Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  ‘No,’ he admitted. ‘It kept getting longer between blinks. I tried to count it, five and five until there were four fives, and it blinked again, and then—’

  She shook her head, denying this strangeness. The people knew the sky as intimately as they knew the land, for it informed them of the times when the deer and horses and aurochs ran, when the forest’s fruit ripened, and when the snow would return. Any change was something to be wary of. ‘I don’t like this, Wolf.’ She moved away from him into the shadow of the Stone, and stepped on something that crunched under her feet. ‘What’s this? Oh, it’s Speaker’s old mask …’ She reached down and picked up a skull adorned with antlers, one broken in two. She dropped it in disgust. ‘I think I cut my foot. And I dropped my antler pin. What a mess this is.’ She clutched her skin cloak, which had come loose. ‘I’m going back to my mother. Wolf, you should come too. Stars that blink –’

  ‘I saw it,’ he insisted.

  ‘Nobody has told of such things, so they can’t be real, and that’s that.’ She stomped back down the track, her irritation and nervousness obvious in her stride.

  Alone, Wolf sat miserably with his back to the Giant’s Stone. If he’d hoped to impress Spring Snow by bringing her up here, he had done the opposite. He picked up the skull mask. Speaker had worn it during his dream dances, the times when he spoke to the animals and the birds and the fish. He had discarded it for a more handsome stag’s skull. And Wolf saw something else that gleamed white, like the skull. It was Spring’s deer-antler needle. Idly he used the needle to scrape at the skull, scratching spirals and starburst patterns into the worn, much-handled surface.

  He looked up at the new star. It was so bright it looked like a fleck of the sun, he thought, and the same sort of colour. If only it had blinked for Spring, even just once, she would have believed him and everything would have been different. But no star was going to perform for his benefit.

  Or would it? Why would a star blink at all? What was a star? A stone, an animal, a bird, a person, a god? What could a star see of the tiny movements of the people, their little camp? But he glanced over at the smoke that rose from the reeds they had set burning, and further across the hillside at the great gash of the clearing they had burned two years ago and later abandoned, a scar not yet healed. Could a star see such vast burnings, such changes in the land? If it was trying to speak to him, what was it saying? But even as he formulated the questions he knew he would never find an answer.

  And just then the star blinked again, turning dark for a heartbeat, two, three, before shining down on him once more.

  949 BC

  It was chance that revealed the strange star to Gouen, that cold summer night. Chance that her eyes were drawn up to its unnatural flickering, from the decomposing corpse of her child by the lake.

  It was midsummer, but it was cold, cloudy, wet – a dismal season, nothing like the brilliant summers Gouen remembered from her own childhood. And it was lonely too. The family’s great cone-shaped house was abandoned save for herself, and the fields marked out across the hillside by reeves and low walls were populated only by weeds and young trees, come to take back their ancient domain.

  Her sisters and their children had already fled the hunger, to throw themselves on the mercy of Podraig in his brooding fort further down the valley. Nobody could farm here on the uplands any more, only in the valleys and the lowlands, all of which were owned by men like Podraig with his swords of iron.

  Gouen, twenty-five years old, knew she would have to follow her sisters. For Gouen’s own husband was gone, dead of overwork. And she would have to trade the last pitiful remnants of her father’s legacy, the pottery, the bits of fine fabrics, the bronze daggers nobody wanted any more, for a place in Podraig’s petty domain.

  But she would not leave, not yet. Not while her only daughter Magda, just eight years old when she died, still lay on the sky burial platform by the water; not until the birds and the worms and the flies had done their work, and Gouen could take her cleansed bones to inter them in the barrow of her grandmothers.

  When the weather permitted, she sat through the night on her blanket by the lake shore, by Magda’s platform. Tonight was mild, relatively, and the stars shone through breaks in the cloud cover. The midsummer sky was pale, and she could easily see the ridge and the brooding mass of the Giant’s Stone and its ring of pillars, on a spot where, it was said, the skull of the Giant who had carried the great Stone was buried, with horns sprouting out of his broken face, and the bone marked with spirals and stars. Gouen had been very small the last time anybody had worshipped up there. When the weather failed them the farmers had abandoned the old stone gods and had taken to sacrificing and propitiating at the edge between land and water, the border between this world and the next.

