Immediately the cacophony of sounds in the room quieted. People who had been speaking on the phone paused in their conversations and looked up inquiringly.
“It is my very great pleasure to introduce to you Sybil’s sister, Cassie. Our new pythia.”
Suddenly a wave of humanity was rushing toward her. Cassie braced herself for impact. Hands reached out to shake hers, to pat her on the shoulder. Voices told her how happy they were to meet her at last. How much they had liked her sister. Everyone was offering encouragement and assistance with anything she wanted to learn, any time, any place. They all seemed to understand why she was here. They all seemed to know what she was supposed to do better than she did herself. They all seemed pleased to see her. She felt as if she’d stumbled into a reunion with a long-lost family she never knew she had.
“Do you still think our vault is, as you put it, an empty schoolhouse with fancy bleachers and a big table?” Griffin asked with a mischievous gleam in his eye.
Cassie was too dazed by the enthusiastic reception to speak.
Griffin waited for the initial hubbub to die down, and then he shooed the throng of well-wishers away. “All right now, everyone. Back to work if you please. Give the young lady a chance to breathe. I fear you’ve quite overwhelmed her.”
Cassie darted him a grateful look as he disengaged her from the crowd and led her around the perimeter of the main room.
On the wall to the right of all the desks were six doors spaced equally apart. The sign on the first one read “Africa,” the second one read “Asia,” the third one “Australia,” the fourth one “Europe,” the fifth one “North America,” and the final one read “South America.” Cassie noted that there was no door for Antarctica.
“Do you keep the relics behind those doors?”
Griffin shook his head. “No, those are archives for each continent. We keep the records of our relics there. Oh dear, I’m going about this backwards. A proper definition of terms is in order. The room in which we’re standing is called the Central Catalog. Its function is to account for the relics we’ve retrieved. The relics themselves are stored in places we call troves.”
Cassie looked up and down the main room. “Then where are the troves?”
“Not here obviously. It’s a major undertaking to keep track of them all. New ones are forever cropping up in the most unlikely of spots. Each continent has many of them scattered about. Individual countries have their own as well. Wherever a cache of important artifacts has been discovered, we attempt to build a collection site around it.”
The girl tried to hide her disappointment at not seeing any actual relics. “Who manages the troves?”
“The person who is charged with the responsibility for a particular group of treasures is called a trove keeper though she or he also has many assistants.”
Cassie wrinkled her brow. “Let me repeat this to see if I have it straight. The Catalog is the records department, and it keeps track of all the items in the troves?”
Griffin nodded. “Yes, that’s right. While each trove has its own version of a records department, there is only one Catalog. One place that contains records of the objects in all the troves: maps, photographs, finder’s journals, and written descriptions of each item recovered. The purpose of this facility is to keep track, at a summary level, of what’s in all the troves around the world. We call this the Central Catalog or simply the vault. The one and only.”
“I don’t get it,” Cassie said abruptly.
“Excuse me?” Griffin seemed taken aback.
“I see a bunch of doors geographically covering the entire planet. Anthropologists and archaeologists have been crawling all over the globe for at least a hundred years now. They have museums full of artifacts. What’s the difference between what you’re doing and what they’re doing?”
The young man gave a thin smile. “As much as anthropologists and archaeologists may protest to the contrary, their work is highly subjective. Their observations are tainted by whatever beliefs they carry with them into the field. That was especially true a century ago. Many if not all of them drew highly inaccurate conclusions about the objects they were collecting and the cultures they were observing. As the old saying goes, ‘a fish cannot see water.’”
“What?”
“A human being living in a particular culture is very much like a fish swimming in the ocean. The fish is immersed in the ocean and therefore cannot see the environment that supports it. Until quite recently with the onset of mass communication, humans were so immersed in the values of a given culture that they couldn’t see their fundamental assumptions at all. Anthropologists of the past century would have been raised with overlord values. They would have overemphasized conquest and domination and underemphasized the pivotal role that the female gender played in establishing human civilization. Therefore, when confronted with ancient cultures and values, the only context they had for explaining what they saw was European.”
Cassie stared at him skeptically.
“Some errors of interpretation are minor. Some misperceptions are so fiercely protected that any attempt to correct the record would result in bloodshed. For instance, the meteorite enshrined at Mecca which Muslim pilgrims kiss so reverently was not originally sacred to the god Allah but to the goddess Al Uzza, the Mighty One. Muslim worshippers circle their shrine seven times without ever realizing they are mimicking the actions of Al Uzza’s priestesses almost two millennia ago.
“Instead, Muslim lore tells that the meteorite landed at the feet of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and was subsequently found by the biblical patriarch Abraham. Now if I were to tell a Muslim fundamentalist about Al Uzza and her prior claim to the stone, I’m sure he would consider me blasphemous and instantly declare a jihad against me.”
“Somebody once warned me never to
