Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 52 by John Joseph Adams

Author:John Joseph Adams [Adams, John Joseph]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science Fiction, Fantasy, Short Stories, Magazine
Publisher: John Joseph Adams
Published: 2014-08-29T04:00:00+00:00

NOVELLA

Giliad

Gregory Feeley

Trent’s pleasure in being asked to βeta-test Ziggurat deeply annoyed Leslie, who watched without comment as he slid in the CD but left when summer-movie music began to vibrate from the speakers as cuneiform characters appeared on the screen and slowly turned into the company’s name. She was in the kitchen when he called her to come see something, and had nearly finished preparing lunch when he appeared at the door. “No, I’m not interested,” she answered, ignoring his crestfallen expression. “Go role-play as Sargon, but don’t tell me its history. And that anachronistic Greek letter is pretty dumb.”

“They’re just showing off their HTML,” he protested, hurt. “You say you hate not being able to underline in email.” He took a sandwich, an act he made seem like a peace offering. “Was there really a king named Sargon?”

Leslie sighed. “Yes, and he’s certain to appear in the game, since his name sounds like someone out of Star Trek.” Trent laughed. “You know what else they’ll put in?”

“Gilgamesh?” he guessed after a second. Trent hated being made to feel he was being tested.

“Beer,” she answered, handing him a bottle. “The Sumerians invented it.”

“Really?” His pleasure at some bauble of fact was unmediated, like a child’s. “And there were seven cities vying for supremacy?”

“In Sargon’s time? I don’t know.” Leslie thought. “Uruk, then Kish . . .”

“Nippur, Eridu, Ur, Lagash, and Umma.” Leslie looked skeptical, and he added, “I know, it depends on when.”

“These are independent city-states? Then this would be before Sargon, or sometime after.” She sighed. “I’ll look it up, okay? But I don’t want to deal with your game.”

When she entered the office, however, a color map of the Tigris-Euphrates valley was glowing on the monitor. Trent was nowhere to be seen. Leslie pulled down her Cambridge Ancient History, and as she turned back toward the desk, a half-dozen cities appeared within the lopsided gourd formed by the two rivers. She stepped closer and saw that the symbols marking the sites were ragged-sloped triangles, ziggurats. Kish was nearest the stem, with the rest farther south; but after a second a constellation of features began to appear: the word AKKAD materialized just beneath the bottleneck, while stylized inverted V’s, ominous as the peaks of Mordor in Tolkien’s map of Middle Earth, rose to the east and became The Zagros Mountains. ELAMITES, AMORITES, and GUTIANS threatened from the periphery. Leslie glanced at the speakers and noticed that the volume had been turned down.

Not wanting to sit with her back to the monitor as it cycled through these changes, she took her book into the bedroom. She could hear tapping from the living room, where the laptop was plugged in by the couch. She sat in the armchair—the squeak of sprawling across the bed would doubtless bring Trent—and browsed through the pages on Mesopotamia.

Reading history will send you repeatedly to the bookcase to consult other sources on the subject, unless the author has managed to catch you in the spell of his narrative (which means you are not reading history).

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