The Meaning of the Word - Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, ebook, CALIBRE SFF 1970s, Temp 2
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The Meaning of the Word
by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro
Then I saw something odd, fuzzed with the sand glimmering in the coral
sunlight, and I began to slog my way toward it.
"Jhirinki, get back here!" Wolton ordered from the skiff. He was sounding
angrier by the minute.
"There's something out—" I tried to tell him but Almrid cut me off.
"Let him alone, Wolton. Your jurisdiction goes no farther than the skiff."
Then, with scarcely a change in tone, he said to me, "You stay here until camp
is set up. I want to know where everyone is."
Wolton gave him a sour smile and motioned me away. But it was important that
they know about that irregularity. I tried again. "I saw something out there.
It doesn't look—"
"Wait until the camp is set up. We need to get some more definitive readings
before we go exploring. And"—Almrid added to Wolton—"we can't get those
without the prowler."
Wolton jerked the hatch of the skiff open. "All right. Here's the prowler. You
know that it can't get any better data from the surface than the monitors
can."
"Look, Almrid—" I began.
"Not now, Peter. We'll talk later. When we have more accurate material to work
from." This last was, of course, for Wolton.
It was useless. I stepped back as Wolton reluctantly put the prowler in
action, letting it scuttle out over the hazy sand, scanners clicking
contentedly to itself.
Sumiko Hyasu had barricaded herself behind her equipment, preparing to run
soil tests. She and Langly, the biochemist, worked in silence, the remote
sounds of their breathing murmuring in my earphones.
On the other side of the skiff I knew Parnini and Goetz were furling the sails
of the weather unit. I could hear them swearing occasionally. They were busy.
Wolton and Almrid were still arguing. My eyes were dragged back again to that
irregular spot in the sand that might be what I wanted. That might be digs.
"I'm calling Captain Tamoshoe," Wolton declared to anyone who would listen.
"I'm going to give him a status report."
"That is your responsibility," murmured Almrid as he watched the prowler set
zig-zagging in a widening spiral. His heavy head was even larger in the Class
Eleven uniform. His hands hung like paws, wholly unlike what one expected in a
virologist. It was hard to think of him doing the minute manipulations that
were the mark of his work—it was like trying to imagine Caliban or Quasimodo
making watches or microcircuitry.
A yawning breeze wound a bit of dust on its finger and then sank back, too
tired to hold it. That was the feel of the whole place—drowsiness. The wind
barely breathed. The plain was heavy with dreaming, the sky unmarred by clouds
where the greater of two suns hung about fifteen degrees above the horizon, a
 platter of polished copper. Our presence intruded on this somnambulistic
landscape where even the rocks were softened and sometimes crumbling and in
place of dirt there was sand that was not sand flickering in the monochrome
stillness.
Yet I wondered and hoped. There had been indications of structures from the
monitors on the Nordenskjold. I knew my digs were here to be found, if only I
knew where to look.
"Jhirinki's been wandering around," Wolton was reporting and the sound of my
name brought me back to the camp. He added in response to the captain's
garbled question, "It was Almrid's idea to bring along an archeologist. Not
mine. Ask him."
In the slow heat of the opalescent afternoon work was sluggish. There was
nothing for me to do but stare at the one odd spot in the distance—and wish.
Goetz swore in my earphone as his equipment toppled for the second time,
victim to the treacherous shifting of the sand. "Need help?" I asked him, not
reluctantly.
"What I need is a foundation," came his answer, the words bitten out in
frustration.
"According to the monitors," Almrid said icily, directing the insult at
Wolton, "there's all kinds of rock around here. Or, maybe not rock. Maybe it
once was buildings."
"Look, Almrid—" Wolton began.
Then, unexpectedly, Sumiko Hyasu cut in. "Leave him alone, Franz," she said
softly to Almrid. "We have work to do."
"It looks like you've wasted your trip, Peter," Almrid said to me, a certain
morose satisfaction in this statement. "Why don't you ride up tonight and
forget it? There are other planets."
I wondered if my disappointment showed so much.
"I think I'll stick around for a while," I said.
· · · · ·
"I don't know, Sumiko," I was saying as we watched the second skiff settle
onto the sand. "I can't give up the thought that there's something here."
Absently she made some answer.
"Don't you feel that?"
"I suppose so." She was only half-listening. This world was too unknown, too
compelling for us to pay much attention to each other. Every one of us saw it
through his/her eyes only. "Is any of this real, Peter?" she asked. "Or is the
planet hiding from us?"
I had felt that from the first. Something was hidden here right under our
noses and we hadn't the sense to find it. But all I could do was shrug. I
 didn't know then what she wanted to find, what it was she had been searching
for with that terrible, fragile intensity that marked her more than her
beauty.
"What do you want to find?" she asked me.
"Oh, I don't know." It was a lie and, like a lot of lies, it felt ugly. But I
couldn't admit to her that I had longed for the chance to find a lost
civilization here, to be the first to decipher its language. People could be
known and understood by the way they used words, and to be the first to
understand in that way had been an obsession with me since before I trained on
the Probe Ship Magalhaes.
"You're going to do some exploring later?" It wasn't really a question, it was
a dismissal.
"Whenever Almrid and Wolton get tired of fighting and give a general release,
then, yes, I'll go exploring." Neither of them was willing to stop feuding
long enough to let the expedition get moving and I was becoming riled at the
delay. But Commander Markham would be in the next skiff and, knowing Josh, he
would put an end to the sparring that had taken up too much time already.
"Good luck," she murmured and went back to her equipment. Then, as she started
adjusting the sample breakdowns, her voice sounded again in my earphones. "Why
wait? Why not do what you want to do?"
