All the Colors of Time (31 page)

Into this building people did not go … until the sun began
to set. But as the light mellowed and washed the white walls rose-amber, it
seemed to become a magnet to the people of the little city. They came from
every direction, many of the shop keepers carrying colorful baskets, which they
set, one and all, in a corner of the market plaza before crossing the street to
the blue-roofed building.

Burton perked up. “What’s this? They seem to be leaving
offerings.” He glanced at Rhys. “At sunset. Need I remind you what will follow
the Etsat sunset by approximately fifteen minutes?”

“Moon rise,” Rhys observed.

“You don’t suppose we’ll see a worship ceremony of some
sort, do you?”

“Professor, I’ve never denied that these people may have a
nature-based religion. In fact, I’d be dumbfounded if they didn’t have
ritualized beliefs of some sort. What I doubted was that they consumed the
entire culture, dominated every event, and produced every artifact from
clothing to art.”

In the dying light of day, the crowned building filled with
Etsatats; the sun set; the moon rose, huge and white in the indigo sky. When it
came over the top of the mountain due east of the watchers’ tree, it struck a
round patch of reflective material in the roof of the building and came face to
face with its mirror image.

“It’s a window!” breathed Yoshi, and at that exact moment,
there arose from the building below a great ululating song of rapture. It was
tunefully alien and did not stop until the orb of the moon had moved completely
from the reflective round. Then the temple erupted from within with a blaze of
pale light. Almost immediately, the worshipers began to emerge. Many of them
carried torches or lamps that gave off a lunar gleam.

“Bio-luminescence?” Rhys wondered aloud.

“Look, they’re filing into the amphitheater,” murmured Bell.

Indeed they were. In an atmosphere of festival, the crowd
took seats on the terraced stone benches while torchbearers formed a corridor.
Down it passed a small group of their fellows dressed in vivid costume.

Burton sat forward. “These will be the priests, I imagine.”

The bright gantlet dissolved when the last “priest” had
stepped to the edge of the large, flat dais. The torchbearers set their lights
about the dais while the costumed ones divided into two groups. One took to the
raised platform, the other formed a semi-circle to one side.

“The victims, perhaps,” Burton whispered.

Yoshi ground her teeth. “The band, perhaps,” she gritted,
and before Burton could retort, lively atonal chords were indeed struck, and
the “priests” began to dance and sing and chant.

Rhys found he could actually understand a few words and
phrases that had been passed down to the modern Etsatat language of the region.
The audience responded with hoots and chirps and pounded their oddly jointed
knees in applause. Professor Burton withdrew so far against the trunk of their
tree that Rhys almost forgot he was there.

oOo

Just before dawn, they were packing up their blind and preparing
to move out, when Burton, still on the supporting platform, uttered a startled
grunt and moved the holocam into operating position.

Rhys, sitting at the platform’s edge, scrambled to his feet.
“What is it?”

“Put your glasses on, Dr. Llewellyn. You should be
interested in this.”

Rhys did as told and saw immediately what had Burton so
excited. A wagon had come down the broad main avenue of the Etsatat town and
pulled to a stop in the market plaza right next to the neat stack of baskets.
Two men in uniforms garish even in moonlight, debarked and carefully lifted the
baskets into their wagon.

“Recognize the costume?” Burton asked.

Rhys nodded. “From Sper-ets. The fellows on the gate lintel,
if I’m not mistaken.”

“Having second thoughts about that tribute train theory?”

“Maybe.” Rhys watched as the wagon turned and rolled away. “Do
we follow?”

Burton grinned fiercely. “What do you think?”

They trailed the wagon at a discreet distance, optics set
for night scanning. It was a long trek through hilly, forested countryside, but
all four of them were in good physical condition and the wagon, heavy and
heavily laden, moved slowly.

At one point, Rhys had stopped to refasten his boot closings
when Burton let out an exultant cry and thumped him soundly on the back. When
he picked himself up and reoriented his optics, he thought for a moment Burton
had given him a concussion. Where there had been one wagon there were now two
ponderous vehicles making their dusty way toward the complex.

