Working Title:
XMA-1
Arrivals
Doctor Andrea Gamble looked out over her work, and found it
good. Shading her eyes against the setting sun, she surveyed the dig site with its
neat grid of stakes and cords, checkered by test pits that already seemed to
promise unusually rich finds. She remembered wondering why these people, so
deeply time-lost that no hint of what they had called themselves survived, had
chosen to live on this sere, ungenerous West Texas hardpan, until that
wonderful day when she had uncovered that first, unmistakable Clovis point,
twin to those found at the famous Gault site. She had been almost sick with
excitement. It incidentally answered her question – when that piece of
chert had been dropped, these had been fertile grasslands, watered by the
retreating Wisconsin glaciation – and also pushed the dating of the site
at least ten thousand years into the past. And she, with a nearly new doctorate
and undeniably limited field experience, was the principal investigator! So
far, her luck was almost beyond belief, and she was willing to overlook some
perplexing details as long as the miracle continued.
There was a real chance that she would jeopardize her career
by some mistake that greater experience might have avoided, a challenge she met
in part by being very procedurally doctrinaire, and otherwise by trying to not
fret over it too much. As she was doing now. Her thoughts returned to the site.
So meagre was the knowledge won by the hard and exacting labor of herself and
her peers that even willful fantasy could raise little more than the shadows of
the shades of these people. They had left little more than a litter of often
ambiguous stone tools, charcoal from their fires (valuable charcoal, she
reminded herself) and of course their bones, such as the skeleton at the bottom
of the pit at her feet. Something about the iliac crest of the partially
uncovered pelvis, the wear on the teeth scattered around the collapsed skull
and the gracile form of an exposed femur said young female to her trained eye,
an all but unconscious twitch of her analytical mind as she sought to know the
truth of these nameless people.
The lowering sun slowly filled the pit with shadow, and the
western sunset breeze cooled her brow and stirred her unbound chestnut hair as
she stood musing over the bones. The site was on the low, broad south bank of
an ancient, silted up dry wash, oriented almost perfectly in an east-west
direction, which tended to channel the winds somewhat. Fine iron-bearing
Saharan dust, lifted by African storms and katabatic winds, picked up by the
easterly Trades and sifted down over a resentful world made toxic algae blooms
in the
As she turned, she felt a stone beneath her right foot shift
and give way, falling into the pit. After a brief, futile flailing for balance,
she again felt the familiar sensations of a fall, a sort of complicated
exasperation. There was not enough time to recover, but there seemed plenty of
time to wonder how she would hit, to make a swift catalogue of the injuries
possible from a two meter fall, and a sudden worry about how she might damage
the skeleton, and even the surprising discovery that she had somehow conceived
an irrational sympathy for the young lady below. But before she was fairly
started down, she felt a brawny arm lock around her chest and heard a grunt of
masculine effort close by her ear. Whoever it was seemed uncommonly strong. She
was no sylph, and loaded with a good forty pounds of gear besides, but after a
brief and ponderous dance with gravity and inertia he drew her back from the
pit and set her on her feet.
Her savior regarded her with a curious, tentative smile. He
seemed almost the somatic antithesis of the people she was studying. He
overtopped her own five feet eight by a good ten inches, with a mop of curly
gold-blonde hair and pale blue eyes, and the painful-looking sunburn that was
unavoidable with naturally fair skin under the merciless
“Are you alright?” he asked, with just a hint of
a German accent.
“Fine, thanks to you,” she replied. “Your
arrival was very . . Timely.” He bobbed his head, smile growing
fractionally wider.
“Ah - who are you?” she asked.
“Klaus vonNeumann, at your service” he said, and
sketched a half-bow. He seemed almost a Teutonic caricature, even wearing
lederhosen and a Bundeswehr T-shirt, all quite over-the-top if it was conscious
affectation, and absurd desert wear. She felt an unaccustomed difficulty in
finding something to say, still somewhat shaken by her near-fall, and a silence
fell which began to feel awkward. He seemed not at all put out. He calmly took
a small leather case from a pocket and removed a monocle from it, which he
solemnly screwed into one eye. Then he clicked his heels, producing a surprisingly
loud pop from his Nikes, and bowed stiffly from the waist.
She had always found self-parody an engaging trait, and at
this she lost it, and burst into gales of laughter, which he joined after a
brief attempt to keep a straight face. Her initial reserve seemed to have blown
away with the breeze.
“You must be the observer from
“And so I would have,” he replied, putting his
monocle away, “had I not damaged the display of my GPS. Without it, this
place is not easy to find.” He had the studied, almost stilted-sounding
lack of regional accent common in educated Europeans.
“Well, our day is done here,” she said,
“and you might as well bunk in the main tent for tonight. There’s
plenty of room, and you won’t be cramping anyone tomorrow when the
shovelbums come back. We lost a couple today.”
“Lost? Nothing serious, I hope?”
“Not very. One lady got a broken finger, and by
coincidence the oaf who was responsible got tagged by a diamondback soon
after.”
“A diamondback?” he asked.
“A rattlesnake.” Because she had noticed that
Europeans often had an exaggerated idea of the lethality of crotalids, she
added “He’ll be pretty sick for a while, but he’ll
survive.” Some impish impulse made her add “Probably.”
Klaus frowned briefly, and then said “It may be that I
could use a quick course on the dangers of this place.”
She smiled slightly and said, “There really isn’t much. The most
likely danger is sunstroke.” She had been peripherally aware for some
time of the furtive scuttling of the tarantulas along the ground, something
they did every sunset for some unknown spidery reason, and one ran almost
across her feet, like a gift from the gods of cheap drama. She bent down and
scooped it up with a practiced motion, and displayed it to him on her palm.
They were not friendly, cuddly creatures, but properly handled they usually
didn’t bite, and it was no big deal if they did.
“These guys, for instance, are almost harmless.”
The tarantula played its part perfectly, shifting with sudden, jerky movements,
big black fangs shuttling like some sort of lethal sewing machine, looking as
un-harmless as possible. The oblique rays of the setting sun caught its eight
clustered eyes, making them glow a chatoyant, baleful red. Klaus said
“Gott – “ stared at it in horrified fascination, and backed
up a step, and quickly glanced down around his own feet.
Suddenly embarrassed by her own theatrics, Andrea set the
spider down and turned away. It had not occurred to her that he might be an
arachnophobe.
“You have to check for scorpions in your sleeping bag
every evening, and in your boots before you put them on. They fluoresce green
under ultraviolet, and you can borrow one of the geologists’ black lights
for that, if you wish. Most of the snakes around here are not poisonous, but
any of them might bite, so you’d best stay away from all of them. Anyway,
the tent is over here.”
They started on the path toward the tents and temporary
buildings down on the wash, where it was at least reasonably level, with the
parking lot beyond. Most of the personnel preferred to stay in the nearest
town, Xebico, sixty miles away. A tiny town, but it had an air-conditioned
motel and a fairly good Mexican restaurant. They passed a bulky, cylindrical
device that looked like an oil drum standing on end, with a complicated
assembly of lenses, mirrors, antennas and less identifiable structures on top.
It was making an eerie, high-pitched keening noise. She gestured at it in
passing, and said, “I guess that's the main reason why you’re
here.”
“Ah,” he said, stopping and studying it with the
rapt expression of the gadget-happy male. “If what I’ve read is
correct, it is an amazing device. Can you demonstrate it?”
“Sure” she said. She removed a headband-like
device from one of her many pockets, and said “Bring your head down
here.” She quickly fitted the band and inserted the earplug.
“Now stand, and look toward the dig site, and say
“quix.”
