The Dig (45 page)

“Where’d the silver stuff go?” he asked.

“Hang on a sec,” Hank replied. “Let’s go in the order we discovered stuff. I still have the ground opaque—oh, and I apologize for the crude surfaces. There’ll be textures and shading before we release it to the media.”

“I think you’re forgiven, Hank,” Tuni laughed. “But what did you mean about the opaque ground?”

“It means,” Peter cut in, “that this three-D site plotter takes all the data from the GPR and builds a map of what’s underground. He can make the brown surface you see there disappear so you can see what we’ve found underneath. But just watch…”

Hank slid the mouse, and they flew up past the trees dividing the sites, to hover about twenty to thirty feet above the surface of B site. Hank clicked a bar on the side of the screen, and the ground became mostly transparent, revealing a warped dome shape perhaps ten feet below the surface. He slid another virtual dial, and the house turned transparent as well. Off to one side of the interior was a gray scribble, and another scribble lay a bit deeper, below the dome.

“What are those?” Matt asked.

“I can answer this one!” Tuni blurted. Peter and Hank looked back at her, amused. “What?” she said. “I was here when we excavated it! I’m not going to be able to tell him
anything
but this.” She turned to Matt. “So, that one over there on the side is the full k’yot we found first. It was all covered in rock that had to be pulverized and removed from every little thread. Peter shipped the middle section to Jon, and you got to see that part when I brought it to you. The top and bottom are still here.”

Matt nodded, fascinated that all this detail could be gathered without even lifting a shovel.

“Now, that one down below, we found it later, and that one is Irin’s k’yot, which you just saw. Correct me if I’m wrong here, gents, but it was buried
under
the surface in
their
time. Then, sometime later, they apparently built the dome over the ground. They’re guessing that—”

“Postulating!” Hank interrupted.

“Sorry! Gosh… they are
pasteurizing
”—she winked at Matt—“that it was put inside the house later and that it might have been a son of Irin and Orin.
You,
my dear, should be able to answer that question at some point.”

Matt imagined it. The possibilities staggered the mind: getting to know a son of Irin and all that he might have experienced.

“So, moving on,” Hank said, clicking another icon on the screen.

Now thousands of little silver capsules appeared under the surface. They looked like slightly elongated medicine capsules, all lying at slightly different angles around Irin’s middle dome.

“And now,” Hank began, “Pete, do I just roll over now or do I show them the render?”

“Do the animation—it’s much more dramatic.”

Hank closed the window and clicked a new icon, and a big window opened and filled the screen. He clicked the play button, and the black dissolved to a simple computer-generated image of a tree. The view lifted up and moved forward, as if a bird had taken off from the tree. It flew higher, and they could see a panorama of small domes. The camera swooped low and passed between a couple of houses, almost running into one at the end of a path before zooming upward. Beyond the house, the vastness of the city became very apparent. There were thousands of domes, with several larger ones, the size of Pwin-T’s Center House. In the very center, the “bird” circled an enormous new Center House, nearly twice the size of the others. It zoomed higher and made a wide circle of the entire area, giving a better view of the city’s scale. Matt and Tuni watched, agape, as the camera turned upward to a starry night sky, rising higher and higher before turning back downward and stopping over a view of both sites: the city and the graveyard. The city appeared to occupy ten times more area than the graveyard.

“Amazing,” Matt breathed. “That is just
huge,
and it really lets you see it as it was. I don’t know if you realize this, but seeing it from that one angle, it was like the first time I saw Pwin-T from the mountain pass, though it looks probably three times the size that Pwin-T was. Crazy, guys, seriously.”

“You did this, Hank?” Tuni asked.

He shrugged modestly. “Well, the program does all the heavy lifting, but I did give it the flight path.”

They all looked at the still shot of the two sites.

“Now, hold on,” Tuni said. “The A site looks far bigger than the clearing out here. Did you take a little creative license there, gents? For the sake of theatric effect?”

“Not at all,” Peter said. “We’ve found houses another half mile into the woods! We just haven’t gotten clearance to log over there. We’re also not sure if we should, you know? Do we really need to dig up
everything
? We’ve got a good ten-year project ahead of us as it is, just for what you see gridded out there. At some point tourists are going to be walking the land here, like the pyramids in Egypt. I think it’ll be fine to let some of the city remain hidden, but I don’t know. It’ll be someone else’s decision down the road.”

Matt wondered what else they would find in and around the houses. Surely only the metal items would have lasted this long.

“Okay,” Matt said, “so what we saw in the video there—is that what the area will look like after you’ve excavated everything?

“Not exactly,” Hank replied as he cleaned his glasses on his T-shirt. “We can tell from the radar data that most of the domes are either crushed, warped, split into pieces, or otherwise damaged. A good number of them are pretty well intact, though. Also, the plain they’re on is not flat like you see in here—erosion and continental plate shifting has it all a bit jumbled. But Pete has a plan for leveling it all out and arranging a whole side of A site that will be a representation of what it really looked like. I presume he’ll be calling you to help reproduce some of the common items and other things one might have seen back then.”

“Yep,” Peter added, “it’s going to be brilliant when we get there.”

Matt sighed, realizing that he would have to return to Africa again despite his promise to himself before this journey.

“So…” He cleared his throat. “Can we see it again?”

Later, during dinner, Matt asked what time the news crews would arrive the next day.

Collette put down her chicken fajita, wiped her mouth daintily, and said, “Well, I’ve got the whole schedule in the office, but I do know that your unveiling ceremony will be at eleven.”

Matt nodded. “Okay, and who exactly are you all saying that I am? Not to seem ungrateful for the opportunity, but I really don’t want any attention on me personally.”

“Simple,” Peter interjected. “You were one of our key researchers in the initial phase at the old site. Also, you were the creative one who came up with all the interesting names for things like
k’yot
and
Pwin-T
and all that. Though, the government is insisting on calling them ‘Kawai People’ after the nearest town.”

“Okay, that sounds cool. Can we use a fake name for me, too?”

Peter and Hank exchanged a glance.

“Er… ,” Peter stammered, “we sort of already told them the name of the person uncovering the structure. Sorry—didn’t know you wanted that level of anonymity.”

Matt shrugged it off. “It’s cool, I guess. I mean, it’s not like I have the most unique name. There’s probably thousands of me in the U.S.”

“So, Matthew,” Hank cut in, “what are you going to do after this? You leave tomorrow afternoon, right?”

“Yeah, actually, Tuni and I are going to Tahiti.”

Oohs and aahs spread around the table. Peter gave Matt a knowing wink.

Tuni saw him and said, “Oh, grow up, Peter.” And holding back her grin, she poked Matt in the side.

“Yeah, I’ve been trying to go for a while and lost out on the room I had reserved before, but it turns out there was another resort just as good that had the kind of conditions I was looking for. It took a little convincing before Tuni agreed to come with me.”

“So, you two are seeing a lot of each other, then?” Peter pried.

“Matthew is very comfortable in his house—four bloody states away,” Tuni replied loftily. “And I’m quite comfortable in New York. Let’s just say that Skype is a godsend.”

“She doesn’t know it yet, but she’ll be moving in within a year.”

“Shut it,” Tuni replied, giving him a little sideways kick.

At eleven the next morning, Matt stood in the middle of the square excavation, shovel in hand. Photographers and video camera crews crowded the ledge above him, and the documentary filmmakers stood in front of him with all their equipment. Peter stood on his right, Hank and Tuni on his left. Three news helicopters circled above.

