Bad to Worse Page 5

  As well, the effort expended on this seemingly intractable decipherment compromised other urgent directions of research, such as blotching methodology and dating, or the larger questions of what civilization would produce such artefacts and why, and what was their people’s fate.

  There were other possibilities, of course. Paulo suggested that the medallion arrays had the appearance of an abacus, and their function might be in calculation, which in turn raised the idea of an exchequer or other number record, perhaps related to festivals or astronomical events. Unfortunately, in this case also, very little advancement was possible without a starting point of basic pattern detection.

  Their objective today was to install generator lighting at the vestibule opening into the second chamber. Paulo was to carry an extension cord through the tunnel, while Nicholas stayed within the first chamber controlling its feed. They communicated using battery-powered two-way radio headsets.

  When Paulo was satisfied that he had secured the new light in a stable and useful position, he asked Nicholas to make the connection to their power distributor in the first chamber, and switch it on.

  ‘How does it look?’ asked Nicholas.

  ‘Fantastic, Nicholas. It’s completely transformed from what we could see in torchlight.’ Paulo paused. ‘Stunning. The medallions here seem brighter, richer than the outside ones. Come through. Mind you don’t trip on the cable.’

  As he approached the inner vestibule, Nicholas could see the glow from Paulo’s installation. He decided there definitely was something cheering about the proverbial light at the end of a tunnel.

  When he arrived at the chamber, Paulo was setting up camera equipment that had been delivered on a previous visit. They both removed their headsets when Nicholas was close.

  They had scheduled one hour in this chamber for Paulo to begin a systematic photographic record of the righthand medallion wall. On this occasion, Nicholas was free to explore, and after conferring about the best way to sequence the filming, he set off into the darkness.

  The ground was moderately rough, and sloping downward. Without warning, he reached an edge, a step down of about ten centimetres, beyond which the stone surface seemed completely smooth. He nearly lost his footing, as there was no shadow to reveal its presence.

  Nicholas stopped, and shone his torch to both sides. The step extended evenly in both directions as far as his light would carry. He wasn’t certain, but it appeared to have a slight curvature, as if it were the shoreline to a smooth stone sea. Ahead, his torch detected nothing. He looked back. The new mains-powered light was easily visible, but he couldn’t see Paulo.

  He continued walking. The incline was very gradual, and the surface featureless. From time to time, he checked Paulo’s light. It became very small and faint, and he began to think about turning back.

  Then he came to the water. So shallow and clear and smooth that he almost stepped into it. He stood at the edge, staring down, mesmerized by its stillness and what he imagined to be an ageless title to purity and secrecy. Again, he looked around. In every direction, his torch beam was lost in darkness. Behind him, he was no longer sure if he could see Paulo’s light, and the uncertainty made him a little anxious.

  He turned back to face the water, directing his torch downward in front of his feet. The slight anxiety was suddenly replaced by a gripping fear. Where there had been a mirror stillness of the water, perfectly reflecting his curiosity in torchlight, there were now ripples, miniature waves lapping at the rim.

  It was in Nicholas’s nature to find existence rational, to be confident in mechanistic explanation. But in that isolation and darkness, where his knowledge of the world extended only the range of a weak torch beam, he was instinctually alarmed. The deadness of the water, supposed undisturbed for perhaps thousands of years, had gone in the seconds of his watching. He couldn’t see the cause, and he didn’t know his part in it. He thought of weaver fish. He thought of Asiatic condors. In an instant his mind conjured up a menagerie of monsters sharing the one dominant importance of being invisibly threatening.

  Nicholas swept his light around before turning in the direction he hoped would lead to Paulo. He persuaded himself that, as there was nothing to see, he should leave. But nothing to see could mean things unseen, and he knew that underneath the reasoning was a presumptive, undifferentiated terror. In setting off, he felt the slight dishonour of retreat.

