Salvage Rites: And Other Stories

by Ian Watson

  Two or three streets were noisy with groups of lemurs warbling at one another. In other streets numbers of the natives were simply curled up along the base of walls, twitchingly asleep, looking like examples of accidie, medieval sloth. Maybe those lemurs were ill, and this was the equivalent of hospitalization. Perhaps they favoured night-life and had hangovers.

  By day, of course, the majority of lemurs were busy in the fields or in the bottle-tree forest or along the river-bank. Or else they were fetching water from one or another crude canal sump outside the city wall, or were engaged in hauling or shoving food back to town on their sledges of bottle-wood.

  No visible arts or crafts; only the all-encompassing intricate chaotic stone itself; or perhaps one should say the solid sketch of a city, where decoration wholly out-weighed function.

  ‘How can they possibly project all of these monstrous images of such simple natural lives?’ repeated Peter.

  ‘That’s exactly it!’ said Mary brightly. ‘Those are images from out of their burgeoning imagination, images which must inevitably scare as well as intrigue because they challenge, they stimulate, they tease. Those are fascinating creatures they see in dreams and which they need to cling on to as a promise, a warrant of increasing complexity of thought. First the form, later the philosophy. Perhaps their subconscious mind, by which I mean the collective unconscious, is evolving and complexifying, acting as a kind of spur to their ordinary consciousness. I’m sure there’s a rich oral tradition amongst all the warbles.’ She glanced regretfully at Carl. ‘After all, they twitter enough. Yet maybe they also experience a sort of angst at emerging from nature – a loss of instinctual, prelapsarian animal paradise – and deflect this angst by embodying and even celebrating such anxieties as environment. Maybe, Peter, that’s your answer.’

  Maybe. Her words sounded more eloquently convincing than they ever could in the clipped speed-talk of the info-swap, where they might shrink into gibberish.

  Thought Peter: if I tried to move closer to Mary emotionally and sensually, she would have a theory about this too. But then, so had he, hadn’t he? He felt a sudden urge to sculpt Mary nude, lascivious, flaunting. Not as a gross exemplar of lust; as an indicator of joy instead. Joy, yes, liberating joy! An explosion of joy which might coat him with dust, however, a joy which might petrify him. No, he wanted to go beyond that, to mould an image which simply stood for itself alone and did not represent any moral catechisms or theory of behaviour.

  In his mind’s eyes he watched Mary fill a pewter tankard full of foaming, heady beer for him, then a second tankard for herself, thus to wash the dust from his throat, from his bloodstream, from his hairy, Pan-like, goaty loins.

  But where was the spare, blank, unoccupied stone waiting to be sculpted?

  Oh here and there, here and there. By no means everywhere. Still, not every niche and nook had been filled.

  An unsculpted pillar rose in a yard. Visualize, chiselled from it: Alien Woman. Alien to the lemur inhabitants, that’s to say.

  ‘I don’t follow you,’ said Carl. ‘There must be some particular environmental pressure to evolve – to which they’re adapting – mustn’t there be? Not a mental pressure from within, a dream-pressure. You’re almost saying that they evolve spontaneously.’

  Mary grinned. ‘Maybe that’s my romantic side showing.’ Her smile encompassed Peter, Peter more than Carl. So perhaps, thought Peter, she was beginning to realize, and her talk of dreams meant… He suspected he could only ever express himself fully not in simple stone but in smooth, rich, aristocratic marble. He might return from this expedition metamorphosed into a sculptor rather than a mason. His hands itched.

  They entered a square flanked with hieroglyphicals. These were figures which seemed to bespeak or riddle out some special symbolism above and beyond the ordinary grotesque; some one-to-one meaning, if only you could decode it. Many of the figures were related to one another by a gesture, a glance, even by physical connections in the shape of a stone chain looping from belly to belly… maybe that was an umbilical cord.

  A stone fish-lemur – lemur with fins and tail – poised as if diving, one hand clamped over its nose. Two distorted lemurs who were fused together, their twin trunks branching from shared monstrous legs, wrestled for possession of a stone knife – to cut themselves apart? to hack off the rival claimant, amputate him? Another figure jutted up with arms outstretched, one hand clutching a stone hoe like a trident, stone wings bursting from its back as though it would take flight into the sky.

