By
Alva Emerson Hare
MAIL: alva_hare@yahoo.com
 

*Dream*

Misty tableau, you try to speak but nothing comes out. Leaves stretch to touch your face. Heat, humidity, you struggle to feel your surroundings, but you can feel only apprehension. Nothing seems to focus clearly. The Jungle surrounds you, it is both silent and deafening at the same time. You stand perfectly still and seem to float. A sound fills your ears, a deafening sound, like rushing water, or possibly just a light breeze.

A panther appears out of the green/black jungle. Gliding by you like liquid muscle and fur, it moves its head in a very sentient manner, and you know that it is for you to follow. You drift behind the creature, fearing what awaits you. As you follow it, the world begins to shake and vibrate.

*** ***

The Amazon

The smell of smoke wafts through the humid jungle like an uninvited ghost. Panther knows this smell and he knows that evil is afoot. His journey has been successful. Of course they always are. He was from a long line of panther hunters.

His father taught him the ancient skills. His name is Panther; So named because his skill is so great. For 22 years Panther has hunted alone. The others in his tribe farm, fish, weave, pot clay, heal sickness and talk to spirits ... , but only he can hunt a spirit.

The Earth is rumbling from the sound of bulldozers and trucks. Panther slowly approaches his own village, his home. He has been following the fresh track of the gauchos for 5 miles as they cut a road through the Amazon. Panther is returning from a hunt, the village sits in the path of the road. A clash is just beginning, and a cacophony is soon to follow. The Panther has arrived home, and death followed with him.

As Panther hides in the jungle, in plain sight, four of the gauchos ride dangerously close to him in one of the smaller vehicles. Larger Earth moving vehicles spout smoke and knock things down, large blades on the front of the mechanical monsters bring down trees and homes. Fires blaze everywhere. He can see his home and his hearth in wreckage and flames. The gauchos have killed everyone in the village.

He can see his family dead in the wreckage, in fact he believes that he can smell them, and in fact he can. He can see his wife quite clearly, her clothes have been ripped from her, she is bleeding, it is obvious what happened to her before she died, the flames are approaching her corpse.

A panther

The panther sees this mayhem through the leaves of the jungle, and its anger flares like a flame as the flames grow larger. The panther grabs its first gaucho, with claws like knives ripping most of the flesh from the guacho’s neck. The panther watches as he bleeds to death rapidly. As the corpse breaths its last breath, the panther coils back on its haunches and bats the dying man almost playfully. The rest of them, He kills slowly.

Mexico City

Passenger jets lumber across the hot tarmac waiting for their turn to take off. The airport is usually busy but today it is even more so. Two black jumbo jets wait on the runway for take off clearance. Meanwhile in the tower nervous air traffic controllers wait for their clearance to resume normal operations. Several years back the Americans had decided to move their military presence into South America, making Mexico city just a little strategic.

The black jumbos were said to contain a laser weapon so powerful that only a plane this large could withstand the turbulence created by the hot blue bolt of light. It was rumored that the device that created this beam was roughly the size of two bread boxes. Each of the black behemoths was escorted by several Black Manta fighter jets. The entire fleet was completely invisible to radar.

Why on earth these weapons should appear in Mexico City was a mystery. Obviously the United States was rattling its well oiled saber. As the black giants slowly hefted themselves aloft, the little Mantas leapt up to fill the air around them.

Soon the black fleet was on its way and the tower was given permission to resume its normal flight schedule. Within the next few hours a minor drug lord, or a mouthy tin horn dictator would be pissing his khaki pants in fear as rounds of intelligent ammunition bring his world crashing down. Waves of hot plasti-steel arrows with near sentient brains will streak from the sky, prickling with lasers, and each of them will surely find its mark. The unfortunate player will find himself on the loosing side of the battle, a battle which has already been fought and won on the supercomputers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.

Afterwards a media-zombied world will cheer the surgical war, businessmen and marketing execs will proclaim that world markets have been stabilized by this decisive action, and the original cause of the conflict will be sufficiently spin-doctored such that even the losers will come to appreciate this benevolent police action.

As the black fleet fades into the distance a jet leaves Mexico city for Brazil. On board are three American scientists who are visibly impressed by the military planes. The Mexican nationals take little notice of such things anymore.