“Quix?” he said, and started as the headband
extruded a transparency over his left eye, like a high-tech version of his
monocle. “I see a point of green light - ah. A virtual image.” No
dummy here, she thought.
“’Quix’ is a control word, selected because
nobody is likely to say it in conversation, telling the system that the next
words will be a command sequence” she said.” Now say ‘Quix
full view.’” He dutifully repeated the words, and gasped. She
smiled slightly, remembering her own first exposure to the gadget.
He was seeing the site overlaid with a grid of thin, bright
red lines, which made the cords and stakes seem a crude approximation. Tiny
beads of light on the grid lines would expand into text blocks when regarded
for more than a second, giving GPS coordinates to eight places. Across the top
of his field of vision were the icons for the clock/calendar, note recorder,
communicator, emergency beacon, several calibration functions and others which
she had never had occasion to remember. The whole picture was overlaid by
complex, rippled surfaces of pale pink, cyan and green, indicating the vector
and intensity of local geomagnetic and gravitational fields and tentative
isochrons. Atop all of this were the yellow curves and loops of the local
topography, automatically maintained and adjusted by the system. The one
function which she privately considered truly indispensable was represented by
a small block of digits giving the local temperature and humidity, cumulative
ultraviolet exposure and the user’s core body temperature, measured by
infrared radiation from the eardrum and monitored by the earplug. This was by
no means all the information available for display, but even this much tended
to create visual confusion. It was dazzling, brilliant- but it had an
overwhelming downside, which she, almost regretfully, had to tell him.
“Amazing!” he said.
“Yes, it is,” she replied, “But
unfortunately, it’s largely useless. Think about it. What do those
functions actually add to what we’re doing here?” This was all a
bit much for him to cope with - it had, after all, taken her several days of
hands-on experience to arrive at her opinions, and he was still rather
distracted by the fantasia he was looking at, so she added “Never mind.
You’ll have plenty of time to think about it. You can talk to the
designer tomorrow, if you like.”
“Very much so” he replied, then thought a second
and tried “Quix off.” The headband obediently retracted the visor
and switched itself off. She knew that was something of a downer, as the
colorful, mentally engaging dataworld disappeared and was replaced by this
dreary stretch of desert, now almost completely dark. Almost regretfully, he
removed the headband and handed it to her. “Don’t worry,” she
smiled, “you’ll be fitted with your own tomorrow.” He seemed
slightly cheered by this. They continued down one of the beaten paths leading
to the wash, bottoming out with its own small alluvial fan onto a narrow plain
tessellated by curled plates of dried mud, with the cracks between them drawn
in bold relief by the low sun.
“And now, the tent is over there,” she said,
pointing, “and the, ahem, sanitary facilities are over there, and you
want to keep a watch on the water level if you take a shower. We have a tank
truck that comes in and tops off the water every morning. Just take any bunk
that looks unoccupied. You’re too late for dinner, but I’ve got a
few MREs, and you’re welcome to pick one. And, some annoying busybody
will get you up in the morning a long time before you’re ready.”
“Ah,” he said, and looked off into the darkness.
Then he looked at her with a curious intentness for several seconds, and then
seemed to relax. She vaguely wondered what all that was about. “I believe
I’ll pass on that MRE,” he said, suddenly merry, “and I
believe I now know enough to get on with. Goodnight.” Again he bowed and
clicked his heels, softly, leaving her chuckling as he strode off to the tent,
picking his way with a new care.
Andrea went to her own nest, the
Under the Sun
As usual, she did not awaken sweetly as some woman in a
Nytol commercial, but to the smell of hot metal, hot fabric, hot ground, and
her own sweat. There was the chunking of car doors, a gabble of talk, the
jingle and clank of gear, and some sadist had started the generator, a hulking
Russian surplus item of unclear provenance, driven by a four-cylinder diesel
engine with pistons almost the size of gallon buckets. It was monstrously
overpowered for their requirements, but it was acquired for little money in
some sort of swap which she prudently made a point of not knowing about. The
shell of her trailer trembled with the violence of its operation, and she was
glad that it was no closer than it was to the dig site. For all their noise,
the shovelbums wouldn’t seriously start to work until she motivated them.
Sighing, but with some pleasurable anticipation, she gathered up her shower
togs and headed out for the first, last, and all too brief time in the day when
she would feel clean.
Ten minutes later, she was in a puppy-stomping mood. Julio
Jimenez, who was supposed to keep the water tank filled, was a no-show and she
would have to start the day hot and sweaty. At least she could get some
satisfaction from reaming out the supply company, and then remembered that they
could only be contacted by the ruinously expensive satellite phone, since this
desolate area was too remote to be covered by a cellphone repeater. Scowling,
she stalked back to her trailer, and jerked her clothes on, while mentally
savoring what she was going to say. She felt a savage pleasure that
Julio’s irritating “No habla Ingles” act wasn’t going
to work, since her own Spanish was, if anything, better than his.
Savoring a few smoking phrases in her mind, she headed out
to the machine, which integrated the satellite phone along with almost all of
the other electronic necessities. As she drew near, she saw that the
machine’s designer, Mr.Tradescent, (“Call me Mike”) had
arrived and was running some sort of maintenance on a laptop plugged into the
machine.
He looked up and said “Good morning” in his
mellifluous bass-baritone. He was a large, bearded man, with perhaps the most
perfect natural poker face she had ever seen. He was an odd one. A superficial
affability and a small range of learned social behaviors concealed a level mind
that seemed to look at the world and could not look away, and his affect was
too intent, too direct. Many, especially women, seemed to find him obscurely
threatening, but Andrea liked and trusted him. He had originally shown up with
the device at the behest of the Wilmarth Foundation, which was paying the
bills, and he was somehow instrumental in procuring the generator. He had
thrown himself into the chores of pulling cables and wiring fuse-boxes with
such cheerful abandon that she had originally taken him for a happy idiot, a mere
technician, and it had taken her a couple of weeks to see that he was more than
that, though it was not clear what. He wore cargo pants and a tech vest, and
all of his many pockets were loaded. Topping off his anti-fashion statement was
a gimme-cap embroidered with the words “Hapi Man,” probably another
example of his often cryptic sense of humor.
He added,” You will be pleased to know that the water
truck should be along shortly. We passed him on the way here, and were able to
render some assistance with a mechanical difficulty.” At his use of the
word “we,” she noticed, or was allowed to notice, that he was not
alone. He was normally self-effacing to an extraordinary degree, but he held
center stage as long as he wanted it.
“Doctor Andrea Gamble, allow me to introduce Eamonn
Duffy, from
Eamonn gave Mike an irritated glance, which was ignored, and
said to Andrea “I am very pleased to meet you.” He had a rich,
musical brogue, which she found immediately attractive. He was, she supposed,
what was called black Irish, dressed in cords and with very fair skin and dark
hair, now in rather untidy bangs. As Andrea and Eamonn began the tentative
overtures of small talk, Mike returned to tapping on his keyboard, and then
looked up again as Klaus came trotting up, now more reasonably dressed in
jeans.
Andrea said, “Ah, Klaus, this is Michael Tradescent,
the designer of this device,” she began.
Mike added” I’ve decided to call it a
polysector, for now. Call me Mike.”
Andrea resumed, “Designer of the polysector, then.
This is Eamonn Duffy. Mr. Tradescent, Eamonn, this is Klaus von Neumann.”
“Is it, now?” said Eamonn, shaking his hand.
“Gut’Morgen, Herr Doktor” said Mike.
Oddly, he did not offer to shake hands, and Klaus did not appear to notice the
omission. The three men fell into a technical discussion and Andrea soon began
wondering how to escape, when she saw Julio pulling up in the water truck. She
hoped that none of the others had noticed her rather ripe condition -
especially Eamonn. She excused herself and went for her shower togs.