In another half mile or so, a third wagon appeared from a
rutted side road and joined the caravan. By the time they drew within sight of
Sper-ets’s gated walls, there were six wagons, each with its uniformed drivers,
each with its load of brightly dyed baskets, and Rhys had to allow that Burton’s
tribute theory looked very good, indeed.

The sun was rising as they worked their way up into yet
another huge and bulbous tree (
ficus
frogus
, Rick called them). They could hear the rumble of the wagons, the
calls and shouts and whistles of the uniformed men, the roar of the fire in the
tower’s hot core. In the broad plaza below and between the lavishly painted
temples, the baskets were unloaded from the first wagon and grouped according
to color. When that task was complete, a commanding figure appeared in the
doorway of the Chapel.

Burton grasped Rhys’s shoulder painfully. “It’s Ets-eket
himself!”

The warrior priest, his elaborate headdress making him stand
head and shoulders above the other men, strode from his abode to meet the
wagoneers. From each he received what appeared to be a necklace of the
rectangular coins.

Rhys brought his optics into tight focus on Ets-eket’s
hands. The coins were strung on a thong, much like the one around Ets-eket’s
neck. The priest pulled a thick-bladed knife from his belt and proceeded to
score each rectangle. He then returned the string of coinage to the driver, who
settled it around his own neck before returning to his wagon and driving away.
This process was repeated for each driver, the only variation occurring when
Ets-eket paused to remove several rectangles from the driver’s thong to string
them on his own. This done, he replaced them with new coins from a bag on his
hip.

Out of the corner of his eye, Rhys saw Yoshi put her hand
over her mouth.

A quick inspection of the baskets was next, which Ets-eket
ended by clapping his hands together. A host of uniformed men poured from the
Chapel and the two temples and began hoisting baskets with chaotic dispatch. A
method emerged from the seeming madness: Blue and green baskets went to the
eastern temple; brown and black ones went to the western temple; the few red
baskets found their way into the Chapel; and yellow baskets were set at the
foot of the tower where uniformed men scurried to open them and spill their
bundled contents to the earth.

Yoshi began to giggle.

Burton shot her an annoyed glance. “Really, Llewellyn, if
your assistant can’t control herself—”

Wayne and Rhys gasped simultaneously, jerking Burton’s
attention back to the tower where, at that very moment, the stone doorway was
rolled back by a quartet of huge, sweating Etsatats, revealing a blast furnace
interior. The four big men then took up crescent-topped staffs from a rack and
proceeded to use them to scoop up the “tribute” and fling it into the fiery
maw.

Yoshi’s giggles collapsed into wild hiccups.

“It’s a … a garbage dump!” whispered Bell.

“And recycling center,” added Yoshi, punctuating the
sentence with a hiccup.

Burton sputtered. “Impossible! What about the stone icons!
The … the potsherds, the animal bones . . .” His voice trailed
off dismally.

Rhys sat back against the
ficus frogus’s
gnarled trunk. The gnawed animal bones. Of course.
It made perfect sense, but even he had been too smitten by the romance of
archaeo-theology to see that any well-organized group of people must have some
way of dealing with their discardables.

He shook his head. “Don’t feel too badly, Professor. I’m as
stunned as you are. And the evidence was all there, too, if only we’d been
open-minded enough to read it. The small animal carcasses, the caches of gnawed
bone, the cellulose deposits, the extreme concentrations of potsherds, the
tally cards.”

Yoshi sighed, pulled off her optics and wiped tears from her
eyes.

“Shovels,” muttered Burton. “They were carrying shovels.
Garbage scoops.” He uttered a low growl that dissolved into a wheezing chuckle.
“Staffs of office, indeed!”

“Well,” said Bell philosophically, “I swear I’ll never look
at a potsherd the same way again.”

“Pass the canteen,” said Burton. “I need a drink.”

Yoshi fished it out of the field kit. “It’s only water, sir.”

Burton gave her an arch glance. “Indeed. Well, I seem to
have enough imagination for two men. I’ll just pretend it’s something stronger.”

oOo

They had to spend the day perched in the great tree
overlooking the dump. The time passed easily enough; they were shaded,
relatively cool, had enough food and water for two days and plenty of activity
to feast their eyes upon. By the end of the day, the system was quite clear:
organic wastes went to the southern pits, broken stuff such as potsherds and
glass went into the eastern “temple,” recyclable articles went to the west,
burnables were sent straight to the fiery furnace. The “icons” they had found
there, they reasoned, might have been toys that made it into the yellow basket
by mistake.

