Discipline

If – February 1959

(1959) *

Margaret St. Clair

No one had labored harder in alien archaeology than Walsh.

He was not going to let them destroy his life’s work now.

-

“EXCUSE ME, sir,” Denton said deferentially, “but isn’t the gender of ‘shar-su ‘ feminine?”

“No,” Walsh replied brusquely. He turned a w ay, to end the discussion, but Denton had already got A Lexicon of the Bi-Yan Language from its place on the cabin shelf, and was ruff l ing its pages.

“Shen —sheg —shar —” he read. “Here it is. ‘Shar-su. Adverbial noun of two terminations. Feminine. Warningly, in a warning manner. (To take) warning.’ Yes, … it does seem to be feminine.”

Walsh felt his face growing hot. How could he have forgotten that the damned word was feminine now, in the revised Gerson-McMahon grammar? In his student days there hadn’t been any gender at all in Bi-Yan, or Te-Hok as they called it then. It seemed to him that things had been going to pot ever since that upstart, Gerson, had put over his revised system of pronouncing Bi-Yan, ten years ago. It meant that older scholars had practically had to learn the language all over again. It was most unfair. Suppose there had been a few inconsistencies in the old phonetic system? Nobody could ever know how the Bi-Yan themselves had pronounced their language, and so what was the point of calling them Bi-Yan instead of Te-Hok? Or saying shar-su instead of mosh-ta ?

He must have muttered the old word under his breath, because Denton said in that irritating way of his, “I beg your pardon, sir?”

“Nothing. Never mind. Well, you’ve proved your point. But don’t you think we ought to be getting back to the dig? It isn’t wise to let robot shovels work too long unattended, you know. I imagine you’ll agree with me about that, at any rate.”

There was an instant’s silence. Denton too had turned red. He stood holding the lexicon between his hands, his head lowered Then he followed the older man through the airlock into the ship’s changing room.

Their suits were hanging under sterilamps. Walsh climbed into his gear stiffly; his arthritic knee was bothering him again. Denton was ready before he was, and stood waiting while Walsh opened the outer lock.

Walsh jumped to the ground. If he didn’t hurry, Denton would try to help him. Why had the Foundation saddled him with a “trainee-assistant,” anyhow? Did they think he w as too old to excavate a Bi -Yan shrine without a younger man to help him? Hell, he was only sixty-four. An archaeologist wasn’t old until he was eighty. Or did the Foundation think that he, the dean of Bi-Yan archaeologists, the top authority in the field, needed a younger brain to check up on his work?

The way to the dig was over rough ground. Like all the Proxima planets except one, Marianna had a thin, cold atmosphere, unbreathable by human standards, but the surface was covered with primitive algae, lichens, molds and a few mosses. The puzzle was why the Bi-Yan had erected most of their tomb-shrines on these inhospitable planets, and almost none on the mother world. That was one of the questions he was attempting to answer in the book he had in progress —The Bi-Yan Tomb-Shrine: An Archaeological Estimate.

Absorbed in these thoughts, Walsh stumbled over a loose stone. He would have taken a sharp fall if Denton hadn’t caught him by the elbow and steadied him. “Thanks,” Walsh said harshly, and jerked away.

They reached the dig in silence. The robot shovels were working away carefully at the excavation of the back wall of the shrine, the only part yet unexcavated. The shovels stopped every six inches for an automatic camera to take pictures of the sides of the trench.

It probably wasn’t necessary to have so many pictures. It was a simple site. On the other hand, it was the best-preserved Bi-Yan tomb-shrine that anybody had ever found. All the others had been in various stages of wreckage. This one was almost miraculously perfect. Except for an enormous gaping hole in the left w all, caused by a meteor impact e ons ago, i t was almost as it had come from the hands of its builders.

Lovely … Walsh’s ill-t em per w as l e aving him. It w as impossible to feel anger while looking at the shrine.

Denton was as affected as he. “Beautiful,” Walsh heard him say softly. “Millennia have gone by. And yet it’s like the first days of spring.”

There were things to be said for Denton after all. “Let’s go inside,” Walsh said.

The plan of the shrine was like that of all the other Bi-Yan tomb -shrines. A smallish oval building, perfectly proportioned, with a deeply recessed door.

Inside, in the shrine proper, were the double storeroo m s, one on either side of the door, where the offerings to nourish the dead were kept. And then the inner shrine, with the checkered twenty-foot ellipse on the floor that marked the “holy of holies,” and the statues of the dead whom the tomb —actually a cenotaph —was designed to commemorate.

“Stay clear of the ellipse,” Walsh cautioned automatically as they stepped into the inner shrine.

Denton grinned. “Still think there’s a density field generator under it, sir?” he asked.

