Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

About the time the wine came, his and mine, he looked up to catch me staring at him. That was my cue. “Pardon me,” I said, leaning toward him, “but aren’t you Casmir Moss?”

“I am.” He was not displeased at being recognized.

“I’m Tiel Chadwick. I’ve read your book.” That was a gamble. The truth was, of course, that I’d read of it.

He smiled back uncertainly, inviting me to say something else. I did. I told him that it had sparked my interest in ancient civilizations, and that I thought he’d made difficult concepts quite lucid. Fortunately, he did not ask for specifics.

Within a few minutes, we were drinking from the same carafe. He loved to talk about ancient Babylonian politics, and I encouraged him, asking a few safe questions and, later in the evening, found myself strolling with him along the beachfront. Abruptly, he turned and faced me. “Who are you, really?”

The question caught me by surprise. “A friend of Ux’s,” I said.

He was silent for a time. The moon drifted low on the ocean, limning the incoming waves with silver. Eventually, gripping the safety rail, he nodded, as if we shared some dark secret.

We walked out past the Oceanographic Institute, saying little and, at my suggestion, stopped at a little bar on the edge of a park. “Reuben Uxbridge,” he said, as we entered, “was one of the most difficult people I’ve ever worked with. He didn’t like to take directions, thought anyone disputing his views was misinformed, and generally behaved abrasively toward everyone. I’m almost surprised to hear he had a friend.” He blinked at me. “I hope I haven’t offended you.” We found a table near the window. Soft music drifted through the place. “But my God, I would give a lot to have him with us tonight.”

That didn’t sound much like the Uxbridge the chessplayers knew. Of course, the circumstances were different.

I’d intended to wait until we’d gone through two or three rounds. But the moment had clearly arrived. We ordered drinks, and I could see that he was consumed by his own thoughts. “Casmir,” I said, “what happened in the tower room?”

His eyes widened perceptibly. “I did not think he would tell anyone. How much do you know?”

“Very little. I know there was a problem. I know he was never the same afterward.”

The drinks came. He drew his index finger through the frost on the glass, then lifted it and studied the liquid in the wavering candlelight. “I assume you are aware of conditions on Belarius?”

“I know they’re difficult.”

“I would say violent .” He smiled, as at some private joke. “But the prize was well worth the risks. Did Ux tell you why we were so interested in Ysdril West? No? Then let me: it is not one city, but seven, built over ten thousand years on the same site. It was a strategic location. No matter how often the city died, later generations returned and built a new one. In ancient times, it stood on a narrow neck of land dividing two continents. But climatic changes pushed the oceans back, the land dropped and dried out, and the place sank into a desert.

“We’ve been able to follow the development of their languages over much of the history of the culture. Let me tell you what that means, Tiel: it means that we can begin, finally, to separate those perceptions that are induced by environment, including one’s own physical form, from those that are of the essence of a thinking species.

I could see that he was warming to his subject, so I tried to steer him back. “The tower, Casmir. Where was the tower?”

“On the eastern edge of the city. It was probably a beacon of some sort at one time, to warn off vessels approaching too close to the coast. We couldn’t be sure because the top of the thing was gone.”

That explained why there was no tower in the diorama. It extended down, rather than up. “Casmir, did you know Durell Coll?”

He looked puzzled. “No,” he said. “Who was he?”

I shrugged. “Not important. Please go on.”

“The tower was a Level III structure, which is merely to assign it to an era. Two more recent cities had been built atop the layer of ruins to which it belonged. We know the Belarians of the later settlements maintained it as a monument and museum.” He looked at me over the top of his glass, and his eyes were luminous. “They had a historical sense, Tiel. You will understand we were anxious to get into the lower levels.

“The upper compartments were filled with sand and, in some places, blocked by collapsed walls. So the work was slow. To make things more difficult, Belarius has a wide variety of exotic predators, and they are hard to discourage. We must have killed hundreds of one kind and another, but there were limits to what we could do.” His voice had grown hollow. “Sometimes people disappeared. Or were devoured in full view of a work crew. Or were carried off. It was like living in an Arabian Nights scenario where rocs flapped in, seized someone, and were gone before we could react. Gradually, we learned to cope, but we had to devote more and more of our people to the defenses.

“We’d originally assumed that it would be necessary to excavate the entire structure, but about a quarter of the way down, the amount of sand in succeeding apartments began to decline, until it had nearly ended altogether. In time, it became merely a matter of opening heavy doors.

“There were inscriptions on the walls, mostly of a religious nature. Quite sophisticated, by the way.” He began an analysis of Belarian syntax. This time I let him go, and tried to show some enthusiasm. Another round of drinks came. And I began to suspect he didn’t want to continue his story.

“Was Ux directing the excavation?” I asked. “At the tower?”

“Oh no,” he said. “We had an archeologist to do that, the detail work. Chellic Oberrif. We brought her in especially for the tower operation. She’d done something similar at the excavations of the early settlements on Mogambo. She was good.”

I thought his eyes misted a little, and his voice caught. He needed a few moments to regroup. Then he continued: “There was a place at the hundred and thirty meter level, about two-thirds of the way down, that blocked us for days. Whole chambers and connecting corridors had collapsed. The danger was that an attempt to cut through might bring down the entire structure. God knows it was shaky enough. But she looped a tunnel around the obstruction, and reentered further down.

“When we did manage later to excavate those sections, we found weapons and remains. A battle of some sort had been fought in there, and somebody had tripped a mechanism that buried the contending parties. We have no idea what the argument was about.

“What was important, however, was that the vandals and robbers of the period immediately following that era, before the upper tower filled with sand, were unable to penetrate below the battle site. In the lower compartments, we found furniture, religious regalia, the stuff of daily life. It had been there a long time, and most of it was dust. But it was there.

“At the base of the tower, we descended a ramp into a wide oval room with an altar raised in its center. A big one, maybe three times the size of the one in the Field Museum. It had several adjoining compartments that were still in decent condition. And the far end of the chamber opened through an archway into a tunnel. Chellic hurried immediately over to it, barely glancing at anything else. “This might give us access,” she said. She meant a way into the heart of Level III.

“We were at the end of a long workday. I proposed that we continue in the morning, but Uxbridge wouldn’t have it. He wanted to see where the tunnel went, whether indeed it did penetrate the ruins. Chellic supported him. So I gave in, reluctantly. That was my mistake, Tiel. I should have held to my instincts.” He sighed. “We sent the work crew back up and pressed on.