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 …
