The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries) (12 page)

“What?”

“A human being living in a particular culture is very much like a fish swimming in the ocean. The fish is immersed in the ocean and therefore cannot see the environment that supports it. Until quite recently with the onset of mass communication, humans have been so immersed in the values of their own culture, that they couldn’t see their fundamental assumptions at all. All of the anthropologists of the past century would have been raised with overlord values. They would have overemphasized conquest and domination and underemphasized the pivotal role that the female gender played in establishing human civilization. Therefore, when confronted with Native American culture and values, the only context they had for explaining what they saw was European.”

Cassie stared at him skeptically.

Griffin
seemed mildly exasperated. “Look, I’ll show you what I mean. Come this way.”

She trailed him down the endless corridor of doors until he stopped before one marked “Winnebago.” Sliding his key card into the slot, he disengaged the lock and they entered. Just as he’d told her, the room was full of metal filing cabinets.
Griffin
seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. He strode halfway down the room and opened a drawer to retrieve a manila folder. He returned to Cassie and handed it to her. “Have a look,” he prompted.

Uncertainly, she took the folder and opened it. There was a faxed copy of an artifact. It was a wooden stick incised with lines, crescents and dots.

Griffin
leaned over her shoulder and pointed to the photo. “The first European who viewed an object like this took it to be a scepter of some sort. A wand of power used by an Indian chief to rule his subjects.”

Cassie raised an amused eyebrow. “I just know you’re gonna tell me it ain’t so.”

Griffin
chuckled. “I’m attempting to illustrate my point about cultural perceptions. It’s actually a calendar stick used to measure time, coordinate lunar cycles with solar cycles and determine the date for various tribal rituals.” He paused for emphasis. “This method of timekeeping was originally developed by women, as were all early methods of timekeeping. Rather than being a symbol of male power, this sort of calendar would have been essential to midwives and expectant mothers to calculate the term of a pregnancy.”

Cassie cocked her head and studied the photo again. “I wouldn’t have gotten that in a million years.”

“Sticks much like this one are depicted in cave paintings dated from 50,000 BCE. They are always held by women and shamans, though I suppose the term women is redundant since the earliest tribal shamans were always female.”

Griffin
took back the folder of the calendar stick. “I think you can begin to understand the myriad ways in which we filter what we see through the values of our culture. Some errors of interpretation are minor. Some misperceptions are so fiercely protected that any attempt to correct the record would result in bloodshed. For instance, the meteorite enshrined at Mecca which Muslim pilgrims kiss so reverently was not originally sacred to the god Allah, but to the goddess Al Uzza, the Mighty One. Muslim worshippers circle their shrine seven times without ever realizing they are mimicking the actions of Al Uzza’s priestesses almost two millennia ago.

Instead, Muslim lore tells that the meteorite landed at the feet of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and was subsequently found by the biblical patriarch Abraham. Now if I were to tell a Muslim fundamentalist about Al Uzza and her prior claim to the stone, I’m sure he would consider me blasphemous and instantly declare a jihad against me.”

Griffin
refiled the folder and led Cassie out of the Winnebago room. “People cling stubbornly to their beliefs. We are attempting to set the record straight but our efforts carry a certain degree of risk. The evidence we are collecting is dangerous to those who dedicate themselves to maintaining the prevailing historical fiction.”

“OK, I get your point,” Cassie conceded. “I can see why you’re going to so much trouble to protect a bunch of papers.”

Griffin
frowned slightly. “We aren’t merely protecting a bunch of papers. We are protecting the fragmented memory of the human race from those who would like nothing better than to erase everything that is inconsistent with overlord values.”

He led her back toward the main room. In a lighter tone he suggested, “Why don’t we continue our tour.”

Chapter 21
–Mothers Of Invention

They exited
North America
and walked around the perimeter of the main room. People glanced up from desks to smile encouragingly as they passed. When they reached the back wall,
Griffin
paused before the giant world map.

At close range Cassie could see colored pins stuck to different locations. Some were single, some in small bunches and some in clusters of twenty or more. “So what’s this?” Cassie asked.

“A map of the world.”
Griffin
sounded playful.

The girl rolled her eyes. “What are the pins for?”

“We use them to keep track of our current recoveries.”

“OK, new word.”

“Yes, quite right. A recovery is an item that the troves are in the process of retrieving or have just retrieved. It hasn’t yet been formally entered into the catalog. I believe you would use the word pipeline to describe something like this.”

Cassie studied the map. About three dozen of the pins were clustered around a point in
Turkey
. “Why so many here?”

