Hundayi felt the last dregs of initiative slipping out of his grasp, and tried to seize them. He unsnapped the flap over his sidearm and drew it out of its holster. "I demand to know who you really are, and what you're doing here. You will be placed under arrest until such time as you have proven to my satisfaction—"
"Let me be frank with you, Major. I represent an international scientific organization which has generously donated to the oppressed people of your great nation several million dollars' worth of medicines, scientific equipment and chemicals which are prohibited under the UN sanctions of Resolution 687. In return for this largesse, and the promise of much more to come, we have been granted unrestricted access to the Tiamat site, and pledged with the assistance and protection of your unit for the duration of the project."
"What is this project?" Hundayi demanded.
"We are going to open Tiamat," Keogh said.
The Major holstered his gun, thunderstruck. It was unthinkable.
"We have a plan, and a very strict timetable, which calls for the excavation to be complete in forty days, Major. More equipment is being flown in from Turkey, and should arrive tomorrow, but we'd like to get started immediately building a shelter and quarters for our people. So, if you have no further objections, I urge you to inspect your orders, and let us get down to business."
In the commo hut, Major Hundayi sat for a long time before he picked up the phone. This was an unacceptable situation he'd been placed in. This American had come out of nowhere with an army of civilians and gear for a full-fledged archaeological dig. The orders in the envelope were what the American had said they were. Unequivocal and clear, and signed by the One himself, they nonetheless only muddied his mind further.
This was exactly the kind of head game the Americans played in the Kuwaiti War, lies and forged documents circulated among the troops to make them think the war was over and Saddam had surrendered, before it had begun. But he also knew that Iraq had, in the last eight years, built a thriving black market to skirt the embargo, smuggling oil out and everything else in around UN and US Navy blockades. Though a million Iraqi babies had died, deprived of medicines and food, the army was stronger now than it had been when it invaded Kuwait, and Saddam's palaces were more plentiful and extravagant than ever. Whatever the American wanted from Tiamat, it was not hard to imagine that he could buy it.
In the end, he called the number at the bottom of the orders, but when a ferocious voice answered the phone by calling him by name, he almost slammed the phone down.
"Hundayi, what is your fucking problem, you shit? Can you not read?" Though he had never heard the voice himself, it was familiar to him from television and radio. It was Uday, Saddam's eldest son and would-be heir. If it were the One, Hundayi would have been frightened for his life, but the One was more or less rational, at least to your face. Uday was an unknown quantity, a spoiled, maniacal devil who sliced up girls and ran over pedestrians for sport in Italian racing cars. Though he had no role in the military chain of command like his younger brother and bitter rival, Qusay, he was forever embroiled in one stupid scheme or another, with or without his father's approval, and had more than ample clout to reach out and squash any who thwarted him.
Major Hundayi picked every syllable with nervous care. "Forgive me, most excellent sir, but it is most unusual and with Americans one can't—"
"Worthless sucker of cocks! Your orders are to assist the dig, protect the dig, lick the diggers' asses for them if they ask, and stay the fuck out of their way, or you are shit from dogs, do I make myself clear?"
"Perfect clear, most excellent sir," he said.
Uday ordered him to leave the room while his second-in-command, Captain Gul, spoke to the younger Saddam. He knew exactly what effect this was intended to have on his nerves, but it still worked.
Major Hundayi walked outside to find half the trucks were gone. In their place, a horde of men and women in fatigues assembled tents. They looked like the UN, whites, blacks and Arabs working together, but there was something else. There was no overseer barking orders, no central plan. They worked silently, each an integral part of the whole, with their portion of the plan firmly fixed in his or her mind. They shamed his own men with their efficiency.
He walked back up the ridge and looked down into the pit. The rest of the trucks had moved down there, and encircled the great plug of concrete where Tiamat had once stood. With the same silent, ant-like order, they dragged the parts for an enormous tent out of the trucks and began to assemble it over the plug.
