Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

‘You had better try the thing, Robert,’ Ethyl Burdock said, ‘or we’ll have no peace this evening.’

Robert Derby took a carbine and went northeastward of the chimney, descending into the draw at forty yards. There was the high ping of the carbine shot. And after some moments, Robert returned with a curious grin.

‘You didn’t miss him, Robert, you killed him,’ Magdalen called loudly. ‘You got him with a good shot through the throat and up into the brain when he tossed his head high like they do. Why didn’t you bring him? Go back and get him!’

‘Get him? I couldn’t even lift the thing. Terrence and Howard, come with me and we’ll lash it to a pole and get it here somehow.’

‘Oh Robert, you’re out of your beautiful mind,’ Magdalen chided. ‘It only weighs a hundred and ninety pounds. Oh, I’ll get it.’

Magdalen Mobley went and got the big buck. She brought it back, carrying it listlessly across her shoulders and getting herself bloodied, stopping sometimes to examine rocks and kick them with her foot, coming on easily with her load. It looked as if it might weigh two hundred and fifty pounds; but if Magdalen said it weighed a hundred and ninety, that is what it weighed.

Howard Steinleser had cut poles and made a tripod. He knew better than not to. They strung the buck up, skinned it off, ripped up its belly, drew it, and worked it over in an almost professional manner.

‘Cook it, Ethyl,’ Magdalen said.

Later, as they sat on the ground around the fire and it had turned dark, Ethyl brought the buck’s brains to Magdalen, messy and not half cooked, believing that she was playing an evil trick. And Magdalen ate them avidly. They were her due. She had discovered the buck.

If you wonder how Magdalen knew what invisible things were where, so did the other members of the party always wonder.

‘It bedevils me sometimes why I am the only one to notice the analogy between historical geology and depth psychology,’ Terrence Burdock mused as they grew lightly profound around the campfire. ‘The isostatic principle applies to the mind and the under-mind as well as it does to the surface and undersurface of the earth. The mind has its erosions and weatherings going on along with its deposits and accumulations. It has its upthrusts and its stresses. It floats on a similar magma. In extreme cases it has its volcanic eruptions and its mountain building.’

‘And it has its glaciations,’ Ethyl Burdock said, and perhaps she was looking at her husband in the dark.

‘The mind has its hard sandstone, sometimes transmuted to quartz, or half transmuted into flint, from the drifting and floating sand of daily events. It has its shale from the old mud of daily ineptitudes and inertias. It has limestone out of its more vivid experiences, for lime is the remnant of what was once animate: and this limestone may be true marble if it is the deposit of rich enough emotion, or even travertine if it has bubbled sufficiently through agonized and evocative rivers of the under-mind. The mind has its sulphur and its gem-stones—’ Terrence bubbled on sufficiently, and Magdalen cut him off.

‘Say simply that we have rocks in our heads,’ she said. ‘But they’re random rocks, I tell you, and the same ones keep coming back. It isn’t the same with us as it is with the earth. The world gets new rocks all the time. But it’s the same people who keep turning up, and the same minds. Damn, one of the samest of them just turned up again! I wish he’d leave me alone. The answer is still no.’

Very often Magdalen said things that made no sense. Ethyl Burdock assured herself that neither her husband, nor Robert, nor Howard, had slipped over to Magdalen in the dark. Ethyl was jealous of the chunky and surly girl.

‘I am hoping that this will be as rich as Spiro Mound,’ Howard Steinleser hoped. ‘It could be, you know. I’m told that there was never a less prepossessing site than that, or a trickier one. I wish we had someone who had dug at Spiro.’

‘Oh, he dug at Spiro,’ Magdalen said with contempt.

‘He? Who?’ Terrence Burdock asked. ‘No one of us was at Spiro. Magdalen, you weren’t even born yet when that mound was opened. What could you know about it?’

‘Yeah, I remember him at Spiro,’ Magdalen said, ‘always turning up his own things and pointing them out.’

‘ Were you at Spiro?’ Terrence suddenly asked a piece of the darkness. For some time, they had all been vaguely aware that there were six, and not five, persons around the fire.

‘Yeah, I was at Spiro,’ the man said. ‘I dig there. I dig at a lot of the digs. I dig real well, and I always know when we come to something that will be important. You give me a job.’

‘Who are you?’ Terrence asked him. The man was pretty visible now. The flame of the fire seemed to lean towards him as if he compelled it.

‘Oh, I’m just a rich old poor man who keeps following and hoping and asking. There is one who is worth it all forever, so I solicit that one forever. And sometimes I am other things. Two hours ago I was the deer in the draw. It is an odd thing to munch one’s own flesh.’ And the man was munching a joint of the deer, unasked.

‘Him and his damn cheap poetry!’ Magdalen cried angrily.

‘What’s your name?’ Terrence asked him.

‘Manypenny. Anteros Manypenny is my name forever.’

‘What are you?’

‘Oh, just Indian. Shawnee, Choc, Creek, Anadarko, Caddo and pre-Caddo. Lots of things.’

‘How could anyone be pre-Caddo?’

‘Like me. I am.’

‘Is Anteros a Creek name?’

‘No. Greek. Man, I am a going Jessie, I am one digging man! I show you tomorrow.’

Man, he was one digging man! He showed them tomorrow. With a short-handled rose hoe he began the gash in the bottom of the mound, working too swiftly to be believed.

‘He will smash anything that is there. He will not know what he comes to,’ Ethyl Burdock complained.

‘Woman, I will not smash whatever is there,’ Anteros said. ‘You can hide a wren’s egg in one cubic metre of sand. I will move all the sand in one minute. I will uncover the egg wherever it is. And I will not crack the egg. I sense these things. I come now to a small pot of the proto-Plano period. It is broken, of course, but I do not break it. It is in six pieces and they will fit together perfectly. I tell you this beforehand. Now I reveal it.’

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.