High Weir

  by Samuel R. Delany

  I

  "What do you know!" Smith, from the top of the ladder.

  "What is it?" Jones, at the bottom.

  And Rimkin thought desperately: Boiled potatoes! My God, boiled potatoes! If I took toothpicks and stuck them in boiled potatoes, then stuck one on top of the other, made heads, arms, legs—like little snowmen—they would look just like these men in spacesuits on Mars.

  "Concaved!" Smith called down. "You know those religious pictures they used to have back home, in the little store windows, where the eyes followed you down the street? The faces were carved in reverse relief like this."

  "Those faces aren't carved in reverse relief!" Mak, right next to Rimkin, shouted up.

  "I can see that from here."

  "Not the whole face," Smith said. "Just the eyes. That's why they had that funny effect when we were coming across the sand."

  Mak, Rimkin thought. Mak. Mak. What distinguishes that man besides the k in his name?

  "They are handsome up there." That from Hodges. "A whole year of speculation over whether those little bits of purple stone were carved or natural—and suddenly here it all is, right on High Weir. The answer. Look at it: It means intelligence. It means culture. It means an advanced culture at least on the level of the ancient Greeks, too. Do you realize the spaces between these temple columns lead to a whole new branch of anthropology?"

  "We don't know that this thing's a temple," Mak grunted.

  "A whole new complex of studies!" Hodges reiterated. "We're all of us Sir Arthur Evanses unearthing the great staircase at Knossos. We're Schliemanns digging up the treasures of Atreus."

  I don't know where any of them are, Rimkin thought. Their voices come through the rubber-ringed grills inside my helmet. All these boiled-potato figures against the grainy rust; that one there, who I think is Hodges; the sun blinds out the faceplate.

  And for all I know, behind the plastic is a grotesquerie as deformed as those domed heads along the architrave above us.…

  "Hey, Rimkin, you're the linguist. Why aren't you poking around for something that looks like writing?"

  "Huh …?" And as he said it, without hearing their laughter, he knew that inside their onion helmets they were smiling and shaking their heads. Jones said:

  "Here we are on Mars, and Rimky is still in another world. Is there any writing or hen-scratching up there where you are, Smith?"

  "Nothing up here. But look at the surface of this eye, the way it's carved out!"

  "What about it?"

  And then Jimmi—Rimkin could always tell Jimmi because her suit was a head and a half shorter than any of the others—climbed up the rough stone foundation blocks and, with a beautiful "Martian lope" and a wake of russet dust, crossed the flooring, then turned back. "Look!" He could always tell her voice, no matter the static and distortion of the radios (long range; no fidelity). "Here's one that fell!"

  "Here!" Rimkin said. "Let me see." They mustn't think he wasn't interested.

  Her soft voice said in his ear: "I can't very well move it. You'll have to come up here, Rimky."

  But he was already climbing. "Yes, yes. Of course. I'm coming." And there was the sound of somebody trying not to snicker, position concealed by lack of stereo.

  The carving had fallen. And it had cracked on the stone flags.

  He walked up to Jimmi. The top of her helmet came to the middle of his upper arm.

  "It's so funny," she said with that oddness to her laughter the radio couldn't mask.

  "It looks just like a Martian."

  "What?"

  She looked up at him, small brown face behind the white frame. The movements of her laughter were displaced from the sound in his ear. "Just look." She turned back.

  "The great, high forehead, the big beady eyes, and hardly any chin. Wouldn't you have guessed? Martians would turn out to look just like a nineteen-fifties s-f film."

  "Maybe …" A third of the face had fallen away. The crack went through the left eye.

  What remained of the mouth leered with prune-puckered lips. "Maybe it's all a joke.

  Perhaps some of the military people from Bellona came here and set this whole thing up like an elaborate stage-set. Just to play a joke on us. They would, you know! This is absurd, just the five of us taking the skimmer on a routine scouting trip across High Weir plateau, not sixty-five miles from the base, and coming across—"

  "—across a structure as big as the Parthenon! Hell, bigger than the Temple of Zeus!"

