THE UNION OF SOIL AND SKY

by Gregory Norman Bossert

Greg Bossert spent twenty years as a software developer, starting in his native Cambridge, Massachusetts, and roaming to Manhattan, New Jersey, Berlin, and the San Francisco Bay Area. Eight years ago, his passions overwhelmed his day job; since then, he’s done research and design for a handful of feature films (including Beowulf and Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland); built and played experimental musical instruments, worked on sound design, editing, animation, and screenwriting for independent film and video projects; and has recently been focused full-time on writing. Examples of all can be found at his website, www.suddensound.com. His very first sale is a thrilling story about a group of archeologists and their desperate race against time to uncover the secret of . . .

The loop around Winifred’s braid finally gave way with a snap and the sting of uprooted hairs. She cursed, reflexively, but she had a much better view of the chalice rim with her head actually in the hole, and anyway, who exactly on this dig was going to complain about the state of her hair? Or even notice it, despite the brilliant magenta dye she had refreshed just the night before. Well, Inanna, perhaps, might, but there was a long list of reasons why her regard didn’t count. Starting with, Inanna kept her observations to herself, and only the careful application of patience and alcohol could get her to express an opinion on one of her fellow archaeologists. Or an opinion at all, for that matter, except when it came to lumps and bumps in the landscape, on which she could be tediously persistent.

These thoughts floated on the surface of her mind, barely heeded, a useful distraction from the gut-churning work her hands were performing. Alternating the tip of her trowel with a coarse-haired brush, she was tracing the edge of the chalice back around to the high point she had first revealed. Another few centimeters, and the rim would be clear, and she could start the careful process of lifting it free of the dirt. The last chunk of soil came away in one piece, claylike and gritty with silicates; it bore an impression of the tracery around the rim of the glass bowl, which was sitting bottom up in the center of the burial pit she had been excavating for the last day and a half. The piece, an “offering chalice type four” in Mort’s nomenclature, or a “top hat” to everyone else on the dig, was in almost perfect condition, the rim embossed with the writhing shapes ubiquitous to these burials, shapes they’d dubbed “dragons” after their resemblance to the mythical Chinese creature. Definitely the best find of the season for her, possibly, she mused, the best find of the dig so far, as the trowel point slipped under the rim, highlights spilling across the green-gold glass as it shifted, just slightly, and . . . it all went obscure as a shadow fell across the pit. Winifred let go of the trowel immediately, for fear of cracking the rim, and cursed again, this time with deliberation.

She looked up into a round face, blank against the brilliant sky, a flutter like leaves brushing her shoulder and a gentle waft of spice and mold. She squinted against the sneeze that always seemed to hang around the keeper, and which could be disastrous now, with her hand still in the hole, centimeters from the delicate glass. A second touch on her shoulder, and then a flicker of the long, twig-like fingers, impossible to read against the silhouetted shape.

“For goodness’ sake, Henry!” Winifred carefully extracted her hand from the hole, and levered her upper body out of the pit, cautious of the clumps and pebbles stuck to her shirt, and no doubt matted in her hair, which could rain ruin onto the delicate glass. “What now?” And then again, in sign, two slow waves of the hand, like wind through stalks, then a downward twist into an open palm; “greetings again after a short time, and how can I aid you?,” that was; there was no way to be rude in the keeper signing, not and make any sense.

“the seed uncovered greets the sun with green,” Henry signed, and, “the soil-mother holds close her blossoms.”

“The soil-mother can kiss my dirty ass,” she muttered, which really wasn’t offensive, given the rituals the keepers dedicated to the gentle, fecund matriarch of their pantheon. But she signed back reassurance, and, “gently plucking the flower from the seed given Her long ago,” a phrase she had developed during her doctoral studies, and one that seemed to successfully convey the idea of archeology to the natives, who had initially been startled and wary of this alien desire to dig up the detritus of their past.

“held close her blossom,” Henry repeated, with the wet puff of air from his nostrils that signaled emphasis, or sometimes just pigheadedness. “blossom” was the bowl, of course, the shape of which mimicked a type of night-blooming flower. As did most of the burial offerings; all keeper art was in imitation of the flora and fauna of their world; blown and drawn glass flowers and leaves both graceful and meticulous. “held close” could mean a loving embrace, or justified stubbornness, but it just as well indicated a type of glue, and since the humans had arrived, “velcro.”

Winifred snorted back, with, “gentle gentle the wind lifts the blossom,” and then, “how beautiful the sky above us,” which was a reminder, about as blunt as one could get in keeper gestures, that the alien was in her light.

“Hey, Henry,” Ant called out, in his permanently dust-roughened growl. “Come on, mate, leave her alone.” That with a wave of his hand that meant something like “the alluvial plains seemed dry last year.” But as always, Henry seemed to understand Ant, or at least to respond to him, with more alacrity than he did to Winifred’s careful, studied attempts at communication. Maybe it was Ant’s familiar scent, she thought, with just a touch of guilt, though he always did smell of earth and antiquity, not unpleasant, really. She sighed as the alien stumped off to look into Ant’s trench, and raked her fingers through the gritty remnants of her braid, dislodging a small shower of dirt safely away from her pit. She refastened a simple ponytail, and looked around for Inanna.

Who was crouched over her recording tablet, staring across the site, bobbing her head up and down; like an earnest, lowly supplicant paying obeisance to some capricious lord, Winifred thought, feeling sore and sour now that her focus on the chalice had been interrupted. “Inanna, do you plan to use that tablet, or just wave it about?”

Inanna stopped bobbing—she’d been looking at hillocks and ridges in the surround field, no doubt—and flashed a smile in reply that made Winifred feel old and cranky. The former was not true, relatively speaking; Inanna was a year older, though most people guessed otherwise. On the same relative scale, however, the “cranky” was a good bet. Then again, Winifred thought, as a landscape archaeologist and surveyor, and as the team’s primary recorder, Inanna spent less time on her knees with her head in the dirt. On cue, a clod dropped from Winnifred’s hair into her lap.

“Just waving,” Inanna said. “You want me to come wave it over there?”

“Yeah, I think I’m ready to lift this chalice. Could you take one last scan, please?”

“Oooh!” Inanna replied, and traced around Ant’s trench with quick, careful motions of her long legs, to stand astride Winifred’s pit. Blocking the light as throughly as Henry had, Winifred noted, though Inanna’s silhouette was as spiky as Henry’s was round, and fully twice as tall; she was spacer-born, all shins and elbows and careful, truncated gestures, as if still wary of tight spaces and critical controls here on the barren, open plains of Aulis.

Inanna held the tablet out over the pit, her long arms an advantage in her volunteer role as recorder, and thumbed the scan button. There was the uneasy thrum of sonics, cut by a beep as the tablet announced it had located its own position relative to the site boundaries; the beep was also Winifred’s signal to shut her eyes before the strobe and sweep of the laser scan started, and finally the flash for the photo. Inanna stayed still with the tablet held out like a tea tray—from supplicant to serving girl, Winifred thought—until it belched out another beep, satisfied with the data.

“Good to go,” Inanna said, leaning the tablet up against the trench wall a cautious distance from the pit, and sitting down on her heels, knees almost in her ears, in the way that always gave Winifred the urge to shove. She’d tried it once, from behind and without warning, but the lanky spacer had hardly budged; muscles toned from pulling those long bones about, gravity or not. They were all reasonably buff at this point from moving dirt; no automated diggers on this desperately underfunded, understaffed dig. Fortunately, Ant was worth a dozen diggers; the strength he’d gained in decades of excavation was uncanny. Here he came now, with Henry in his wake. The little alien was pretty much a member of the team, having arrived over a year ago now, not long after the dig had begun, and having apparently come all the way from the Argolids, four thousand kilometers away. The few local keepers in this desolate area seemed to regard Henry with cautious restraint. Winifred thought they found his interest in the digging somewhat simpleminded, though Ant maintained that Henry’s interest in archaeology was a clear indication of his superior intelligence.

Winifred got her head back into the hole before Ant could arrive, and began to wrap the bowl in plastic film. Anthony Wessex had more experience in the field, thirty years more, give or take, and, despite his surprising strength, he had a knack for removing delicate finds in one piece. It wouldn’t occur to him to step in here, however, unless asked; it was her trench and her find. And she didn’t feel like asking, thank you.

“Henry seems a bit in a bother about your bowl there,” Ant noted.

“Henry can . . .” Winifred started, voice booming in the hole, then continued more evenly, “Henry can go get a degree and a trowel and dig up his own damn bowl.”

“Probably will at that,” Ant said. And after a pause, “It’s just that he may be worried about the varitropes.”

Winifred tore off another sheet of film with a bit more force than necessary. “The pit is clean, and dug straight into the natural, and it’s all under a layer of hard clay. There’s nothing living down here.”

“Nothing modern, you mean,” Ant rumbled. Winifred bit her lip and managed not to tug on the plastic. This was an ongoing debate, on several counts. Starting with whether the wormlike varitropes that riddled the site were, strictly speaking, alive, and if so, were they animal, vegetable, or some classification that had no Earthly analog. More pertinent, perhaps, to their work was whether the varitropes they dug up represented modern contamination, or whether their position in the stratigraphic sequence actually indicated their age. Winifred refused to believe that anything, living or not, could move of its own accord after thousands of years in the dirt. Ant stubbornly insisted that the fibrous clumps had to be interpreted in context unless there was evidence of them having been buried more recently, or having burrowed down on their own. The rest of the team had staked out less committed positions on the issue, with the exception of Mort, who just limited himself to noting that it was early days yet and, occasionally, that loose lips sink ships, a concept that spacer Inanna found baffling yet hilarious.

The wrapping complete, she recovered the trowel from where it was still wedged under the rim, and began to gently work it around the edge. The glass was almost opaque, flecked with gold, but it was a safe bet that the bowl was entirely filled with dirt; she had to break any suction, and then it should lift upward, like a cake pan off a, well, a mud pie. She stifled a nervous snort, or maybe it was a sneeze; she caught a whiff of mold as Henry settled in with the others to watch.

Nor was he the last, as Mort squatted down across from her with a familiar creak of old joints. “Ah, now, that is a beauty, isn’t it?” he said. He’d been back at camp all day, another round of the ongoing three-way battle between the University, the local bureaucracy, and the project, the funding and approval for which only continued thanks to Mort’s authority and expertise at negotiation. Many a pompous official had been taken in by Mort’s plump, rosy-cheeked smile and quiet, professorial manner, not realizing until too late that he had honed his political skills to perfection in the perilous battlefields of academic advancement and grant-funded research. Winifred had learned as much about that fight for survival, studying under him first as an undergraduate and then as a doctoral candidate, as she had about extraterrestrial archaeology; she suspected, hoped, at least, that he looked on her as a successor as he grew creakily closer to retirement.

None of which, thoughts nor audience, helped her nervousness as, having run the trowel around the rim, she felt the chalice shift again. She got her fingertips under the edges of the rim, and worked them in, dirt gritting under her fingernails, until she could feel the thicker glass where the rim turned upward into the sides of the bowl. She puffed out a breath, a habit picked up from the keepers, and curled her fingers upward. Gold sparkled as the bowl’s bottom tilted, and the glass grew a rich green in spots as the dirt began to fall away, allowing light through the surface. It was the first time, she thought, that that color had been seen for eight thousand years, with a thrill that ran up her spine and tickled the scalp under her makeshift ponytail. A thrill that, just seconds later, flared into numbing, blinding dismay as the bowl gave a sharp crack and split down the middle.

There was complete silence for a second, from Winifred and audience alike, and then with another crack, and a series of crunches, the bulk of the bowl’s bottom and left side crumbled and, impossibly, began to retract into the soil. Winifred grabbed the largest remaining piece, and sat back, dizzy and uncertain what to do with it for a moment, until Ant rescued her with a sample tray. She carefully set the piece into the tray, and stepped up out of the trench. It was safe to scream and stomp there, but all that came out was a sort of hiss. She closed her eyes and turned her face up into the sun.

Voices started up below her in the trench. First Ant, with “Now that’s something, ain’t it?”

