Ratner's Star (58 page)

Wu mused on latent history. Not the negative chronology of years
B.C.
but a class of intelligible events too fine to be collected in the sifting mechanism that determines which sets of occurrences are to be recorded and analyzed as elements in a definite pattern and which examined merely for their visibility as the coarser of the particles in the mesh. Latent in any period's estimation of itself as an age of reason is the specific history of the insane. Diametrically opposed entities, Rob had said, partaking of each other's flesh. Does syncretism really permeate all my thinking? Lost historic categories. Appearing neither in patterns nor as radioactive flashes. One might extend this search for lost categories to a subject as choicely off-putting as guano. The history of guano mining. Worldwide guano markets. Effects of guano on agriculture, trade, society. Bird matter vs. bat matter. Soil renewal and patterns of economic decline. Techniques of vacuum-pumping bat guano by the ton into enormous cylinders which are hauled out of the caves by an aerial conveyor system, and the profits thereof.

Not far from the fragments of pottery he found a circular bronze mirror, its reflecting surface shattered, the rest of it in remarkably good condition. This was by far the most interesting thing he'd come upon since he'd started exploring these caves. He estimated its period as late Warring States, which coincided well enough with the lead-glazed bowl.
He used his pocket magnifier to examine the back of the mirror, its concave rim, the concave band encircling the small fluted knob at the very center. Between rim and band was the ornamental field. He was both surprised and undazzled by the mirror's design element. Abstract geometric patterns executed in thread relief. A ring of figures that made him think of the ambiguous markings on the stone at Sangkan Ho. What was surprising was the fact that the design was so purely non-representational, apparently empty of any attempt on the craftsman's part to stylize animal or other figures or in any way to sacrifice reality to principles of design; most likely there'd been no thought at all of an antecedent reality. What was undazzling about the mirror was the fact that it was so completely free of the swarming ornamentation, the animal motifs, the dragon scrolls, the cosmological diagrams, the visual puns, the syncretistic juxtapositions and the
b'ai kiu
or play-verse as well as other types of inscriptions that characterized centuries of Chinese mirrormaking. He spotted several corroded areas that would have to be swabbed with a chemical solution to remove the offending copper chloride, an agent of what is known as bronze disease. Of course, oldness was one thing. Europe, Mexico, the Transvaal, the East African rift valley. Oldness was one thing but reverse evolution was something else; probable mental progression in the wrong direction; advancement backward. It was one thing that the findings were pushing human origins back to a point in time much more remote than anyone had believed possible; it was quite another thing (as he was reminded in thinking of the Sangkan Ho stone) to find signs of advancing culture the deeper we probe. With his trowel he drew and marked a figure in the powdery dung.

So we begin to see not only that we go back much farther than previously estimated but also that there is no aspect of the natural history of the brain or femur that makes it obligatory to deduce that evidence of our extended lineage must show ever increasing primitivism—smaller and smaller cranial volume, cruder tool types, nonhuman skeletal organization. Given the questions that still existed concerning the early atmosphere of the planet and the age and nature of the first living organisms, given the factors not yet taken into account (there are always factors not yet taken into account), given the relative speed with which complicated molecular systems developed and the nonrigorous estimates of the time involved for these designs to elaborate themselves, it seemed to Maurice Wu that an element of poetic truth might be contained in the speculation that humans and their precursors filled that huge primordial blank in the fossil record (a blank just beginning to be systematically roughed-in). Not being a specialist in biochemistry he had the advantage of nearly free-reined conjecture and used it to imagine a form of accelerated evolution (a process consisting, after all, of nothing more than life plus time) taking place in some lost fold of our genetic beginnings, long before the firemakers, the cave painters, the crafters of bone daggers, the brachiating primates, the bipeds who sucked nonopposable thumbs. This expeditious, this somewhat cursory emergence would be followed, in his scheme, by a gradual decline to the point where cranial capacity measured well under a thousand cubic centimeters, which is precisely where things at the Sangkan Ho strata began to get interesting. Poetic truth usually raises more questions than the fledgling poet is inclined to answer; nevertheless, he believed, we are on to something here.

Billy kept on rocking, enjoying the illusion that the room was gradually emptying itself of exhausted thought. Dense sensations reduced themselves to points, lines and planes. The unshaded bulb. The rectangular imprint on one wall. The pattern made by the grain in the hardwood floor. The hands on the clock. The angle at which light climbed one wall. The continuous functional shift in the room's configuration (noun to verb) due to his movement in the rocker. Something may happen at fourteen hours, twenty-eight minutes and fifty-seven
seconds on a day yet to be determined. The correct number of objects. The objects spaced at fitting distances. The distances defined in varying degrees of light and shade. The light and shade informed by a converse moderation. Space and periodic solids. Continuously filled transitions. Acts of the time-factoring mind.

