"Multiples of eight? Would we know if there'd been an event on Nok around 8000 B.C.?"
"Probably not. The current cycle of civilization got started three thousand years later." He studied the top of his desk. "I have no problems with a coincidence. One coincidence."
"What's the other?"
"The resemblance between Oz and the cube moons."
"So what do we do now?"
"/ retire," he said. "And hope I have some money left after the lawyers get finished with me."
"Henry, you can't just walk out—"
"I sure as hell can just walk out. Listen—" His face reddened and he leaned across the desk. "Do you have any idea what all this means to me? I'm about to be drummed out. Blamed for the death of an old friend." His lip quivered. "And God help me, maybe they're right."
"But we need you."
"And I needed you. We went through hell out there, and I made a decision that I'm going to have to live with the rest of my life. You're taking an accusing tone with me now. Where were you when we were trying to get a few answers? All you could contribute was to hang on the other end of that damned commlink and try to panic everybody. Did you really think we didn't know what was coming? We went down there with our eyes open, Hutch. All of us."
And you didn't all make it back. But she said nothing. He glared at her, and then the energy seemed to go out of him, and he sank back into his chair.
"I'm sorry you feel that way," she said. "I did what I had to."
"As did I."
They looked at one another across a gulf. Finally, Hutch said, "You will follow up on this. Right?"
"You follow up on it. If you find something, I'll be in Chicago."
Henry's anger hurt. Had the others felt the same way? My God, had Richard gone to his death disappointed in her? A cold wind blew through her soul.
She could not go back to her apartment that night.
She wandered among some of her old hangouts, ending eventually at the Silver Dancer, which was a favorite nightspot for airline types, and which had probably never seen an archeologist. She drank a series of rum-and-cokes that had no effect on her. Somewhere around midnight, she encouraged a shy young flight attendant with good eyes and went home with him.
She gave him the night of his life.
Hutch wanted to let it rest, to put it behind her. But she could not. So, on a crisp, clear evening a week after her conversation with Henry, she met Frank Carson for dinner at an
Italian restaurant along the Arlington waterfront.
"I wouldn't worry about it," he said. "Henry tends to get upset, and he's been through a lot. He told me, by the way, that he'd talked to you."
Carson was a good guy. He tended to take a paternal line with her, but she could forgive that. She came very close to approving. "He resents me," she said.
He asked her to explain. When she'd finished, he tried to wave it away. "I did the same thing," he said. "I was on the circuit to Henry, and I kept pushing them the whole time. It's not to your discredit that you wanted them out of there. In your place, Henry would have done the same. He's upset with me, too."
It was just after sunset. They were drinking Chianti, and watching a boat discharge passengers from Alexandria onto the dock. "What do you think?" she asked. "About the discontinuities?"
He didn't hesitate. "I don't think anything's established yet. If it turns out there was an event on Nok eighteen or twenty thousand years ago, I still don't think it would mean very much."
"What about 'the engines of God'?"
"Beg pardon?"
" '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. It's from a Quraquat prayer book. Art thought it might have been a prediction of the Second Discontinuity on Quraqua. The timing was right."
"There are always predictions," he said.
Their dinners arrived, spaghetti and meatballs for both.
"Feel better?" Carson asked, after she'd made inroads.
"Yes," she said. "I guess so."
"Good. I've got some news for you: we've tracked down the horgon."
She looked up from her plate, delighted. "Good," she said. "What have you got?"
"Well, it's kind of interesting. You know the thing was a mythical monster. It was all claws and teeth, it had fiery eyes, ti was armored, and it stood on two feet. It had a built-in flame thrower." He paused. "And it could see three hundred sixty degrees."
Hutch did a double take. "The horgon's eye," she whispered.
"Yes." Delighted, Carson drew out the aspirate. "That's what we thought. The beast is associated with the child-hero Malinar, and with Urik, who was a kind of Quraquat Hercules. Malinar rescued his sister when she was threatened by the creature by diverting its attention with a plate of food. The thing pitied the child and spared him. And the girl. We know there was a cycle of Malinar myths, but the horgon story is the only one we have.
"Urik is perhaps the best known of all Quraquat mythical figures. The important point is that he would certainly have been known to the Quraquat of the Linear C era."
"So we get a fit," said Hutch.
"Yes." He speared a meatball and tasted it. "Good," he said. "Anyway, Urik lived at the beginning of their civilization, in a world filled with enchantment and dark spells and divine retribution for anyone who got out of line. Only one god in this scenario, the usual male deity, with the standard short temper and no-nonsense code of conduct. Monotheistic systems, by the way, were common on Quraqua during that period. There is residual evidence of polytheistic religions, but over thousands of years the original tales must have been rewritten to reflect correct views. And there's another universal tendency."
"What's that?"
"Monotheistic religious systems are usually intolerant." He smiled warmly at her, and his tone softened. "This is actually quite nice," he said. "Having dinner with the loveliest woman in Arlington, Virginia."
Appreciative, Hutch reached across the table and squeezed his hand.
Back to business, he said: "Somebody was having trouble with a horgon. It was terrorizing the countryside and generally raising hell. So they called in Urik."
"Okay."
"The only way to kill it was to put a sword into its heart."
"Seems straightforward," said Hutch.
"It's an old story," he said. "Hermes and Argos."
"Beg pardon?"
"Greek myth. It's a hunter's tale. You are trying to bring down the ultimate prey, a creature that's exceedingly deadly,
and you can't hide in the bushes. And you can't take it head-on. So you have to devise a trick.
"In the Urik story, a series of heroes, over the course of a generation or so, have tried to kill the monster. They used all sorts of imaginative schemes to get close to it. They tried to blind it with sunlight reflected from a polished shield; they tried to sneak up on it disguised as a female horgon; they tried to put it to sleep with a magic trombone."
Hutch smiled. "A magic trombone?"
"Well, not really. But it was a mystical instrument, a pipe of some sort. In any case, things always went wrong. The hero put the pipe down to get a good grip on his sword, the horgon woke up, and the hero got barbecued. That was the technique that Hermes used, by the way. It worked for him.
"There was also an attempt by a female. Her name was Haska, and she brought along an army of pages to keep dousing her with water. The horgon cooked the pages, but Haska was fortunate enough to escape with her life. She was the only hero to do so, until Urik.
"Now—and here's the point—Urik got involved in all this because his lover, Lisandra, was carried off by demons, and he was advised by a neighborhood sage that he could find her only with the assistance of a horgon's eye."