Dex felt his face flame.
“Tempt God, Archbishop?” prompted the senator.
“Matthew, chapter 4, verse 7: Thou shalt not tempt the Lord your God.”
The senator’s smile changed subtly. “You believe that Monsignor DiNardo tempted God by going to Mars, despite his illness?”
“What else? He chose secular humanism over his, Lord and Savior and suffered the consequences.”
“Then his death wasn’t an accident?”
“It was divine justice.”
Dex fought down a sudden urge to puke. This isn’t an investigation, he realized. It’s a fucking inquisition.
Tithonium Chasma: The Dig
Zeke Larkin laid his digging spade on his shoulder as he and Alonzo Jenkins trudged through the morning sunshine from the dome’s main airlock toward the dig.
Lonzo, a stubby, dark-skinned postdoc geochemist from Toronto, was singing his usual lament, “… picked up my shovel and walked to th’ mine. Loaded sixteen tons of number nine coal and th’ straw boss said—”
“Don’t you know any other songs?” Larkin asked, half annoyed, half amused.
“None that’s so appropriate.”
The rest of the digging crew were already standing around the edge of the pit in their nanofabric suits. Carleton was nowhere in sight.
“Where’s our taskmaster?” Larkin asked, turning back toward the airlock.
Sure enough, Carleton came through the hatch in his bulky hard-shell suit. He’s too goddamned stubborn to switch to a nanosuit, Larkin thought. Like it’s going to damage his reputation if he gives in and admits the nanos are better.
Carleton strode to the edge of the dig, his face hidden behind the reflective visor of his helmet. “All right,” he said, “let’s get to work.”
Larkin realized that Carleton didn’t give him any specific instructions. After his blowup with the anthropologist two days earlier, he’d stayed away from the dig. But Jamie Waterman had stepped into his lab the previous evening to tell him that Dr. Chang had rearranged his schedule and he was expected at the excavation site the next morning.
So he stood with his spade on his shoulder, like an infantryman with his rifle, as all the others started down the ramp and into the pit.
“Larkin, you go with Jenkins and help him with the digging out by the old riverbed,” Carleton said, his voicing sounding tight, edgy in Larkin’s earphone.
Suppressing an instinct to give the anthropologist a military salute, Larkin said merely, “Right. Okay.”
But he hesitated. “Dr. Carleton…”
“What?”
“Over on the other side of the village, where I was digging a couple of days ago—”
“When you decided to quit?” Carleton snapped.
Larkin sucked in a breath.
“Well?” Carleton demanded.
“Nothing,” said Larkin. And he started down the ramp to catch up with Jenkins. Why bother? he thought. So there’s some bumps in the ground out there. So what? It’s probably not important. And even if it is, he’s too pigheaded to listen to me. I’m on his shitlist, big time.
As the day wore on, though, Larkin kept thinking about the seemingly empty ground on the other side of the village. He and Jenkins were just going through the motions, he realized. They were digging through the layers of accumulated stone that had once been the bed of the river that flowed through the valley.
Look for possible fossils, Carleton had told them. Yeah, sure, thought Larkin. Like we’d be able to tell what’s a fossil from what’s an ordinary rock. On Earth you might turn up a fragment of a seashell, or the bones of some animal. But on Earth you’d recognize them for what they are. What do Martian seashells look like? How can I tell if this flat rock is just a rock or maybe it was once a turtle’s shell? No way to know. Like trying to decipher those hieroglyphics from the buildings up on the cliff. We’ve got nothing to compare them to.
Still his mind kept returning to the memory of those slight, hardy perceptible ridges in the ground out in the empty area on the other side of the village. You can hardly make them out, Larkin said lo himself. Only when the sunlight slants in at the end of the day, I hat’s when you can see them.
Do they mean anything? Probably not. And yet—they’re regular, like a pattern. Not random.
His spade struck a hard, stubborn layer of rock with an impact that sent a shudder up his arms. Damn! Like the pirates in Treasure Island when they hit the buried treasure chest.
“Hey, Lonzo,” he called. “Gimme a hand here.”
“Whatcha got?” Jenkins asked, straightening up tiredly from his own digging.
“Maybe a whale,” Larkin wisecracked.
Jenkins came over and the two of them began digging carefully around the hard object. It took more than an hour, but they finally cleared all the compacted dust from it.
“Some whale,” Jenkins grumbled, panting from the exertion. “It’s just a goddamned big flat rock.”
Larkin stared at it. Maybe a geologist could make something out of it, but he had to agree with Lonzo: it was nothing more than a big flat rock.
“A lot of work for nothing,” Larkin said.
“Yeah, but you never know. Might’ve been a whale. Or a dinosaur. You don’t know till you’ve done the work to uncover it.”
Larkin shook his head inside the inflated bubble of his helmet. “What’s that song of yours say? ‘Another day older and deeper in debt’?”
“Exactly.” Jenkins looked up at the sky. “Well, this day’s just about over. We’ve loaded our sixteen tons, right?”
“Right. Let’s head for the showers.”
But when they got to the ramp that led up to the lip of the excavation, Larkin told his partner, “You go on, Lonzo. I want to look at something.”
Jenkins shrugged inside his nanosuit and started up the ramp. Larkin walked through the remains of the village, past the dark square shapes of building foundations laid out in neat geometric order, and out to the edge of the empty space.
The sun was low enough to throw those slight banks of ground into high relief. Another few minutes and the sun’ll sink down past the edge of the pit, Larkin thought. Then it’ll all go into shadow.
He hunkered down to his knees, then leaned forward and put his head on the ground, squinting at the faint, faint rows of raised mounds.
“What are you doing?” Carleton’s voice sounded more annoyed than curious.
Getting up to a kneeling position, Larkin called back, “There’s a pattern here.”
“A pattern? What are you talking about?”
“Come over here and take a look. Quick, before the sun goes down too far.”
Turning to look over his shoulder, Larkin saw Carleton’s cumbersome hard suit clumping slowly toward him, like some robot monster from a horror vid.
“Come on,” Larkin urged. “Faster.”
Carleton lumbered up to him. “What pattern? I don’t see any—”
“Get down. You can barely make it out, but if you get down you can see the shadows.”
Muttering to himself, Carleton slowly, awkwardly lowered himself to his hands and knees. “If this is some kind of a practical joke…”
“Lower. Quick, the sun’s almost down.”
Carleton slowly, carefully got down flat on his belly. Larkin fought back a laugh. The anthropologist looked like a beached mechanical whale.
“What pat—” Carleton’s breath caught in his throat.
“You see it?” Larkin urged.
“Rectangles! Laid out in orderly rows!”