  Hodges exploded. "Come off it, Rimky! You can't just sneak off in the morning and erect an entire stone ruin. Not one like this."

  "Yes, but it's so—"

  "Hey! You people!" Again, the voice came from Smith. "Somebody come up here and take a look at the eyes. Are they the same stone as the rest of the building, just very highly polished? Or are they some different material set in? I can't tell from here."

  Jimmi bent awkwardly and ran her glove over the broken surface. She who is dark and slender and the definition of all grace, Rimkin thought, muffled against the blazing ruin beneath deep turquoise skies.

  "It's an inset, Dr. Smith." She made a blunted gesture, and Rimkin bent to see.

  The eyes were cylinders of translucent material, perhaps nine inches in diameter and a foot long. They were set flush into the face, and the front surfaces ground to shimmering concavities.

  "Lots of them are different colors," Mak noted.

  Rimkin himself had noticed that the great row of eyes gave off an almost day-glow quality from across the dunes; up close, they were mottled.

  "What are they made of?" Hodges asked.

  "The building's that marsite stuff," Jones said. The light, purplish rock "marsite" had been found as soon as the military base at Bellona had grown larger than a single bubble-hut. Rimkin, there with the Inter-Nal University group, had spent much time looking at the worn fragments, playing after-dinner games with the military men (who barely tolerated the contingent of scholars) speculating as to whether they were carved or natural. The purple shards could have been Martian third cousins to the Venus of Willendorf, or they could have simply been eroded fragments tossed for millennia by the waterless waves.

  "What are the eyes made of?" Hodges demanded. "Semiprecious stone? Is it something smelted, or synthetic? That opens up a whole world of possibilities about the culture."

  "I can chip some off this broken one to take back—"

  "Rimkin! No!" Hodges shouted, and in a moment the bumpy air suit had scrambled over the foundation. Hodges swayed on bloated feet. "Rimkin … look, wake up!

  We've just had the first incontrovertible proof that there is—or at any rate, at one time there was—intelligent life beside us in the universe. In the solar system! And you want to start chipping. Sometimes you come on like one of those brass-decked thick skulls back at the base!"

  "Oh, Hodges, cut it out!" Jimmi snapped. "Leave him alone. It's bad enough trying to put up with those thick-skulls you're talking about. If we start this sort of bickering—"

  "Stop trying to protect him, Jimmi," Hodges countered. "All right, perhaps he's a brilliant linguist in a library cubicle. But he's absolute dead weight on this expedition.

  He spends all his time either completely uninterested in what's going on, or worse, making absurd suggestions like breaking up the most important archaeological discovery in human history with a sledgehammer!"

  "I wasn't going to break up—"

  Then: "Oh my—God.… No! This is—"

  And Rimkin thought: Which one is it? Jesus, with all this distortion, I can't tell what direction the voices are coming from. I can place any accent on Earth, but I can't even recognize their individual voices any more! Which one?

  Hodges turned around. "What is it?"

  Jones, still down on the sand, called up, "What is it, Dr. Smith? What's happening up there?"

  "This is just … no … this is amazing!"

  They were all going to the base of the column against which the ladder was leaning.

  So Rimkin went too.

  The white-suited figure on the top rung was peering into one of the eyes with a flashlight.

  "Dr. Smith, are you all right?"

  "Yes, yes. I'm fine. Please, just wait! But this …"

  "That's a low-power laser beam he's looking in there with," someone began.

  "He said be quiet," from someone else.

  I can hear five people breathing in my ears, Rimkin thought. What could he be looking at? "Dr. Smith," Rimkin called.

  "Shhhh!"

  Rimkin went on doggedly. "Can you describe what you're looking at."

  "Yes, I … think so. It's—it's Mars. Only, the way it must have been. A city, the city around this building. Roads. Machines that move, and a horizon full of man-made—buildings? Perhaps they're buildings. The picture moves—and the streets are full of creatures, like the statues. No, they're different. Some hurry … some go slowly … This whole plateau, all of High Weir, must have been some incredible acropolis for a mammoth cosmopolitan community. Wait! They're unveiling some sort of statue. Now they're presenting one of them to the people. Maybe a priest.

