The Martian Sentence, page 3
Bethany turned to look up at Manwaring. “You’re not coming with us?”
“No,” Manwaring said, reaching down to stick the bottle opener back onto the side of the trash can. “The university needs an update before next Friday so they can release the remaining funds from their summer grant. Don’t worry, though, as I have a nice bottle of Tatascan whiskey to keep me company.”
“Okay,” she said slowly. “But we picked up a dozen bundles last weekend. Remember?”
“Bethany, you’ll find out that when it comes to field archaeology, you can never have enough zip ties on hand. Something to remember for the future.”
He lifted his beer bottle in salute, turned, and stepped into the hallway to his room. But, as he did, and over the voices of two female students fighting over the mirror in the hallway bathroom, the show’s narrator mentioned a name, catching Manwaring’s attention.
He turned in time for the show’s narrator, a pudgy White man wearing his version of an Indiana Jones fedora, to profile their next guest, Angar Einstok. The screen on the television switched from the narrator standing among ruins of a Roman fortress to a still frame of camouflaged and armed men sliding down ropes hanging from a stationary helicopter hovering above the deck of a ship—a civilian freighter. The caption under the image read: Angar Einstok and his team of operatives, in conjunction with the Turkish government, seize a pirate ship off the coast of Cyprus.
“Now that’s what I call archaeology,” Stephen, one of the young men sitting on the sofa, said. “Repelling out of a helicopter to take down a ship full of pirates and gold from the Ottoman Empire.”
Manwaring took an eye off the TV screen and planted it on Stephen. “Just because the pirates looted an ancient site, there is no reason to call that ship boarding archeology. And Einstok is not an archaeologist.”
Manwaring stopped his rebuke and turned to face the door to his bedroom. He spoke as he took his first step. “And it’s called fast roping: not repelling. There’s a difference.”
#
Hearing Manwaring slam the deadbolt into place from inside his bedroom, Bethany again sensed something had happened that day. Though he usually locked himself in his bedroom, coming out only for dinner and to place his crockery in the sink for somebody else to clean before locking himself back in his room, today was different. Was it the way he carried his shoulders? Or was it something extra in his eyes? She could not place it, but she knew something had happened that very afternoon.
“So, if Lord Douchebag isn’t coming with us to town,” Mark said, pulling Bethany’s attention away from Manwaring’s bedroom door, “I call shotgun!”
“Thank God,” Stephen said. “All he does every Saturday night is ride shotgun, and doodle in a stupid notebook while ignoring us. Then, when we get to town, he disappears. Maybe he’s found some sort of weird opium den. Or hangs out in a creepy whorehouse.”
Bethany reached into her pants cargo pocket and pulled out her cell phone. “I don’t know about any whorehouse or opium den, but he does have a habit of disappearing every time we go into town.” Using her thumb to swipe the screen, she looked for a certain phone number while asking the two young men sitting on the sofa with her. “Did you guys finally get rid of whatever you ate last night?”
2
Now, alone in his room, Manwaring tossed his straw hat and pack on the bed and took a long pull on the beer bottle—almost emptying it in one swallow. As he caught his breath, he placed the near-empty bottle on the nightstand next to his bed, peeled back the flap of the Alpine backpack, and pulled out the container. He spent the next minute just trying to comprehend what he was holding in his hands. After a long sigh, he stepped over to his desk—a cheap folding table from the local version of Wal-Mart—that was pushed against the wall under the room’s only window. Closed gray drapes lorded over a spiral-bound notebook partially filled with doodles, rough sketches, and freethinking, a pen, a laptop in its padded case, a single-bulb lamp, and a twenty-year-old box-like alarm clock. The red digital numbers read 3:04 p.m.