“Yes. That, or something very similar.” Walsh raised an a rm to indicate the calligraphic i nscr i ptions that ran around the i nte ri or wall of the cella. “The warnings about touching the ‘holy of holies’ are certainly explicit. The curse … Sooner or later we’ll try some experiments to find out just what is under the floor.”

“Ye-es,” Denton replied. “There’s no doubt there’s something under there. Fragments of machinery have been found under the ellipses in other digs. But —” He began to walk up and down restlessly, between Walsh and the e llipse.

“But!” Walsh said, trying to laugh. He didn’t like the way Denton kept arguing with him. “Do you think it was merely a coincidence that the dirt in the cella had stayed completely clear of the elliptical area? You remember, Denton —the cella was half full of dirt. I t had been drift ing in through the hole in the wall for centuries. It was packed up to the ceiling in spots. But there wasn’t a grain of dust on the ellipsoid.”

“Oh, I remember,” Denton said, laughing. “I’ll never forget those two weeks with hand tools. But —”

“But what?” Walsh said w ith a touch of irritability. “Well, sir —” He hesitated. “Sir, what was the holy of holies for?”

“For?” Walsh repeated rather blankly.

“Yes, sir. What did they use it for?”

“It was the center of the shrine, the focal point. If they ‘used’ it for anything —if there’s actually a density field generator under it —I think it w as to immolate victims.”

“To immolate victims?” Denton repeated.

“Animal victims, in honor of the dead man whose cenotaph the tomb w as.”

“In honor of the dead man,” Denton repeated in an unsatisfied voice. He began to w alk up and down even more rapidly.

-

A BRUPTLY he stopped in front of Walsh. “Look here, sir,” he said, “have you considered —”

“Considered what?”

“Considered —” Denton paused to swallow —”considered, sir, that this may not be a shrine?”

“May not be a shrine!” Walsh felt a touch of pure amazement. His eyebrows went up. He began to laugh. “Oh, my dear boy!”

Denton flung out one hand in an impatient gesture. “Please, sir! What I mean is, why does everyone take for granted that the Bi-Yan constructions on the outer planets a r e shrines?”

After a moment, Walsh decided to treat the absurd question as if it were serious. “For a number of reasons,” he replied. “The tomb ‘curse’ —you can read it on the walls here yourself —that is one of them. Then, there is the offering of food to the dead, and the holy of holies in the center. And, finally, the very existence of the shrines, so beautifully wrought, so filled with art treasures. There is nothing other than shrines that they could be.”

“Isn’t there?” Denton asked keenly. “Isn’t any other explanation possible?”

His voice had taken on that needling edge that Walsh so disliked. He felt himself growing angry, and it exasperated him. “No,” he a nsw ered. “No, it isn’t.” He turned away.

”But, sir —”

“I don’t want to discuss it further. You’re not here to argue with me, Denton, but to be trained in archaeology.”

Denton stepped in front of him, between Walsh and the elliptical area. “Don’t be such a fool,” he said in a low, choked voice. ’”… Sorry. I—Sorry. You get under my skin. But if you’d only listen —”

“You couldn’t tell me anything,” said Walsh, losing control of hi m self. “You’re a young ass w ho brays instead of thinking. Keep your hee-haws to yourself.” His hands had clenched.

“You old fool!” Denton cried wildly. “It’s not a shrine, it’s a ma —”

He was not allowed to finish the sentence. At the repetition of the unbearable word “fool,” Walsh, blind w ith fury, struck out.

It was an old man’s blow, weak and badly aimed. But Denton involuntarily stepped backward to avoid it. He stepped across the dark-checkered rim, fairly into the elliptical area.

His mouth came open. Walsh heard him give a faint cry. His body grew diaphanous. In less than two seconds after he had taken the backward step, he w as gone. He had disappeared.

Gone … Walsh looked around dazedly. It had happened so quickly that he couldn’t take it in. One moment there had been the argument, and his sudden anger. The next, Denton had been gone. Walsh felt an irrational impulse to go about the shrine looking for him.

What had happened? Walsh had a lw ays felt the “holy of holies” was dangerous, but now that its po tency had been actually shown, Walsh was stunned. The density field generator m ust still have been active, after all these ages; poor Denton had been immolated in m uch the same w ay the old Bi-Yan priests’ sacrificial victims had been. An engineer could examine the generator later and find out ho w it w orked. Walsh wouldn’t poke about w ith it —” he didn’t want to share Denton’s fate.

Had it been his fault? He gave a deep sigh. No, he didn’t think so. True, he had struck the blo w that had driven Denton into the danger area. But on the other hand, he had warned him against the spot again and again, and Denton hadn’t listened. There was a certain poetic justice —Walsh managed a shaky laugh —in Denton’s having fallen victim to the very “curse” whose existence he had denied.

