Shaman (31 page)

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 large 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 modern 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.

o0o

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 a 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 five thousand Before Present.”

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 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 holopad. “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 are 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, Professor.”

“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 has been spent out here, on other 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, Professor. 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 smelted 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 Judgment 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 display of his holopad.

o0o

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—bleak, 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. “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. Unforgivable, 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 mid-corridor 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. “Which can be 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 I 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.”