  And tonight, praying for repose for her daughter, Gouen would make another sacrifice to the water gods: one of her last daggers, a thin blade of bronze that had been handled by her grandfathers since time out of mind.

  It was just as she was about to jam the dagger between two boulders, meaning to break the blade before casting it in the water, that she noticed the flickering in the sky.

  Entranced, she watched the new star come and go, shining longer and more steadily with each return, as if it were trying to say something to her. She counted the shining by her own breaths: two breaths, three, five, eight, thirteen … The glow of the star was bright, surely brighter than any other star in the sky, and it had a yellowness to it that reminded her of the sun.

  Magda’s white face was turned up to the star: poor Magda who had never known a single summer of warmth and play.

  Gouen lurched to her feet, stiff from sitting on the damp ground, pulled her woollen blanket around her shoulders, and stumbled over to the platform of the dead. Worms curled in Magda’s vacant eye sockets, and flies rose up from her open mouth. It was unbearable to Gouen that Magda could not see the sunny star. How it would have delighted her!

  Her father’s dagger was in her hand.

  She leaned over Magda and scraped hard at the bone forehead, her movements jerky and anxious. She drew a star shape, there on the pale bone under the remnants of flesh. It would be a mother’s last gift to a lost daughter, to show her this shining jewel of light that rode over the petty concerns of the human world, the rain and the mud, the grasping of men like Podraig. She scraped and scraped.

  But the skull rolled loose on its neck. And before she was done, the bronze tip blunted. She threw away the dagger and fell weeping on her daughter.

  1238 AD

  At the close of the sixth day of the new star’s apparition, Brother Wilfred summoned Ibn Mazur to his side. Wilfred had the Moor set out chairs and a table on the green beside the abbey’s cloister, with parchment and quills and ink, and books and hourglasses.

  From here Ibn Mazur had an uninterrupted view of the countryside, of the lake and the village on the upland beside it, and the crag with its brooding rock and silent attendant monoliths. It was midsummer. The sun had set but the sky was still a powder blue, and only a few stars yet shone – one of them the enigmatic newcomer.

  For just a moment this dismal corner of Wales evoked some of the beauty of far-off al-Andalus. Ibn Mazur could never return to the land of his birth. But he was alive, thanks to the charity of the brothers of this Christian house.

  Wilfred saw nothing of the evening. For days he had been staring at the sun through his bits of parchment with their pinprick holes, determined to discover if the star’s light was indeed the same as sunlight. Now his eyes were tired, he said; as he waited impatiently for the day to fade he sat back in his chair with a damp towel over his eyes, white hair sticking up around his shaved scalp. Unseeing he might be, but his mind bubbled with speculation. ‘You say you have the date I asked of you, Ibn Mazur?’

  ‘I do.’

  Wilfred breathed, a frail old man’s excitement apparent in
the way his bony fingers flexed. ‘Then tell me – but not yet …’

  When the winking star had first appeared in the sky, Wilfred had been excited to learn of local legends that seemed to be connected to it. Seven centuries after Augustine’s mission of conversion, the people of this remote place still clung to remnants of pagan belief. And they said this had been a holy land long before the Norman abbey had been built here to replace a Saxon church, which in turn had been built over a sylvan temple of the pre-Roman British. All of this was a link to the deep past, Wilfred believed, to legends of a dead child with a third eye that had gazed up at a winking star, and to even older legends of the primordial giant who built the landscape and was now buried under the great Stone. Wilfred had seized on Ibn Mazur’s scholarship, and had urged the Moor to check through the almagests he had carried since his enslavement in Granada to determine if the Moors had any record of those earlier apparitions. After all, a winking star must have been visible all across the world, if it existed.

  Somewhat to his own surprise, Ibn Mazur had been successful. More than two thousand years before, long before the Prophet’s revelation, such a sighting had been made by a Chinese court astronomer, and written down in a book of astronomical oddities that had eventually been brought to al-Andalus by traders along the Mongols’ Silk Road.