"A temporary shelter," said an American voice from behind him. He jumped, a little. "Tomorrow, we'll begin to build a more permanent one, which will render the excavation invisible from the air. No UN enforcement flights are scheduled over this area for three more days, and by then, we'll be securely dug in."
Hundayi turned and regarded the white-haired American, who had crept up to within arm's reach of him unnoticed. His deeply-lined features were pale and bookish, but his eyes pinned and probed Hundayi. They were prophet's eyes, burning with an icy, omniscient zeal that was more than Hundayi had ever dreamed there was to power. The mullahs of Iran who sent fanatical human waves of children into his gunsights in the War of the Cities had only sparks of such cold fire. Through his eyes, Hundayi could see that he knew things no other man could know, had seen secret things too terrible to tell, and yet he believed in something too wondrous to describe, something that was coming over the horizon any minute. Against those eyes, Hundayi found himself beginning to burn with a desire to believe in it, too, to make it happen, whatever it was.
"Are you a religious man, Major Hundayi?" Keogh asked.
He bristled at the impertinence of the question. He had never discussed his faith with men beside whom he had faced death on the battlefield, and this American, this civilian, deigned to talk religion to him? "What I believe is no affair of yours," he said, as civilly as he could.
"Saddam was a fool to allow the UN to fill it in," Keogh said. "Kuwait was a pearl, but this…" He turned and approached Major Hundayi so swiftly his hand went to his holster, but Keogh was already inside the sweep of his arm before he got it unclasped. "Do you know about Delphi, Major? In ancient Greece, an oracle sat in a cave over a deep fissure that they believed reached down to the center of the earth, where Gaea, the living earth itself, whispered prophecies. They called the oracle's cave and the temple of Apollo there the Omphalos, or navel of the world. This place is infinitely more precious. This is the living womb of the earth."
Major Hundayi sneered and stepped back. "Your cousins in the United Nations did not agree with you. You Westerners are never of one mind about anything."
Dr. Keogh smiled at him. "But we will be," he said. "Soon."
He walked out to the edge of the cliff, and by the settling of his posture, Major Hundayi could tell that he was lost in memory. To heave the American over the edge now would be such a simple thing…
"It has been so long since I was here last. So much has changed since it was ours…"
"We have always stood guard here, Dr. Keogh. This has always been
our
land."
"Major," Dr. Keogh said, "the last time I was here, your ancestors had not yet crawled up out of the oceans." Major Hundayi jumped, because the Doctor still stood with his back to him, but the voice came from behind him. He whirled, and this time he did draw his pistol, but he could not raise it any higher than his own beltline. The man before him was Dr. Keogh, and so were the three men beside him. One was red-headed and plump, another an Arab or Turk, and the third was a white woman, with hair wrapped in a scarf. But they all looked at him with
his
eyes,
his
mind behind them, as if they believed so fervently in his vision that they had been burned away, and only he looked out of their heads. One or another spoke, but the bedrock of his voice lay beneath their words.
"When I was here last, this land was a great forest, and the ruin below us was the mouth of all Creation, and the last best hope of a race as far advanced beyond your kind as you are above the single-celled amoebae that escaped from this place and struggled to evolve into you. They failed, but their grand experiment goes on, down there. Beneath all that stone, lies the Garden of Eden."
Major Hundayi felt as if he were going to faint. His voice cracked as he asked, "And what—what will you do?"
"We are going to walk into Eden, and we are going to eat the flesh of the gods."
Hundayi bowed his head and covered his face with his hands to pray for surely this was a devil, and if there were devils then surely there must be God. "There is no god but Allah—"
"Oh, the universe is rife with gods, but not one of them cares for your miserable race. Do you know the true name of the Crawling Chaos, or the Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young, or the Unbegotten Source? They sleep, and hear you not. I am the only god who will hear your prayers, Major."
