The Chara Talisman

by Alastair Mayer

  “They what?” Carson bridled.

  “Forget it, Hannibal, let’s just get out of here,” she said, and turned back to moving rocks. The others joined her, occasionally stopping to examine the wall.

  After several minutes of this, Carson shouted. “I think I’ve got it. Marten, bring the key.” He used his fingers to clear dust and bits of gravel from a recess in the wall. The recess matched the supercircular shape of the talisman. Marten handed it to him.

  “Hadn’t we ought to clear some of these boulders out first, they might block the door.”

  “If you like, but I’m ready to try it now.” Carson placed the talisman in the niche. Jackie took a hasty step back out of the way as some of the rocks slid a little further. The door opened.

  They entered the new room and shone their lights about. It was another gallery, with carvings on the wall and simple mechanical models on the pedestals. From the diagrams and models, it looked like lessons in basic mechanics and machines: the lever, the pulley, the screw, the hammer.

  “The hammer’s not a separate class of machine,” said Jackie.

  “Isn’t it?” asked Carson. “Maybe we don’t consider it so, but it isn’t a lever. Think of a pile driver. It provides a mechanical advantage in momentum, is all”

  “I suppose you’re right. That might have led them to some interesting insights on physics.”

  Carson shrugged. “That could be, but I think physics is physics.”

  Marten, meanwhile, had been examining the walls, focusing on the corner near where they came in. If there was an outside door, it ought to be about here. There! It was another talisman-shaped niche. “Over here!”

  Again Carson applied the key, and the door began to slide up, this time with a horrible scraping and screeching. As it rose, rock and rubble slid in underneath it, and they jumped back to avoid crushed feet or broken ankles. The door stopped, jammed about halfway up, with the opening obstructed by more stone and rubble.

  “Damn it, the slide has blocked both doors.”

  Chapter 26: Exploring

  Within the Pyramid

  Carson and Roberts sat on small boulders. Marten had hopped up onto a pedestal where he too sat. It had been several minutes since they’d found the second door and the blockage behind it. Marten toyed idly with a model gearbox.

  “Carson,” said Roberts.

  “Yes?”

  “If that first room was, as you put it, the alien equivalent of a janitor’s closet, what do you suppose that Maguffin was?”

  “Good question. Could have been anything from a floor polisher to the router used to engrave the walls.”

  “Ah, I hadn’t thought of that last one. The floor polisher had occurred to me. But that would make it advanced technology, anything that could shape or carve whatever this pyramid is made of.”

  “Yes.” Carson sat up straighter. “A disintegrator, perhaps. Yes, whatever it is, we’ve got to get it back.”

  “Sure. How?”

  “Well, first thing is to get out of here.”

  “Sure. How?” asked Roberts again.

  Marten spoke up. “This room is all mechanics. That can’t be all the Spacefarers wanted to teach. There must be more galleries or rooms. Maybe they’ll have a way out.”

  “Exactly!” said Carson. “Look for doorways, access key niches, puzzles. You know. Spread out.” The others were doing that as he spoke, examining the gallery walls carefully.

  It didn’t take but a couple of minutes before Carson called out. “Found it!” He showed the others a carved picture depicting a balance or lever on an off-center fulcrum, with a rectangle on the short end. Near the other end, connected to the lever by dotted lines, were three other rectangles: smaller, the same size as, and larger than the balanced block on the lever.

  “What do you think, a simple multiple choice question in mechanical advantage, right?”

  “Like, ‘a block on the short side is going to be balanced by what on the long side?’” said Jackie.

  “A smaller block,” Marten said.

  “Exactly,” Carson said as he reached over and pushed on the smaller rectangle. There was a click and, with a hum, a door slid up.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  A long dark passage sloped downward, curving to the left as it descended. They looked at each other, hesitant.

  Carson turned to the others. “Any better ideas?” Not getting a response, he started walking cautiously down the passage. A few feet in, panels set in the wall near the floor lit up dimly, lighting the way.

