The Dig (13 page)

“I haven’t had a chance, actually, but it’s all still very fresh in my head, and I can always go back to it in a session if I forgot anything. It was all very bizarre.”

Rheese handed out cold bottled water to everyone; then, as everyone else listened, Matt relayed the experience to Peter. Peter scratched down notes and asked him to pause a few times so he could catch up. Everyone was enthralled, even Rheese.

F
AST FORWARD.

Yes, that was definitely the Little Dipper. Light around the bend. Still worried, though; still counting the steps.

Fast forward.

Here we are… I must meet in the Center House with Inni’s friends and family. We stop walking single file, and Irin stops counting steps. Pwig comes up beside me and grabs my hand to walk with me. Pwig
has the same mother and father as I. He is my brother. I had another brother. We’re walking, holding hands, toward the Center House.

I see the Center House now at the end of the path. The ground looks and feels like walking on a stone garden, with chunky rocks that are a little too big to feel comfortable walking on. On either side of us are smaller houses, interconnected. Most are dark, but some have the pale blue light coming from them. Are those windows? I wish Irin would actually look at something close-up. I want to see where the light actually comes from.

My timer’s set for ten minutes… if this imprint lasts that long.

As we approach the Center House, the path splits off in two directions: one to the left that appears to wrap around to the other side of the round structure, and the other curves to the right and then straight to a rounded entryway. The buildings all look like smooth-walled igloos, but this one is huge compared to the rest. I walk inside and see other people. I pull the
k’yot
top off my head and lay it on a flat surface near the door, where several others are already piled. No one inside this room wears the
k’yot,
the shielding clothes, except the men who were with me on the path. Both men and women are bare-chested but for what look like two wide suspenders, perhaps three inches across, going over each shoulder and then connecting to a wraparound skirt piece that starts at the waist and ends a few inches above the knees. The skirts are fairly plain, only dressed up by the overlap of the suspender straps, which, looking around this room, appear to come in many different colors. The skirts, too, are varied in color. I see tan straps with blue skirt, matching purple straps with purple skirt, and dark brown with pure white. Their foot coverings all seem the same: tan material nailed or stapled into large foot-shaped pieces that stick out quite a bit from the actual foot, making everyone’s feet look pretty big. Also, judging by the odd feeling when Irin walks, they aren’t very comfortable.

That is Oinni sitting on what appears to be a short tree stump with no bark. It’s called a
footrest,
but others are sitting on them, too, so I’m guessing these are their chairs. I walk to Oinni and put my hand on her head. Her hair hangs to her ears. It is straight, black, and clumpy, like very thin dreadlocks. It looks as if everyone’s hair is like this. Irin speaks to her.

“Inni twyn gin, ylt pwino i pwin opget.”
Your mate now rests and is forever safe. He feels deeply sad for her and thinks how his own mate, Orin, would feel if he were lost.

I get it now—the names. My name is Irin; my wife is Orin. The first sound is in place of Mr. or Mrs. So is my name actually
Rin?
I wonder what a woman is called before she is married.

Irin looks up and across the round table to some others he knows in the house. In the middle of the table, there! I can finally see one of the light sources! It’s a wide tube of liquid that leads all the way up to the domed roof; at the base, inside the tube, something that looks like a lit candle is submerged in the liquid. This tube is clearly made of glass or some sort of transparent plastic. Witno just bumped the table, and now the liquid went into motion inside the cylinder, and the light has begun to dance around the room as if we were under water. Irin steps back and turns toward a man who is talking to him. It’s Norrit; he’s taking off his middle and tells me I should, too.

Rewind.

That tube of light—how do they get the lit candle thing in there? Someone must stick it in through a hole in the table, up into the tube, and then something closes on the bottom. The flame in there is huge. It doesn’t look as though there’s a wick; it’s just the whole stick of whatever’s on fire in there. Doesn’t it need air? Irin steps back…

Fast-forward.

