Shaman (33 page)

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 that 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 hands. 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 corner 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 black 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 archaeo-theology to see that any well-organized group of people must have some way of dealing with their discardables.

He shook his head. “Don't feel too badly, Professor. I'm as stunned as you are. And the evidence was all there, too, if only we'd been open-minded enough to read it. The small animal carcasses, the 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.”

o0o

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 to the southern pits, broken stuff such as potsherds and glass went into the eastern “temple,” 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.

Hence, 5,000 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 modern 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,” said Yoshi.

Burton glanced at her. “Prejudice,” he agreed. “I can only plead that my lack of exposure to... other races has ill-prepared me to deal with them. I have never liked reptiles. The sight of a six foot tall talking 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 stele, 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?”

As if 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. “Okay, 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.

“Know thou that every fixed star hath its own planets, and every planet its own creatures, whose number no man can compute.” — Gleanings from the Writings of Bahá'u'lláh

I mentioned my love of archaeology and cultural anthropology. I also love First Contact stories. So any opportunity I get to combine those two loves, I will take. This story is one of those opportunities.

o0o

They called the planet Bog for lack of anything nicer to say about it. The name was certainly appropriate, if not one hundred percent accurate. The entire planet was not a bog, but anyone set down in its narrow “temperate zone” would find that hard to believe. The planet's abundant supply of surface water brought to mind words like “tarn” and “bracken”—even “bilge.”

Not a drop of the stuff was drinkable. It contained salts and minerals in such concentration that, in some of the smaller bodies of water, you could float objects that would have sunk to the bottom on Earth or Pa-Loana or just about any other habitable planet Rhys Llewellyn could name.

Take that gently bobbing field lamp, for example. Rhys gazed at it in consternation as it was carried away on the sludgy currents of Brown Salt Lake, gliding serenely just out of his reach.

“See what I mean?”

Roderick Halfax lobbed a flat rock at the lamp. It struck the metal casing with a muffled ping! and plopped into the water, where it began the tedious and protracted process of sinking. A tiny cloud of native “fireflies,” already visible in the twilight, eddied above the flotsam, apparently attracted by the gleam of alien metal.

“I'd rather not have demonstrated it at the expense of our field supplies,” Rhys admitted, “but yes, I do see.”

Rick peered at the sludgy liquid. “You could probably walk out and get it... but I wouldn't recommend it.”

He turned back from the water to make his way up the newly constructed pier, laid just last week by Tanaka Corp's advance team of engineers.

After a last glance at the lost field lamp, Rhys fell into step beside his assistant. “I'll bet you can build a boat out of just about anything here—wood, metal, stone...”

“Ah, but sir,” Rick countered, a frown puckering his brow, “the natives here don't build boats, nor do they work wood, make metal or carve stone... sir.”

Rhys laughed; the younger man's impersonation of his very earnest female assistant, Yoshi Umeki, was humorously accurate. And, of course, what he said was also true. The “natives” of Bog did none of those things, which posed the question of whether they were “natives” at all, in the anthropological sense.

There was nothing like alien/human contact to blur the lines between man and intelligent animal. Rhys could recall particular Humans whose behavior blurred the lines even further. It was that sticky question of consciousness that Rhys Llewellyn had been brought to Bog to answer.

“Ah, Yoshi!” He looked up and saw the girl making her way toward them through the stacks of tarp-covered trading goods and camp supplies that sat upon what passed for
terra firma
in this neck of the swamp.

She was pecking at a notepad with one hand and frowning earnestly over the results of her work. Seeing Rhys and Rick, she paused and waved, oblivious to the admiring glances of a handful of Tanaka engineers who'd gathered around the mobile cantina.

Rhys lengthened his stride and covered the distance between them to give the girl a hearty hug. “So, Yoshi—any candidates for sentience among our Bogies?”

She consulted her notepad. “Well, there appear to be several at this location. The top candidates are a bipedal, brachiating mammalian reminiscent of a lemur, a burrowing reptilian form not unlike an iguana, and an amphibian that builds mud lodges in the swamp.”

“Ah, now that sounds promising.”

“I'm glad you think so, Professor. Personally, I find it all rather depressing.”

The voice, sporting a decidedly British accent, came from over Rhys's shoulder, making him turn. He found himself face to face with an inappropriately well-dressed man of perhaps middle age. He was average in height, bland in coloring, and wore an expression of annoyed boredom.