On either side of the table, a six-foot particleboard bookcase filled with reference material, light reading, day-to-day castoffs, and a station where he brewed his own tea or coffee stood sentry. Sitting on the metal folding chair in front of the desk, he set the cylinder on the table and pulled his damp kerchief from his pants pocket. Removing his glasses from his face, he leaned forward while wiping the lenses. Was the cylinder made of gold? White gold? Or even platinum? It was heavy but not too heavy. After cleaning his glasses, he perched them back on his face. Tossing the kerchief on the table, he replaced it with the cylinder, holding it like an ear of corn. As he rolled it slowly, he recognized three of the lines as Aztec or Nahuatl.
Although not literate in Mesoamerican writings, he did have exposure to writings, whether on paper or stone, that the invading Spanish, from centuries before, failed to destroy. As Manwaring viewed those markings on the cylinder, a combination of ideographic proto writing and pictographs augmented by phonetic rebuses started to present themselves. He thought he could also see numbers, represented by dots, and one of them being the number four, expressed by four dots. Like most Mesoamerican writing, the text of the language he had seen on paper, in books, or on stone tended to be large and graphic. He appreciated the clarity of the detail inscribed onto such a small surface area.
Still rolling the cylinder in his hands, he determined the next set of lines as Toltec, and the lines after that as Mayan. Script or logograms complemented by syllabic glyphs, which could appear to some observers as being similar to Japanese writing in structure and format. He also saw a series of numbers including the number four again. The fourth set of lines seemed different in structure and design from the other three, and it took him a second to recognize the form of writing.
Still holding the cylinder like an ear of corn in his shaking hands, he recalled the undergraduate linguistic lectures he had attended. One of those classes, which he enjoyed, was about runology, or the study of Germanic languages.
Now, just like faded ghosts slowly emerging from the walls of an old house, those lectures, and that specific class, returned. Try as he might though, any familiarity between the fourth set of lines and Germanic runes stopped there. He did recognize two symbols, however. One of them looked like a Nazi swastika, and the other appeared to be a pair of lightning bolts parallel to each other. Two jagged lines that adorned the uniform lapels and helmets worn by the German Waffen SS.
As his mind tried to comprehend the significance in front of him, he heard doors closing inside the house and someone calling shotgun outside his window, followed by the van’s engine starting. He looked at the old alarm clock. It was now 3:30 p.m. After a not-too-short drive to town, they normally spent six or so hours in town shopping, drinking, sightseeing, and dancing before returning to enjoy a late morning sleep-in.
While he knew he would have hours to himself, he also knew that he would need those hours to comprehend the relic in his hands. He also knew he could not reveal his findings to the world, starting with the others inside the house, at least not yet. He placed the cylinder on the table and lifted his glasses from his nose. Leaving the cylinder and his glasses on the table, he went to get one item that would help him start his journey of discovery. And that started with a statement he repeated often to past students: “Nothing wrong with kitchen-table archeology.” On entering the living room, he grabbed two beers from the Igloo cooler and the bottle opener from the side of the metal trash can next to it. Reentering his room, he placed the beer bottle opener against the cylinder. It did not stick.
“Well, it’s nonferrous,” he said aloud as he lifted the opener from the cylinder and grabbed a beer. “Just like gold.”
He drank that beer while studying Aztec writing, and a message began to fall into place in the back of his head. Though he did not consciously translate the Aztec writing verbatim, the message just seemed to fall into place like dice or dominoes cast by God’s own hand.
Something about a visitor from the south lofted in the back of his mind.
Setting the empty bottle down, he reached for the second bottle of beer on the table but stopped. Knowing he would be better off having some water, he reached over and grabbed one of the plastic bottles of water standing on the bookshelf, and next to his coffee pot. Grabbing it he straightened up in his chair and twisted the cap off. He sipped some water and set his eyes on the Toltec writing before inspecting the Mayan glyphs again. After a half of a bottle of water, he started to get the idea of a visitor, but from the heavens this time. The number four also appeared again in the text. Suddenly, he realized the potential in front of him. As if to celebrate the epiphany, he brought the bottle of water to his lips and took an exceptionally long swallow. When he brought his eyes level again, they fell on one of the bookshelves standing guard on either side of the desk and draped window.