He takes off the jacket part of the
k’yot
and lays it on the table by the door. Okay, well, I guess I don’t have to wait for the timer. This imprint should fade out quick now that he’s not in contact with it anymore.

Back to structure. How am I going to tell what era this is? These people are
clearly
humanlike, but the giant eyes and three fingers thing makes them… what? Some kind of unique tribe that started with a couple of three-fingered, odd-faced freaks, and everyone else is an offshoot of them? Irin is stepping outside for air. If this
is
all those millions of years ago, how can I tell? This guy’s concept of the date is full of batches and gross batches, and now I’m aware of some “all batch” that works out to four thousand something. Maybe Pete can help with that. Let’s hear it, Irin
—
what’s the date again? And I’ll try to remember this to write down immediately.

Single plus batch plus batch plus batch plus full batch plus gross batch plus single plus single past.

Past
what
? Past the moon. What about the moon? An eclipse or something? No, some
big
moon event. Oh, a big moon event, wow, that’s great. Some raging party on the moon. Anything else? Oh, a
t’gyt
will help! That’s their calendar. I’ll have to hope Irin takes a look at one at some point.

Right now, Irin
is looking at the stars and thinking about Inni. That is what he’s supposed to be doing right now. This is Inni’s evening. Hopefully the imprint ends, or ten minutes are up soon, or I’m going to forget these numbers. Irin has an image of Inni and another man (who looks just like him), and they’re stirring some shiny liquid, like metal, in a huge vat. They’re talking about the excitement of the coming gathering—meaning harvesting, I’m guessing by the other images popping up in Irin’s
head. He gets sad again and closes his eyes.

His eyes are still closed. This is going to get boring. How could the imprint still be going? It’s just a wash of emotions now. This keeps going on, let me say the date over and over to remember it: single plus batch plus batch… Someone’s rubbing his head now and talking to him. He knows the voice. It’s Orin. She says it’s time to return to house,
i tyg rol—
that means “make safe,” referring to a time. It’s make-safe time. And be with her inside the house. Finally! This should be good. I want to see inside his house. That Center House seems to be just a town hall sort of building.

Irin
steps back into the Center House and grabs his
k’yot
parts. That explains why this imprint went on so long: it’s an overlap. We walk around the path from the Center House and then cut left onto a branching trail. I know the way. Three more houses on the left, four on the right, and mine is at the end—it’s the only one with the light still visible through the little window opening there. We come upon my house, which is just like all the rest: a small, perfect dome of unknown material. Irin
glances through the window as he passes. It’s not a glass window, just an opening in the shape of the letter “D” turned so the flat side is on the bottom. The doorways are the same shape, but elongated tall enough for Irin and Orin to enter without ducking.

I turn right just after stepping into the house, toss the
k’yot
to the side, and put my hand at the top of a big door thing. It will fit perfectly into the doorway, but it is not on any hinges. I reach up and turn a metal handle thing out of the way, which allows the weight of the door onto me. That latch was holding it against the inner wall. Irin lifts the door via two bar handles, steps to the right, and pushes it into place. I can tell that the door is really heavy, but Irin
is apparently very strong, and it doesn’t faze him to lift it. It does indeed fit perfectly into the opening. The two bars twist in opposite directions, and he secures the door in place. We do the same thing for the window opening. Its hatch, I’ll call it, was leaning against the wall underneath it.

“Irin,” a man’s voice says behind me. Irin isn’t startled. Odd as Orin and I were the only two in here. I turn around and Orin is undressing on the floor mat. She continues to do so, even though this old guy is standing here. He actually looks really old—the first one I have seen. He’s my father, Tillyt. He lives in the adjoining house next to ours, and I see there is a tunnel, shaped like the front doorway. It leads to another house/room behind him. I suppose the whole thing could be considered a house with two rooms, but in Irin’s
head, this is his house, and his father’s house is next door; his brother Pwig’s is connected on the other side of his parents’ house, but that isn’t visible from here.

