Contact

CHAPTER 13 Babylon

THE CRAY 21 mainframe computer at Argus had been instructed to compare each day's harvest of data from Vega with the earliest records of Level 3 of the palimpsest. In effect, one long and incomprehensible sequence of zeros and ones was being compared automatically with another, earlier, such sequence. This was part of a massive statistical intercomparison of various segments of the still unde-crypted text. There were some short sequences of zeros and ones—”words” the analysts called them, hopefully—which were repeated again and again. Many sequences would appear only once in thousands of pages of text. This statistical approach to message decryption was familiar to Ellie since high school. But the subroutines supplied by the experts from the National Security Agency—made available only as a result of a presidential directive, and even then armed with instructions to self-destruct if examined closely—were brilliant.

What prodigies of human inventiveness, Ellie reflected, were being directed to reading each other's mail.

The global confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union—now, to be sure, easing somewhat—was still eating up the world. It was not just the financial resources dedicated to the military establishments of all nations. That was approaching two trillion dollars a year, and by itself was ruinously expensive when there were so many other urgent human needs. But still worse, she knew, was the intellectual effort dedicated to the arms race.

Almost half the scientists on the planet, it had been estimated, were employed by one or another of the almost two hundred military establishments worldwide. And they were not the dregs of the doctoral programs in physics and mathematics. Some of her colleagues would console themselves with this thought when the awkward problem arose of what to tell a recent doctoral candidate being courted by, say, one of the weapons laboratories. “If he was any good, he'd be offered an assistant professorship at Stanford, at least,” she could recall Drumlin once saying. No, a certain kind of mind and character was drawn to the military applications of science and mathematics—people who liked big explosions, for example; or those with no taste for personal combat who, to avenge some schoolyard injustice, aspired to military command; or inveterate puzzle solvers who longed to decrypt the most complex messages known. Occasionally the spur was political, tracing back to international disputes, immigration policies, wartime horrors, police brutality, or national propaganda by this nation or that decades earlier. Many of these scientists had real ability, Ellie knew, whatever reservations she might have about their motivations. She tried to imagine that massed talent really dedicated to the well-being of the species and the planet.

She pored over the studies that had accumulated during her absence. They were making almost no progress in decrypting the Message, although the statistical analyses now stacked into a pile of paper a meter tall. It was all very discouraging.

She wished there were someone, especially a close woman friend, at Argus to whom she could pour out her hurt and anger at Ken's behavior. But there was not, and she was disinclined even to use the telephone for this purpose. She did manage to spend a weekend with her coUege friend Becky Ellenbogen in Austin, but Becky, whose appraisals of men tended to be somewhere between wry and scathing, in this case was surprisingly mild in her criticism.

“He is the President's Science Adviser, and this is only the most amazing discovery in the history of the world. Don't be so hard on him,” Becky urged. “He'll come around.”

But Becky was another of those who found Ken “charming” (she had met him once at the dedication of the National Neutrino Observatory), and was perhaps too inclined to accommodate to power. Had der Heer treated Ellie in this shabby way while he was a mere professor of molecular biology somewhere, Becky would have mari-nated and skewered the man.

After returning from Paris, der Heer had mustered a regular campaign of apology and devotion. He had been overstressed, he told her, overwhelmed with a range of responsibilities including difficult and unfamiliar political issues. His position as leader of the American delegation and co-chairman of the plenary might have been rendered less effective if there had been public knowledge of his and Ellie's relationship. Kitz had been insufferable. Ken had had too many consecutive nights with only a few hours” sleep. Altogether, Ellie judged, there were too many explanations. But she permitted the relationship to continue.

When it happened, it was Willie once again, this time on the graveyard shift, who first noticed. Afterward, Willie would attribute the speed of the discovery less to the superconducting computer and the NSA programs than to the new Hadden context-recognition chips. At any rate, Vega had been low in the sky an hour or so before dawn when the computer triggered an understated alarm. With some annoyance, Willie put down what he was reading—it was a new textbook on Fast Fourier Transform Spectroscopy— and noticed these words being printed out on the screen:

RPT. TEXT PP. 41617–41619: BIT MISMATCH 0/2271. CORRELATION COEFFICIENT 0. 99+

As he watched, 41619 became 41620 and then 41621. The digits after the slash were increasing in a continuous blur. Both the number of pages and the correlation coefficient, a measure of the improbability that the correlation was by chance, increased as he watched. He gave it another two pages before picking up the direct line to Ellie's apartment.

