Джек Макдевитт - Engines Of God

"Does Maggie know we're in?"

"They're getting her now. The poor woman never gets any rest, Henry."

"She can rest when we're out of here." Maggie was his chief philologist. Code-breaker, really. Reader of Impossible Inscriptions. The lamp on his left wrist flashed green. He activated the energy field.

Carson punched the go pad, and the lock cycled open. Water sloshed in over the deck.

Outside, visibility was poor. They were too close inshore: the marker lights always blurred, the water was always full of sand, and one could seldom see the entire Temple.

The Temple of the Winds.

A bitter joke, that. It had been submerged since an earthquake somewhere around Thomas Jefferson's time created a new shoreline. The Temple was a one-time military post, home for various deities, place of worship for travelers long before humans had laid bricks at Ur or Nineveh.

Sic transit.

Fish darted before him, accompanied him. Off to his left, something big moved through the water. Carson turned a lamp in its direction, and the light passed through it. It was a jelly. Quite harmless. It rippled, blossomed, and swam leisurely on its way.

A broad colonnade masked the front of the Temple. They settled onto the stone floor, beside a circular column. It was one of ten still standing. Of an original twelve. Not bad, for a place that had been through an earthquake.

"Frank." Linda's voice broke in on his earphones. She sounded pleased. And with good reason; she had planned this aspect of the excavation. She'd taken a couple of chances, guessed right, and they'd broken in well ahead of schedule. Under the circumstances, the time gained was critical.

"Henry's with me," said Carson. "We're on our way."

"Henry," she said. "We're open as far back as we can see."

"Good show, Linda. Congratulations."

The Temple entrance gaped wide. They swam into the nave. Lines of colored lights trailed off through the dark. It always seemed to Henry that the lamps exaggerated the size of the place.

"Blue," said Carson.

"I know." They followed the blue lamps toward the rear. Only vestiges of the Temple roof remained. The gray light from the surface was oily and thick against the cheerful glow of the markers.

Henry was in poor condition. Swimming tired him, but he had declared jets too dangerous to use inside the excavation. He had to live by his own rules.

The glowing blue track angled abruptly off to the left, and plunged through a hole in the floor.

He could hear Linda and Art Gibbs and some of the others on the common channel. They were laughing and cheering him on and congratulating one another on the find.

He swam down the labyrinthine approach tunnel. Carson stayed to his rear, advising him to take his time, until Henry finally lost patience and asked him to be quiet. He rounded the last bend and saw lights ahead.

They stood aside for him. Trifon Pavlaevich, a husky Russian with a giant white mustache, bowed slightly; Karl Pickens beamed; and Art Gibbs floated proudly beside Linda.

Linda Thomas was a redheaded dynamo who knew what she was doing and didn't mind sharing credit with her colleagues. As a result, they loved her. She stood over a shaft, waving him forward. When he reached her, she shook his hand, and their fields glimmered. "All right," he said briskly. "Let's see what we've got." Someone pressed a lamp into his hand. He lowered it into the darkness, saw engravings and bas-reliefs, and descended into a chamber whose dimensions reached beyond the limits of the light. The walls were busy, filled with shelves and carvings. There were objects on the shelves. Hard to see precisely what. Maybe local sea life, accumulated before the room was sealed. Maybe artifacts.

His team followed. Trifon warned them not to touch any thin. "Got to make a chart before anything gets moved." We know, Tri.

Lights played across the wall-carvings. He could make out animals, but no likenesses of the Quraquat. Sculptures of the intelligent species were rare, except in holy places. In any age. And among most of their cultures. There seemed to be an imperative that prohibited capturing their own image in stone. There would be a reason, of course, but they had not yet found it.

The floor was covered with a half-meter of silt. Other chambers opened beyond. And voices echoed happily in his phones:

"This used to be a table." "The symbols are Casumel series. Right?" "Art, look at this." "I think there's more in back." "Here. Over here."

And Linda, in the room on the north side, held a lamp up to a relief which depicted three Quraquat figures. Trifon delicately touched the face of one of the images, trailing his fingers across its jaw, along the thrust of its mouth. The Quraquat had been warm-blooded, bipedal, furred creatures with a vaguely reptilian cast. Alligators with faces rather than long jaws and mindless grins. These were robed. A four-legged beast stood with them.

"Henry?" She motioned him over.

The figures were majestic. They radiated power and dignity. "Are they gods?" he asked.

"What else?" said Tri.

"Not strictly," said Linda. "This is Telmon, the Creator." She indicated the central figure, which was dominant. "She is the Great Mother. And these are her two aspects: Reason and Passion."

"The Great Mother?" Henry sounded surprised. The Quraquat at the time of their demise had worshipped a supreme male deity.

"Matriarchal societies have been common here," she said. Tri was taking pictures, and Linda posed beside the figure. For perspective, more or less. "If we ever get a decent analysis on the Lower Temple," she said, "we'll discover that was a matriarchy. I'll bet on it. Moreover, we'll probably find Telmon in that era as well."

Carson's voice came in on Jacobi's personal channel. "Henry, there's something here you'll want to see."

It was in the largest of the chambers, where Carson waited before another bas-relief. He waved Henry nearer, and raised his lamp. More Quraquat figures. These seemed to be set in individual tableaus. "There are twelve of them," he said in a significant voice. "Like the Christian stations."

"Mystical number."

Henry moved quietly around the room. The figures were exquisitely wrought. Pieces had broken away, others were eroded by time. But they were still there, frame after frame of the Quraquat in that same godlike dignity. They carried rakes and spears and scrolls. And, near the end, a fearsome creature with partially hooded features appeared.

"Death" said Linda.

Always the same, thought Henry. Here or Babylon or New York. Everybody has the same image.

"What is this? Do you know?"

Linda was glowing. "It's the story of Tull, the Deliverer. Here—" She pointed at the first tableau. "Tull accepts the wine of mortality from Telmon. And here he is behind a plow."

Quraquat mythology wasn't Henry's specialty. But he knew Tull. "Christ figure," he said. "Osiris. Prometheus."

"Yes. Look, here's the visit to the armorer." She drifted along the friezes, pausing before each. "And the battle sequences."

"There's a problem here somewhere," said Carson. "The myth is later than this period, isn't it?"

"We're not sure of very much yet, Frank," said Linda. "And maybe this place isn't as old as we think. But that doesn't matter as much as the fact that we have a complete set of tableaus."

"Marvelous," said Henry. "They'll put these in the West Wing and hang our name on them."

Someone asked what they represented.

"Here," said Linda. "It begins here. Tull is an infant, and he's looking down at the world."

"It's a globe," said Art. "They knew the world was round."

"That knowledge was lost and recovered several times during their history. Anyway, Tull envied the people on the world."

"The Quraquat."