack dormitory. You know how they like living all
jumbled up together.”

“Among their own tribes,
perhaps,” Park commented. “They have wars between different tribes.”

“Not among the shaman class and
the scholars are apparently just another flavor of shaman,” Arn told him. “The
population of that building is entirely scholar class Atackack and apparently
they like living together like that. We could be looking at the preliminary
model for an Atackack city.”

“Atackack don’t build cities,”
Park noted, “or has that changed too in my absence?”

“Not yet, but Taodore tells me
they aren’t far from establishing their own rudimentary civilization,” Arn told
him. “I didn’t believe it, but I did a bit of research. Did you know there were
human cities before the invention of pottery?”

“Sure,” Park shrugged. “Jericho
had habitation levels back during the Neolithic and yeah, I guess Pre-pottery
Neolithic Level B counts as a real city. The Atackack have a better technological
base than humans did back then, but I’ve heard some convincing arguments that the
Neolithic cities were exceptions and not entirely cities as we might think of
them, more like very large trade centers and that most of the population was
actually transient.”

“Is that the generally accepted
view?” Arn asked, “Or, I should say, was that the view back in the old days?”

“The arguments went back and
forth,” Park shrugged. “Archaeologists love to argue over the meaning of what
they find. Just part of not studying a true science, I guess.”

“What do you mean?” Arn asked. “I
thought archaeology was completely scientific.”

“Yes and no,” Park replied.
“Physics is a science. Force and vectors; you can’t argue with what they mean,
it’s all math. No arguing with math. It’s only when you get to the areas of
doubt and uncertainty that you can have a real debate, so if you have some sort
of event or behavior for which there is no established cause then you’ll get a
dozen theories as to why it is the way it is and that leads to debate. That’s
sort of the way it was before the Higgs Boson was finally detected. Physicists
were queuing up on boths sides to say why or why not it could possibly exist.
Sure the math was there and it fit, but until the Higgs Boson was detected it
was just an hypothesis – unproven. Once they found it, they could argue over
what it really meant, but couldn’t argue about its existence.”

“Archaeology, though, has a lot
more uncertainties. It, like all the other erroneously named ‘Social Sciences’
is not a science,” Park went on. “But it is a scientific discipline.
Archaeologists use scientific reasoning to attempt to prove their cases. They
look for reproducible results when they can, it’s just that people are a lot
more complex than subatomic physics and an eleven-dimensional universe and in
archaeology the only hard facts are what you actually find. Everything else is
conjecture. It’s supposed to be conjecture based on experience, on other
similar artifacts and on other similar cultures one has studied, but, like I
said, people are complex and little differences, even two sites just a few
miles apart can make all the difference in the world. Sometimes two seemingly
identical occupation levels in two sites are actually a generation apart or
maybe a century in age. A lot of changes can take place in a century. Just look
at all that’s changed in the two years since we sat together here last. What’s
that?”

“The rest of the University,” Arn
explained. “It’s grown quite a bit and so has the rest of the town. Along with
all the new Atackack scholars we’ve more than doubled the population of the
city with Mer immigrants. That’s not really a surprise. We’re the major
spaceport on Pangaea so everyone in the space industry wants to be here.”

“What about the other ports?”
Park asked. “Every major city has one, you know.”

“But this is the center of
activity,” Arn told him. “This is where Doctor Sheetz hangs up her hat so this is
where all the new ships are.”

“Oh?” Park wondered. “Is her
private shipyard no longer a secret?”

“I’m not sure it ever really
was,” Arn admitted. “Marisea had it right two years ago. Everyone knew we were
building something big down there in the basement and most of them guessed
correctly. The strange thing is everyone seems to be willing to keep the
secret. Everyone knows what’s going on in there, but no one is talking about it
until the first production models roll of the line in Questo. The prototypes
only get rolled out at night and everyone makes a big deal about how it must
have just “flown in” when they see it out in the spaceport. In any case, though
a lot of the Mer moving in are here to study with some of our other experts.

“There’s been a lot of interest
in Twenty-first Century crops, for example,” Arn went on. “We have over one
dozen Mer agronomists currently studying here full time and they’re have a
world-wide convention next month. Do you remember that Mer Engineer who helped
out with the new runway?”

“Larie Hawshu,” Park supplied.
“Is she back?”

“She’s opened a office here,” Arn
informed him. “She teaches at the University sometimes and otherwise runs her
consulting business from Van Winkletown. She says our central location is
ideal.”

“Equally inaccessible from
anywhere on Pangaea,” Park laughed.

“With dozens of flights coming
and going each day,” Arn countered, “we’re at the hub of everything on Earth.”

“Dozens of flights?” Park asked.
“That’s a very big change.”

“We have a lot of open space to
expand in,” Arn explained, “and our climate is better suited, except during the
rainy season which is relatively brief, as you know.”

“Somehow it always seems
interminable to me,” Park replied, “Although I have missed rain.”

“It doesn’t rain on Owatino?” Arn
asked.

“It does,” Park admitted, “but
Centre or Owatino city – I’m not sure why it has two names – was built in an
ever drier climate than Van Winkle’s. Even during the rainy season it only
rains at night.”

“Owatino is Camelot?” Arn
chuckled.

“It is a silly place,” Park
joined him. “Is that a city park?” He pointed vaguely northeastward.

“One of several,” Arn informed
him. “When you left, the town was still small enough that if you wanted to go
on a picnic you could simply walk to the edge of town. Now it takes
considerably longer, so while we were rebuilding anyway. We put some areas
aside for parklands, including that place between the rivers where the green
kids got married.”