He returns to his digging.
But almost immediately comes another booming cry from Ibrahim: “Paydos! Paydos!” Time to quit for the lunch-break.
Halvorsen would just as soon go on working while the others knock off. That would be bad form, though: you mustn’t let your workmen think you’re lazy, but it’s not good to seem maniacally compulsive, either. He hobbles down the hill and over to the workshed, where the usual meal of olives, eggs, canned tuna fish, and warm beer is being dispensed.
“How’d things go, Dr. H?” Sparmann asks. She smiles pleasantly—she’s very pretty, actually, though Halvorsen would never dream of laying a hand on her—but her subtext is fundamentally malevolent. She knows damned well how it has gone up there, how it goes all the time. But she is politely maintaining the pretense that he may eventually find something on the hill.
“Starting to look promising,” Halvorsen says. Why not? Hope costs nothing.
This season’s dig has four weeks to go. And then? Will he spend the off season, as usual, raising money for next year’s work, the grant applications, the lecture series, the endless begging among the well-heeled? Not to mention the interminable business of renewing the digging permit, a hassle that was always complicated in unpredictable ways by the twists and turns of Turkish politics. How much easier it would be simply to give up, retire from field work, write some books, find a soft curatorship or chairmanship somewhere.
But that would be an admission of defeat. It had been a calculated risk to propose his theory as openly as he had; if the notion had come from a 40-year-old, the eventual failure to produce substantiation would be accepted by his colleagues simply as a case of a young man’s reach exceeding his grasp, but at Halvorsen’s age any such failure would be an irrevocable mark of decline, even senility, a regrettable third act to such a brilliant career. He didn’t dare abandon his field work. He was condemned by his own insistent hypothesis to stay out here under this glazed blue sky until he found what he was looking for, or else die trying.
“Beer?” someone asks him.
“Please,” says Halvorsen, taking the bottle, though he knows that it will be weary, stale, flat, unprofitable. No surprises there. It is Efes Pilsen, the terrible Turkish beer. Halvorsen would have preferred a Carlsberg; but Copenhagen is a long way away. So he guzzles it, wincing a little, and even has a second one. Warm and weary, yes. Stale. Flat. And definitely unprofitable.
The nights are always strangely cool here, even in summer, with a sharp autumnal edge on them, as though the sun’s intense heat has burned a hole in the atmosphere by day and the place is as airless as the moon after dark. Halvorsen sits apart from the others, reads, broods, sips raki, soaks his sore leg. The archaeologists’ compound consists of two whitewashed cinderblock storage buildings, a work-shed, and six little tents down by the sandy beach where they sleep. Most of the Turkish workmen make their camps for the night on the shallow slopes just back of the dig, covering themselves with leafy branches or threadbare blankets, though some go home on donkeyback to their village five or six miles up the road.
Halvorsen’s assistants—two women, three men, this year— sit outside their tents, waiting for him to go inside and fall asleep. During the season they have coupled off in various spasmodic patterns, as usual, but they try to hide that from him as though he were some sort of chaperone for them. For most of the summer, Halvorsen is aware, Jane Sparmann has been sharing the tent of Bruce Feld of the University of Pennsylvania, and the Chicago girl, Elaine Harris, has been shifting her affections between Martin Altman of Michigan State and the other boy—Riley, O’Reilly, Halvorsen can never remember which—from that university in Ohio. Let them have their fun, Halvorsen thinks: what they do at night is no business of his. But still they wait for him; and at last, though he isn’t sleepy yet, he rises and waves goodnight and limps into his tent.
His body aches, his mind is terribly alert. He stretches out on his cot and prays in the clammy darkness for sleep to take him.
Instead the night-voice, that insinuating, tickling voice in his head that has been so insistently frequent of late, comes to him again and says:
—Here. I want you to see this. This is the Palace of the Triple Queen.
Every word is perfectly distinct. He has never heard the voice with such clarity before.
And this time the words are followed by an image. Halvorsen beholds on the screen of his mind the facade of a many-columned three-terraced structure that might almost be Hatshepsut’s temple at Deir al-Bahri, except that the colonnades fold back upon themselves in topologically implausible ways, as if they were pivoting into some adjacent dimension, and the glowing bas-reliefs along the pediment are utterly alien in style, a procession of slender angular figures interlocking and bending out of focus in the same incomprehensible twisting way. Behind the columns of the topmost terrace lurks some filmy, shadow-cloaked being, barely perceptible except as huge eyes and a ripple of shimmering light, whose frail silvery form nevertheless emanates immense strength and power.
“Who are you?” Halvorsen asks. “What do you want with me?”
—And this, this is the courtyard of the Tribunal of the People in the time of the Second Mandala.
Halvorsen sees a sort of marble beehive, fifty or sixty hexagonal tanks out of each of which rises the face of a huge-eyed hairless figure, more or less human in general outline. They are submerged from their shoulders down in a radiant luminous fluid. Halvorsen is given to understand that these creatures are a single entity in fifty bodies, that in their own era they exerted some kind of high governmental function, that they spent lifetimes of unimaginable length standing in these six-sided pools of nutrients.
—And what I show you now, says the voice, are the ruins of the building known as the Concord of Worlds, which also is of the time of the Second Mandala, and above it the outlying precincts of the City of Brass, constructed thirty cycles later.
Scenes of confused splendor flood his mind. Marble pillars, shining metal slabs inscribed in unknown languages, obelisks of chalcedony, all strewn about as though by a giant’s hand; and, overlying them with a casual disdain, the streets of some rigidly geometrical later city, gleaming with a cruel metallic sheen.
“This is madness,” Halvorsen mutters. He sits up, gropes in the darkness for his sleeping-pills. “Leave me alone, will you? Get out of my mind.”
—I mean no harm.
“Tell me who you are, then.”
—A friend. A colleague.
“I want to know your name.”
—It would mean nothing to you.
This is a new development, actually to be holding a conversation of sorts with this phantom: with himself, to be more accurate. It seems to mark a dismaying advance in his mental deterioration and he finds it terrifying. Halvorsen begins to tremble.
“What do you want with me?” he demands. Shouting out loud, now. Careful, he thinks. The others will hear you and come running, and the secret will be out. Poor old coot has lost his mind. He will beg them to cover it up, and they will promise, but of course gossip travels so quickly in academic circles—