Orbit 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  And Anteros revealed it. There was something wrong about it even before he uncovered it. But it was surely a find, and perhaps it was of the proto-Plano period. The six shards came out. They were roughly cleaned and set. It was apparent that they would fit wonderfully.

  ‘Why, it is perfect!’ Ethyl exclaimed.

  ‘It is too perfect,’ Howard Steinleser protested. ‘It was a turned pot, and who had turned pots in America without the potter’s wheel? But the glyphs pressed into it do correspond to proto-Plano glyphs. It is fishy.’ Steinleser was in a twitchy humour today and his face was livid.

  ‘Yes, it is the ripple and the spinosity, the fish-glyph,’ Anteros pointed out. ‘And the sun-sign is riding upon it. It is fish-god.’

  ‘It’s fishy in another way,’ Steinleser insisted. ‘Nobody finds a thing like that in the first sixty seconds of a dig. And there could not be such a pot. I wouldn’t believe it was proto-Plano unless points were found in the exact site with it.’

  ‘Oh here,’ Anteros said. ‘One can smell the very shape of the flint points already. Two large points, one small one. Surely you get the whiff of them already? Four more hoe cuts and I come to them.’

  Four more hoe cuts, and Anteros did come to them. He uncovered two large points and one small one, spearheads and arrowhead. Lanceolate they were, with ribbon flaking. They were late Folsom, or they were proto-Plano; they were what you will.

  ‘This cannot be,’ Steinleser groaned. ‘They’re the missing chips, the transition pieces. They fill the missing place too well. I won’t believe it. I’d hardly believe it if mastodon bones were found on the same level here.’

  ‘In a moment,’ said Anteros, beginning to use the hoe again. ‘Hey, those old beasts did smell funny! An elephant isn’t in it with them. And a lot of it still clings to their bones. Will a sixth thoracic bone do? I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. I don’t know where the rest of the animal is. Probably somebody gnawed the thoracic here. Nine hoe cuts, and then very careful.’

  Nine hoe cuts - and then Anteros, using a mason’s trowel unearthed the old gnawed bone very carefully. Yes, Howard said almost angrily, it was a sixth thoracic of a mastodon. Robert Derby said it was a fifth or a sixth; it is not easy to tell.

  ‘Leave the digging for a while, Anteros,’ Steinleser said. ‘I want to record and photograph and take a few measurements here.’

  * * * *

  Terrence Burdock and Magdalen Mobley were working at the bottom of the chimney rock, at the bottom of the fluting that ran the whole height of it like a core sample.

  ‘Get Anteros over here and see what he can uncover in sixty seconds,’ Terrence offered.

  ‘Oh, him! He’ll just uncover some of his own things.’

  ‘What do you mean, his own things? Nobody could have made an intrusion here. It’s hard sandstone.’

  ‘And harder flint here,’ Magdalen said. ‘I might have known it. Pass the damned thing up. I know just about what it says anyhow.’

  ‘What it says? What do you mean? But it is marked! And it’s large and dressed rough. Who’d carve in flint?’

  ‘Somebody real stubborn, just like flint,’ Magdalen said. ‘All right then, let’s have it out. Anteros! Get this out in one piece. And do it without shattering it or tumbling the whole thing down on us. He can do it, you know, Terrence. He can do things like that.’

  ‘What do you know about his doings, Magdalen? You never saw or heard about the poor man till last night.’

  ‘Oh well, I know that it’ll turn out to be the same damned stuff.’

  Anteros did get it out without shattering it or bringing down the chimney column. A cleft with a digging bar, three sticks of the stuff and a cap, and he touched the leads to the battery when he was almost on top of the charge. The blast, it sounded as if the whole sky were falling down on them, and some of those sky-blocks were quite large stones. The ancients wondered why fallen pieces of the sky should always be dark rock-stuff and never sky-blue clear stuff. The answer is that it is only pieces of the night sky that ever fall, even though they may sometimes be most of the daytime in falling, such is the distance. And the blast that Anteros set off did bring down rocky hunks of the night sky even though it was broad daylight. They brought down darker rocks than any of which the chimney was composed.

