Thalarne agreed, all too readily. “Yes. Yes, that has to be it.” She smiled at the Sea-Lord and turned her hands outward, apologetically, and the two of them moved away, back toward the encampment by the water. The Sea-Lord remained where he was, watching them go.
“Will you tell the Bornigrayans about this?” Nortekku asked.
“I have to,” said Thalarne. “We’re not here as competitors. They’ve shared a lot of things with me. They’ll find it by themselves before long, anyway. You know that.”
“Yes,” he said. “I imagine they will.”
The eyes of that old Sea-Lord haunted him as they picked their way back over the outer dune. Thinking of him, Nortekku felt again a sense of the great age of the world into which his own people had erupted so recently. His world was new and young, only two centuries old, bursting with the vigor that came with having been let free of the cocoons after seven hundred thousand years in hiding. But now he saw more clearly than ever that the world of the New Springtime was but a thin overlay masking the dead, used-up world that had preceded it—masking a whole succession of dead, used-up worlds, going back to who knew what pre-human mysteries.
So you are back to that, he thought. The transience of everything, the eternal cycle of decay and extinction. That is a grim and cheerless way of looking at things, he told himself. It is a vision devoid of all hope.
But in that same bleak moment came once again the opposite thought, the compensating and comforting one, the thought that the world is a place of constant renewal through billions of years, and that that renewal was a never-ending process that held out the promise of eternal life. World after world, world without end.
I will cling to that idea, Nortekku told himself. I must. I must.
The next morning Thalarne led the two Bornigrayan archaeologists to the site on the far side of the dunes. Nortekku was still displeased about that, but grudgingly he accepted her argument that it would be unethical for one member of the expedition to conceal an important find from the others. He had to bear in mind, she reminded him, that she was here—and he as well—only because they had invited her along.
There was something wrong with that line of reasoning, but Nortekku did not feel like taking the matter up with her. She was here, in fact, because her husband had wanted to send her somewhere far away, someplace where her lover wouldn’t be able to find her: it was for that reason, and no other, that Hamiruld had arranged to have her included in what was fundamentally an expedition designed to produce new plunder for those wealthy highborn collectors of antiquities who were paying the venture’s expenses. Whatever scientific information might be gathered was strictly incidental. And so, even though it struck Nortekku as folly to be worrying about ethical issues when dealing with such people as Siglondan and Kanibond Graysz, he wasn’t in a good position to be urging her to conceal finds from them. The truth of the situation was, he conceded, that he and Thalarne were fundamentally helpless here.
Helplessly, therefore, they accompanied the Bornigrayans to the place of the chariots. The old Sea-Lord custodian was nowhere in sight. That was a blessing, Nortekku thought. Helplessly they looked on as Kanibond Graysz, using a power torch, went slithering into the tunnel that entered the dune. Helplessly they watched him emerge with objects: a rusted helmet that had an air of immense age about it, a knobby-tipped rod of scabby yellow metal that might have been a scepter, a battered bronze box inscribed with curvilinear writing of a Great World sort.
“Nothing else in there,” Kanibond Graysz reported. “Just these three things, scattered about at random. But it’s a start. We’ll need to excavate to see if other things are buried beneath the floor. Tomorrow, perhaps.”
Little was said by anybody as they returned to camp. But once Nortekku and Thalarne were back in the tent that they shared—the pretense that they were brother and sister had long since been abandoned—he found, to his horror, that he could not keep himself from raising the issue that he knew he must not raise with her.
“That made me sick, what happened today. It’s theft, Thalarne. You said yourself, back in Bornigrayal, that it’s one thing to collect objects from a site that’s been abandoned for a million years, and something very different to steal them from living people.”
“Yes. That’s true.”
“And yet you just stood there while he went in and took those things. Even leaving the ethical issues out of the question, I ask you, Thalarne: is that good archaeological technique, just to walk in and pick up objects, without recording stratification or anything else?—But then there are the ethical issues too.”
She made no attempt to hide her anguish. “Let me be, Nortekku. I don’t have any answers for you.”
He pressed onward anyway. “Is it your position that since these people don’t care a hoot whether they live or die, it doesn’t matter what we do with the things that belong to them? We aren’t sure that that’s how they feel, you know. It’s just a speculation.”
“A very likely one, though.”
“Well, then—granting that you’re right—can we really feel free to help ourselves to their possessions while they’re still alive?”
“Let me be, Nortekku,” Thalarne said again, tonelessly. “Can’t you see that I’m caught between all sorts of conflicting forces, and there’s nothing I can do? Nothing.”
He saw that it was dangerous to push her any further. There was nothing she could do, nor he, for that matter. Nor would she allow any further debate about this. It was as though she had pulled an impenetrable curtain down around herself.
The days went by. Nortekku stayed away, most of the time, when the Bornigrayans went over the dunes to poke in the caches of hidden artifacts back there. Usually Thalarne went with them, sometimes not, but when she did go she had little to report to Nortekku about anything they might have found there. It couldn’t have been much, he knew: Kanibond Graysz said something about that, one night at dinner, remarking on how scrappy and insignificant most of their finds had been. The sponsors of the expedition were going to be disappointed. Too bad, Nortekku thought, but he kept his opinions to himself.
He still could not bring himself to go near the Sea-Lords. They spent much of their time in the water, often far out from shore where it would not have been possible to go, but when they returned to the beach he kept his distance from them. The unhappiness that they emanated was too contagious: being near them plunged him into gloom. Now and then he would see one of them looking toward him with that poignant, yearning stare of theirs. He would always look away.
His estrangement from Thalarne saddened him as much as what the archaeologists were doing in the dunes. They still shared a tent, they still would couple from time to time, but there was no lifting of the invisible barrier that had fallen between them. Since he was unable to discuss anything with her involving the Sea-Lords, about all that was left to talk about was the weather, and the weather was unchanging, warm and sunny and calm day after day.
It surprised him not at all when the two Bornigrayans returned from a trip to the inner dune one morning, accompanied by their two Hjjks, who were carrying one of the Great World Sea-Lord chariots on an improvised litter of planks that had been brought from the ship. Of course they would take one of the chariots: of course. There had been so little else of any note to bring back. The chariot was a major prize, worthy of the finest collection.
The Sea-Lords who were nearby didn’t seem to be in any way upset as the chariot was stowed aboard the dinghy and transported to the ship. Shouldn’t they be protesting this flagrant theft of one of their most sacred objects? Apparently they didn’t care. They looked on in the same uninvolved, passive way they had greeted everything else since the landing of the expedition on their shore. Either the chariot wasn’t really sacred to them, or, as Thalarne believed, they had so thoroughly divested themselves of all will to live that its removal couldn’t possibly make any difference to them. If so, then he had been wrong to berate Thalarne after the Bornigrayans’ initial intrusion into the artifact cache, and he needed to tell her that. Even if the Sea-Lords didn’t care, though, he did, and it saddened him greatly to watch what was happening.