  Jackie hung back. She hated tunnels, especially dark ones, the thought of all that solidity around her was . . . disturbing. But at least this had some light and was obviously man—or intelligent being, anyway—made.

  “Come on, let’s see what’s down here.” Marten tried to encourage her. Maybe we’ll find the treasure, or at least a way out.”

  “Treasure?”

  Marten shrugged. “I don’t know, isn’t that what the lost temples of ancient civilizations are supposed to contain? Although in real life, looters more often get to it first.”

  They moved to catch up with Carson, who had rounded the curve and was out of sight. “Come on down here!” he called back, “There’s another chamber!”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The ramp spiraled down through a full revolution, ending abruptly as though the corridor had been just walled off. To the right, leading off the spiral ramp, was an open gallery. Ahead, Jackie could make out the faint outline of a door.

  “How come there’s no niche for the talisman in this door?” she asked.

  “Who knows? Maybe the janitor didn’t need access. Maybe the problem is so simple, if you can read the symbols, that they thought it was redundant.”

  “Simple? What, like ‘what is two plus two’?”

  “Quite possibly, yes.”

  “Great, so we just have to figure out the symbols. Yeah, simple.”

  The gallery walls were covered with carvings. What could be best described as low tables were arranged around the room. On several of these were placed objects, artifacts of different kinds, although they looked more artistic than functional. Most of the tables were engraved with passages of what might be text or hieroglyphs, as well as diagrams and pictures.

  “It looks like a museum,” said Jackie, “although this stuff is kind of simple. No Cosmic Maguffins here.”

  “I think it might be more of a classroom,” said Carson. “Look over here, it starts out with simple mathematical concepts—counting, positional notation. I think it’s supposed to teach their numbering system. Base eight, octal, by the looks of it.”

  “Yes, octal,” said Marten. “Here it progresses to geometry.” He pointed to a carving showing a right angle triangle, with squares on each side. The smaller ones were divided into a three by three grid and a four by four grid of squares. The large one on the hypotenuse was five by five, but that grid was also overlain with shading to show it was the sum of the two other squares. “It’s an illustration of Tevarki’s Theorem. Pythagorus, on Earth. And look, here it’s getting deeper into geometry and trigonometry.” He gestured at a different set of carvings, diagrams and text.

  “It’s a math classroom then. These artifacts,” Carson picked up a dodecahedron from a set of regular geometric solids, “are just to help with the lessons.” He set the object back down.

  “All right, what does that buy us?” asked Jackie. “We didn’t come here for a math lesson, and it’s certainly not going to get us out.”

  “Don’t be too sure of that. Look, the markings on the outside of the pyramid were astronomical, right?”

  “Yes, so?”

  “Well, the puzzle we were supposed to solve to open it was based on astronomy, it could only be opened by someone who’d learned basic astronomy, which they could do by looking at the sky. With me so far?”

  “Well maybe, but we used a key.” Jackie shook her head. “Anyway, with that level of astronomy they’d have this level of
mathematics, too.”

  “We solved a puzzle for the door that led us here. Mechanical advantage. They’d probably know that if they knew astronomy too. I think . . .” Carson paused. “Yes, this is deliberately simple to establish a pattern, to make sure the basics are covered.”

  “To what purpose?” asked Marten.

  “Remember the wall at the bottom of the ramp? It had a door in it, and several of the carvings were definitely mathematical,” Carson said. “I think the text was based on their numbering system, and perhaps whatever symbols they used for mathematical operations.”

  “So there’s another puzzle to open this door, one based on mathematics?” asked Jackie. “As simple as ‘two plus two’, I think you said.”

  “Yes, almost certainly. Anyway, we have nothing else to try. First we need to decode their symbols, we ought to be able to understand the mathematical concepts. Marten, give me a hand here, we’ll start with the very basics.”

