Across a Billion Years, Page 3

  I can hear you snorting with amused impatience and giving one of your typical common-sense answers. You might have pointed out that none of the aliens wear clothes themselves, or have any kind of privacy taboos, Or even remotely understand why it is that Earthfolk feel they must cover certain parts of their bodies. You might also have noted that galactic equality doesn't have anything to do with sex—which is at the bottom of our thing about clothes—and that it is perfectly proper for a girl to be modest with males of her own species without at the same time seeming to put down males of some other species. But common sense, Lorie, doesn't always rule the universe. Dr. Schein had a long huddle with Jan, and then conferred with Saul Shahmoon and Leroy Chang, and finally—very nervously —took the matter to Dr. Horkkk. Who thought it was so wildly funny that he tied all his arms into knots, which is how the people of Thhh register uncontrollable laughter. He expressed the belief that none of the non-humans would take offense if the girls failed to be properly demure with them.

  And so it was settled. What a bunch of chimpos we Earthers can be about these primitive idiocies!

  The four of us got Mirrik the bulldozer for a bunk-mate, since there wasn't room for him with the others. Jan and Kelly bunked with Dr. Horkkk, Pilazinool, 408b, and Steen Steen. For all I know they had wild orgies over there all night.

  I slept poorly. It wasn't just Mirrik's fragrance, which I'll adapt to in time, but the excitement that got to me. Sleeping a hundred meters away from a treasure trove a billion years old, piled high with the artifacts left behind by the mightiest and most advanced race the universe has ever known. What wonders will we find in that hillside?

  I'll know soon. It's morning, now. Pale, straggly light is coming over the horizon. I was the first one up in our dorm; but when I came outside I found Dr. Horkkk doing some kind of weird calisthenics, and Pilazinool sitting on the ground stripped down to a torso and one arm, polishing his other limbs, while 408b was meditating. Those aliens don't sleep much.

  An hour from now we'll tackle the site. More news later.

  THREE

  August 23, 1 think, 2375

  Higby V

  We've been at it a week. No luck. I almost think we've been hoaxed.

  The site is a hillside outcropping exposed by recent erosion, as I think I may have said already. The top forty meters of countryside here did not exist when the High Ones had their camp on Higby V; all of this gritty, sandy yellowish soil piled up hundreds of millions of years after their time, deposited by wind and flood in the long-ago days when this planet still had weather. Then after we got here and reintroduced weather, the topsoil started to erode, permitting the discovery last year of characteristic High Ones artifacts. Fine.

  Then Dr. Schein and a couple of grad students from Marsport came here last year to do the preliminary survey. They went into action with neutrino magnetometers and sonar probes and density rods, and calculated that the zone of High Ones occupation constituted a large lenticular cone running deep into the hillside. Fine. They covered the whole site with a plastic weather shield and went away to raise funds for a full-scale excavation operation, in which I have been allowed to take part. Fine. We are here. Fine. We have begun the customary resurvey procedures. Fine. Fine. Fine. We haven't found a thing. Not so fine.

  I don't understand what's wrong.

  What we have to do, basically, is very gently lift off the top of the hillside so we'll have access to what was the surface of the ground a billion years ago. Then we gently work our way down, layer by layer, to the High Ones strata. Then we gently take everything out, one scrap at a time, recording relative positions in a dozen different ways. If we're gentle enough we may learn something about the High Ones here. If we aren't gentle, our names will go down in the black book of archaeology alongside the spinless sposhers who took that Martian temple apart to see what was underneath it, and couldn't get it back together again. Or the zoobies who found the key to Plorvian hieroglyphics and dropped it overboard in a methane ocean. Or the feeby quonker who stepped on the Dsmaalian Urn. The first rule in archaeology is: Be careful with the evidence. It isn't replaceable.

  No, that's the second rule. The first one is: Find your evidence.

