Patron of the Arts

All I admit hearing, that is.

The great blocks of pink and rose and rust formed themselves into complex structures, open-topped, ruined, melted away in the icy winds and carried off by the abrasive sandstorms of the millenia. Most of one dome had fallen, but the arch next to it stood. I parked the sandcat outside and walked in through the Sungate.

Maybe I could hear the whispers of the ancients or the first bars of Wargod.

As I walked into the first vast courtyard the sound of the slight wind behind me was cut off and it was very quiet. I heard my boots crunch in the sand drifts and I stopped.

Silence.

Twenty-five millennia of silence. Covered and uncovered a hundred times by the sand. A dead city. A dead world. But it had lived once and it would live again.

I knew which way the Great Hall lay but took the other direction. I walked down wide streets and cut through fallen walls. I found where Evans had excavated to the point where the stones were relatively unweathered and proved that they had once been so finely honed together they shamed the magnificent Inca walls of Machu Picchu. But the centuries had eaten at the joins, deepening them, digging at their perfection until the individual stones stood out boldly, each carved away from its neighbors.

I stepped around a fallen column and suddenly there was the Little Palace, a near-perfect structure buried completely except for the minaretlike towers. I circled to where the Evans-Baker team had dug an opening, extracting the sand drifts from within and shoring up the roofs. The plastex sheets across the arch at the bottom of the slope were alien, intrusive, but quickly behind me as I went through the unlocked gate. My torch threw its beam into the blackness and I saw the foyer and halls and small rooms, each with its mosaics and carved designs. Here the weathering had been considerably less, but still only an instrument could have told whether that smooth-faced wall once held a painted mural. Anything less permanent than rock itself was smoothed away into oblivion.

I stood for a very long time looking at the hunting scene on the wall of the main room. What were those blurred beasts? Did they really have six legs, like John Carter’s thoats? I had to smile, but the smile faded when I saw a crisp yellow Kodak Sunpan box lying nearby. I picked it up and put the anachronism in my pocket. Sorry, I said to the ghosts.

I sat on a block for an even longer time scanning the delicate bas-relief in the room that has come to be called the Bedroom of the Little Prince. Was it a child’s room, with a fantasy mural of elves and winged mice and fairy queens? It could almost as easily have been a mural depicting some kind of Waterloo, with attacking armies and flying bat raiders. Almost. It did have a kind of delicacy, but what psychology might these aliens have had? We would never know. We don’t even know where the Maya went, or why, and that had been only a little before Columbus landed.

Gone, but not forgotten, I said to the ghosts. I went back out into the weak sunlight and along the Street of Heroes with its sculptured columns blurred into tall rosy lumps protruding from the sand. To my left was the Shell Dome, with the remnants of fossilized crustaceans embedded in the broken shards of dome. Further on to the right was the Treasury, where they had found so many beautiful pieces of what could only be jewelry. Nothing so extravagant as the so-called Royal Jewels of Ares from the Bradbury ruins, but wonderful to look upon and ponder.

I was tempted to enter, but a quick look at the sky showed me I did not have that much time. I hurried on toward the Great Hall. The Circle of Juno, with its judgment seats. The Romulus and Remus Blocks. Further on, the Athena Stone, definitely graceful, quite feminine, yet regal, and quite, quite beyond recognition. Then the entrance to the Great Hall. I turned and looked back, wondering at the Grecian and Roman mythology that had been force-fit onto what man had found here. “We have to call it something,” Evans had said, “and Athena Stone is better than Item XV-4, 3 meters high, at coordinates M-12, subsector A-7.” I had to admit he was right, but I wondered how this nomenclature might blind someone to the discovery of something else. Simpson, in the twentieth century said, “It’s good that things can be found by accident—otherwise you’d never find anything you weren’t looking for.”

So far, everything is “yet.” So far we haven’t met an intelligent race. Yet. Men are not gods. Yet.

I turned and went in.

There is something about proportions that makes a structure greater than the sum of the parts. The Parthenon, that Doric temple to Athena on the Acropolis, is often cited as the perfect building because of its proportions. The Great Temple of Amon at Luxor, the Aztec Pyramid of the Sun at Teotihuacan, the Shinto Shrine at Nikko, the Temple of Heaven at Peking, Persepolis, Angkor Wat, Versailles, and of course the Taj Mahal, have all been lauded as “perfect buildings,” and rightly so. But they were all made by humans. As diverse as their builders were they were all Homo sapiens. The Xeno ares or, hopefully, the Homo ares, were simply alien. Their idea of proportions was different, and possibly everything else about them was different, too. The Great Hall was unlike Terran structures that were rigid, rectangular or circular or even trisoctahedral. It flowed, an enormous enclosed space of great majesty. It was more like visual music than walls, a floor, and (once) a ceiling. From no one spot could you see all of it, so it was always exciting. The walls tilted and curved and flowed and changed texture and color. The floor rose and fell, becoming a cozy swirl of stone where you might sit with a small group, then rising and becoming a pulpit-like protuberance. It swept away and flowed upwards to become a wall, then down again to become what might have been a pool. Walls thinned and melted away to become windows, then thickened and drew close to form side passages to other, lost, rooms. I wandered past the spot where the Colossus had once stood and into a large cul-de-sac of once-bright blood-rock, a cylinder open to the sky. The floor flattened and dipped down in a gentle series of wide terraces toward the