A terrible shaft of cold shot up Rhys’s back. “Excuse me?”
“I fibbed a little about the send-off. This is more in the nature of an educational field trip. I’m going to prove to you, beyond any doubt, that my theories about this dig are correct.”
“I don’t understand—” Rhys started to say, but suddenly he did understand. “You’re taking us back in time.”
“I am indeed.”
“But this ship must have temporal grid limiters—”
Burton shrugged. “Easily disabled by someone who knows what they’re doing. Did I mention that Wayne here worked his way through his first three years of college as a temporal engineer at QuestLabs?”
Rhys glanced back over his shoulder. Yoshi’s eyes were big as saucers, Rick was looking positively ill and Wayne was holding a fuzz gun. He jerked back around to face Burton. “Doctor, what you’re contemplating is illegal, not to mention unethical.”
“Ah, for the casual time traveler, perhaps. But this is far from casual. We’re on a mission of sorts—a search for truth.”
“Professor, I protest. You can’t do this.”
Burton chuckled. “Watch me. I can play Indiana Jones as well as the next man.” He leaned closer to Rhys, pinned him with over-bright eyes. “This is important to me, Rhys. I have to prove this to you. To myself. Now, if you’ll kindly enter your cabin. ”
“Professor?” Rick was looking at Rhys with panic in his eyes and sweat beading on his upper lip.
Rhys swung back to Burton. “Roddy has severe temporal displacement syndrome. If we time shift, he’ll become critically ill.”
“Ah, so 1 should abandon this crazy idea, eh? Or send the young man back to the Ceilidh. I think not. Several of my crew have TDS. I know the precautions. Trust me—Roddy will be suitably sedated.”
“I can’t talk you out of this?”
“No, young man, you cannot.”
Rhys glanced at Bell. “And you? How can you allow him to do this?”
“The professor taught me everything I know, Doctor. Unlike some, I’m not likely to forget that. You impugned his integrity. I think he deserves the chance to vindicate himself.”
They shifted within the hour, moving millennia in time, but infinitesimally in space. It was a long shift, one which required every human aboard to be sedated against the displacing effects, though none so deeply as Rick. In the darkened cabin, wearing shift goggles and respirators, Rhys and his two companions slept while ages rolled back around them.
Rhys woke to total darkness and thought, for the briefest moment, that he was dreaming rather than conscious (or dead rather than alive). But Yoshi stirred and murmured on the bunk opposite his and he came completely awake on a surge of memory and adrenaline. If Burton’s disabling of the ship’s temporal grid limiters had worked, he was now orbiting a younger Etsat. About 5,000 years younger, if their dating was correct. He had called on the lights and was helping Yoshi to sit up when Burton appeared, his eyes bright with exhilaration.
“We re here. We’ll shuttle down when the site is in darkness. That will mean turning off the running lights but there shouldn’t be any other airships to collide with, should there?” He chuckled, obviously enjoying the extraordinary situation. Leaving the deeply sleeping Rick in the darkened cabin, he led Rhys and Yoshi to the mess for a pre-descent meal.
The squat, boxy little shuttle carried four people—Rhys, Yoshi, Burton and Bell, who acted as pilot. In the deepest part of the local night, they brought the craft in on instruments. A clearing in the comparatively sparse forest of a younger world afforded them a landing site with adequate cover between the village and the Ets-eket complex. Or so Rhys hoped. The thought of bumping into the Etsatat’s ancestors filled him with mortal dread. Whatever else they did during this madcap adventure, they absolutely must avoid changing Etsatat history.
As the shuttle descended into the trees, Rhys saw a few points of firelight in the direction of the village and sighed deeply. He was tom about this “mission,” and knew he shouldn’t be. He should be outraged at Burton, but the thought of seeing first hand what he before could only theorize about made his heart hammer with pure excitement and his breath come quick and shallow. He often daydreamed about what it must have been like during those brief halcyon days when scientists could, and did, use QuestLab’s Temporal Grid technology to study the past. He had read the field notes of those early time travelers. He had seen the video journals. He had, in his personal library, the private diaries and logs of one Arthur Llewellyn, the man directly responsible for the ban on what his great-great-grandnephew was presently doing. It would be painful irony, indeed, if ill came of this.
“Rhys, look.”
Rhys tugged his thoughts back to the surface and followed Yoshi’s gaze through the starboard canopy of the shuttle. There was light in the direction of Sper-ets, too, a ruddy, volcanesque glow that lit the low clouds and smoke that lay like sleeping sheep above it. The tower, Rhys suspected, and felt a guilty tingle of anticipation. He felt eyes on him and glanced forward to find Professor Burton watching him with an odd little smile on his lips.
“You wouldn’t stop this now if you could, would you?”
Rhys declined to answer that, but knew in his heart of hearts that Burton was right.
Dressed in forest camouflage and packing a proximity scanner, they used the still predawn hours to set up an observation post up slope from the village in the branches of a massive, gnarled tree. Sunrise gave them a clear view down the main avenue from almost directly above the amphitheater. What was only marginally apparent in the ruin was highly visible in the living town. There was one main street; all other avenues—there were ten of them—crossed it at a precise ninety degree angle. As the sun climbed, the denizens of those streets came out and began their daily routines, unaware of the alien presence watching them from the east through long-range optics.
As expected, the market plaza was soon aswarm with buyers and sellers of produce. Traffic sprouted in the streets; carts and wagons appeared, most pulled by domestic animals called tirzen. Contraptions that looked like rikshas and handled like bicycles wove in and round larger conveyances. People wandered the avenues, popping in and out of buildings.
Rhys barely knew where to look first among such visual riches. Finally, he opted for a systematic survey of each street, beginning with those nearest his vantage point. He was focusing on the side of a large building adjacent to the amphitheater when Yoshi interrupted him.
“Sir, look at the stelae. They’re painted.”
They were, indeed. Rhys brought his own field optics to bear on the grouping they’d surveyed only four or five days ago. (Or was that five thousand years and five days ago?) The “Water Goddess” was done up in shades of turquoise and blue. The building she fronted was, likewise, awash in aquatic tones. Rhys supposed it could be either temple or bath house; the only evidence either way was that some of the people entering seemed to be carrying clothing draped over their arms or carried in baskets or bundles.
“Now scanning building 1A,” murmured Burton.
Rhys turned to find the elder archaeologist had mounted a holocam on his optics visor and was recording the street scenes. Or rather, he was recording the buildings—the people seemed to be of little interest to him. “What are you doing, Professor? You’ll never be able to show that to anyone.”