Not entirely without conflict, were they?
An older deity, with a lined face and weary eyes, bent over a scroll. A girl played a stringed instrument. And a male, overweight even for a Goompah, was transfixed in the act of laughing. He seemed somehow most dominant of all, and he set the mood for the place.
“Are you thinking what I am?” Kellie whispered.
That all this was going to be destroyed? That the circular shape of the temple was unlikely to save it because it was much too close to the city? “You know,” he said, “I’m beginning to get annoyed.”
The floor was constructed from ornately carved tiles. There were geometric designs, but he could also see depictions of the rays of the sun and images of branches and leaves. There were more columns in the interior. These were narrower, and they were decorated by the now-familiar symbols of the Goompah language. They moved through the temple, taking pictures of everything.
The worshipers walked quietly. No one spoke; the only sounds came from the wind and the sea and the periodic scream of a seabird. In the west, the sun was sinking toward the horizon.
An attendant passed through, lighting oil lamps. “It’s getting late,” Kellie said. “You ready to go back?”
Digger nodded. He removed a pickup from his vest, kept it carefully hidden in his hands, until he’d inserted it in the shadows between a column and a wall. “Last one,” he said.
“You think there’s much point, Dig? I don’t think anybody here says anything.”
“It’s okay. The atmosphere of this place is worth recording and sending back.”
But he knew they wouldn’t capture the atmosphere on disk. Hutchins, sitting in her office three thousand light-years away, would never understand what this place felt like.
They stood a moment between two columns and watched a ship pass. Digger tried to remember what the ocean looked like to the east. How far was the next major landfall?
“Traffic must all be up and down the isthmus,” said Kellie. “North and south.”
Not east and west. There was no evidence the Goompahs had been around the world. Strictly terra incognita out there.
The visitors to the temple were filing away; Digger and Kellie were almost alone. The lamps burned cheerfully, but their locations seemed primarily designed to accent the statuary.
Digger looked at the flickering lights, at the figure of the woman and child. What was the story behind that? The images were aspects, he knew, of the local mythology. Of the things that the Goompahs thought important. This was information that Collingdale would want to have.
The place was different in some ineffable way from houses of worship at home. Or even from pagan temples.
They paused again before the winged figure at the entrance. “Somebody here studied under Phidias,” said Kellie.
Digger nodded. Creature from another world that he was, he could still read dignity and power and compassion in those features. And the torch that she held spoke to him.
He looked back into the rotunda. At the laughing god.
THE ISTHMUS ROAD seemed unduly long on the return, and Digger was weary by the time they reached the lander. Night had fallen, and he was glad to shut off the lightbender and the e-suit and collapse into his seat.
Kellie gave a destination to Bill, and they lifted off and turned seaward. “How we doing?” she asked, reminding him that his bleak mood was still showing.
“Good,” he said. “We’re doing fine.”
For a long moment he could hear only the power flow. “You going to be all right?” she asked.
He looked out at scudding clouds, bright in the double moonlight. “Sure.” Don’t do it, Digger. He was okay. A little down, but he was okay. “Where are we going?”
“There’s an island. Safe place to spend the night.”
“Alone with Collier on an island,” he said. “Sounds like a dream.”
“You don’t sound as if you mean it.”
“I’m all right,” he insisted. “This island. Does it have a name?”
She thought a moment. “Utopia,” she said.
LIBRARY ENTRY
The great tragedy confronting us here is not that the Goompahs, to use the common terminology, face massive destruction, although that is surely cause enough for sorrow. But what makes me sad is that they may pass from existence without ever having understood the supreme joy that accompanies the life of the spirit. They have lived their lives, and they have missed the heart of the matter.
— Rev. George Christopher
The Monica Albright Show
Wednesday, May 7
PART THREE
molly kalottuls
chapter 20
On board the al-Jahani, in hyperflight.
Tuesday, June 10.
THE NEWS OF Markover’s death had delivered a jolt, reminding everyone on board that the operation on which they were embarked had its unique dangers.
A few members of the research team had known him. Peggy Malachy had worked with him years earlier, and Jason Holder recollected signing a petition that Markover had sent around, though he could not recall the issue. Jean Dionne remembered him from a joint mission years before. “Good man,” she told Collingdale. “A bit stuffy, but you could depend on him.”
Collingdale had been on a weeklong flight with him once. He remembered Markover as aggressive, arrogant, irritating. Although he wouldn’t have admitted it even to himself, he was relieved he wouldn’t have to deal with him at Lookout.
THE LINGUISTS WERE getting torrents of raw data from the Jenkins. They’d broken into the language, and were in the process of constructing a vocabulary that by then numbered several hundred nouns and verbs. They understood the syntactical structure, which resembled Latin, verb first, noun/subject deeper in the sentence. They had the numeric system and most of its terms down. (Base twelve, undoubtedly a reflection of the fact that Goompahs had twelve digits.) They knew the names of about forty individuals.
The city that Markover had called Athens was Brackel in the language of its inhabitants.
Brackel.
Whatever else you could say for the Goompahs, they had tin ears.
The residents of Brackel were Brackum. Well, Collingdale thought, there you are.
Two other cities for which they had names were Roka and Sakmarung. The planet, their word for Earth, was Korbikkan, which (as at home) also meant ground. They lived in it, and not on it, implying they had no sense of the structure of things. Their name for the sea was bakka, which also meant that which is without limit.
They had a complex conjugal system of shared spouses, which Collingdale and his team of specialists hadn’t quite figured out yet. Brackel seemed to be home to approximately twenty-eight community groups. Spouses within a group had free access to each other, although it appeared they settled on a favorite or two, and only had relations with others to keep up appearances or morale or some such thing. It wasn’t an area in which Collingdale was interested, but some of his experts were already making lascivious jokes.
Offspring from one group could, on maturity, become a member by marriage of specified other groups. But the choices were limited to prevent genetic damage. It was a cumbersome system, which would, he suspected, eventually give way to monogamy. Holder wasn’t so sure, pointing out that similar systems were still in use in remote places at home.
They had not established whether the same system was in use in the other cities, although preliminary evidence suggested it was.
Life among the Goompahs seemed to be pretty good. Apparently, the crops all but grew themselves. Digger Dunn was still dithering about getting a reliable climate analysis, but it looked as if the temperatures ranged from cool to balmy.