Orbit 7 - [Anthology]

by Edited by Damon Knight

  ‘I don’t believe that any one of us is guilty, Terrence,’ Ethyl put in mildly. ‘They are found four feet in from the slant surface of the mound. Why, we’ve cut through three hundred years of vegetable loam to get them, and certainly the surface was eroded beyond that.’

  ‘We are scientists,’ said Steinleser. ‘We find these. Others have found such. Let us consider the improbabilities of it.’

  It was noon, so they ate and rested and considered the improbabilities. Anteros had brought them a great joint of white pork, and they made sandwiches and drank beer and ate pickles.

  ‘You know,’ said Robert Derby, ‘that beyond the rank impossibility of glass beads found so many times where they could not be found, there is a real mystery about all early Indian beads, whether of bone, stone or antler. There are millions and millions of these fine beads with pierced holes finer than any piercer ever found. There are residues, there are centres of every other Indian industry, and there is evolution of every other tool. Why have there been these millions of pierced beads, and never one piercer? There was no technique to make so fine a piercer. How were they done?’

  Magdalen giggled. ‘Bead-spitter,’ she said.

  ‘Bead-spitter! You’re out of your fuzzy mind,’ Terrence erupted. ‘That’s the silliest and least sophisticated of all Indian legends.’

  ‘But it is the legend,’ said Robert Derby, ‘the legend of more than thirty separate tribes. The Carib Indians of Cuba said that they got their beads from Bead-spitters. The Indians of Panama told Balboa the same thing. The Indians of the pueblos told the same story to Coronado. Every Indian community had an Indian who was its Bead-spitter. There are Creek and Alabama and Koasati stories of Bead-spitter; see Swanton’s collections. And his stories were taken down within living memory.

  ‘More than that, when European trade-beads were first introduced, there is one account of an Indian receiving some and saying, “I will take some to Bead-spitter. If he sees them, he can spit them too.” And that Bead-spitter did then spit them by the bushel. There was never any other Indian account of the origin of their beads. All were spit by a Bead-spitter.’

  ‘Really, this is very unreal,’ Ethyl said. Really it was.

  ‘Hog hokey! A Bead-spitter of around the year seven hundred could not spit future beads, he could not spit cheap Hong Kong glass beads of the present time!’ Terrence was very angry.

  ‘Pardon me, yes sir, he could,’ said Anteros. ‘A Bead-spitter can spit future beads, if he faces North when he spits. That has always been known.’

  Terrence was angry, he fumed and poisoned the day for them, and the claw marks on his face stood out livid purple. He was angrier yet when he said that the curious dark capping rock on top of the chimney was dangerous, that it would fall and kill someone; and Anteros said that there was no such capping rock on the chimney, that Terrence’s eyes were deceiving him, that Terrence should go sit in the shade and rest.

  And Terrence became excessively angry when he discovered that Magdalen was trying to hide something that she had discovered in the fluted core of the chimney. It was a large and heavy shale-stone, too heavy even for Magdalen’s puzzling strength. She had dragged it out of the chimney flute, tumbled it down to the bottom, and was trying to cover it with rocks and scarp.

  ‘Robert, mark the extraction point!’ Terrence called loudly. ‘It’s quite plain yet. Magdalen, stop that! Whatever it is, it must be examined now.’

  ‘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 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 grey soapstone 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 odd 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 there?’

  They had eaten rampant badger meat and drunk inferior whisky (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 spat 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 the 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 pictograms. 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, an
d 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.”‘

  ‘Oh brother! Nobody gets that stuff from such kid pictures, Steinleser,’ Robert Derby moaned.

  ‘Ah well, that’s the end of the spiral picture. And a Kiowa spiral pictograph ends with either an in-sweep or an out-sweep line. This ends with an out-sweep, which means —’

  ‘“Continued on next rock,” that’s what it means,’ Terrence cried roughly.

  ‘You won’t find the next rocks,’ Magdalen said. ‘They’re hidden, and mo
st of the time they’re not there yet, but they will go on and on. But for all that, you’ll read it in the rocks tomorrow morning. I want it to be over with. Oh, I don’t know what I want!’

  ‘I believe I know what you want tonight, Magdalen,’ Robert Derby said.

  But he didn’t.

  The talk trailed off, the fire burned down, they went to their sleeping sacks.

  Then it was long jagged night, and the morning of the fourth day. But wait! In Nahuat-Tanoan legend, the world ends on the fourth morning. All the lives we lived or thought we lived had been but dreams of third night. The loincloth that the sun wore on the fourth day’s journey was not so valuable as one has made out. It was worn for no more than an hour or so.

  And, in fact, there was something terminal about fourth morning. Anteros had disappeared. Magdalen had disappeared. The chimney rock looked greatly diminished in its bulk (something had gone out of it) and much crazier in its broken height. The sun had come up a garish grey-orange colour through fog. The signature-glyph of the first stone dominated the ambient. It was as if something were coming down from the chimney, a horrifying smoke; but it was only noisome morning fog.