And then Mort, intrigued and a bit delighted, “It’s varitropes, then, from underneath. Interesting. Look, they’re still tugging at it.”

And finally Inanna said, “Sorry, Henry, I didn’t follow that.”

Winifred opened her eyes, then squinted again against the sunlight, and looked down into the trench at Henry. Spots swam in her vision, but she could follow the squat alien’s graceful motions well enough. “He says,” she translated, “that some seeds will blossom down, and some will root up; no keeper, no one, I guess, can tell which way the sprouting will go.”

They all considered this for a spell.

“Well, time for tea, then?” asked Mort.

* * * *

The discussion over tea started at a low point and went down from there. John had gotten back from town with supplies and coffee—Mort and Winifred herself being the only ones who actually drank tea—and Winifred had to sit through a reenactment of the chalice incident for him, complete with Henry’s cryptic summation. And that led inexorably into the discussion of varitropes.

“The archaeology is clear as day,” Ant rumbled. “That bowl was in a layer that has consistently produced finds from the Late Empire era. The bowl itself is a Late Empire style, that’s right, ain’t it, Mort?”

“Looks to be,” Mort agreed. “Fortunately, the piece that Winifred rescued includes the rim and base; good job, that, Win.”

Winifred glowered.

“It seems diagnostic, classic type four.” Mort continued. “Seventy-ninth century before contact, I’d say.”

“And Winifred herself here says that pit was cut into the natural and capped with that hard clay that runs under the Early Migration finds in my trench. Inanna’s got that on her map right there, don’t you?”

Inanna was curled around the recording tablet, cleaning up her notes. She gave her small, careful nod, a smile just visible in the light from the tablet.

“Well, there it is, then,” Ant concluded. “Simple stratigraphy. Those fibers were under the bowl; they’ve got to be Late Empire or earlier. No reason to think otherwise.”

“No reason, beyond the fact that they are still alive!” Winifred replied.

“The bio guys are not sure of that,” said John, from where he lay sprawled on the floor. “The varitropes are right on the edge of what might be called life; more like a virus, really. Only big.” He stretched his arms out wide, though the largest varitrope found to date was about the size of a carrot, and hit Inanna in the ankle. The spacer gently kicked him back.

“Did you see that paper by Qu in last month’s XenoScience?” she asked. “He says that the fibers couldn’t have evolved; they had to have been genetically engineered. They and the host plants, together.”

“By the ‘Snips?” John snorted. “No offense, Henry,” he added to the oblivious alien, who was sitting near the door with a cup of water and a slice of cake. “Not much evidence of that, now, is there?”

“Well, it’s early days yet, John,” said Mort. “We’re just beginning to get good evidence from before the Late Empire period. Who knows what technologies were lost in the Migrations? The native Aulans are certainly handy enough with the fibers. One can’t help but suppose a long tradition there.”

“And they use those minerals in the glass, that stuff the miners are on about, silicas and pierogis and whatnot,” Ant said.

“Perovskites,” John corrected. “Ceramic superconductors.”

Winifred waved a hand dismissively. “Natural or manufactured, the varitropes are still organic, and complex enough to respond to all sorts of stimuli, and complex organics just don’t survive eight thousand years of being buried. For goodness’ sake, Anthony, if you were digging a site this old back on Earth and you found a mouse, you wouldn’t assume that it was in context.”

“I would until I found the hole it came through,” he said.

“He would, too, you know,” John said, somewhat muffled; he’d thrown his arms across his face to block the sun streaming in through the door to the tent.

“If context and relationship are the basis of archaeology, well, you’ve got to include the context of the other sciences. Like biology. And physics; the varitropes move, and that means a source of energy. If they’ve been buried for eight millennia, where do they get the energy?”

Inanna looked up from her notes. “Dormant mold spores have been found in contexts older than that, back on Earth. And they were viable, too, once they got light and nutrients.”

“Hey, we can grow our own ancient ‘Snips,” John said. “Aulans,” he corrected, under Winifred’s glare. “Um, keepers.”

“Nothing insulting about parsnips,” Ant said. “Henry don’t mind, do ya?” The alien, stubby, lumpy body and slender limbs silhouetted against the door, was looking particularly root-like; Winifred sniffed, and swirled her tea leaves.

“Well, we’ll leave the growing to the lab boys, shall we?” said Mort. “We need to focus on digging while we still have access to the site.”

That sounded grim. Winifred set her cup down. “Problems with the town again?”

Mort nodded, looking tired, and suddenly old. “I’m afraid the mining company has persuaded the municipal board to move up their start date. They’re talking about beginning the site preparation in three weeks.”

Looks of dismay all around. John sat up, banging his head on Inanna’s protruding knee. Even Henry reacted; the keepers were almost entirely deaf, at least in human terms, but they were adept at reading expressions, and, of course, gestures.

“You told ‘em that’s impossible, didn’t you, Mort?” asked Ant.

“I can’t really tell them anything at this point, not without support from Aulis University, and that support is rather unreliable these days, I’m afraid. They’re crying budget again, and the needs of other projects.”

“What other projects?” asked John.

And Ant added, “Ain’t no one else digging on-planet, not that I know of.”

The shout of frustration Winifred had suppressed earlier threatened to bubble out. “It’s not budget, it’s politics. And prejudice.”

Mort nodded sadly. “I’m afraid that it’s much simpler for most folks to think of the keepers as a primitive, nomadic species.”

Inanna had the confused crease between her eyes she always got when this came up, and John looked uncomfortable. Winifred and Ant exchanged glances; growing up on Earth gave one a perspective that the off-world cultures fortunately lacked.

“Makes it simpler to dig up their land, you mean,” Winifred said.

Mort spread his hands helplessly. “I’m afraid our work here, showing not just millennia of settlement, but also a legacy of technological innovation and use of the natural resources, is somewhat, ah, awkward for the mining companies and their allies in the government. And they seem to have made that point rather vigorously with the oversight committee at Aulis University, who have their own politics, alas.”

Winifred puffed in frustration, prompting a curious look from Henry. She had focused on native Aulan language and culture at Oxford, in an environment still awkwardly conscious of a legacy of colonialism, and had been shocked to discover the level of thoughtless assumption and outright disdain for the natives at the University on Aulis. Studies of the keepers’ culture and history were dwarfed by the programs devoted to Aulis’s complex mineralogy, and to the associated industrial applications. Their project had only been approved because Mort had brought in funding from Earth; even so, it was tightly monitored by the local human administration.

She tugged a strand of hair behind an ear, rubbed the grit between her thumb and fingers. “What do we do, then?”

Mort scratched his head, his few remaining hairs sticking up, brilliant white in the sunlight from the door. “So, well, there’s no budging on the three weeks. I did get the University to agree to send us some help for that time; anyone they can spare.”

“Meaning students, that’ll be,” grumbled Ant.

“Well, yeah, but bodies, regardless. They can clean up and record what we have here, and that lets us open a few last trenches. At the very least, we can try to nail down the extent of the site. With luck, we’ll find something outside the area slated for mining.”

Winifred gave a dubious snort.

“So, that brings up the question of where to dig. John, any luck with the radar?”

John grimaced. His speciality was surveying and geophysics. Unfortunately, the exotic geology of the area and the ephemeral nature of most keeper artifacts had made most of his equipment and techniques useless. It wasn’t a matter of no results, rather, everything looked equally interesting, a sea of dense, noisy data covering the entire site; artifact of the same minerals that had attracted the mining conglomerates. “No, the radar is still inconclusive. I still think there’s evidence in the magnetometry of burning, well, more evidence of more burning, at the southern end of the current trenches. Or it could be a big slab of something.”

“Geology, then,” Ant said. The keepers didn’t do slabs, as far as anyone had found. John shrugged.

Inanna was bouncing in her chair, in her spacer way, more vibration than actual motion. “What about my bumps?” she asked. Inanna had a passion for landscape analysis, odd in someone who’d grown up with no vistas larger than a ship’s cabin. She claimed to see signs of earthworks covering a vast area to the east of the current dig. Winifred was unconvinced; the ridges and ditches were subtle at best, and keeper settlements tended to be small and lacking in solid, regular structures.

“Yeah, I’d like to get my hands on Inanna’s bumps,” said Ant, with no trace of irony. On the Argolids dig two years ago, as the result of a drunken bet, Winifred, Inanna, and their colleagues of both sexes had spent three days digging in the skimpiest costumes they could manage, in an attempt to get a reaction out of Ant. Winifred had finally resorted to tucking his trowel into the back of her shorts, a tactic that had been declared cheating, and regardless had elicited no more than a “Here, now, I was using that,” though Inanna swore that he looked at the trowel suspiciously for the rest of the day.

“Inanna’s bumps are looking pretty good right now,” Mort agreed, with an eyebrow twitched in Winifred’s direction. “Tell you what, Inanna, you and John scout out your top three locations tomorrow, and we’ll put in a few test pits before the students get here.”

“I’ve mapped them out,” Inanna said, lifting the tablet. “The platform, for sure, and—”

“Tomorrow, tomorrow,” Mort said, creaking to his feet. “There’s plenty to do in the current trenches now, while we have the light.”

* * * *

Fired by equal parts caffeine and frustration, Winifred spent the next hour digging out the chalice pit. The varitropes had settled into a clump just below the remains of the chalice, which they had broken into long slivers. Inanna helped collect the shards, her long fingers carefully probing the dirt, while Winifred uprooted the varitropes, black and worm-like, many of which still brandished bits of glass like tiny, glittering swords. Once pulled from the soil and placed in the sample tray, however, they curled into balls and showed no inclination toward further mischief. Winifred cleaned the bottom and sides of the pit carefully, looking for signs of the varitropes’ access. Inanna dutifully recorded a few soft spots in the soil, but Winifred had to admit they didn’t seem to have any relationship to the fibers.

John had persuaded Ant to extend his trench another meter southward, toward the anomaly he thought he’d seen in the magnetometry. Burned patches were ubiquitous in keeper digs; the aliens had a tradition of glassworking as far back as archaeology could trace, but the visible remains of a glass oven were often just a slight discoloration of the soil, and a scattering of near-microscopic glass droplets. Seeing either required decent light, and Mort had made several mild comments about the advantages of the morning sun, and the limitations of the spectra of artificial lighting, finally resorting to lauding the new beer on tap at the pub in town. Ant, however, ignoring hints and temptations alike, dug into the end of the trench, first with a spade, and then with his trowel.

“What I’m wondering about,” he explained, apparently to Henry, who was crouched on the spoil heap, dun skin turned bronze by the sunset, “is this cut just here. If I didn’t know better, I’d say it was the edge of some sort of pit, or ditch. And a damn fine edge it is, at that.”

John squinted at the trench wall, which looked to be a consistent deep brown, and shrugged. “You’re still about twenty centimeters from where the readings really shot up,” he said, dubiously.

But Mort tilted his head, and then got down into the trench and ran his fingers over the soil. “Just here, yeah? You’re right, Anthony, a completely different texture, compacted. And look at the distribution of the gravel. As if it’s been taken out and filled back in again.”

Winifred got up and stretched, ambled over to the other trench, Inanna tiptoeing along behind her. Ant was tracing the cut with the point of the trowel. “It comes along here, see, and angles off under Henry. And on the other end, I think it turns here, back south.”

Winifred traced the edge with her finger, the boundary clear to the touch and running razor-straight up to where she squatted, then making a ninety-degree angle out the end of the trench. “This isn’t geology,” she said. “this is a feature.” And the soil, compacted or not, was familiar. “Outside the edge here, this is the same natural level my pit’s dug into.” Inanna reached down, rubbed a pinch of clay between her fingertips, gave a careful nod. “And my pit’s Late Empire, so this cut predates it.” Everyone nodded, basic stratigraphy, except Mort, who mouthed a silent “ah,” and leaned forward to peer at the near invisible seam in the soil. “But look,” she continued. “This infill, it’s definitely been packed back in here, but it’s the same soil. Which means . . .” She stopped, and raised an eyebrow, a habit she’d gotten from Mort, but it was Mort who obligingly played the student’s part this time.

