Fatalis

Chapter Seventeen

Grand pulled up to the curb just as Fluffy was coming in from his late afternoon walk. The scientist was looking forward to seeing the dog. He could use some unqualified support after the difficult encounter with Tumamait.

He didn't get it.

The Labrador retriever had a walker named Stanley Walker, which was one of the reasons Rebecca had hired him. The retired actor was conscientious and had good references, but Rebecca also enjoyed irony and silliness.

Fluffy usually greeted Grand by throwing his oversized front paws on his chest and barking until he drooled. Today he planted his paws on Grand's chest and just stood looking up at him, silently.

"What's wrong, boy?" Grand asked.

"He's been a tad weird today," said the short, white-haired, well-groomed Walker.

"In what way?"

"Our boy has been extremely quiet."

Grand put his hands under Fluffy's big ears and looked into his gentle eyes. "You got a problem you need to talk about? Was that collie next door teasing you again?"

"I don't think so," Walker said. "Marley was quiet today too. So were my other dogs."

Grand looked at Walker. "All of them?"

Walker nodded.

"Has that ever happened before?"

"Just once," Walker said. "Right before the Northridge earthquake. But this is different."

"In what way?"

"It's not like they're earthquake afraid," Walker told him. "They haven't been hiding under the bed or in the bathtub or any of that business. It's also not a sick quiet I don't feed them the same brand of food, so it isn't poisoning. They're just-not excitable. That's the best way I can describe it."

Grand scratched hard behind Fluffy's ears. The dog took it without his usual panting enthusiasm.

"See what I mean?" Walker said.

Grand nodded. "It could be the weather."

"Too much gray?" Walker said.

"Maybe. Something else we can blame on La Nina. If we can whip up a little sun tomorrow maybe we'll all feel a little better."

"I know I would," Walker said as he gave Fluffy's ribs a strong pat. "I'm running out of dry shoes." He gave the big dog another pat and then headed for his station wagon. "Well, good night, Fluffy. Good night, Professor."

"Good night," Grand said.

Grand and the dog crossed the stone walk that cut through the center of the small, neatly kept yard. Grand had cut the seven stones himself after Rebecca's death. He'd carved them in the mountains and carted them down here; anyone who looked at them closely might notice that they were rough-hewn letters that spelled his wife's name.

Grand took a quick shower, dressed in sweatclothes, and snatched a cold chicken drumstick from the refrigerator. He usually bought a whole cooked chicken on Sunday and picked at it the rest of the week. It was only Wednesday; this bird wasn't going to make it But it had been an active week and Grand usually didn't bother eating lunch.

He finished the chicken leg and sat down at his crowded desk. Fluffy lay on the mat beside the chair, as usual. As Walker had said, there didn't seem to be anything wrong with him other than the fact that he was quiet Rebecca had always insisted that animals could get the blues, just like people. Maybe La Nina was that cause.

Grand booted the computer. Over the years be had built an extensive library of prehistoric and pictographic art, starting with books he had begun accumulating when he was six years old.

Back when he was Jimmie " Grand Canyon ," he thought. The memory came with feelings that were both bitter and warm, loving and angry, polar emotions in careful balance. Two more things that were perched on the tips of the Great Eagle's all-encompassing wings.

Grand still had those original books on his shelves. Only now there were literally thousands of books featuring tens of thousands of illustrations ranging from the hieroglyphs of Middle Eastern peoples to the more recent designs of Native Americans. While many of the illustrations were in books, some were on videotape and some-most, in fact-were stuffed in file folders.

Undergraduate anthropology students at the university had been scanning the loose art onto diskette for Grand. He decided to check those first The pieces had been indexed by subject and he began by inputting the keywords moon, sun, planets, comets, and stars. Grand was more familiar with the European and North and South American animal art than he was with celestial art and was curious to see what would turn up.

The search gave him star charts of prehistoric Polynesian seamen, carvings of constellations by the Naxca peoples of southern Peru, stars drawn in the Sacred Almanac of the Mayans, Babylonian lunar maps, and the Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, monuments of the Anasazi,

Grand accessed the Anasazi photographs, which were of artwork dating from A.D. 900 through 1130. There was a color petrograph of the 1,054 supernova which created the Crab Nebula. It consisted of carvings showing three concentric circles roughly a foot in diameter with flame firing off to the right. Above it were a large star, a crescent moon, and a handprint.