After dark, they hiked the five or six kilometers back to
the shuttle, their shadows cast indigo against the ground by the intense
moonlight. Their departure from the planet was silent, the homing lock on the
cutter’s temporal grid transporting them in a blink through space and time to
its shuttle bay.

There was little conversation as they prepared for the shift
forward. No mention of illegalities or arrests. Rhys knew without asking that
Burton would bring the
Feathered Serpent
into synchronous orbit over the village exactly 5,000 years to the minute of
when they’d left. It would be a matter of Rhys’s word against his if
accusations were made. He decided accusations would serve no one.

Hence, 5,000 years later they stood in the
Serpent’
s docking bay. Rick was safely
stowed aboard Rhys’s shuttle and would likely sleep for another day or two—long
enough for a return trip to Tson, where Danetta Price would listen with feigned
interest as they described their “vacation”—omitting one important detail.

“Well, Llewellyn, I don’t suppose I could talk you into
staying on a bit. Helping out with the dig?” Burton was looking at the wall of
the bay, not at Rhys’s face.

Rhys felt a tingle of the same joy he’d experienced when
Burton had first invited him to Etsatat. Still, he said, “I don’t know, sir. I
suppose that depends on what you intend to do about … certain matters.”

“Well, I’ve, em, rethought my position on some of the
artifacts, if that’s what you mean.” He glanced at Rhys with a glint of humor
in his pale eyes. “In fact, I’m thinking of completely rewriting my journal. I
think it might benefit from a different point of view. I have the feeling that
if I study the Sper-ets collection from a slightly more…pragmatic
perspective—perhaps contrast and compare modern Etsatat cultures—I might even
advance some new … theories.”

“I rather think,” Rhys said carefully, “that your relations
with nonhuman colleagues could also benefit from a different point of view.”

Burton had the good graces to look uncomfortable. “I’m an
old dog, Rhys. You know what they say about old dogs. I’m not unaware of my
bias.”

“Prejudice,” said Yoshi.

Burton glanced at her. “Prejudice,” he agreed. “I can only
plead that my lack of exposure to … other races of people has ill-prepared me
to deal with them. I have never liked reptiles. The sight of a six-foot tall
talking lizard gives me goose flesh. But I suppose if I closed my eyes, Tzia
would seem as human as the next qualified archaeologist.” He met Yoshi’s eyes. “I
will try to listen to her without looking.”

Catching Yoshi’s barely perceptible nod, Rhys bowed to his
mentor. “I believe we’d be interested in renewing our collaboration under those
circumstances. I’m glad you’ve had a change of heart.”

Burton snorted. “Change of heart? What was it Wayne
said—that he’d never again look at a potsherd in the same way? Let me tell you
something; I have immersed myself in Mesoamerican antiquities for over forty
years. After our little jaunt, I shall never look at Caracol or Tikal or
Teotihuacan the same way ever again. I shall wonder about every pyramid and
stele, every mural and icon. Dear God, do you realize that the statue of Chac
Mol at Chichen Itza might have been an advertisement for Lamaze classes?”

As if finding that thought supremely amusing, he rolled away
from his guests leaving a trail of guffaws.

Rhys looked after him for a moment, then put his arm around
Yoshi’s shoulders. “He’s right, you know. If this escapade has served a
purpose, it’s been to make us question our assumptions … about a lot of things.
Now, let’s go collect our duffel and hie down to the surface. Rick can sleep it
off in the shuttle.”

Yoshi nodded, her brow creased with evident concern. “Sir,”
she said, and he sighed inwardly. “Is this a good time to tell you about the
graffiti on the side of Dr. Burton’s shuttle?”

He stared at her. “You put graffiti on his shuttle? Good
Lord, Yoshi, I realize you don’t like the man, but—”

She was shaking her head. “No. I didn’t do it. I only
noticed it when we debarked just now. It wasn’t there when we went down.”

“Do you realize what you’re saying?”