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  It went quickly. These carvings were meant to be understood by someone with no native knowledge of the language, so it built upon itself progressively. Marten, Jackie and Carson were all familiar with these elementary mathematical concepts. At least at the beginning. By the time they got to spherical and hyperbolic geometry, Jackie, with her background in astronavigation, was going it alone for the most part. Marten and Carson filled in with translation and building up their mathematical vocabulary.

  “Whew,” Jackie said, rubbing her eyes. “I’m beat, let’s take a break.” She sat down on the floor. “Between the lighting, the low tables, and the brain-strain, I’m bushed.” The others made mumbling agreement noises. “Can we try the door now? Do we have enough to figure out what the puzzle is?”

  Carson shrugged. “Perhaps for now. Who knows what we might need later. But it doesn’t hurt to check.” He got up, signaled to the others. “Come on, let’s take a look, the more eyes the better.”

  Now that they could read Spacefarer numbers and math symbols, the puzzle was amazingly simple; they could have stopped their efforts some time earlier.

  “Oh hell,” muttered Jackie at this realization, “bloody archeologists.”

  Carson pressed on a sequence of raised squares marked with carved glyphs, and the outline of the door deepened, then the whole rectangle moved inwards a centimeter or two and slid sideways. The opening revealed a continuation of the downward spiraling ramp, again illuminated with dim lights along the wall.

  The three looked at each other, waiting.

  “Well gentlebeings,” said Carson, breaking the tension. “Shall we proceed?” and he started down.

  “I’m just worried about what the next lesson is going to be. Sooner or later we’ll find something that none of us know anything about, and then where will we be?” said Jackie.

  “I am hoping it will be near an exit,” Marten said, with a not quite sincere note of cheerfulness in his voice.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The theme of the next “classroom” would have been obvious to any high school science student. Even though the presentation was a bit different than the customary human way of displaying it, the model of the periodic table was a dead giveaway. Chemistry.

  “Kind of obvious, this one,” said Jackie. Look, we’ve got chemical samples here, and information about their structure.” Indeed, the shelves held small blocks of metal, and easily recognizable small blocks of carbon, and sulphur. Globes of glass—or a similar hard transparent substance—held what was probably the various gases; the reddish-brown bromine and the yellow-green chlorine were obvious. The engravings beside the samples matched the symbols in the rectangles on the periodic table model. The model was interesting. Rather than the flat chart Jackie was most familiar with, this was as though the chart had been rolled into a kind of stepped cylinder or spiral, which widened at the points where the Mendeleev table inserted extra columns.

  “Hey, Carson, did you ever study science fiction?” Jackie asked.

  “That sounds like an oxymoron.”

  “No, I mean stories about scientific ideas. I had to do a semester of it at spaceflight school, mostly stories about alien contact. I think it was because they didn’t really have any idea how else to prepare us for what we might find out here.”

  “That’s one approach. What’s your point?”

  “This place reminds me of something from one of the stories we studied, a team exploring ruins on Mars—”

  “We haven’t found any ruins on Mars,” Carson pointed out.

  “This was written before the first landings. Anyway they’re looking for a way to translate Martian texts and find a chemistry lab. The periodic table is their Rosetta Stone, their omnilingual. That’s the name of the story, ‘Omnilingual’.”

  “Very clever. Do you think you can do that here?”

  “Maybe.” Jackie began examining the model more closely. Chemistry had been one of her favorite subjects, she had a natural talent for it, and she still remembered where some of the elements belonged in the table. She started singing under her breath, pointing to appropriate locations as she did so: “There’s mercury and thallium and indium and gallium.” Start there, over one, up two, three. Then up one more, over and down: “Aluminum and silicon, germanium and stannium.” That last was tin. The chemical symbol came from the Latin name stannum, but the latter didn’t scan any better than the old British “aluminium” did. What was next? Something leading into the rare earth elements, in a row. “And cesium and barium and lanthanum and cerium.” What came next? She couldn’t remember, and skipped on a bit. “There’s gold and silver, copper, zinc and cadmium,” those were in some kind of order, up over and down. “And rhenium and osmium, iridium and platinum.” Enough! Rhenium? Ah, right, that was in this row along with the other three, the platinum group. What next?

