The Anomaly(45)

“And that other stuff—it’s at the far end?”

“Yeah.”

She reached down to pull her T-shirt over her head.

“Excuse me?” I said.

She undid her jeans and pushed them down, too. “I’m not trying to sleep in wet clothes afterward.”

“Okay then.”

“I am wearing underwear. You’ll cope.”

I stood there dithering, wondering whether to do the same. It’d taken a long while for my clothes to dry off after the last time. By the time I’d decided, she’d already launched herself off the edge and into the pool, in a practiced shallow dive.

I transferred everything of importance to my shirt pocket and let myself gently down off the edge, still fully clothed, feeling like her granddad.



“Did you notice every one of these is different?”

We’d walked around the spheres. She agreed that each looked like it was a different type of metal or mineral. She was now standing at the rock in the middle and talking about the pictograms carved on its top surface.

I joined her. She was right. It didn’t leap out at you because each of the composite forms was somewhat complex, a combination of between four and six individual symbols. At a guess I’d say there were thirty or forty of these component images. Some simple geometric signs, others that looked like a sheaf of wheat, or an oval with six tiny lines coming out of it—a stylized sun, or perhaps a sacred bug or something, as I’d speculated last time I was here. The human mind seeks patterns, so when you look at the surface you tend to see uniformity—the repetition of the constituent symbols. It took a little longer to appreciate there was uniqueness within the bigger picture. Each of the hundred icons was different.

“Huh.”

“There’s a smear on it.”

A small brown smudge across the top. “Gemma was dripping blood from that scrape on her arm,” I said.

“So what is this thing?”

“I don’t know. A dictionary. A galactic genesis myth. A grain inventory. Somebody with tenure will work it out.”

“Assuming anybody else ever sees it.”

Even though I’d thought this myself earlier, I gently trod on the idea. “Which they will, Molly. Obviously.”

“Nolan—how are we going to get out of here?”

“Tomorrow morning Feather will go look for Dylan again. If he’s not there…I talked to her about the idea of climbing down and waiting there all day, or maybe swimming downriver. She’s willing to do either.”

“But where the hell did Dylan go?”

She sounded petulant, betrayed, and young. That and the fact she was standing there in wet underwear made her seem very unlike Molly Mom.

“He went to organize more food. It took longer than expected. In addition, possibly, the raft was too hard to work by himself in more hectic waters. He will, maybe even as we speak, be resolving one or both of those problems. He’ll be there bright and early tomorrow morning, and our situation will rapidly start to improve.”

She looked up at me hopefully. “You think so?”

“You met the guy, Moll. He has a great big ego, and with that comes pride. He’s not just going to bail.”

“I hope you’re right.”

“Molly—what’s the deal here? I mean, you don’t have to tell me. But you can if you want.”

She looked away, at the symbols. Then pushed back from the stone and wandered to the edge of the platform. She sat down, pulled her knees up, and wrapped her arms around them.

I came and sat cross-legged a few feet away. Took out a cigarette. Eleven left now. I frugally lit up with a match from the book I’d found, reasoning that it was a good idea to conserve my lighter as much as possible. As I did so I noticed the book was from a bar in Santa Monica—the one Kristy and I had finished up in, the night I bailed from the movie industry, in fact. I know the owner a little and he’s a bad-tempered asshole, prone to fight any form of opposition—and signs of “progress” in particular—with both fists. Hence still printing his own matchbooks, years after you were last allowed to smoke in a bar in LA. I realized there were probably drinkers in their twenties now who simply didn’t understand why bars had matchbooks. It’d be like having menus in places that had never sold food. We live among fossils and rock paintings and ancient signs, wherever we are.

I sat smoking for a while, Molly looking out at the water.

“You know…” she said eventually, “I don’t even know. I mean, I know what it’s supposed to be. The issue. I’ve been over it. With people whose job it is to know how to get to the other side of that kind of thing. And I have. And it’s not like it’s so terrible. It’s really, really not. It’s barely anything. And nothing lurid. This is not NSFW material.”

“That’s a relief. Not a Bad Uncle story, then.”

“My uncle’s awesome,” she said. “He taught me to surf. But actually…he is kind of relevant. Though he doesn’t know it. Look, bottom line, there was this night. When I was a kid. I was seven years old. And I woke up.”

She stopped. Breathed in, breathed out.

And then she told me.





Chapter

27