Alien Mysteries Collection

Chapter 5

Nosuma looked over the map on the wall, where five excavation sites were marked, edifices of stone abandoned by the native people some six hundred years before the restoration of interstellar travel. Not one percent of the number she"d seen entering the atmosphere, when she"d first touched the figurine.

She sat in the corridor outside the office of her new supervisor, Otiji Benguela, dressed uncomfortably in skirt, blouse, jacket, and pumps, the clothes insubstantial. Slender to the point of skinny and just five-five, Nosuma didn"t have the figure for business formal. She couldn"t wait to get into her khaki digs and get out to the Zimbabwes, spread across the main continent on Achernar Tertius. In her tool satchel at her feet was a pair of boots, but she hadn"t brought khakis, not on her first day.

Institute Headquarters was utilitarian in design, its purpose to support the teams at the dig sites. The speckled tile showed wear in the center, buildup along the edges. The off-white ceilings might have once been brighter, dust and time having tinged the paint. The waist-high wainscoting was chipped and scored from specimen carts. A patina of dust speckled the light fixtures, lintels, and picture frames.

Through the supervisor"s door she heard voices. “There"s little more here to be found. Why bring her on? It"s Chaos throwing his weight around, butting heads with the board, I tell you.”

“Keep your voice down, for Mwari"s sake. She"s out in the corridor.”

“Chaos” was Doctor Tugulu Kaonde, Chief Archeologist at the Institute, called such behind his back for multiple reasons, primarily his blizzard of journal articles, books, and vids on the Zimbabwes. Doctor Kaonde had also peer-reviewed Nosuma"s doctoral dissertation.

The door opened, and two men came out.

Nosuma stood, trying to act as if she hadn"t overheard.

“Doctor Okande, I presume?” said the taller man in a pretentious English accent, mocking a famous event on Earth. “I"m Otiji Benguela, and this is Laurentius Sese Nyari, President of Shumba Industries, a member of our board of directors.”

“President Nyari, a pleasure to meet you,” she said, extending her hand.

He shook. “Pleased, Doctor Okande. I pray you find Babwe as exciting as Doctor Kaonde paints it.”

“I"m sure I will. The view from the incoming flight was magnificent.”

“See any aliens, Doctor?” Nyari asked. “According to a small group of crackpots and conspiracy theorists, Babwe was occupied by aliens some millennia ago.”

“No sightings from space,” she replied. “Any chance I might happen upon an artifact or two, President Nyari?”

“No one has yet, Doctor Okande. Thanks for your time, Mr. Benguela,” Nyari said to the other man. “I"ll see you soon, I"m sure, Doctor Okande.” And he strode down the corridor.

“Come in, Doctor Okande, pardon the delay.” Otiji led her into his office, where another map hung on the wall, similar to the one in the corridor.

She sat across from his desk, setting her satchel at her feet. “I"m sure there are a hundred formalities to get through, but I want to know whether you received my message.”

“I did, Doctor Okande.” Otiji Benguela frowned at her, his eyebrows climbing his forehead. “That"s an unusual request, Doctor. Why twelve-hour shifts? Nearly everyone else works eight-hour days.”

“Simply put, I can get more done, Mr. Benguela,” she replied, making an effort to keep her eyes on him. Her gaze kept going to the map and the paucity of sites marked upon it.

“Are you sure, Doctor? The work is grueling, quite a contrast to research, content analysis, and the like.”

Nosuma gazed at him, seeing little of the weathering common to their ilk, who spent year after year in the trenches. The amusing phrase, a legacy from a bitterly fought war on the planet Earth some two centuries before the diaspora, had fallen out of common use but was still in vogue among archeologists and excavation crews, its literal meaning highly relevant to their profession. The man across from her bore little sign he spent any time in the trenches, his face baby-skin smooth, his hands soft, his fingernails clean.

Hers weren"t much different. She saw him glance at his bookshelf, where a copy of her dissertation sat, protruding from among the other literature as if recently consulted. A hard-bound copy, she thought, Benguela still adheres to the old ways. Print editions were extremely expensive, bulky, and difficult to find. Two and a half years of her life had gone into its composition, and four years of university curriculum before that. Definitely not the grueling work to be found in the trenches, but grueling in its own way.