  “What was that?” asked Carson.

  “What was what?”

  “That tune you were singing.”

  “Me? No, I wasn’t . . .” Jackie said, but there was no use denying it. “Okay, it’s just a mnemonic for the elements, a song I learned back in school. We used to play a study game of pointing them out on the chart. I’ve forgotten a lot of it now.”

  “Ah, catchy tune. Sounds like something from Gilbert and Sullivan.”

  “Who? Oh, Gilbert—didn’t they manufacture chemistry sets for kids? My dad had an antique he’d inherited from someone. Never let me touch it of course.”

  “No,” Carson said. “Something about a modern major general, from The Pirates of Penzance, an operetta.”

  Jackie just looked at him blankly.

  “Never mind.” He shook his head. “It’s obvious what this is set up for. Let’s just figure out what we need to translate to open the next door. Come on.” He turned to go to it. “Marten!” he called across the room, “Let’s just copy down the symbols we need from the door and translate those, not much for us to learn here.”

  They began examining the door to the next level. Carson and Marten examined the symbols and diagrams to determine which they would need to translate, and Jackie occasionally contributed the element names she had already determined from looking at the periodic table. She sat on the floor, leaning against the wall, and idly studied the door, putting in her bit when asked but mostly just daydreaming, humming that damn element song, or whatever the tune was. Her gaze fell upon a recess carved in a familiar shape. At first glance it looked like part of the decorative carving that framed the different areas of the door holding the puzzles, just as the previous door had. But there was something about the shape and size . . . Jackie scrambled to her feet, surprising the others at her sudden motion.

  “What’s up, Jackie?” asked Carson. “Did you sit on an anthill?”

  “No, look!” she pointed at the supercircle-shaped recess. “Who has the talisman?”

  “I do” said Marten.

  Carson was now at the wall, examining the recess with growing excitement. “Dig it out, give it here!”


  Marten fished it out of a pocket, and passed it over to Carson. Carson held it up close to the recess—the shape and size looked like a match.

  “What are you waiting for?” said Jackie.

  The recess wasn’t deep enough for the talisman to stay in it unsupported. Carson held it in, and a second later there was an audible hum and click—the same sound they’d heard when they’d solved the puzzle on the last door—and the door started to slide open. Carson let the talisman fall from the niche into his hand, and the door continued its movement until fully open. Beyond it lay another downward ramp.

  “We should have guessed, based on the first door, or at least noticed it sooner,” muttered Carson.

  “Too many other interesting things to look at,” Marten said. “But exploring the rest of this structure should be easy.”

  “Let’s hope there’s no place off-limits to the pass,” said Jackie.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  The going went faster from that point on. The security pass talisman did work in subsequent doors, so they didn’t have to waste time solving problems. They did, however, make brief excursions through each gallery or “classroom” to determine what each was about and see what useful items there might be. The galleries covered more complex subjects, and in greater depth, as they descended. There was optics, mechanics, basic biology, genetics—it was interesting to note that the Spacefarers were apparently related to terrestrial life too. “Or maybe they just studied the local and flora and based the lesson on that,” pointed out Jackie to the others’ chagrin.

  ∞ ∞ ∞

  Further down they went. They found galleries describing fluid mechanics and aerodynamics, biochemistry, static electricity, geology, electromagnetism, nuclear physics, astrophysics, and more.

  “Is that a Feynman diagram?” Jackie wondered aloud, examining a wall carving which depicted a series of bent lines with a chain of small circles connecting them.

  Marten and Carson looked at the diagram, then at each other. “What’s a Feynman diagram?” Marten asked.

  “It shows the interaction of subatomic particles by their paths and energy exchange. This line of circles might represent energy waves.” She studied the other diagrams. They had a familiar feel, with a difference she could quite put a finger on. “I think this gallery might be quantum mechanics, but it’s a little off. I don’t know if I’ve forgotten more of my QM than I thought or if the Spacefarers had a different spin on the theory.”