Christine Lembart sits back her the seat and prepares for the boring flight ahead as she pours through databases full of information on Mayan and Aztec culture, trying to find a connection between those cultures and the recent findings in a remote corner of the Brazilian rain forest. She finds very little help in all of the libraries of the world. On her lap she holds several pictures of the interior of a pyramid located in western Brazil. The pyramid itself is an anomoly because it appears very Aztec in design and construction. Although the design is anomolous and anachronistic, thus making it interesting in its own right, the interieror is even more interesting. Inside the pyramid there are markings on the wall that appear to be an alphabet. The symbols are at times simple like a circle, or a triangle, suggesting a true alphabetic system. Other symbols are obviously symbolic. One of the symbols can be nothing other than a sun with emenating rays.

As a paleontologist she was entrhalled by these findings. She had lost sleep over the last few weeks preparing for this trip. She wondered if the symbols were a developed language, embedded, isolated, a language with no progenitors or decendants. Could the symbols be art work, not a language at all but simple art? This idea was strange but no more strange than the idea that these symbols were a devloped language that had as yet remained undiscovered. How long had the language been in use? All of these questions were swimming in her head. At one point she even caught herself thinking about one of the symbols during sex.

It was her interest and publications in the field of paleontology that led her to this point in her career, but it was her doctorate in medicine that landed her this job

Beside her Jon, the cryptologist, sits with his notebook open listening to the "Rite of Spring" by Stravinski, broadcast live from Paris. Jon always wanted to tie math and language together, like scientists who seek to unify all physical theories into one elegant mathematical model, Jon fancied himself finding mathematical formulea and underlying patterns to language. This interest led Jon into a field that was only partially what he wanted. He found funding for a doctoral thesis in computer science. He worked on language recognition and machine speech. When his research reaches fruition all of our lives will become a little easier, or more complex, but certainly different.

Even though Jon had attended prestigious schools, his performance was lackluster. Certainly, Jon passed, performed satisfacorily, but he never really fit in well. Sometimes he would sit through classes without taking a single note and pass with straight perfect scores. Other times he barely made it. Part of his problem is that he was not able to settle on a direction.

Jon was the first to notice that several of the symbols appear to be mathematical functions. His mathematical background finally paid off in his first love, language. One symbol appeared to be a soft wave with two peaks. Upon close inspection this seemed to be exactly that, a wave, a sine wave in fact. Another of the symbols appeared to be two flat topped peaks. Each of the flat topped peaks had crenalations on top. To someone familiar with advanced calculus this symbol appeard to be a square wave with Gibbs Phenomenom fluctuations. The third symbol that appeared to be mathematical in nature was a series of sharp triangular peaks, or a triangle wave.

Lesse Escher, the third member of the group, an archeologist, sat several seats behind the other two. He has decided to have a rum and coke. All three are quite pleased with themselves.

Jon fell into a fitful sleep as eclectic music quietly issued from his notebook.

The stars wheeling over head, the hot equatorial night slipping past the airframe and lulled by the muffled thrum engines, he dreamt again.

He was being beckoned by a strange creature, a man. This time he followed the apparition farther into the dream, onto a killing field. He saw men lying about dead, he watched as live men were smacked off of horses buy a great sweeping paw, or perhaps there were two paws, and at times both of them appeared to hang in front of his face.

He lifted his left paw and let the claws slide out, and then in again. They felt powerful, they felt like machines, they felt like spiking passion and grip. He bore down on a corpse and let his claws sink into the back of the dead man. With the slightest tug he turned the body over, face up. The corpse had his own fathers face; he awoke with a start.

The 777 touched down, meeting the tarmac lazily only the slightest vibration let the passengers know that they had reached Brasilia.

While they were in flight the world markets had fluctuated slightly, a very rich man in San Carlos de Rio Negro had been assassinated, and live fire fights had been reported just east of Mitu. Small but rapidly growing forest fires had erupted like a string of cancerous pearls along the northern shore of Negro.

The three Americans ran through the Brasilia airport to make their connecting flight to Itaituba. They flew on one of the last working DC-10’s into a turbulent place. The weather was calm.

Christine had hardly noticed the last flight. She had been absorbed in research, already trying to generate a template for something publishable. Lesse struck the ground thanking the Gods that at least they hadn’t flown on an antique French plane.

Gatn looked up at the silhouette in the canopy above. He saw a panther prowling through the upper branches of the tall trees. The cat filled him with fear and it pulled at a silver string attached to Gatn’s heart. He felt lifted toward the cat; Called. His eyes, like tethered birds, wished for a place to dart. But his attention was fixed on the dark shape above, moving as only a cat can do through the brush overhead. He felt as if his body should run, but his mind stood in wonder.

