All the Colors of Time (30 page)

“I don’t think so, Doctor. Now, if you’d kindly let me get
back to my work?” He gave Rhys a curt nod and returned to his study of the
display of his holopad.

oOo

Back aboard the TAS schooner
Ceilidh
, Rhys tried to banish his black mood without success. He’d
just blown a huge hole in his personal history and, glancing backward, saw a
void where there had once been a professional relationship, a wall of regret
where there had once been pleasant and important memories. His mental landscape
was Scotland in winter—bleak, gray, cold. Neither Yoshi nor Rick could pierce
the veil of sorrow that hung over him like a mountain-topping cloud.

“I’ll get over it,” he told Yoshi when he felt her eyes on
him for the thousandth time since they’d left the surface of Etsat. “You were
right, you know. I did idolize the man. I suppose … I suppose it’s best that I’ve
been reminded painfully of his humanity … and mine.” He shook his head
ruefully. “I couldn’t believe he could be so biased. I assumed that whatever
expertise he applied so successfully to the Terran field, he’d apply to the
broader field of xenoarchaeology and become the authority there, as well.”

Yoshi looked down at her tea cup. “You’re the authority in
xenoarchaeology, Rhys. And I think that bothers Dr. Burton more than he’ll
admit.”

“Rhys?” Rick’s voice floated over to them from the intercom.
“You’ve got a communication from Dr. Burton. I’ll patch it through to the mess
comlink.”

Rhys made a face, his eyes meeting Yoshi’s through the steam
of tea. “I guess he hadn’t quite finished flaying me.”

But Burton apparently was no longer in a flaying mood. His
face, filling the comlink’s flat screen, wore a shining cloak of joviality.

“Rhys! I’m glad I caught you before you left. I, em, I’d
like to apologize for losing my temper earlier. It was unprofessional in the
extreme. Unforgivable, really. I’d like to have you to a bit of a send-off
party aboard our cutter—a bit more plush than the cabins at the dig.”

Caught completely off guard by the older man’s conciliatory
tone, Rhys could only stammer out his acceptance. Several hours later he, Yoshi
and Rick ferried over to the
Feathered
Serpent
for the send-off. Burton greeted them in the docking bay with Wayne
Bell at his side. He seemed cordial enough, but Rhys caught an undercurrent of
nervousness and found it impossible to relax. The slightest misstep, he feared,
would bring on another fit of professional vituperation.

What actually happened was much stranger. They were passing
through the row of crew’s cabins with Burton leading and Bell bringing up the
rear, when the Professor stopped in mid-corridor and slid back one of the cabin
doors.

“Dr. Llewellyn, if you and your associates would kindly enter
and prepare for transport?”

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.”

“This ship must have temporal grid limiters—”

Burton shrugged. “Which can be 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. 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 I 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. 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.

oOo

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.

oOo

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
torn about this “mission,” and knew he shouldn’t be. He should be outraged at
Burton, but the thought of seeing firsthand 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 volcanic 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.

oOo

Dressed in forest camouflage and packing a proximity
scanner, they used the still, predawn hours to set up an observation post
upslope 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 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
rickshas 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 5,005
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.”

“Ah, but you and I will know, Rhys. You and I will know.
Now, building 1A has before it a stele depicting a merchant goddess and her
pack—”

“It’s a weaver’s shop!” Yoshi broke into the narrative.

“What?” Wayne Bell glanced from the display that showed a
Burton’s-eye-view to the view through his own optics.

“Look. That woman in the red halter went in empty-handed and
came out with a little rug or something draped over her arm. And there goes
someone with a basket of yarn.”

Sure enough, a female Etsatat bearing a basket of brightly
colored yarn walked up to the doorstep of the equally colorful building and
spoke to someone just inside the door. She then set the basket in a sunny spot
on the patio behind the stele where the colors of her wares shone like jewels.

A moment later, a second woman joined her from inside the
building and began to pick through the jumble of richly hued spools. In the
end, she wagged her head and made a series of intricate hand gestures. Then she
pulled several rings of bright metal from her necklace and handed them to the
other woman who bobbed, turned, and left the yarns, basket and all, in the six
fingered hands of their newcomer.

Rhys glanced at Burton. He had stopped recording and had
moved his holocam to another target. Rhys glanced at the locational grid on
Burton’s display frame then adjusted his optics to find the building visually.

There was the wall relief Rick had found so amusing. It was
part and parcel of a shoulder-height stone wall that enclosed a paved piazza.
Wall and building were glazed in succulent colors overlaid on gleaming, white
granitic rock. A woven awning stretched over the patio, undulating gently in
the breeze. Beneath it sat five rows of low wooden platforms, two of which were
already populated by kneeling and squatting Etsatat who seemed to be engaged in
lively conversation. They used their hands much as they talked, all the while
dipping into bowls and baskets of food spread before them.

All in all, Rhys thought, they looked very much like the
quartet of brightly painted fellows in the relief on the encircling wall.

“Four guys selling pizza,” murmured Yoshi, hiding a giggle
beneath her whisper. “I wish Rick were here.”

Burton moved his focus yet again.

Wayne Bell frowned at the blur on the holopad. “Do you want
me to do that, Professor?”

There was no response.

“I realize we’re not supposed to be here, but I really think
we should be recording this.”

“It’s only a bistro,” muttered Burton. “A stupid, mundane
bistro.”

“Professor,” breathed Bell. “With all due respect—it’s a
five thousand-year-old
alien
bistro.”

The day continued in much the same way. Wayne Bell
eventually took over the recording, Rhys and Yoshi catalogued buildings and
cultural features and Burton pouted, insisting that he’d never been as
interested in the village as Nyami had been and grumbling about not having gone
straight to the Sper-ets complex. By late afternoon, they had located two
metallurgists or smiths, a spinner, a dyer, two mercantiles, an apothecary, two
doctors or shaman, a wagon wright, a second bath house, and two smaller
eateries. There was also a building Rhys thought was an inn and a place south
of the amphitheater that seemed to be a school.

There were homes as well, none over two stories tall. The
only edifice taller than that sat just north of the amphitheater. It was
different than the other buildings in town from the height of its facade to its
shape and the character of its ornamentation. The curved face was taller than
the roof behind it, giving the impression that the building wore a crown or
tiara. The roofing was a tile of such deep indigo that it seemed to suck
sunlight from the sky. Unlike other buildings, it had no paint upon either face
and visible sides or around its many round windows.