'I'm not thrilled with the prospect of being dressed like a nun,' Ali agreed.
January laughed. 'I'll never understand you,' she said to Ali. 'They give you a year off, and back you go to your deserts.'
'But I know the feeling,' Thomas said. 'You must be eager to see the glyphs.' Ali grew more wary. This was not something she had written or told to January. To January, Thomas explained, 'The southern regions near Yemen are especially rich. Proto-Semitic pictograms from the Saudis' ahl al-jahiliya, their Age of Ignorance.'
Ali shrugged as if it were common enough knowledge, but her radar was up now. The Jesuit knew things about her. What more? Could he know of her other reason for this year away, the step back she had taken from her final vows? It was a hesitation the order took seriously, and the desert was as much a stage for her faith as for her science. She wondered if the mother superior had sent this man covertly to guide her, then dismissed the thought. They would never dare. It was her choice to make, not some Jesuit's.
Thomas seemed to read her misgivings. 'You see, I've followed your career,' he said.
'I've dabbled in the anthropology of linguistics myself. Your work on Neolithic inscriptions and mother languages is – how to put this? – elegant beyond your years.' He was being careful not to flatter her, which was wise. She was not easily courted.
'I've read everything I could find by you,' he said. 'Daring stuff, especially for an American. Most of the protolanguage work is being done by Russian Jews in Israel. Eccentrics with nowhere to go. But you're young and have opportunities everywhere, yet still you choose this radical inquiry. The beginning of language.'
'Why do people see it as so radical?' Ali asked. He had spoken to her heart. 'By finding our way back to the first words, we reach back to our own genesis. It takes us that much closer to the voice of God.'
There, she thought. In all its naïveté. The core of her search, mind and soul. Thomas seemed deeply satisfied. Not that she needed to satisfy him.
'Tell me, as a professional,' he asked, 'what do you make of this exhibit?'
She was being tested, and January was in on it. Ali went along with them for the moment, cautiously. 'I'm a little surprised,' she ventured, 'by their taste for sacred relics.' She pointed at strands of prayer beads originally from Tibet, China, Sierra Leone, Peru, Byzantium, Viking Denmark, and Palestine. Next to them was a display case with crucifixes and calligrams and chalices made of gold and silver. 'Who would think they'd collect such exquisitely delicate work? This is more what I would expect.' She passed a suit of twelfth-century Mongolian armor, pierced and still stained with blood. Elsewhere there were brutally used weapons and armor, and devices of torture... though the display literature reminded viewers that the devices had been human to begin with.
They stopped in front of a blow-up of the famous photo of a hadal about to destroy an early reconnaissance robot with a club. It represented modern mankind's first public contact with 'them,' one of those events people remember ever after by where they were standing or what they were doing at the moment. The creature looked berserk and demonic, with hornlike growths on his albino skull.
'The pity is,' Ali said, 'we may never know who the hadals really were before it's too late.'
'It may already be too late,' January offered.
'I don't believe that,' Ali said.
Thomas and January traded a look. He made up his mind. 'I wonder if we might discuss a certain matter with you,' he said. Immediately, Ali knew this was the purpose of her entire visit to New York, which January had arranged and paid for.
'We belong to a society,' January now started to explain. 'Thomas has been collecting us from around the world for years. We call ourselves the Beowulf Circle. It is quite informal, and our meetings are infrequent. We come together at various places to share our revelations with one another and to –'
Before she could say more, a guard barked, 'Put that down.'
There was a sudden commotion as guards rushed down. At the center of their alarm were two of those people who had come in behind Thomas and January. It was the younger man with long hair. He was hefting an iron sword from one of the displays.
'It is for me,' his blind companion apologized, and accepted the heavy sword into his open palms. 'I asked my companion, Santos –'
'It's all right, gentlemen,' January told the guards. 'Dr. de l'Orme is a renowned specialist.'
'Bernard de l'Orme?' Ali whispered. He had parted jungles and rivers to uncover sites throughout Asia. Reading about him, she had always thought of him as a physical giant.
Unconcerned, de l'Orme went on touching the early Saxon blade and leather-wrapped handle, seeing it with his fingertips. He smelled the leather, licked the iron.
'Marvelous,' he pronounced.
'What are you doing?' January asked him.
'Remembering a story,' he answered. 'An Argentine poet once told of two gauchos who entered a deadly knife fight because the knife itself compelled them.'
The blind man held up the ancient sword used by man and his demon both. 'I was just wondering about the memory of iron,' he said.
'My friends,' Thomas welcomed his sleuths, 'we should begin.'
Ali watched them materialize from the darkened library stacks. Suddenly, Ali felt only half dressed. In Vatican City, winter was still scourging the brick streets with sleet. By contrast, her little Christmas holiday in New York City was feeling downright Roman, as balmy as late summer. But her sundress served to emphasize these old people's fragility, for they were cold despite the warmth outside. Some wore
fashionable ski parkas, while others shivered in layers of wool or tweed.
They gathered around a table made of English oak, cut and polished before the era of great cathedrals. It had survived wars and terrors, kings, popes, and bourgeoisie, and even researchers. The walls were massed with nautical charts drawn before America was a word.
Here was the set of gleaming instruments Captain Bligh had used to guide his castaways back to civilization. A glass case held a stick-and-shell map used by Micronesian fishermen to follow ocean currents between islands. In the corner stood the complicated Ptolemaic astrolabe that had been used in Galileo's inquisition. Columbus's map of the New World occupied a corner of one wall, raw, exotic; painted upon a sheepskin, its legs used to indicate the cardinal directions.