Vellum (40 page)

“You really think we found the ‘great Aryan city from which all civilization sprang.'”

“I know you mounted an expedition after which the professor never published another word, while you disappeared off the face of the earth. I think you found it, then buried your research, covered your tracks, denied all knowledge of it for some twenty years. Why? Because it didn't suit your Jew-loving ideas.”

“It's some story.”

“You didn't want the world to know the truth of Aryan superiority. Of a master race who ruled this world long before the weak and decadent races of the East built their pyramids and ziggurats.”

[Carter laughs.]

An email to [email protected], 10/05/99 14:53

This is a joke, right? You need to get a girlfriend or a hobby or something, Jack. How long did it take you to put together, anyway? I mean, 23 pages of pseudonostratic. What are you on? I mean, whatever it is, Jack, I swear you must be tapping into the old racial memory, or mass unconscious, or a higher plane, or whatever you want to call it, because I know you don't know shit about this stuff. Come on, Jack. Where did this stuff really come from? Who was it put you up to this?

“Don't test me, Mr. Carter. Now. Think about this carefully. I have the tablet; I have Pechorin. You are a luxury. I don't need you to
find
the city, only to tell me what to expect. I've heard Mr. Pechorin mumbling in his sleep, and I've heard
you
screaming.”

“I have a guilty conscience.”

“It's more than that. You saw something, something the Aryans had that made later civilizations mere barbarians in comparison. Now, before I put a bullet through your brain, you will tell me what you found.”

“Send out the stenographer and I'll tell you all about your fabulous Northern City of the Ancient Ones. Maybe you want to hear some words in their language? Hmm? It's quite unique, you know. But I doubt that you could handle it.”

“Mr. Carter, I—”

[indistinct]

“I think you…you…you may leave us now, Sturmman.”

Our Language, Ur Language

Email to [email protected], 10/07/99 14:48

Pull the other one, Jack. I'm not buying this granddaddy's papers found in the attic bullshit. Oh, sorry, I mean sent by a mysterious stranger with no return address. Was I born yesterday? Ha ha. Very funny, Jack. You know there's enough claptrap written by morons about the so-called secrets of the ancients without adding more of this sort of hokum.

I gotta give it to you though, whoever put it together for you did a good job. I got about halfway through translating the first page before the “written across the forehead” line gave it away. Presumably, the word was “sucker,” right? Just read what I've done so far and tell me, with a straight face, that this isn't a complete stitch-up.

Email [email protected], 10/11/99 14:53

OK. Number One—Nostratic is just a bullshit theory made up by crazy Russkis in the eighties, saying that just as most languages can be traced back to an ancestor like Indo-European or Ural-Altaic, these protolanguages can be traced back further still. IE and UA, along with Afro-Asiatic, Dravidian and half the languages in the world, are all supposed to go back to Nostratic. It's a bullshit theory because there's no way we can trace any language back that far. It's a construct built on constructs—one big house of cards.

Number Two. Even if Nostratic was once spoken by some hairy-arsed tribe that wandered over half the world, it would have been about 15,000 years ago—only about 8,000 years before writing was invented. So where exactly is Grandpa Carter supposed to have found this stuff?

Three. Those scans you sent me are sooooooo authentic! What did you do, crumple up the paper and stain them with coffee? I especially liked the dried bloodstains on the last page. I'm impressed.

Email to [email protected], 10/12/99 14:01

Jack. I am majorly wowed. I couldn't resist having a go at some more of your “Nostratic.” It's fucking tremendous. I mean, it holds together so well as a language, even if it is a hoax. The grammar, the projected sound-shifts—it all makes sense even if it is one massive con. All I want to know is when and why did you learn this much about linguistics, or who's in on it with you? You should write a bestseller, with your imagination. Fuck. You're the one who should be doing the doctorate, not me.

Email to [email protected], 10/13/99 14:44

You are one sick puppy, Jack. Some of this stuff, I don't know whether to laugh or throw up. It's one thing inventing a language, but come on. It's fucking genocide you're writing about here and some of it just isn't funny.

