Гарри Тертлдав - The First Heroes

The basement shelter in Milford, with its blankets, chemical toilet, and emergency provisions, seemed in his imagination to lie still underwater. The image, literary and unreal, could not be contemplated in the intolerable present: it belonged to some other category of time. He imagined the occupants of a New York apartment building crowding down into the basement in the minutes before attack.

Cyril was leafing through the book. "Firsts?" he asked curiously. "Sumer was the beginning of civilization?"

"As we are its end. Great cities whose literate class is kept busy producing official documents, and so don't distract their masters. They found the Gilgamesh epic among thousands of temple inventories and official genealogies."

"First tame writers, eh?" Cyril commented. "Guess that's why they also had to invent beer." His own bottle, the scribe noticed, appeared to be bourbon.

"In their beginning is our end," he murmured.

"It's a cute idea," said Cyril, meaning that's all it was. "Is there a story in it?"

"I don't really feel like mining it for story potential," the scribe replied, a bit waspishly. Which wasn't really true, he realized: without thinking about it, he had been doing exactly that. "I suppose you've been digging for references to Sumer in that damned thick square book," Cyril continued.

"It's not square; it's circular," he protested mildly.

"Found some already, I'll bet. Care to read me one? Go on; you know you want to."

With only a show show of reluctance, he pulled out the big book, supple-spined as a dictionary from frequent opening, and found the marked passage. "Behailed His Gross the Ondt, prostrandvorous upon his dhrone, in his Papylonian babooshkees, smolking a spatial brunt of Hosana cigals, with unshrinkables farfalling from his unthinkables, swarming of himself in his sunnyroom, sated before his comfortumble phullup-suppy of a plate o'monkynous and a confucion of minthe . . ."

"A bigshot," Cyril commented. The scribe blinked at this, and jotted lugal = bigshot on a pad beside his typewriter. "Lots of bug imagery: drone, cigals, papillon—this is the ant and the grasshopper story, right?"

The scribe nodded. Cyril would love the Wake if he allowed himself. "Dhrone also meaning throne, meaning the crapper. The great man's preoccupations never recede far, do they? I can bet what the 'un-thinkables' are, but what about the 'unshrinkables'?"

"Pajamas, I think," the scribe replied. His mind flinched away from unthinkable. "There's a later passage, which contrasts 'Sum-merian sunshine' with 'Cimmerian shudders.'" Cyril looked about to smirk, and he added sharply, "Not Robert E. Howard's, but the land of shadows."

Cyril nodded wisely. "Sumer is igoin out," he said. "Lhude sing Goddamn."

There was nothing the scribe could add to that. The faint whine of an overhead jet, some 707 bound for Idlewild, reached them faintly through the window. The scribe looked at the pane, thinking about shutters. Flying glass; blast sites in the financial district, the naval shipyards. Apartments with a view of the Manhattan skyline might prove less of a premium.

"You're thinking story ideas." Cyril became very acute, not to say accusing, when he got drunk.

The scribe flushed. "The greatest temptation is the final treason," he began, then stopped: he seemed to have no more control over his words than his thoughts. "I was thinking about shutters." Cyril laughed, then finished the bottle and set it on the floor. "Well, tell me what you decide." The scribe's bottle was also empty, and it occurred to him that when Virginia took the kids to a movie so he could entertain in the tiny apartment, he should be quicker in realizing that he had to go to the kitchen himself. Indurate though he was to alcoholic remorse, the scribe felt a stab of grief, that he had brought his family back to the targeted city, now near the endpoint of history.

And Cyril, who sometimes seemed to read minds (but likelier knew to follow one's stream of consciousness to where it pooled), said, "There's your title: Last and First Gravamen."

The scribe found he could not bear to contemplate the word gravamen. He was standing in front of the refrigerator, looking at containers of the juice, whole milk, condiments that he usually saw only at table. The quart bottle was cool in his hand, its heft comforting, but the hum of electricity and wisps of Freon-cooled vapor seemed fragile to evanescence, and the emanating chill breathed a message that he hoped not to hear.

Leslie was halfway through an aggravating Monday afternoon when Trent called with his proposal.

"That game?" she said distractedly, waving away a colleague who had poked his head into her cubicle. Trent had fooled around with it all weekend, reasonable behavior for someone who spends his workdays editing documentation, but was expected to set it aside for Monday.

"I have been exchanging e-mail with the developers, and they're planning a series of novel tie-ins."

"Novels? You mean, like Dungeons & Dragons books?" Leslie had seen such paperbacks in Barnes and Noble.

"Not gaming novels, but novels set in the game's era. They would be packaged to tie in with Ziggurat but wouldn't follow its storyline or anything—it doesn't have one, of course. Three novels, each one long enough for a slim book, and historically authentic, which is a selling point. But dealing with wars, trade conflicts, dynastic succession: just like the game."

Leslie didn't like the sound of this. She had met friends of Trent who had worked on such projects, which seemed a good way to earn six thousand dollars in four months rather than four weeks.

"What are they offering you?" she asked.

"They want to see a proposal, maybe two or three outlines. I told them about your history background, and said you would be involved." "In writing a novel?" Leslie was sure she was misunderstanding something. "I'll do the work, I just need input for the outlines." "Trent, this makes no sense." Her phone began blinking, a call routed to voicemail. "Isn't this game coming out in November? There isn't time for all this."

"It's been pushed back till spring; they're afraid of the competition from You-know-what. This repackaging is kind of desperate, and they need the books fast. I can do that, I just need to get the contract."

Leslie sighed. "We'll talk tonight, okay?" A second coworker appeared, and Leslie waved her in. Another light went on, and she jabbed at the button, too late. "Sit down, I just need to check my messages."

On the way home Leslie returned the weekend video rental to the library, where she checked the 930s shelf for books on Mesopotamia. She brought back several, which Megan studied curiously while Trent made supper.

"These must be very old people," she remarked. Then she added confidingly: "Daddy is reading me the oldest story in the world." "The Sumerians were around long before the Trojan War. They probably invented the wheel."

Can something so obvious be startling? Megan evidently pondered the matter until dinner, when her parents' conversation brought it to the fore.

"Their civilization was stranger than those game designers realize. You can't write a popular novel about it without distorting everything."

"Oh, come on—how strange can their motivations be? The cities fight over resources and influence, their churches slowly turn into bureaucracies, and individuals pray for solutions to their personal problems and worry about dying. Sounds familiar to me."

"That's a gamer's-eye view. A novel would have to go inside the heads of one of these characters, and their value system—it's as far from the Greeks' as they are from us." "They invented the wheel, so they wanted to be like us. The Pequots didn't have wheels, and Ms. Ciarelli read us a book about them."

Both parents stared at their daughter.