As she was dressing, after along, luxurious shower, there
was a rap at the palace door. “Come in!” she called, and the door
opened a crack. “Are you decent?” Mike’s heavy voice asked,
and she replied “No, but I’m clothed.” He let himself in and
stood looking around at her bric-a-brac as she speed-laced her boots. Abruptly,
something in one of his pockets caught his attention, and he removed a small
device with a flashing point of light on it and stood frowning at it while she
finished dressing. She stood up and said “Well?”
For the first time since she had known him, he seemed
uncertain about something. He said “Ah. Umm, there’s something
outside that you need to see.”
“Well, let’s go,” she said, and followed
him out, grabbing her fedora in passing. He forbore any remarks about Indiana
Jones, and led her a few yards from the trailer, away from the main camp, while
he peered at his gadget. Then he stopped, and ignored the interrogative lift of
her eyebrows as he looked around. His headband, which looked something like a
stainless steel crown a good deal bulkier than the standard model, extruded its
visor and he scanned their surroundings.
“Too hot for thermal imaging” he said,
apparently to himself, and his headband retracted its screen.
He looked at her and said gravely “There are a couple of things you need
to know.” She interrupted, “How do you do that?”
“Do what?” he said, frowning.
“Control your headband without speaking.”
“Brainwaves.” He removed the crown and showed
her the electrodes set into the plastic liner of the band. “It’s a
peculiar discipline, which I had to pick up for - another project. You
don’t need it, and we don’t have time for this. Listen. Your trailer
is bugged.”
“Bugged?” She was rather surprised by her own
lack of reaction. “So far as I know there’s nothing going on there
of the slightest interest to anybody.” Having said this, she immediately
thought of a couple of uncomfortable possibilities, but they were of a personal
nature, and probably not anything that Mike would care about one way or
another.
“That was the idea,” he said cryptically. He
replaced the crown and took several seconds seating it to his own satisfaction,
then took another, longer look around, apparently running through several
sensor modalities and producing sound effects which she smiled to recognize as
Star Trek originals, then shut down everything but an irritating, pulsing
whine.
“Perhaps you have wondered at certain curious features
in the funding for this dig,” he said quietly.
“No kidding,” she said. The money apparently
came from a small, obscure school in Arkham, near Innsmouth in
“This site was ‘suggested’ by the funding
organization as one of exceptional interest, but their interests are not
entirely the same as yours,” he said. “They believe, for reasons we
need not go into, that there is a certain artifact here that is of
extraordinary importance, and one which they must have. For what it’s
worth, I will tell you that they are the good guys, though of course
you’ll have to make up your own mind on that. ’By their works shall
ye know them.’ However, there is another party interested, and you know
their agent here as Klaus von Neumann. The real von Neumann is dead. A great
loss.”
“All this cloak and dagger crap is irrelevant,”
she said hotly. “Any artifacts found will be properly catalogued,
described and curated, and any poaching or theft will be reported to the proper
authorities, no matter who’s paying for this operation.”
He nodded, and said “The sentiment is natural and
honorable, and one of the reasons you were selected for this job. However,
it’s not as big an obstacle as you might imagine. If this artifact is at
all what we think it is, your reporting it will make you the laughingstock of
your profession, and cast strong doubts on all of your previous contributions.
How would it feel to have your name publicly linked to that of, say, Erich von
Däniken?”
As she fumed, he did something rare for him, and reached out
and clasped her shoulder gently. “Understand, this is not something that
I or anyone else is doing to you,” he said in a conciliatory tone, his
face sincere. “It’s simply in the nature of the situation.”
She said nothing, and he went on “And you must admit, even aside from
this funny business, the site is worthwhile in itself, eh?”
“Yeah, I suppose” she said grudgingly.
“And I’ll just make up my own mind about this whatsit, when and if
we find it.”
“Of course” he said. “For now, it would be best and safest to
treat ‘Klaus’ just as if he were who he says he is. You may as well
get some work out of him, if you can.”
“I’ll just do that,” she said, and strode
away to motivate the serfs. Mr. Tradescent called after her, “Wait a minute.”
He walked to her and handed her a small disc of greenish-grey stone, perhaps
olivine, about four centimeters in diameter, with a design like a five-pointed
star with broken tips crudely engraved. “For luck,” he said, and
smiled. She looked at him doubtfully, dropped it in a pocket and walked off.
Mr. Tradescent shutoff the anti-surveillance whine his headband was making, and
stared after her for a few seconds, his face becoming expressionless. Then he
turned and walked to his utility truck. There were things to do.
The next few days proceeded smoothly enough, with only the
drama normal to a dig. There were personality clashes and one fight, and a lot
of griping, a recognized prerogative of diggers. Small but interesting finds
continued to turn up, and there was one work-stopping moment of excitement when
animal bones with what looked like tool marks were found, and Andrea was
required to make the determination. If they were tool marks, the whole matter
would suddenly be exponentially more important, and the deliberate pace of the
work would become dead slow, as toothpicks, soft brushes and low-pressure jets
of canned air replaced trowels. Andréa brought out one of her most prized
possessions, a fine old Zeiss-Ikon stereomicroscope on a complicated,
multi-legged mount which could be adjusted in any plane to give a firm footing
in situ.
From her initial examination with a loupe, She was almost
sure that it was a false alarm, but it was always necessary to be sure, and she
thought it might be a valuable lesson to some of the newbies about how careful
one had to be, and how to see the subtle differences. Some people, she knew,
never would learn to see it. She took nearly a day examining the marks before
concluding that they were chance scars from stones in the matrix, and the
deliberate pace of work resumed, but with a noticeably better morale.
For several days, nothing strange happened, and Mike’s
vague warnings receded in her memory, seeming ever more remote and unreal. He
came and went at odd times, often fiddling with the polysector or conferring
with Eamonn, but had little more than ordinary pleasantries for Andrea. Once he
had asked her if she were still carrying the good luck talisman, and she was
somewhat surprised to find that she was. Apparently she had gotten into the
habit of dropping it in a pocket while gearing up.
The polysector itself went through various changes during this time, acquiring
some sort of optical device that looked like the compound eye of a gigantic
dragonfly. Another addition looked almost like a Christmas tree ornament, an
insubstantial-looking glass ball housing what appeared to be a small, twisted
bar of quartz which had an odd twinkling effect about it, as if it were some
sort of optical illusion, or was in someway unreal. Andrea had no real idea of
the function of most of the things on the polysector, but she was a child of
technology and she had a distinct impression that the style of the thing
was pretty damned strange, to such an extent that it was subtly reassuring to
see ordinary bolts and pop rivets holding it together.
Several new pits were begun, and she was beginning to get
some feeling for how this Paleolithic settlement had been laid out, though
still no hint of why this place had been selected. The usual explanations, she
knew, were that the place had some religious importance, and if so, she might
never understand it. Nevertheless she felt a slow fulfillment, fully engaged in
her life’s work.
Eamonn proved an intelligent and helpful observer, not least
because he had added greatly to the music library stored in the polysector,
which many of the workers listened to through their headbands. He assured her
that it had almost unlimited storage, and had added a large variety of pop,
show tunes and light classical music, but greeted suggestions of rap and
hip-hop with a sort of fastidious disgust. All that Mike had stored in it was a
collection of bizarre “ambient noir” and funereal-sounding Russian
Orthodox liturgical music, grumbling that he wasn’t sure that listening
to music during work was a good idea. Aside from this merciful act, Eamonn was
cheerfully willing to pitch in with the grunt work, and seemed to get along
well with everyone.