  Still, it was a small blast. The chimney tottered but did not collapse. It settled back uneasily on its base. And the flint block was out in the clear.

  ‘A thousand spearheads and arrowheads could be shattered and chipped out of that hunk,’ Terrence marvelled. That flint block would have been a primitive fortune for a primitive man.’

  ‘I had several such fortunes,’ Anteros said dully, ‘and this one I preserved and dedicated.’

  They had all gathered around it.

  ‘Oh the poor man!’ Ethyl suddenly exclaimed. But she was not looking at any of the men. She was looking at the stone.

  ‘I wish he’d get off that kick,’ Magdalen sputtered angrily. ‘I don’t care how rich he is. I can pick up better stuff than him in the alleys.’

  ‘What are the women chirping about?’ Terrence asked. ‘But those do look like true glyphs. Almost like Aztecs, are they not, Steinleser?’

  ‘Nahuat-Tanoan, cousins-german to the Aztec, or should I say cousins-yaqui?’

  ‘Call it anything, but can you read it?’

  ‘Probably. Give me eight or ten hours on it and I should come up with a contingent reading of many of the glyphs. We can hardly expect a rational rendering of the message, however. All Nahuat-Tanoan translations so far have been gibberish.’

  ‘And remember, Terrence, that Steinleser is a slow reader,’ Magdalen said spitefully. ‘And he isn’t very good at interpreting other signs either.’

  Steinleser was sullen and silent. How had his face come to bear those deep livid claw-marks today?

  * * * *

  They moved a lot of rock and rubble that morning, took quite a few pictures, wrote up bulky notes. There were constant finds as the divided party worked up the shag-slash in the mound and the core-flute of the chimney. There were no more really startling discoveries; no more turned pots of the proto-Plano period; how could there be? There were no more predicted and perfect points of the late Folsom, but there were broken and unpredictable points. No other mastodon thoracic was found, but bones were uncovered of bison latifrons, of dire wolf, of coyote, of man. There were some anomalies in the relationships of the things discovered, but it was not as fishy as it had been in the early morning, not as fishy as when Anteros had announced and then dug out the shards of the pot, the three points, the mastodon bone. The things now were as authentic as they were expected, and yet their very profusion had still the smell of a small fish.

  And that Anteros was one digging man. He moved the sand, he moved the stone, he missed nothing. And at noon he disappeared.

  An hour later he reappeared in a glossy station wagon, coming out of a thicketed ravine where no one would have expected a way. He had been to town. He brought a variety of cold cuts, cheeses, relishes, and pastries, a couple of cases of cold beer, and some V.O.

  ‘I thought you were a poor man, Anteros,’ Terrence chided.

  ‘I told you that I was a rich old poor man. I have nine thousand acres of grassland, I have three thousand head of cattle, I have alfalfa land and clover land and corn land and hay-grazer land—’

  ‘Oh, knock it off!’ Magdalen snapped.

  ‘I have other things,’ Anteros finished sullenly.

  They ate, they rested, they worked the afternoon. Magdalen worked as swiftly and solidly as did Anteros. She was young, she was stocky, she was light-burned-dark. She was not at all beautiful. (Ethyl was.) She could have any man there any time she wanted to. (Ethyl couldn’t.) She was Magdalen, the often unpleasant, the mostly casual, the suddenly intense one. She was the tension of the party, the string of the bow.

  ‘Anteros!’ she called sharply just at sundown.

  ‘The turtle?’ he asked. �
�The turtle that is under the ledge out of the current where the backwater curls in reverse? But he is fat and happy and he has never harmed anything except for food or fun. I know you do not want me to get that turtle.’