  It was this Chinese date that Wilfred now deferred hearing, like a child putting aside a strawberry the better to enjoy its flavour later. ‘Let us review what we know. The star itself—’

  ‘Is known to the Arabs as Altair.’

  ‘And to Ptolemy as Alpha Aquilae, the first star of the constellation of the Eagle.’

  Ibn Mazur bowed his head. ‘But the light we see, so like sunlight as you have observed, is not that of the star itself. In the intervals when the new star is dark, we still see Altair shining as we remember it.’

  ‘We know that it has shone in its intermittent way for six days now, in which time it has undergone two cycles of pulsing – starting with the rapid flickering, the shining intervals gradually lengthening.’

  ‘So we believe. But we cannot see the star easily in the day, and our observations of the beginning of the first cycle are uncertain, being based on the ramblings of a wide-eyed boy and an old woman of the village.’

  Wilfred waved that away. ‘Well, we have one more chance to observe a full cycle with scholarly precision.’

  Ibn Mazur frowned. ‘Why just one? Why not many?’

  ‘The star is ruled by numbers – or so I believe, Ibn Mazur. We have had two cycles of three days; a third cycle would round off the set neatly.’ The talk of numbers made Wilfred agitated; despite his great age he had a boyish enthusiasm for his studies. ‘I cannot wait any more. The date, Ibn Mazur! Tell me what the Chinese said!’

  Ibn Mazur had managed to convert the date from an archaic Chinese form to the Arabs’ elegant calendar and then work it through the Christians’ own error-ridden calculations. ‘The Chinese saw the star nine hundred and forty-nine years before Christ.’

  Wilfred’s mouth worked. ‘Nine hundred and forty-nine! How long ago is that? Added to our date, which is one thousand, two hundred and thirty-eight years – oh! Numbers enchant but baffle me.’

  Wilfred was a computistor; his primary job was to figure the movable date of Easter each year. But Ibn Mazur had never yet met a Christian who could do computations much beyond nine hundred, not even a computistor. ‘I worked it out on my abacus,’ he said dryly. ‘The apparition was two thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven years ago.’

  ‘Two thousand, one hundred …’ Wilfred muttered, adding up figures in his head. ‘Why, I believe that number is divisible by three!’

  Ibn Mazur took a bit of parchment and a pen, and wrote down the figure in his own Arabic numbers. Because of his affliction all but two of his fingers were bandaged stumps, and his writing was clumsy and slow. ‘You are correct,’ he said at length. ‘The product of the division is also divisible by three …’

  It took them a few minutes to establish that two thousand, one hundred and eighty-seven was in fact three multiplied by itself seven times.

  Wilfred was so excited by this result that he sat upright and his towel fell from his face. Ibn Mazur was shocked at how red and watery his eyes were. ‘Numbers, Moor! I told you, New Altair is a star made up of numbers, woven by God and hurled into the sky!’

  Ibn Mazur looked up with some unease. ‘Perhaps you are right. But why should God speak to us in this way?’

  ‘To reassure us, perhaps, that there is an order in all things? To remind us that He is here, in an age of chaos that crowds around us …’

  Like all thoughtful Christians Ibn Mazur had met, Wilfred fretted over the trajectory of history. Across Europe, save only for Iberia, Islam was triumphant against the forces of Christianity. Further afield, the pagan Mongols were ripping in turn into the bellies of the great Islamic empires of the east. It was a world where Christ’s triumph seemed very distant indeed.

  And yet there were gentler consolations, Ibn Mazur thought. He looked down at the village. Tithed to the abbey, it was a rude collection of longhouses where, Ibn Mazur had been horrified to learn, the people lived with their animals. Tonight those few villagers not yet in their houses kept their eyes averted from the sky, for these Welsh were a superstitious lot who feared the new flickering star.