Hundayi sank to the ground before the Americans. Jagged black rock bit into his rubbery knees. He did not want to, but he feared if he didn't bow down, he'd stumble off the cliff-face, or be pushed. And the Major had come so far, fought so hard, just to stay alive in this shitty army, this shitty world. He was almost relieved to know that, now, nothing else mattered. What he had to do was sickening to him, but he had done it all his life, and needed no further prodding to do it now. "I pray to you, most excellent Sir," he hissed, "I beseech you spare my life, and let me serve you. But tell me, please: what are you?"
"The first," Dr. Keogh said, "and the last," and showed him.
~1~
There was dark.
There were dreams so real she thought she'd died and been reborn. A cat in the lap of someone with eternally stroking, scratching hands. A protean sliver of almost-living matter on a cradle of languid tides, her boneless body little more than a higher iteration of the blood-warm water around her. Adrift on the dying gamma ray emissions of a supernova, a blackened speck of mind that not even the death of a sun could extinguish.
The dreams exploded in black fireworks like she'd been socked in both eyes, and it was less like waking up than being reborn into a stone womb, to a mother who cannot feel her, and will never birth her out.
There were burning worms of phosphene unlight in her eyes that might be the test pattern blind people see all their lives, or maybe just chemical vapors and radioactive isotopes eating them out of her head. Her mind darting a thousand directions at once and returning with no answers. Her body coming back with the same dumb responses,
no, you cannot move, no, there's nothing to see. Legs? Haven't heard from them in ages.
She screamed so loud that the ragged sound trailed off only when she had flattened her lungs, so loud she sent pebbles and dust tumbling in the dark. Not because of fear, which was growing like ice crystals in her brain with the realization of where she was. Not in hope of being found, because anyone looking for her would hardly have her rescue in mind. She screamed because she had no other way of telling herself she was alive. She was crushed between two slabs of steel-reinforced concrete deep in a collapsed warren of tunnels beneath a junkyard in the middle of the Mojave Desert, and nobody knew she was there.
Her throat was parched and nearly stopped up with dust, and her sinuses were packed with a conglomerate of sand and snot that felt like crushed glass. She could feel fluid flowing past her on the slab, but she restrained herself from drinking. She burned all over, her skin raw and blistered from her scalp to her belly. The odds on her laying in anything like water in this godforsaken hole were next to nil.
Like your chances of getting rescued.
She forced herself to lie still, forced her breathing to level off, and let her gyroscopic mind whirl itself to an exhausted standstill.
She could move her left hand before her face, but the right was pinned flat against her back in a devastating compound shoulder fracture.
Still in shock, I must be, that should hurt like hell.
She could feel something that might be either a tarantula or her right hand twitching uselessly against her left shoulder blade. Below there, she could feel nothing at all.
That she had survived the previous week, only to end up here, buried alive in the mad prison she almost escaped with a cure for her cancer, made a perverse kind of sense that she might have laughed at, if it were somebody else's life she was reading about in the odd news from Reuters, over breakfast. When her captors had opted for suicide over capture by federal agents, she'd bolted, and gotten free. She could still see that fleeting glimpse of moonless sky, alive with stars and roving searchlights, and that wondrous
other
light from on high, what the Radiant Dawn patient Stephen had called the moon ladder, that had touched her just before the earth opened up and swallowed her. She could still see that soldier, the one who'd come back for her, could still feel the fumes of that exhilaration when she'd thought the world had seemingly decided it had tired of fucking with Stella Orozco and wanted to make things right. Now the soldier was probably buried alongside her, and no light would ever touch her living skin again. This was not the end she would have foreseen for herself, stupid girl, and that was what hurt most of all.
Why are you alive right now?
She was a survivor. She had taken one misstep into her new life, and lay in the grave, unable to die. That fits, God. I'm alive because there's nobody else, who knows I'm here, nobody else to laugh at my joke. If I laugh, if I admit it—
Good one, God, you really had me going there for a minute—
then I'll be allowed to die.