  With its bare hands a fourth figure ripped open a hole, a grinning mouth, in its belly. This one’s neighbour had shrunk into a wizened ball mostly, yet one single giant arm pointed dramatically… towards a gloomy doorway barren of any images except one, and that image not carved at all but seemingly painted or burnt (or both) upon the curved rock lintel. The daubed image was a pair of staring black-rimmed eyes, two circles side by side.

  Their guide had gestured and twittered at them to stay in the square, and had run off. Initially they had been more interested in scrutinizing and taking holos of the hieroglyphicals. Only as she returned, carrying some stiff and still steaming purple root vegetable on which she alternately blew and chewed, did they notice the sign above the doorway – to which the lunching lemur trotted, and where she squatted down.

  ‘A sign!’ exclaimed Carl. ‘God, it’s the first graffito we’ve seen. The first genuine arbitrary symbol. Two circles touching, like our sign for infinity, eh? I’m sure it’s painted. The first piece of written language?’

  ‘Lemur eyes,’ Mary said. ‘That’s what it shows. As a warning? Dark inside. Doesn’t open out and brighten? No, why should they warn of darkness – with their eyesight?’

  ‘What we assume about their eyesight,’ Carl corrected. ‘Can’t test them out like animals, can we? Damned if we will!’

  Yet even so. Big eyes. At night spy-cams usually showed activity in the city. The lemurs had fire but this seemed restricted to cookery. No natives carried brands to light their way or did flambeaux illuminate any of their living zones.

  ‘Maybe it means, “Look in here.”’ Carl unclipped a flashlight, shone the beam down a plunge of broad shallow steps which didn’t appear to be made of stone.

  ‘Hey! Door against the wall!’ He leaned to rap with his knuckles. ‘Bottle-wood door. Or an upended sledge.’

  He was standing above the lemur. Gulping the last of her veg, she twittered up at him. He frowned in concentration.

  ‘Children. Run. Hide? I can’t understand.’

  Peter felt resentful of that sign. If it was a sign at all, it wasn’t inscribed in his own language, of stone.

  Carl leaned again to shine his light down those steps. The lemur rose, blinking. Briefly Peter was convinced that the native was attacking Carl in protest at the phenomenon of the torch, for she grabbed hold of Carl’s tunic and began scrambling up him. Before Carl could do more than squeak loudly in surprise she was touching the sign above the door.

  ‘Stay still!’ called Mary. ‘Don’t dislodge her!’

  With sharp little teeth the lemur bit at her own thumb till it bled freely, a rich scarlet flow. In blood she painted around the outline of the sign till her wound coagulated. Then she leapt free from Carl, jerked her hurt thumb at the open doorway, warbled what might have been a farewell, and scuttled away.

  It was thus that they found the catacombs.

  ‘Catacombs’ was Peter’s description, although Mary soon pointed out that there did not seem to be any corpses or bones anywhere in the extensive series of corridors and little chambers underneath that part of the city. The whole complex, steps included was scooped out of firm clay, not cut through rock, and it was empty apart from numerous open doors of bottle-wood, none of which possessed any type of hinge.

  ‘It’s a burrow,’ said Mary. ‘Evidently they were never arboreal animals, like Earth lemurs! They were burrowing creatures. That’s why they have the apparent nocturnal adaptation of such big eyes
– it was to see underground. This is the Ur-burrow. The original, basic burrow over which they later built the city.’ ‘Rock upon clay?’ Peter asked sceptically. He felt consumed with claustrophobia as their flashlights played upon yet more tight corridors and empty little cells, all lemur-size. They were being forced to stoop. Oh to be high on a spire in the open air, settling a block into its new resting place of centuries, a block rampant with an eagle’s head. The air down in these, yes, catacombs smelt stale and dank.

  Nor were there any gargoyles or lapids or demons. Nothing carved whatever. No stone. To Peter’s mind the place was worse than empty. It was meaningless, and he feared that somehow he was losing Mary here as she spun her new theory of how the natives had originally burrowed like rabbits.

  ‘And then they emerged from the soil, from chthonic Nature, into light and consciousness and creativity!’