Klaus, on the other hand, remained distant but vaguely
affable, and could often be seen observing and taking pictures, though rarely
turning a hand in labor. Andréa began to find him rather irritating, but that
was his privilege, and she felt that academic courtesy was one of the marks of
the true professional.
Shall These Bones Speak?
As work progressed, Andrea began to have an intuitive feel
for the arrangement of the site, which was like a jigsaw puzzle with most of
the pieces hidden or lost. It slowly coalesced into the realization that there
was a sort of focal point, and she began to bend the team efforts in that
direction. Also, her curiosity about this mysterious artifact began to nag at
her. She took advantage of one of Mike’s erratic visits to learn more. He
seemed to expect her questions.
“Look at the site,” he said, and narrowed his
eyes in concentration. The results of were not too exciting. Her visor cleared,
and then there were two new grids superimposed on the visual scene, a more or
less flat red one rising to a sharp spicule over one point in the site, and a
green one seeming to dive into the earth at the same point, which was pretty
close to where she imagined the site’s “focal point.” His
facility for communion with the polysector was sometimes a bit disturbing. She
knew that the whole site was permeated by the low-power microwave and infrared
laser radiation that the polysector used to measure its surroundings and
communicate with the headbands, an alien sea which only he could perceive, let
alone navigate. What information, what visions, awaited only her knowledge of
invocation? Then she smiled and snorted quietly at her own imaginings. All this
was, after all, the ordinary human condition. And it wasn’t as if Mike
hadn’t tried to teach them.
He went on, “This is not in real time. It took a lot
of number-crunching to produce this image. What you’re seeing is –
hmm. Well, you might say that the geomagnetic field is being distorted in a
certain way at that point.”
“You mean, there’s a lump of iron or something
there?”
“No, this is the opposite of that. Something in the
earth is refusing to be permeated by the local field. The Meissner effect, or
diamagnetism, or something analogous. It is only really strong in
superconductors, so far as I know. I call it ‘Xebico Magnetic Anomaly
One.’”
“Why one? Is there more than one?”
“No,” he said, and a smile briefly flickered across his face. Even
his simplest expressions often seemed to carry a hint of mockery or bitterness.
“I think that it’s pretty safe to say that there’s only one,
but it still needs an ordinal number. Tradition, you know.”
“Ah. And the green grid?”
“That’s some sort of temporal distortion.”
“Temporal? You mean, time distortion? How is that
possible? And how would you measure a thing like that?”
“Hmph. Taking the second question first, by the
production and decay of strange particles.”
“Strange? Like the quantum number, strange?”
“Why, yes,” he said, looking pleased and
slightly surprised. “As to your first question, beats me,” he said.
Unlike many confessing ignorance, he seemed happy and excited by it. “If
I may make a suggestion, dig there. You’ll find the top meter or so of
overburden essentially sterile, so you need take no more trouble with it than
you feel you must. And, I would suggest about a ten-by-ten excavation.”
“Ten by ten meters? Do you have any idea how much dirt
moving that involves?”
He looked at her without expression, and she began to feel slightly embarrassed
by her own question. “Anyway, since you’re a representative of this
mysterious Wilmarth Foundation, I suppose that’s more than a mere
suggestion.”
Again he looked slightly surprised. “Not at all. This
is your dig. If you were to become incapacitated, or decide to walk away, we
would find someone to replace you, but we would regret the necessity. Until
then, it’s all yours. No second-guessing, no nudging, no cannibal
accountants. Dig wherever you want. Use whatever methods seem best to you.
That’s the way it has to be.”
She looked at him distrustfully. She had never known him to
lie, even by misdirection, but maybe he was just really good at it, or was
saving credibility points for a real whopper, and his expression offered no
hint one way or another. She sometimes felt that a less intelligent person
might be more knowable, more trustworthy. Then, on second thought, it occurred
to her that a less intelligent person would also be a lot less useful, and that
this was probably all just nerves, and nobody was going to pull on her leash.
There was no leash. It was just that she still didn’t fully believe her
own incredible luck. And, he was suggesting that she do more or less what she
had already decided on anyway. Her own desire and ambition were more than
enough to drive her.
Again she stood overlooking the dig, but this time she was
barely aware of the setting sun. The last five months had been all that Mike
had promised, or threatened. The weirdness had begun with an urgent
communication from Ian Wren, one of the shovelbums.
“Hey, Andy, I think you might be interested in
this.” Her visor showed a diamond-sharp relayed image of an exposed ridge
of apparent bone. He was one of the few who had bothered to learn some of the
more arcane possibilities of the system, and occasionally liked to show it off.
She gratefully abandoned the probably futile attempt to piece together one of
the chert cores from the debitage littering the site, separating with the speed
of long experience the primary, secondary, reworked and cortex pieces, and
trotted over to the Big Pit where he was working.
Wren looked up at her hopefully. He had a curiously British
face, broad and fleshy, with a small, censorious-looking mouth, now slightly
open with anticipation. She could see at a glance that the bones were not
human, and with all the buildup of the last few months, she felt an urge that
she had thought herself superior to, to grab a shovel and dive in like a
pothunter. On the other hand, the correct method had its own rewards, like
foreplay indefinitely prolonged. Really, of course, there were only small
choices in the basic procedure, and she began to mentally assemble the
necessary resources. This was going to be interesting.
Which, shelter reflected, was a fantastic understatement.
Perhaps the defining moment was when Mike drifted by and looked over what they
had uncovered, and observed mildly “That’s pretty unusual,
isn’t it?”
Silence spread to everyone in earshot like ripples in a
pond, and Andrea stared at him with stark disbelief. It had never occurred to
her that he might have large gaps in knowledge – by her reckoning,
apparently gigantic gaps. What they had found was so unprecedented, so wrong,
that she would not have believed it without seeing it herself. Taking a moment
to control the incredulity in her voice, she said, “Yes, it’s very
unusual.”
“Ah,” he said, and wandered off. The first thing
they had uncovered, the ridge of bone, had proved to be a spinous process, an
attachment point for the heavy muscles and ligaments on a massive lumbar
vertebra of a Columbian mammoth. Further excavation revealed a complete ring of
vertebrae, clearly assembled from several individuals but fairly matched for
size. Aside from these, no other mammoth bones were found on the site. Outside
this ring, of about three meters in diameter, was another ring composed of four
human skeletons, provided with a trove of
Taking the composition as a whole – with one exception
– she felt a kind of sorrow which she could never have articulated. These
people would be completely and finally dead and lost when she failed, as she
must fail, to figure out what this extraordinary construction had meant, and
this site would be destroyed in the attempt. Could the reams of paper, the
hundreds of sketches and photographs, preserve it as well as the patient Earth
had? Would the wisdom of the future condemn her actions? This was the
fundamental dilemma of all archaeology, and it was one that each field worker
had to come to terms with as best she could.
The one exception to these considerations was the Artifact.
As much as her mind shied away from coming to grips with it, it seemed obvious
that it had been of central importance here, and equally obvious that these
people could never have produced it. It was a disc of about 1.5 meters in
diameter, slightly convex on its upper surface, composed of some unknown purplish
material that felt like polished ceramic. For all its having been buried under
tons of sand and rock for millennia, it seemed to have an immaculate, optically
perfect surface. Obviously whatever it was made of was extremely hard. It had
an embedded pattern of white swirls and sinuous curves which reminded her of
something that she couldn’t quite recall, until she had it under her
microscope. The patterns revealed fuzzy edges under low magnification, which
showed still more patterns, similar but different, under higher magnification
and so on to the limits of her microscope, where there was still a tantalizing
hint of pattern. Then she remembered an old Scientific American offprint. She
was looking at apparent example of something that she had thought to be a
purely mathematical whimsy, fractals, or fractional dimensions. She was
disappointed when Mike seemed only mildly interested by this, but he also
didn’t claim to know what it meant. She considered how to obtain higher
resolution.