  He navigated by keeping his course uphill, and soon was confident of seeing Paulo’s light. But it wasn’t until he reached the stony shoreline and stepped from smooth to rough rock that he started to feel safe. He shone his torch first to the right, where the delineation looked as before. But to the left, the scene was changed, and it was clear that with the slightness of the incline he had wandered from his previous path.

  His torch was reflected in a large sparkling boulder resting at the edge. He walked across, and found it to be one in a row of similar stones, placed about five metres apart, extending down toward the water and uphill into the cave. Beyond these, four metres away, was another row, equally spaced, and parallel to the first, the two giving the appearance of an avenue of sentry stones.

  Nicholas reached the first and touched it. The surface was cold and faceted, and when he held his torch to it the whole rock body seemed to glow with ethereal transparency. At his feet he saw some smaller pieces, roughly spherical and about the size of a grapefruit. He collected one to study, and set off toward Paulo. When he was close enough to call out and hear a response, the anxiety was gone.

  ‘You were a long time. What did you find?’ asked Paulo when Nicholas entered his light.

  Nicholas gave an account of his discoveries, showing Paulo the rock specimen he had taken. He omitted mention of his fear, which now seemed rather groundless. Paulo was unmoved by hearing of ripples in the water.

  ‘There might be low-level seismic disturbance in the plateau. We’ve never thought about it, but we should monitor that. I’ll tell Edvard, because it could be a safety concern for survey teams working down here. Or there may be other cave entrances, or chimneys to the surface. So, fresh water could be feeding in somewhere, perturbing the surface. Or likewise wind. That would be good, if there’s ventilation.’

  It was easier to be rational when you were safe, thought Nicholas. He knew he had felt no disturbance in the ground, sensed no movement of air, heard no falling water, but he said nothing.

  ‘We need to bring in a canoe, or an inflatable maybe, to explore your lake,’ continued Paulo. ‘I’ll organise water analysis. That can be done in Madregalo.’

  It was a reasonable plan, but Nicholas had little enthusiasm. Although the terror was now passed, he did remember it.

  ‘I think we need much better lighting down here, first,’ he said.

  After their evening meal, Nicholas sat alone in the office that he shared with Paulo. The amount of time they were now devoting to the exploration of the cave was affecting other work, including his private IT consultancy obligations with international banking and insurance clients, as well as the ongoing LDI modelling and analysis programme. He was also trying to keep up with the burgeoning research literature in avian linguistics, a field that he had pioneered.

  At one stage he became aware that the office was completely dark except for the glow of his computer screen, and he switched on a desk lamp. Its light played on the cave quartz that he had positioned as a paperweight, and his attention was diverted periodically over the next few hours by its curious and beautiful optical properties.

  Those hours were spent following up on the Area Pi request from Tøssentern. None of the commercially available geospatial imagery was particularly informative, unless one’s interest was in the detail of roads and roofs. Nor were there online sources explaining the site’s purpose. He decided that Walter’s needs called for a more intrusive inspection, and he knew of only one person who combined the skills and discretion to achieve that effectively. He emailed Richard Worse.

  When th
at was done, he closed his laptop and turned off the lamp. In the dark, his arm knocked the quartz; he heard it fall off the stack of papers onto the desk and roll to the edge. He felt instantly sickened that in these beginning hours of his custodianship an artefact appropriated from its immemorial resting place would fall to the floor and shatter.

  But it didn’t shatter. Instead, it flashed with light. Nicholas was confused; he found the switch of the desk lamp and turned it on. He picked up the quartz and sat in his chair to examine it carefully. It seemed undamaged, and he decided to experiment. He held it over a folder on his desk, switched off the light, and brought the stone down, gently at first, then more forcefully. With each impact, the quartz flashed, and the louder the sound, the brighter the light.

  The Circular Sea in Ferende cosmogony defined both the possible world and the dominion of its founding queen, Rep’husela. Its perfect circumscription resulted from the limiting flight of servant condors restrained to calling distance from her Great Throne. Of course, it was conceived as oceanic, not subterranean. But when Edvard Tøssentern was informed of the find in the second chamber, he was quick to point out that archaic Ferent words for sea and lake were the same: any distinction resided in modifiers about size and potability. He boldly suggested that Nicholas and Paulo had discovered, if not the mythological expanse, perhaps its secular inspiration.

