Or what was left of them.
Her tent was in pieces, ripped and torn and useless. A pair of shoes. Her bandeau. A broken spear, flint tip gone.
“The storm got worse after I got you,” Martin apologized as he exited the hut after her. They stood together, side by side, over the pathetic little pile. “We found what we could but we were busy with you and, well…”
“It’s all right,” she said. She reached down, touched the bandeau.
It’s safe, Artie assured her. I killed all the little flea bastards. And their eggs. And their eggs eggs.
She picked it up, stood, and fastened the bandeau in place around her neck. The fibers were ragged, worn and frayed, but it felt right when it settled into place on top of her breasts. She glanced at Martin. He seemed awkward, uncertain.
“I suppose you have to go now.”
She seemed just as clumsy and hesitant.
“The Kehin will expect me to come back,” she agreed. “But…”
“What?”
“Sometimes I stay longer, after I’ve told everyone else to evacuate,” she said, in a rush. “The uncertainty grows because some event, something key to their timelines, is about to occur. Even though all the Travelers here are from congruent lines, it’s still a center of uncertainty.”
“But you’re not from this timeline,” he said slowly.
“Exactly. It might cause them uncertainty but it does nothing to me. Still, I don’t dare change anything or I might lose the timeline where the Kehin can unlock Mom. So I just stay here, quiet and out of the way, and record. Sometimes I earn a reward and they give us extra time together.”
I have an—, Artie said in silent.
“Shut up,” Martin said. He turned to Rachel.
“Stay,” Martin said, impulsively. Suddenly he felt it again, the loneliness he kept pushed away, like he had that night so long, long ago. Back when the stars looked so much different than they did now and he realized he would have to live his way home.
“Stay? I can’t. My tent, my supplies… I have nothing.”
“Stay here. In the hut. With me.”
“With you?”
“Yes,” Martin said. He gestured helplessly. “I need someone who can help me with the beer and the flints and mashing the wheat and—”
“Hush,” she said. She stepped closer to him, but not close enough to touch. “I’ll stay. But just for a few days.”
Martin smiled.
“But just for a few days,” she warned, and smiled back at him.
All right, what’s your idea? I admit it, I’m all out of if-then, even in random mode.
It was months later. Martin sat outside the camp, on the crest of a ridge where he could see across the valley and up the hill to the temple on top of Gobekli Tepe. He absently chewed a long piece of rye grass.
“Let me see Gobekli, again.”
Artie shifted his vision to binocular mode.
Gobekli Tepe’s latest incarnation was almost finished. The Tall Men, giant T-shaped pillars, twenty five feet high, solid limestone blocks, carved with shapes in bas-relief, were almost set into place facing each other. The benches facing the open area between the tall men were ready. The smaller pillars, arranged in a circle around the Tall Men, were up. Thatch and wooden poles, to make and support the roof, lay in piles, ready to be assembled and cover the whole temple once the tall men were ready.
The entrance was still a wooden framework, a skeleton of lashed-together branches and limbs. It was deliberately short—to make everyone duck and lower their heads—and winding. When it was ready it would become a corridor, covered with layers of hides to make a darkened tunnel with just enough torches and openings to see a step or two ahead. The idea, one of the priests had told him after a night of drinking, was to have people experience the darkness of death and dying before they entered the temple to celebrate and honor their own dead.
It was almost time for the tribes to gather and the ceremonies to begin.
You want to go to the temple and work the crowds? One more time?
“No,” Martin said decisively. “How many times have we tried that? How many hundreds of years? It’s never there. Too many people, too much going on, too hard to figure out what to do. I’m sick of searching Gobekli. It never works.”
But we know it comes through Gobekli on its way to Carthage, Artie argued.
“Agreed,” Martin said. “Every trail we’ve followed shows it comes through here. But despite everything we’ve tried, the Qart-hadast Travelers still come back here from the future every few months. If we had broken the chain, they wouldn’t come back. So we haven’t done the job right yet.”
Martin shook his head.
“The camp is the key,” Martin said, stubborn and determined. “The people come here, to the camp. This is the key, not Gobekli. It spreads out from here and eventually ends up in Carthage.”
Even if this is the change locus, what good does it do us? Artie asked, despairingly. When the temple is dedicated, when the Tall Men are set in place, all the tribes will flow in here with their dead. Thousands of people. It’s even worse than searching up at the temple. Too many people and too crowded. How the hell do we find it?
“We need to make it look for us. A honey trap is the best idea.”
I don’t like it.
“You don’t have to like it. You just have to tell me if your if-then thinks it will work.”
Martin sat quietly on the hillside. He finished the rye grass straw, tossed it aside, picked another and started chewing fresh.
Before him were plains and rolling hillsides, green and fertile, fresh with rain, crossed with small streams, dotted with marshes. A flock of goats, a small herd of gazelle. The plains of Edin.
“Maybe I should change my name to Eve,” he asked thoughtfully.
Wrong sex, Artie said. And even worse attitude.
“Answer?”
Maybe, Artie said, thoughtfully. My if-then says maybe your idea will work. But you know what that maybe means?
“I know,” Martin said, morosely. He licked his lips, moved his jaw back and forth.
More beer.
“Rachel can help us,” Martin said. He did not look happy. “More wheat gruel. More starter mash.”
If you want to build a trap, you have to bait it…
“So we concentrate here this time.”
Beer. And Rachel’s knife.
Artie went silent. Martin imagined the code, all the if-then spinning around if-then, subroutines chasing subroutines, with random changes thrown in, evolved in, evolved out…
And what if you do find it? Artie asked. If we do what we have to do, all the Qart-hadast timelines, all the Travelers from those futures, are going to shift away. You’ll be alone again. And what about Rachel? She must have some small connection to these timelines, or she never would have made it here. Are you going to just use her and then let her, maybe… go away? Damn it, Martin, if she’s linked to Qart-hadast she won’t even get to say goodbye to her mother!
“Are the needs of the one,” Martin asked, “more important than the needs of the many?”
Yes. That’s exactly what I’m asking you. That’s exactly what my if-then wants to know.
Martin stared at Gobekli. Even at full magnification, the priests and the slaves seemed like tiny little ants, unimportant, something to be brushed away and ignored. Not something important. Not something like himself.