Among the many books crammed onto its shelves, one particular volume caught his attention. Reaching over, he stuck his finger behind the top of the binder and pulled it down. An image of Napoleon, with his cock hat sitting sidesaddle on his head, riding a camel, filled the book’s front cover with the Pyramids of Egypt in the background. He flipped through the pages until he came to the chapter about the scientists and engineers who followed Napoleon’s soldiers on their campaign across the Egyptian desert, among them linguists and antiquaries.
As he glanced at those pages, two words popped up. After spending more minutes on that chapter, he looked up and found another book on the shelf. Pulling it down, his eyes focused on the book cover’s image, which showed a fragment of a stone tablet with three distinct sets of text inscribed into it. With a growing smile, he read aloud the title above the image: Secrets of the Rosetta Stone.
With that thin volume in his hand, Manwaring remembered a statement a journalist made a year ago while drafting an article about him in Mexico. During that interview, she referenced Sherlock Holmes. The reference centered on the idea that Holmes would not exist without Doctor Moriarity, Holmes’s archenemy. Manwaring remembered one of the detective’s mysteries: The Adventures of the Dancing Men. A mystery centered around a written message consisting of a series of stick figures in various positions. The detective, Sherlock Holmes, realized the message was nothing more than a substitution cipher, where each stick figure represented a letter, an English letter. And knowing that the English language had only twenty-six letters in its alphabet, and a limited number of vowels with the letter E used most often, Holmes employed frequency analysis.
Thinking about that mystery novel, Manwaring remembered something a linguistic teacher repeated in his lectures, which focused on the idea that all languages have the same basic components and a singular reason for existing: to communicate.
Manwaring set the book about the Rosetta Stone on the desk and looked at the cylinder. After understanding the mission in front of him, he looked down at the weapons at his disposal. A cheap book about the Rosetta Stone, a pencil, a spiral-bound notebook half full of doodles and free thinking, a bottle of whiskey, a cooler full of beer bottles, hours by himself, and a memory of childhood mystery readings. His eyes landed on the laptop in its padded case. Knowing how easy it had become to hack into computer files, he reached out with his hand and pushed the laptop aside. “Kitchen table archaeology it shall be.”
Now, with his arsenal set, he turned his attention back to the cylinder. He picked it up and inspected the bulbous caps at each end, trying to work out how they were attached. He tugged to pull them off. That did not work, so he looked for a secret button or hidden release lever. The caps were devoid of any markings or buttons. He put the cylinder down, and reached for the water bottle, emptying it in one long swallow. He put the bottle back on the table and grabbed the container. Holding it in the crook of his right arm, he reached out with his left and gave the cap of the cylinder a twist. He felt it turn slightly. Excited, he continued to twist it. After ten complete turns, the cap came loose in his hand. He examined the cap and its inside threading and found sheets of paper-like material rolled up and stuffed inside the cylinder.
As a Mesoamerican archaeologist, Manwaring recovered all manner of gold artifacts, most being thousands of years old, buried in the sands of time. Humans placed value on gold because it remained shiny, never corroded, and soft which made it easy to smelt and work. So for the threads and inscriptions to remain undamaged, its makers must have alloyed metals together; however, the magnet from the beer bottle opener did not stick to the cylinder. Another mystery.
Looking at the cylinder, he remembered a piece of equipment in the studio apartment in the backyard, and that being a handheld XRF machine. Shaped like a cashier’s scanner, the electronic tool could tell him the exact metal content of the cylinder, including any subsidiary metals or alloys. He also thought about his friend back in Cambridge, who could use laboratory equipment such as a laser ablation machine to trace the source of the metal back to the mountain or river it came from. But he realized that doing so would mean sharing with another person what could be a find of historical dimensions. The question: When, and how should others know about his find? Or should they?