She had been in a deep sleep and was momentarily disoriented. But she quickly turned on the bedside light and after a moment gave instructions for senior Argus staff to be assembled. She would, she told him, locate der Heer, who was somewhere on the facility. This proved not very difficult. She shook his shoulder.

“Ken, get up. There's word that we've repeated.”

“What?”

`The Message has cycled back. Or at least that's what Willie says. I'm on my way there. Why don't you wait another ten minutes so we can pretend you were in your room in BSQ?”

She was almost at the door before he shouted after her, “How can we recycle? We haven't gotten the primer yet.”

Racing across the screens was a paired sequence of zeros and ones, a real-time comparison of the data just being received and the data from an early page of text received at Argus a year before. The program would have culled out any differences. So far, there were none. It reassured them that they had not mistranscribed, that there were no apparent transmission errors, and that if some small dense interstellar cloud between Vega and the Earth was able to eat the occasional zero or one, this was an infrequent occurrence. Argus was by now in real-time communication with dozens of other telescopes that were part of the World Message Consortium, and the news of recycling was passed on to the next observing stations westward, to California, Hawaii, the Marshal Nedelin now in the South Pacific, and to Sydney. Had the discovery been made when Vega was over one of the other telescopes in the network, Argus would have been informed instantly.

The absence of the primer was an agonizing disappointment, but it was not the only surprise. The Message page numbers had jumped discontinuously from the 40,000s to the 10,000s, where recycling had been uncovered. Evidently Argus had discovered the transmission from Vega almost at the moment it first arrived at Earth. It was a remarkably strong signal, and would have been picked up even by small omnidirectional telescopes. But it was a surprising coincidence that the broadcast should arrive at Earth at the very moment Argus was looking at Vega. Also, what did it mean for the text to begin on a page in the 10,000s? Were there 10,000 pages of text missing? Was it a backward practice of the provincial Earth to start numbering books on page I? Were these sequential numbers perhaps not page numbers but something else? Or— and this worried Ellie the most—was there some fundamental and unexpected difference between how humans thought of things and how the aliens thought? If so, it would have worrisome implications about the ability of the Consortium to understand the Message, primer or no primer.

The Message repeated exactly, the gaps were all filled in and nobody could read a word of it. It seemed unlikely that the transmitting civilization, meticulous in all else, had simply overlooked the need for a primer.

At least the Olympic broadcast and the interior design of the Machine seemed to be tailored specifically for humans. They would hardly go to all this trouble to devise and transmit the Message without making some provision for humans to read it. So humans must have overlooked something. It soon became generally agreed that somewhere was a fourth layer to the palimpsest. But where?

The diagrams were published in an eight-volume “coffee table” book set that was soon reprinted worldwide.

All over the planet people tried to figure out the pictures. The dodecahedron and the quasi-biological forms were especially evocative. Many clever suggestions were made by the public and carefully sifted by the Argus team. Many harebrained interpretations were also widely available, especially in weekly newspapers.

Whole new industries developed—doubtless unforeseen by those who devised the Message—dedicated to using the diagrams to bilk the public. The Ancient and Mystical Order of the Dodecahedron was announced.

The Machine was a UFO. The Machine was Ezekiel's Wheel. An angel revealed the meaning of the Message and the diagrams to a Brazilian businessman, who distributed—at first, at his own expense—his interpretation worldwide. With so many enigmatic diagrams to interpret, it was inevitable that many religions would recognize some of their iconography in the Message from the stars. A principal cross section of the Machine looked something like a chrysanthemum, a fact that stirred great enthusiasm in Japan. If there had been an image of a human face among all the diagrams, messianic fervor might have reached a flash point.

As it was, a surprisingly large number of people were winding up their affairs in preparation for the Advent. Industrial productivity was off worldwide. Many had given away all their possessions to the poor and then, as the end of the world was delayed, were obliged to seek help from a charity or the State.

Because gifts of this sort constituted a major fraction of the resources of such charities, some of the philanthropists ended up being supported by their own gifts. Delegations approached government leaders to urge that schistosomiasis, say, or world hunger be ended by the Advent; otherwise there was no telling what would happen to us. Others counseled, more quietly, that if there was a decade of real world madness in the offing, there must be a considerable monetary or national advantage in it somewhere.

