A knock at the dour.
“Siferra? Siferra, are you there?”
“Come on in, Balik.”
The broad-shouldered stratigrapher was soaking wet. “This foul abominable rain,” he muttered, shaking himself off. “You wouldn’t believe how drenched I got just crossing the quad from Uland Library to here!”
“I love the rain,” Siferra said. “I hope it never stops. After all those months baking out in the desert—the sand in your eyes all the time, the dust in your throat, the heat, the dryness—no, let it rain, Balik!”
“But I see you’re keeping yourself indoors. It’s a whole lot easier to appreciate rain when you’re looking at it from a nice dry office.—Playing with your tablets again, are you?”
He indicated the six ragged, battered slabs of hard red clay that Siferra had arranged atop her desk in two groups of three, the square ones in one row and the oblong ones below them.
“Aren’t they beautiful?” Siferra said exultantly. “I can’t leave them alone. I keep staring at them as if they’ll suddenly become intelligible if only I look at them long enough.”
Balik leaned forward and shook his head. “Chickenscratches. That’s all it looks like to me.”
“Come on! I’ve already identified distinct word-patterns,” Siferra said. “And I’m no paleographer. Here—look—you see this group of six characters here? It repeats over here. And these three, with the wedges setting them off—”
“Has Mudrin seen them yet?”
“Not yet. I’ve asked him to stop by a little later.”
“You know that word has gotten out about what we’ve found, don’t you? The successive Thombo town-sites?”
Siferra looked at him in amazement. “What? Who—?”
“One of the students,” Balik said. “I don’t know who it was—Veloran, is my guess, though Eilis thinks it was Sten. I suppose it was unavoidable, don’t you?”
“I warned them not to say anything to—”
“Yes, but they’re kids, Siferra, only kids, nineteen years old and on their first important dig! And the expedition stumbles on something utterly astounding—seven previously unknown prehistoric cities one on top of the next, going back the gods only know how many thousands of years—”
“Nine cities, Balik.”
“Seven, nine, it’s colossal either way. And I think it’s seven.” Balik smiled.
“I know you do. You’re wrong.—But who’s been talking about it? In the department, I mean.”
“Hilliko. And Brangin. I heard them this morning, in the faculty lounge. They’re extremely skeptical, I have to tell you. Passionately skeptical. Neither one of them thinks it’s even remotely possible for there to be even one settlement older than Beklimot at that site, let alone nine, or seven, or however many there are.”
“They haven’t seen the photographs. They haven’t seen the charts. They haven’t seen the tablets. They haven’t seen anything. And already they have an opinion.” Siferra’s eyes blazed with rage. “What do they know? Have they ever so much as set foot on the Sagikan Peninsula? Have they been to Beklimot even as tourists? And they dare to have an opinion on a dig that hasn’t been published, that hasn’t even been informally discussed within the department—!”
“Siferra—”
“I’d like to flay them both! And Veloran and Sten also. They knew they weren’t supposed to shoot their mouths off! Where do those two come off breaking priority, even verbally? I’ll show them. I’ll get them both in here and find out which one of them’s responsible for leaking the story to Hilliko and Brangin, and if that one thinks he’s ever going to get a doctorate in this university, or she, whichever one it was—”
“Please, Siferra,” Balik said soothingly. “You’re getting all worked up over nothing.”
“Nothing! My priority blown, and—”
“Nobody’s blown anything for you. It all remains just a rumor until you make your own preliminary statement. As for Veloran and Sten, we don’t really know that either of them is the one that let the story get out, and if one of them did, well, remember that you were young once too.”
“Yes,” Siferra said. “Three geological epochs ago.”
“Don’t be silly. You’re younger than I am, and I’m hardly ancient, you know.”
Siferra nodded indifferently. She looked toward the window. Suddenly the rain didn’t seem so pleasing. Everything was dark outside, disturbingly dark.
“Still, to hear that our findings are already controversial, and not even published yet—”
“They have to be controversial, Siferra. Everybody’s wagons are going to be upset by what we found in that hill—not just in our department, but History, Philosophy, even Theology, they’ll all be affected. And you can bet they’ll fight to defend their established notions of the way civilization developed. Wouldn’t you, if somebody came along with a radical new idea that threatened everything you believe?—Be realistic, Siferra. We’ve known from the start that there’d be a storm over this.”
“I suppose. I wasn’t ready for it to begin so soon. I’ve hardly begun unpacking.”
“That’s the real problem. You’ve plunged back into the thick of things so fast, without taking any time to decompress.—Look, I’ve got an idea. We’re entitled to a little time off before we get back to full-time academic loads. Why don’t you and I run away from the rain and take a little holiday together? Up to Jonglor, say, to see the Exposition? I was talking to Sheerin yesterday—he was just there, you know, and he says—”
She stared at Balik in disbelief. “What?”
“A holiday, I said. You and me.”
“You’re making a pass at me, Balik?”
“You could call it that, I suppose. But is that so incredible? We aren’t exactly strangers. We’ve known each other since we were graduate students. We’ve just come back from a year and a half spent in the desert together.”
“Together? We were at the same dig, yes. You had your tent, I had mine. There’s never been anything between us. And now, out of the blue—”
Balik’s stolid features showed dismay and annoyance. “It’s not as though I asked you to marry me, Siferra. I just suggested a quick little trip to the Jonglor Exposition, five or six days, some sunshine, a decent resort hotel instead of a tent pegged out in the middle of the desert, a few quiet dinners, some good wine—” He turned his palms outward in a gesture of irritation. “You’re making me feel like a silly schoolboy, Siferra.”
“You’re acting like one,” she said. “Our relationship has always been purely professional, Balik. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”
He began to reply, evidently thought better of it, clamped his lips tight shut.
They looked at each other uncomfortably for a long moment.
Siferra’s head was pounding. All this was unexpected and disagreeable—the news that the other members of the department were already taking positions on the Thombo finds, and Balik’s clumsy attempt at seducing her as well. Seducing? Well, at establishing some sort of romantic rapport with her, anyway. How utterly astonished he looked at being rejected, too.
She wondered if she had ever accidentally seemed to be leading him on in some way, to give him a hint of feelings that had never existed.
No. No. She couldn’t believe that she had. She had no interest in going to north-country resorts and sipping wine in romantically lit restaurants with Balik or anyone else. She had her work. That was enough. For twenty-odd years, ever since her teens, men had been offering themselves to her, telling her how beautiful, how wonderful, how fascinating she was. It was flattering, she supposed. Better that they think her beautiful and fascinating than ugly and boring. But she wasn’t interested. Never had been. Didn’t want to be. How tiresome of Balik to have created this awkwardness between them now, when they still had all the labor of organizing the Beklimot material ahead of them—the two of them, working side by side—