  ‘I do! There’s eighteen pounds of him. He’s fat. He’ll be good. Only eighty yards, where the bank crumbles down to Green River, under the lower ledge that’s shale that looks like slate, two feet deep —’

  ‘I know where he is. I will go get the fat turtle,’ Anteros said. ‘I myself am the fat turtle. I am the Green River.’ He went to get it.

  ‘Oh that damned poetry of his!’ Magdalen spat when he was gone.

  Anteros brought back the fat turtle. He looked as if he’d weigh twenty-five pounds; but if Magdalen said he weighed eighteen pounds, then it was eighteen.

  ‘Start cooking, Ethyl,’ Magdalen said. Magdalen was a mere undergraduate girl permitted on the digging by sheer good fortune. The others of the party were all archaeologists of moment. Magdalen had no right to give orders to anyone, except her born right.

  ‘I don’t know how to cook a turtle,’ Ethyl complained.

  ‘Anteros will show you how.’

  * * * *

  ‘The late evening smell of newly exposed excavation!’ Terrence Burdock burbled as they lounged around the campfire a little later, full of turtle and V.O. and feeling rakishly wise. ‘The exposed age can be guessed by the very timbre of the smell, I believe.’

  ‘Timbre of the smell! What is your nose wired up to?’ from Magdalen.

  And, indeed, there was something time-evocative about the smell of the diggings; cool, at the same time musty and musky, ripe with old stratified water and compressed death. Stratified time.

  ‘It helps if you already know what the exposed age is,’ said Howard Steinleser. ‘Here there is an anomaly. The chimney sometimes acts as if it were younger than the mound. The chimney cannot be young enough to include written rock, but it is.’

  ‘Archaeology is made up entirely of anomalies,’ said Terrence, ‘rearranged to make them fit in a fluky pattern. There’d be no system to it otherwise.’

  ‘Every science is made up entirely of anomalies rearranged to fit,’ said Robert Derby. ‘Have you unriddled the glyph-stone, Howard?’

  ‘Yes, pretty well. Better than I expected. Charles August can verify it, of course, when we get it back to the university. It is a non-royal, non-tribal, non-warfare, non-hunt declaration. It does not come under any of the usual radical signs, any of the categories. It can only be categorized as uncategorized or personal. The translation will be rough.’

  ‘Rocky is the word,’ said Magdalen.

  ‘On with it, Howard,’ Ethyl cried.

  ‘“You are the freedom of wild pigs in the sour-grass, and the nobility of badgers. You are the brightness of serpents and the soaring of vultures. You are passion on mesquite bushes on fire with lightning. You are serenity of toads.”‘

  ‘You’ve got to admit he’s got a different line,’ said Ethyl. ‘Your own love notes were less acrid, Terrence.’

  ‘What kind of thing is it, Steinleser?’ Terrence questioned. ‘It must have a category.’

  ‘I believe Ethyl is right. It’s a love poem. “You are the water in rock cisterns and the secret spiders in that water. You are the dead coyote lying half in the stream, and you are the old entrapped dreams of the coyote’s brains oozing liquid through the broken eyesocket. You are the happy ravening flies about that broken socket.”‘

  ‘Oh, hold it, Steinleser,’ Robert Derby cried. ‘You can’t have got all that from scratches on flint. What is “entrapped dreams” in Nahuat-Tanoan glyph-writing?’

  ‘The solid-person sign next to the hollow-person sign, both enclosed in the night sign – that has always been interpreted as the dream glyph. And here the dream glyph is enclosed in the glyph of the deadfall trap. Yes, I believe it means entrapped dreams. To continue: “You are the cornworm in the dark heart of the corn, the naked small bird in the nest. You are the pustules on the sick rabbit, devouring life and flesh and turning it into your own serum. You are stars compressed into charcoal. But you cannot give, you cannot take. Once again you will be broken at the foot of the cliff, and the word will remain unsaid in your swollen and purpled tongue.”‘

  ‘A love poem, perhaps, but with a difference,’ said Robert Derby.