  Or a sacrifice—"

  After moments of silence, Mak said, "What pictures are you talking about?"

  "It's like looking through a window onto what must have been here … on this plateau perhaps hundreds of thousands of years ago. As soon as I shine my laser light into the concaved surface, I'm suddenly looking out on three-dimensional

moving scenes, just as real … just as strange …"

  Mak turned to Hodges. "Is it some sort of animated diorama?"

  "It's got to be some kind of hologram. A moving hologram!" At the top of the ladder, Dr. Smith finally looked down. "You've got to come up here and see this! I just wanted to look at the inside of the eye on this carving closely. I thought with the laser light I might detect crystalline structures, perhaps get a clue to what the eyes were made from. But I saw pictures!" He started down the ladder. "You've all just got to go up there and take a look!" Smith's indrawn breath roared in Rimkin's ear. "It's the most amazing thing I've ever seen."

  "Still think somebody came by and built this today just to get us off on a wild-goose chase, eh, Rimkin?" Hodges chided. "Let me go up and look. I've got my own beam, Dr. Smith." Hodges started up the rungs as Smith reached the bottom.

  Frowning behind his faceplate, Rimkin took out his own flash. For a moment, he fondled the tube; then he went back over the rusty sand tongues and purple stone to where the head had fallen. He looked at the whole eye. He looked at the broken one. He did not know what perversity made him crouch before the latter. He flicked on his laser beam.

  · · · · ·

  It took half an hour for Mak, Hodges, Jimmi, and Jones to climb the ladder, watch for two or three minutes, then climb down. They were gathering to go back to the skimmer when Jimmi saw Rimkin. She loped over to him.

  She laughed when she saw what he was doing. "Now, aren't we a bunch of dopes!

  Some of us could have looked at this one down here. Come on, we're going back now."

  Rimkin switched off his beam but still crouched before the tilted visage.

  "Oh, come on, Rimky. They're starting back already."

  Rimkin drew breath, then stood slowly. "All right." They started across the dressed stone flooring. The sand, fine as dust, spewed about their white boots like powdered blood.

  · · · · ·

  II

  The commons room of the skimmer was a traveling fragment of classical academia.

  The celitex walls looked depressingly like walnut paneling. Above the brass-fixtured folding desk surfaces, the microfilms were stacked behind naugahyde spines lettered in gold leaf. There was a mantelpiece above the heating nook. Glowing plates shot pale flickerings across the fur throws. The whole construct, with its balcony library cubicles (and a bust of Richard Nielson, president of Inter-Nal University, on his pedestal at the turn of the stairwell) was a half-serious joke of Dr. Edward Jones.

  But the university people, by and large, were terribly appreciative of the extravagant façade, after a couple of weeks in the unsympathetic straits of the military back at Bellona Base.

  Mak sat on the hassock, rolling the sleeves of his wool shirt over his truckdriver forearms. He had headed the Yugoslavian expedition that had unearthed Gevgeli Man. Mak's boulderlike build (and what forehead he had was hidden by a falling thatch of Sahara-colored hair) had brought the jokes in the anthropology department to new nadirs: "This is Dr. Mak Hargus, the Gevgeli Man … eh, man …"

  Mak raised the periscope of his briar from his shirt pocket. "Tell me about holograms. I've seen them, of course, the three-dimensional images and all. But how do they work? And how did the ancient Martians store all those pictures that just pop up under laser light?"

  Ling Wong Smith dropped his fists into the baggy pockets of his corduroy jacket. He and Mak gazed over the ferns in the window-box. Outside the tri-plex pane, across the dusty bruise of High Weir, the dark columns—twelve whole, seven broken—sketched the incredible culture they had viewed in the polished eyes along the carved lintel.

  Jimmi pushed her dark braid back from her shoulder and leaned on the banister to look.

  Ling Wong Smith turned away. "It's basically a matter of information storage, Mak."

  He lowered himself to the arm of the easy chair, meshed his long fingers, and bent forward so that his straight black hair slipped forward.

  "The Martians certainly stored one hell of a lot of information in those eyes," Hodges commented, coming jerkily down the stairs on her crutches. She was large, almost as large (and soft) as Mak was large (and hard). She had a spectacular record in cultural anthropology, and combined a sort of braying energy, enthusiastic idealism, and a quite real sensitivity (she had been a cripple since birth), with which she had managed to stagger through all sorts of bizarre cultures in East Africa, Anatolia, and Southern Cambodia to emerge with thorough and cohesive accounts of religions, mores, and manners. Her spacesuit was a prosthetic miracle that enabled her to move as easily as anyone while she wore it. But outside it, she still used aluminum crutches.

  From his go game with Jones in the corner, Rimkin watched her lurch down the stairs. She must think they're a psychological advantage, he decided.

  "Go on, Ling. Now tell us all about holograms." She picked up one crutch and waved it at the Chinese psychologist, only just avoiding the venerable Nielson.

  "Information storage," Smith repeated. "Basically it's a photograph, taken without a lens, but with perfectly parallel beams of light—the sort you get in laser light. The only scattering is that which comes from the irregularities of the surface of the object being recorded. The final plate looks like a blotchy configuration of grays—or mud, if it's in color. But when you shine the parallel beams of a laser light on this plate, you get a three-dimensional full-color image hanging over the plate—"

  "—that you can walk around," Mak finished.

  "You can walk around up to a hundred and eighty degrees," Smith amended. "It's just a completely different way of storing information than the regular photographic method. And it is far more efficient."

  Jones said softly, from across the gaming board, "It's your move, Rimky."

  "Oh." Rimkin picked up another black oval from his pot between his first two fingers and hesitated above the grid, dotted with white and black. Bits of information. He tried to encompass the areas of territory mapped below him, but they kept breaking up into small corner battles. "There." He clicked his stone to the board.

  Jones frowned. "Sure you don't want to take that move back?"

  "No. No, I don't"

  "You can, you know," Jones went on, affable. "This isn't chess. The rules are that you can take a move back if you—"

  "I know that," Rimkin said loudly. "Don't you think I know that? I want to go"—he looked around and saw the others watching—"there!" The click of his stone had been very loud.

  "All right." Jones' stone ticked the board. "Double attari." But Rimkin was looking past Jones' small, heart-shaped Nigerian face to the others in the room, thinking, How can I tell them apart? They all just blend with one another. The room is round, their faces are round, stuck on little round bodies. Suddenly he closed his eyes. If they started talking, I know I wouldn't be able to tell any of them apart. How is one supposed to know? How?

  And if I opened my eyes?

  "Your move, Rimkin," Jones said. "I've got two of your stones in attari."

  Rimkin opened his eyes on the grid of black and white. "Oh," he said, and tried to strangle up a laugh. "Yes. That was a pretty silly move after all, wasn't it?"

  · · · · ·

  III

  Such an absurd move; he lay in his bunk with his eyes closed and his lips open over his teeth in a leer, trying to think of a better one. He hadn't slept in two nights. An hour like this … maybe it was only a few minutes, but it seemed like an hour … and he sat up.

  He swung the reading machine over his bed and rolled it to the closing of the Tractatus. He'd been rereading it the afternoon the skimmer had left Bellona: Wovon man nicht sprechen kann.… He pushed the machine aside and ran his hand under his undershirt. The skimmer would not leave till the morning. They should return to Bellona that night and report their discovery to the Those Who Were in Charge of Such Things. But the university people (especially the anthropology department) treasured their brief freedom. One more examination of the site tomorrow, a few cursory readings and measurements.…

  Rimkin walked barefoot into the hall. It must have only been a few minutes, because strips of light from reading machines underlined three doors. Which room belonged to whom? He knew, and yet somehow there seemed no way to know.…

  Down in the locks, he put his air suit on over his underwear. The plastic form-rings felt odd against his thighs and arms without the usual padding. He stepped into the lock.

 

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