All of the renderings were interpretive rather than literal. So were the astronomical designs Grand found in other files. The Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty visualized the omnipotent sun as a wide, glowing eye. The Hopi of the North American Southwest portrayed stars as flaming arrow tips. The Thules of prehistoric Alaska imagined shooting stars to be the dripping blood of wounded animals. Apparently, no early artists had rendered the heavens as literally as the Chumash painter. Grand checked some of his books and found the same symbolic art among other ancient peoples.

That made sense, he thought. Like the afterworld, the heavens were incomprehensible to ancient people. They would have personified or anthropomorphized the universe to make it understandable.

Grand sat back in his chair. It was getting dark and he switched on the fluorescent desk lamp. He thought for a moment. He went over what Tumamait had told him, but he didn't have any new insights on his single word.

"Exactly."

He put Tumamait from his mind for now and went back to the source. Maybe the old man didn't know the answer and was simply suggesting that the question itself was the problem.

The trick to solving mysteries like these was to try and free the mind from contemporary knowledge and references. Not to think of the earth or moon as huge spheres but as a fragile dirt shell and a bright eagle's eye in the sky, respectively. To imagine the gods living above and below and seeing everything and controlling the weather and the flow of water and the fertility of the land. To be aware of their spirit emissaries moving through the dark to give shamans visions and ordinary mortals dreams or nightmares.

To think like an ancient man.

When that was done, it was necessary to look at the designs for the first time-again.

He had found Chumash paintings of the Great Eagle soaring through blackness, but never any that represented the heavens. Perhaps showing the god was as far as the shamans went.

"Hold on," Grand thought aloud. "Maybe they're not stars at all, Fluffy."

Grand went back to his earlier thoughts and word-searched eggs. He found several designs from around the world. They ranged from perfect ovals to cracked ovals to hatched and broken shells. Some eggs were giving birth to animals, some to people, some to hybrid gods. Some were white, some were brown, some were red. He found nothing that looked like the Chumash designs. He checked Native American alphabet. The Chumash frequently traded with other tribes, perhaps they picked up some of their symbols.

He looked at samples of the Cherokee alphabet, of the Mohawk, the Blackfoot, the Cree, the Lakota, the Potawatomi, and others. There was nothing that looked like what he'd seen in the tunnel.

"Maybe you're still going about this the wrong way," he said to himself.

Typically, Chumash cave paintings were not interrelated. Designs within individual caves were often random, like the rooms in a museum. They were linked only by the artist or the era. Maybe these were different. Perhaps the mountain with the snake and the mountain with the dolphin were designed to lead to the paintings in the tunnel.

"The dolphin mountain is white," Grand said. "Maybe the pictures are supposed to be ice or snow."

But deep inside the mountain? That made no sense.

Maybe the designs were meant to be read the other way, from the bottom up. The circles and crescents could be leading to the mountains, flowing from inside the earth.

"What about seeds?" he thought out loud. "Maybe the Chumash thought that mountains were born from rock-eggs. Or maybe the designs are supposed to be clouds formed inside the earth-"

Grand liked that one. Maybe the shamans thought that clouds were smoke, that they were formed by fires that burned inside the earth. He decided to word-search clouds, see if there were other examples of subterranean origins. Even when ancient peoples had no contact they often came up with similar ideas, such as boats or rafts that took the dead to the underworld or newborn kings being sent to earth in baskets. The phenomenon was called "cultural parallelism" and it had helped Grand interpret cave paintings in the past.

As the computer searched for clouds. Grand looked down at Fluffy. The dog was asleep on his mat.

"What do you think, boy?" Grand asked. "Did the shamans believe that clouds were made from fire?"

Fluffy looked up and Grand reached down to scratch the dog under the chin. As he did, Grand saw something he hadn't noticed before.

"Shit," he said as he swung back to the computer, canceled the search, and started a new one.