Flying through almost nothing
toward a planet freshly imprinted
with Australopithecus tracks,
a photon takes one path if it is observed
by earthly instruments in 2002 C.E.,
another if it is not. Thus our current techno-futzing
determines the photon’s past.
Ruminating upon a world
slung between counterintuitive particles,
physicist John Wheeler postulates
that the cosmos beyond our perceived horizon
is a kind of cloud as yet unresolved,
that the universe exists only, he says,
“with somebody to look at it.”
Photons rain unobserved on Gustarz,
crouched at his first dig, sweating into
a crease in the dirt as he patiently makes it deeper.
Perhaps today he will unearth
yet another crushed oil lamp.
Everything they are here for, he thinks,
is fragmented, altered, spoiled, allusive—
except the blank sort-of-stela he found last week.
People lived here, his ancestors maybe,
but the tender parts are gone, the smells,
the sounds, the binding threads. Of course
he began with dreams of gold. Now he’d be
excited by a lousy unbroken pot.
“Still and all,” McPartland says if anyone grumbles,
“it’s needful, all of it needful.”
When, rarely, he isn’t busy, he picks up
a pebble and rolls it around in one hand.
He spent last night assembling pieces
the size of his little fingernail
into half a clay vessel. Gustarz
noticed his tent walls glowing at dawn, stepped in,
and saw him regarding the thing with a look
of stern love, as one might a son.
In a city absorbed by the kingdom of Nab,
here stood a temple to an ancient deity
of whom is known no myth, no image,
only that it was called A’a, and oldest.
McPartland theorizes that the cult
dwindled to nothing in a time of plague.
At its height, this wasn’t the richest of Nabbite temples,
but its sanctuary was painted in many colors,
lit, it seems, with hundreds of lamps.
Besides the lamps and flecks of paint
they don’t have much: a partial floor plan,
and, in the maze of little rooms
behind the large one, the monolith
that Gustarz found, 1.5 meters tall,
which so far has told them nothing.
Its surface isn’t even carved,
just naturally eroded, even the deep pits
near the top that, though lopsided,
strike everyone who sees them as two sad eyes. Later,
Jusuf and Keram will find a cache
of arthritic bones, one of several burials:
For the first time in four thousand years,
light will fall on the bundled remains
of A’a-mnek, priest of A’a, the One Who Watches.