Several ravaging bats swept past an outcropping of rock and then flashed toward the ceiling. Wu was unable to observe the subsequent kills at the precise time they took place (due to
megaderma
's quickness and his own delayed reaction) but did manage to “re-record” events (or fit them together) as the discarded parts of a number of roosting bats hit the floor of the cave. Deciding to inspect these particular in-edibles, presumably wings and heads, he got up and walked toward the other end of the cave, filled with a childlike mingling of aversion and thrill, the severed and no doubt bloody extremities concentrated in an area dense with limestone formations. When he got there he realized he would either have to squeeze past some jagged rocks to reach the leavings or enter the area through a small crawlway. In a prone position he began to work his way through the opening, which was of no greater length than his own body but more cramped than he'd expected. He was nearly to the other end when the flame in his headlamp went out. The darkness was total and he was frozen to the stone. He tried to think beyond the level of unchecked hysteria. The core of his immobility was a whirl of (psychic) motion. He told himself to remain calm. He tried to fight the illusion of rush, of speed, of overwhelming events. He couldn't move his arms to reach the matches in his coveralls. With a lighted match he could easily find his way to the backpack on the other side of the cave. In the backpack were candles. In the light of one of these candles he could easily refill the carbide lamp. But he couldn't seem to move. He told himself to think into this problem calmly. After a while he was able to grasp the possibilities. Either he couldn't move because his fear had made him rigid. Or he was wedged. He realized he was not breathing properly and then felt chills in his upper body. He tried to gauge his panic, to talk to it, to determine its contents. Again he told himself to proceed with utter calm. He summarized the situation and calmly measured the depths of his terror. It
was difficult to maintain a thought for more than several seconds. He attempted to concentrate on the problem of movement, on involuntary rigidity versus being wedged. This is unreal fear, he told himself. This is fear based on unreasonable foundation. This is unfounded fear. In a series of incomplete summaries he tried to tell himself what had happened, where he was, how he felt, when he would be able to move again. But being wedged. The possibility of being wedged kept occurring to him. Being wedged meant something he did not give a name to. There was still the feeling of speed to contend with, the rush of events (although obviously nothing was happening), this uncontrollable hurry in his mind, this nullifying plunge. He tried to recall precisely what had happened. Was darkness all that happened? Or did his shoulders become stuck in the crawlway as well? He wasn't sure. He couldn't remember. He was afraid to try to squirm backward. He thought this might confirm his being wedged. He thought his feet, his toes might be able to move slightly, his hands, his fingers, thus establishing that it was not fear that caused his immobility. His body itself would be stuck fast. Then he would know he was wedged. There was no dark adaptation, or adjustment of the eyes, in this total blackness. This was not just complete absence of light but a state of its own, the quality of authentic darkness, that aspect of nightlikeness which makes distinctions impossible. This dark had a special presence. It was far from empty. It was not just nonlight. It had a nature that dated back. It had intrinsic characteristics. It was animal. Be calm, he thought. Analyze the fear and you will control it. He began to wail then. It happened before he knew what was taking place and after a while it seemed that he had given himself over to this lamentation as one enters an irreversible state of being. What came out of him was a series of prolonged near-rhythmic sounds, intense and pitiful, marked by the fact that he was able to sustain each high-pitched cry far longer than might have been considered possible under the circumstances, any circumstances.

Wu was engaged in a lifelong effort to become Chinese. His crossing between the spheres was becoming burdensome in many ways, with the result that what had been a tendency to examine and strengthen the Oriental aspects of his identity was now a demanding need and more. The cultural parts could not be equated; the languages were noninter-locking; the souls did not shine in each other's light. These, it seemed, were the obstacles he faced. His own life then was a bitter contradiction of that dyadic principle of thought in which an element complements its opposite. State of being one. Singleness of purpose. Constancy and accord. Ironic that these intuitive Chinese objectives were precisely what he saw no hope of attaining in the years that remained to him (relative youth notwithstanding). During his stays at one or another division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences he was never able to believe that his presence was any more than an
exchange
of some unspecifiable sort, a form of reciprocal scientific politeness in which a rather anonymous prehistorian from the West is allowed to stride casually in and out of
the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, occasionally speaking the language to colleagues, who (as per terms of contract) answer him in elaborately meaningless phrases—this entire affair, down to the length of his stride, subject to duplication in a Western university (or some such) with a slightly Westernized Chinese scientist doing the striding and with English the language in question.

Vocal sounds in meaningful patterns.

The language itself, Chinese, was a deeply woven structure through which he tried to guide his intercultural assumptions. To become Chinese was to rethink oneself, to yield to alien verities. Whatever was in him of that nation and race had to be allowed to find its way to definitive expression. The vagueness of such an undertaking was precisely what made it seem impossible; the generalities that had to be exposed in layers; the set of personal characteristics that had to be restaged somehow; the primary source that had to be found; the embedded part of him that had to be read and understood: