There was even the extraordinarily disturbing possibility that large numbers of humans had been taken away…as food. He was beginning to wonder if that, in fact, was the root of the worldwide primitive practice of sacrifice.
Each of the artifacts recovered at Picard appeared to be a different list of tribute and conquest. Seventeen dual inscriptions, in Proto-Sumerian and in a totally unknown language that David assumed was the native language of the An colonizers, had opened a crack in the door to an entirely new and previously unguessed-at chapter in human history, one reaching back far before the known, historical beginnings of civilization three to four thousand years earlier.
A chapter in which humanity had been enslaved by war-like invaders with a technology vastly superior to their spears and bows.
The discussion had left David feeling depressed. Lonely. The universe was not the small and comfortable place it had been back when he’d written his doctoral thesis…or when he’d married Liana.
Teri seemed to sense his mood. She leaned forward, touching his arm. “So,” she said, “not to change the subject…but what are you doing tonight? That new gel-bed of mine could use a real workout. I might even be able to rent a dolphin, just for the evening.”
He stared into her eyes for a moment and into the promise behind them. Then he looked away. “Damn. I’m sorry, Teri, no. I wish I could…”
She gave his arm a squeeze. “That’s all right, love. We’ll just have to be patient.”
He laughed, a harsh and bitter sound. Patient? He was fed up with being patient! Liana almost certainly knew about his relationship with Teri, even if she wasn’t aware of the depth of his feelings for her, but still she refused to talk about getting a divorce or even a legal separation.
The truth was that he and Liana simply weren’t well matched with each other. They’d married when he was twenty-nine and she was nineteen; lust, he’d long since decided, had a nasty tendency to cover up a person’s character flaws.
Well…not flaws, exactly, unless you called having the brains of a box full of facial tissue a flaw. And there’d been some good times, especially early on. But damn it all, how could he stay with someone as enamored of these weird cults and bizarre religions as she was, especially when those same groups seemed to be feeding off the information he’d uncovered? Sometimes, it seemed like distorted versions of his discoveries were being bandied about on the Earthnet talk shows before he’d even released them to the director of the institute. It was eerie how quickly the news was spreading through the religious underground out there.
Liana kept pestering him for information about his discoveries. Damn, but he hated that. Sometimes, he wondered if he hated her. He didn’t want to; he really simply wanted the two of them to agree that they’d made a mistake, that they weren’t well matched, and that they should go their separate ways. But the way she was clinging to him, his disdain for her was going to turn to hatred pretty soon.
He was, he realized, unhappy with his life, and that wasn’t Liana’s fault. Working jaunts to Mars and the Moon were a wonderful perk—at least, they were when he wasn’t being shot at—and the chance at making discoveries destined to change humankind’s understanding of history went a long way toward guaranteeing that he would never be bored…but there was still a bitter restlessness within. He wasn’t even sure it had anything to do with Liana. Maybe it had more to do with the constant uphill battle against entrenched academia.
Damn it all, he needed to be sure of these translations. Self-doubt, that was the big weakness. If he could confirm this connection between the An and the Sumerian Anu, prove his discovery despite the unsavory connections with ancient astronuts and all that that entailed, maybe he could still get the last laugh on Tom Leonard and all of the rest.
After that, all he would have to do was prove to his wife and the other crackpot astronuts that he wasn’t some kind of reluctant messiah. That was what he hated most about the church groups his wife was involved with. They looked to him as some kind of prophet, and he simply wasn’t willing to fill that role.
And then there was the problem with the government.
They’d sent him to the Moon to investigate the UN’s discoveries there, and he’d turned up more than anyone had expected. Still, discoveries involving ancient Sumeria and alien slave-raiders were pretty remote…things that might upset astronut churches, the Vatican, and mobs in the streets but didn’t have much to do with the war at all. The government had been far more interested in that piece of an ancient spacecraft that had already been salvaged at Picard than in any of the engraved artifacts he’d found.