  ‘I never was able to go his stuff, and I tried, I really tried,’ Magdalen moaned.

  ‘Here is the change of person-subject shown by the canted-eye glyph linked with the self-glyph,’ Steinleser explained. It is now a first-person talk. “I owe ten thousand back-loads of corn. I own gold and beans and nine buffalo horns full of watermelon seeds. I own the loincloth that the sun wore on his fourth journey across the sky. Only three loincloths in the world are older and more valued than this. I cry out to you in a big voice like the hammering of herons” (that sound-verb-particle is badly translated, the hammer being not a modern pounding hammer but a rock angling, chipping hammer) “and the belching of buffaloes. My love is sinewy as entwined snakes, it is steadfast as the sloth, it is like a feathered arrow shot into your abdomen – such is my love. Why is my love unrequited?”‘

  ‘I challenge you, Steinleser,’ Terrence Burdock cut in. What is the glyph for “unrequited?”‘

  ‘The glyph of the extended hand – with all the fingers bent backwards. It goes on, “I roar to you. Do not throw yourself down. You believe you are on the hanging sky bridge, but you are on the terminal cliff. I grovel before you. I am no more than dog-droppings.”‘

  ‘You’ll notice he said that and not me,’ Magdalen burst out. There was always a fundamental incoherence about Magdalen.

  ‘Ah – continue, Steinleser,’ said Terence. ‘The girl is daft, or she dreams out loud.’

  ‘That is all of the inscription, Terrence, except for a final glyph which I don’t understand. Glyph writing takes a lot of room. That’s all the stone would hold.’

  ‘What is the glyph that you don’t understand, Howard?’

  ‘It’s the spear-throwing glyph entwined with the time glyph. It sometimes means “flung forward or beyond”. But what does it mean here?’

  ‘It means “continued”, dummy, “continued”,’ Magdalen said. ‘Do not fear. There’ll be more stones.’

  ‘I think it’s beautiful,’ said Ethyl Burdock, ‘in its own context, of course.’

  ‘Then why don’t you take him on, Ethyl, in his own context, of course?’ Magdalen asked. ‘Myself, I don’t care how many back-loads of corn he owns. I’ve had it.’

  ‘Take whom on, dear?’ Ethyl asked. ‘Howard Steinleser can interpret the stones, but who can interpret our Magdalen?’

  ‘Oh, I can read her like a rock,’ Terrence Burdock smiled. But he couldn’t.

  * * * *

  But it had fastened on them. It was all about them and through them: the brightness of serpents and the serenity of toads, the secret spiders in the water, the entrapped dreams oozing through the broken eyesocket, the pustules of the sick rabbit, the belching of buffalo, and the arrow shot into the abdomen. And around it all was the night smell of flint and turned earth and chuckling streams, the mustiness, and the special muskiness which bears the name Nobility of Badgers.

  They talked archaeology and myth talk. Then it was steep night, and the morning of the third day.

  Oh, the sample digging went well. This was already a richer mound than Spiro, though the gash in it was but a small promise of things to come. And the curious twin of the mound, the broken chimney, confirmed and confounded and contradicted. There was time gone wrong in the chimney, or at least in the curious fluted core of it; the rest of it was normal enough, and sterile enough.

  Anteros worked that day with a soft sullenness, and Magdalen brooded with a sort of lightning about her.

  ‘Beads, glass beads!’ Terrence Burdock exploded angrily. ‘All right! Who is the hoaxer in our midst? I will not tolerate this at all.’ Terrence had been angry of face all day. He was clawed deep
ly, as Steinleser had been the day before, and he was sour on the world.

  ‘There have been glass-bead caches before, Terrence, hundreds of them,’ Robert Derby said softly.

  ‘There have been hoaxers before, hundreds of them,’ Terrence howled. ‘These have “Hong Kong Contemporary” written all over them, damned cheap glass beads sold by the pound. They have no business in a stratum of around the year seven hundred. All right, who is guilty?’