Рафаэль Лафферти - The Best of R. A. Lafferty

“Oh, it’s just more of the damned same thing! I wish he’d let me alone. With his kind of money he can get plenty of girls. Besides, it’s private, Terrence. You don’t have any business reading it.”

“You are hysterical, Magdalen, and you may have to leave the digging site.”

“I wish I could leave. I can’t. I wish I could love. I can’t. Why isn’t it enough that I die?”

“Howard, spend the afternoon on this,” Terrence ordered. “It has writing of a sort on it. If it’s what I think it is, it scares me. It’s too recent to be in any eroded chimney rock formation, Howard, and it comes from far below the top. Read it.”

“A few hours on it and I may come up with something. I never saw anything like it either. What did you think it was, Terrence?”

“What do you think I think it is? It’s much later than the other, and that one was impossible. I’ll not be the one to confess myself crazy first.”

Howard Steinleser went to work on the incised stone; and two hours before sundown they brought him another one, a gray soap-stone block from higher up. Whatever this was covered with, it was not at all the same thing that covered the shale-stone.

And elsewhere things went well, too well. The old fishiness was back on it. No series of finds could be so perfect, no petrification could be so well ordered.

“Robert,” Magdalen called down to Robert Derby just at sunset, “in the high meadow above the shore, about four hundred yards down, just past the old fence line—”

“—there is a badger hole, Magdalen. Now you have me doing it, seeing invisible things at a distance. And if I take a carbine and stroll down there quietly, the badger will stick his head out just as I get there (I being strongly downwind of him), and I’ll blam him between the eyes. He’ll be a big one, fifty pounds.”

“Thirty. Bring him, Robert. You’re showing a little understanding at last.”

“But, Magdalen, badger is rampant meat. It’s seldom eaten.”

“May not the condemned girl have what she wishes for her last meal? Go get it, Robert.”

Robert went. The voice of the little carbine was barely heard at that distance. Soon, Robert brought back the dead badger.

“Cook it, Ethyl,” Magdalen ordered.

“Yes, I know. And if I don’t know how, Anteros will show me.” But Anteros was gone. Robert found him on a sundown knoll with his shoulders hunched. The old man was sobbing silently and his face seemed to be made out of dull pumice stone. But he came back to aid Ethyl in preparing the badger.

“If the first of today’s stones scared you, the second should have lifted the hair right off your head, Terrence,” Howard Steinleser said. “It does, it does. All the stones are too recent to be in a chimney formation, but this last one is an insult. It isn’t two hundred years old, but there’s a thousand years of strata above it. What time is deposited here?”

They had eaten rampant badger meat and drunk inferior whiskey (which Anteros, who had given it to them, didn’t know was inferior), and the muskiness was both inside them and around them. The campfire sometimes spit angrily with small explosions, and its glare reached high when it did so. By one such leaping glare, Terrence Burdock saw that the curious dark capping rock was once more on top of the chimney. He thought he had seen it there in the daytime; but it had not been there after he had sat in the shade and rested, and it had absolutely not been there when he climbed the chimney itself to be sure.

“Let’s have the second chapter and then the third, Howard,” Ethyl said. “It’s neater that way.”

“Yes. Well, the second chapter (the first and lowest and apparently the earliest rock we came on today) is written in a language that no one ever saw written before; and yet it’s no great trouble to read it. Even Terrence guessed what it was and it scared him. It is Anadarko-Caddo hand-talk graven in stone. It is what is called the Sign Language of the Plains Indians copied down in formalized pictographs. And it has to be very recent, within the last three hundred years. Hand-talk was fragmentary at the first coming of the Spanish, and well developed at the first coming of the French. It was an explosive development, as such things go, worked out within a hundred years. This rock has to be younger than its situs, but it was absolutely found in place.”

“Read it, Howard, read it,” Robert Derby called. Robert was feeling fine and the rest of them were gloomy tonight.

“‘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 nighthawk, the dainty feet of the skunk, you are the juice of the sour squash. Why can you not take or give? I am the hump-backed 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 pictographs 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 Nahuatlan 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.”