She held up her hands. “Many a night I soaked these hands in cold water, they were so sore and swollen from research, content analysis, and the like. Yes, Mr. Benguela, I"m sure.”

He blinked at her and sighed. “Very well. I"ll see if I can find a crew who"ll be willing to work such hours.”

“I appreciate that, Mr. Benguela. Where will I be starting out?”

“First, I"m going to have you orient with Doctor Kaonde, our Director of Research. He"s fluent in Shona and negotiates labor contracts with the local villages. Perhaps he can help you find a twelve-hour crew.”

“Doctor Chaos,” she said, as he was known in academia, his research brilliant but his writing style somewhat prone to chaotic elaboration.

Otiji blanched and coughed. “Not a welcome moniker, Doctor Okande, something I"d suggest you keep to yourself if you wish to preserve the integrity of your anatomy.”

Dr. Kaonde also had a reputation for an acerbic wit and an intolerance for ineptitude.

“Too late, Mr. Benguela. He was one of the peer reviewers.” She threw a glance at her dissertation.

“Oh? And what part of your anatomy are you missing?” Otiji smirked. “He was quite gracious when it was announced you were joining us.”

“Grooming me for s*******r, I"m sure.”

The man across from her suppressed a laugh. “He"ll be here in an hour. In the meantime, Sesotho in HR has a few formalities to review with you, and a hundred or so forms to sign. Good day.”

Nosuma hadn"t told Otiji the real reason for her request. Three twelve-hour days would give her four days at a stretch to do some exploring on her own. But he doesn"t need to know that, she thought.

She spent a perfectly good hour pushing a stylus across a signature pad. Sesotho kept apologizing for the inordinate number of forms to be signed, and the experience might have been less onerous if he hadn"t stammered his every word.

“You"re here, finally!” Dr. Kaonde shouted from the doorway. “We hired you six months ago. What took you so damned long!?”

Nosuma realized he really didn"t want an answer. “You"re here, finally! What took you so damned long?” She stood and shook his hand, imitating his accent. “Thank you, Doctor, for such an effusive and memorable welcome—and for sparing me more of Sesotho"s drudgery. Oh, and it"s a pleasure to see you again, incidentally. Shall we go? I"m looking to put some miles between my backside and that awful chair. Thank you, Sesotho, you"ve perfected the art of toil!” And she was out the door before either could object, satchel in hand.

“Don"t you want to change into digs?” Kaonde asked, catching up with her in the corridor, looking over her skirt, blouse, jacket, and pumps.

“Just going to tour a site, right?”

“You won"t get far in those pumps.”

“Boots in my satchel to match my skirt. Girl"s got to accessorize. Where"s the vehicle?”

“Out back,” Doctor Kaonde said, zipping down a side corridor.

Playing the game of who could keep up with whom, she thought, following.

“Doctor, wait!” called a voice from behind them.

“Pay no attention,” the Doctor muttered to her, slowing not at all. They"d just made it out the door when the person caught up with them.

“Looking for these, Doctor?” He jiggled a set of keys, and then whipped them behind his back when the Doctor tried to grab them. “Signatures first, Doctor Kaonde.” The man turned to Nosuma. “I"m Rufiji Duala, Doctor Kaonde"s administrative assistant. Welcome aboard, Doctor Okande. You want anything, supplies, driver, vehicle, shovel, axe, murder weapon, you see me. If you ask Doctor Kaonde, you"ll be waiting so long, you"ll contemplate homicide. Everyone around here has wanted to kill him at one time or another, right, Doctor?”

He looked up from the device Rufiji had shoved in front of him. “Eh? Stop spreading nasty, well-known facts about me. Of course. Not doing my job if anyone likes me. Being obstinate"s the only way to get things done, right, Doctor?” He grinned at her.

“Nice should never be underestimated, Doctor,” she retorted. “But you"ve never tried it, so how could you know?”

“Touché, touché,” he said, shoving the tablet at Rufiji and taking the keys. “Back this afternoon, Rufi.”

Nosuma followed him to the hover and climbed in the passenger side.

“Helluva dissertation, Doctor,” he said as they roared away, Nosuma clinging to her seat as he swerved recklessly between other vehicles.

