Somewhither: A Tale of the Unwithering Realm (3 page)

Dad took down his arm and sat up. He had not undressed, so that his Kevlar jacket still covered him mostly; but he had unzipped it, so a flap hung open, and the white collar of the deacon’s uniform he wore beneath was visible above his ammo bandolier. Around his neck, on a chain of rosary beads the Archbishop himself had blessed, he wore an ivory crucifix that contained, in a tiny glass vacuole, the finger bone of Saint Demetrius of Sermium, patron saint of Crusaders, coated in the oil it spontaneously exuded. Next to it, in a sheath, was his black-bladed stiletto with the wide hilts, a dark cross next to a pale one.

“No, my son, if you must believe that there are many worlds, believe me, I pray you, that if you do evil in this world, you have not the power to create some new world where that choice was made aright. Only the Creator can create new worlds. Only miracles change history; nothing inside nature has the power to undo the natural consequences of what evil men do.”

Then he looked at me sharply and said, “What order are you thinking of disobeying? What promise were you planning to break?”

He had been playing Huckle Buckle Beanstalk too, it seemed, and somehow figured out exactly where to put his hand to find what I was hiding from him, my own personal little sizzling thimble.

The fire was hot, and I was bent over it, so that I did not notice the warmth of the blush of anger spreading through my face until I heard how harsh my answer was: “Is my life all a lie? Well, you would know, wouldn’t you, Dad?
If
you are my dad!”

I gave the fake log one last strong blow from the fire poker, then stood and turned. I pointed the poker at him accusingly. “How many universes are there? You
know
, don’t you?”

The same day Professor Dreadful was dragged away in a straitjacket, raving, I discovered what he had been working on.

You see, I did not want to go home and face the looks on the faces of Dobrin and Father. Looks of total not-surprise, looks that said
I told you so
louder than words. And I could not stay at the Museum; they had a cordon around it.

It was a simple choice. Either he was crazy, and there was no way to translate random marks left by a random energy discharge during a random accident because there was nothing to translate, just a crazed mind seeing patterns in chaos, like a child who keeps seeing his mother’s face in the fluffy clouds. Or he was crazy, but right, and had read them.

I decided on option two. Because that meant I did not need to go home right away and face Dobrin’s carefully sarcastic unshocked looks.
So your Professor who collects animals that don’t exist actually was a babbling lunatic after all, not just a guy who acted like one?

What angle had the Professor been working on? What had he seen that the rest of the world had not?

So I went to the library. I looked up his work, read his papers and articles.

Hours went by, but it was not hard work, like weeding ruins, just brainwork, and if bow-hunting teaches anything, it teaches patience.

I struck gold when I found a recent issue of
SIGN AND SEMIOTICS
journal, which published peer-reviewed papers on comparative symbology. Tucked in between an article on Merovingian Grail-Kings and an article on the links between Egyptian esoteric practices and the Cathars of Andalusia, was a paper by my own Professor Achitophel Dreadful.

It was an article on semantic drift between Akkadian Cuneiform and a hypothetical proto-Sumerian logogram system, deduced from an application of Grimm’s Law. The article had extensive footnotes, as you’d expect, and some of the references were to books right here in this very library—where, come to think of it, the Professor was doing most of his research last year.

I had to get the librarian to unlock the case in the rare books room tucked into a corner of the top floor.

“You have to sign in,” she said sharply, pointing with her beaklike nose toward the visitor’s log.

I was looking for one book in particular from the Professor’s footnotes. And I found it, tucked between the sole surviving volume, number XI, of the lost
First Encyclopædia of Tlön
compiled by the Orbis Tertius Society, and a rare unabridged edition of
A Study of the Chaldaean Roots in the Ancient Cornish Language (with observations on the early tin trade in West Cornwall)
by W.S.S. Holmes. The book I sought had the catchy title of
Paleogenetic Assessments of Epipaleolithic Migration and Population Replacement in Erythraean Coastal Areas
by the Eritrean Research Project Team.

