Джек Макдевитт - Cryptic - The Best Short Fiction of Jack McDevitt

We already had samples of one of the languages. That first night he showed them to me, slowed down of course. It was a musical language, rhythmic, with a lot of vowels and, what do you call them, diphthongs. Reminded me of a Hawaiian chant. But he needed a linguistic genius to make it intelligible.

He called a few people, told them he was conducting an experiment, trying to determine how much data was necessary to break in and translate the text of a previously unknown language. Hinted it had something to do with SETI. The people on the other end were all skeptical of the value of such a project, and he pretended to squirm a bit but he was offering lots of cash and a bonus for the correct solution. So everybody had a big laugh and then came on board.

The winner was a woman at the University of Montreal. Kris Edward. Kris came up with a solution in five days. I’d’ve thought it was impossible. A day later she’d translated the Commandments for him into the new language. Ten minutes after he’d received her transmission, we were driving over to Caswell Monuments in the next town to get the results chiseled onto two stone tablets. Six on each. They looked good . I’ll give him that. They had dignity. Authority. Majesty .

We couldn’t actually transport the tablets, the Commandments, physically to Utopia. But we could relay their image, and their substance, and reproduce them out of whatever available granite there might be. Abe’s intention was to put them on a mountaintop, and then use some directed lightning to draw one of the shamans up to find them. It all had to be programmed into the system, because as I said the real-time action would be much too quick for anyone to follow. I didn’t think it would work. But Abe was full of confidence that we were on track at last.

We had a flat on the way back with the tablets. The spare was flat too. Maybe we should have taken that as a sign. Anyhow, by the time we’d arranged to get picked up, and got the tire changed, and had dinner, it had gotten fairly late. Abe was trying to be casual, but he was anxiousto start. No, Jerry, we are not going to wait until morning. Let’s get this parade on the road. So we set the tablets in the scanner and sent the transmission out. It was 9:46 p.m. on the twelfth. The cylinder flashed amber lamps, and then green, signaling success, it had worked, the package had arrived at its destination. Moments later we got more blinkers, confirming that the storm had blown up to draw the shaman into the mountain.

We looked for results a few minutes later. It would have been time, on the other side, to build the pyramids, conquer the Mediterranean, fight off the Vandals, get through the Dark Ages, and move well into the Renaissance. If it had worked, we could expect to see glittering cities and ships and maybe even 747’s. What we saw, however, were only the same dead end settlements.

We resolved to try again in the morning. Maybe Moses had missed the tablets. Maybe he’d not been feeling well. Maybe the whole idea was crazy.

That was the night the quake hit.

That’s stable ground up in that part of the world. It was the first earthquake in Crestview’s recorded history. Moreover, it didn’t hit anything else. Not Charlie’s Bar & Grill, which is at the bottom of the hill on the state road. Not any part of the Adams Ranch, which occupied the area on the north, not any part of the town, which is less than a half mile away. But it completely destroyed the lab.

What’s that? Did it destroy the cosm? No, the cosm was safely disconnected from the state of Colorado. Nothing could touch it, except through the cylinder. It’s still out there somewhere. On its own.

But the whole thing scares me. I mean, Mac was already dead. And two days later Sylvia drove into a tree at about sixty.

That’s okay, you can smile about it, but I’m not sleeping very well. What’s that? Why would God pick on us? I don’t know. Maybe he didn’t like the idea of someone doing minor league creations. Maybe he resented our monkeying around with the Commandments.

Why do you think he didn’t say anything to Moses about slavery? What, you’ve never thought about it? I wonder if maybe, at the beginning, civilization needs slaves to get started. Maybe you can’t just jump off the mark with representative democracy. Maybe we were screwing things up, condemning sentient beings to thousands of years of unnecessary savagery. I don’t know.

But that’s my story. Maybe it’s all coincidence. The quake, the plane crash, Sylvia. I suppose stranger things have happened. But it’s scary, you know what I mean?

Yeah, I know you think I’m exaggerating. I know the God you believe in doesn’t track people down and kill them. But maybe the God you believe in isn’t there. Maybe the God who’s actually running things is just a guy in a laboratory in another reality. Somebody who’s a bit less congenial than Abe. And who has better equipment.

Well, who knows?

The scotch is good, by the way. Thanks. And listen, Phil, there’s a storm blowing up out there. I don’t like to impose, but I wonder if I could maybe stay the night?

If the lights at Bolton’s Tower go out, the devil gets loose. At least, that was the story. The idea spooked me when I was a kid and even years later on those rare occasions when I traveled into its general neighborhood, which was well north on the Great Plains, far off the trading routes.

The Tower put out a lot of light, so much that it could be seen from the Pegborn-Forks road. In a world illuminated mostly by kerosene and candles, it was unique, and it was easy to believe there might be a supernatural force at work.

I’d been away from the Dakotas for years , and had long since forgotten about the thing, when the press of business and a series of unseasonal storms drove me north into my old home grounds. The weather had been overcast for a week, had cleared off during the course of a long cold afternoon, and when the sun went down, Bolton’s star rose in the east. I knew it immediately for what it was, and I knew I was close.

There’s something else odd about Bolton’s Tower.

It’s just inside the southern rim of a long, curving ridge. The ridge isn’t high. It seldom exceeds thirty feet, and sometimes it’s no more than a ripple in the grass. But it’s a strange ridge: if you follow it far enough, you discover it forms a perfect circle . You can’t see that from any single place; the ring is too big. More than sixty miles around. I’ve heard tent preachers explain that the circle symbolizes God, because it’s endless, and cannot be improved on. Just the thing to imprison Satan, they add darkly.

I crossed the ridge on foot, leading my mount. Snow was beginning to fall again, and the wind was picking up. The Tower rose out of a cluster of dark, weatherbeaten buildings and a screen of trees. These structures were low and flat, dreary boxes, some made of clapboard and others of brick. Their windows were gone; their doors hung on broken hinges or were missing altogether. A roof had blown off one, another lay partly demolished by a fallen tree. A small barn, set to one side, had been kept in reasonable repair, and I heard horses moving within as I drew near.

The Tower soared above the ruin, seven stories of bone-white granite and thick glass. Porches and bays and arches disconnected it from the prairie, as if it belonged to a less mundane reality. The roof melted into banks of curved glass panels capped by a crystal spire. Its lines whispered of lost power and abandoned dreams, passion frozen in stone.

I released the straps on my crossbow and loosened it in its sheath.

Several windows on the second and third floors were illuminated. The Tower lights themselves, red and white signature beams, blazed into the murky night.