  We commenced by scanning the top of the hill. We found some intrusive Higby V burials up there, maybe 150,000 years old, dating from the last epoch before this planet lost its atmosphere. The natives of this planet were of no special cultural interest, never having got much past the level of Stone Age man, and as Dr. Schein had already made clear, we are here exclusively to study High Ones remains. Still, once we stumbled onto this Higby V stuff, we had to treat it with some respect, since it might be somebody else's specialty. So Mirrik reverently cleared the site, Kelly Watchman got to work vacuum-coring, and we transferred the whole business to an open space back of the hill, where Steen Steen and I sealed it up and marked it for future reference.

  There weren't any other irrelevant deposits in the upper part of the hill. Luckily. The next stage was to lift most of the remaining overburden. ("Overburden" is one of those zooby archaeological terms of which you're always cranking, Lorie. It means the burden of soil or gravel or rock or whatever that's on top of what you want to excavate. I know it sounds dumb, but what the zog, it's part of the professional jargon.)

  To clear overburden quickest, you use a hydraulic lift. This is nothing more than a highly directional sort of hose-and-pump deal, which you snake into your hillside at just the right angle. Turn the water on and zit! The overburden is sliced off and sloshed away. Dr. Schein and Leroy Chang spent half a day computing velocities and lift angles; then we ran the pipes into the hill, hitched up the compressors, and in five minutes succeeded in cutting off the top twenty meters or so of the hill. In theory we now had a clear shot at our site.

  In theory.

  In practice, not the case. Our modern gadgets deceive us into thinking archaeology is easy, sometimes. But gadgets may err, and in many ways we are not too far removed from the innocent pioneers of four hundred years ago, who bashed around with picks and shovels until they found what they were after.

  Our trouble seems to be that Dr. Schein's survey of last year was off by a bit, and that the degree of error is variable, which is to say he was wronger in some places than in others. This is forgivable: an underground survey is a tricky thing even when you have neutrino magnetometers and sonar probes and density rods. Still, it's a pain. We know that a terrific cache of High Ones things is right in front of us. (At least, we think we know it.) But we haven't found it yet.

  Mirrik labors heroically to clear the remaining overburden. This has to be done manually, because we're too close to the supposed upper strata of High Ones occupation to dare use anything as violent as the hydraulic lift. Kelly hovers just back of Mirrik's huge left shoulder, taking core samplings now and then. The rest of us haul dirt, fidget, speculate, play chess, and crank a good deal.

  The weather doesn't help. At least our work is conducted under the weather shield, but that protects only the site and those actually examining it. In order to get from shack to site we have to cross a hundred meters of open ground, with one chance out of four that it will be raining, three chances out of four that a strong wind will be blowing, and five chances out of four that the air will be bone-chillingly cold. When it rains, it doesn't drizzle. The wind unfailingly carries tons of sand and grit. And the cold is the sort of cold that doesn't just bother you, it persecutes you. Some of us don't mind it, like Pilazinool, although he's having tremendous trouble with sand in his joints. Dr. Horkkk comes from a cold planet—you can even have cold planets around a blazing star like Rigel, if you're far enough out—and he rather enjoys a brisk breeze. Mirrik doesn't mind because his hide is so thick. The rest of us are a little unhappy.

  The landscape is no source of cheer. Some trees and shrubs, chosen for their ability to hold down topsoil, not for their beauty. Low hills. Craters. Puddles.

  Dad would be sniggering up his sleeve if he knew the dark
thoughts I've thought all week. "Serve the slicy idiot right!" he'd say. "Let him marinate in his archaeology! Let him ossify in it!"

  You were lucky, Lorie. You missed the really nasty family conferences dealing with my choice of a profession. Dad hates to stir a fuss when we're visiting you. Even so, you got a good dose of the quarreling, but it wasn't a snip of what went on at home.

  I have to say I was awfully disappointed in Dad when he started all that cranking about my being an archaeologist.

  "Get a real job!" he kept yelling. "Be an ultradrive pilot, if you want to see the galaxy! You know what kind of stash they make? The pension rights? They get sore thumbs from all the spending they do. Or interplanetary law, now, there's a profession! Alien torts and malfeasances! Hypothecation of assets on nonverbal worlds! Infinite possibilities, Tom, infinite! Why, I knew a lawyer on Capella XII, he did nothing but color-change suits and metamorphoses, and he had a ten-year backlog with six clerks!"