“Which means, if Winifred is correct about the phasing, that this cut is Late Empire at the latest, and possibly earlier. And without doubt the largest feature ever found from the period.”

Mort straightened up, beaming at Winifred, then around at the whole team. A team grown dim as the sun gave way to dusk. “Well, so, something to get out of bed for in the morning, eh?”

John flipped his tablet and held it out, blocky pixels in rainbow shades. “But, but, we’re just centimeters from the slab!”

Mort peered dubiously over his glasses. “Ah, it’s a slab now for sure, is it?”

Ant tilted his head, lip jutting. “It’s an awful big, straight ditch for glassworks,” he pointed out. “I reckon it wouldn’t do much harm just to clear a tiny patch back to where John had his readings.”

Mort rubbed his head, leaving a smudge. “Just a tiny patch.”

“No more than a shovel’s width,” Ant agreed, and “Excuse me, there, Henry,” as he pulled the shovel from the spoil heap under the alien. Henry hopped off the pile and down into the trench, sidling in next to Winifred, as Ant took a careful slice from the end of the trench. Three slices, and on the fourth, the grate of steel on stone. John produced a torch, and under the LED glare Ant troweled out the dirt, each scrape revealing more of the stone, perfectly squared and polished flat, except where it swirled out into a carved, coiling relief, a shape familiar from the dozens of burial finds they’d had in this dig alone, and the hundreds recovered since humans had come down and begun to unearth the alien past. Henry leaned forward, past Ant, and gently touched the carving. Then he looked up at Winifred, and made a single, curling gesture.

“Dragon,” she translated.

* * * *

Winifred counted the overlapping strands of light that fanned out across the plastic ceiling of the cabin. Four of Aulis’ seven small moons were up, leaving glittering traces that Winifred could read in reflection; bronze, bright Orestes was easy, and fleeting Iphigenia, faint but visibly shifting as she watched. She rolled on her side and wished she’d had a second pint of beer, or a glass of the dry, bitter digestif the locals swore by. The human locals, that was, who tended toward dry and bitter themselves, and had been in a less than hospitable mood this evening. After sitting through a series of loud jokes about the ‘Snips, and a pointedly obscene one about Earth women, and unable to get the bartender’s attention despite repeated attempts, the team had left earlier than usual.

Inanna and Mort took the short way down the road to their camp, about a kilometer from the rough and tumble sprawl of what was rapidly becoming a small city. John had ditched right after dinner; with that jiggle of his leg that meant he had a new gadget waiting back at camp. Winifred and Ant took a longer loop along the gorge and out across the plateau, skirting the site and tracking over Inanna’s bumps, which were surprisingly visible in the moonlight. Henry joined them at some point, his stumpy steps as always silent and strangely graceful. Winifred was tempted to go into the site, to have another look at the inexplicable slab, a gentle touch of the carved coils. But the guard wasn’t evident, either on rounds or asleep, and likely to be startled either way by a visit, so they continued on to camp. The two Earthers did, anyway, Henry drifting off with a wave, “glass and leaves under starlight look the same”; “Useful work is done for the day” was the gist of it.

This was sound advice, thought Winifred, but under the practical awareness of the busy day ahead, and the mental and physical exhaustion that came with an active dig, were layers of skittering thoughts that refused to settle down: the broken bowl, the possibility that their work would be shut down months too soon, and them at the edge of real discovery, the sullen, inarticulate resentment of the townsfolk, most of all the sense of restless, relentless hurry, antithetical to a science that dealt with millennia and sometimes seemed to take as long. She quivered suddenly with the desire to toss the covers back, stand up, and let out the shout that had failed to come that afternoon, but it was late, or rather, early, and Inanna lay asleep on her side of the cabin, silent and still in her spacer way. Instead, Winifred reached out, ran her fingers through the moonlight under the window. The fabrilum on the sill followed her fingertips, sending the reflections scattering across the ceiling. Winifred brushed its tips, carefully—they were fragile, and perilously sharp—then spread her fingers wide, palm cupping back, and the glass flower bloomed in iridescent moonlight.

A long breath in, the mix of frustration and awe she’d felt, undiminished, since that first encounter, first hands-on, or rather hands-over, encounter with Aulan variform sculpture back in London. There was a bit more frustration in the mix tonight; that unlikely combination of glass and varitrope had been the cause of her chalice disaster that afternoon. But then again, for all of her degrees, and work in the field on Aulis, she still lacked the feel for glass and fiber, and the sheer, stunning patience of the native Aulans, the “keepers of the soil,” as they called themselves. The glasswork alone for a fabrilum, even one small enough to perch on the narrow sill before her, took months, sometimes years. And then the selecting of the varitropes, the impossible, half-living fibers that grew on, or were produced by, or infected—that was a debate that could set any random group of xenobiologists to shouting—but regardless, were carefully harvested from their host plants; ghostbush, the humans called them, for the shaking and tortured twisting they performed when approached. The fibers reacted in different ways to different stimuli, depending on soil chemistry or host plant variation or, for all human science could tell, the sevenfold phases of Aulis’s moons; some twisted away from light, some stretched out toward warmth, or quivered in resonance to sound; any one varitrope might have several reactions, and there were uncounted variations. The keeper gardener/artists that collected the fibers seemed to have some insight or instinct for the varitropes’ behavior, but mostly they were patiently persistent, testing each bush, then each clump of fiber, before harvesting those that seemed to show the desired set of reactions. And then the varitropes were sorted and measured and even trained, not like an animal with reward and punishment, but rather like a plant, with tiny stakes to encourage a stretch, or a line of lacquer to coax a curl into the desired direction. Winifred had visited the workhall of a master gardener once; as they walked past the long tables, the fibers had writhed and reached in a wave of reaction that followed them the length of the hall. The varitropes looked something like long, ebony earthworms, and the effect could have been ludicrous, but Winifred found it eerily beautiful.

And even then, after the lampworkers and gardeners had spent their months or years, and the glass and fibers were ready, the work on the fabrilum itself was only starting. Then began the patient, painstaking work of tying together the fragile bones of glass with the unpredictable muscles of the fiber, no other elements allowed, a puzzle almost as complex as the plant or animal being evoked. That final phase of construction was usually measured in days, not months, but those were continuous days, work without break until the fabrilum was complete, and came to life under the master’s gesture. At any moment during that process, an unintended stimulus, a mistimed breath, a cool draft, a sudden shaft of light, and the varitropes could crush the work as thoroughly as they had the chalice today. And when the work was complete, then came the proof of the design, the culmination of the vision, as the varitropes merged into the matrix—human studies suggested both chemical and electrical crosstalk between the fibers, webs of conductivity through the glass—and the sculpture awoke to the master’s gestures.

Winifred curled her fingers, all but one, and traced that one down to the sill, and the fabrilum’s long, spiky petals spiraled closed, the central spine bent, the opalescent blossom slumped gently, mimicking sleep. As did Winifred, watching the moons refracted in the glass, until the line between mimicry and reality faded.

* * * *

Winifred peered through the steam rising from her mug of tea, and into Eden. Ant and Inanna had been digging since dawn, stripping the trench back to reveal the full edge of the slab. Winifred had resisted the pull, and showered, dug out a reasonably fresh pair of shorts, made toast and an egg, and got to the tent at the site just as Mort was putting on the kettle. While the water boiled and the tea steeped, they talked about the burden of haste that had Winifred up late and Mort up early, composing messages to Aulis University, and to the project funders back on Earth, asking for help or time or both.

The risks were significant, not just to the site here, but to their careers, and to archaeology in general on Aulis. A lot of people were watching their work closely, ready to find faults of administration or science, all the while tossing obstacles their way. Half the team hadn’t even made it on-planet; the group from Appleh had pulled out over the lack of local support, gone to dig on Shada IV instead. And the Earth team had started with a crew of ten laborers, local colonists shifting dirt and setting fences, only to have the town bureaucracy suddenly announce that that constituted construction, which required a permit, which had, of course, already been granted to the mining company for that particular parcel of land. A strip mine is what they had planned for it; exotic silicates and perovskites, fodder for the booming spintronics industry in orbit. So there went those ten, and the ability to excavate a significant area; they’d gone for a scattering of smaller trenches, instead, and sections in test pits, hoping to establish a clear pre-Migration stratigraphy and thus, perhaps, generate some scholarly excitement.

And it wasn’t just the townsfolk; the recording team that Aulis University had promised arrived in the form of two confused undergraduates, neither with any training nor particular enthusiasm. After a month of late nights correcting garbled context records and reports laced with misspellings and inaccuracies, Mort had sent them back with polite thanks and best wishes. It was as if, John had grumbled at the time, no one wanted them to succeed, and Mort had nodded and agreed, it was exactly like that.

And now, with possibly just weeks left, they had this slab, unprecedented in the Aulan archaeological record, and if it was as large as John’s muddy data suggested, then they might not have time to record and clear the recent and Migration-era phases on top of it. Let alone look under it, and that’s where the prize beckoned. If it was a platform, it could cover Early Empire archaeology, which was rare, and possibly key to understanding the faded history of the keepers. And if it wasn’t a platform, but rather the lid to something larger and deeper, then nothing like that had ever been found on Aulis. So the challenge was to show enough potential to stop the bulldozers from rolling over the site, without getting sloppy and opening themselves up to criticism of their methods. There were already mutterings along the latter lines from established figures at Aulis University, who didn’t appreciate an Earther-led team, who thought that pre-Migration archaeology was a dead end, and who were, of course, funded by the pro-mining government. Their public position was in favor of deferring excavation to future archaeologists with more appropriate funding and techniques. “More appropriate politics, they mean,” grumbled Winifred, and Mort just shrugged.

“It’s hard to justify the importance of Aulan archaeology to people who just see the wide-open surface,” he said.

“When the keepers themselves aren’t interested,” Winifred finished, and that was the real source of the frustration she felt, mixed with marvel at the improbable art and culture of the native Aulans. The aliens were blithely uninterested in their own past. Well, that wasn’t entirely true, fabrilum and other artworks were kept and studied with a combination of craftsmanly interest and religious reverence. But there was no written history, no context; a sculpture hundreds of years old was treated no differently than one just completed. And there was little interest in actively seeking out the past, certainly not digging down into it; the soil-mother would send what she would to the surface, just as the sky-father had seen fit to send down the nervous, noisy humans.

Tea in hand, but no real plan beyond seeing what turned up on the edges of the slab, they were themselves pretty much relying on the soil-mother to provide.

And She had done so, or so Ant exclaimed, Inanna quietly brushing, but with a vast grin on her down-turned face. They had cleared the entire edge of the slab, about three meters from sharp corner to corner, and it was covered with intricate relief, a carved garden of curling flora and fauna, with inlaid glass picking out a bloom here, an eye there. There were examples of similar inlays in the record, mostly in wood, sometimes in stone, but nothing of this scale or antiquity. And nothing this . . . “lush” was the term that came to mind, as Winifred carefully crouched down in the trench; the shapes were familiar from other, more common burial art, but they were overlaid here in riotous, joyful profusion.

“And that’s not half of it,” Ant said, with a flourish of his trowel. He stepped around Inanna, who stood up, grin still gleaming. They’d cleaned around the east corner of the slab, exposing a half-meter along the side, and that corner was cracked, clean across, the resulting triangle of stone slightly askew, leaving a dark gap.

“It’s loose,” Ant said. “We didn’t lift it, though.”

“It’s recorded,” Inanna said, “and I took extra photographs.”

“Can you see through the gap?” Mort asked.

“Just dirt,” Ant said, “but there’s space between it and the bottom of the slab, and it looks like the ground is sloping away.”

“Like a sarcophagus,” Winifred said.

“Or an entrance,” Ant replied.

“We’ll not be doing much entering,” Mort said, amused, “unless Inanna thinks she can squeeze through.”

Inanna measured her hips with her hands, thin as they were, and grinned again, with a little shake of her head.

“Ah, yes, well, John thinks he has an answer to that,” Ant said, a bit dubiously.

