"Jerry Davis - Elko the Potter (2)" - читать интересную книгу автора (Davis Jerry)

slowing so that he could see the passage of humanity through the
stinging hell of the retinal linkage. There were no carts at all,
and then suddenly they were everywhere! It was like there had been
an explosion of carts.
He reversed the scan, going backwards through time. Below his
disembodied eyes the city deteriorated into a village of mud huts,
and the bronze plow devolved to copper and then to a curved stick.
The men and women carried their harvest in by hand in large
baskets. There was not a wheel in sight. Wearily, Raymond flipped
the controls forward again. This was taking forever.
For seven long years Raymond had been waiting for this
chance, and now he had only three days to accomplish it. Two of
those three days were already gone, and this last one was rapidly
coming to a close. Behind Raymond there was a long line of others
who waited for their turn at the temporal viewer, each with their
own pet projects. If Raymond didn't make his discovery within the
next few hours, it would probably never happen.
Through the haze of pain he watched it happen again. An
explosion of carts. He reversed the controls again and watched,
scanning slower than ever, trying to trace the progress. It had to
have begun here. Somewhere.
And then --- suddenly! --- he spotted it. He stopped the
temporal scan, freezing the image. Raymond was so elated he
giggled like a madman. "That's it! That's it that's it!" he yelled
out loud. They were beautiful --- the most beautiful thing he'd
ever seen. Four round bricks drying in the hot summer sunlight.
Four bricks that would forever change the history of mankind.

#

Elko, a Sumerian potter living on the banks of the Euphrates,
had this reoccurring feeling that he was being watched. It would
come and go, and sometimes he forgot about it altogether, but then
sometimes he could be all alone and it was like someone was above
him looking down. He attributed it as the attention of the gods.
His own father thought him a fool, so maybe the gods did too, and
Elko was providing them with amusement.
Elko, son a farmer, heir to a long line of the most
successful farmers anyone had ever known, had turned down the
family trade to play with mud. That's how Unko, his father, would
put it. Playing with mud. Unko saw water as the power, water
flowing through their hand-dug ditches, irrigating the fields. Man
controlling the power of water from the great Euphrates.

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Elko firmly believed it was not the water, it was the dirt.
The water merely followed where the dirt directed it. Hand-built
levees, hand dug ditches --- it was the dirt.