The four skeletons, clockwise from the northernmost one,
were dubbed Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. After innumerable photographs and a
demand for sketches which almost caused mutiny from Mary, their best sketch
artist, she decided to remove Alpha. And, she thought that she would use a new
technique that Eamonn had been telling her about. She assembled a team.
“Alright, listen up. We’re going to remove
Alpha, and we’re going to try this new technique that Eamonn showed us.
Do you pole people feel up to it?” As the ones who would have to perform
the trickiest operation, the pole people had practiced for a couple of days
under Eamonn’s guidance, and there were no objections now. “Okay,
as the Principal Investigator and head honcho, I get to run the zap gun.”
This produced a stir and a few smiles from her audience, but aside from a few
quiet chuckles, nobody spoke up. She clapped her hands and said,
“Alright, timber pimps, rustle timbers!” This miner’s
expression was not really appropriate, but she thought it had a stirring sound.
Most of the hangers-on retreated to the awning to get out of the sun, waiting
for the show to start, while the working party trudged down to the storage
tent, soon returning with the poles, several lengths of rough board, a roll of
silvery plastic film and other gear, including the zap gun, which was trailing
a heavy black cable back to the generator down on the wash.
The “timber pimps” quickly built a rough box of
a size to contain Alpha, with eye bolts screwed in along the top and sides,
while the pole people chose their locations carefully and limbered up their
insulating poles, actually lengths of PVC pipe. Eamonn eyed the box that the
pimps were building, and unrolled and cut a sheet of the silvery plastic film
on the ground of a size to cover it with some overlap. While this was going on,
Andrea seta red plastic milk crate in the center of the square of the four pole
handlers and set the zap gun on it, then went to get the rod driver. She used
this simple tool, little more than a piece of heavy iron pipe welded closed at
one end, to drive a piece of steel rebar about half a meter into the ground
within half a meter of the milk crate, and then borrowed somebody’s
canteen and poured a pint or so of water around it. She then picked up the zap
gun and stepped atop the crate, and waited. Eamonn had affixed the corners of
the plastic sheet onto the ends of the poles by simple clips that could be
released by the handlers, and after a quick look over the setup he took up one
of the poles himself.
After a brief hesitation –this was the real deal, and a lot was riding on
it – he said “Ready.” He and the other three pole handlers
lifted their poles in careful unison, holding the plastic sheet more or less
flat in front of Andréa. She lifted the zap gun. It was a simple device,
containing a high-speed fan, a set of heating coils and a high voltage power
supply feeding a set of ionizing points, each controlled by a switch on the
side of the housing. It got its name from the fact that the metal housing was a
large, chrome plated affair with vaguely Art Deco styling which would have
looked at home on the cover of a 1940’s “Amazing Stories.”
Then she said “Wait a minute,” and set the gun down, to the frowns
of the pole handlers, which changed to smiles as she unbound her hair and
picked up the zap gun again.
“Zap!” she cried, and turned-on the first two
switches, for the fan and high voltage. The gun replied with the high-pitched
scream of the fan, propelling a cloud of ions at the plastic sheet. The plastic
was coated with a conductive but highly resistive film, and was taking on an
enormous static charge as she swept her stream of ions slowly back and forth,
and the sharp, musty smell of ozone soon became oppressive. Of course she was
taking on an equal and opposite charge, and she felt her hair stirring and
finally standing straight out from her head, like a brown dandelion seed. She
visualized what she must look like now, and repressed a giggle. Finally, she
felt her clothes begin to stand out from her body, and a rather unpleasant
sensation as if ants were crawling on her skin.
“Now!” she cried, and turned off the high
voltage. The pole handlers, moving with careful coordination, maneuvered the
sheet over the remains of Alpha and, keeping it as level as possible, let it
down. The electrostatic charge forced the sheet into close conformity with the
bones, as if it were sucked down by a vacuum, but with a gentle insistence that
eased off as the charge bled away on contact. Andrea turned and touched the zap
gun to the grounding spike beside her crate, and as her charge neutralized with
a vicious snapping spark, her hair tumbled down around her shoulders and her
clothes settled around her body. She shook the hair out of her eyes and turned
on the third switch, the heating coils. The distant racket of the generator now
picked up an emphatic note, as it was called on to deliver real power. She
stepped off the crate and walked up to where Alpha now looked as if he had been
silver-plated. The zap gun was now like a giant hair dryer, and as she swept it
back and forth over Alpha the plastic softened and shrank slightly. The heat
was almost unbearable, but it was soon done. “Well done,” as some
self-appointed wit among the spectators muttered. It may have been Mike. She
turned off the zap gun, and the fan whined down into silence, accompanied by
the crinking sounds of cooling metal. Then the timber pimps came up with their
box, and set it down around Alpha,
picked it up again by the eye bolts and roughly trimmed the bottom edge
with machetes for a better fit to the ground. They laid it back down again, and
Eamonn came on with the foam pack, two pressurized cylinders connected together
through a mixing valve to a length of pipe. He inserted the pipe into a hole
which had been left in the box for this purpose, and triggered the valve. With
a muted hiss, the box began to fill with rapidly expanding plastic foam,
extruding blobs of pearly white like whipped cream through the cracks and gaps
in the box. These small losses didn’t matter, so long as the box was
filled, and indeed there was enough to push a billow of the stuff out through a
gap in the end of the box. The cylinders were a one-shot, and once triggered,
there was no way to shut them off. After they had emptied, Eamonn removed the
tube and said, “Well, it’s done. We’ll let it set overnight,
and see what we’ve got tomorrow.”
There was a smattering of applause led by Mike. It seemed to
her that he had somehow contrived to put a sarcastic note into his applause,
but thinking about it later, it occurred to her that sarcastic clapping would
have required a true miracle of expressiveness, never one of his strong points.
She felt uncomfortable about something, vaguely apprehensive. Almost alarmed,
in fact. She tried to shake the feeling. Things seemed to be going very well.
After a few hours of setting time, the foam would harden enough to allow them
to lift Alpha intact, and the chemical reaction that generated the gas that
made the foam expand also produced a photolytic agent, so that the foam would
crumble into inert dust when exposed to intense ultraviolet light. The plastic
film could be stripped off after the application of moderate heat. Altogether
an ingenious system, she thought, far superior to the old cheesecloth and
plaster of Paris method. She was proud of Eamonn.
Early the next day, the audience had gathered again for the
liftoff. It went off perfectly, with anticlimactic ease, showing Alpha
completely intact when the box was turned over, looking as if he had been
submerged in a pool of dirty mercury. A layer of ordinary foam rubber was
rolled over the exposed surface, and boards were attached across the bottom of
the box with a thick, gummy, quick-setting adhesive from a caulking gun. There
would be no hammering on this box. After the adhesive had set, four of the team
picked it up and carried it down to the base camp, looking for all the world
like litter bearers, and indeed there did seem to be a common feeling of
triumphal procession as the rest of the crew followed.
Eamonn and Andrea had remained behind, turning attention to
the artifact, which was at last easily accessible. It sat on a base of solid
granite, so that there was no apparent chance of disturbing anything else
below. She ran her handover the polished surface, feeling its incredible
smoothness, and something else, a strangely persistent sense of déjà vu.
