Дэймон Найт - Orbit 7

‘“I own three hundred ponies,” Steinleser read the rock out of his memory. “I own two days’ ride north and east and south, and one day’s ride west. I give you all. I blast out with a big voice like fire in tall trees, like the explosion of crowning pine trees. I cry like closing-in wolves, like the high voice of the lion, like the hoarse scream of torn calves. Do you not destroy yourself again! You are the dew on crazy-weed in the morning. You are the swift crooked wings of the night-hawk, the dainty feet of the skunk, you are the juice of the sour squash. Why can you not take or give? I am the humpbacked bull of the high plains, I am the river itself and the stagnant pools left by the river, I am the raw earth and the rocks. Come to me, but do not come so violently as to destroy yourself.”

‘Ah, that was the text of the first rock of the day, the Anadarko-Caddo hand-talk graven in stone. And final pictograms which I don’t understand: a shot-arrow sign, and a boulder beyond.’

‘“Continued on next rock,” of course,’ said Robert Derby. ‘Well, why wasn’t hand-talk ever written down? The signs are simple and easily stylized and they were understood by many different tribes. It would have been natural to write it.’

‘Alphabetical writing was in the region before hand-talk was well developed,’ Terrence Burdock said. ‘In fact, it was the coming of the Spanish that gave the impetus to hand-talk. It was really developed for communication between Spanish and Indian, not between Indian and Indian. And yet, I believe, hand-talk was written down once; it was the beginning of the Chinese pictographs. And there also it had its beginning as communication between differing peoples. Depend on it, if all mankind had always been of a single language, there would never have been any written language developed at all. Writing always began as a bridge, and there had to be some chasm for it to bridge.’

‘We have one to bridge here,’ said Steinleser. ‘That whole chimney is full of rotten smoke. The highest part of it should be older than the lowest part of the mound, since the mound was built on a base eroded away from the chimney formation. But in many ways they seem to be contemporary. We must all be under a spell here. We’ve worked two days on this, parts of three days, and the total impossibility of the situation hasn’t struck us yet.

‘The old Nahuatian glyphs for Time are the chimney glyphs. Present time is a lower part of a chimney and fire burning at the base. Past time is black smoke from a chimney, and future time is white smoke from a chimney. There was a signature glyph running through our yesterday’s stone which I didn’t and don’t understand. It seemed to indicate something coming down out of the chimney rather than going up it.’

‘It really doesn’t look much like a chimney,’ Magdalen said.

‘And a maiden doesn’t look much like dew on crazy-weed in the morning, Magdalen,’ Robert Derby said, ‘but we recognize these identities.’

They talked a while about the impossibility of the whole business.

‘There are scales on our eyes,’ Steinleser said. ‘The fluted core of the chimney is wrong. I’m not even sure the rest of the chimney is right.’

‘No, it isn’t,’ said Robert Derby. ‘We can identify most of the strata of the chimney with known periods of the river and stream. I was above and below today. There is one stretch where the sandstone was not eroded at all, where it stands three hundred yards back from the shifted river and is overlaid with a hundred years of loam and sod. There are other sections where the stone is cut away variously. We can tell when most of the chimney was laid down, we can find its correspondence up to a few hundred years ago. But when were the top ten feet laid down? There were no correspondences anywhere to that. The centuries represented by the strata of the top of the chimney, people, those centuries haven’t happened yet.’

‘And when was the dark capping rock on top of it all formed—?’ Terrence began. ‘Ah, I’m out of my mind. It isn’t there. I’m demented.’

‘No more than the rest of us,’ said Steinleser. ‘I saw it too, I thought, today. And then I didn’t see it again.’

‘The rock-writing, it’s like an old novel that I only half remember,’ said Ethyl.

‘Oh, that’s what it is, yes,’ Magdalen murmured.

‘But I don’t remember what happened to the girl in it.’

‘ I remember what happened to her, Ethyl,’ Magdalen said.

‘Give us the third chapter, Howard,’ Ethyl asked. ‘I want to see how it comes out.’

‘First you should all have whisky for those colds,’ Anteros suggested humbly.

‘But none of us have colds,’ Ethyl objected.

‘You take your own medical advice, Ethyl, and I’ll take mine,’ Terrence said. ‘I will have whisky. My cold is not rheum but fear-chill.’

They all had whisky. They talked a while, and some of them dozed.

‘It’s late, Howard,’ Ethyl said after a while. ‘Let’s have the next chapter. Is it the last chapter? Then we’ll sleep. We have honest digging to do tomorrow.’

‘Our third stone, our second stone of the day just past, is another and even later form of writing, and it has never been seen in stone before. It is Kiowa picture writing. The Kiowas did their out-turning spiral writing on buffalo skins dressed almost as fine as vellum. In its more sophisticated form (and this is a copy of that) it is quite late. The Kiowa picture writing probably did not arrive at its excellence until influenced by white artists.’

‘How late, Steinleser?’ Robert Derby asked.

‘Not more than a hundred and fifty years old. But I have never seen it copied in stone before. It simply isn’t stone-styled. There’s a lot of things around here lately that I haven’t seen before.

‘Well then, to the text, or should I say the pictography? “You fear the earth, you fear rough ground and rocks, you fear moister earth and rotting flesh, you fear the flesh itself, all flesh is rotting flesh. If you love not rotting flesh, you love not at all. You believe the bridge hanging in the sky, the bridge hung by tendrils and woody vines that diminish as they go up and up till they are no thicker than hairs. There is no sky-bridge, you cannot go upon it. Did you believe that the roots of love grow upside down? They come out of deep earth that is old flesh and brains and hearts and entrails, that is old buffalo bowels and snakes’ pizzles, that is black blood and rot and moaning underground. This is old and worn-out and bloody time, and the roots of love grow out of its gore”.’

‘You seem to give remarkable detailed translations of the simple spiral pictures, Steinleser, but I begin to get in the mood of it,’ Terrence said.

‘Ah, perhaps I cheat a little,’ said Steinleser.

‘You lie a lot,’ Magdalen challenged.

‘No I do not. There is some basis for every phrase I’ve used. It goes on: “I own twenty-two trade rifles. I own ponies. I own Mexico silver, eight-bit pieces. I am rich in all ways. I give all to you. I cry out with big voice like a bear full of mad-weed, like a bullfrog in love, like a stallion rearing against a puma. It is the earth that calls you. I am the earth, woollier than wolves and rougher than rocks. I am the bog earth that sucks you in. You cannot give, you cannot take, you cannot love, you think there is something else, you think there is a sky-bridge you may loiter on without crashing down. I am bristled-boar earth, there is no other. You will come to me in the morning. You will come to me easy and with grace. Or will you come to me reluctant and you be shattered in every bone and member of you. You be broken by our encounter. You be shattered as by a lightning bolt striking up from the earth. I am the red calf which is in the writings. I am the rotting red earth. Live in the morning or die in the morning, but remember that love in death is better than no love at all.”‘