Some said that there was no primer, that the whole exercise was to teach humans humility, or to drive us mad. There were newspaper editorials on how we're not as smart as we think we are, and some resentment directed at the scientists who, after all the support given to them by the governments, have failed us in our time of need. Or maybe humans are much dumber than the Vegans gave us credit for. Maybe there was some point that had been entirely obvious to all previous emerging civilizations so contacted, something no one in the history of the Galaxy had ever missed before. A few commentators embraced this prospect of cosmic humiliation with real enthusiasm. It demonstrated what they'd been saying about people all along.

After a while, Ellie decided that she needed help.

They entered surreptitiously through the Enlil Gate, with an escort dispatched by the Proprietor. The General Services Administration security detail was edgy despite, or perhaps because of, the additional protection.

Although there was a little sunlight still left, the dirt streets were lit by braziers, oil lamps, and an occasional guttering torch. Two amphoras, each large enough to contain an adult human being, flanked the entrance to a retail olive oil establishment. The advertising was in cuneiform. On an adjacent public building was a magnificent bas-relief of a lion hunt from the reign of Assurbanipal. As they approached the Temple of Assur, there was a scuffle in the crowd, and her escort made a wide berth. She now had an unobstructed view of the Ziggurat down a wide torchlit avenue. It was more breathtaking than in the pictures. There was a martial flourish on an unfamiliar brass instrument; three men and a horse clattered by, the charioteer in Phrygian headdress. As in some medieval rendition of a cautionary tale from the book of Genesis, the top of the Ziggurat was enveloped in low twilit clouds. They left the Ishtarian Way and entered the Ziggurat through a side street. In the private elevator, her escort pressed the button for the topmost floor: “Forty,” it read. No numerals. Just the word. And then, to leave no room for doubt, a glass panel flashed, “The Gods.” Mr. Hadden would be with her shortly. Would she like something to drink while she waited? Considering the reputation of the place, Ellie demurred. Babylon lay spread out before her—magnificent, as everyone said, in its recreation of a long-gone time and place. During daylight hours busloads from museums, a very few schools, and the tourist agencies would arrive at the Ishtar Gate, don appropriate clothes, and travel back in time. Hadden wisely donated all profits from his daytime clientele to New York City and Long Island charities. The daytime tours were immensely popular, in part because it was a respectable opportunity to look the place over for those who would not dream of visiting Babylon at night. Well, maybe they would dream.

After dark, Babylon was called an adult amusement park. It was of an opulence, scale, and imaginativeness that dwarfed, say, the Reeperbahn in Hamburg. It was by far the largest tourist attraction in the New York metropolitan area, with by far the largest gross revenues. How Hadden had been able to convince the city fathers of Babylon, New York, and how he had lobbied for an “easement” of local and state prostitution laws was well known. It was now a half-hour train ride from midtown Manhattan to the Ishtar Gate. Ellie had insisted on taking this train, despite the entreaties of the security people, and had found almost a third of the visitors to be women. There were no graffiti, little danger of mugging, but a much inferior brand of white noise compared with the conveyances of the New York City subway system.

Although Hadden was a member of the National Academy of Engineering, he had never, so far as Ellie knew, attended a meeting, and she had never set eyes on him. His face became well known to millions of Americans, however, years before as a result of the Advertising Council's campaign against him: “The Unamerican” had been the caption under an unflattering portrait of Hadden. Even so, she was taken aback when in the midst of her reverie by the slanted glass wall she was interrupted by a small, fat beckoning person.

“Oh. Sorry. I never understand how anyone can be afraid of me.” His voice was surprisingly musical. In fact, he seemed to talk in fifths. He hadn't thought it necessary to introduce himself and once again inclined his head to the door he had left ajar. It was hard to believe that some crime of passion was about to be visited upon her under these circumstances, and wordlessly she entered the next room.

He ushered her to a meticulously crafted tabletop model of an ancient city of less pretentious aspect than Babylon “Pompeii,” he said by way of explanation. “The stadium here is the key. With the restrictions on boxing there aren't any healthy blood sports left in America. Very important. Sucks out some of the poisons from the national bloodstream. The whole thing is designed, permits issued, and now this.”

“What's “this'?”