Eamonn asked, “May I borrow your hammer?” took the proffered
Estwing and inserted the pick end under the edge of the disk and levered it up
with surprising ease. Whatever it was made of seemed much lighter than stone or
metal, and it revealed what looked like a vertical shaft descending into
darkness. The surface of the shaft looked glassy and fused, as if it were a
lava tube. But of course, they were within the bounds of the Stable Interior
Craton, various odds and ends of Mesozoic sedimentary material laid over
primordial plutonic granite, and there had been no volcanic activity around
here for at least sixty million years. Even if there had been, some freakish,
unprecedented hot spot in the mantle beneath, such a fragile structure would
not have survived erosion so long in any case. The bones of the land were close
here.
As she peered under the edge of the disc, Andrea felt a more
powerful, disorienting rush of déjà vu, almost as if some sort of
hallucinogenic gas had been released from the shaft. It was all she could do to
remember whether or not she was standing, and she swayed on her feet. Eamonn
was too intent on his examination to notice her reaction, and after a few
seconds he let the disc back down again, to her great relief. She immediately
felt better, although the nagging sense of temporal dislocation she had felt on
first touching the disc seemed to persist.
She asked, “Aren’t you afraid of damaging the
thing with a steel tool?” He gave her a sidelong glance and a crooked
smile, and made a shocking answer by twirling the hammer so that the square
face was down, and striking the disc a sharp blow. She half expected it to
shatter, or boom like a gong, but the disc itself seemed as oblivious to this
rough treatment as it had to millennia of burial; there was only the high,
ringing impact of the steel hammer head itself. “No,” he said. As
she considered this, and bit back on what she was tempted to say about the
irresponsibility of risking damage, there came a click and whir from the edge
of the pit, and they both looked up sharply to see Klaus taking pictures. He
waved at them, smiling blandly, and walked away.
As they looked at each other in speculative surmise, her
headband began tweedling at her, a signal she had never heard before. She
hadn’t even known that it was capable of turning itself on. Donning the
headband, she was immediately confronted with a new, flashing red icon at the
top of the visor. She stared at it for a second, and it expanded into a page of
text, a weather alert from NOAA. This area normally had about five inches of
rain per year, but now it looked like it was going to get all five of them, and
more, within twelve hours. A quick mental estimate reassured her that it
wouldn’t actually be dangerous, but it would certainly interfere with
operations. The headband had begun showing her satellite pictures when she shut
it off. “Bloody hell,” she said, and then added “Shit!”
after mentally reviewing just how ill-equipped they were for this. Well,
nothing to do but get to it.
“Smith! Korzybski! Carnap! Huynh! Steiner! Get out the tarps!” she
shouted, then repeated it on the headbands’ general alert channel, and
charged up out of the Big Pit to boss the work gangs spreading the tarps over
the excavations and weighting down the edges with rocks. It looked
aggravatingly like it would leak all over, but it was all they could do.
After a final look over the preparations, she told everyone
to head on out. There was no point in their all sitting around in the rain.
Eamonn and Klaus both volunteered to stay on, which she found rather
disquieting, but their differences were none of her business, and she had
certainly never volunteered to get between them.
As the first fat drops began landing in tiny explosions of
dust, soon turning to mud, they adjourned to one of the sorting tables, covered
by a nylon canopy against the sun. Andrea shared out the last of her MREs,
which left her stuck with the pasta with vegetables entrée, her least favorite.
She picked at it for a while and then abandoned it, too distracted to eat, but
she did eat the pound cake, which was really excellent. She wondered, not for
the first time, why military rations had pound cake better than Sara
Lee’s best efforts. The other two ate with good appetite, and after they
had made an end to the meal, there seemed nothing to do but sit and watch the
rainfall, and wait for the sunset. Afterwards, they could sit and listen to the
rainfall.
Andrea supposed that she could collate notes or something,
but that would involve an extended session with the polysector since the field
notes on this dig were now spoken, interpreted as text by the machine, and
stored. Without the discipline enforced by written notes the text files tended
to be wildly chaotic, and the polyester’s text to speech conversion
program interacting with sloppy pronunciation and regional accents had stopped
being funny along time ago. She just couldn’t force herself to take an
interest. She stared out at the darkening rain, feeling apprehensive and
depressed.
Abruptly Eamonn said, “We can do better than this.
Just a minute.” He dashed out into the rain in the direction of the bunk
tent, leaving an uncomfortable silence between Andrea and Klaus. It seemed far
too long before he came sprinting back, carrying something wrapped in a length
of his special plastic sheet, which he unwrapped to reveal a pressure lantern
and an odd-shaped wooden item, shaped something like an autoharp, with six
plastic vanes, almost like a ventilator grille, and an array of knobs and
buttons on one surface.
As the others watched, he pumped up and lit the lantern, and
set it on the ground so that its hot glare would not be in anyone’s line
of sight. He took up his instrument and said, “I call this a sonodor.
It’s mostly my design, though Mike helped with some of it.” He
adjusted the knobs and swept a hand over the vanes, strumming them like strings,
and the sonodor responded with the sound of something like a harpsichord, but
with a higher, more tinkling sound. A virginal, Andrea thought, or maybe a
clavichord. It really wasn’t her field. He began playing something
intricate and Baroque sounding, but soon gave up on it. Andrea guessed that he
thought the sound too delicate to compete with the drumming of the rain on the
canopy. He reset the sonodor to a good, loud bodhran, and immediately launched
himself into a series of Irish jigs and reels, with great brio and a clear,
sweet tenor voice, often dipping into the baritone range with no loss of
control. It was one of the medium-sized regrets of Andrea’s life that she
could not sing well, but she knew enough to know that she was listening to something
extraordinary.
A few minutes into this recital, Klaus excused himself and said that he wanted
to turn in for the night, his accent seeming thicker and more guttural than
usual, and the others barely noticed his leaving. Andrea leaned back against a
packing case and enjoyed the show, fingering Mike’s good luck charm in
her pocket and wondering if Eamonn knew that she knew that he was, in his odd
way, coming on to her. She also wondered if he knew that he was making a pretty
good job of it, and began to consider how she might rearrange things in the
As she sank into these pleasant thoughts, a rather curious
idea crept in. She was, she supposed, more or less as empathetic as the usual
run of humanity, but never before had her impressions of someone else’s
thoughts been so distinct, so strangely assured. She idly ran a fingernail
along the grooves in the talisman in her pocket as she considered this, but the
thought seemed to have come from nowhere and lead nowhere, so she dropped it;
still, the assurance somehow remained.
The drumming roar of the rain began spasmodically tapering
off, with occasional violent gusts, and Eamonn glanced up at the canopy, gave
her a small, crooked smile and said, “It sounds like Tlaloc might be
having prostate problems.” She snickered at this. Soon it stopped
entirely in the midst of a wailing song in thick dialect about the Great
Hunger, a central feature of long Irish memories. The silence after the rain,
which might be a fruitful and growing time in richer land, here brought only a
dead feeling, seeming to echo the grief and loss of the song. After it was
finished, Eamonn remained bent over his instrument, then looked up and offered
her a half-smile while knuckling a tear from the corner of one eye, and Andrea
realized that the past was alive for him in a way that it could never be for
her. A real romantic, she told herself, with the reflexive disdain of a
rationalist, but also with the realization that that was by no means entirely unattractive.
He adjusted his sonodor, finally settling on a sound
something like a plucked bass viol, and said “Last song tonight. This
song is the oldest song in the world, from
She smiled and said, “I’ve never heard of
Ugarit-oops, so maybe there are still a few things for me to learn. Play
on.”
The song sounded more like a Gregorian chant than anything else she was
familiar with, aside from one odd bit near the beginning with a rapid
alternation of notes, almost a warble, which was rather distracting to one who
knew only the Western musical traditions. The language itself suggested nothing
at all to her, which was not surprising, and she became distracted from the
song by the ancient riddle of
These musings were interrupted by the headbands’ emergency
person-to-person signal, in both her and Eamonn’s pockets. They looked at
each other in surprise, then scrambled to put them on.