Whatever Happened to Jack Carter?

Email to [email protected], 10/13/99 15:26

Jack. I'm on page 17 and I'm sending you what I've done so far. I don't know where you got this stuff, but it's real, isn't it? For fuck's sake, Jack, this can't be real. It can't be. But, I don't know why; I just believe it now. If this is a joke, I'll fucking kill you, Jack. I swear to God, I'll fucking kill you. I'll rip out your throat and piss down the hole. Ha ha. Just kidding. Gotcha, didn't I? Gotcha. Anyway, I'll send you more as I get it translated.

I'm running out of space on the floor now, so when I lay that email down I place the second one overlapping it. I could have printed out those last few emails on the same page, but somehow I think they each belong apart. The next is short. The text looks tiny on its own on the white paper. Its time is marked as 17:08, just an hour and a half after the last one.

Jack, it says. Take what I sent you and burn it. Burn it now. Burn it all.

I had read what he sent me by that point, as well as much of my grandfather's journals. And I was starting to feel this crawling nausea. I was starting to wonder myself if this was all some fucking sick prankster stringing me along. So when I opened up that first email in my inbox and read it I didn't get a sudden shock, I didn't get goose bumps or feel a shiver run down my spine. I just realized that I was already scared.

There were two more emails waiting for me, and I'd checked my inbox only ten or fifteen minutes ago. 17:11, the next one was time-stamped.

Jaguar Jack, it said. Take that what which I sentenced 2 you & BURN IT.

I don't know what was going through his head, or rather I think I know what was going through it, but not in detail. I don't know linguistics, I don't know phonetics. I can't look at Hobbsbaum's notes and translate the squiggles and flourishes into sounds, exact sounds, precise sounds, that language written down exactly as it would have been coming out of the mouth of whoever—whatever—was speaking it, writing it down all those millennia ago. So I don't know the actual words that were going through his head. All I've got is the translation.

The last email was dated 10/13/99 17:13. I look at it lying there on the floor, at all of it scattered around and the pages that I haven't put in place yet and Hobbsbaum's notes in their manila folder, and I try not to think of him, sedated like that, doped up to the eyeballs.

I need to know, I realize. I need to follow this through to the end, to Aratta or wherever the hell it was my grandfather went, whatever happened to Jack Carter.

I have the money that my grandmother left me, in the form of a plane ticket and a lot of traveler's checks now, and I've done a bit of backpacking in my time, so I know that I can do this. But that last email scares the shit out of me.

Iacchus tick the witch senseless twitch sin 2 U and and burn it burn it burn it burn it burn it burn it burn it burn it.

I fold the cover of the Holiday Inn matchbook back to squeeze the match between it and the black strip, flick and light my cigarette with the flaring flame. I'm smoking a lot more these days.

Errata

The Simians on the Veldt of Evenings

T
he creatures travel in packs, and Puck and I travel with them, observing from a distance, Puck with the Book of All Hours open on his lap, ensuring that we don't get too far from the track, I with my notebooks, studying and trying to make sense of these simian scavengers, ghosts of our long-dead ancestors, one might think, or distant relatives, shoots of some parallel evolution in the otherworlds of the Vellum. Somewhere between brute and human, clearly they can reckon the risks and chances offered by predators and competitors, judging the strong, the weak, the quick, the dead. They do not dumbly accept us in our cart, trundling alongside, drawn by the ten-limbed crawling thing that I once wore as wings, stopping where they stop in the dusk, and setting off with them again each dawn, but neither do they bolt. They howl and gibber hostile warnings at us, throw stones every so often, but we have good food to steal and seem to pose no obvious threat, so they maintain a wary curiosity that marks them out from the other tribes of hominid creatures dwelling on the low slopes of the foothills of Oblivion's Mount.

I watch them and I feel like some anthropologist gifted with the chance to study
Homo habilis
in its natural environment, except for the fact that the world we travel in seems less the dawn of human evolution than the twilight.

The bones of a long-dead civilization crumble all around us, and these simian things that forage berries and fruits among the overgrowth, all smooth-copper-skinned and gracile, tall and slender, look as modern a human as any man who ever walked through city streets in his designer suit.