  The earliest European maps to depict explicitly the Ferendes attach the name Centrum Mysticum. There is debate whether this referred to the land mass generally or to the actual throne of Rep’husela, for which no artefact or natural feature has been identified. Whatever its significance, the notion of Centrum, along with the Circular Sea, receded into myth when the imagined collided with the real: those same cartographers brought civilizational upheaval in the form of empirical geography and something even more unsettling, foreign language. (And with foreign language comes a higher order concept: translation error.)

  The name Nicholas Misgivingston will be familiar to all who follow the literature of mathematical linguistics. Best known for his seminal contributions to our understanding of silence in human communication (his Stochastic Signatures of the Parsan Gap remains the standard reference), he was also the first to obtain statistical proof for punctuation signifiers in birdsong. In the case of the swint (S. tinctoria; US: S. transmuta), which is the species most studied to date, these include markers for stop, question, and exclamation. Current research is focused on whether swint grammar is structurally triadic. (Human language is polyadic. The idea that restricted grammars might be possible was put forward by Tøssentern in Interlocutory Graphs: A Theory of n-Grammars, but their existence had been assumed hypothetical. For readers untrained in linguistics, the concept is best explained by noting that any well-formed n-grammar statement is fully intelligible in a society of k individuals when k = n, and not otherwise. Tøssentern’s theory has at its foundation the famous fifth postulate, customarily but simplistically rendered from symbolic notation as ‘Language is cooperative’. The designation is a natural target for academic rivals who delight in drawing parallels with Euclid’s fifth, but have failed to expose a weakness. Indeed, in numerical simulation studies, it is the cooperativity parameter γ in Tøssentern’s equation system that is proving to be the main determinant of intelligibility, translatability, and—for unstable or negative γ—language extinction.) If so, this might relate to the well-documented but mysterious phenomenon of thricing in swints, in which flock counts without exception are exactly 3-divisible (but see Appendix A). Of course, there remains the historical, supernatural explanation that thricing manifests the swint’s holiness, being a behaviour reverential of the Trinity.

  The occurrence of exclamation is widely viewed as evidence that swints enjoy a sense of humour. In the field, this marker is almost invariably followed by a respondent song element (provisionally catalogued mirth) that is unisonous and perseverated, and identified with laughter. The proven connection of modern birds to their dinosaur ancestry provides an insight into the past. Far from the savage, terrifying environment fictitiously (and facilely) portrayed, life in the Mesozoic likely had a benign sociability, with a forest background of complaining chatter and comedic repartee little different from that of today’s senior combination room.

  8 NICHOLAS MISGIVINGSTON TO RICHARD WORSE

  Dear Worse

  I hope all is well with you in Perth. I know that Millie is very much looking forward to returning for her fellowship year, but I don’t think the dates have been finalized yet.

  I have a slightly complicated request of you, and you must say if you are too busy to become involved. Actually, the request comes from Anna through Edvard, and now through me. Anna tells me that you know about Walter Reckles surviving a plane crash just north of Dante in Arizona. There’s an investigation under way into its circumstances. Walter believes that he collided with an illegal drone, and that a conspiracy is in place to suppress the truth. The theory is that a secretive research establishment called Area Pi near Dante is involved. The problem is, no one can find out anything about the place, or what goes on there.

  Anna was in Dante recently to interview Walter for an article in Aviation Reviews (I believe). I think you are aware that it’s one of her slightly eccentric non-psychiatry pursuits. She attended the preliminary hearing with him and thought he was given a very rough time by one of the board members (by name of Mortiss). While she was in Dante someone gave her an anonymous note suggesting that Area Pi was implicated. She and Walter drove out towards it and were terrorized by a couple of private army heavies protecting the place. That’s about all we know at present.