She was sure he was doing double the speed limit. The yellow caution lights atop the vehicle and the Institute emblems on the doors gave it the air of officialdom, but she was certain they weren"t a license to drive hazardously.

On the main highway out of town, he took the hover to its top speed, the occasional tree whisking past. He drove with one hand on the wheel and the other on the horn, bleating it so often that speech was impossible. She wished the vehicle had had a set of five-points, the shoulder and waist strap almost inadequate to keep her in her seat.

“Here we are,” he said, pulling onto a side road.

They dropped to a stop at the base of a small rise where other vehicles were parked. Ahead, just over the rise, Nosuma glimpsed the top of a wall—or at least a stone escarpment too straight and even to be natural.

She opened her bag and pulled out her boots. “You go ahead if you like. I"ll be along in a moment.”

“I"ll wait. Your dissertation was a welcome reminder to us all that acceptance of conventional wisdom is the alluring trap of complacency. We build these ivory towers for ourselves and end up prisoners of our own devices, wondering what happened.”

She allowed herself a small smile. “I continue to ask myself if I"ve done the same.”

“Bless that you do, Doctor Okande. Maybe you"ll be able to swing back the pendulum of knowledge so violently, you"ll have expanded its boundaries.”

She tied the last lace, gratified at his praise. She swung her snug, calf-high boots out the door and shouldered her tool satchel and handbag. “Ready.”

They trudged up the hill.

At the crest, the full wall was visible. Nosuma stopped, awed.

This first, outer wall of the Great Zimbabwe soared easily thirty-five feet, made of blocks of native granite fitted without mortar, curving gracefully away on either side, the narrow end of a weaving ellipse, a well-worn track at its base, the whole structure looking indomitable. At multiple points along the base were portals, each framed with planters protruding from the wall.

“It"s magnificent.”

He raised an eyebrow at her. “You know its dimensions.” Dr. Kaonde said. “Eighteen hundred acres of interlocking walls, buttresses, berms, and towers, occupied by twenty thousand people in its heyday. A magnificent structure, left behind by the ancestors without a word as to how or why they built it.”

She recognized other structures in the compound beyond the wall. A conical tower poked above it, the individual stones visible, and the entire tower looking as if it defied gravity in standing so tall. Other shapes of unknown purpose jutted above the wall, the outer barrier just one of many walls within the compound.

“Why don"t you go ahead, Doctor?” she said.

“I"ll be at the main encampment over there.” He pointed to the northwest, nodded, and descended the knoll.

Nosuma returned her gaze to the complex.

This was what she"d worked for, to study a place long past its zenith, so ancient and glorious, one which retained its majesty long after its builders had died off, leaving behind only their bones and the artifacts of their daily lives. Nosuma could almost see the traffic, people bustling about as they conducted their commerce and explored their potential from within the security of such a monumental edifice.

The Shona people who"d emigrated from Earth in the diaspora had landed on Achernar Tertius, a mostly-grasslands planet circling a hot blue star in the Eridani Constellation, and then had been forgotten when war had erupted along the Orion Spur. Interstellar trade had collapsed and halted further human expansion, leaving thousands of settled planets isolated for nearly a millennium, many colonies dying off for lack of vital manufacturing, while technological levels fell below pre-diaspora levels, spaceflight prohibitive to all but the most-densely populated core systems. Humanity had nearly bombed itself back into the Stone Age.

Among the colonies left to fend for themselves had been those on Achernar Tertius, or Babwe, as it was known to its inhabitants. The Shona had thrived on the planet in spite of the sudden collapse in trade and technology, adapting readily to local conditions, despite their reversion to early Iron Age levels of civilization.

The hills surrounding the Great Zimbabwe were granite ridges devoid of all florae but the hardiest of tree and grass. As such, it was the perfect building material for a people suddenly left to fend for themselves. The paucity of large forests had practically forced them to build in stone.

From this vantage, Nosuma could just see the outlines of the entire complex, portions visible as it rolled across the hillsides, slumbering under the early morning sun, as it had since being abandoned nearly six hundred years before.

The reason the Zimbabwes had been abandoned was still an enigma.