  But Ibn Mazur had experienced great kindness here. There were no slaves in Wales or England, or none that Ibn Mazur had encountered; he himself had been set free after his purchase in Bristol by a lord who valued his skills in arithmetic. There was law: the manorial courts ensured that a rough balance was maintained between the interests of the peasants and the lords and bishops. And the Christian Church, for all its infantile theology, cared for its flock from cradle to grave in return for devotion and moral rectitude. Wilfred spoke earnestly of the Fourth Lateran Council, when the Church had resolved that salvation was available to all, not just the most righteous. This was not Islam, but there were worse systems.

  Ibn Mazur himself had cause to be grateful for Christian charity. He had caught his ailment when the Viking raiders who had captured him had traded him through African ports. When it became impossible to hide his condition, his lord had not thrown him out or put him to death, but consigned him to the care of this remote abbey with its hospital of St Lazarus, patron saint of lepers.

  Would a star, or a being riding on a star, be able to see such petty sufferings and kindnesses? Perhaps such a being would make out only the greater works of man: the walls of Hadrian and Offa, or the way humans had turned so much of their world into a patchwork of farms. Perhaps, then, the flickering star transcended human divisions among men. Perhaps the star presaged a better future in which Christian and Muslim would be able to put aside centuries of warfare, and work together on loftier purposes.

  Wilfred was agitated. ‘Tell me, Moor, I cannot see well, my eyes are tired … Has the star gone dark? Has the new cycle of flickering begun?’

  Ibn Mazur glanced up. The sunlight sliver had indeed gone out, and only the pale, familiar light of Altair shone. ‘It has,’ he said softly; and even as he said it the brighter light returned.

  ‘Quickly, man,’ Wilfred said. ‘The hourglasses …’

  As the star resumed its flashing, each glare longer than the one preceding, the two of them went into the routine they had rehearsed, of hourglasses and counting and scratched numbers on parchment. It soon became apparent to Ibn Mazur that each successive glow lasted a little more than half as long again as its predecessor.

  But Wilfred was after more precision. ‘Yes, yes – look at these numbers! It is as I suspected. If you take the first pair, each as a unit of duration, then the next beaming was two units long, and then three, then five, then eight, then thirteen, then—’

  ‘I see the sequence,’ Ibn Mazur said. ‘I do not understand it.’

  ‘It i
s additive, man! Look – one plus one is two; I don’t need your abacus for that. One plus two is three. Two plus three is five …’

  ‘Ah.’ Each number in the sequence was the sum of the two preceding. Something in Ibn Mazur warmed with satisfaction at the realisation, and yet another part of him cringed. Abstract philosophy was all very well, but could Wilfred be right, that something divinely numerate really was at work above his head, visibly, in the midsummer sky of Wales?

  The two of them continued to work long into the night, measuring the lengthening intervals until they could count no more.

  Wilfred turned out to be right that the final sequence of flashes lasted three days, as had the first two, and then the star turned dark, leaving only patient Altair. Wilfred babbled speculation, wondering what strange eyes might see the star when it returned in another three-to-the-seventh years, or three to the sixth or three to the eighth … But Wilfred was not able to see even the end of the new star’s nine days, for his eyes were ruined from staring into the midsummer sun.

  After that Ibn Mazur stayed with him, a leprous Moor with a blind Christian. They let the days slide by, neither of them with anywhere else to go, and waited for more messages from a silent sky.

  1967 AD

  ‘Neolithic SETI, man,’ Neville had promised on the phone. ‘That’s what I’m talking about. That and the Beatles. You’ve got to be there …’

  On that June Sunday, it was early evening by the time Barry Morgan drove up to the ruins of the abbey. The place hadn’t changed in the eight or ten years since he and Neville had come up here when they were both still geeky kids at school in Cardiff, fascinated by maths and scared of girls. The abbey still stood gaunt beside its lake, a shell since the dissolution of the monasteries four centuries before. And, older yet, there was the Giant’s Stone, a great glacial erratic with its ring of standing stones. But the pale light of the four-day-old new star – the sunlight beacon, as astronomers like Neville were calling it – was already visible in the evening sky. And Barry could see the TV aerial Neville had fixed to the stone wall of the abbey.