"No," he said.
"How old are they?"
"Six thousand years. They were good-luck talismans. Made by mixing animal fat with clay, and baking the result. As you can see, they last a long time."
Hutch would have liked to ask for a souvenir. But that was against the rules, and Eddie looked as if he took rules very seriously.
"And this?" She indicated a gray ceramic figurine depicting a two-legged barrel-shaped land animal that resembled a Buddha with fangs. It had large round eyes and flat ears pressed back on its skull like an elephant's. The body was badly chipped.
Eddie glared at her, angered that she could not see the need for haste. But it was also true that he loved to talk about his artifacts. "It's roughly eight hundred years old." The object was intricately executed. He held it out to her. It was heavy. "The owner was probably one of the last priests." A shadow crossed his pinched features. "Think about it: the Temple, or some form of it, had been there since time immemorial. But somewhere toward the end of the fourteenth century, they closed it up. Locked the doors, and turned out the lights. Can you imagine what that must have meant to that last group of priests?" The ventilators hummed in the background. Eddie studied the figurine. "This is not a sacred object. It had some personal significance. We found several of these in one of the apartments. This one was left near the main altar."
"Company for the dying god," suggested Hutch.
He nodded, and she realized at that moment that whatever else he might be, Eddie Juliana was a hopeless romantic.
Two hours later, she was in the air, enroute to Wink.
"Janet, are you there? This is Hutch."
"Negative, Hutch. Janet's asleep. This is Art Gibbs."
"Pleased to meet you, Art."
"What can I do for you?"
"Uh, nothing. I was just bored."
"Where are you now?"
"Chasing my ship. But I won't catch her for another few hours." Pause. "What do you do with this outfit, Art?"
"Dig, mostly. I'm sorry I missed you today. I hear you're a knockout."
Hutch smiled and switched to video. "Dispel all illusions," she said. "But it's nice to hear."
Art beamed at her. "The rumors are short of the mark," he said gallantly. Art Gibbs was in his fifties, hair gone, a roll of flab around his middle. He asked whether she had been to Quraqua before, what she had done that had so impressed Richard Wald, what her reactions were to the Temple of the Winds. Like the others, he seemed stricken by the impending evacuation.
"Maybe it'll survive," she said. "It's underwater. And the Knothic Towers look pretty solid."
"No chance. A few hours after they knock the icecap into the ocean, we'll get huge tidal waves here—"
She had lost the sun now, was gliding through the dark. Her left-hand window looked out on the Void. She caught a glimpse of the Kosmik space station, a lone brilliant star.
"Somebody else," continued Art, "will be along in a few thousand years to try again. Be an interesting puzzle, I'd think: hi-tech wreckage on a low-tech world."
"Art, have you been to Oz?"
"Yes."
"What did you think of it?"
"I don't think we'll ever know what it's about."
"Doesn't it strike you as odd that it got burned at the same time that the military post was destroyed?"
"It burned during the same era" he said gently. "Don't forget that the fort disappeared during an epoch of worldwide destruction."
"That's my point. I think. Doesn't it seem likely there's a connection?"
"I don't see how there could be." He stuck his tongue in the side of his cheek and frowned. "I really don't."
"Frank Carson mentioned the connection between the events at Oz and widespread destruction on Quraqua."
"What could it be? There's only a connection in very general terms, Hutch. The discontinuities occurred over long stretches of time. For all we know, so did the damage inflicted on Oz. But they didn't necessarily happen at the same time. Only during the same era. There's a difference, and I think we fall into a trap when we confuse the two." He paused. "Are you interested in the discontinuities?"
"Yes."
"Then I'll tell you something else. It's coincidence, of course."
"What is?"
"There's a poem that we have in translation. Wait a minute, let me find it."
Art walked off-screen. "Have you ever heard of the Scriveners?"
"No."
"They dominated this area between approximately 1400 B.C., and the collapse of the Eastern Empire, about four hundred years later."
"Scriveners?"
"So named because they kept records of everything. Detailed commercial accounts, inventories, medical records, vital statistics. They were quite advanced." He grinned. "In a bureaucratic way. They were a lot like us. They even seem to have had insurance policies. Now, their demise, the fall of the Eastern Empire, and the Second Discontinuity all seem to have occurred around 1000 B.C."
"Okay." Ten lines of text had appeared on Hutch's monitor.
"Judging from the commercial nature of the writings they left behind, the Scriveners appear to have been neither philosophical nor religious. The Temple was relegated to a historical curiosity during their period of ascendancy. But we did find a book of devotions in one of their cities. Valdipaa. Not far from here. Next stop on the trade route west. The verse on your screen is from the book."
In the streets of Hau-kai, we wait. Night comes, winter descends, The lights of the world grow cold. And, in this three-hundredth year From the ascendancy of Bilat, He will come who treads the dawn.
Tramples the sun beneath his feet, And judges the souls of men. He will stride across the rooftops, And he will fire the engines of God.
She read through it twice. "What are the engines of God?"
Art shrugged.
"Then what's the point?"
"Bilat. He was a hero. He was used for a time to mark the beginning of the Scrivener era. He seized power somewhere around 1350 B.C., our time. Hau-kai, by the way, was a kind of Jerusalem, a holy city, symbolic of the best that the faithful could hope for in this world."
Hutch reread the verse. "Three hundred years later would take them close to the Second Discontinuity." She exited from the screen, and brought Art back. "You're suggesting somebody predicted the event?"
"We've dated the book. It's one of the oldest we have. Can't read much of it. What we can read is mostly devotional."
"Who did the translation?"
"Maggie Tufu. Have you met her? Well, anyway, she converted the time references. The term that reads as men actually refers to all the inhabitants of the planet, male and female, past and present. And the verb that's rendered as judges seems to imply both judge and executioner." Art seemed simultaneously amused and perplexed. "And, yes—the prediction is right on the money."
"Prophecy's a tricky game," said Hutch. "It's common for religious groups to predict catastrophic events. Get enough predictions, and somebody's bound to hit it right."
Art nodded. "That would be my guess. But some people here have wondered whether the thing on the moon doesn't in some way mark this world for periodic destruction."
By 1900 hours, the Temple shuttle was loaded and ready to follow Alpha. Carson checked everything to ensure that the containers wouldn't shift, and watched the sub draw away. Eddie sat stiffly in its bubble with his arms folded, staring straight ahead.
Carson powered up, informed the watch officer he was on his way, and lifted off.
The sun had moved behind the peaks, and a cold wind blew across the gathering darkness. The tide was out, and wide stretches of sand glittered in the failing light. Waves broke around the Towers. Carson would be glad to be away, to get to D.C. and to walk in the sun without needing a Flickinger harness.