In the pit, the National Geographic channel’s director gave Matt the signal, and after thanking everyone for coming, Matt pushed the shovel into the dirt. He tossed a spadeful aside, then another, and on the third thrust, there was an audible chink of metal on metal. Cameras snapped, film rolled, and Matt kept digging. Four more shovelfuls revealed a dull, pitted metal surface. At this point, all four of them—Matt, Tuni, Hank, and Peter—got down on their knees and brushed the remaining dirt away. Matt ran his work gloves over the surface and smiled for the pictures. Then, looking down at the small section of exposed metal, he knew that he was ready to do another session. He couldn’t wait for the media business to be over so he could read from Irin’s recovered k’yot.

Walking back to Peter’s RV, he refused a dozen interviews, then hid inside with a can of mixed nuts. He wondered how weird he looked in a hooded sweatshirt, jeans, and gloves while the other three wore shorts and short-sleeved shirts.

An hour later, the helicopters were long gone and most of the news vans had rumbled back up the highway toward Nairobi. Tuni had joined Matt in the RV, then Hank, and finally Peter.

When Peter took the whole k’yot from the cupboard and spread it out on the table, Tuni took a deep breath and massaged Matt’s shoulders. “You sure you’re ready for this now?” she whispered in his ear.

“You don’t think I should?” he replied. Then he quickly added, “You’re right, let’s just forget the whole thing. I don’t know what I was thinking.” She flicked his ear.

“This’ll be like the good old days, huh, Matt?” Peter said, sliding in next to Hank.

Matt pulled off his gloves and gave them to Tuni, then looked in awe at the garment that lay before him. “Wait,” he said. “Who has my timer?”

It appeared in front of him before he could finish asking the question.

“Sorry, pal,” said Peter. “I thought of it right when you did. I’ve had it in my pocket since this morning—meant to give it to you a couple of times. It’s all charged up.”

Matt rolled up his left sleeve and set the timer for three minutes. They all watched his hand hover over the k’yot. He took a deep breath and dropped his hand.

I am from Pwin-T. I kneel over my man’s lifeless body. Wil helps me to remove Irin’s k’yot. I try not to look at the red around his head and on the rocks beneath him. I try to walk. It’s a challenge. The edge of the waterfall is a swirling cloud of mist. I walk into it, hold the k’yot under the falling shower to cleanse blood from it once again. Everyone is looking at me and crying. They don’t know what to do; they suppose we’re lost. We’re not lost, though. I realize this, and feel deep in my throat that I know what we must do. They just don’t realize that we’ve nearly arrived. My man got us this far; he did his job. A thought strikes me—perhaps a crazy thought, but I reject my doubts and step into the k’yot bottom, pulling the torn middle over my arms. Wil hands me the top and tells me as I pull it over my head that I must lead our people now. I tell him I will do what I can. We will build our new city, he says, and call it Irin-T. I hear my name pass quietly through the onlookers.

Orin.

* * *

T
HE SKY SEEMED TO BLEED UPWARD
from the horizon, dripping the last of the sunlight across long, wispy clouds. On the deck of their suite, Tuni looked down admiringly at Matt. Here he was, wearing swim shorts—and
only
shorts—reclining on a deckchair in this beautiful, tropical setting. He sipped soda directly from the brand-new glass, held in his ungloved hand. She climbed on top of him, careful that her bikini bottom touch only his long shorts. He looked up at her and grinned.

“How daft is all this?” She said, beaming a huge smile.

He gazed up at her eyes. “Which part, what do you mean?”

“Which part? Look at you! Bloody shorts? Not even a t-shirt!”

He smirked and stroked her arms. “Get what you pay for, right?”

She gave him a kiss on the mouth and stood back up, peering out at the watercolor sky.

He said, “You are so fricken beautiful, it’s disgusting.”

“Odd compliment, dear. Let’s stow that one away, shall we?”

“Sorry. Oh shit, what time is it?”

She glanced at the wall clock back inside the room. “Half-past six, why?”

He started to get up in a panic, “Our reservation! For some reason I thought we had more time…”