“John knows he does,” said John, coming across the site trailed by Henry, the two of them laden with cases. He gestured “here” to the alien, and “thanks”; after Winifred, John was most proficient in the Aulan sign language, a dexterity he attributed to long, late hours spent with game controllers.

“Is that your SpyBot?” Winifred asked, suspiciously. “Because, if so, it doesn’t work, remember?” She certainly did. They had spent, one might say wasted, days on the Argolids dig trying to get the remote controlled explorer to work. Aulis’s crazed magnetic field, and the dense, strange soil, had prevented it from functioning at anything like a useful distance underground; no surprise on a planet that defied technology as basic as cellular phones.

“Nope,” John replied, popping open a case and extracting a gleaming steel spider, a bit bigger than a dinner plate, studded with sensors.

“Surely looks like it,” Ant rumbled; he’d been on the Argolids dig, and had at one point threatened to stomp the thing if he saw it again.

“Nope,” John repeated, with a wave that Henry echoed, “This is . . . Spybot Vee Two.”

Silence, broken by the susurrus of brush on stone; Inanna had started working again around the loose corner.

“Well,” John continued, opening another case, and pulling out a large coil of what looked like cable, “strictly speaking, this is the Vee Two.” He pulled loose an end, removed a cap, and plugged it into the spider. “Fiber optics. No more reception problems, and the fiber is light enough that the Spybot can pull about three hundred feet behind it.”

Winifred puffed and grimaced at the pile of gear, foreseeing a day lost to technology and enthusiasm. But Mort rubbed his head and said, “If three hundred feet isn’t enough, we’ll just have to squeeze Inanna in after all. Good work, John. Let’s give it a try, shall we?”

* * * *

“Can you see anything?” Inanna asked, from behind Ant; there wasn’t quite room enough for all of them, clustered around John in front of the small monitor that showed the view from the SpyBot.

“Yes, wonderful things,” came the reply, in unison, from John, Ant, and Mort.

“Still nothing but dirt,” said Winifred.

The spider was creeping backward down the scree under the corner, the result of millennia of seepage through the cracked stone. The corner piece had lifted off easily enough; it had been a clean break, along what looked to be a natural flaw in the stone. But the opening was small, just a few handspans across, and the angle bad, and all they could see with a torch and angled heads was the dirt sloping away into the dark.

John hooked up the SpyBot, via the cable that ran from the little robot to his laptop, and sent it through a warmup of simple motions, Henry delightedly gesturing back at it. John declaring the ‘Bot operational, despite Ant’s grumbling, they had lowered it gently through the break in the slab, and it had begun its descent, crabbing slowly down the slope to avoid starting a small but potentially terminal avalanche.

The image shuddered suddenly, and indicators flashed on the screen. “Ah,” John said, and thumbed the joysticks; the view spun, as the ‘Bot took a step back up the slope and carefully turned around. There was a band across the screen, the same tan stone of the slab, and then a darker one beyond that, and another yet darker and farther, and another...

“It is steps!” said Inanna, who’d found a spot where she could see, looking past Winifred’s shoulder and over Henry. Ant tapped an excited rhythm on the back of John’s chair, and Mort muttered something decidedly unprofessorial. Winifred started to tilt her head, stopped, feeling a bit foolish, and fervently wished she could get her hands on the controls.

“Can you look up?” she asked, simultaneous with a babble of suggestions and requests from the others.

“Hold on, hold on,” John said, hunched forward over the controller, which had apparently been salvaged from an ancient game console. “Let me get onto solid ground first.”

The ‘Bot started forward, and the view tipped sharply down, as it hung over the edge of the step. Then the indicators along the bottom of the screen went green—those were pressure sensors on the footpads, John had explained—and the camera tilted back up. The bulk of the image was dark, a deep brown, then a light bar near the top, and what had to be the bottom of the slab, acting as a ceiling. The wall was faintly visible on the right side.

“A door?” Winifred suggested. “Maybe a wooden door, something like lacquered baskwood?”

“And not rotted away?” Ant asked.

“Yeah, look see, that’s the stone lintel,” Mort said, pointing at the lighter strip toward the top of the screen. “How far is that in, then, John?”

“Uh, well, the door or whatever is . . . two point six meters in front of us, and we’ve gone about four meters, both forward and down. So the door, that should be the far end of the slab.”

“And then?”

John shrugged, and set the ‘Bot marching forward.

It was another ten minutes of seesawing video before the SpyBot made it down the steps to the base of the door. They had paused to examine the walls and the bottom of the slab, but they proved to be plain, if neatly dressed, stone. The door, however, was something else entirely. It was covered top to bottom in the same intricate decoration as the slab. And as they got closer, the dark surface began to glow a deep amber in the light from the ‘Bot. John stopped the SpyBot at the foot of the stairs, and looked up at the door, shifting slowly from side to side. The answer was obvious, once Mort got it. “Ah, ah, remember where we are. It’s glass, of course.” Funny, that reminder of place, but useful; with the setting of stone and sharp right angles, Winifred had found herself thinking of ancient sites back on Earth, and classic tales of archaeology from when it was struggling out of the colonial adventuring of the nineteenth century to become a science.

“Well, that’s it, then, ain’t it? End of the line,” Ant announced. “Look how tightly it’s hung. We’re not crawling through that crack. Nor under.”

But Henry made a gesture, which Winifred caught. She laughed, a delighted chortle that surprised everyone, including herself. “ ‘Remember where we are,’ “ she repeated. “The keepers don’t lock their doors. Henry’s right. Give it a push.”

John looked up at Mort, who blinked, and puffed out his cheeks, and said, “Might as well. But gently, and mind you don’t scratch it.”

“That glass is harder than steel,” John replied, but was nonetheless careful in moving the ‘Bot up to the door. He brought a foreleg up, into view.

“Here’s the bit when it all shatters,” Ant said. Mort rubbed his head vigorously, and opened his mouth, but it was too late; the ‘Bot’s footpad settled onto the surface of the door, its sensor barely shifting from the green of minimal pressure, and then the door was moving, the organic shapes embossed in its surface seeming to writhe in the shifting light, and then the door swung wide, and the far wall was visible, a floor clear of debris, a room. The door kept swinging, right out of view, and John craned the camera around, as Ant continued, “I take it back. Here’s the bit where it all shatters.”

But there was no awful crash from the speakers, nor flying shards, and the camera finally found the door up against the left hand wall, which seemed to be a dead end. To the right, however, the room extended into what seemed to be a long hall, stretching eastward. John marched the ‘Bot out into the center and faced it down the hall. The far end was lost in darkness. Shelves and narrow tables lined the sides, in a configuration that Winifred recognized. As did Henry, if his little puff of excitement was any indication.

“It’s a crafthall,” Winifred said. “Where they make fabrilum. Or the same layout as one, anyway. I wish we could see onto the tables.”

“I can climb one of the shelves.”

But Mort said, “No, we’ve taken too many chances already. Let’s not push our luck.”

So John marched the ‘Bot down the open center of the hall, its steps echoing through the speakers, stopping now again to look back at the trailing cable, and to gaze up at either side. The tables and shelves seemed to be made entirely of glass, still intact, level under the load of millennia. The glass was opalescent, close to opaque, revealing only tantalizing traces of the items lying on top. Even Mort was sucking his teeth in frustration by the time the ‘Bot was halfway down the hall.

“If this is the standard crafthall configuration,” Winifred said, “there will be a door at the far end, and one on either side wall. Left will be the storerooms and the rooms for the apprentices, right will be the master’s workroom and chambers, and straight ahead, though an alcove, is the courtyard, a sort of cloister, the main communal area.”

And her hunch about the layout seemed to be borne out, as, indeed, three doors became visible as they crept closer, richly decorated, colors shifting in the ‘Bot’s little spotlight, iridescent. John stopped the ‘Bot between them, and spun in place, looking back down the hall, and up at each door in turn. They all looked at Mort, and Mort in turn stared at the screen, brow furrowed. After a few long breathes, he frowned.

“I’m not comfortable with trying the side doors. If this is anything like the modern crafthalls, those areas are absolute mazes of little rooms, and shelves covered with glassworks, glass shelves covered with glassworks, in this case. It’s just begging for disaster, and we’ve had enough of that without asking on this dig.”

“And straight ahead, into the courtyard?” Winifred asked. Mort looked at her, with an eyebrow raised. She knew the correct answer, the head-of-the-class answer, but this once she didn’t want to be right; she wanted to be down there, was the truth of it, but lacking that: “It’s an open space, nothing to knock over, and if it is a courtyard, well, some sort of underground cloister, anyway, then it confirms the layout, shows continuity of Aulan culture. A pre-Migration keeper structure, maybe Early Empire. And that will knock those windbags back at Aulis University onto their arses once and for all.”

“What she said,” said John, and “Hear, hear,” from Ant.

“Is it a vote, then?” said Mort, a little tartly.

“If it is, then I vote ‘yes,’ “ said Inanna, all but forgotten behind them.

And then Ant leaned over and asked, “And what does Henry think? Seeing as it’s his folk and all?” So Winifred translated the question, and Henry replied, a long set of signs, and then to Mort, a short and quite human nod of the head.

“Ah, don’t bother, I got it,” Mort said to Winifred, and then to John, “Well, there it is, then, we’ll call it unanimous. Full speed ahead, Mr. Haggard, and damn the torpedoes.”

John kept the ‘Bot to its steady crawl, but ahead is where it went, up to the middle door.

“Uh, does it swing in or out?”

“Away from us,” Winifred replied. “All the doors open in toward the courtyard. It’s the center of the hall, socially, it’s where they gather, where they welcome their guests.”

“Well, I hope they’re expecting company,” John said, and tapped the controller. The ‘Bot’s foot came up, with a tiny click of steel on glass, then the door swung, slow and massive, revealing darkness. The image flared as the camera shifted exposure, adjusting from the bright glare of the glass to the dim space. A large space, a very large space, far beyond that of a crafthall cloister, and unexpectedly below the ‘Bot; the floor was many meters down. The view shifted, tilting; John frantically tugged at the joysticks, but the ‘Bot was going over. “Steps!” he spat, “no one said anything about steps!” The ‘Bot hit the first step, teetered, and John shoved, got it over onto its feet, but those feet were now out over nothing but air. It hung for a second, sideways, one foot caught on the edge of the step, the spotlight shining down the hall, and the camera catching reflections, a field, a galaxy of glittering edges and faces and points flaring starlike in the beam. And then there was a flash and deep, fatal clunk from the speakers, and the image went black, and every indicator red.

“Uh, Houston,” started John.

“Don’t say it,” warned Winifred.

“It’s full of stars?” he ventured, and Winifred growled, just growled, and turned her back, and saw the figures lined up at the door of the tent. Townsfolk, mostly; she recognized a couple of council members, and the head of the planning commission, and several executives from the mining company, and, with a chill as sharp as that she’d just felt as the robot tumbled, she saw two, no, all three members of the Aulis University oversight committee, in the flesh, four thousand kilometers from where they should be, and not looking pleased to have come all that way.

* * * *

John was beyond miserable. “I needed new drivers, software, for the serial link, the fiber, you know,” he said, talking into his coffee. They were back at camp, huddled around the table in the small cabin they used as an office. Mort was wedged behind the desk, phone tucked on a shoulder, typing furiously at an email. “So, last night I chatted with Thomas back at the University, he worked on the comm system for the ‘Bot, asked him if he could hook me up.”

“And told him we had a major find,” Winifred continued, grimly.

“No, well, yeah, I mean, all I said was that the SpyBot Vee Two was finally going to get his chance. And that there was a hole. And maybe something about the slab.”

“When the one thing everyone knows about Aulan archaeology is that there aren’t any big stone ruins.”

“I didn’t think he’d blab. He was supposed to be a friend,” he trailed off, head down.

Mort look up over his glasses, phone still tucked under his ear, and said, “Loose lips sink ships.”

“I don’t know what that means!” John moaned, who’d spent most of his life on a station around Epsilon Eridani, then come to Aulis for post-graduate studies, had probably never seen a body of water larger than a swimming pool, and whose knowledge of history was largely garnered from old movies. Winifred suspected his education had some significant gaps in the subject of politics as well, but then again, she found that true of almost anyone not from Earth.