The librarian had to sit in the rare books room with me, since I was underage, or maybe she just did not trust my sloping cranium with its supraorbital brow ridge. She watched me with a cold and scowling eye while I read, no doubt fretting that, had she not been there, I would have blown my nose on the antique pages. I even had to wear white plastic gloves while handling the book. I don’t know if everyone who steps into the rare books room has to wear them, or only teenagers with oily skin.

I thought it would be dull as ditchwater. Instead, I kept having that dizzying sensation Dorothy must have felt when she stepped out of her monochrome Kansas house into the Technicolor Munchkinland. Twice I flipped back to the front matter to assure myself that this was a real, copyrighted book published by Cambridge University Press.

There was a discussion of the
Urheimat
, which is the hypothetical homeland of whatever tribe fathered the first Indo-European language.

For over a century, scholars had speculated about the location of Urheimat. This volume claimed to know the secret: one of the most fertile lands of the Fertile Crescent, between Ethiopia and Felix Arabia, between the Kebassa plateau and the Red Sea, where the modern city of Asmara rises in Eritrea.

This is the spot where legend says the Queen of Sheba gave birth to the son of Solomon, Menelich, while history says the ambition of Caesar during his Egyptian campaigns attempted to annex this rich land but failed. Long before Caesar, before Solomon, before even the long-vanished Sabaeans dwelt here, the nameless and primordial tribe of Man walked upright, invented fire, invented language: The first tribe of the first true humans.

That original band of fire-using early man was less than two thousand breeding individuals. Recent studies in genetics traced all human lineages back to ten sons of a genetic patriarch and eighteen daughters of a genetic matriarch. The Tree of Man is rooted in a single mother, the mitochondrial matriarch, because all other branches fell extinct. The first three lineages that arose from the genetic patriarch spread through Africa. Most paleogeneticists rather fancifully referred to the ancestral genetic markers as Shem, Ham and Japheth. This author, more stolid, designated them Son I, Son II and Son III.

Son III’s lineage was the one with whom this author was mainly concerned, the line from which races as distinct as Chaldaeans and Cornishmen, Peloponnesians and Paleosiberian Macedonians and Manx arose. Perhaps clutching logs, this clan braved the waters of the Red Sea, those straits the Arabs call
The Gate of Grief
: twenty miles from isle to isle to the coasts of what is now Yemen. From there, Son III and his bloodline migrated to Asia to beget Sons designated IV through X: this great Diaspora of his bloodline reached from the Sea of Japan (Son IV), to Northern India (Son V) to the South Caspian (Sons VI and IX).

I bent my head over the page. The author speculated about the origins of dialects, and how they grow to form independent languages, and why they change over time. His basic question: since there is such a strong evolutionary incentive for individuals and groups to communicate with each other, either to form alliances in war or partnerships in peace, what possible reason was there for linguistic drift? Why did people form local dialects which rendered them unable to talk to their cousins in the tribe a day’s march away? No other animal signals, birdcalls and suchlike, showed such a strong and rapid drift.

He saw how you would get special words for birds and beasts in one area not found in another, or why seashore people would have names for tools and nautical terms that mountain-dwelling tribes would lack: but aside from these special cases, whoever
stops
using a word his neighbors and ancestors used, and deliberately starts using a word no one understands?

The trait of misunderstanding had no evolutionary value, no good reason to exist.

He did not think it was nurture that caused languages to divide away from each other. He thought it was nature: a genetic disease. This author had written out the transmission vectors of the disease. As best he could from genetic and cultural clues, he tried to identify where it had started, how it had spread.

The Y chromosome lineages are positively associated with the major language groups of the world. In the absence of the genetic drift or defect, there is no correlative grammatical drift…

… the indication is that some primordial catastrophe, of which no record survives, or perhaps garbled as myth, disorganized the genetic and intellectual structure of early man, causing a rapid degeneration from the robust features and larger brain of the Neanderthal, and other transitional forms…

The back flap of the book was a folding chart, like a map, of the linguistic tree, showing the descent of all the dead languages in the world.