After thinking for a second, he answered his own question, and the answer started with Bethany Rogers, his assistant project leader. Born a British subject, the daughter of a mining engineering consultant, she grew up traveling with her father and his business. The result was a young, multilingual lady with world-travel experience, something she often reminded their students of. Still, she should have been the first person to consult because of her knowledge and experience of minerology and geology; however, she also came off as ambitious. Too ambitious for Manwaring’s taste.
Also, like the truther, whose image could have graced any military recruitment poster, Bethany’s looks were not a disadvantage to her future. A future set for a person who viewed archaeology as her next cool hobby. Her position here this summer season was merely a steppingstone to her PhD. A career path streamlined by her father’s influence at the university, his Alma mater. Resentful of the old British class system, Manwaring had earned his doctorate years ago, without the benefit of good looks, connections, or being born into privilege.
He, on the other hand, came from the opposite end of the spectrum. Putting his youth and his disadvantages aside, he had clawed his way to the top of his profession and published a list of achievements and publications a meter long. However, these last few years produced no recent discoveries or publications. But the discovery he held in his hands could change his flight path. His challenge, now, was to be strategic with his discovery. Sighing, he thought about that strategy, and its opponents. One of those opponents graced the cover of the magazine The Truther held back at the site. And the same opponent who was featured on the archaeology show, Expedition Horizon. Yes, that opponent was one to be wary of.
#
The red LED numbers of the twenty-year-old alarm clock showed 1:13 a.m. Next to it, the light from the desk lamp’s single bulb pulled at his tired eyes. Manwaring rubbed his eyes with one hand while setting his pencil down onto the open spiral-bound notebook. A notebook now almost filled with whatever his mind, and hand, could capture from the cylinder’s metal surface, and from the sheets of paper-like material inside it.
As he grabbed for the tumbler of whiskey next to the notebook, he heard the van enter the walled-in driveway next to their fieldhouse. The staccato of metal doors opening and closing replaced the reverberations of the engine as Bethany turned it off. Dismissing the drunken babble of the students, he tilted his head back to think. But his mind devolved into a conflicting, twirling maze of confusing questions. Queries centered on items strewn across his bed.
On the blanket covering the bed were sheets of bark cloth with Mayan text and images. Accompanied by an equal number of plastic paper sheets that contained a sort of alien text, again appearing runic in nature, along with two images, which appeared to be photographs of a human-like creature. One showed a frontal image and the other in profile: the creature had a robust build with bluish skin, almond-shaped yellow eyes, an arrogant-appearing smile revealing sharp teeth, and a bald scalp exposing a long, sloping forehead. The creature’s ears and lips were festooned with piercings and jewelry, which looked like gold, inset with brilliant gems. Manwaring remembered how cultures, including the Mayans, often modified their appearances with piercings and filed teeth, and they bound children’s heads to reshape their skulls.
As the students clamored for the one available bathroom inside the house, Manwaring reflected on his days as a youth in church and remembered points the priest mentioned in his sermons. Including one passage: God hath thou made us in his own image? “Now it makes sense,” Manwaring mumbled as he remembered the emails from his laboratory friend in England and the inconclusive results concerning the remains he sent to his friend. It was obvious to Manwaring now that his laboratory friend had no comparison, basis, or datum to go by. Manwaring lifted the tumbler to his lips with a shaking hand and sipped the whiskey. Or did they make their image into that of their gods?
Questions raced through his mind including: Why were there sheets of Mayan bark cloth and what looked like modern photographs on some sort of plastic paper? And why were they hidden in a stela well over seven hundred years old?
Pulling the tumbler from his lips, he held the glass in front of him as if it were a crystal ball with the liquor inside, being the mystic who could answer those questions through the thick glass. The dim light from the lamp revealed nothing on the thick crystal glass.
Half listening to the students still fighting over the hallway bathroom, he thought about a quote from long ago. He restated it to the glass as if it were his newfound best friend at a London pub. “With wine comes wisdom. Therefore, whiskey must provide the answers?”