Though, she had to admit, the colonists had out-politicked them this time. Despite two hours of argument with the invading horde, and another few hours of Mort and her taking shifts on the satellite phone, the project was officially shut down pending further review; review that was likely to occur well after the mining crew had ripped their way through the strata, the keepers’ legacy reduced to base silicates.

“They would have found some excuse, anyway,” she said to John. “They didn’t prepare all that paperwork overnight, not at the speed the municipal council works. And the oversight committee, they must have been sitting by the door with their bags packed.” The University representatives had come in via suborbital shuttle, at an expense, Winifred suspected, that would have funded the entire dig for another few weeks.

“Yeah, I guess,” John said, unconsoled, “but I still handed it to them wrapped up with a damn bow. The SpyBot was excuse enough. ‘Possible damage due to experimental and unreliable equipment.’ “ Which was unreasonable; remote exploration devices were a standard part of the archaeological toolkit, common, even, in the crevices and drains of urban digs back on Earth. But they were rare here on Aulis, with its simple, shallow archaeology. And the “unreliable” was hard to argue, when the ‘Bot had fallen down the stairs and was stranded somewhere inside, and the whole investigatory group there to witness.

“We all voted to go ahead,” said Inanna, quietly.

“And I lifted that corner off, or there wouldn’t have been anywhere to go in the first place,” Ant said, not the least remorseful.

Mort raised a hand, gesturing for quiet, and said, “Yes, yes I see,” a few times into the sat phone, and then, “Of course, wonderful, thank you, goodbye,” thumbed the switch and set the phone down carefully, lined up square with the edge of the desk, which was not a good sign. “The Dean is still occupied, will get back to us as soon as her schedule allows, and suggests that we bring up anything urgent with the oversight committee.”

“Bugger off, that means,” said Ant.

“In so many words, yes. I’ve left messages with the APCS, and sent email to everyone I can think of back on Earth, but that will, be, what, a week each way by courier.”

“Twelve days, best case,” Winifred said.

“Which could be just in time,” Mort said, with a trace of his usual optimism, but no one looked particularly convinced. “And I’ve sent a message to Frank Patil asking for legal advice about the records.” That was salt in the wound, or maybe it was the other way around, and all the rest of it was just the salt; one of the contingent from town had been the sheriff, who had locked down the site; “in case of follow-up investigation toward formal charges” he’d said, and denied them access to their records, a move that had Winifred literally seeing red for a few seconds.

“Did anyone actually check the backups?” Winifred asked, a bit sharply.

“Feel free,” John snapped back, with a wave toward the office computer, which also served as the dig archives. “Has anyone suddenly remembered doing a backup?”

“We didn’t ask Henry,” Mort threw in.

And Ant scowled thoughtfully and said, “We get started up again, let’s put him in charge of all that tedious stuff. If he thinks watching us digging is entertaining, he’ll love computers.”

“Might as well put him in charge of the whole dig, then,” Mort said. “Arguing with the committee, that’s as tedious as it gets, yeah? And it’d be about time those chowderheads talk with the real natives.” Which had everyone nodding, and settling back in their chairs, the tension let out a notch. Not accidental, Winifred thought; the two veteran archaeologists had been working together since their undergraduate days back on Earth; that was decades of experience in keeping teams from imploding.

“It’s my fault,” said Inanna quietly. “Last night, I was so excited about the slab, and the tablet memcard had lots of room, and then it was late and we were going into town, and I just didn’t swap the card out.”

“And I couldn’t wait to get working on the SpyBot,” said John.

“We were all excited,” said Winifred, conciliatory, “and we’re all overloaded. If we had the full team we were supposed to have, we’d have had someone assigned to do backups and archiving. If anyone’s to blame, it’s those idiots back at Aulis University.”

“Back at our site, now,” Ant grumbled.

“What I’m worried about,” Winifred said, and looked around at Mort, “is what they might do with that data. Like lose it.”

The team made shocked noises, but Mort nodded grimly. “A discovery like this, proof of an established, advanced cultural history for the natives, it’s exactly what this lot doesn’t want.”

“And we don’t have any evidence, do we?” Winifred pointed out. “I’ll bet they come in and search the camp before long, just to make sure. It’ll end up just our word, hearsay, basically. Us against them, and we’re the ‘them.’ Every one of us from off-world, which is where they’ll ship us. By the time we can find any support, and that’s assuming anyone with any authority will care, this will all be a bustling strip mine.”

“They can’t!” said John, aghast. But Mort nodded again, and Ant glowered at the plastic wall, in the direction of the forbidden site.

“What’s to stop ‘em?” he asked, and no one answered.

Mort got up, creaking, and extracted himself from behind the desk. “Well, we’ve done what we can for now. Tea time?”

“Beer,” Ant said, and on that everyone agreed.

* * * *

The beer was in bottles, however, and back in camp. Winifred, Inanna, and Mort raided the fridge, and set up a picnic in the women’s cabin, which doubled as storage and was largest, and arguably the neatest, of the camp’s cabins. Ant persuaded John to walk down to the pub, but they returned half an hour later with another six pack and a bottle of wine from the market.

“Not so comfortable tonight,” Ant had said.

“Lots of DeMitt crew in there,” John had added, which was the mining company, “and out on the street, too. And bulldozers.” Which they could see from the edge of camp, sitting on flatbeds down the road.

“Like those birds on Earth, what are they called?” asked Inanna.

“Vultures,” Winifred said, and went back inside and poured another glass of wine.

The party, such as it was, wound down with the sun. Mort left after a few encouraging words, soon followed by John, several sheets to the wind, and then Ant, who suggested a walk. But Winifred declined, deterred by the locals in one direction and the dig, forbidden territory now, in the other. And Inanna, with her small, careful steps, had trouble keeping up with Anthony’s determined stride. So Ant went by himself, with hope of finding Henry, who had disappeared soon after the arrival of the invading human horde.

Despite the beer and wine, and the long, eventful day, it was too early and too tense for sleep. So Winifred and Inanna talked, the spacer more voluble than usual between the alcohol and the frustration. The biggest problem, they agreed, was the loss of the records. If they had the video from the ‘Bot, or even the still pictures of the slab, they could leak them to the press back in Tauris, the capital, where the locals, the human colonists, that was, wouldn’t have such a direct motivation in opposing their work, and maybe a keeper elder might take interest. That would at least be enough, one would hope, to prevent any outright destruction of the site.

“We could sneak into the site,” Inanna said, “there on the gorge side, where the fence is low. Into the tent and get the tablets. Or at least the memcards.”

“Those guards, the deputies or whatever they were calling themselves, they’re armed,” Winifred said. A group of them had shown up at the camp, as Winifred had predicted, belligerent, and with a warrant. They rummaged through everything, searching for “evidence,” they said vaguely, and eventually confiscated the office computer. “Bloody thugs, is what, and I’ve seen some of them before, in the pub. I’m sure they work for DeMitt. Anyway, if we run into one of them, well, I really don’t like to think what they might do...”

That led to silence, and unpleasant thoughts, and then Inanna said, “What about my bumps?”

Winifred blinked at her, bleary and not following the suddenly energetic spacer.

Inanna smoothed out the blanket on her cot and quickly traced a map out of wrinkles. “Look, the slab is here, and the hall leads east, what, twenty meters?”

Winifred nodded, cautiously.

“And that courtyard, cloister, whatever, it was big, at least another twenty, thirty meters across. And you were saying there should be a complex on either side, the master’s rooms and all that.”

Winifred nodded again, with a sudden hunch where Inanna was going. “And those should extend the length of the cloisters, and if everything is scaled up to the same degree, they could stretch for fifteen, twenty meters on either side, north and south.”

“Which means they’re all through here,” Inanna said, making little dimples in the blanket.

“Right under your bumps,” Winifred said, and Inanna nodded excitedly, and she, who compulsively avoided big gestures, swept her arm around and poked a dent in the center of the makeshift map. “We could dig.”

“Um, in plain sight of the guards?” Winifred asked.

“No, I mean now, in the dark! The ridges, I’ll bet they’re slabs, the roofs and such over the crafthall. It’s not like the usual Aulan features; we’ll know when we hit them, even in the dark.”

It was a mad idea, absolutely daft, and dangerously appealing. “It’s . . . vandalism,” Winifred said. “We can’t possibly do a proper job in the dark.”

“Better to risk messing up one little spot than to let them destroy the whole site! Anyway, it’s not archaeology, it’s, uh, journalism. Just so we have something to show for all this.”

“Something to use as leverage,” said Winifred, feeling herself teetering into agreement. “If we have some proof, some photos, say, maybe we can claim to have more, scare them into thinking twice about all of this.”

“And we’d have something to send off-world, out where people are sane.” Which Winifred suspected meant off of any world; it was hard to take offense, under the circumstances.

“Well,” Winifred said, with a look around the suddenly oppressive cabin, “ ‘then ‘twere well it were done quickly.’ “ She stood, gave Inanna a hand up off the bed, both of them a bit wobbly. “Do we tell the others?”

Inanna tilted her head, then shook it. “What they don’t know...”

“Can’t send them to jail,” Winifred finished, and was surprised by her own cheerfulness.

* * * *

As it turned out, they had to expand the conspiracy. While their cabin was well supplied with tarps, buckets, a couple of small flashlights, water, an emergency supply of beer, a measuring tape, and pads of paper—Inanna being determined to record what she could—all the shovels that weren’t under lock and key were in John and Anthony’s cabin. Ant was still out on his walk, but John didn’t hesitate to join in the plot. “Hell, yeah,” he said, and spent five minutes piecing together an all-black outfit, while the women sorted through the picks and shovels.

And then it was out the door and north toward the gorge, a worrisome route that took them past Mort’s cabin and the bulldozers on the road, but there were no signs of life at either spot. There were six moons up, and the visibility was good; a bit too good, Winifred thought, and maybe John’s outfit wasn’t so silly after all. They circled around the site, then Inanna took the lead, following the map in her head toward the set of ridges she now thought might be the roof of the great chamber the SpyBot had discovered.

The plain beyond the site was mostly scrub, low trees, and ghostbush that twitched and quivered at their passing. Though they were all trying to move silently, only Inanna was succeeding; the dark and the uneven ground, and, Winifred admitted, the alcohol, had the other two shuffling and occasionally stumbling. So they didn’t hear the sound until they were close to their goal, and Inanna suddenly gestured them to a stop. It was a quiet, determined scraping; “Not an animal, something metal,” Winifred whispered.

“It’s on my bump!” Inanna whispered back, indignant.

John set down his load of equipment and slithered forward before the other two could stop him, to peer past a hunched, ancient tree. At least he was almost invisible in the shadows, until, that is, he stood up with an audible snort. He waved back at them, and stepped down into the small depression that marked one side of their target ridge.

Winifred and Inanna looked at each other, and then the spacer shrugged, and, setting her pack and shovel down next to John’s pile, shuffled forward. She stopped at the same tree, and made the same noise, and came back with a grin that gleamed white in the moons’ light. “Here, take this,” was all she would say, and handed John’s pack to Winifred. Winifred followed her, baffled. The depression, and the ridge it bordered, cut a dry, parched line through the scrub; more evidence of archaeology underneath, Inanna had maintained, creating an open area several meters wide. Standing in the center were three figures, John in his black, the plump shape of a keeper, and...

“Ant?” Winifred asked.

“ ‘Bout time you got here,” Ant replied. “Henry said you were on your way.”

There were so many improbable layers to that statement, starting with the fact that Ant was there to make it, that Winifred just stopped, arms full of gear, her brain refusing to process. But Inanna gave her a tug, and whispered, “You’re standing on the highest point. Come on.” Winifred stepped down after the spacer; the depression was gentle, but with the ridge on the far side and the scrub, it provided a bit of cover.

John slapped Ant on the shoulder. “Great minds, huh? Hey, we brought beer.”

“And shovels,” added Inanna.

“I’ll have one of each, thank you very much,” Ant said. “Slow going with just the trowel.” But he had already cut a narrow, clean slot half a meter into the slope of the ridge, and Henry’s long twiggy fingers were dirty; it looked like he’d been clearing rocks.

The keeper fluttered those dirty fingers in greeting, and with a gesture to include the group, signed “night blossoms.” On top of everything, Winifred thought, now Henry has discovered sarcasm, and then, with a bit of a chill, remembered that night blossoms were the emblems of keeper burial art.

She set her armful of gear down. “We’ve got more than beer and shovels. We thought we’d put these tarps up as a kind of barrier between us and the site. It’s not perfect camouflage, but one big solid shape is less noticeable than a bunch of moving ones.”

“Makes sense,” Ant said, so they spent a couple of minutes setting up a sort of lean-to on the ridge. Then Ant started back in on his slot, made much faster progress with a pick; Winifred took turns cleaning with a spade. Henry found the bucket, and to Winifred’s rapidly numbing astonishment, used it to collect and clear the spoil. Meanwhile, Inanna and John made a rough plan of the area, measuring from the tree behind them, which Inanna thought she could locate on her digital plots, assuming they got access to them again.

They’d widened and deepened the slot into the ridge, stopping now and again to feel the soil, and take a quick peek with a flashlight, hoping for a cut like that surrounding the slab. During one of these breaks, Henry put a gentle hand on Winifred’s shoulder, and signed “ghostbush,” and then a quick combined motion. Winifred shook her head slowly, and grinned up at Ant, who was waiting for a translation. “It’s a party,” she said. “We should have brought a cake.”

Ant squinted in confusion. “What’s he mean, ‘fat stream something’?”

“ ‘The slow stream cuts stone,’ “ she corrected, as John and Inanna, who were under the tree jotting down their measurements, suddenly sat up and looked around. “It’s his name for Mort.” And indeed, there was the distinguished professor himself, concealed in a sort of dark cloak that proved to be a blanket, smile and hair both gleaming white in the moons’ light.

“Hello!” he said, then “hello” again, in a much quieter voice. “I’ve brought tea, and biscuits.” Which were close enough to cake, Winifred decided, and took a couple as they huddled together in the depression.

Mort explained that he had decided to bluff his way into the office, and at least retrieve the sat phone. He’d gone looking for the team—”Didn’t feel entirely comfortable going on my own; those deputy chaps were drinking, and armed,” he said—and finding all of them missing, had quickly, and correctly, surmised what was up. “I’m not sure I approve,” he said, after they explained their plan, “but I certainly haven’t had much luck doing things by the rules. I’ll just sit here and keep an eye on all of you.”

But it wasn’t long before he was hunched over the slot, running his fingers along what might be a cut in the soil. “Feels about the same as the other one,” he said, and Ant and Winifred agreed, but nothing was visible, even in the thin light from the torch.

“Well, only one way to tell, and that’s to keep digging,” concluded Ant.

Inanna said, “We could do a little test pit on top of the ridge, see if we hit stone.” So she and John started on that, a few meters in from where the edge might be, and using the two picks in the heavy clay, while Ant and Winifred extended the slot toward them, working carefully now, Ant reverting to his trusty trowel.

Despite the hard going, the new pit deepened quickly. While Inanna stopped to clear the bottom with her trowel, John grabbed another beer, and peered over Winifred’s shoulder. “We’ll hit it first,” he pronounced.

“Who let him dig?” Winifred asked the group at large.

“Gently, now,” added Mort.

But John gave his pick a twirl and grinned, and started in on the pit with renewed vigor. And three swings later, there was a sharp clunk as he hit something hard. He swung a few more times, with the same result, before Inanna could stop him. She scraped the debris from the hole, but the clay was solid, difficult to lever up.

“I got it,” John said, and Inanna sat back, a bit alarmed, as he swung, and hit something solid again.

“Shhhh!” hissed Winifred.

Ant frowned, head tilted, and said, “Don’t sound like stone, does it?”

John swung again, and the sound this time was more of a crack, startlingly loud. And then a strange creaking, that stopped and started in spurts, with a sort of keening overtone that made Winifred suddenly think of winter as a child, family trips to Scotland, and gleefully stepping on puddles gone wondrously hard and slippery. “Ice?” she said, baffled.

But Mort stood, hands held up, and said, “Glass.”

John stopped, mid swing, and swore. “Sorry, god, sorry, I hope I didn’t break something.”

But the sound was still growing, and spreading, and the dirt in front of Winifred shifted, a miniature avalanche running down the face of their slot. “Uh, guys?” she said, “I think you should come here. Carefully.”

“Now,” added Mort, firmly, and John took a big step back, and then another toward the edge of the ridge.

But Inanna was still on her knees, and as she got her foot under her, the ground shuddered and then tilted, along a line that cut through the pit. Inanna slipped, and slid into the hole, which should have been no more than knee deep, but there was a crunch and she kept going, just disappeared, and then a three meter section of the ridge was slumping after her, with a great woomph and a cloud of dust and debris.

“Oh God oh God,” John was saying, sprawled on the edge of the depression.

In front of Winifred and Ant, the soil had miraculously parted. On the left, there was a perfect cross-section, layers of topsoil and clay, and then a long low arch of glass, thick and laced with fantastic, feathery buttresses of the same material. On the right, there was nothing; the ridge had collapsed in, a hole about three meters square, perfectly square, in fact, and sloping down into darkness.

Silence, then, except the clatter of stones and shards still dribbling down the new slope. Winifred leaned out into the gap where the end of their excavation had been, and Ant grabbed a handful of her shirt.

“Careful,” he said.

“No, it’s safe, there’s an edge. A wall.” Her hands were on stone, a sort of beam, carved to support the edge of what seemed to be a vast glass vault. Supporting that was a wall, also stone, and below that, presumably the floor of the chamber, now buried under the remains of the roof and what must be tons of dirt.

“Inanna,” Winifred hissed. Then again, louder; damn the risk from the deputies, and anyway the collapse had probably been audible all the way back to camp.

There was a stir from below, maybe, but Mort and John came up behind her, their steps, and John’s continuing muttered curses, drowning out the sound. Winifred gestured them still, and called again. This time there was a definite reaction, dirt shifting, and a crunch of glass. And then a quiet voice, “Huh? Yeah, um, what?”

“Are you okay?” Winifred asked.

“Tell her not to move,” Mort said over her shoulder. “That slope doesn’t look stable.”

“Inanna, don’t move, all right? You could start an avalanche.”

“I’m under something. I think a shelf fell on me.”

“Are you hurt?”

A long pause, and then, “Not really.” Which was not a satisfactory answer. But before Winifred could push the point, the spacer continued, “Oh, hey, there’s some cool stuff down here!” Which was a bit more reassuring, and John gasped out a sort of laugh, and finally stopped cursing.

There was a sound from nearby, and Winifred looked up, they all did, expecting a gun-toting deputy, but the ridge was empty. The tarps were gone, pulled into the room below, and they could see across the site through the scrub; there was no sign of the guards.

“I guess it’s a good thing they were drinking, after all,” Mort said. But the sound repeated, from a different spot on the ridge, and this time accompanied by a rattle of debris below.

Ant said, “I’m not sure about the other half of the roof here.”

And from the darkness below, “The ceiling is making noises. And bits are falling off.”

Winifred sat back and faced the others. “We’ve got to get her out of there.”

Ant asked, “Should she move over to the other side, get out from under that glass?”

Mort shook his head, and quietly said, “That rubble is going to slide, and push her right under.”

“And it’s full of glass.”

“The wall’s too high, even for Inanna, even if she could climb on top of the debris. And too smooth to climb.”

“Speaking of glass, if the rest of the roof collapses, it’s going to explode. She was on top of it the first time,” John pointed out.

Ant folded his arms. “Well, we’ve got to do something.” They all looked over at the hole.

“We get a rope,” Winifred said. “We go to the site, and get a rope, and we pull her out, fast, keep her on top even if the rubble starts to go.”

“The guards—” Mort started.

“We deal with them,” said Winifred, and Ant nodded slowly.

“There’s a stack of poly line by the trenches we were using for laying out the fencing,” John said. “You could lift a truck with that stuff.”

They all looked at Mort, and he said, “Ant’s right, we’ve got to do something. But do take care with the guns.”

Winifred leaned back over the wall. “Inanna, we’re going to get a rope from the site, pull you out of there.”

“The door is broken,” Inanna replied.

“What?”

“There’s a door, in the wall here, and the dirt’s up against it, but it’s broken. I think I can get through, if I clear a bit. I have my trowel.”

“Thatta girl,” Ant said.

“I don’t think you should move,” Winifred called.

“I really don’t like it here,” came the plaintive reply. “This thing on top of me, it’s sharp.”

Which brought to mind images of glass shelves hanging like guillotine blades. “Well, do what you need to do. But be careful. We’ll be back with the rope as soon as we can.”

“It’s me,” was the reply, which was a point; if anyone could move cautiously, it was the spacer. And, “You be careful of those deputies.”

Winifred got up, dusting her hands, and said, “Okay, I’m going.”

John opened his mouth, and Winifred shook her head. “It was my idea, I’ll take the risk. And one person will be quieter.”

“I know where the line is,” John insisted.

“I’m coming,” said Ant, “to sort those geezers out, if they need sorting.”

Winifred looked at Mort, and he waved them all off. “I don’t think we should stand around debating,” he said.

So the three of them went, leaving Mort and Henry to keep Inanna company. They climbed the fence into the site, and carefully moved toward the trenches. There were lights on in the tent, but no other signs of life. True to his word, John found the rope easily. It was a bit of a tangle, though, and he and Winifred had to work at it in the dim light to get a length free, while Ant stood guard. And then, uncertain of how much they would need, they went after a second piece, John quietly cursing the laborers who had left the rope in a jumble. Ant grunted, and reached down to help, and then froze, they all did, as voices came from the tent. Two, no three, at least; multiple males, guttural and confused, and a single female, strangely thin, and familiar.

“It’s Inanna,” Winifred whispered. “How. . . ?”

But John was nodding. “Those are my speakers. She found the—” And then he leapt to his feet and was charging toward the tent. A man had come out, headed toward the little guard hut by the gate. He turned at the sound of John’s steps, but too late; the tech was already midair. The two slammed to the ground, John on top. Ant started toward them, and almost ran into a second man coming out of the tent. With no evident surprise or haste, Ant swung a hand up and smacked the newcomer on the side of the head, and he dropped in a heap.

John had his man up, and was prodding him back toward the tent. Ant looked in, then gestured at Winifred. She got up, arms still full of rope, and walked toward them, eyes on the guard post.

“That’s all of them,” Ant said as she got close.

“There could be someone at the gate,” she said.

“Best get inside, then,” he said, and held the flap open. Winifred waited, however, for John and his captive. The local man was big, and there was a ferocious scowl on his heavy, red face, but John had the man’s gun, and a look of cold determination.

“He was going for the land line in the guard post,” John guessed. He waved the captive into the tent, and ordered him down on the ground. Ant dragged the other one in, and soon both were tied and gagged with tape from their own med kit, which Winifred tucked into her pack.

Meanwhile, John had sat at his stack of equipment, and was frantically flicking switches. They all jumped, as Inanna’s voice came out of the speakers again. “Hello? I’m one of the archaeologists. I need help, I’m trapped underground.”

The monitor flickered to life, image blurred, and Inanna made a startled noise. The picture swirled, then steadied.

“That’s it, back on our feet,” John muttered.

“The SpyBot,” Winifred said. “She fixed the SpyBot.”

John thumbed the controls and the view panned about, under his control again. A shape flew past, an arm, and he tracked it up to Inanna’s face, pale and smudged in the ‘Bot’s little spotlight. “Can you hear me?” she asked, peering down at the camera. “I need help. I’m hurt.”

Winifred realized with a chill that the smudges on Inanna’s face were dripping, black in the LED light, but certainly blood.

The ‘Bot’s footpad came into view, one of the front legs, and waved.

“Oh,” Inanna said, and sat back. “I know this sounds crazy, but I am trapped under the slab out there. My colleagues are out on the plain behind the site.” And then with a crease of her brow, “It’s not their fault! They’re trying to rescue me.”

