Anytime now, I told myself. Nothing stopping me from accessing what the file contained.
Deep breath.
World-soul, attend. Search file for occurrences of the name "Maya" or close homologues.
I didn’t have to specify which file, which input port — all those things would be tagged onto the transmission by my subconscious. For that matter, I didn’t have to sub-vocalize an explicit command… any more than I had to say, "Arm, lift up," when I reached for a beer. The unspoken impulse was enough; my link-seed understood what I wanted the moment I wanted it, and had dashed off a request to the datasphere long before I spoke the words in my mind.
A second passed. Then I found myself pushing the eject button, watching the bubble chips harden back to diamonds and the packet closing around them. There’d been no sensation of the world-soul "speaking" to me, telling me the file didn’t mention Maya; I just knew the file contained nothing relevant, as surely as I knew the colors of my spouses’ eyes.
Knowing without the experience of learning. Spooky.
Three more packets. Loading them, rejecting them, with no intelligible moment of transition between wondering whether a file referred to Maya and the certainty that it didn’t. Out of morbid curiosity, I tried to doubt that I’d scanned the files at all. The doubt wouldn’t come; my brain was dead certain it knew the files were clean, even though I had no idea what the chips actually contained.
Creepy. Goosepimply. Enough that when I reached the fifth packet I took a moment to read the outside label, just so I’d know what my brain was looking at.
The tag said archaeology liaison bureau. Chappalar once mentioned he scrutinized archaeological activities for the whole planet — easy work, because the "bureau" was actually a single man working out of a fiddly-dick office just down the street from us. Whenever the Heritage Board on New Earth authorized an exploration of Demoth’s ruins, our archaeology liaison was supposed to handle local arrangements (transportation, accommodation, and so on).
Not that the Heritage Board had authorized a single dig during my lifetime. As I’ve said, the board wrote off our planet long ago. So the bureau man collected his pay and spent his time teaching oboe lessons to local teens; he played with a woodwind quintet and was supposedly quite good. (If it’s not a contradiction to use "oboe" and "good" in the same sentence.)
Every year, Chappalar submitted a suggestion to the Speaker-General’s office, recommending the liaison job be dissolved or folded in with some other department. Every year, the SGO replied that the Technocracy had rejected the idea. The Heritage Board bureaucrats demanded we have someone standing ready in case they ever favored Demoth with their assy-brassy attention… and the SGO decided each year not to fight the Technocracy over a single man’s salary.
I loaded the archaeology file and watched it congeal into the reader. When it was spooled up for access, I psyched myself to deliver another request to the world-soul… and found the answer was already in my mind.
The file contained a letter signed "Maya Cuttack, Ph.D." What did the letter say? I knew that too, as if I’d memorized the message decades ago as junior-school rotework.
Dear Proctor Chappalar,
I trust it is not improper to ask for help from the Vigil — as an offworlder, I do not know what is considered appropriate on Demoth — but I am having trouble with one of your local officials, and I understand you act as a kind of ombudsman who can cut through red tape.
I am an archaeologist from Mirabile and am trying to launch an excavation in the interior of Great St. Caspian. The area contains abandoned mines dating back more than two thousand years before the Oolom colonization, and I should very much like to determine which race or races were active on Demoth at that time.
Unfortunately, my intended excavation site is owned by a company named Rustico Nickel… and while company officials are not opposed to my work, they say they cannot grant permission for me to dig unless I get an official archaeology permit.
(No surprise. Any digging on mine-owned land had to satisfy a slew of safety regulations — like requiring the company to install industrial-grade emergency equipment and establish a comprehensive risk-management program. If Rustico let Maya stick a single shovel in the soil, they’d have to pay for all those things to keep the Mines Commission happy. Very expensive. Rustico could only dodge the safety costs if Maya’s dig was an officially recognized archaeology project; and that meant a license from the Heritage Board.)
Unfortunately, my request for an excavation permit has fallen on deaf ears in Demoth’s Archaeology Liaison Bureau. The man there says he cannot issue licenses himself — that is a matter for the Technocracy’s Heritage Board. But the Heritage Board will not issue a license until it receives something called a Statement of Non-Opposition from the Demoth government… which the Archaeology Liaison Officer says he cannot give without some ridiculous background check that I am expected to pay for out of my own pocket.
Help! Is there anything you can do to make an underfunded scientist’s life easier?
Yours in hope
Maya Cuttack, Ph.D.
c/o The Henry Smallwood Guest Home
Sallysweet River
"Ouch," I said. "Have you ever had that feeling of someone walking on your grave?" The Henry Smallwood Guest Home was a manor lodge built on the old muddy site of the Circus — a place to house the worshipfully respectful Oolom tourists who flocked to pay tribute to Dads’s memory. If you looked at it one way, I shouldn’t be surprised an offplanet archaeologist had set up residence at the guest home; it was the closest thing to a hotel in the whole underpopulated interior of Great St. Caspian.
Still. This Maya Cuttack, possibly a robot, possibly a murderer… staying nearly on top of my old bedroom in Sallysweet River. It made the hairs curl on the back of my neck.
"You’ve found something?" Master Tic asked.
"An archaeologist named Maya Cuttack — an offworlder, which is why she didn’t show up when you scanned the census database. She wrote to Chappalar…" The date of the letter appeared in my mind. "She wrote to him four weeks ago." More details from the file kept popping into my head. "He investigated the situation, then met with her to explain what was going on… which obviously started their acquaintance."
"Where is this Maya now?"
"Sallysweet River."
Tic went very quiet. Every Oolom on Demoth knew the name of the town. Most of them thought of it as a place of salvation, but for Tic… anything associated with the plague probably hit him like a hammerfist to the head.
"Sallysweet River," he said. His voice was level, but he enunciated every syllable precisely. "What could possibly interest an archaeologist around that place?"
"The usual ruins," I replied. "Householes. Some ancient mines." I couldn’t help picturing the tunnel we’d used as a mass grave. The one where we regularly touched off explosions from the fumes of decay. Oh yes, there was a place archaeologists could find some eye-catching artifacts.
Tic was silent a moment, brooding. Then he drew a sharp breath, and said, "Fine. The world-soul confirms that Maya Cuttack applied to excavate several sites around Sallysweet River. The archaeology bureau conducted the usual elementary validation check on her credentials — doctorate from Pune University on Mirabile, participation in digs on Caproche, Muta, the Divian Free Republic…"