Heinrich Schliemann took Homer literally and so managed to discover and excavate the ruins of Troy. The Iliad was Schliemann’s guidebook.
I believe in the literal truth of my father’s final tape, which you have published in his ethnography as ‘Chaney’s Monologue.’ I also proclaim the accuracy of all his previous field work and reportage. Why shouldn’t I? Schliemann wasn’t related by blood to Homer, as I am to Egan Chaney, and yet Schliemann’s faith in the historicity of an ancient poem led him to great discoveries. I would be a traitor to my heritage if I didn’t invest my father’s words with at least as much authority as Schliemann found in Homer’s Iliad.
I’m looking forward to meeting you.
Cordially yours,
Elegy Cather
After this first communication, Elegy Cather relayed to me via light-probe transmission four or five additional messages, none of which went very far toward explaining how she hoped to succeed where dedicated, intelligent, and experienced adults had met only tangled jungle and the palpable mockery of their own rank sweat.
That’s why I was looking forward to meeting her, too, and that’s why I was a little frightened as well. How long would it take Elegy Cather to discover that she was on a fool’s errand, thus dashing her youthful hopes along with my grey and haggard ones?
And I? My name is Thomas Douglas Benedict, but call me Ben. I originally went to BoskVeld as the Third Denebolan Expedition’s junior paleoxenologist, in the wake of Oliver Oliphant Frasier’s discoveries near the Great Calyptran Sea and the disaster of the Second Expedition. For a good while, though, I was merely a general flunky to those with more formidable scientific credentials than mine.
I was in my late thirties. My most marketable skill was not my university training but my ability to pilot that all-purpose variety of Komm-service helicraft known familiarly as the Dragonfly. I had learned to fly them during the closing years of the African Armageddon, which threatened to end humanity’s tenure on Earth in approximately the same general area where it may have begun.
At an age when most literate adults are settling into positions of executive responsibility or at least securing the career gains of their youth, I had been languidly finishing up my graduate work in Nairobi. By rights, I ought to have been further along. It’s impossible to grab at the hostilities in Africa as an excuse, because I had frittered away a decade of my life before landing in Luanda with a contingent of foreign mercenaries, and immediately after the conflict I took my sweet time ‘recuperating.’ When I finally reached Nairobi and used my status as a Pan-African veteran to enroll in school there, I caroused as often as I studied, and only my late acquaintance with a woman older than I who had found several promising protohominid fossil sites in Ethiopia near Lake Shamo returned my interest and my attention to paleoanthropology.
Then I began to do well in school, but not exceptionally well. Just well enough not to be totally ashamed of myself when, my degrees newly in hand, I summoned the courage, or the brassiness, to apply for an auxiliary scientific post with the Third Denebolan Expedition then making ready at Kommthor Headquarters in Dar es Salaam.
Surprisingly, I was selected. I owed my selection, I knew, to my presence on the continent, an overgenerous letter of recommendation from a professor at the National University who had once met Moses Eisen in London, and, finally, the personal intervention of the woman who had turned me around in my studies. She visited Kommthor Headquarters on my behalf and pled my case with one of Captain Eisen’s personnel officers. She did this, I somewhat belatedly came to realize, because she loved me and because my devil-may-care indifference to her love demanded not only an admonitory generosity on her part but a real effort to remove me from her life. Two birds with one stone. Off went Thomas Douglas Benedict to BoskVeld.
Once we had established our base camp, I began to hope for a chance to examine and date several specimens of pre-Asadi statuary discovered by Oliver Oliphant Frasier in the ruins of a temple near the Calyptran Sea. But my immediate superior, a woman named Chiyoko Yoshiba, took this duty right out of my hands by virtue of her greater experience. I might have helped her in the appraisal of these artifacts, I suppose, but my attitude, even at thirty-nine, was that of a know-it-all joove; and I alienated Yoshiba with my clumsy self-confidence, my intellectual jokes, and my unauthorized absences from base camp in the Dragonfly belonging to the paleoxenological cadre of which she was the head. Many, many times I went off flying over the veldt country or the jungle simply to get away from people more in control of their lives than I was of mine, usually in the vain hope of purging the loneliness in my soul by getting better acquainted with myself. In retrospect, I can’t say that I blame Yoshiba for disliking me. After Chaney’s disappearance, though, we patched up our differences and eventually made friends . . .
Yoshiba soon discovered that every specimen of Asadi artwork or technology dug up from Frasier’s ruins defied accurate dating. Techniques employing the carbon-14 method, potassium-argon comparisons, geomagnetic determinations, fission-track readings, and measurements of thermoluminescence all proved equally useless because they gave her contradictory results. It was impossible to find out how long ago the Asadi’s ancestors – we’d begun calling them the