John waved again, and looked up at Winifred and Ant.

“How do we talk to her?” Ant asked.

“We don’t,” John replied, with a helpless shrug. “It’s one way. I didn’t think we’d be talking to the archaeology.” He fidgeted with the controls, Inanna’s face bobbing on the screen as the ‘Bot bounced.

Winifred pictured the SpyBot, a six-legged steel spider covered with sensors, all of them for taking in information, not sending it back out. Though it certainly was agile; John had it all but dancing yesterday, warming up, while Henry had sat in front of it, fingers flicking, as if it were a fabrilum that would respond to gesture, and...

“Can you use two feet at the same time?” she asked, “like this?” And she made a sign, a finger tracking up, and then all of them spread sideways over the other hand.

“Hah!” said John, and “I can try.”

Winifred looked over at Ant. “ ‘A stalk in the wind,’ “ she explained. “Henry’s name for Inanna.”

On the screen, both front feet were now in view, and John tried the gesture, accidentally clapping the feet together on the first attempt, but the second worked a bit better, and the third was right on. As much as it could be, that was, given the lack of individual fingers, though the footpads did swivel. Inanna tilted her head, and then shook it. “Is there something wrong with the—oh! It’s me! Who is that? John?”

And John raised a foot straight up, “yes,” that was, and bobbed the ‘Bot in a nod.

“Oh hey, are you okay? Did the guards get you?”

John snorted. “Are we okay?” he said, and signed “yes,” then “no.” Which Inanna seemed to follow; she sat back, with a look of relief.

“Thank goodness. I found the SpyBot, well, obviously. I found the cable first. Okay, first I got out that door. The ceiling was making cracking sounds, and sort of groaning, and Mort said that maybe the door was a good idea, after all. The shelf that was on top of me was leaning up against the door, but the door itself had broken, so I cleared the dirt away at the bottom and got it open enough to crawl through. If those shelves had come down . . .” She shuddered, and rubbed her face, then stared at her hands. “I’m bleeding,” she said quietly, “I hit my head when the hole collapsed. And I cut my leg.” She leaned out of frame for a second. “And that’s bleeding, too, so I made a bandage once I was through the door, with my tights. I tried to call through the door to Mort, but I guess he couldn’t hear me, or I couldn’t hear him. So I thought, well, I guess it doesn’t make much sense, but I really didn’t want to be next to that door, if the ceiling went and all that glass came down. And maybe I could find the slab, and peek out, see if you guys were there. Stupid, I guess.”

She stopped, and looked at her hands again. John flicked the joysticks, and the ‘Bot gave a little wave, somehow reassuring, a gesture that made Winifred blink, and consider forgiving him for his earlier excesses. Inanna smiled her small smile, and echoing Winifred’s thoughts, said, “John, it wasn’t your fault. It was my idea to dig that pit. And who would have imagined that ridge was glass? A glass vault. It must have been beautiful.” She took in a long breath. “So, anyway, I crawled down what seemed to be a corridor, with doors on one side. It was completely dark. I should have read Winifred’s paper on crafthalls more carefully; maybe I would have had a better idea of where I was. Is she there?”

The ‘Bot nodded, and made a little digging motion, which was not a keeper sign but Inanna laughed, and said, “And Ant. Hi, guys. So, I followed the corridor, and eventually it turned, and there was a door on each side. The one on the left smelled strange, musty, so I went right, and that was a big room, and the air seemed fresh. So I went that way, and after a couple of meters put my hand on something totally out of place, it wasn’t stone or glass. Though I guess it was, wasn’t it?”

“The fiber cable,” John said.

“It was the cable for the SpyBot, so then it was just a matter of picking a direction. I picked wrong, which I figured out pretty quick; there was an opening just a meter away, and steps, and then the cable just stopped, with a little plug.”

John swore.

“So I felt my way down the steps, it must be ten meters down, and there was the ‘Bot at the bottom. It didn’t feel broken, and after a bit I figured out how the cable plugged in. I could have followed the cable the other way, up to the slab, but . . . It was dark. I know this sounds strange, but it’s never dark like that in space. I mean, everything lights up on a ship, you know? And in-system, there’s a star, and out-system, there’s all of them. I’ve never felt this lost.” She sat up and stretched, John panning to track her face as she looked around. “But now there’s your light, the ‘Bot’s light, I mean, and I’m here, so I should look around, huh?”

John wiggled a footpad, the sign for “no,” but Inanna got up, and he spun the ‘Bot, only her legs in frame, and one of them streaked dark with blood. She limped away from the camera, and down, and John sent the ‘Bot after her, recklessly dropping down the steps. The light bobbed wildly, and as before, was echoed in countless reflections.

“Oh.” Inanna’s voice echoed. “Oh. Can you see this?” But the camera didn’t have the range of the human eye, the image was blown out white on black, the pattern seemingly random.

John typed at the keyboard, and the image blinked. “Ditching the autogain,” he said, and tapped at a key, the contrast coming down. Details began to emerge, shades of grey, but still nothing that made sense, apart from the form of the woman walking into the center of the space.

“They’re huge,” she said.

Winifred didn’t understand the plural, but the room was enormous, maybe forty meters square, and lined with columns. “It is a cloister,” Winifred said. “The layout is exactly that of a crafthall. Just bigger.” Maybe that’s what Inanna meant, she thought, the columns, the rooms, all of it huge. “Much bigger.”

But as John sent the ‘Bot with its readjusted camera scurrying after the spacer, the reflections that filled the open space shifted with the light, and began to trace out shapes. Shapes that loomed up to the distant, vaulted ceiling. Inanna stopped in front of one, and looked up. John stopped the ‘Bot, stepped it back until the shape was in frame, the tall spacer less than half its height. With the camera and light still, the image was easier to read: a series of long, swooping glints, and a long central line of gleaming blocks, looping back on itself like a vine, or a snake’s spine, or...

“It’s one of them thingums,” Ant said. “What you lot are calling dragons.”

“Glasswork,” said John, “a sculpture. An Early Empire ‘Snip sculpture. God, we are going to be so famous.”

Inanna reached up. “It’s beautiful,” she said, and spread her arms wide, twirled toward the camera. “Are you getting this?”

And behind her, reflections ran riot, as the sculpture stretched, and uncoiled.

Winifred tried to interpret the change as the light moving, or the camera, but that was wrong, even if the alternative was unbelievable. “It’s a fabrilum,” she said.

On the screen, Inanna turned back to the moving sculpture. Reflected light swirled around her. She brought her arms up to her face, covering her mouth in surprise, perhaps, they couldn’t see from this angle, and the fabrilum, the dragon, bent down its head, more flora than fauna, really, a bloom of sharp-edged petals and long curving spikes. The head was itself larger than the woman.

“Don’t move, Inanna, you’re a spacer, be still,” Winifred said, despite the one-way link. But Inanna was as far from space as she could be, and working on instincts much more ancient. She jumped back, stumbling on her bad leg, and flailed her arms for balance. And the fabrilum slid forward on its coils, and the head moved forward, almost gently, the petals irising out, the spikes spreading around her. The image was baffling again, the angles didn’t make sense, all glints and shadows, until Winifred realized the shadows were spreading, spilling down the spacer, because the spikes weren’t around her, they were through her, and the dark was blood, more blood.

“No no no,” Winifred said.

And John sent the ‘Bot charging forward, to the rescue, which worked, maybe, in the video games. But motion was answered with motion, a flare of glass before the camera, a final crunch from the speakers, and for the second and final time that day, the screen went black.

* * * *

They stood there, silent in front of the screen. Even their one conscious captive lay quiet. Maybe he had followed what was going on, or maybe he’d strangled himself, struggling in the ropes. It didn’t really matter much, Winifred thought. But after a while, minutes, or perhaps just seconds, a noise intruded, a shuffling from outside the tent. Winifred quietly turned, and went to look, because anything, be it more deputies, or a horde of townsfolk with pitchforks and torches, was better than looking at the blank monitor.

It was Mort, standing outside the tent, blinking over his glasses. “It is you,” he said. “That’s quite a relief. You were gone so long, you see, and Inanna isn’t answering, so I thought it best to come and . . .” He trailed off, looking at her, then past her, where the others had emerged from the tent. “Oh dear,” he said. “Oh dear, what’s happened?”

Winifred opened her mouth, and shut it again; she had no idea where to begin, and really, no desire to do so. The only thought in her mind would make no sense to the professor, and that was, “She’s in the dark; she’s down there in the dark.”

John stepped up next to her, and pointed, and said, “DeMitt men,” which was so far from the point as to be provoking, if any provocation could possibly penetrate her blankness. But there was, indeed, a group coming through the gate, and the floodlight on the guard post picked out sticks and worse in their hands.

“What was that noise?” asked one of them, and Winifred wondered how they could have heard that crunch from the speakers. But no, they must have heard the vault collapse, all the way back in town; what seemed like days past had only been about half an hour; just time to round up a gang and come to investigate.

“And where’s Paul and Janos? What have you goddamn Earthers done with them?” another demanded. Ant took a great stride forward and shoved Mort toward the tent, then headed toward the locals, a fist raised. There was a crack. “Glass,” Winifred thought, and the darkness in her rippled a bit. But no, one of the gang had a hand raised, a gun, and Ant was stumbling, and then sitting down.

She looked at the gun; it seemed so small, and dull, and mundane, like everything else human in this place. And then she shivered, and the darkness came crashing down, and she was there again, and Ant was down, and hurt, and the gang was heading toward them, all shouting and waving their sticks. It was villagers with pitchforks, after all, she thought, bemused, but not with the blankness of before; things seemed important again, and most immediately important was getting away, finding help for Ant, and Inanna, and all of them. She turned and ran, out through the trenches, and out of the corner of her eye she caught John heading back past the tent. “Poor Mort,” she thought. “They’ll catch him, and he’s the one who has no idea what’s happened.” She almost turned back, then, at the thought of the professor with that mob, but what could she do there? Try the camp, and hope that the sat phone was there, and if not, then into town, knock on random doors if she had to, until someone let her use a phone. Find the oversight committee, even; they were pompous, bigoted asses, but they wouldn’t want to be associated, however incidentally, with this sort of violence.

There was a thud behind her, and angry voices; someone had tripped into one of the trenches, she thought, but there were other voices closer, and gaining. She hit the fence, and went straight up it, thankful for the muscle she’d acquired. She swung over the top and hung, looking back into the site, and one of the locals rushed out of the gloom and slammed the fence with his length of pipe. She dropped to the ground, and looked through the fence at him. He glared back, panting, his face a dark, crudely formed lump in the moonlight.

“Teach you to mess around in other people’s business, you Earther bitch,” he said, and hit the fence again.

“This is not your world,” she replied, and was surprised at how coldly certain she sounded.

A second man ran up on the other side, who looked to be in better shape; he went straight for the fence, and the first man said, “Just shoot the bitch!” Winifred turned and ran, into the scrub. Toward the collapsed ridge, in fact, a familiar path in the dark, and she was thinking of the pursuer who had fallen into the trench, and of the much deeper, glass-filled hole ahead.

Cassandra had risen, small and red in the East, all seven moons, now, and Winifred thought dawn was not far off. If she couldn’t circle around, she was going to be trapped out on the plain, alien and obvious in the landscape. There was sudden motion to her left; a clump of ghostbush reared up and shook itself at her. And from behind, the bang and whistle of a shot, into the ghostbush, fortunately. Winifred doubled over, and slid across a series of low ridges, and almost went straight into the collapsed chamber; she skidded to a stop a meter from the edge, and realized she was on the other half of the broken vault.

Soil cascaded over the edge, shaken loose by her steps. She looked down after it, into the chamber, and Henry was there on the scree, clear in the moons’s light, looking back up at her. He signed, a series of small, calm gestures, “honors the soil,” the name she’d always found a bit embarrassing. And then a much simpler motion, but one that took her a second to parse, under the circumstances: “jump.”

Voices in the scrub, and she ducked down; the vault creaked beneath her, and shook another small avalanche of dirt over the edge.

