two.' He paused. 'Are you interested in the discontinuities?'
'Yes.'
'Then I'll tell you something else. It's coincidence, of course.'
'What is?'
'There's a poem that we have in translation. Wait a minute, let me find it.'
Art walked off-screen. 'Have you ever heard of the Scriveners?'
'No.'
'They dominated this area between approximately 1400 B.C., and the collapse of the Eastern Empire, about four hundred years later.'
'Scriveners?'
'So named because they kept records of everything. Detailed commercial accounts, inventories, medical records, vital statistics. They were quite advanced.' He grinned. 'In a bureaucratic way. They were a lot like us. They even seem to have had insurance policies. Now, their demise, the fall of the Eastern Empire, and the Second Discontinuity all seem to have occurred around 1000 B.C.'
'Okay.' Ten lines of text had appeared on Hutch's monitor.
'Judging from the commercial nature of the writings they left behind, the Scriveners appear to have been neither philosophical nor religious. The Temple was relegated to a historical curiosity during their period of ascendancy. But we did find a book of devotions in one of their cities. Valdipaa. Not far from here. Next stop on the trade route west. The verse on your screen is from the book.'
In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends, The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn.
Tramples the sun beneath his feet, And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops, And he will fire the engines of God.
She read through it twice. 'What are the engines of God?'
Art shrugged.
'Then what's the point?'
'Bilat. He was a hero. He was used for a time to mark the beginning of the Scrivener era. He seized power somewhere around 1350 B.C., our time. Hau-kai, by the way, was a kind of Jerusalem, a holy city, symbolic of the best that the faithful could hope for in this world.'
Hutch reread the verse. 'Three hundred years later would take them close to the Second Discontinuity.' She exited from the screen, and brought Art back. 'You're suggesting somebody predicted the event?'
'We've dated the book. It's one of the oldest we have. Can't read much of it. What we can read is mostly devotional.'
'Who did the translation?'
'Maggie Tufu. Have you met her? Well, anyway, she converted the time references. The term that reads as men actually refers to all the inhabitants of the planet, male and female, past and present. And the verb that's rendered as judges seems to imply both judge and executioner.' Art seemed simultaneously amused and perplexed. 'And, yes—the prediction is right on the money.'
'Prophecy's a tricky game,' said Hutch. 'It's common for religious groups to predict catastrophic events. Get enough predictions, and somebody's bound to hit it right.'
Art nodded. 'That would be my guess. But some people here have wondered whether the thing on the moon doesn't in some way mark this world for periodic destruction.'
By 1900 hours, the Temple shuttle was loaded and ready to follow Alpha. Carson checked everything to ensure that the containers wouldn't shift, and watched the sub draw away. Eddie sat stiffly in its bubble with his arms folded, staring straight ahead.
Carson powered up, informed the watch officer he was on his way, and lifted off.
The sun had moved behind the peaks, and a cold wind blew across the gathering darkness. The tide was out, and wide stretches of sand glittered in the failing light. Waves broke around the Towers. Carson would be glad to be away, to get to D.C. and to walk in the sun without needing a Flickinger harness.
Still, he was angry. When he had first come here, six years ago, he had thought of the Temple, with its rock walls, as timeless. Long after he passed to a happier existence, it would be here, as it had been here for millennia. It was a symbol, for all of them, of stability. Of the idea that things that really matter live on.
He drew back the yoke. The shuttle sailed through the clouds.
Below, the Knothic Towers were already lost in twilight.
LIBRARY ENTRY
When, in the spring of 2187, Alexander LaPlante completed the first phase of the excavation of Sodom, he concluded that the city had been burned, a fate not uncommon in Biblical times. But he offered two additional opinions which created a storm of controversy:
(1) that the site was far older than had been expected, dating to approximately 5000 B.C.; and
(2) that a computerized reconstruction of the damage suggested the city had been shattered by something akin to modem weapons.
LaPlante's grant was cut off in 2189. A second expedition, led by Oliver Castle and Arian Adjani, examined both propositions. They confirmed the earlier date, but found no compelling evidence to support what had by then become known as the bomb thesis.
LaPlante lost his tenure at the University of Pennsylvania in 2195, and is now teaching at Radison University in London.
— Marjorie Gold
Dead Sea Excavations
Commonwealth, New York, 2199
9
Quraqua. Tuesday; 2148 hours. (Twenty-eight minutes before midnight.)
Both shuttles had unloaded their cargo on the Winckelmann, and were on their way back to the surface when the eleven-ton block of supercooled ice that was designated #171 in the Kosmik inventory crossed the equator into the southern hemisphere. With a whisper, it passed over moonlit tundra and pulpy forests, something not quite heard. Shining splinters fell away, and the arid landscape momentarily brightened.
Snow blew against Alpha's windscreen. Hutch (who had waited for Carson at Wink, and then followed him down) could see the sub and the Temple shuttle, haloed by their lights, docked at the floatpier. The shuttle's cargo door was open; Carson and Loughery were working to move a stack of containers off the pier into the spacecraft.
Janet Allegri blinked onto her overhead display. 'Hello, Hutch,' she said. Her hair was pressed down by an energy field. She was speaking from the sub. 'We seem to have got a little behind with Plan A.' They had intended to pile cases on the floatpier, and have two more complete shipments ready to go when the shuttles arrived. But not very much had made it topside.
'Weather been bad?'
'It's been wet. But the problem is people. Everybody's hunting artifacts.'
Well to the south, lightning struck the ocean.
Hutch understood. Under extreme pressure, Henry was willing to risk the artifacts he already possessed— which were after all duly recorded on hologram—to increase his chances of finding what he was really looking for. 'Coming down,' she said.
She settled smoothly into the sea, and drifted into the magnetic couplers, which locked the shuttle against the pier. Carson was loading the last container, and his hold was still half-empty.
Loughery smiled shyly. He was loading a dolly into the sub. The snow slid down his energy envelope.
'How can I help?' she asked.
Janet came out of the sub. 'Just in time,' she said lightly. 'We were running short of peasants.'