“No gladiatorial games. I just got word from Sacramento. There's a bill before the legislature to outlaw gladiatorial games in California. Too violent, they say. They authorize a new skyscraper, they know they'll lose two or three construction workers. The unions know, the builders know, and that's just to build offices for oil companies or Beverly Hills lawyers. Sure, we'd lose a few. But we're geared more to trident and net than the short sword. Those legislators don't have their priorities straight.”

He beamed at her owlishly and offered a drink, which again she refused. “So you want to talk to me about the Machine, and I want to talk to you about the Machine. You first. You want to know where the primer is?”

“We're asking for help from a few key people who might have some insight. We thought with your record of invention—and since your context-recognition chip was involved in the recycling discovery—that you might put yourself in the place of the Vegans and think of where you'd put the primer. We recognize you're very busy, and I'm sorry to—”

“Oh, no. It's all right. It's true I'm busy. I'm trying to regularize my affairs, because I'm gonna make a big change in my life…”

“For the Millennium?” She tried to imagine him giving away S. R. Hadden and Company, the Wall Street brokerage house; Genetic Engineering, Inc.; Hadden Cybernetics; and Babylon to the poor.

“Not exactly. No. It was fun to think about. It made me feel good to be asked. I looked at the diagrams.” He waved at the commercial set of eight volumes spread in disarray on a worktable. “There are wonderful things in there, but I don't think that's where the primer is hiding. Not in the diagrams. I don't know why you think the primer has to be in the Message. Maybe they left it on Mars or Pluto or in the Oort Comet Cloud, and well discover it in a few centuries. Right now, we know there's this wonderful Machine, with design drawings and thirty thousand pages of explanatory text. But we don't know whether we'd be able to build the thing if we could read it. So we wait a few centuries, improving our technology, knowing that sooner or later we'll have to be ready to build it. Not having the primer binds us up with future generations.

Human beings are sent a problem that takes generations to solve. I don't think that's such a bad thing. Might be very healthy. Maybe you're making a mistake looking for a primer. Maybe it's better not to find it.”

“No, I want to find the primer right away. We don't know it'll be waiting for us forever. If they hang up because there was no answer, it would be much worse than if they'd never called at all.”

“Well, maybe you have a point. Anyway, I thought of as many possibilities as I could. I'll give you a couple of trivial possibilities, and then a nontrivial possibility. Trivial first: The primer's in the Message but at a very different data rate. Suppose there was another message in there at a bit an hour—could you detect that?”

“Absolutely. We routinely check for long-term receiver drift in any case. But also a bit an hour only buys you—let me see—ten, twenty thousand bits tops before the Message recycles.”

“So that makes sense only if the primer is much easier than the Message. You think it isn't. / think it isn't.

Now, what about much faster bit rates? How do you know that under every bit of your Machine Message there aren't a million bits of primer message?”

“Because it would produce monster bandwidths. We'd know in an instant.”

“Okay, so there's a fast data dump every now and then. Think of it as microfilm. There's a tiny dot of microfilm that's sitting in repetitious—1 mean in repetitive—parts of the Message. I'm imagining a little box that says in your regular language, “I am the primer. ” Then right after that there's a dot. And in that dot is a hundred million bits, very fast. You might see if you've got any boxes.”

“Believe me, we would have seen it.”

“Okay, how about phase modulation? We use it in radar and spacecraft telemetry, and it hardly messes up the spectrum at all. Have you hooked up a phase correlator?”

“No. That's a useful idea. I'll look into it.”

“Now, the nontrivial idea is this: If the Machine ever gets made, if our people are gonna sit in it, somebody's gonna press a button and then those five are gonna go somewhere. Never mind where. Now, there's an interesting question whether those five are gonna come back. Maybe not. I like the idea that all this Machine design was invented by Vegan body snatchers. You know, their medical students, or anthropologists or something. They need a few human bodies. It's a big hassle to come to Earth—you need permission, passes from the transit authority—hell, it's more trouble than it's worth. But with a little effort you can send the Earth a Message and then the earthlings'll go to all the trouble to ship you five bodies.

“It's like stamp collecting. I used to collect stamps when I was a kid. You could send a letter to somebody in a foreign country and most of the time they'd write back. It didn't matter what they said. All you wanted was the stamp. So that's my picture: There's a few stamp collectors on Vega. They send letters out when they're in the mood, and bodies come flying back to them from all over space. Wouldn't you like to see the collection?”

He smiled up at her and continued. “Okay, so what does this have to do with finding the primer? Nothing.