Henry gestured again, “jump.” And, “the soil-mother will provide.”

It was just too much. She was an academic, for goodness sake, a student of the deep, still layers of the past, of individual actions compressed into abstract, anonymous strata. What on Earth was she doing here, part of the action herself, and every option dangerous, potentially fatal?

“Henry,” she hissed, more frustrated than anything else. But that wasn’t his name, that was what the team had dubbed him; fair enough, as keeper names were granted when they came of age, as much description, or title, as name. And standing there, arms raised, in a chamber his people had built eight thousand years ago, when humans were still working on setting one stone on top of another, he wasn’t a Carter or Schliemann or Jones; he was this: a palm held flat, and two fingers set lightly on it, the name he’d chosen, or had been chosen for him by an elder: “waiting.” Frustration was a human thing, a product of haste and desire. The keepers had what they wanted, and most of all they had patience.

Which the men in the scrub behind her lacked; their voices were getting louder, both angrier and decidedly closer. But nothing in those voices was of any interest to her, was in any way meaningful, not in the context of that open chamber, and the figure standing in it.

She stood up smoothly, and kept going, out and over the edge. She hit the slope, which immediately started to slide, but the alien was already moving, leading her down, skating over the debris. The door Inanna had opened was a dark gap in the wall in front of her, just a meter square at floor level, and surrounded on all sides by razor-edged reflections, which must be the remains of the shelving. Henry squatted down and slid through the opening, and Winifred, ankle-deep in fast-moving rubble, curled into a ball and hoped to hit the gap and not impale herself on the shelves. She bumped hard against something, with a crunch, and spun and nearly went over backward, but gentle hands caught her, pulled her back. There was a crash, and debris hit her legs like shrapnel, as the avalanche of soil and glass smashed into the door.

The impact went on and on, as the shelves and maybe even the door collapsed, eventually tailing off into echoes and darkness. Henry placed something in her hand, metal and plastic and familiar; she thumbed the switch, and the torch came on, shockingly bright. The door at the end of the corridor, a slab of thick, ornate glass, was off its hinges but pinned in the opening. Debris spilled under all the way to their feet, soil and rock but mostly great shards and slivers of glass. Winifred checked herself, certain of finding some terrible injury, but there were only scratches; her jeans and boots had caught the worst of it. Incredibly, she still had her pack, which had not been properly on, just slung over a shoulder, and the med kit was in it.

But that brought a new, urgent thought to mind. “a stalk in the wind, lost,” she signed, awkward with the torch. Inanna was down here, and hurt, a desperate hope, that the spacer was just hurt. And she added, “a hall of giant fabrilum,” which she wasn’t sure made sense, not on any level. But Henry nodded, human-style, and set off down the corridor, as if quite certain where he was.

The corridor crooked a bit, and was lined with cubbyholes and niches, and ended with doors open left and right, as Inanna had described; they were in the master’s wing of this ancient, oversized crafthall, and the door to the left must be the master’s sanctum, where the fabrilum were finished. That was hard to resist, with its promise of ancient wonders, and long-lost technology. But Henry and Winifred went right, into the long workhall, with its lining of tables and shelves. There was glass stacked everywhere, great petals and horns and long, articulated bones. And along a series of tables, black shapes writhed and turned to the light; varitropes, some as long as a body. Alive, or at least active, but Winifred had already conceded the fact of their survival, in light of things far more extraordinary.

And then they turned right again, and stopped at the head of the steps, and the extraordinary was before them. The cloister looked larger than it had in the ‘Bot’s camera, cathedral-like, long steps down and a high vault overhead, and everywhere the glittering garden of fabrilum, every shape she’d ever seen in keeper art, none smaller than a human, and some coiled, hulking up to the roof.

Inanna was a small dull curl on the floor, a dozen paces from the bottom of the steps. Over her loomed the dragon, looking less animal and more like an intricate, impossible bloom, but alive, and awake, and rearing up in the light, head level with them at the top of the steps.

Winifred froze, and wished the light off, but was afraid to make any change without understanding the design, the controlling logic that had gone into building the great fabrilum, millennia ago.

Henry glided down the steps and across the floor, and stood over the crumpled spacer. The fabrilum, the dragon, curled over to follow him, the long, wicked spikes splayed out over the alien’s head. Winifred felt lightheaded; she wasn’t breathing, she realized, fearing even that small motion.

Henry reached up, a long series of gestures, a sort of dance, and none of it familiar to Winifred. But the dragon responded, the matrix of varitropes reacting to heat and motion and whatever else had been specified by its designer, and it coiled back on itself, curled down to rest its closed head/blossom on its body.

Henry looked up at her, signed something she couldn’t follow, but she got the point. She took a long, deep breath, and ran down the steps. Inanna was curled on her side, all but under the dragon, reflections shifting across her crumpled form as Winifred approached. The pool of blood was too big to reach over; Winifred had to step into it, though it felt somehow indecent, an invasion of Inanna’s person. She knelt, and hesitated, uncertain about moving the body, but that was for spinal injuries, not stabbings, and regardless, Inanna couldn’t stay there, under those menacing coils. Lifting her was difficult; she was too limp and slippery, though Winifred tried to ignore both facts. The spacer was surprisingly light, not a happy thought either; Winifred dragged her to the base of the steps, and laid her flat.

She couldn’t feel a pulse, or maybe there was something, thin and irregular, but Inanna was still warm, and despite all the blood, there wasn’t any obvious active bleeding. That might not be a good sign, she thought, and dug out the med kit. There was an autotransfuser, a pouch of blood substitute attached to a needle and a small pump, and she hooked that up. And an emergency cardiac device, a complicated set of pads and cables that led back to a tablet; she followed the instructions as well as she could in the light from the torch, and the tablet lighted up, red and yellow, and a flashing warning to stand clear of the victim. An alarm beeped, and Inanna quivered, repeatedly, and then lay there, as still as before. The warning on the tablet went away, for good or bad, so Winnifred bound the wounds she could see, with bandages from the kit, and the remains of Inanna’s tights, and finally strips from her own shirt.

She had been vaguely aware of motion behind her, Henry moving about the chamber, and sounds, not just the near silent padding of the alien, but a creak and scrape, the now familiar combination of glass on stone. She rested her hand on Inanna’s forehead, which was smooth and still, and not cool to the touch, she insisted to herself. She set the torch upright by the spacer’s head; the fuel cell would keep it lighted, and the dark at bay, for years, and then she unthought that thought. There was nothing more to do, then, no excuse to stay bent there on the ground, so she stood up, and turned around.

Winifred had been expecting to find the dragon looming over her. But it was still resting on its heavy coils, dormant. Everywhere else, though, there was movement. Henry was moving from one fabrilum to the next, a different, complex dance of signs for each one, and one by one they awoke, and slid forward on stalks, or rows of thorns, or long, spiked legs.

She watched, arms folded against chill and wonder, as Henry worked his way back to her, the last of the ancient glassworks awoken. She felt somehow bashful in the alien’s presence, for all the last year of their acquaintance; and her gestures felt clumsy and childish after the dance she’d just witnessed.

“here was known to you?” she signed, not quite grammatical.

“seeds given the soil-mother long ago, before our sad restlessness,” the alien replied, his motions still carrying the grace of his wakening dance; Winifred suspected that he had been simplifying his signs for her before, a sort of baby-talk.

“the gestures known to you. you-waiting”

And he signed yes, and “waiting,” which was his name, or maybe his title; how wrong they’d all been, the archaeologists as much as the colonists, in thinking the Aulans had no legacy, or no interest in one. What had seemed a shallow, ephemeral existence, barely touching their own world, had been something else, something deeper, some hidden knowledge or wisdom. But those were still human words, and concepts, and probably wrong again. She repeated the only keeper sign she knew that applied.

“waiting”

And the alien nodded, a purely human gesture, and turned, and walked into the center of the room. Winifred followed, skirting the pool of blood, and the little tangle of metal that was all that remained of the ‘Bot.

The alien swirled through one of the dances, and the dragon uncoiled, bowed down, the lethal bloom of its head set on the ground before her. She stopped still, waiting for the long curved spines. But the touch that came was gentle, and warm. Henry took her hand and led her forward, and they stepped up, onto the coils; there was a smooth curve behind the head, the first great vertebra forming a sort of saddle, and he sat her there, and showed her where her feet could set against two of the outer spikes. It was a bit cramped, scaled to shorter keeper legs, but she fit. And then he stepped down, and made a gesture, and the dragon reared under her, until she hung just under the intricate vaulting of the roof.

Far below, Henry whirled and waved, and the fabrilum shifted and shuffled around him. Then he mounted a low, spidery shape, a tangle of limbs around a central shaft, like a sketch in glass of a ghostbush, she realized. And then they were moving forward, toward the rear of the chamber; there was a great arch there, and a hall that angled off and up.

Winifred looked back, at Inanna lying in the little pool of light. And around at the strange procession; as they moved into the dim hall, all that was left visible was the glint of edges and points. An army, she thought, and imagined the townsfolk with their sticks and pipes and dull little guns. She shook her head—because it was an army of glass, after all—and suddenly feared the dragon would react in kind, and fling her off, but it kept to its steady progress, her seat barely swaying as it coiled forward.

“Army” was, of course, the wrong concept, a human concept. She, of all people, perhaps, literally, of all humans, could see a glimmer of the truth in that alien dark.

When she had come to Aulis for the first time, during her graduate studies, and visited the crafthall, the first human to have done so, and the cumulation of years of patient inquiry, she had sat in the cloister, with the master. The cloister had been nothing like the great hall she had just left, of course; it was a comfortable, open space, with neat gardens of herbs and flowers, and a well from which they had drawn water. She had asked her questions, with carefully rehearsed gestures, and the master had replied, some of his signs beyond her level, but she was vidding, and would have another year or two of work on her thesis in which to decipher them. And then the master had questioned her, a few polite queries about her intentions with this strange digging she intended. After which, he gestured to an apprentice, a confusing sequence until she realized that “honors the soil” referred to her. And that surprise had been overwhelmed by what followed; the apprentice bringing out the little fabrilum, and the master showing her the gestures that made it unfold, and track her finger, or follow the sun, or curl back into repose, and the realization that it was hers, a gift to take, like the name.

She had expressed her gratitude and excitement with every sign she knew, the keeper gracious in turn, and no doubt amused. There were too many questions to ask, and all of them suddenly personal, but the apprentice had opened the door, and the master was rising, so she went with the one that couldn’t be answered by study, or digging. “why do you make them?” she signed, and the master looked at her, a long quiet regard, and she felt herself flush. Then he made a gesture that was uniquely Aulan, “existence,” some scholars translated, and others related to the Zen “mu,” a nonsense word that unasked the question. But from this new vantage, as the hall turned and the procession moved through the darkness, Winifred had a better translation: “That they might be.” The spikes and edges weren’t weapons; what had happened to Inanna had been an accident, a mistake in translation, not the first casualty at the interface between cultures. The shapes were there to catch the light, to be beautiful, nothing more. And that was enough, enough for the keepers, certainly, and, she thought, enough for the humans; if the archaeologists’ recordings of the slab had been sufficient to threaten the mining project, then this incredible procession would surely stop it dead, at least long enough for debate, and for a new assessment of the aliens, their legacy, their world.

The movement stopped. She hung there, in darkness. And then there was a huge groaning, and a line of light above; the dragon’s great head before her flashed in blinding refraction. The ceiling had split; two long sections levered up and out by huge ropes of varitropic fiber; dirt cascaded away as the sections tilted, letting sun through the glass vaults for the first time in millennia. This is what a seed feels like, Winifred thought.

The hall ramped up. The spidery bush-shape moved forward, stepped off the ramp and onto the plain. The alien stood up astride it, and made a sign, “the union of soil and sky,” which meant “glass,” or in a different context, “the marriage of the soil-mother and the sky-father.” The procession stirred, and moved forward; in the sunlight, they were almost too brilliant to see. Winifred rode into that light, and the dragon coiled out of the dark like a thousand suns beneath her.

Copyright © 2010 Gregory Norman Bossert