My father is telling me that his friend, Pret, wants to speak with me next night. Tomorrow night. It’s important, apparently, about the
ypritl
he knows is coming. That is a sky stripe. A shooting star? An asteroid? Irin is worried about this. Pret was right about the blood attack a half-full batch before. He had been saying it for many moon cycles, and those who listened made-safe early and stayed in-house for longer the next night. Wil
hadn’t mentioned anything about it, so
Irin had only done make-safe early because Tillyt insisted. Irin is thankful now. Way too many names. I’ll have to unravel all that later, if I need to.

Do they have someone with some sort of real clairvoyance ability? This might just be the typical superstition of people, though. There are people today who say something bad is going to happen for months and months, and then when something finally does, they say, “See?” An asteroid is pretty specific, though.

Irin agrees to speak with Pret next night, and his father goes back through the tunnel. Irin
turns and looks down at the floor mat bed and sees Orin lying there completely naked. Her body has no hair except for her head. She has the same thin dreadlock thing going on, but longer than Oinni’s, spreading out on the mat like a black flower.

We look away and walk over to the candlelight tube sticking up out of the ground by the window. He picks it up with one hand, and the thick candlestick stays on the floor. The tube is pretty heavy, filled with maybe four gallons of the light blue liquid around the edges. He taps the candlestick with the flat bottom edge of the liquid tube a few times until it goes out. Now it’s almost completely dark in the room, the only light coming from the liquid in the light tube. There must be residual light bouncing around in the liquid! I am undressing now and throwing my foot covers and clothes toward the other side of the room. That’s where the clothes go.

There’s nothing else in the room, either. No tables, no containers. Just the light tube, a small pile of clothes now, and the sleeping mat with a thin rolled-up fabric that borders the edges of the mat. Perhaps a blanket of sorts, for when it gets cold. The light from the tube is almost completely gone now as I lie down on the mat and look at the dimming brightness of Orin’s eyes. They are not the pitch black everyone has had so far, but a medium brown with little specks of black. Their shine is the last thing we see as the remaining light fades away.

I can feel Orin’s arms pulling me closer to her. She wraps them around my head and shoves the rest of her body into contact with mine. She tugs gently at our hair, and I can tell that mine is short—little sprouts of the skinny dreadlocks. I always felt that these intimate moments were a bit of an invasion of privacy, but I found them… I don’t know,
interesting,
nonetheless. As she continues to play with my head, her toes start messing around with mine. It’s fading now.

This is the end of the imprint. I know this feeling well. His thoughts start to pull away into a dark shroud, the vision blurs in and out for about thirty seconds before going completely black, and then I’m out. It was hard to tell at first, since the light in the room was fading out on its own, but now I can’t feel her toes or arms around the head.

Matt removed his hands from the artifact, and Tuni and everyone else jumped. He supposed that ten minutes of just staring probably got pretty boring. He pulled off his timer and turned it off to preserve the batteries. Only eight and half minutes had passed.

“What happened?” asked Tuni. “The timer didn’t go off, did it?”

“Nope,” Matt replied as he shoved the timer into the duffel beside him. “The imprint ended. Actually, they’re usually much shorter—this just happens to be a really emotional guy, I guess. He let go of the
k’yot
a minute earlier, so it makes sense it faded away. Normally would have been much quicker though.”

“So that’s it, then?” Tuni asked. “It’s over?”

“Oh, I don’t think so. That’s just the end of that particular imprint. See, the way this whole thing works is that somebody’s holding something when a crazy thing happens or they hurt themselves, or maybe his wife says she’s leaving him or whatever—something like that. It leaves an impression on the object of a few minutes leading up to the event and a few minutes after it’s over. In this case, Irin had the sort of prolonged emotional period of carrying his friend’s dead body to this burial ritual, and then there was a funeral service get-together thing with friends and family. He was pretty upset the whole time and still was at the end there. But let’s say something huge happened just then, like someone came and stabbed him in the hand—it would have no effect on the imprint I was reading, because he didn’t have the piece on him anymore.”