Built across a relatively short span of one hundred years, the great Zimbabwe had been occupied for an equivalent period, and then abandoned by its occupants suddenly and mysteriously, conjectures pointing to overgrazing, shifting trade routes, depletion of local mineral resources, and the like. In her dissertation, Nosuma had argued that these posited theories were nothing more than conjecture, and no one really knew why a city the size of the Great Zimbabwe had been abandoned.

She scanned its far edges, just visible along the slight rise across the valley, where lesser outlying structures stood outside the main wall. These were a people who hadn"t feared incursion, she knew. The walls had multiple portals, each framed by a pair of bulging pillars, garden planters atop those pillars. The lintels of each portal were made of multiple beams laid crosswise. Unlike structures on other planets, the Shona had used not a single arch across Babwe, and yet every single portal stood preserved as built, defying the depredations of time, erosion, and subsidence.

Nosuma felt the presence of those ancient builders and their perseverance in the face of isolation. To them, she thought, tales handed down by word of mouth from generation to generation of strangers who came down from the sky in fantastic machines must have proved entertaining at nighttime hearths, their society having forgotten even the simple skill of writing.

She glanced east, toward the morning sun. The sun rose in the east and set in the west, no matter what world humanity had colonized, as ingrained to their evolution as the flight-or-fight response. Nosuma dug out her compass. The double arrows spun crazily around the dial, first one direction, then the next.

She wondered if this were among the “unique conditions” that the pilot had referred to on the inbound flight. Something awry with the planet"s magnetic field? Nosuma shook her head, bewildered. Planetology had been her mother"s field of study, not hers. I"ll have to ask how people know which direction they"re going, she thought.

Then she remembered the pole carving in her bag. Somehow, from the upper atmosphere, it"d given her a glimpse of thousands of ancient sites.

She reached in and grasped it, and the world fell away. Nosuma floated on nothing more substantial than a thought. Below her lay the Great Zimbabwe, all eighteen hundred acres, the figurine growing warm in her hand. The glow of ancient artifacts sparkled like diamonds in the rough landscape below her, each flaring with light as though scintillating in its effort to tell its story to these interlopers from the sky.

One artifact glowed brighter than the rest. Nosuma marked its location, and then forced herself to let go of the figurine.

She snapped back into her body, feeling a touch of vertigo, her forehead covered with sweat.

“Are you all right, Doctor Okande?” croaked an old voice.

The relic in front of her was so old, she might have once occupied the Great Zimbabwe. Braids of black and gray stuck out at odd angles above a forehead as wrinkled as rhinoceros hide. The braids stuck out from beneath a beehive headdress, and a bright shawl started at her shoulder and wound around and down past her knees, her legs no more than two ungainly sticks holding up a tent. A perpetual stoop freighted her shoulders. A half-toothed mouth grinned, looking like the windows of a long-abandoned factory. The grin might have been a lecherous leer, except that the poor old soul looked as if she would fall apart at the thought of s*x. Bracelets rattled on both twig-like forearms, and earrings tinkled against the shoulders beside a neck built of corded pillars. A desiccated claw clutched a staff smoothed by years of handling. In the other hand was a trowel.

“Am I all right?” Nosuma repeated, wondering how the old woman had managed to get up the hill. How did she even get out of bed today? “Am I all right?”

“Well, if you can"t answer your own blessed question, the answer must be no. Anything I can get you, child?”

“A new pair of glasses,” she retorted, “since I can"t believe I"m seeing someone as old as the Zimbabwe itself.”

“No respect for the elders, these days,” the old woman muttered in Shona, and she turned to descend the hill toward the wall, picking her way carefully with the staff, bracelets rattling.

“Forgive me, Mother, I spoke rashly,” Nosuma said in the same language. “You"re right, of course, and I apologize for speaking disrespectfully. Lend me your guidance that I may return to the true path of our ancestors.” She bowed elaborately and held it.

The rattling stopped.

Nosuma looked up at the silence.

The old, yellowed eyes regarded her doubtfully. “You speak the ancient tongue and ask for ancestor guidance. You are not like these other strangers from the sky who speak from the sides of their mouths. How do I know you"re not a spirit, a mudzimu newly departed from among us and come to bedevil me with your mischief?”

“Me? An ancestor spirit?” She laughed lightly. “You dig alongside the others with that trowel, yes? Show me where you dig, and I"ll guide your hand to richer ground.”

