They trailed the wagon at a discreet distance, optics set for night scanning. It was a long trek through hilly, forested countryside, but all four of them were in good physical condition and the wagon, heavy and heavily laden, moved slowly. At one point, Rhys had stopped to refasten his boot closings when Burton let out an exultant cry and thumped him soundly on the back. When he picked himself up and reoriented his optics, he thought for a moment Burton had given him a concussion. Where there had been a wagon there were now two ponderous vehicles making their dusty way toward the complex. In another half mile or so, a third wagon appeared from a rutted side road and joined the caravan. By the time they drew within sight of Sper-ets’s gated walls, there were six wagons, each with its uniformed drivers, each with its load of brightly dyed baskets, and Rhys had to allow that Burton’s tribute theory looked very good, indeed.
The sun was rising as they worked their way up into yet another huge and bulbous tree (ficus frogus, Rick called them). They could hear the rumble of the wagons, the calls and shouts and whistles of the uniformed men, the roar of the fire in the tower’s hot core. In the broad plaza below and between the lavishly painted temples, the baskets were unloaded from the first wagon and grouped according to color. When the task was complete, a commanding figure appeared in the doorway of the Chapel.
Burton grasped Rhys’s shoulder painfully. “It’s Ets-eket himself!”
The warrior priest, his elaborate headdress making him stand head and shoulders above the other men, strode from his abode to meet the wagoneers. From each he received what appeared to be a necklace of the rectangular coins.
Rhys brought his optics into tight focus on Ets-eket’s hand. The coins were strung on a thong, much like the one around Ets-eket’s neck. The priest pulled a thick-bladed knife from his belt and proceeded to score each rectangle. He then returned the string of coinage to the driver who settled it around his own neck before returning to his wagon and driving away. This process was repeated for each driver, the only variation occurring when Ets-eket paused to remove several rectangles from the driver’s thong to string them on his own. This done, he replaced them with new coins from a bag on his hip.
Out of the comer of his eye, Rhys saw Yoshi put her hand over her mouth.
A quick inspection of the baskets was next, which Ets-eket ended by clapping his hands together. A host of uniformed men poured from the Chapel and the two temples and began hoisting baskets with chaotic dispatch. A method emerged from the seeming madness: Blue and green baskets went to the eastern temple; brown and blue ones went to the western temple; the few red baskets found their way into the Chapel; and yellow baskets were set at the foot of the tower where uniformed men scurried to open them and spill their bundled contents to the earth.
Yoshi began to giggle.
Burton shot her an annoyed glance. “Really, Llewellyn, if your assistant can’t control herself—”
Wayne and Rhys gasped simultaneously, jerking Burton’s attention back to the tower where, at that very moment, the stone doorway was rolled back by a quartet of huge, sweating Etsatats, revealing a blast furnace interior. The four big men then took up crescent-topped staffs from a rack and proceeded to use them to scoop up the “tribute” and fling it into the fiery maw.
Yoshi’s giggles collapsed into wild hiccups.
“It’s a… a garbage dump!” whispered Bell.
“And recycling center,” added Yoshi, punctuating the sentence with a hiccup.
Burton sputtered. “Impossible! What about the stone icons! The… the potsherds, the animal bones…” His voice trailed off dismally.
Rhys sat back against the ficus frogus’s gnarled trunk. The gnawed animal bones. Of course. It made perfect sense, but even he had been too smitten by the romance of archaeotheology to see that any well-organized group of people must have some way of dealing with their discardables. “Don’t feel too badly, Professor. I’m as stunned as you are.” He shook his head. “And the evidence was all there, too, if only we’d been open-minded enough to read it. The small animal carcasses, the large caches of gnawed bone, the cellulose deposits, the extreme concentrations of potsherds, the tally cards.”
Yoshi sighed, pulled off her optics and wiped tears from her eyes.
“Shovels,” muttered Burton. “They were carrying shovels. Garbage scoops.” He uttered a low growl that dissolved into a wheezing chuckle. “Staffs of office, indeed!”
“Well,” said Bell philosophically, “I swear I’ll never look at a potsherd the same way again. ”
“Pass the canteen,” said Burton. “I need a drink.”
Yoshi fished it out of the field kit. “It’s only water, sir.”
Burton gave her an arch glance. “Indeed. Well, I seem to have enough imagination for two men. I’ll just pretend it’s something stronger.”
They had to spend the day perched in the great tree overlooking the dump. The time passed easily enough; they were shaded, relatively cool, had enough food and water for two days and plenty of activity to feast their eyes upon. By the end of the day, the system was quite clear: organic wastes went into the southern pits, broken stuff such as potsherds and glass went into the eastern “temple,” and recyclable articles went to the west, burnables were sent straight to the fiery furnace. The “icons” they had found there, they reasoned, might have been toys that made it into the yellow basket by mistake.
After dark, they hiked the five or six kilometers back to the shuttle, their shadows cast indigo against the ground by the intense moonlight. Their departure from the planet was silent, the homing lock on the cutter’s temporal grid transporting them in a blink through space and time to its shuttle bay. There was little conversation as they prepared for the shift forward. No mention of illegalities or arrests. Rhys knew without asking that Burton would bring the Feathered Serpent into synchronous orbit over the village exactly 5,000 years to the minute of when they’d left. It would be a matter of Rhys’s word against his if accusations were made. He decided accusations would serve no one.
Five thousand years later they stood in the Serpent’s docking bay. Rick was safely stowed aboard Rhys’s shuttle and would likely sleep for another day or two—long enough for a return trip to Tson where Danetta Price would listen with feigned interest as they described their “vacation,” omitting one important detail.
“Well, Llewellyn, I don’t suppose I could talk you into staying on a bit. Helping out with the dig?” Burton was looking at the wall of the bay, not at Rhys’s face.
Rhys felt a tingle of the same joy he’d experienced when Burton had first invited him to Etsatat. Still, he said, “I don’t know sir. I suppose that depends on what you intend to do about… certain matters.”
“Well, I’ve, em, rethought my position on some of the artifacts, if that’s what you mean.” He glanced at Rhys with a glint of humor in his pale eyes. “In fact, I’m thinking of completely rewriting my journal. I think it might benefit from a different point of view. I have the feeling that if I study the Sper-ets collection from a slightly more… pragmatic perspective— perhaps contrast and compare modem Etsatat cultures—I might even advance some new… theories.”
“I rather think,” Rhys said carefully, “that your relations with non-human colleagues could also benefit from a different point of view.”
Burton had the good graces to look uncomfortable. “I’m an old dog, Rhys. You know what they say about old dogs. I’m not unaware of my bias.”
“Prejudice,” murmured Yoshi.
Burton glanced at her. “Prejudice,” he agreed. “I can only plead that my lack of exposure to… other races of men has ill-prepared me to deal with them. I have never liked reptiles. The sight of a six-foot-tall lizard gives me goose flesh. But I suppose if I closed my eyes, Tzia would seem as human as the next qualified archaeologist.” He met Yoshi’s eyes. “I will try to listen to her without looking.”