We take our routes through wildernesses empty of all humanity these days, so as to avoid the questionings of those who find a human with horns somewhat…outlandish, or who think our lack of tails a pitiful deformity; and also, more importantly, so that I'm not required to work like a man possessed, squiggling and dabbing people into the Book as I approach; or have Puck or myself running up and down, peering in gas station or truck-stop windows, returning with counts and coordinates to the other, waiting, bored and restless, pen poised over the page. Puck, fast as he is, can be a little unreliable as a scout, and after the odd episode where a shopkeeper or garage attendant has disappeared on my entry into the premises, Book in hand, I am reluctant to rely too heavily on his accuracy with facts and figures. Worse still have been the times I've scouted ahead myself and returned only to find Puck doodling absently in the tome or using it as a child's coloring book, spread out before him on the cart where he lies, feet kicking in the air, tongue sticking from one corner of his mouth, scribbling ferociously with a crayon.

Passing through a swath of purple desert, a pointed look from me at Puck, a shrug.

“I like purple,” says Puck, sheepish and sullen.

Well, at least we have now established that the influence of the Book is temporary; the worlds silenced for our passing seem to resume their normal business, people reappearing in my wake, carrying on not quite where they left off but doing what they would have been doing had I not so rudely interrupted their daily lives. Skittering back to collect some forgotten trinket he had collected on our passage along the Turpentine River, Puck returned with great excitement to announce that the vacant village where he'd left his necklace of dice was now thriving once again. As I tweezered the buckshot pellets from his butt, blasted by some horrified farmer who'd clearly thought the creature rifling the mounds of jewelry on his daughter's bedside table was Satan Himself, I breathed a sigh of relief.

I am not, it seems, an angel of oblivion, doomed to extinguish every soul in my path that I fail to mark within the Book of All Hours. It is more that we move across the Vellum as some fish-eye lens, magnifying, inverting, distorting the area around our focus, but with only an illusory and temporary effect. I do think, however, of the debris I've left scattered in my wake, and wonder what those denizens have made of it, the aircars, steamtrucks and whirliwalkers I have stolen from one world and abandoned in another, the libraries I have populated with notebooks and journals scribbled in the inscrutable, alien tongue of English. I think of the furry people of Gernsback City clambering out of their hoverpods onto the Silver Bridge, where, amongst the jam of traffic and blaring horns they gather around the spectacle of a Volkswagen camper van, or of the Amish-like inhabitants of the Strawberry Fields circled around a hulking autospider suddenly appeared amongst their crops like a crashed alien spacecraft.

So we try to minimize the effects of our passage now, as much as possible, and for a decade or two we had not seen another living soul until the simians appeared.

We started to glimpse the creatures about the same time the great monolith of a mountain came into our sight across the Veldt of Evenings, where, each day, black clouds of night would clear from the sky revealing a sun already crawling down to the horizon, and where, with each slow sunset, crimson, rose and golden clouds would fill that sky and slowly darken with the dusk into a mere hour of night before it all began again. They appeared in the distance, wandering dots, and I rose from the padded cushion of the cart, clicked off the gloves and goggled my eyes to skry them, waving my hand at Puck to quick, quick, mark them in the Book, a dozen of them at least, no, two, four, six…ten…fifteen. Fifteen.

After that first tribe, we spotted many more, moving in parallel with us or crossing our tracks. They were scattered and sporadic, these tribes, spread out over territories so vast I wondered how often they came into contact with each other. The one time we saw two tribes come into each other's sphere of awareness, there was only a brief but loud exchange of machismo and outrage that ended with little more than a few sticks flying through the air and a disgruntled, wordless agreement to go in entirely different directions.

All of these tribes, though, treated us with similar crude fear or fury, till we drew up to the low slopes of Oblivion's Mount and Puck spotted this tribe led by the individual that Puck assures me should be known as Jack.