One graying brow wrinkled the forehead further. “Follow me, Shona-speaking one.”

Nosuma straightened and realized the older woman was already entering the compound. She hurried to catch up. “What"s your name, please?” she asked, ducking through the portal despite its easily clearing her head by a foot.

“Teke Bapoko,” the old woman said, throwing a glance at her. “I am N"anga of the Madziva Mutupo.”

Medium of the hippopotamus totem, Nosuma translated, but the way she"d said it didn"t sound quite the way Nosuma heard it. “Doctor” or “priestess” were also possible translations. “Mother Bapoko, forgive me my ignorance, but when you say "N"anga," do you mean you worship the hippopotamus?”

“ "Worship" is an odd word, child Nosuma. No, it is more apt to say I intercede with the Madziva to bring healing to members of our totem. The Madziva requires no worship, other than we respect its watering holes and its young.”

A threatened hippopotamus was no easy adversary, Nosuma knew. “Thank you, Mother Bapoko.” Nor a displeased N"anga.

They passed numerous trenches, one or two workers in each. All glanced up at the woman in the professional business suit and dirt-stained digging boots. “Greetings,” she said in Shona, nodding at each, some replying and others looking surprised.

“Rare to hear a person in your dress speaking our difficult tongue,” Teke said, stepping to a small pit in the shadow of a thirty-foot wall. The red-brown soil had been dug from a trough a foot wide and two feet deep. Six inches from the base of the wall, diagonal stakes held thick planks in place, buttressing the trench wall right below the fitted stone. She was surprised they"d excavated so close, but she also knew some walls were as thick as eight feet and fitted so well that they could be tunneled under if need be.

“I"ve turned up a dozen artifacts from this trench alone,” Teke said proudly.

“How long have you been working it, Mother Bapoko?”

“Six months, child.”

Nosuma wondered how the frail old woman had lasted that long.

“But before that, I dug another trench over there for a year, but with less luck. This has been a fruitful dig, this one.”

Subtly, without letting the old woman see, Nosuma touched the pole sculpture in her handbag, peering in as if looking for something. Several spots on the ground lit up for her, one of them flaring with the brilliance of a spotlight. The one she"d seen from the ridge before entering the compound. She released the figurine and grabbed a miniature trowel from her tool satchel.

“Is that a Di Maniago?” the old woman asked, reverence in her voice.

Nosuma always carried a set of Di Maniago tools, de rigueur for the discriminating archeologist. She knelt beside the trench. “Mother Bapoko, you must focus your attention here.” She indicated the place a foot from the trench, outlining it with a swipe of her trowel. “I"ll stake it off.” She traded her trowel for a hammer and a sack of small stakes, knelt, and set stakes around the area.

The old woman raised that gray eyebrow at her again. “The child who descends from the sky and speaks the language of the ground sees deep into the hearts of our ancestors.” Teke smiled at someone over Nosuma"s shoulder. “Doctor Okande already advises us with second sight, Oh Great Kaonde,” she said, bowing.

Nosuma stood and turned.

“You mustn"t pay attention to the old woman,” he told her in English. “She prattles on all day about Mitupo and ancestors. Come, let me introduce you to the site supervisor.”

Nosuma tucked her tools back into her bag and bowed. “Bless, Mother Bapoko. I will praise you to our ancestors,” she said in Shona.

“And I, you, child of the skies.”

She followed Doctor Kaonde through another portal into a denser section of the complex, where the smoothly-undulating walls varied in height and enclosed what looked to have been a central gathering area, a fountain at its center. The bare, w**d-strewn earth and sere, dry stone gave no hint to the lush garden that once must have surrounded the fountain, its multiple cascading pools stepping downward beside a grand staircase, the fountain now dry. Atop the stairs flush with the platform were round planters, now devoid of plants, and between the planters was a table, a holomap hovering above it, a few artifacts on the table beside the holojector.

At one corner was a carved headrest, its pillars shaped in Xs, ridges carved along them in relief. Beside it was a blocky female figurine tapered at its lower end to a point, elaborate crosshatching across its abdomen. Nearby was a nearly-intact gourd, remarkably preserved, etchings in a band around its middle, a single split cracking one side all the way down.

