Читать книгу The Wasteland Saga: The Old Man and the Wasteland, Savage Boy and The Road is a River - Nick Cole - Страница 33

The Chief Excavator stood atop the scaffolding, the wind blowing at his jacket. He stepped back from the hole he had just made with the cutting tool.

“It’s your turn.”

The Doctor of Antiquities stepped forward. He had campaigned long and hard for this day. Now that it was upon him, he didn’t want to go through with it. From theory to paper, to committees and hearings, it had been one thing. The game of academics. But now those questions would be answered. He would have to find something new to uncover because the riddle of the tank would be solved.

His heart beat rapidly as he moved his light toward the opening, his head close behind. Inside, a wrapped body was the first thing he saw. He knew it was a body. The first residents of the reoccupation of Old Tucson, the foundation of their culture, had prepared their bodies in the same manner. But those bodies had all been found in the graveyards of Starr Pass.

“It’s true,” he mumbled.

“You were right?” asked the Chief Excavator.

The Doctor stuck his head and light back in the hole.

“It’s a body. Probably an early warlord. Maybe the first to conquer the area. There is something on top of the body. A book perhaps.”

A strong wind, a danger at this altitude, gusted past the Doctor’s head and turned the ancient book to fragments, floating and swirling about the inside of the tank.

“Looked like a book, I should say.”

“Any clue how they got the tank to the top of the tower?” asked the Chief Excavator. The Doctor stepped back and pulled a plastic sheet over the opening to prevent further wind damage.

“We’ll never know how they did that.” He took in the panorama of the world’s oldest still-populated city. Towers and buildings raced toward the heights above, the Space Elevator beyond that, its thin diamond line tracing away into the sky above.

“That was never the point of this project. We wanted to know who was in here. It’s our city’s oldest monument and no one knows a thing about it.”

“So who was he?”

“Can we ever know? Probably not. We will make some guesses from what we know about the survivors of that period. But we can never know for sure.”

“So we can just guess a little better, is that it?”

The Doctor put his hand on the tank, feeling its ancientness.

“I can say one thing.”

“What?” asked the reporter who’d come out to the historic district to cover the story.

“Whoever put him here, in a war machine of the period, which was impossible as we know it by their standards after the catastrophe, to hoist a multiton vehicle to the top of this tower, whoever it was, loved him very much. He was very important to them. I can say that.”