  If you ever play this back, Lorie, I hope you appreciate the skill with which I imitate Our Lord And Master's voice. I get just the right tone of hearty manliness mixed with stuffy hypocrisy, don't I? No, blot that. Dad's not really a hypocrite. He's consistent to his own rules.

  We all knew he wasn't the intellectual type, though I at least always felt that despite his extreme concern with piling up stash and keeping a busy thumb, he had some interest in the finer values. He did get a degree from Fentnor, after all, and even though it was in Business Administration they don't let you escape from Fentnor illiterate. I also felt that Dad was far from being the kind of reactionary vidj that tries to dictate his son's professional choice. He always struck me as a live and let live type.

  So it hurt when he came down so hard against my going into archaeology.

  No secret what he really wants, which is for me to follow him into the real-estate business and eventually to take over from him. But real estate sings no songs to me, and I made that clear to him, didn't I, by the time I was sixteen? Dad gets his zingers, not to mention much stash, from building his instant slums out of parapithlite sheeting on faraway worlds, and I suppose for him this is a creative thing. I admit some of his projects have been ingenious, such as the chain of floating houses on that gas-giant world in the Capella system, or the high-grav shopping center with interlocking centrifuges that he whipped up for the Muliwomps. Nevertheless I have always lacked a craving for this entire pocket.

  Anyway, why should I go into a "useful" or "profitable" line of work, to quote two of Dad's favorite adjectives? What better justification for his bulging bank accounts than that they allowed his son to dedicate himself to the pursuit of pure knowledge?

  Such as the digging up of old odds and ends on miserable cold stormy planets.

  Enough. I need not yammer to you about Dad's obtuseness, since I think you share my feelings and—as, usual—are 100 percent on my side. Dad went his way, I went mine, and perhaps he'll soften up and forgive me after a while for turning my back on color-change litigation and housing projects, and if not, I will somehow avoid starvation anyway, doing what I most enjoy doing, which is archaeologizing.

  Though I will not pretend that I've enjoyed this current job so far.

  I will take a positive attitude. I will tell myself that we'll hit the right level any day.

  * * *

  Three-hour intermission there, during which I helped to perform some hard, dull, valuable work.

  What we did was get fiber telescopes into the hillside to see what's in there. These are long strands of glass which transmit an optically undistorted image from end to end, given the right illumination. Getting them into the hillside involved drilling holes, which Kelly took care of with her vacuum equipment; this had to be done with unusual care, since the drill might blunder right into the site we're looking for and chop it up some.

  I may have underestimated Kelly. She handles those corers beautifully.

  Kelly perforated the hill for us; then we mounted the fiber telescopes on sprocket wheels and fed them ticklishly into the ground. We put four in altogether, spaced twenty meters apart; Jan and I worked together on one wheel.

  Now the telescopes are in place. The big shots are peering into the heart of the mound. Night is falling, and it's raining again. I'm in the dorm, dictating this. If my voice is a little low, it's because I don't want to disturb Saul and Mirrik, who are playing chess. It's astonishing to watch somebody as huge as Mirrik moving chess pieces around with the tip of a tusk.

  Jan is running toward our shack from the dig site. She looks excited. She's calling something to us, but I can't hear her through the bubble wall.

  * * *

  One hour later. Night, now. What Jan was trying to say was that they hit paydirt. The telescopes show the location of the High Ones cache. We weren't more than a dozen meters off course. For some reason we had misinterpreted the survey figures and were coming in on a tilt, but we can correct for that now.

  It's too late to do any digging tonight. First thing in the morning we'll plot a whole new survey graph so that we have the position down perfectly. Then we'll finally be ready to start real work, with all of the preliminaries out of the way.

