Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“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 darkness. For some time, they had all been vaguely aware that there were six, 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 leap toward 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 meter 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 humor 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.

“This cannot be,” Steinleser groaned. “They’re the missing chips, the transition pieces. They fill the missing places too well. I won’t believe it. I’d hardly believe it if mastodon bones were found on the same level here.”

“In a moment,” said Anteros, beginning to use the hoe again. “Hey, those old beasts did smell funny ! An elephant isn’t in it with them. And a lot of it still clings to their bones. Will a sixth thoracic bone do? I’m pretty sure that’s what it is. I don’t know where the rest of the animal is. Probably somebody gnawed the thoracic here. Nine hoe cuts, and then very careful.”

Nine hoe cuts; and then Anteros, using a mason’s trowel, unearthed the old gnawed bone very carefully. Yes, Howard said almost angrily, it was a sixth thoracic of a mastodon. Robert Derby said it was a fifth or sixth; it is not easy to tell.

“Leave the digging for a while, Anteros,” Steinleser said. “I want to record and photograph and take a few measurements here.”

Terrence Burdock and Magdalen Mobley were working at the bottom of the chimney rock, at the bottom of the fluting that ran the whole height of it like a core sample. “Get Anteros over here and see what he can uncover in sixty seconds,” Terrence offered.

“Oh, him! He’ll just uncover some of his own things.”

“What do you mean, his own things? Nobody could have made an intrusion here. It’s hard sandstone.”

“And harder flint here,” Magdalen said. “I might have known it. Pass the damned thing up. I know just about what it says, anyhow.”

“What it says? What do you mean? But it is marked! And it’s large and dressed rough. Who’d carve in flint?”

“Somebody real stubborn, just like flint,” Magdalen said. “All right then, let’s have it out. Anteros! Get this out in one piece. And do it without shattering it or tumbling the whole thing down on us. He can do it, you know, Terrence. He can do things like that.”

“What do you know about his doings, Magdalen? You never saw or heard about the poor man till last night.”

“Oh well, I know that it’ll turn out to be the same damned stuff.”

Anteros did get it out without shattering it or bringing down the chimney column. A cleft with a digging bar, three sticks of the stuff and a cap, and he touched the leads to the battery when he was almost on top of the charge. The blast, it sounded as if the whole sky were falling down in them, and some of those sky-blocks were quite large stones. The ancients wondered why fallen pieces of the sky should always be dark rockstuff and never sky-blue clear stuff. The answer is that it is only pieces of the night sky that ever fall, even though they may sometimes be most of the daytime in falling, such is the distance. And the blast that Anteros set off did bring down rocky chunks of the night sky even though it was broad daylight. They brought down darker rocks than any of which the chimney was composed.

Still, it was a small blast. The chimney tottered but did not collapse. It settled back uneasily on its base. And the flint block was out in the clear.