  ‘Where are the tools?’ he asked, and he remembered William Blake’s poem. ‘What the mallet, what the chisel?’

  Were these really doors, loose doors, down here -when there were no doors in the city up above – or were they simply surplus sledges, stored against a mammoth harvest or retired from service?

  When Mary snapped holopics the tiny chambers were blindingly illuminated. The after-dim, while his eyes readjusted to torchlight, was terrible to Peter’s heart.

  At the info-swap that evening Mary reported a great discovery which should quite trump Fremantle’s coup concerning the natural origin of agricultural tools. A whole new subterranean layer of significance had been laid bare. A biological Troy: the original habitat. Doubtless it should be a source of chagrin to the biologist that she had found this out whilst he had been haring about in the forest, barking up trees, breaking up trees. For a little while, the burrow even seemed to diminish the city of statuary, to thrust it into the shade, as though that hole in the ground could be more important.

  ‘Definitely not for burial purposes?’ demanded Ash. ‘Even in previous epochs?’

  ‘Most unlikely,’ replied Mary. ‘Not abandoned. Kept in repair. Using, um, bottle-wood implements. Otherwise collapse eventually. Besides, entrance marked with life-blood sign, constantly renewed. Ritually. Here is the root, the racial birth.’

  Fremantle said, ‘You think lemur fingers adapted to burrow? Ha!’

  Before Mary could field this thrust, Leo Allen was saying, ‘Seems like war-shelter to me. Refuge from enemies.’

  ‘No, no. When we landed, lemurs didn’t hide. Not threat-conscious.’

  ‘Carvings could have fooled me,’ said Allen. ‘Where metal sculpting tools, incidentally? If not hidden down burrow?’

  ‘Maybe buried there, below ground. If so, appropriate place, culturally. Symmetric, linked inversely. City opposite of burrow, stone opposite of soil.’

  ‘Fieldtrip there tomorrow?’ suggested Allen. ‘With metal detectors?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Ash. ‘Everdon, take Allen, Fremantle, and Ramirez.’

  Peter had no wish to join in this expedition to the oppressive, meaningless warren. Let slick Fremantle and crony Ramirez spoil Mary’s day for her, so that she would come back into the upper world of rock-art away from envy and barbed malice feeling stifled, needing Peter’s… solidity, craving significance and warmth.

  If Leo Allen’s detectors uncovered any concealed chisels, Peter couldn’t be more pleased. However, he had no wish to be present and couldn’t really credit Mary’s ‘symmetric’ argument. The following day would be better employed in company with Lipmann, who himself had no conceivable reason to descend again into that voiceless collection of worm holes in the clay.

  Almost shunning Mary, Peter went directly back to his hutch to sleep. Before shuttering the window for the night he stared out at one of the little moons hanging full, bone-white, over the forest. The two moons of Rock orbited at different speeds in differently tilted planes. He could almost see that moon moving, but then a solitary cloud consumed the satellite so that its light diffused and swelled into a glowing amoebic blob. The pure circular stone of the moon had melted into shapeless, meaningless menace.

  Leo Allen found no metal hidden in the burrow, though after his tour of inspection he was still inclined to the shelter idea, with reservations.

  ‘Yearly insect swarms? Like killer bees, lethal locusts?’ he suggested the following evening. ‘Small, but many and deadly.’

  Ramirez reported tersely at speed on the local analogues of insects, rodents, and riverine reptiles. To Peter’s ears she sounded like a twittering lemur herself.

  ‘Quick plagues of pseudo-mice,’ she gabbled. ‘Behave like lemmings every few years, maybe develop toxic bite?’

  ‘No food storage,’ said Allen. ‘Burrow not stocked.’

  ‘Innocuous-seeming species undergoes startling life-cycle metamorphosis? Like caterpillar into moth?’

  ‘Lemurs still intelligent to build shelter,’ Mary argued optimistically. ‘Memory of past, concept of future.’

  ‘Is hibernating tortoise intelligent?’ called out Fremantle.

  ‘Actually,’ added Allen, ‘shelter not spacious enough for more than quarter of estimated population.’

  ‘Therefore original home,’ said Mary, ‘before population rose.’