It's relevant only if I'm wrong. If my picture is wrong, if the five people are coming back to Earth, then it would be a big help if we've invented spaceflight. No matter how smart they are, it's gonna be tough to land the Machine. Too many things are moving. God knows what the propulsion system is. If you pop out of space a few meters below ground, you've had it. And what's a few meters in twenty-six light-years? It's too risky. When the Machine comes back it'll pop out—or whatever it does—in space, somewhere near the Earth, but not on it or in it. So they have to be sure we have spaceflight, so the five people can be rescued in space. They're in a hurry and can't sit tight until the 1957 evening news arrives on Vega. So what do they do? They arrange so part of the Message can only be detected from space. What part is that? The primer. If you can detect the primer, you've got spaceflight and you can come back safe. So I imagine the primer is being sent at the frequency of the oxygen absorptions in the microwave spectrum, or in the near-infrared— some part of the spectrum you can't detect until you're well out of the Earth's atmosphere… ”

“We've had the Hubble Telescope looking at Vega all through the ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared.

Not a hint of anything. The Russians have repaired their millimeter wave instrument. They've hardly been looking at anything besides Vega and they haven't found anything. But we'll keep looking. Other possibilities?”

“Sure you wouldn't like a drink? I don't drink myself, but so many people do.” Ellie again declined. “No, no other possibilities. Now it's my turn?

“See, I want to ask you for something. But I'm not good at asking for things. I never have been. My public image is rich, funny-looking, unscrupulous—somebody who looks for weaknesses in the system so he can make a fast buck. And don't tell me you don't believe any of that. Everybody believes at least some of it.

You've probably heard some of what I'm gonna say before, but give me ten minutes and I'll tell you how all this began. I want you to know something about me.”

She settled back, wondering what he could possibly want of her, and brushed away idle fantasies involving the Temple of Ishtar, Hadden, and perhaps a charioteer or two thrown in for good measure.

Years before, he had invented a module that, when a television commercial appeared, automatically muted the sound. It wasn't at first a context-recognition device. Instead, it simply monitored the amplitude of the carrier wave. TV advertisers had taken to running their ads louder and with less audio clutter than the programs that were their nominal vehicles. News of Hadden's module spread by word of mouth. People reported a sense of relief, the lifting of a great burden, even a feeling of joy at being freed from the advertising barrage for the six to eight hours out of every day that the average American spent in front of the television set. Before there could be any coordinated response from the television advertising industry, Adnix had become wildly popular. It forced advertisers and networks into new choices of carrier-wave strategy, each of which Hadden countered with a new invention. Sometimes he invented circuits to defeat strategies that the agencies and the networks had not yet hit upon. He would say that he was saving them the trouble of making inventions, at great cost to their shareholders, which were at any rate doomed to failure.

As his sales volume increased, he kept cutting prices. It was a kind of electronic warfare. And he was winning.

They tried to sue him—something about a conspiracy in restraint of trade. They had sufficient political muscle that his motion for summary dismissal was denied, but insufficient influence to actually win the case.

The trial had forced Hadden to investigate the relevant legal codes. Soon after, he applied, through a wellknown Madison Avenue agency in which he was now a major silent partner, to advertise his own product on commercial television. After a few weeks of controversy his commercials were refused. He sued all three networks and in this trial was able to prove conspiracy in restraint of trade. He received a huge settlement that was, at the time, a record for cases of this sort, and which contributed in its modest way to the demise of the original networks.

There had always been people who enjoyed the commercials, of course, and they had no need for Adnix.

But they were a dwindling minority. Hadden made a great fortune by eviscerating broadcast advertising. He also made many enemies.

By the time context-recognition chips were commercially available, he was ready with Preachnix, a submodule which could be plugged into Adnix. It would simply switch channels if by chance a doctrinaire religious program should be tuned in. You could preselect key words, such as “Advent” or “Rapture,” and cut great swaths through the available programming. Preachnix was a godsend for a long-suffering but significant minority of television viewers. There was talk, some of it half-serious, that Hadden's next submodule would be called Jivenix, and would work only on public addresses by presidents and premiers.

As he further developed context-recognition chips, it became obvious to him that they had much wider applications—from education, science, and medicine, to military intelligence and industrial espionage. It was on this issue that the lines were drawn for the famous suit United States v. Hadden Cybernetics. One of Hadden's chips was considered too good for civilian life, and on recommendation of the National Security Agency, the facilities and key personnel for the most advanced context-recognition chip production were taken over by the government. It was simply too important to read the Russian mail. God knows, they told him, what would happen if the Russians could read our mail.