Walsh felt an overpowering fatigue. He hadn’t liked Denton. Indeed, he had hated him. But it had been dreadful to see the young man disappear like that. Wa lsh wanted to go back to the ship and rest —and, now that there was no longer a need to keep up appearances, there was no reason why he shouldn’t. He would feel better after a rest.

He went outside the shrine, still haunted by t h e illogical feeli n g that Denton must be hiding in it. He shut down the robot shovels. He switched off the lights. He’d come back later…. What was it Denton had been trying to say when he disappeared?

“This isn’t a shrine, it’s a ma —” A what? What would the word have been if Denton had lived to finish it? Walsh didn’t even have an idea what the first syllable would have been. Man? Mar? Mat? Matter … well, it probably didn’t matter. Denton was gone.

-

WALSH entered the ship’s main cabin, switched on the phosphors, and lay down in his bunk. After he’d rested, he’d get himself something to eat. And, before he w ent to bed, he’d tape an account of Denton’s mishap for the ship’s log.

Desperatel y tired as he was, he couldn’t relax. He kept shifting about on his mattress and sighing. No matter how he had felt about Denton, it had been appalling to see the younger man’s body thin out and disappear. Denton —What had Denton been trying to say?

Walsh swung his feet around and sat up on the edge of his bunk. After a moment he rose and went over to Denton’s bunk. He opened the foot-locker.

Denton’s diary was on top of the folded shirts and underwear, just where Walsh had often seen him put it. Walsh \vent back to his own bunk with it.

He opened the book. He wouldn’t go too far back in the entries —say a week or ten days. Denton’s writing was clear and easy to read.

Almost at once Walsh found traces of what he was looking for. “More than ever I doubt the reality of the Bi-Yan ‘curse,’ ” ran an entry dated a week ago. “The ‘curse’ inscribed on the cella of the shrine, about whose direfuln e ss Walsh is so insistent, seems to me, properly read, much less of a curse than a caution. Or —an idea I am just beginning to form —a series of instructions. Instructions for what? I don’t know. I can’t but feel, though, that Walsh is basing his interpretation on a misconception. I don’t suppose it will do much good to tackle him about this.”

Walsh raised his eyebrows. He gave a short laugh. But the curse had got Denton —poor young fellow —in the end.

He read on. Two days on unimportant things. Then, “I cannot accept the reality of the ‘neolithic psychology’ Walsh talks so much about. No c om parisons with the tomb and shrines of ancient Egypt will convince me. It is, to me, incredible that people as technically advanced as the Bi-Van could believe that by putting food in the tomb-shrines of their dead they were providing for them in the after-world.

“Bi-Yan art is unsurpassed. We have a considerable body of evidence that their spaceflight had carried them to the ends of our galaxy. And these people thought they could feed their dead —or, rather, the images of their dead; no one has ever found any bodily remains in a Bi-Yan tomb-shrine with canned protein? Faugh!

“Nor does Walsh’s lugging in the ‘transubstantiation’ of the old Catholic mass-ritual make his idea about the Bi-Yan any the more convincing. Again, faugh!”

Denton seemed, Walsh thought sourly, to have used most of the space in his diary in trying to refute whatever Walsh had told him. He went on with his reading.

The day before yesterday’s entry was only one line: “I have a hypothesis .,, And then the last entry of all, yesterday: “Yes, I have a hypothesis. And, unlike Huygens and his idea about the existence of the rings of Saturn, I am not going to encode it elaborately.

“The Bi-Yan shrines are not shrines at all. They are relay stations in a space-spanning system.

“‘Why hasn’t anyone else suspected this? There are, I think, two reasons. One, the surpassing beauty of the Bi-Van installations. And, two, the fact that no Bi-Yan ‘shrine,’ except the one Walsh and I are currently engaged in excavating, has ever been found reasonably intact. Meteor falls, mechanical failure in the course of ages, and wars have gutted them. Only in the present ‘shrine’ has the ‘holy of holies,’ which I suspect of being a matter-transmitter, survived.”

… which I suspect of being a matter-transmitter. Walsh’s whole body was trembling. Oh, yes, Denton’s idea —damn him, damn him—had a horrible cogency. The cans of food: not offerings, but provisions for travelers. The curses, not curses but warnings and instructions on how to handle awesome potencies.

Yes, Denton was undoubtedly right. And Walsh’s work —his whole work, the work of his whole life —had been wrong. He had built on sand.

Everything he had written had been wrong. His ne w book, the book he had been preparing for thirty years to write, could ne v er be written. It would be nothing but lies. And he would be a laughing stock. The dean of Bi-Van archaeologists. Talking about neolithic psychology as if he knew something. It had taken a smart young man to show him up.

