Still, he digs on. What else can he do?
It’s a long day. The new trench gets deeper and longer and it’s still absolutely virgin. Thinking incorrectly that he has spotted something significant jutting from its side, Halvorsen jumps eagerly down into it and wrenches his bad leg so severely that he almost bursts into tears, though they are tears of rage rather than pain. Halvorsen is a big, strapping man whose physical endurance was legendary in the profession, and now he is little more than a cripple. If he could, he would have the leg cut off and replaced with something made of steel and plastic.
The raki helps a little. But only a little.
Lying on his back and massaging the throbbing leg with his left hand with the raki bottle in his right one, Halvorsen says into the dense clinging darkness, “How did you find me? And why?” He is somewhat tipsy. More than somewhat, maybe.
There is no answer.
“Come on, speak up! Have you been in touch with others before me? Twenty, fifty, a hundred, a hundred thousand different minds, every era from First Dynasty Egypt to the fortieth century? Looking for someone, anyone, who would go for your deal?”
Silence, still.
“Sure you did. You’ve got a million-year lifespan, right? All the time in the world to cast your line. This fish, that one, this. And now you have me on the hook. You play me. Trade bodies with me, you say, come see the marvels of the far future. You think I’m tempted, don’t you? Don’t you? But I’m not. Why should I be? Don’t I have enough on my plate right here? You think I want to start over, at my age, learning a whole new archaeology? You suppose I need to worry about identifying the strata that signify the fucking Second Mandala?”
No answer. He knows that he is losing control. He never uses obscenities except under extreme stress.
“Well, go fish somewhere else,” Halvorsen says. “I reject your deal. I piss on your crazy deal. I stay here, you stay there, the way God intended it to be. I go on digging in the dirt of Turkey until my brains are completely fried and you sit there amidst all your fucking post-historic apocalyptic miracles, okay? Costa Stambool! You can take Costa Stambool and—”
At last the voice out of distant time breaks its silence.
—Is your refusal a final one?
And, almost in the same moment, another voice from closer at hand, from just outside his tent, in fact:
“Dr. Halvorsen? Are you all right, Dr. Halvorsen?”
Bruce Feld’s voice.
My God, Halvorsen thinks. I’m bellowing and ranting at the top of my lungs, and now they all finally know that I’ve gone nuts.
“I’m—fine,” he says. “Just singing, a little. Am I too loud?”
“If you need anything, Dr. Halvorsen—”
“Maybe another bottle of raki, that’s all.” He laughs raucously. “No, no, just joking. I’m fine, really. Sorry if I disturbed you.” Let them think I’m drunk; better than thinking I’m crazy. “Good night, Bruce. I’ll try to keep it down.”
And then, again:
—Is your refusal final?
“Yes! No. Wait. I have to consider this thing a little, all right? All right?”
Silence.
“God damn it, I need some time to think! —Hey, are you still there?”
Silence.
Gone, Halvorsen thinks. He has given his answer, and the being from the far end of time has broken off the contact, and that is that. Even at this moment the offer is being made to someone of the thirtieth century A.D., or perhaps the thirtieth century B.C., or any of a million other years along the time-line between prehistory and the Fifth Mandala of Costa Stambool. A trade, my time for your time: your body for mine, our minds to change places.
“Listen,” Halvorsen says piteously, “I’m still thinking it over, do you know what I mean? Although I have to tell you, in all honesty, you’d be getting a bum deal. I’m not in really good physical condition. But I want to discuss this proposition of yours a little further before I give you a definitive answer, anyway.”
Nothing. Nothing. An agony of regret.
But then, suddenly:
—Let us discuss, then. What else would you like to know?
The promised visit of the new superintendent of excavations does not occur on the second day after the receipt of the letter from the Ministry of Education, nor on the third. Halvorsen is unsurprised by that. Time moves differently in different cultures; he lives on the Turkish calendar here.
The work is now going so badly that he actually has begun to regard his nightly bouts of madness as comic relief. His leg has swollen, practically immobilizing him; it is so difficult for him to get around now that he is unable to reach his excavation site at the top of the hill, short of being hoisted up there with a sling and pulley. So he supervises fretfully from below. But that makes no difference, because Ibrahim, Ayhan, and Zeki are still digging through virgin soil. Elsewhere all around the site, nice little things are turning up for the others: Riley and Harris have found some bits of Byzantine mosaic in association with coins of the Emperor Heraclius, Feld and Altman have struck an interesting layer of early Minoan sherds, Jane Sparmann has found a cache of glass and terra-cotta beads that may indicate the presence of a previously unsuspected zone of late Greek occupation. The hilltop work, though, is plainly a bust. Hittites, or somebody who built walls in Hittite style, undoubtedly had had a fortress up there four or maybe five thousand years ago, but what Halvorsen is after is some sign of civilization two or three thousand years older than that—some deposit that will convincingly link this coastal outpost to the known Neolithic settlements far to the east at Catal Huyuk—and he has not had the slightest luck. The three anomalous artifacts that that storm had laid bare remain perplexing enigmas, tantalizing, inexplicable.
He consoles himself with conversations in the darkness. The visions of the Fifth Mandala grow ever more baroquely detailed. Halvorsen, who still believes that he is spinning these fantasies within the walls of his own tortured mind, is bemused by the discovery that he has such lavish qualities of imagination within himself. He has thought of himself all along as a prosaic drudge, a plodding digger in musty, dusty ancient realms. Evidently there is more to him than that, a rich vein of the fabulist locked away somewhere. The realization makes him uneasy; it seems to call in question the integrity of his own scholarly findings.
He wants to know about the inhabitants of the remote eon of which his informant is a denizen.
—There are very few of us. I may be the only one.
“You aren’t sure?”
—Contact is very difficult.
“It’s easier for you to speak with someone who lived a million years in your past than it is to pick up the phone and call someone who lives around the corner from you?”
Apparently so. There has been a great cataclysm, an invasion of some sort, a climactic battle: the last and ultimately futile stand of the human race, or rather the evolved and vastly superior successors to the human race, against an inexorable enemy so terrible that its nature seems beyond the abilities of Halvorsen’s informant to communicate. This, it seems, occurred as the closing act of the epoch known as the Fourth Mandala, when humanity, after having attained a supreme, essentially god-like height, was thrust down irreparably into the dust. Now only a few lurkers remain, scuttling through the heaped-up ruins of previous glorious civilizations, waiting for their final hours to arrive. Halvorsen gets the impression that they are not even creatures of flesh and blood, these last few humans, but some kind of metallic mechanisms, low spherical beetle-like housings, virtually indestructible, in which the souls of the remaining inhabitants of Earth have taken refuge.