“Oh yes, the Cybele artifacts. Excellent find. We’ve uncovered quite a few Thracian relics in that spot. We call what you see a concentration point. It will vary depending on the activity of a particular trove at a particular point in time. Right now, we’ve been very lucky in this geographic area.”

Cassie felt a sense of misgiving. “Doesn’t the local government have something to say about what you’re taking out of the country?”

“We only take artifacts out of their area of origin if the political climate is unstable enough to pose a threat. If there’s a chance they might be destroyed we will relocate them to the next closest stable area. As you might guess, the situation is very fluid.”

Cassie shifted to another topic. Looking up toward the ceiling, she asked, “Are we still under the school?”

“Yes, partly. We excavated additional space around it too.”

“There are so many people down here. Why didn’t I see any cars when I drove up?”

“An underground car park on the other side of the building. The ventilation system is state of the art.”
Griffin
cast a glance toward the multitude of desks in the middle of the room and gave a sigh. “It’s unfortunate our technological innovations haven’t yet extended to the information we collect.”

“Huh?” the girl asked blankly.

“We’re still in the throes of converting our paper records to computer format. Some of us are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the information age. I confess that I, myself, am far more comfortable with the printed page.”

Cassie registered surprise.
Griffin
had to be in his early twenties but somehow he’d managed to miss the digital bus. When it came to books, he seemed as techno-phobic as some old codger in his sixties.

By this time, they had reached the left wall of the vault. Passing the door marked Security Division, Griffin stopped in front of the one that read “Scrivener’s Office.”

He opened the door without knocking.

Cassie hung back. “Should you be going in there? I mean, what if the Scrivener whatsit catches you?”

“I’m sure he won’t mind.”
Griffin
sounded unconcerned. “After all, he is me.”

“You’re the Scrivener?” Cassie gasped. “What’s a Scrivener?”

Her companion chuckled. “It’s an honorary title much like the term ‘Pythia’. It refers to the person who is in charge of all the scribes.” Anticipating Cassie’s next question, he added, “We call all the record-keepers in the vault ‘scribes’. Obviously these antiquated names go back to the earliest days of the Arkana.”

“So you’re the guy in charge of the vault?” the girl asked doubtfully.
 

Griffin
nodded. “Of the cataloguing tasks anyway. Yes, I am.”

“But aren’t you kind of young?”

“My colleagues didn’t seem to think that mattered when they elected me to this post. Though I am quite new at it,” he added. “Just over a year now. Please come in and take a seat if you would.”

The Scrivener’s office was furnished in simple elegance. Two leather wing chairs faced the Sheraton mahogany desk. The desk was flanked on either side by floor to ceiling book cases. Cassie sat down while
Griffin
began opening and closing drawers, evidently looking for something.

“But the Scrivener must have a ton of responsibility. Nothing personal but why would they pick you to be in charge of all of this?” she asked again.

Griffin
didn’t seem offended by the question. He continued turning over the contents of his desk drawers as he spoke. “I think it may have had to do with the peculiarities of the way my mind works. I seem to have the ability to recall nearly everything I’ve ever read.”

“Oh, I’ve heard about that!” Cassie exclaimed. “They call it idiotic memory, don’t they?”

The Scrivener stopped shuffling and stared at her in perplexity for several seconds, not sure whether she was joking or not. “It’s called eidetic memory,” he finally corrected.

“Sorry,” she said sheepishly. Trying to repair the damage, she rushed to add, “So that’s a really important job you’ve got. I mean, this place must be as big as the Library of Congress and you’re the head librarian.”

“Scrivener,” he corrected. “Head Scrivener.” He resumed his search until he happened to look up and catch the expression on her face. “What is it?” he asked, concerned.

Cassie realized she was frowning in intense concentration as she tried to work out a puzzle in her head.

Griffin
came to sit down in the wing chair next to hers and peered at her intently. “Are you all right?”

She laughed, embarrassed. “Sorry. My mind was off on a side trip somewhere. I was just thinking back to that calendar stick you showed me and it jogged my memory about something Maddie said the last time I was here. She told me that women were responsible for inventing clothing, agriculture, animal domestication and even writing. I thought it was just her own crazy theory but you said something like that when you were talking about women inventing time measurement. You seem awfully sure of your facts.” Her voice took on a troubled tone. “Considering how long ago all these things were invented, don’t you think you’re jumping to conclusions? I mean how can you prove that women came up with all those ideas?”

The young man gave her an impish look. “And why are you so willing to believe that men were responsible for them?”