  The whole team is over in our dorm right now. Outside it's pouring again. Everyone's tense and jumpy. Dr. Horkkk keeps pacing around in that weird precise way of his—a dozen steps, turn, a dozen steps back, turn, mathematically calculated so that he covers the same distance down to the millimeter. Steen Steen and Leroy Chang are following along behind him, having some kind of argument about High Ones linguistics. Pilazinool and Kelly Watchman are playing chess, which as you've guessed is our big recreation here. Kelly got very wet coming back from the site and has stripped down to her pretty pink synthetic skin, which has Leroy Chang disturbed; he keeps peering over his shoulder at her. So much for all that elaborate stuff about modesty. Kelly is a handsome wench, of course, but it quonks me how Leroy can get so excited about something that came out of a vat of chemicals. Maybe she's naked, but she isn't real, and that takes some of the thrill out of the nakedness. Pilazinool has done his kind of strip routine too: he's down to head and torso, and one arm to make the moves, while the rest of his body is lying in a mixed-up heap next to his bench. Now and then he screws one of his legs back on, or takes off an antenna, or otherwise fissions around with himself in his nervous way. He's losing the chess game, incidentally.

  Dr. Schein is running scanner tapes of previous High Ones excavations, and is discussing tomorrow's digging techniques with Mirrik, who has plenty to say. Saul Shahmoon has one of his stamp albums out and is showing his prize specimens to 408b and Jan, who don't look very interested. And I'm sitting off in one corner talking into a message cube.

  The evening seems endless.

  Is it ever like this for you, Lorie? Even after all these years I don't really know how you work inside. I mean, lying there, hardly able to move, getting your food through tubes, no way even to go to the window and see what the weather's like. Yet I've never seen you bored or impatient or even depressed. If you were some kind of mental vegetable, I could understand it. But your mind is active and alert and probably in most ways a better mind than mine. Here I am—here we all are—counting minutes until morning and sick of waiting. And there you are, with nothing to look forward to except another day of the same, keeping cheerful.

  Is it the TP that does it? I guess it is. Being able to rove all through the universe in your mind. Talking with friends on a thousand different planets, seeing strange scenes through their eyes, finding out everything about everything without leaving your bed at all. You can't ever be bored or lonely for long. You just have to tune in on some other TP and you've got company and entertainment.

  I've always felt sorry for you, Lorie. Me being so healthy and active, going everywhere, doing so much, and you tied down to your hospital room, and yet we're twins, who are supposed to share so much. That's the ironic part. But tonight I wonder whether I ought to pity you or envy you. I can walk; you can
soar from star to star via your TP powers, no limits. Which of us is the real cripple?

  Idle thoughts on a long night, nothing else.

  Jan is tired of looking at Saul's stamps. I heard her ask him to go for a walk with her, but he said no, he's got some cataloging to do. So Jan came over and asked me instead. Second Choice, as usual.

  We'll go out and stroll a while, unless it's still raining. She's a nice kid. This fixation she has on Saul makes no sense to me—he's twice her age, obviously a confirmed bachelor, and must have been frightened by a woman at an early age, judging by the way he hides behind those stamp albums—but maybe Jan's got a need for pursuing shy older men. We're each of us chimpo in our special way, I guess. Anyhow, if she wants to walk a while, why should I say no? It's a way of passing time.

  So I'll wrap up this cube here. Perhaps next time I'll tell you how we uncovered the tomb of the Emperor of the High Ones and found him still alive, in suspended animation. Or how we found the Secret Treasure of the High Ones, fifty billion credits worth of uranium. Fantasy comes cheap on a dull night. Tomorrow arrives the moment of truth at last. Out into the cold and dark, now. Off.

  FOUR

  August 28, 2375

  Higby V

  So we started digging, and right away we came to this sleek solid plutonium sarcophagus with a platinum button on its side, and Dr. Horkkk pushed the button and the coffin popped open, and inside it we saw the Emperor of the High Ones, who came out of suspended animation and sat up and said, "Greetings, O beings of a distant future age!"

  So we began to follow this narrow winding tunnel through the hill, and Kelly cored into a side passage where there was this vault of blue fusion-glass, and upon command of "Open, Sesame," the vault door swung back and we saw, neatly stacked, the cubes of uranium that we realized had to be the imperial treasure of the High Ones, worth at least fifty billion credits.