“Mr. Thuto Lungu, lead supervisor for the Guru Zimbabwe dig, this is Doctor Nosuma Okande, just off the ship from Alpha Caeli.”

Thuto Lungu stood six-foot-nine and was thin as a rail. He took one look at her and knelt. “You have been blessed and praised by Mother Bapoko, our N"anga. Welcome, Doctor Okande. We are honored.”

Dr. Kaonde glanced between them.

“Thank you, Mr. Lungu,” she said in Shona. “I feel quite welcome.”

Thuto climbed back to his feet, a seemingly impossible distance, a look of awe on his face. “It is we who are honored. Rarely does a Shona-speaking person descend from the sky. As if beyond this world, our language is rare, our beliefs unknown. Our legends talk of these strangers, but many among us dismiss them as tales meant only to delight the children. Perhaps there is substance to our other legends, too.”

“I"d be curious to hear them, Mr. Lungu, hopefully soon.”

“You must come to gathering, if Dr. Kaonde doesn"t take you too far afield.”

“I"d like that. Thank you, Mr. Lungu.”

“You seem to have found your way into their hearts quite quickly, Doctor Okande,” Dr. Kaonde said in English. “An admirable trait, to establish empathy so fast.”

“Thank you, Doctor.”

On the map of the compound, he showed her the major points of focus, many of these locations visible from their promontory. “We stand on what we think was a temple,” he told her. “But of course any wooded structure has long since rotted or burned away. Post holes indicate it was a rather large building, perhaps visible from most places in the Great Zimbabwe. As you know, the numerous portals in the perimeter indicates fairly heavy traffic to and from the compound, indicating that the Zimbabwe was a center of commerce, perhaps government or manufacturing—”

“Or worship,” she added, having argued in her dissertation that traditional archeological theories frequently neglected possibilities outside mainstream thought.

“Or worship,” Dr. Kaonde conceded. “To the west, here—” He pointed at the map, and then that direction to a particularly sinuous wall— “inside that enclosure, we found evidence of concentrated heat, as in a foundry, the surrounding granite block glazed on one side and a thick layer of carbon on everything.”

From her glimpse earlier on the ridge, through the vision given her by the figurine, Nosuma knew that not a tenth of the Zimbabwe had been explored, despite its having been under active excavation for nearly a century.

“Two factors have inhibited the pace of excavation. One is the native people"s insistence that each dig be restored to its previous condition once artifacts have been removed,” Dr. Kaonde said. “Hence, before digging begins, each site is photographed and measured carefully. A second factor is the insistence of the village mediums—the Svikiro, the Vatete, the Shave, and the N"anga—that the ancestors be praised in elaborate ceremonies before a single shovel splits the dirt.

“Here at the west end, where the entrance portal is as grand as it is intricate, we delayed excavation to accommodate local requests. Much of that end is given over to tourism. The scale and scope of the Guru Zimbabwe brings in much-needed revenue. We"ve negotiated ways to excavate the portions most popular to the tourists without interfering with the crowds. Not an easy task, to say the least. And certainly not fast.”

Nosuma remembered as a child seeing stills and vids of the west end, and feeling enthralled at the ingenuity required to build such an edifice. “The Great Zimbabwe was among the sites that inspired me to enter archeology, Doctor Kaonde. It was just by chance I referenced it in my dissertation.”

He smiled, nodding. “Certainly captures the imagination, doesn"t it?”

A shout from the east, and workers began to converge at the base of the main outer wall. Nosuma checked both left and right to confirm, saw it was Mother Teke Bapoko"s dig they converged on.

Doctor Kaonde glanced at her and headed nimbly down the stairs.

Nosuma followed, getting glimpses of Teke on her knees in between other workers. A holographer stepped in and started imaging, Teke leaning back, her form blocking Nosuma"s view as she approached. She heard gasps, murmurs, whispers.

“It was Doctor Okande who told me to dig here,” Teke announced.

Gazes riveted her, and she glanced among them. “What have you found, Mother Bapoko?” she asked in Shona.

“Come and look, child,” Teke said, shooing the others back.

Nosuma stepped forward beside Dr. Kaonde.

Six inches down, inside a narrow trench off the larger trench, was a creamy-white face with the humanized features of a hippopotamus.

Being extruded from a human birth canal.