Maya Bohnhoff - The Secret Life of Gods

“I’m telling you, this is the opportunity of a lifetime. Not only is this one of the most exciting archaeological finds since… since…” Rhys Llewellyn’s hands searched the air for a suitable comparison.

Danetta Price, CEO of Tanaka Enterprises, settled in her chair and propped sneakered feet atop the coffee table in the small lounge/mess of Rhys’s corporate schooner, Ceilidh. She was wise enough not to try to finish the sentence. That would be sure to send him off into a litany on the accuracies and inaccuracies of her choice. “I get the picture,” she told him dryly. “Now, would you kindly stop pacing and tell me—”

But he’d gotten himself unstuck and was off again. “And of course, to work with Dr. Burton… I did tell you I studied under him at Edinburgh?” Seeing her nod, he forged on. “I was in awe of the man, Danetta. Sheerly and purely in awe of him. He’s been more influential in my life as an archaeologist—”

“I hear you, Rhys!” Danetta chuckled and peered at her chief negotiator between the toes of her sneakers. “How long do you think you’ll be gone?”

Rhys ran a hand through his unruly red hair and grinned ruefully. “Sorry. I’m not sure how long I’ll be gone precisely—” Reading her frown, he added, “But no more than a month or two at best.”

“At worst you mean.”

“I have the time coming.”

Danetta raised a restraining hand. “I know. You have months of leave coming. I’m only selfishly concerned with the state of our negotiating team without you and yours on it. I don’t suppose you intend to leave Yoshi and Rick out of this little junket.”

Rhys scratched behind his ear, a gesture Danetta knew meant he thought he was asking for the Moon. “Well, actually, I thought they’d enjoy the break. It’s been a while since any of us has worked in the field. Not that I’m belittling your efforts to keep us in trim. That conference on xenoanthropology last month was marvelous. But we all miss the field work—and this, well—”

“Yes, I know—once in a lifetime opportunity, greatest dig since King Tut, close company with the God of Archaeology.”

Rhys flushed. “Please, Danetta, I don’t worship the man, but I’ve the deepest respect for his accomplishments. And I said not one word about ‘King Tut,’ which, as you ought to know, was a find of very little historical significance—”

“OK, OK. Saint Burton, then, and you can pick your own dig.” Danetta uncrossed her legs and stood, straightening bright silk shorts around her hips. “As if I’d ever say ‘no’ to you, Rhys McCrae Llewellyn. Go on your little sabbatical, with my blessing. We don’t have any major bids in the offing that our regular crew can’t handle. If Yosh and Rick want to tag along, they’re certainly entitled. They’ve got as big a backlog of leave as you have. It’s not my idea of a dream vacation, but, to each his own. Now…” she glanced purposefully at the door to the companionway. “If you don’t think me rude, I’ll just take my little cutter and shift on back to the home world, “It’s been about two months since I’ve seen my beloved husband. And the changes on Tson are happening just about as fast as he can handle them.” She circled the table, caught Rhys by the upper arms and gave him a solid kiss on the cheek. “Bon voyage, Professor. Have a nice dig.”

Rhys waited a restrained five seconds after the lounge doors closed before executing a four-foot-high pirouette and a clan McCrae war whoop. He’d landed and was going up for a second revolution when Yoshi Umeki poked her head into the room from the adjoining galley. “Sir? Are you all right?”

He caught himself on the back of a chair, narrowly avoiding a trip to the floor, and straightened his flight suit. “Are you all right, Rhys, ” he corrected.

Her smile was brief and bright. “Are you all right, Rhys?”

“I’m fine, thank you.” He rubbed his hands together briskly, a gesture which Yoshi knew was usually followed by some outrageous suggestion. “How would you like to go on a little vacation?”

The “little vacation” began with the passengers and crew of the Ceilidh in an induced sleep, preparatory to a shift to the distant precincts of a star its human visitors called Leguin. They would travel simultaneously through space and time—outward through one, backward and forward through the other—to arrive at their destination within a week of when they had left their point of origin. The week of travel time was composed entirely of inter-shift stops to reorient the ship for its next jump and check the health of its passengers; the temporal shift itself was virtually instantaneous. Backward and forward went the Ceilidh, safeguards built into her temporal grid dictating that she ascended through time exactly as far as she had descended. Rhys, as always, slid toward sleep imagining what it would be like if they were only allowed to take a detour now and then.

A week later, the Tanaka Corporate schooner Ceilidh slipped out of time-altered space, settled into synchronous orbit around Leguin 4, and delivered its passengers into what a groggy Roderick Halfax immediately dubbed “Fort Stinking Swamp.” It wasn’t so much a swamp as it was a rain forest, Rhys told him—as if he didn’t already know the difference—nor did it stink, strictly speaking. The equatorial forest on Leguin 4 was a place of pungent and warring perfumes, rather like, Yoshi commented, what happened when all the Umeki and Sakai aunts gathered for tea on a muggy Hagi day. Rhys had to admit the cloyingly sweet smell of blooms might grow tiresome. He said that, then forgot the blooms and their odiferous presence the moment he set eyes on Professor Sir Drew Burton, K.N.B.E., and his mammoth find.

It was a complex of buildings still half-buried in green and burgundy plant life that brought to mind Angkor Wat, Teotihuacan, and the ziggurats of Baroosh at Wan, all at the same moment. Walls of massive granitic block rose from a froth of shrub and vine to a height of about five meters. They were interrupted by a rectangular gateway that extended another two meters above that. The lintel evidendy held something of interest, for a scaffold covered it from edge to edge. Above that rise of native rock Rhys could see the top of a thick spire whose rounded sides were cloaked in mosses of varying hues. So overwhelmed was he by the sheer magnitude of the place, he barely noticed that the patron saint of archaeology was vigorously pumping his hand.

“Professor Llewellyn,” the older man enthused, “you have no idea how pleased I am that you and your associates could join us here. You’ve done well since leaving University, sir. Your reputation precedes you.”

Rhys caught himself back from the dizzying sight of the tower looming above its encircling walls, swatted an insect and murmured, “Sir, your reputation overwhelms me.”

Burton laughed, showing pleasant crow’s feet and gleaming, even teeth. “Flattery will get you anywhere. You know, I have to admit, I was dubious when I heard you’d gone into corporate service. A little disappointed, if you want the honest truth. But it didn’t seem to slow you down in the ‘real’ world, eh? You practically wrote the book on alien antiquities.”

Rhys flushed pleasantly. “Correction. I wrote one book on xenoarchaeology; you’ve written dozens on every conceivable subject.”

“Twenty… but really, I thought your analysis of the Poclar culture on New Scotland was quite insightful. I’ll be interested to see what you think of our work here.”