Cassie shrugged. “I guess because that’s what we’re taught in school. Men invented everything, right?”

“I should think your brief exposure to the Arkana would at least open your mind to alternative explanations,” he objected mildly. “Look, it’s quite simple really. If you think about invention, you need to think about necessity.”

“And mothers,” the girl added wryly.

Griffin
looked lost for a moment and then smiled. “Oh yes, quite. Necessity is the mother of invention. A cliched proverb but an accurate one.” His expression grew serious. “Whenever you look at an object and you speculate about who might have invented it, you need to think about who had the greatest need for it. In the case of time measurement, it’s hard to imagine a hunter requiring a precise lunar calendar to track game migration patterns. But it’s very easy to assume a woman would notice the correlation between her own reproductive functions and the phases of the moon. It certainly would have helped the female population of the tribe far more than the male.”

Cassie tilted her head to consider his argument. Finally she nodded in agreement. “I guess that makes sense. I’ll buy it. Women probably did invent calendars but what about the other stuff. I mean, isn’t it kind of a stretch to think they invented agriculture?”

“Not at all,”
Griffin
said solemnly. “Not when you consider that in hunter-gatherer societies, the vast majority of the daily food supply was provided by women. The estimate is somewhere between 60% and 85%.”

“What!” Cassie exclaimed. “That can’t be right. What about man the mighty hunter bringing home the bacon?”

Griffin
raised an eyebrow. “Like so much else that is taught in schools, that is an overlord myth. It was the woman bringing home the beets who kept the tribe alive. Don’t misunderstand. Fresh meat was a valuable supplement to the diet but killing wild game when armed with nothing more than a sharp stick is an uncertain business. It may take a week of effort to accomplish that task. On a daily basis, the women of the tribe would go out with their digging sticks and forage for edible plants, roots, berries, nuts and seeds to sustain themselves and their children. And the process was hardly haphazard. Knowledge of plants would have been passed down from mother to daughter. There are literally hundreds of species of plants that a woman would need to recognize on sight as well as their season of ripeness. Some are edible, others hallucinogenic. Some poisonous and others curative.”

Cassie interrupted him. “But you’re talking about foraging. What’s that got to do with agriculture?”

“Absolutely everything,”
Griffin
said with a knowing smile. “Over a period of time, a forager would notice that a seed would germinate into a plant. Since she was already gathering wild grains for consumption, she most probably experimented with planting some of the seeds to see if they would grow. The rest, as they say, is history.”

Griffin
paused a moment to let Cassie assimilate these new facts before he continued. “Now that you know how to apply the rule of necessity to any invention, you’ve no doubt understood why pottery and textiles would also have been female inventions.”

“Maybe,” Cassie said cautiously. She wasn’t at all sure she understood what he considered to be obvious. “Why don’t you explain it to me anyway.”

“Very well.” The young man complied. “A forager who travels up to ten miles a day gathering food for her family would need some way to carry the food back. An animal carcass is fairly convenient to carry whole or even cut into large pieces. Small plants are not. If she depended on nothing more than what her arms could hold, the evening meal would be disappointingly small. She would need a container of some sort to bring home substantial quantities of anything. Hence, she would have developed techniques for weaving baskets or cloth, shaping animal skins into slings or molding mud into ceramic ware. That last item, of course, implies that she also invented clay ovens and kilns.”

Cassie decided to play devil’s advocate for a while. “But maybe there were men back in camp who made all those things.”

“According to overlord myth, all the men were out striding purposefully across the savannah butchering everything in their path.” Cassie noted the mischievous gleam in
Griffin
’s eye. “Where on earth did they find the time? They must have been Renaissance men indeed if they managed to stalk and kill game before rushing back to weave baskets and clothing for their womenfolk. Perhaps they even managed to hoe a row of corn before dashing off again. Very chivalrous of them. Goodness knows what the women were doing all this time. Probably just lying around waiting for instruction. The silly cows.”

Cassie giggled at the picture he painted. “It does sound pretty ridiculous when you put it that way,” she admitted.

“That’s because it is ridiculous. Overlord historians would like to have it both ways. They want to paint a picture of man the hunter as well as man the inventor. From a practical standpoint, there aren’t enough hours in the day for him to be both. One or the other assumption has to be false. It’s far more logical to assume that human beings survived as a species because the sexes depended upon one another. They each had complementary skills and the contribution of both was respected. That balance remained intact until career warfare began to distort it about five thousand years ago. And now we live with the consequences of that imbalance.”