Hundreds of meters to go, though, before they got down to the important layer. Said one, “The sands will take this hole and refill it before the consortium finds enough money to empty all of it.” Meanwhile, it was a gig. “Smoke, drink coffee and tea, move the desert from here to there, send some money home, and no one is shooting at you,” said one fellow, who immediately grinned toothlessly at Gordon. “Forgive me,” he said, “no one is shooting at me.” More laughter.
Purposes and dreams, thought Gordon. Getting through the day alive is a noble purpose—putting bread on the table. In his own mind he had a curiosity to see what happens next. Gordon nodded once thinking again of Hosteen Ahiga. Perhaps if he had gotten more time with the old man Gordon’s purpose might have been more noble.
If this. If that. As another teacher, Sergeant Grubbs at Fort Benning, had said, “If a frog had wings he wouldn’t bump his ass every time he jumped.”
Bilagana wisdom.
Someone at the dig recognized him and waved him to join them. Gordon paused only to wave back. He turned and looked toward the processing shelter. An aged Egyptian in western clothes was pacing back and forth nervously in front of the large reflective environmental shelter, the fabric blinding beneath the unrelenting sun. As Gordon approached, the man stopped and with only the briefest nod of his head, waved him beneath the cover of the shelter.
“Thank you for coming so promptly, Mr. Redcliff. Dr. Hussein said you are comfortable in Arabic.”
“Yes,” answered Gordon. There was a hardboard floor beneath his feet, gritty with sand. It was a few degrees cooler beneath the shelter, which meant that it was almost hotter than Hell.
“Excellent. I am Dr. Taleghani.” The man walked to the desk in the tent being used for the dig’s headquarters. The desk was heaped with files, loose papers, and odd bits of pottery and bone. The archeologist began sorting through the mess, obviously searching for something. Taleghani was as dried and supple as an old bowstring. As did most Egyptian academics, he favored western dress in the field, from hikers and jeans to a white cotton shirt, blue denim vest, and bleached straw hat.
Gordon slowly looked around the shelter’s interior, noting the lights illuminating the worktables to his right. The sides of the shelter were rolled up to allow the furnace-hot air from Egypt’s Western Desert to drift languidly beneath one side of the enclosure and out another. A dozen or more archeology students—mostly Europeans in various states of dress among a forest of water bottles—were at the tables, cleaning, sorting, and studying the detritus gleaned from the dig’s upper scrapings. They appeared to notice neither heat nor anyone else’s presence. Some brushed, some picked, some probed, some sketched, and some tapped furiously upon keyboards. There was a very old, very worn-out truck tire leaning up against one of the tent poles. Someone had scribbled some English on it in yellow chalk: Eat out your heart, Heinrich Schliemann!
“What a muddle,” said the archeologist. “My assistant pinched a nerve in his back and is in terrible pain,” he explained. “Everything is a mess.”
Gordon glanced past the busy worktables to the base of the escarpment where the small legion of diggers and sorters toiled still beneath the unrelenting hammer of the sun, gathering up existence’s litter a layer at a time. Over Taleghani’s left shoulder, however, was something new. Just over a kilometer southwest of the escarpment there was what appeared to be a timespanner and next to it three large generators mounted on truck beds. The generators were quiet, the site’s modest power requirements being handled by a small portable generator near the cook tent.
The timespanner looked like a large turquoise blue can stuck in a cylindrical black metal spiderweb. As only a former military sniper could, Gordon admired patience. The T-span being there, though, was evidence of something other than patience. Someone didn’t want to wait years for his peek at the past. He looked to the man who had asked Dr. Hussein for his services. Dr. Ibrahim Taleghani was searching a second time through the same stack of files.
Not a patient man. Curious trait for an archeologist. Gordon shifted his gaze to the timespanner. He had been a young boy when the excited announcements came of the first successful experiments at spanning time. Time traveclass="underline" someone had actually done it. The excitement and wonder, though, had been immediately swallowed by the overwhelming tide of scientific, political, environmental, and especially religious hysteria against this form of transportation and investigation.
What if this? What if that? Was man really meant to? Was this really what God had in mind? What kind of pollution were we spreading by these edges into other dimensions? What might we be bringing back? Timespanning became every nation’s favorite political football, every religion’s evidence of the existence of faithlessness, every criminal’s nightmare, and almost every scientist’s harbinger of the end of life as we know it. To young Gordon, timespanning became like space travel and genetics: rich dreams, exciting possibilities, and grand promise buried beneath oppressive restrictions, narrow-minded regulations, and prohibitive costs. Timespanning was wrung dry of anything resembling adventure or even useful results.
“What Christ meant here was that to be not a Christian was to be denied Heaven.”
“Oh yeah? Well, let’s ask him.”
“Oh, no, no, no.”
“Why not?”
“Oh, no, no, NO.”
But what about these issues tearing humanity to pieces? Who’s right? Who’s holy? Who really was chosen? What did God really say to Abraham? What were the Ten Commandments before they were edited, or did Moses just make them up? Did that bush really burn? As the weight of his own body pulled the spikes through his wrists, what exactly did that carpenter say to God before he died, and who was he talking to if he, indeed, was himself God? Was he even there?
“Let’s go find him and ask.”
“Oh, no. No, no, no.”
Well, what about the uncountable versions of the Prophet’s revelations collected by Zayd? What were those truly revealed by Muhammad? What did he really mean by them?
“Why not go and ask the guy?”
“Forget it.”
Can printed texts, interpretations, temples, and rituals stand up to a real-time examination? Would our actions today be condoned by those whose names we use to justify them?
“Hey, there’s one sure way to find out.”
“Absolutely not. N-O-T.”
Timespanning control was internationalized, priorities rearranged. Licensing was taken over by a commission controlled by the United Nations, overseen by committees of the world’s religious, environmental, and scientific communities, and relegated to a highly restricted long-distance sightseeing enterprise. Countless forbidden areas, in addition to the religious ones. It was still a point of Egyptian national pride, for example, that Cleopatra should resemble an Egyptian and not a Greek, the Ptolemys notwithstanding. Until they could get a stand-in back there, no one was going to do any looking at Queen Cleopatra. Until the real past could be made to conform to the accepted histories and beliefs, investigation would not be allowed.
“Mr. Redcliff?”
Gordon shifted his gaze to Dr. Taleghani. “Doctor.”
“You were looking at the timespanner.”
“I was.”