The Complete Short Stories: Volume 1. Adam Thirlwell

Чтение книги онлайн.

СКАЧАТЬ The shadows around me were enormous parallelograms, their angles shrinking as the sun blazed up into the sky. I walked slowly round into the centre of the group, dimly aware that neither Tallis nor the two geologists could have carved the megaliths and raised them onto the pentagon, when I saw that the entire inner surface of the nearest megalith was covered by row upon row of finely chiselled hieroglyphs.

      Swinging round, I ran my hands across its surface. Large patches had crumbled away, leaving a faint indecipherable tracery, but most of the surface was intact, packed solidly with pictographic symbols and intricate cuneiform glyphics that ran down it in narrow columns.

      

      I stepped over to the next megalith. Here again, the inner face was covered with tens of thousands of minute carved symbols, the rows separated by finely cut dividing rules that fell the full fifty-foot height of the megalith.

      There were at least a dozen languages, all in alphabets I had never seen before, strings of meaningless ciphers among which I could pick odd cross-hatched symbols that seemed to be numerals, and peculiar serpentine forms that might have represented human figures in stylized poses.

      Suddenly my eye caught:

CYR*RK VII

A*PHA LEP**IS

*D 1317

      Below was another, damaged but legible.

AMEN*TEK LC*V

*LPHA LE*ORIS

AD 13**

      There were blanks among the letters, where time had flaked away minute grains of the stone.

      My eyes raced down the column. There were a score more entries:

PONT*AR*H*CV	ALPH* L*PORIS	A* *318
MYR*K LV*	A**HA LEPORI*	AD 13*6
KYR** XII	ALPH* LEP*RIS	AD 1*19
………………………	…………………	……………
………………………	…………………	……………

      The list of names, all from Alpha Leporis, continued down the column. I followed it to the base, where the names ended three inches from the bottom, then moved along the surface, across rows of hieroglyphs, and picked up the list three or four columns later.

M*MARYK XX*V	A*PHA LEPORI*	AD 1389
CYRARK IX	ALPHA *EPORIS	AD 1390
………………………	…………………	……………

      I went over to the megalith on my left and began to examine the inscriptions carefully.

      Here the entries read:

MINYS-259	DELT* ARGUS	AD 1874
TYLNYS-413	DELTA ARGUS	*D 1874
………………………	…………………	……………

      There were fewer blanks; to the right of the face the entries were more recent, the lettering sharper. In all there were five distinct languages, four of them, including Earth’s, translations of the first entry running down the left-hand margin of each column.

      The third and fourth megaliths recorded entries from Gamma Grus and Beta Trianguli. They followed the same pattern, their surfaces divided into eighteen-inch-wide columns, each of which contained five rows of entries, the four hieroglyphic languages followed by Earth’s, recording the same minimal data in the same terse formula: Name – Place – Date

      I had looked at four of the megaliths. The fifth stood with its back to the sun, its inner face hidden.

      I walked over to it, crossing the oblique panels of shadow withdrawing to their sources, curious as to what fabulous catalogue of names I should find.

       The fifth megalith was blank.

      My eyes raced across its huge unbroken surface, marked only by the quarter-inch-deep grooves of the dividing rules some thoughtful master mason from the stars had chiselled to tabulate the entries from Earth that had never come.

      

      I returned to the other megaliths and for half an hour read at random, arms outstretched involuntarily across the great inscription panels, fingertips tracing the convolutions of the hieroglyphs, seeking among the thousands of signatures some clue to the identity and purpose of the four stellar races.

COPT*C LEAGUE MILV	BETA TRIANGULI	*D 1723
ISARI* LEAGUE *VII	BETA *RIANGULI	AD 1724
MAR-5-GO	GAMMA GRUS	AD 1959
VEN-7-GO	GAMMA GRUS	AD 1960
TETRARK XII	ALPHA LEPORIS	AD 2095

      Dynasties recurred again and again, Cyrark’s, Minys-’s, -Go’s, separated by twenty-or thirty-year intervals that appeared to be generations. Before AD 1200 all entries were illegible. This represented something over half the total. The surfaces of the megaliths were almost completely covered, and initially I assumed that the first entries had been made roughly 2200 years earlier, shortly after the birth of Christ. However, the frequency of the entries increased algebraically: in the 15th century there were one or two a year, by the 20th century there were five or six, and by the present year the number varied from twenty entries from Delta Argus to over thirty-five from Alpha Leporis.

      The last of these, at the extreme right corner of the megalith, was:

CYRARK CCCXXIV

ALPHA LEPORIS

AD 2218

      The letters were freshly incised, perhaps no more than a day old, even a few hours. Below, a free space of two feet reached to the floor.

      Breaking off СКАЧАТЬ