It was yellow with age, and brittle, and I unfolded it very carefully, while the librarian stared at me, looking like she wanted to hiss. I did not tear it.

The sheet, unfolded, covered most of the table, and was covered with hundreds of spidery branching lines, like a family tree, or like a nervous system would look, if you just picked it up out of someone’s body by the upper spinal column, and let the nerves dangle.

At the lowest root of the tree was a strange word:
Ursprache
.

This was the name assigned for the hypothetical common ancestral tongue of the Cauco-Sinitic, Euro-Asiatic, and Austric language groups; the languages of Son I, Son II and Son III.

If it had been spoken at all, it was spoken thirty-five thousand to sixty million years ago. The diagram showed the first major division into three language families appearing in the Tigris-Euphrates valley: that was the day the pan-human Ursprache language died. An explosion of languages followed. According to this chart, it had occurred as suddenly, on the geological scale, as the extinction of the dinosaurs and the explosion of mammalian varieties of life. But what was the disaster?

Something fluttered to the floor like a dry leaf. It was a folded scrap of paper. I dropped my pencil, bent over, and palmed the scrap of paper before the librarian saw me.

I did not dare look at it until I was outside, just in case the librarian was peering at me through a slatted window, around the corner. I didn’t know what the penalty was for stealing material from the library, but even if the cops were not involved, the librarian knew my family, as well as knowing my boss, since both Dad and the Professor were pretty frequent visitors.

The little scrap was in Professor Dreadful’s handwriting.

WE is right! The Cuneiform is Ursprache!! An application of the Law of Semantic Drift, following an analogous genetic drift, to the earliest possible ur-words of the CS, EA, and A linguistic groups reveals common signs.

Parallel worlds use the common oldest language found on all versions of Earth as their Lingua Franca: the one semiotic form older than all others, the central stem predating the earliest division of offshoots.

On the other side of the scrap were questions.

What world is my daughter from?

Not mine, nor the Incarnation Earth. Hidden world?

How many universes are there?

At that time, that day when the Professor was first committed, I had not had the courage to ask my Dad that question.

I knew there was more.

To be sure, the globe of the earth and the reach of the skies, from amoeba to the great nebula in Andromeda, all the cosmos is fearsomely and wonderfully made. You have to be dead inside not to be awed, or stupid to pretend to be so cool as not to be. You cannot just be a scientist to learn it all, not just an explorer to see it, not just a poet to praise it, not just a priest to bless it. You also have to be a hero to protect it.

But there are also clues in the Earth, hidden things, overlooked, half-whispered things; clues that there is something more. Our world is mostly civilized these days, mostly tamed: but I knew there was wildness and weirdness out there. Where? Hither or thither or somewhere or somewhither: In elfland or outer space or beyond the walls of the world.

And it was as if I could smell the wild hint of that somewhither clinging to my father like woodsmoke, like the musk of bloodshed.

Whenever I caught the scent, my happy life turned into a beartrap I would have gnawed off my leg to escape. Some universe larger than this one was meant for me.

And then there was the girl. (Maybe she was meant for me, too? But that was a thought I dare not think or else my brain might explode.) So I had to know if her peril was real. Not everything madmen say can be trusted.

So I had to ask. My words gushed out in an angry rush.

“How many worlds are there? And where do you go on your business trips? What
business
requires you be armed to the teeth? And don’t say it is dangerous missionary work—”

He said, “It is. Missionaries sometimes have to enter other — I mean, enter other
places
that are a little, ah, wild, and with my background in the service — it’s not illegal, but it is not something the Council of Bishops wants any public, ah, outcry —”

“— Where do you go? Name the spot on the globe. Give me the longitude and latitude, can’t you? You can’t. And you can’t tell me who am I really, can you,
Father
? Can’t or won’t! Why don’t I look like you or like my brothers?
And tell me where Mom is!
”