  ‘Lingo?’ asked Ash, and Carl reported quickly on the frustrating day he had spent with Peter.

  ‘Requires much work, back home. Breakthrough by next expedition, yes. If true language.’

  Ash raised a quizzical eyebrow.

  ‘Masonry?’ she enquired. A titter ran round the refectory, originating near Ramirez.

  ‘Twin-circle sign not found in carvings,’ Peter confessed.

  ‘Are you blind?’ heckled Fremantle. ‘Image of lemur eyes!’

  ‘Not necessarily.’ Though what else?

  ‘If burrow shelter from perceived threat,’ said Allen, ‘mount more survey cams in city for when M lights up tomorrow? Suppose Anthro records behaviour vicinity shelter?’

  Mary sat on Peter’s bunk, as he had hoped she might.

  ‘What a wretched day.’

  ‘Yes.’ He agreed sympathetically, gladly. ‘I’m afraid my carvings are no Rosetta stone, as yet.’

  Why should he be afraid? He thought of the hieroglyphicals he had restored in one Oxford college, hieroglyphicals inspired by the medieval bestiary representing desire, timidity, moroseness. He wanted to touch Mary, hold her, mould her, tumble her in bed. Yet he couldn’t. Didn’t know how. Couldn’t read her signals, which weren’t carved in stone but enciphered in flesh; couldn’t transmit his own signals to her adequately, hieroglyphically.

  His fear was deeper, obscure, indefinable, as though the lemur burrow was some nightmare area of himself which he had been forced reluctantly to enter. As yet nothing had been found, no final truth or ultimate idol, either glorious or evil. Why should the locus of nightmare be down there when blatant nightmares capered in full grotesquery along all the lanes of the city? To return to the courtyard of the… evil eyes, the very next evening, as he must now do in company with Carl and Mary, scared him in a way that no summit of any spire or tower height had ever done. A vertigo of the dark cramped depth afflicted him.

  ‘Mary.’

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  Damned timidity!

  ‘That’s to say, tell me about yourself, Mary, will you?’

  ‘But you already know. We know each other’s bios.’

  ‘Yes, but a person is not a biography.’ His own contained nothing about pints of ale or about a certain barmaid who consoled a certain farmer, who happened not to be as strapped for cash as other local farmers because he had seen the future and had roofed his fields over early with filtering, humidifying, climate-control film.

  ‘Any more than a tribe of aliens is a smarty-pants ethno-report. Is that what you’re implying?’

  Had he inadvertently opened a door to some hollow which haunted her? The most insightful of social maps (of one’s own well-planned life, too!) was not
the actual untidy paradoxical territory.

  ‘What should I tell you, Peter? Of times when I made a fool of myself? Times when I became obsessed? Times of confusion? My favourite foods? My favourite fantasies?’

  Yes, those, he thought.

  ‘Never mind,’ he said. ‘Look at the moon.’ (Which was over the river, streaking out a silver snake.) ‘Its side’s being shaved off by the sculptor of the night.’

  She stared at him intently. Was her stare a signal? He didn’t know.

  She said, ‘It should be almost full tomorrow evening. And it’s past our bedtime, if we’re to be wise owls then.’

  For that night of nights Leo Allen had done the observers proud. His own team, consisting of himself and Carl, team two, namely Fremantle and Ramirez, and team three, Mary and Peter, as well as being in audio contact with each other, with the base, and with Michelangelo, had multi-channel video links with all the survey cams, which were equipped for infrared in case of dark cloud. In the event the sky was clear; starlight and moonlight sugared the city.

  Since the workers were all home from the fields, the full complement of population was inside the city. Many were asleep, but others wandered about twittering so that lanes and yards and rooms seemed just as crowded – or uncrowded – as by day.

  ‘Fusion minus one hundred seconds,’ counted a radio voice. The glint of the orbiting voidship should be in sight any moment.

  ‘Allen here. It’ll look as though that moon has given birth to another moon. As though the other moon has jumped right around the sky to just beside it.’

  ‘Fremantle. Birth of myth, maybe? Like Velikovsky’s Bible?’ A sneer in his voice.

  Peter swept his flashlight beam above the doorway of the burrow. Two eyes, of dried blood, stared blackly. In panic he thumbed his com.