· · · · ·
By the time the base camp had been set up and the full complement of
expedition staff had been ferried down the surface shelters were waiting. I
had spent the long afternoon struggling with ring supports, emplacing the
doughnut-shaped foundations for the inflatable buildings, but now it was
night.
I walked away from the camp, watching the unfamiliar sky. There were more and
brighter stars above me and some eleven dissimilar moons coursed overhead in a
bewildering tangle.
In a while I found the irregular stone, although I had not consciously been
looking for it—I had been drawn to it as surely as fur draws static. I knew
that it would tell me what I wanted to know, if only I could puzzle it out
before Captain Tamoshoe ordered us all back to the Nordenskjold. Yet, as I
stood over it, not knowing where to look or what I was looking for, I could
still mock myself for being so obsessed with wanting to find a language and a
culture that obviously had failed in all this desolation.
So I paced the thing off nonchalantly. It was not too large, this oblong
section of rock, rather like one of the old headstones in the landmark
cemeteries.
I kneeled in the sand and rubbed at the side of the block—and touched what I
thought at first was a flaw or chip in the surface. Curious, I bent closer,
gently blowing the clinging dirt from the slab with my sweat valve, brushing
the stone clear as I worked.
And then, there it was. Without any doubt, without any ambiguity, the glyphs
appeared under my hands. I drew back to get a proper look at them.
 For several minutes I sat and looked at them. The stillness of the night was
suddenly alien. Eight low relief marks on a rock—and I felt for the first time
that all I am was justified.
I rose, wiping more of the block free of the sand, but I could find nothing
more. The inexorable movement of the sand might have worn other markings away,
or perhaps the stone reached deeper into the ground than I had thought at
first, with more glyphs farther down. Almrid and Wolton had said something
about erosion. Perhaps this had been high above the sand, once.
It seemed like a long way back to the camp just to get a shovel and some help.
I stood, rubbing my hands together to free them of the dust that was clinging
insidiously to them and to film of my surface suit. Was it worth it, going all
the way back? I could do more here tonight even without tools. And if I went
back, Almrid or Wolton would be sure to try to stop me from coming back. In
the morning I could bring some of the expedition with me, but then this find
would no longer be mine. I finally accepted the rationalization that left me
alone with my particular dream for a little longer.
Setting to work, I scooped armloads of the soil away from the block, hoping to
discover more glyphs. I felt that I had found the key to a larger discovery.
It was on the fifth armload that I fell through into the room.
· · · · ·
Dust spread out around me like a reverse halo against the shiny surface of the
floor. I tasted grit—the suit must have ruptured somewhere. As I lay on the
floor I took stock. No bones broken, but some dandy bruises. I gathered my
knees beneath me and carefully stood up. It was dark down here except for the
shine from the moons through the hole. There was no other light.
With uncertain fingers I grabbed for my litepak and found it undamaged.
Thumbing it, I found that it could hardly reach beyond that sand on the floor.
After a moment of thought I turned it off and began walking slowly in an
outward spiral.
On the third round I bumped into a thing, apparently of stone, about the size
of a half-chair with a shoe-shaped projection. It felt smooth and solid.
"Curiouser and curiouser," I said aloud to the unechoing blackness.
Slowly I wandered back to the sand haze on the floor, the site of my fall. I
looked up at the rent in the roof. The realization rushed in on me then that I
was truly cut off from the expedition. I had left my commkit at the camp and
my litepak's trickle of beam could not have been seen by anyone at that
distance. The sand filtered down through the hole, whispering.
And the light was failing. Two of the moons had set since I had fallen into my
 find and I could not get out without light.
Let's leave that alone for the moment, Jhirinki, I told myself for comfort.
Then, as I watched, the great heavy stone I had loosened by my fall gave a
kind of sigh and, with deceptive languor, tumbled end over end to crash and
shatter on the floor. If it had fallen straight down, that would have been the
end of Peter Jhirinki.
Badly shaken, I went back to the object I had walked into earlier. My hands
shook when I reached out to steady myself, and I drew them back.
Perhaps I should touch nothing here until I knew what had made that great
stone fall. Were other stones still in the ceiling above me?
Anxiously I pulled out my litepak again and played its feeble beam over the
ceiling. But the fact that I saw no other blocks of stone was actually small
comfort. This room was an important find and I was without means to see it—and
now too isolated to get the help I needed. I also remembered there was a tear
in my suit, which might or might not mean anything on this planet.
Again I wandered back to the place beneath the hole, taking care not to get
near the gently falling sands.
"Peter!"
For a moment, I didn't believe the sound in my suit phone. Then, as my name
was called again, I realized that I had been missed and that a party was
searching for me.
"Yeo!" I yelled, full of relief.
The stream of dust into the hole increased.
"Peter Jhirinki—" Now that the voices were closer I was able to pick out
Markham's among the others—a large resonant sound that no commsystem could
properly handle.
"Down here—" More rivulets of the soft dust were pouring down now and I
wondered how strong the roof was. "Be careful—I don't know how long the roof
here will hold."
"Thanks." Markham's voice. "We'll get you out of there. Dominguiz went back
for the rig." After a moment's silence Josh Markham asked, "And did you find
anything down there, Pete?"
It took me a little time to answer him. "I hope so," I said finally. Then, as
I looked around the dark, I didn't want to leave. "Drop me a litepak, will
you?"
"Right." And in a moment Markham's litepak in its crashcase thudded to the
floor. "Dominguiz will be back any time, Pete. Make it short."
· · · · ·
But I knew that. I wrenched the litepak from its case and pressed the switch.
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