“She will sleep long, and waken without pain,” said the old woman. “When the gods turn the world over, she will have her other children.”
“It’s got to be climate.” Ann leaned on the counter and squinted at the computer screen. Her new glasses were driving her nuts; bifocals were not the answer. She wanted the new surgery. Maybe next year, if the bigger grant came through.
“Invasion,” said Chris. He was being difficult, as usual.
“Climate. It matches with the onset of the interglacial—”
“You think you take four lousy trips backtime, and you know everything.”
“I know four trips more than you do.” She knew he thought she was being bitchy, but she did have four trips back to Stone Age Europe, and he had yet to be cleared for one.
“You never even saw them. You just robbed graves. You can’t be sure of anything just from the graves—”
“Chris, you’re never going to get clearance for backtime research if you stay an interventionist. No one is about to let any of us make actual contact with the primitives.” Ann punched up the climate data again. The match wasn’t exact, but then the climate data were approximations from pollen analysis—old dates, not direct measurement. They couldn’t leave a team onsite in the past long enough to do climate studies, much as she’d have loved it. The match was close enough. Warming climate had sent the prim’s main prey north, had changed their society, and that must be why their grave customs changed, from the lavishly decorated and prepared graves of the previous centuries to the plain, stark burials she’d found recently.
Chris leaned over her shoulder, peering at the screen. “That stuff’s outdated. Pollen analysis! If you’d put a team down for even one week, real time, in decent weather, and let them do an astronomical scan—”
“Interference.”
“Who cares? Those old stone-carvers? Ann, what if they do see a team? They won’t know what it is. They’re savages, primitive, superstitious—they’ll just call ’em gods and run away. Didn’t you say you’d found contemporary tracks at Site 402?”
Ann pushed her chair back slightly and bumped into his knees. Site 402 still scared the hell out of her. They’d gone in, found a couple of six-month-old graves, still untouched, and some other obvious graves nearby. They’d done a bounce-scan and decided to drop back fifty years, then another fifty: a fast in-and-out each time, plucking the graves clean. Then a final stop at the first time, maybe a day later real-time, and they’d seen tracks. Human tracks, recent, clear evidence that some of the primitives had arrived just after the first sampling. How long after? Ann still wondered if they’d come before, or after, the older graves changed. And had the graves changed then, at the theoretical fork in time, or along the main line back when they’d been opened?
She mentioned that chilling possibility. Chris shook his head.
“Ann, they can’t think—not like we can. They won’t be able to reason anything out. And if they did figure it was people from the future, what could they do?”
“I don’t know.” It was the not knowing that was worst. Would they fumble around for a new set of words to express that concept? Would they migrate away from the place where their graves had been robbed? What could they do, primitive hunters that they were? They couldn’t change history, surely. “It doesn’t matter, anyway,” she said, pushing all that aside. “What matters is this paper for the meeting, and that means coming up with a reasonable explanation for the change in burial practices. Climate fits well enough. If you have to hunt different animals in the same place, or follow familiar animals to new places, you won’t have time to accumulate the same quantity of grave goods, or build elaborate graves—”
“Behavior is conservative. I still think it’s invasion—different people, with different customs. Look what you found this last time: twigs and pebbles in the graves, with nothing but a scrap of skin under the bodies. Stones carelessly tossed on top. If you’d brought back even one whole gravesite, we could have found evidence of a new culture—”
“It wasn’t worth it. Chris, the body type’s the same. Biochem sampling on the one indicates it’s the same genetic type, same everything… they just aren’t putting any cultural goods in the graves, and it has to be because they can’t afford to, they don’t have enough. An impoverished culture, struggling to maintain its way of life—”
“Twigs! Dammit, that’s a different religion.” She was fascinated that the change from carved bones to uncarved twigs could excite him on religion, but the possibility of a resurrection myth didn’t move him at all. “Ann, think about it. They used to bury their dead with carved bone and wood: animals, mostly. Bits of stone, yes, but carved or shaped into ornamental items. Carved bone buttons, awls, that amber whatsit from Site 327, fancy leather items. Animals, dammit. Not twigs, not plant life. Maybe it’s not an invasion, but something’s made them start worshipping trees instead of reindeer and wolves.”
“A climate change could do that. Forest expanding, with higher temperatures, or—”
Chris leaned against the wall, and she could tell he was thinking about it. She considered the possibility herself. A change in religion leading to tree worship? Certainly there was tree worship later in Europe, on the edge of historical time. Trees hung with offerings to forest deities, trees in sacred groves. But would people really change from worshipping animal totems to trees just because the forest was expanding? She tried to think herself back into a primitive mind…would they see it as trees chasing the animals away? It didn’t make sense, but then primitives didn’t have to make sense. They were primitive, nonrational, that was the whole point….
Two summers later, Carver saw that Molder’s grave had not been disturbed. The bulge of his gift was hardly noticeable now beneath the bark of its tree. He plucked a twig from it, and dropped it on the stones piled not-quite-carelessly atop Molder’s grave. They had had good luck, the past seasons, and he wished he could share more with her spirit. But the others agreed that their luck lay partly in the quiet rest of their dead… a rest that depended on fooling the witches of the future. He still found it hard to think about, the way they could walk backwards through time and change the past. Why would they rob graves, when they could gain more power by undoing their own mistakes? He thought what he could do with such ability—prevent Molder’s fall, find where the herds had gone when they didn’t appear in the usual ranges, know which trail he should have taken, and what had happened to those who disappeared. He would not bother to find old graves and rob them. Unless the dead had more power than anyone had believed until now, more power even than the spread of death pollen.
But they had fooled the latecomer witches. This tribe, at least, was safe from them, its dead resting peacefully and properly gifted throughout time. Once he believed, he’d wanted to tell the others, at the trading sites and hunting conclaves, but the old woman of Ash had forestalled him.
“We must first protect ourselves,” she had said. “If the witches find no graves’ goods to rob, they may rob bare bones or search the trees for gifts, and leave us to the wrath of our dead. Other tribes have godtalkers of their own—if they listen truly, they can learn for themselves.” And she had bound him with terrible oaths, so that he could not tell even his mother’s brother, when they met at the rapids of the river where the fish leaped into their basket, answering their need.