Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

‘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 deeply, 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?’

‘I don’t believe that any one of us is guilty, Terrence,’ Ethyl put in mildly. ‘They are found four feet in from the slant surface of the mound. Why, we’ve cut through three hundred years of vegetable loam to get them, and certainly the surface was eroded beyond that.’