Written in Sand
by Robert Chilson
Paul Enias travels from 21st century Egypt back to the third century where he becomes
Pausanias, falls in love with the slave Taia, and takes advice from Apollonius about
which of 750,000 available books to bury in clay jars for future Egyptians to discover.
Odd that the book-man should shrug off the value of books, but Pausanias had too much to
do to ponder it, overseeing the copying, the shipping of the books up the Nile, the
reorganization of his new estate, and of course there was taia, then a new—bride.
“Written in Sand” by Robert Chilson, in Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1979.