Martin Chiswick looked up at his creation, marveling at his work. Square after square of carefully etched tiles curved above him, stretching up into the gloomy vault overhead. It was, he thought, nearly over.
The Object was acquired. How he had managed it he wouldn’t say, even to himself. Some things were better left in the dark corners to which they belonged. But, nonetheless, The Object was his.
What work was left? There were still a few tiles left. He could finish them tonight. It was very late, his favorite time to work. Martin had a strong feel for color, and he liked the shape of pre-dawn dark best. It energized him; filled him with purpose.
That purpose had carried him from the ruins of Etemenanki to the half-ruined London house in which he worked. He lifted his eyes from the tablet, scanned his desk, stared down his much-thumbed copy of Koldewey, snarled contemptuously. His stylus danced in his hand, carving and pressing into clay.
Martin liked working in clay. Cuneiform, he thought, was a more civilized way of communicating than paper and ink or — he shuddered — the hateful glare of a screen. You could feel it. The words were real. And if modern scholars considered the language limited, it’s because they had refused to listen to him. They’d wanted nothing to do with what he’d unearthed from Babel’s prostration.
The stylus stopped. Martin smiled to himself, gathered this last tablet and swept into the adjacent room. The kiln glowed sullen, accepting his offering reluctantly. Now he had to wait.
Martin returned to his desk. He still had the originals. He’d copied them carefully, patching up any gaps. He could not understand how the rest of the world was missing what was obvious. Babylonian mathematics was known as the beginning of geometry, it was true, but here was evidence that they’d gone far further than modernity dreamed.
He read the cuneiform again, fingers sliding over the equations lovingly. Tactility made it more real, Martin thought. He laughed softly to himself. How was it that the legend of Babel had been so corrupted? Any fool combing through the shards should have realized the truth behind the secret, forbidden, language.
Why forbidden, though? Why had the great mathematical library been destroyed, annihilated in an orgy of fire and flood? Why was his favorite tablet polluted with grease and blood, an ancient handprint begging sanctuary from the past? It was not as though hyperbolic sphere geometry was unknown to the moderns, after all. But to them the thoughts had no power, no life of their own.
Perhaps the difference was the way we counted now, Martin thought. Sixty is a far more sensible way of dealing with the world than 10. Ten was what one liked if one spent one’s time focused pathetically on one’s own hands, refusing to look up at the sky. Sixty gave you the cosmos.
Perhaps it was indeed that cuneiform was real; the bite of stylus into clay had more power than the spray of ink onto bleached pulp. At any rate he knew there was something rather more to what he’d found at Etemenanki than he’d encountered in his wasted years of modern mathematical study.
After the tower crumbled, so too did knowledge, picked up in drips and drabs across the ancient world. The Greeks’ feted science was a pale imitation; Thales, Anaximander, even Pythagoras, all children compared to the ancient masters. The world was fire, void, flux, water —
— the kiln beeped. The tablet had been baked and cooled. Martin hastened to retrieve it. Its deep ochre had faded slightly in the heat, but it was light and strong and the etching was done well. He stood in the center of his workroom, next to the cruel and ominous altar he’d erected some weeks ago, looking for the place to fit the last tile. He found it, and fit it. The world was nearly done.
All that was left was to place The Object. Martin’s hand shook as he unveiled it.
The cuneiform in the tiles glowed a sickly green-blue. The very air seemed to blur and shimmer. It reeked, somehow with ozone and seaweed. Martin paused for a second, alarmed, but regained his composure quickly. He had come too far to turn back now. He strode forward and placed The Object on the pedestal in the center of the room.
After Marduk tore his way through the shuddering portal and into the world, he killed his now-useless servant first, a fitting reward for Martin Chiswick’s long and lonely work.
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