Гарри Тертлдав - The First Heroes

And you had to be similarly obsessed to write his life, thought Leslie. Most of Trent's enthusiasms—Finnegans Wake, the works of James Branch Cabell, Wagner's Ring—were those of the great man, whom he was seeking, through a kind of literary archeology, to understand. That this required the intentness of the scholar rather than the enthusiasm of the dilettante was for Leslie its primary value.

"He would have hated computer games," Leslie pointed out.

"Certainly these games. He would have hated postmodernism's embrace of pop culture and mass media; he still believed in great modernist masterpieces rising above a sea of trash. Yet look at his best work: commercial SF novels, his 'serious' efforts unpublished. And his narratives are fragmented and decentered, mixing prose with verse and embedding texts within texts like—" Trent looked at the monitor, where overlapping windows had opened atop one another, and laughed at the too to-hand analogy.

Trent had been gesturing unconsciously toward the top shelf, too close to the ceiling to hold any but small-format paperbacks, and L eslie glanced up at their titles. "If you want to write about porno sci-fi, why not the guy who wrote The Simulacra?"

"He's not as interesting," Trent said in a conspiratorial whisper, as though broaching heresy. "My guy isn't trendy; he's still out in the margins."

Images were appearing one after the other on the screen: an ancient map of Nippur, an artist's rendition of the walls of Uruk, a detailed relief of charioteers riding into battle. Scenes of war, which the city-states waged incessantly upon each other until they were conquered from without. Was this how players would busy themselves? An image of naked prisoners in a neck-stock was followed by a stele fragment of soldiers dumping earth over a mound of enemy dead.

"How do you win?" she asked. "Conquer everyone else, or just stay on top of your own small heap until you die of old age?"

"I'll let you know," he said. The screen was once more displaying the entire region, and Trent leaned forward to study it. "Why do they call it a river valley? The land between the rivers is wide and flat, with mountains on one side only."

"It's an alluvial plain." Except for the levees that gradually build up along the banks of the river and any canals, the land appears perfectly flat. But the basins defined by these ridges, too wide and shallow for the eye to discern, would determine the flow of water as it floods, an issue of gravest consequence.

"Annalivia, Annaluvia," Trent mused. "Yes, dear." Outside, Megan's shout echoed off the tier of condo balconies across the grass, and she looked out the window. "Beta-testers play with the product, right? They don't work at it."

"Not exactly, but I take your point." Leslie was already heading for the door, where Ursuline was blocking the threshold, evidently to alert her to anyone coming or going. She stepped over the sleeping Labrador and padded quietly down the hall, leaving her book on the table outside their bedroom. Through the back screen she could hear the children's shouts, none pitched to the pain or alarm she was always listening for.

Four kids were visible or audible through the dining room window, circling each other on the trimmed lawn. Their game seemed improvised yet intuitively understood, and even the fluid shifting of rules that Leslie observed provoked neither confusion nor protest. What games did children play in the ancient world, without structures designed for their edification? Would the diversions of ancient Greece be more familiar to us than those of early Sumer, a culture twice as old and incomparably stranger?

Leslie took chilled coffee from the refrigerator, added ice, and stood watching out the kitchen window, a few degrees' different perspective. Without a ball or demarcated spaces, their game seemed the frolic of will in a field of limitless play, the impulse to sportiveness before it has touched a limit.

At one point the four children were all facing one direction, paused before a prospect invisible to Leslie. Something in their hesitancy immediately reminded her of the scene, shown earlier in this Kubrick's year on living room DVD, of the killer apes crouched warily before the slim featureless monolith. "It looks like the World Trade Center!" cried Megan, still weeks shy of her eighth birthday. "Where's the other one?" Trent had laughed, anticipating the coming scenes depicting life in 2001. "You'll see," he said.

The sun retained the brightness of midafternoon, though it was after five and Leslie, had she not taken a half-day from work, would be on the train home by now. The resumption of school still left what seemed an entire play day for Megan, who would go back outside for more than an hour after dinner. This plenitude, possible only in the first weeks of the school year, possessed the transient glamour of enchantment: one layer of time folded over another. Partake while the feast is before you, she wanted to tell her daughter, who consumed her good fortune with youth's grassfire prodigality. She brought a glass in for Trent, who had called up another map of Mesopotamia, this one showing the network of canals running between rivers and cities. "It's all connect-the-dots on a flat surface," he said in mild surprise. "I bet news traveled by boat and canal path, along these lines. Like a computer chip," he added after a moment.

"Watch it with the cute conceits," Leslie warned. She wondered whether the map's density of crisscros sings (which seemed to include all the thirty or so Sumerian city-states, not just the Big Seven chosen for gaming purposes) was largely imaginative reconstruction. How many of those first distributaries could still be discerned beneath millennia of subsequent history, flooding, and war? Perhaps through satellite photography, of which the last decade must have seen a lot.

Trent, angling his head to regard the map northside up, seemed to be thinking along the same lines. "The entire region is now part of . . ." "Iraq, yes." Where children now perished for the imperial ambitions of their leaders, as had doubtless happened five thousand years ago.

Trent grimaced. "At least Great Games never pandered to the help-kill-Saddam market." He was reminding her that he had refused to get involved with a project called The Mother of All Battles nearly ten years ago, when turning down assignments was hard to do.

Leslie recognized that she was looking for a reason to dislike the game. "Ancient Sumer was such a strange culture, you're not going to gain an understanding of it by playing geopolitics."

"I don't think this is all war gaming," Trent replied as he clicked through a series of menus. "Here's a module on the economy of mud bricks. Look, you have to bake the ones that go into the bottom rows, or they will draw moisture out of the ground. And you need wooden frames to make them, which are expensive."

"That's not a mud brick," Leslie pointed out. "It's a clay tablet." "Whoa, you're right." Trent backed up to restore a rectangular image that had appeared as a sidebar. "That might be a bad link." He scribbled for a moment on a clipboard next to the monitor.

Leslie leaned forward as Trent, exploring the program's architecture, followed a series of links that brought up more cuneiform images: tablets, cylinders, a pieced-together stele. "Wait, stop," she cried. The clay square on the screen was evidently small, as it contained only five rows of text. "I remember that one from college. See the first characters of the top three registers? They are 'Day 1, Day 2, Day 3.'"

"Really?" Trent studied the pictograms—a pair of curved lines, suggesting sunrise over the saddle between two hills, with one, two, and three vertical slashes beneath—while Leslie explained that the tablets dated from 3000 B.C., the dawn of writing, and that these three characters were for a long time the only ones on the tablet whose meaning was known. She had seen a slide of it in a history lecture, and when the teacher asked the class to guess she felt a thrill at the unmediated transmission of meaning, like current, across five thousand years. "How many hash marks till the base number?"