Now all was frozen around him. Rippled forest exploded before him. Something was wrong. He could smell nothing strange, how could the beast be so close. Great sweeping paws appeared near his face. Hmin, the uncle, pushing the young boy back, faced the cat with a small knife, and great courage. The forest erupted with motion and breeze. Soon Hmin, Gatn’s uncle, lay dead on the forest floor. The cat stood grinning.

The boy, standing still, seeing his dead uncle in one corner of his vision, and the great cat just as near, trembled. Gatn was afraid.

"Why do you hate me?" the child asked?

"I do not hate you." answered the panther.

"Cats cannot talk!" the child responded, "And you would only kill me, as you have killed my uncle. Why should I listen even if you could?" Still frozen the child trembled. "You are a murderer."

"A beast cannot be a murderer." replied the stalking dream, smiling like a friend in fur. "I can only hunt and live, you are the murderer. You are the enemy."

Above in the canopy the dark shape began to move slowly and determined. Gatn saw the shape and watched, as his, father, slinking down the tree, slowly approached the panther from behind. Gatn knew there was great magik in this pelt. He hoped secretly that he would be allowed to make a belt from the hind section of the fur.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

After landing, they spent the night in Itatuba, a town and an airport, Itaituba like all isolated hamlets, was a world unto itself. Their smaller plane landed after nightfall. The town was dark, sparsely lit by a handful of diode panels scattered through the store fronts of Main Street. Their green/red glow providing security from the darkness just out of sight. The sky overhead held more stars than one could see in three cities back east.

A blimp lofts over head carrying a cargo hung low in a tank. The neon derigable held onto the tank with a fat black steel cable. The blimp itself was blazed with logos of red, white, blue and black, a fractal of pepsi-eXxon-icana. The only color missing from the large ship was green. Green goes unnoticed here.

The white tank hanging below the blimp was marked plainly in small black block letter, "Technical Animal Oils". On close inspection one would find a small triangular sign colored international orange, with black lettering, "Caution, Medical Gasses". From the ground this little sign looked like a decoration, an advertisement for one of the more shy corporations.

They found lodging in a fairly nice little barn. All fresh sap and crosscut grain; bleeding turpentine kept the bugs from eating the little hotel in one night. Natural cedar floors with splinters that beg for the sink of tender American feet.

Downstairs by midnight local time, Lesse found solace and inspiration in the company of one of the locals. Lesse was drinking and telling tales from his undergraduate years at Marseilles. After the second Desert Storm, he chose to spend his GI education grants in Europe. He never noticed the irony that he, one of the self acclaimed "Ugly Americans" should have so much fun in France. One wonders how much fun the French had.

Lesse never talked much about his military career, or if he did it was a string of cussing emitted during a drunken tirade. After listening to such an episode, it would be clear that the Iraqis had enjoyed Sgt. Escher even less than the French had.

Around the little bar people were drinking and talking. Someone had packed one of the com booths with US dollars. The bread box sized computer was playing hours of American classic rock, a high tech juke box that never skips. Two other kiosks sat around the bar, one was being used as an ad hoc pay phone, with people lined up ready to slide their plastic money into the slot. A few of the callers still used coins into the antique coin slot to pay for their call. The third kiosk was being used to participate in the DOOM International Playoffs, adding noise chaos and flashing lights to the room. The hubbub of people combined with the gaming, the music and Lesse’s loud voice, served to make the place a proper pub.

Jon slipped in with his note book, ordered a beer and took up residence in a quiet corner. Lesse noticed the mousy young man and decided to talk to him, later. Lesse had become inpatient at the total lack of women here in Itaituba. What good was a bar without women anyway? Where were all the grass skirts he had dreamt about on the plane?

Jon sat in the corner reading. Before him he had a file picturing a long list of characters. It was uncertain whether these characters were hieroglyphs, or alphabetic, or perhaps something else. The pictograms had been found in the interior of a temple uncovered deep in the Amazon Rain forest. Even though the Architecture resembled Mayan to the tee. The alphabet was unlike any ever uncovered. It seemed to progress from simple to elaborate. Starting with a circle, a square, a triangle, and most of the other basic geometric shapes, toward the end of the list the characters were elaborate and almost artistic.

The characters were found carved in a wall inside a Mayan like pyramid, laid out in a list. On the other walls there were a groupings of the characters grouped together in smaller chains. Looking for all the world like sentences formed from some sort of alphabet.