  Edvard asked me to get some satellite imagery of the site, which I have obtained from commercial suppliers. It shows the buildings and so on, but doesn’t tell us about their operations. I was wondering if you might be able to access better sources for a more revealing look at the place. If so, Walter can give you exact date and time information in the hope that you can analyse activities on the day of the crash. I have attached the images that I could obtain conventionally. You will find the coordinates of the site on each frame. Walter’s address is walterreckles@flightcontrolcorp.com.

  I am still very involved in the Ferent language research programme here. As well, the swint studies have reached an exciting stage. It would be wonderful if you could come back to the Ferendes one day soon and visit us at the LDI station. (Perhaps a trip with Millie?)

  We have discovered an incredible cave complex in the South Joseph Plateau that shows evidence of early human occupation and—wait for it—primitive semiotics painted on the cavern walls. LDI certainly landed in the right place when it came here. Not only that, there’s a huge underground lake with two rows of precisely positioned henge stones leading towards it. I’m tempted to imagine they form some kind of via dolorosa used in prehistoric religious rituals. It’s like an avenue of great clear quartz boulders and looks spectacular—and quite haunting, I have to say—even in our feeble torchlight.

  Anyway, Worse, if you can help with the above Dante business, that would be greatly appreciated. But of course you should not feel under any obligation as I know you always have a lot on. The next public hearing of the crash enquiry is scheduled in a few weeks, and will also be in Dante.

  Best wishes

  Nicholas

  Despite its superficial resemblance to clear quartz, Nicholas’s rock specimen was something very different. An example of a petrocyst, it was formed by a process called igneo-capsular condensation. Typically spheroidal, the Ferende variety (now known as josephite, an origin term coined by Tøssentern) has a variably thick, irregular and very hard crystalline surface composed of oxides of silicon and terencium. This encases a core of colourless liquid terencium sulphide (evidencing a volcanic origin) with argon in solution.

  The phenomenon of sonoluminescence has been recognized in the modern era for almost a century, though it has not previously been reported as a percussion response in a natural mineral. The a
coustic pressure wave causes miliary cavitation; as micro-bubbles collapse, they generate extremes of temperature and pressure, emitting photons in the visible spectrum. In experimental models, the flashes are very transient (lasting fractions of a nanosecond), but josephite emissions are of the order of milliseconds. Moreover, because thousands of bubbles are formed over a single pressure cycle, each differing in dimensions and collapse kinetics, a semi-continuous luminescence can result. When used ceremonially, we might also suppose that a Neolithic percussionist would observe the responsiveness (natural frequency) of a particular josephite and attune his beating to stimulate resonant cavitation-collapse cycles, thereby maximizing useful illumination.

  In a letter to Tøssentern, Nicholas described his mental picture of such a ceremony:

  Out of the blackness in the second cavern, the avenue of josephites would suddenly be lighted as drummers, perhaps two or three per stone, were cued to start their beating. The striking implements may have been wooden or bone, but were more likely smaller josephites that would themselves scintillate as the drummers’ arms swung through the air. It wasn’t solely a light show; the rhythmic sound might be musically directed and joined with flutes and human voice. This would echo through the cave, conduct along the tunnel to the first chamber, enthralling those not privileged to be present in the deeper sanctum. Then some holy rite would begin, a procession down the avenue of flashing stones, direct into the water. Perhaps there were sacrificial subjects, made numb with adulation and seki wine. Perhaps there was Rep’husela herself, or an effigy, carried on a chariot-barge, drawn by attendants representing harnessed condors. At the avenue’s end, where the light of submerged josephites scattered in the depths, her acolytes would gladly breathe the water for their queen, while she was launched across the darkness to the centre of the sea, into the Centrum Mysticum. Then the furthest drummers would drop their striking stones to enter the procession, followed by the next, and each in turn down to the water’s edge, till all were given likewise to the Circular Sea. It was the baptismal journey of their race, bequeathing to the centuries a heaviness of faith and fear. From time to time this re-emerged, to speak its testament as ripples on the surface.