Following Us Ahead of Us

Jack stands out from the others as a wanderer, reviled wild child, solitary coyote in the rain-hard night, a wisdom in his ravenous eyes as he watches them, waiting in the dark to raid what the others see as rubbish, or stalking the other animals of the terrain as if to steal the scraps of their secrets, thieving the tricks of other beasts, and crowing about it in the morning. When we first saw him, he seemed only a sickly adolescent, scavenging status by unusual strategies, sparkling stones given to other males to barter with the females for sexual favors, joining the female grooming and gossip sessions, flirting outrageously but bolting at the first advance. But over time this omega boy to the alpha male seems to have latched onto charm and subterfuge to gain a status that is quite outside the standard pecking orders of the other tribes, creating a role that has transformed the whole social structure of his simian clan.

Wandering wide out of the foraging paths of the others, he returns with gifts of necklaces made from washers and nuts and locker keys dug from the garbage-strewn ground, or mushrooms and herbs that lead to stoned orgies of tripping, puking, giggling chaos. And even as the upper echelon males drive him away with stones in their hungover mornings, they seem to follow his skipping, outskirting dance off into the margins. Whenever the bulky leader of them rises in the afternoon dawn, casting his gaze around their lands, he always seems to settle on the direction where the one that we call Jack sits, picking his teeth with a stalk of grass and trilling merrily to himself, singing.

And that is his unique characteristic, I think, amongst his kin.

Jack sings.

Where the others all use their complicated sounds simply to grub for favors and commitments within their own community, cooing and giggling together or shrieking antagonism, this scavenger of drugs and glimmering stone fetishes sings in a cunning grammar, scheming his sounds, it seems, into a sequenced story, as if he's telling a tale of where he's been and what he's seen, enchanting, canting. I am convinced that if it is not language then it is, at least, the roots of it.

I wonder sometimes if he is answering the earth—because there are noises up here in the foothills of Oblivion's Mount that are…unsettling at times. Every so often I'll follow a low hum to its source and find some splay of wire fence catching the wind, or trace a sudden twang to a blue steel guitar stuck halfway down a slipped face of garbage sediment, its last snapped string still swaying in the air. There are creaks and groanings, rustles of dirt trickling somewhere, and sometimes, at dusk—when for some reason, the noise seems loudest—it sounds almost musical, in an atonal, modernist way.

Jack sings loudest in the dusk, and even as he wanders round the huddling others, he often skips away, out to the edges, and sings looking out into the gloaming as if addressing it.

The others obviously don't have a clue what he thinks he's doing, but you can see them listening, inspired with a distrusting reverence, a fearful respect for this jackdaw birdman of the dreamtime. Charlatan savior, heroic fool, sagacious rogue, he is a snake-oil salesman of lies and illusions, using the stage-show shell game of his song to charm them, and I think without knowing it they follow him on a journey into his own mind and across the Vellum. None of the other tribes we've traveled with followed our course around Oblivion's Mount so closely, all of them veering off to travel east or west away as if the lowering tower signified some dread power that it would not do to get too close to. Jack, on the other hand, seems bent on leading them around it. Sometimes I think it's actually he who's following us…following us ahead of us, if that makes sense.

He does remind me of the Jack I once knew; I understand why Puck would call him that. But like Puck himself he seems drawn with a broader brush than the brash youth of my distant memories, as if in the Vellum we all tend toward our essence, finding a strange unity within the myriad variations of our souls, in the commonalities or in the deeper patterns suggested by discrepancies. The Hindus claim that there are five souls in any body, five
skandas.
The ancient Egyptians distinguished seven. I'm not sure we don't have infinite souls scattered all across the Vellum, or one soul shattered into infinite pieces.

Is that what lies at the end of our journey, I wonder, on the last page of the Book of All Hours, a place where all the variations are resolved, where all our multiple selves are boiled down into one perfect Platonic form of us? And what Jack would we find there, I wonder? What is it that this Jack shares with mine, with Puck's? A gleam in the eye? A glint of grin? Or just a name, a word?

It worries me a little, I must admit. I look at this Jack, and I think of the Jack of my memories and if there is a single word that sums them both up I would have to say it's
firestarter.