Under the Moon
Mike’s heavy voice said, “Well, hello
there.”
“What’s up?” said Eamonn, all business
now.
“Friend Klaus is absconding to the parking lot, and
he’s taking a rather large souvenir with him.” Their visors showed
a relayed picture in tints of rose and scarlet, a clear enough infrared image
of Klaus dragging something bulky wrapped in a tarp. “He doesn’t
know I’m here yet.”
“Shit!” said Eamonn, sounding for the moment
remarkably American. “Can you delay him?”
“Oh, I can temporize the sun up,” Mike said,
“but will he listen? Don’t dally.”
“We’re coming,” Eamonn said, and charged
into the darkness. For reasons which she could never begin to explain, feeling
pretty sure that she was making a bad mistake, Andrea sprinted after him. A
gibbous moon, invisible before in the lantern glare, peered down intermittently
through the driving cloud wrack, and it was enough to keep them going in the
right direction. As for the mud and water, there was nothing to do but plunge
on through, and try to have faith that there wouldn’t be an ankle-breaking
hole or loose rock beneath their feet. It was the better part of half a klick
to the parking lot, and they arrived gasping for breath while trying to be
stealthy and make as little noise as possible. It was wasted effort. Just as
they saw Mike standing in the moonlight, Klaus’ voice said behind them
“Go and join your friend.” They turned to see him holding a pistol
on them. He followed them about a meter back as they slowly went to stand
beside Mike. The disk, still wrapped in its tarp, lay in the mud nearby.
“Well, well,” Klaus said. “We’re all
together now, but I fear that I must soon take my leave of you. The Herald
comes, and soon the Master. He will be pleased in what he sees of me.” He
appeared to be almost in ecstasy. Andrea and Eamonn stared at him in
puzzlement, and Mike looked grim.
Klaus pointed his pistol at Mike and said,
“You’re first, Frater Michael Tradescent.” Frater? Andrea
thought.
Klaus raised his pistol, and then lowered it. “Remove your headband! Try
to say a control word, and it will be your last, and I will not be
merciful.”
Mike closed his eyes for a moment, and seemed to
concentrate. For the first time she could remember, Andrea saw him make what
looked like nervous gestures, holding both fists near waist level and then opening
them outward, closing one fist and leaving the other hand with fingers pointing
downward, then closing his right hand with the thumb outside and making a
circular gesture over his stomach. All this was flickeringly fast, and she saw
Eamonn nod infinitesimally out of the corner of her eye. Then she realized that
the gestures were Ameslan, the gestural language of the deaf, with which she
had a nodding acquaintance. As far as she could remember the gestures were
depart, five, and regret. Quickly and sloppily executed as they were, and
displaced downward, they could perhaps be taken for some sort of nervous tics,
and Klaus did not seem to react to them.
Michael removed his headband and tossed it in the mud. Klaus
raised his pistol again, smiling, and Mike stared at it intensely. At this
range Klaus could not miss, and he did not. In the muzzle flash Andrea saw
Mike’s head snap back, and he fell into the mud to lie very still.
Andrea put her arm around Eamonn and turned her face away,
pressing against his side, seeking whatever human comfort she could before the
end, and he put his arm around her and held her tight, still facing Klaus. As
she grappled with her emotions, she felt a light, bristly touch on her arm
around Eamonn’s back, and knew instantly what it was, a tarantula flooded
out of its burrow and seeking high ground. An idea sprang into her mind as if
ready-made. From the feel of the spider’s progress, she made the best
guess she could about its location and seized it by the pedicel, the narrow
area between the abdomen and cephalothorax.
The spider did what they usually did when challenged and reared up its front
two legs, a fearsome display to another tarantula, which only made it easier to
detach from Eamonn’s sweater.
She turned and gently underhanded the spider, like a black,
bristly softball, into Klaus’ face. Perhaps it was that very gentleness
which did not cause Klaus to react instantly. The sac of its abdomen plopped
neatly into his mouth, and the tarantula, an irascible creature at all times,
enraged by being flooded out of its burrow and still more by being handled in
such a manner, seized what it could with all sixteen tarsal claws and bit
whatever it could reach. Klaus shrieked and whirled madly, apparently trying to
dislodge it without touching it, and Eamonn reacted instantly. He shoved Andrea
violently aside and leapt on Klaus. I guess I should have expected that she
thought, as her butt spattered into the mud and she went rolling, and she heard
two sharp blows and a cracking crunch. Immediately, Eamonn was at her side,
helping her to her feet.
“Sorry about that, but I didn’t want to take any
chances with stray bullets,” he said, speaking quickly. “Good
riddance to bad rubbish. And now, we need to seek cover. That
‘polysector’ contains a bomb, and Mike set it to go off in five
minutes. Four now, I guess. I don’t know what kind of bomb, but I don’t
think it’ll be anything trivial. I suggest that we, as you Americans say,
make tracks.” He looked around at the moonlit desert, as if seeing it for
the first time, and his face fell. “Damn.” It was not absolutely
flat, of course, but there was nothing suggesting cover against a major
explosion. He sighed, and took up the Artifact, stripping off its covering
tarp, and said “Well, let’s see what we can do with this. This is
sort of what it’s for, I think.” He found a crack in the rock under
the mud which would accept some of it and hold it upright, and hastily hammered
it down with another rock, apparently giving no thought to how he might be
damaging it.
He gestured for her to join him behind the shield, when
something like a gigantic shaft of green fire exploded from the Big Pit,
thrusting up through the restless cloud deck and flattening into an umbrella
shape of dim green flame an unguessable distance above. Andrea screamed and
fell to her knees, futilely pressing hands against her ears.
Overwhelmingly powerful and alien thoughts seemed forced into
her head, and she was not sure where, when or what she was. This compared to
her previous déjàvu as a match compared to a volcano, and she seemed to come
adrift in time, screaming with memories of future pain and eternities of torture
endured. She was aware of Eamonn seizing her and dragging her behind the shield
as something that would happen / was happening / had happened, or maybe the
other way around. The shadow of the shield seemed to have some ameliorating
effect, gave her a partial sense of time’s direction, but she still knew
that she was somehow experiencing the smallest fraction of the agony of a
Titan, the full apprehension of which would blow her life from her body like a
flake of ash lofting from a bonfire. Then the desert lit up with supernal white
light ten times brighter than the day, and she knew no more.
Departures
She awakened in a white room full of sunlight and a with a
lively breeze ruffling the curtains at the open window, but the smell and the
institutional television set mounted on the wall said hospital. She seemed to
feel empty, light and cheerful, and wondered if she hadn’t had a little
pharmaceutical help with that, and found that she didn’t care. There was
a still figure in the other bed with a heavily bandaged head, apparently
somebody of some heft. She didn’t even care that she felt a little too
empty. Eamonn was sitting by her bed, asleep.
“Hey,” she said, and began coughing. He started
awake, grabbed a cup imprinted with “Xebico County Hospital” from
the bedside table, and supported her head very gently with his other hand as
she took a drink of cool water through the straw. She smiled at him and said,
“To ask an original question, what happened?”
He smiled into her eyes for a few seconds, and said “I
think that first, you ought to know that you’re going to be all right. I
am told that you might feel as if part of your mind is gone, or something like
that?” For the first time, she began to feel vaguely alarmed.
“Well, don’t worry about it. The part that is gone wasn’t
really yours anyway. You’re all here, and you’re going to be all
right.”