Walsh had to bite his lips to keep from groaning. Archaeology had been the only thing he had ever had, the only thing he had ever cared for. And now it had been taken away from him,’ forever, ruined by a few pages in a diary. Pages written by a smart young man.

No. No, it hadn’t. No, it hadn’t.

Walsh didn’t even hesitate. He didn’t even give an order to his fingers. Of their own accord they reached for the diary and ripped the bad pages out.

He drew a terrible, shuddering breath. On wobbling legs he walked over to the waste-reducer and threw the pages in. They flared up and were gone.

It was going to be all right. He could forget all about the nonsense Denton had written. Now he could go ahead and write his own book. His wonderful, exhaustive, monumental book.

For a moment Walsh covered his face with his hands. God, if only he hadn’t been curious! Now, before he could think about his book, he’d have to fix things. He’d destroyed the diary, yes. But he hadn’t put things back to where they’d been before. He’d have to do a lot of lying to accomplish that.

He’d have to make up some plausible account of what had happened to Denton, something that didn’t involve the material working of the Bi-Yan curse. And then he’d have to destroy the shrine.

It was so beautiful! But as long as it was intact; it was a danger to him. The first engineer, if not the first archaeologist, to investigate it would su rm ise what the “holy of holies” was for. There must be a lot of machinery under the ellipsoid area where Denton had disappeared. Walsh would have to destroy it. There was some blasting powder among the ship’s stores. Perhaps he could fake damage from a meteor fall.

He was so tired. He’d try to concoct some reasonable-sounding story about Denton’s disappearance, and get it into the log tonight. He didn’t think he’d be able to sleep at all unless he got at least part of his difficulties settled. And tomorrow, when he was a little fresher, he’d try to destroy the telltale machinery.

-

WHAT COULD have happened to Denton, reasonably? A young man, strong, impetuous ... Oh, now he had it.

Denton had contracted a general infection from one of the local fungi or bacteria —it had been known to happen —and in his delirium had wandered off into the wasteland while Walsh was asleep.

Then … oh, yes. Then Walsh had gone after him in the ship’s launch, .and hadn’t been able to find him. He simply hadn’t been able to find him , that was all.

It was such a simple story that Walsh was sure people would believe it. It wasn’t complicated enough to sound like a lie … When he read it into the log, he’d put in some sad reflections about how Denton must even now be dying of asphyxiation.

And that w as probably the truth,. Walsh thought. Wherever the matter-trans m itter had sent Denton, even if there had been a still-functioning receptor at the other end, it wasn’t likely he’d be able to get a w ay from there. Assuming he’d survived the journey, Denton .must even now be sitting on the bleak surface of some wretched planet, watching the gauge on his air tank slip around to zero, and wondering how much longer he could last.

A wretched way to die. But at least t hat was something Walsh didn’t have to blame himself for. He wasn’t even morally responsible. He hadn’t sent him there.

He switched on the recorder. Better get h i s account of the m atter down now, while it w as still clear in his mind. Tomorrow he’d destroy the site.

He switched the recorder off again. It wasn’t so much that he minded telling lies about what had happened to Denton. And certainly no reasonable person could expect him to go after Denton, to risk his own life trying to save a man he hated. He could excuse himself these things.

But he couldn’t excuse himself if he destroyed the site.

He had put Denton’s diary in the w aste-reducer; that was disgraceful, but a personal matter. He was willing to connive at Denton’s death; he wasn’t under any obligation to try to save him. But he couldn’t destroy an archaeological site. A science, in the old and honorable te rm , was a discipline.

Walsh’s head had gone up a little. He might be old, and a fool. He might be willing to tell lies. But he was a scientist. And he couldn’t destroy an archaeological site .

Once more he switched on the tape recorder. He gave a full and complete account of what had happened, including his destruction of the diary. He hesitated. Then he said, “I am going to try to rescue him. I do not think my chances ar e very good. Earth technology has not yet been able to build a matter -transmitter, and I have no idea what being ‘transmitted’ will be like. But I am willing to try· to rescue him. End of entry.”

-

He opened the ship’s belly, got out the launch, and climbed into the tiny cabin. On low manual power he worked the craft over the rough terrain, through the hole in the wall, and onto the rim of the elliptical “holy of holies”. He made sure that the nose of the launch was centered on the same dark -checkered area that Denton had stepped over. If there w as any control system built into the transmitter —anything that determined where you landed —that might be it. One more little push, and the craft would be over in the transmitting area.

He paused. Did he still hate Denton? Yes, as much as ever. The smart young bastard. The smart righ t young son of a bitch.

He was risking his life to save a man he still hated. He couldn ‘t explain his action, even to hi m self. He grinned sourly. Still faintly grinning, he touched the manual control and gave the craft the last little push.

The End

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