Hadden refused to cooperate in the takeover and vowed to diversify into areas that could not possibly be connected with national security. The government was nationalizing industry, he said. They claimed to be capitalists, but when push came to shove they showed their socialist face. He had found an unsatisfied public need and employed an existing and legal new technology to deliver what they wanted. It was classic capitalism. But there were many sober capitalists who would tell you that he had already gone too far with Adnix, that he had posed a real threat to the American way of life. In a dour column signed V. Petrov, Pravda called it a concrete example of the contradictions of capitalism. The Wall Street Journal countered, perhaps a little tangentially, by calling Pravda, which in Russian means “truth,” a concrete example of the contradictions of communism.

He suspected that the takeover was only a pretext, that his real offense had been to attack advertising and video evangelism. Adnix and Preachnix were the essence of capitalist entrepreneurship, he argued repeatedly. The point of capitalism was supposed to be providing people with alternatives.

“Well, the absence of advertising is an alternative, I told them. There are huge advertising budgets only when there's no difference between the products. If the products really were different, people would buy the one that's better. Advertising teaches people not to trust their judgment. Advertising teaches people to be stupid. A strong country needs smart people. So Adnix is patriotic. The manufacturers can use some of their advertising budgets to improve their products. The consumer will benefit. Magazines and newspapers and direct mail business will boom, and that'll ease the pain in the ad agencies. I don't see what the problem is.”

Adnix, much more than the innumerable libel suits against the original commercial networks, led directly to their demise. For a while there was a small army of unemployed advertising executives, down-and-out former network officials, and penniless divines who had sworn blood oaths to revenge themselves on Hadden. And there was an ever-growing number of still more formidable adversaries. Without a doubt, she thought, Hadden was an interesting man.

“So I figure it's time to go. I've got more money than I know what to do with, my wife can't stand me, and I've got enemies everywhere. I want to do something important, something worthy. I want to do something so that hundreds of years from now people will look back and be glad I was around.”

“You want—”

“I want to build the Machine. Look, I'm perfectly suited for it. I've got the best cybernetics expertise, practical cybernetics, in the business—better than Camegie-Mellon, better than MIT, better than Stanford, better than Santa Barbara. And if there's anything clear from those plans, it's that this isn't a job for an oldtime tool-and-die maker. And you're going to need something like genetic engineering. You won't find anybody more dedicated to this job. And I'll do it at cost.”

“Really, Mr. Hadden, who builds the Machine, if we ever get to that point, isn't up to me. It's an international decision. All sorts of politics is involved. They're still debating in Paris about whether to build the thing, if and when we decrypt the Message.”

“Don't you think I know that? I'm also applying through the usual channels of influence and corruption. I just want to have a good word put in for me for the right reasons, by the side of the angels.

Yon understand? And speaking of angels, you really shook up Palmer Joss and Billy Jo Ran-kin. I haven't seen them so agitated since that trouble they had about Mary's waters. Rankin saying he was deliberately misquoted about supporting the Machine. My, my.”

He shook his head in mock consternation. That some long-standing personal enmity existed between these active proselytizers and the inventor of Preachnix seemed probable enough, and for some reason she was moved to their defense.

“They're both a lot smarter than you might think. And Palmer Joss is… well, there's something genuine about him. He's not a phony.”

“You're sure it's not just another pretty face? Excuse me, but it's important that people understand their feelings on this. It's too important not to. I know these clowns. Underneath, when push comes to shove, they're jackals. A lot of people find religion attractive—you know, personally, sexually. You ought to see what happens in the Temple of Ishtar.”

She repressed a small shiver of revulsion. “I think I will have that drink,” she said.

Looking down from the penthouse, she could see the gradated tiers of the Ziggurat, each draped with flowers, some artificial, some real, depending on the season. It was a reconstruction of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Miraculously, it was so arranged that it did not closely resemble a Hyatt Hotel. Far below, she could make out a torchlit procession headed back from the Ziggurat to the Enlil Gate. It was led by a kind of sedan chair held by four burly men stripped to the waist.

Who or what was in it she could not make out.

“It's a ceremony in honor of Gilgamesh, one of the ancient Sumerian culture heroes.”

“Yes, I've heard of him.”