She smiled again and said simply, “Okay.” She
had also felt a bit disturbed that the logo on the water cup, from the corner
of her eye, had seemed to be a rendering of a single staring eye; but with
Eamonn’s reassurance, she forgot about it.
“As to other events, if you want long-winded explanations, why not ask
him?” hooking a thumb toward the occupant of the other bed.
“Damn you,” Mike said dispassionately, “I
was almost asleep.”
“I thought you were dead,” Andrea said in a
small voice. She felt that she should be glad, and perhaps later she would be
glad; but now she just felt stunned.
“Well, perhaps in some metaphorical sense,” he
began, and then took a good look at her face. “Never mind,” he
said.
Mike sighed, making a noisy production out of it, and said “Well. First,
it’s not commonly known, but being shot in the head is not as certain as
one might think. There are several cases on record of the bullet striking the
skull and actually traveling around the head under the scalp, and I did what I
could to encourage it in my case. I tried to anticipate the moment of firing, and
snapped my head back to take it at an oblique angle. It was a one in ten
thousand chance, but that’s infinitely better than nothing. This time it
worked, leaving me with authentic-looking head wounds, a bad concussion and a
lot of blood loss. At that point, you might say that I lost interest in further
proceedings. And speaking of which, very well done, both of you.”
He regarded them with grave approval, and Andrea felt as if
she had been knighted by her liege lord and consecrated to some high purpose,
rather than idly complimented ban odd acquaintance. A ridiculous, irrational
feeling, which nonetheless brought a blush to her cheek. Perhaps it was the
drugs.
“Now, the bomb was, as you must have surmised, a small
nuclear device, but it was only the power source for the real bomb, which was a
– Hmph. Call it a Planck shear. Or to be a bit more poetic, a reality
pinch. Its shielding accounted for most of the mass of the polysector. Its
effect was to remove everything within about a hundred meter radius.”
“Remove?” Eamonn asked.
“Yes. I don’t mean vaporize, or irradiate, or
anything like that. What was there is simply gone, fortunately taking the
fireball and most of the fallout with it. There are some fascinating side
effects,” he went on, showing a little more animation. “For
example, the value of pi is probably about three point seven at the epicenter,
which will normalize as the surrounding metrical frame reasserts itself. All
you’d see if you were to look at it now is distortion, as if you were
looking through a warped lens, but the distortion is in fact and matter, not
merely image. And, maybe some Cerenkov radiation, but that’s just blue
light. If anyone were to blunder into it for the next couple of weeks it would
literally turn them inside out, but it’ll be safe in a couple of weeks, and
undetectable in a month. Then we’ll have gotten away with it. We were
damned lucky to be outside its range.”
“And what about that – thing?” Andrea
asked.
“Ah yes, that.” Mike fell back on his pillow,
scientific enthusiasm gone. He looked old and ill. “Call it a Kalend, if
you like.” This seemed to amuse him briefly, and then he sighed again.
“What we did – what I did - was really a mercy. Normally they have
a necessary role in what might be called the metaphysical ecology, and they
almost never have direct contact with humans. You might say that they are the
“and” in cause and effect, the separators of dichotomies, the
guardians of the one impossibility that makes all else possible. For all that,
they are of the Earth, just as we are.” He made an odd, ritualistic
circular gesture. “But that one was trapped somehow, tormented into
insanity, controlled by something else trying to get into the world from
outside. As to what was controlling it – I will not give a name to that
which can have none.”
A few days ago Andrea would have dismissed all this as
mystical rubbish, but now a cold wind from nowhere seemed to blow through the
room, chilling the sunlight, stirring tenebrous, half-formed thoughts like dry
leaves.
Then Mike smiled tiredly, and said “So. What are your
plans?” which seemed to dispel the darkling mood, and everything seemed
almost normal again.
Andrea said, “I take it that the site I was working is
no longer workable?”
“Correct, alas” Mike said. “But, you need
not fear for employment. You have greatly indebted us, and made some powerful
allies, as well as piled up a lot of good karma, which might express itself in
surprising ways.” He winked at her, but she had no idea what he meant by
it. “All of your surviving gear has been retrieved and decontaminated,
and you’ll find the ‘
He seemed to put aside his brief spate of levity, and said,
“I’m afraid that all that pain you endured was partially my fault.
That ‘good luck charm’ was an amplifier of sorts, and rendered you
susceptible to influences to which you would normally be immune. I had hoped
that it would help you somehow.” He made another curious gesture,
crossing his wrists and pressing his arms against his chest, like a pharaoh
holding crook and flail. “I am deeply sorry. I think that you may yet
find the amplifier useful, and you can have it back if you want it. As to our
late dust-up, don’t worry about it. The cover story is in place and the
evidence is being manufactured right now. Someone will brief you on it later,
and hand you a nice chunk of change. The Foundation will pick up your medical
bills here, Miss Smith.” His smile became sardonic, then he winced.
“Ach. Anyway, by necessity, we’ve really gotten very good at that
sort of thing. For now, you say nothing, you know nothing, and I promise you
that it will all soon blow over.”
“All right, one big question,” Andrea said.
“What is this ‘Foundation?’ Who the hell is ‘we?’
Mike sighed. “I’m getting tired of the sound of
my own voice,” he said, “Believe it or not. Ask him,” nodding
at Eamonn.
Eamonn cleared his throat and said, “Screw that. I
want to take a sabbatical.”
Mike smiled lazily and said “Surprise, surprise.
It’s not a good time for it, but it probably never will be. I’ll
handle the paperwork. Go, with my blessing.”
Andrea said, pulling the covers over her head with childlike
pleasure, “I’m tired. As soon as I get out of here, I’ve got
a trailer I’d like to show you.”
Eamonn bent over her bed, and very gently brushed his lips
over her forehead, the only part of her still exposed. He sat beside her bed
and watched her quietly. Mike watched this without expression, and then turned
away.
The tale is told.
Notes
Saharan dust:
http://www.nwo.nl/nwohome.nsf/pages/NWOP_5UAFB5?OpenDocument&g=NWO&n=ACPP_4WMESE&rc=1
Polysector’s “compound eye”:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2003/12/031212075348.htm
“Stable Interior Craton”:
“We had come into thecontinent’s province of supreme tectonic calm,
the Stable InteriorCraton, where a thin veneer of sediment lies flat upon the
stolidfundament, where the geology – even by geological standards –
is exceptionally slow.”
“There are roots of long-gone mountains deep in the rock of the
stable craton, but it has not had an orogeny in a thousand million
years.”
- John McPhee, “In Suspect Territory”
Tarantula Eyes:
In the last revision, I referred to compound eyes on a tarantula. Oops. Spiders
have from two to eight eyes, but they’re all simple eyes, which can see
little but light and shade. Their main sensory modality is the setæ, the
“hair.” It’s not true hair, but is extremely sensitive to
vibrations.
“. . . a small, twisted bar of quartz . . . “
The thing the Time Traveller held in his hand was a glittering
metallic framework, scarcely larger than a small clock, and very delicately
made. There was ivory in it, and some transparent crystalline substance.
The Time Traveller looked at us, and then at the mechanism.
`Well?' said the Psychologist.
`This little affair,' said the Time Traveller, resting his elbows
upon the table and pressing his hands together above the apparatus, `is only a
model. It is my plan for a machine to travel through time. You will
notice that it looks singularly askew, and that there is an odd twinkling
appearance about this bar, as though it was in some way unreal.' He
pointed to the part with his finger. `Also, here is one little white
lever, and here is another.'
H. G. Wells, “The Time Machine.” A little joke on my part.
“Xebico”
http://www.saviodsilva.net/life/horror/3.htm
Another little joke.
End.