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themummersfolly · 4 years

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I will probably not enter this in the contest I wrote it for, but I’m proud of it anyway.

@aerialsquid, @ardenrosegarden, you will probably like this. It involves ghosts and extinct cephalopods.

The Ordovician Testament

I guess it all started the day we opened a new fracture at the Dakota site. I was a consulting geologist, monitoring pressure gradients in the wellbore while they pumped slurry in to widen the crack.

“We’re about ready to start extracting,” the site manager told me. I nodded.

“You know what the downside is to this process? No fossils.”

“What, like dinosaurs?”

“No, no, we’re in the wrong place for that. See right here,” I pointed to a chart, a map of the wellbore. “We’re right on the edge of the Ordovician shale. The fossils in this layer would be shellfish, trilobites, corals…”

“You collect ‘em?”

“Sort of. But that’s only part of it. Think of what we can learn from them, the picture they paint of the way the world was during that time…”

I could see the manager’s eyes glazing over. He didn’t care that much about geology, as long as it wasn’t working against him. As long as the well kept producing.

At last, the oil started to flow.

“Hell yeah!” The manager grinned. “This is a good one!”

I grinned back. The company had gone out on a limb with this site; my team had been pushing for it, and it had paid off.

I was still thinking about the nice fat end-of-year bonus we’d be getting when my vision started to change. Everything in the monitoring station took on an electric glow. I blinked. It didn’t go away; in fact, it was getting stronger. A faint tension appeared far behind my eyes.

“Hey, Greg, I’m gonna punch out early today. I think I’m getting a migraine.”

The manager glanced back at me. “Yeah, sure. We should be good for a while. Be careful.”

Halfway down the highway, the pain set in. I pulled into the first motel I saw, managed to hold it together long enough to book in, stagger to my room, and collapse.

-------

To this day I haven’t had as bad a headache as that one. I was in that motel room for three days: two of them trying to fight off the pain, the third too wrung-out to move. When my team members called to check on me, they told me to go to the hospital. If I had been thinking clearly, I would have.

As bad as it was, the pain wasn’t the worst part. Whenever I fell asleep, I saw colors. Bright, vivid, solid colors, blinding primaries, rapid-fire pastels, swirling psychedelic neons. It sounds nice, but at the time it was like being kicked repeatedly in the brain. My head was full of colors that gave me no peace and made no sense.

And the mood swings – one minute I was bawling my eyes out, the next, I was ready to rip the lamp out of the wall and throw it across the room. At one point I was up for about twenty-four hours straight, bouncing from rage to depression to manic glee, faintly aware than there was something wrong with me.

About 3 am on the third day of my stay, the pain broke enough to get a coherent thought through, and that thought was that I might have been poisoned. My next thought, which occurred maybe forty minutes later, was that the worst of it was over and I might as well try to get some sleep.

This time, I dreamt of an ocean.

-------

I didn’t have any more symptoms after that, although as soon as I was up I made an appointment to get checked out. Everything came back normal, and the doctor gave me a referral to a neurologist if I kept having migraines. I didn’t call, but I held on to the number. The pain and hallucinations were gone, but I couldn’t shake the feeling that this wasn’t over.

In the following days and weeks, I kept coming back to that thought. Every now and then, my head would fill up with colors again. And I kept dreaming about oceans. Not like I was at the beach or sailing or scuba diving; I was disembodied, submerged in a sea I didn’t recognize. When I was awake, I would get flashes of sights and smells, like when a memory jogs, but in response to the most random things. And I was remembering things I had never seen.

Come to think of it, I was having a lot of intrusive thoughts, and I had a growing sense that I wasn’t alone. In the middle of the night, I would wake up thinking something had brushed past me; a search of the house would show it was empty. At work, on the long drive to the site – I felt like if I looked over my shoulder fast enough, I would see… something.

“I feel like there’s another mind inside my head,” I said.

“Maybe you should see a doctor,” offered Greg.

I didn’t really want to see a shrink. But when invisible tentacles wrapped around me in the shower, I decided to bite the bullet.

“Stress,” the psychiatrist said after talking to me. She suggested I take some time off work. But she wanted to schedule a follow-up, soon. She was worried.

I had some vacation time, and the nearest airport was advertising cheap flights to Mexico. If I was having a nervous breakdown, might as well have it in Puerto Vallarta with a drink in my hand. On the flight the intrusive thoughts seemed to slack off; but during the final approach, when I looked out the window and saw the Pacific, my vision exploded with purple and teal. Ocean, ocean, ocean! I had to reach for the airsickness bag.

-------

Whatever this is, it’s connected to the sea. I spent the first day of my trip lying in my hotel room with the blinds drawn, going over and over the past weeks. I wasn’t in any pain, but the thing in my head – I was increasingly sure that it was something separate from me – whatever it was had gotten more agitated since I arrived in PV. This all started in a rented room like this… Had anything unusual happened around that time? Did I eat something, or interact with anyone who acted strange? No, the only thing that had happened was we’d opened a new fracture at the wellbore…

I sat up straight. That was the day this had started. Either that headache had done me permanent damage, or oil wasn’t the only thing that had come up the wellbore.

I squeezed my eyes shut, shouted mentally at the source of the colors and visions. Hey! What the hell are you?

-------

A neighboring hotel had a hypnotist doing nightly shows. Expert in multiple personality disorder, said his brochure. Underneath, it listed another of his specialties: contacting past lives.

This is insane, I thought as I knocked on his door.

I’d called ahead, asking if I could meet with him privately, since I didn’t want to work out my issues in front of a crowd. The fee was a little steep, but he sounded intrigued by my symptoms and offered to meet me before a show.

If he was a quack, at least he was professional about it. He explained up front what would and would not happen and what might happen, and then he put me into a trance.

You are completely safe, nothing can hurt you. You allow all thoughts to exist. You float through all levels of consciousness like a warm, peaceful…

OCEAN.

I was disembodied, submerged in sunlit waters. Beside me rose a coral reef; below it spread meadows and forests of seaweed. Sea-pens and sea-lilies sprouted everywhere. Below me, rustling through mud and algae –

Trilobites?!

They were trilobites. Little Asaphus kowalewskii with its eyestalks – I had a fossil of that one in my collection. And a Paraceraurus, all horns and spines, blindingly iridescent.

And off in the murky distance, the outline of a gigantic, drifting cone.

This sea hadn’t existed for over 400 million years.

-------

“When I snap my fingers, you will return to the waking world.”

On cue, I opened my eyes. The hypnotist stared at me, his face sweaty. His assistant had her phone out, poised to make a call.

“You should have told me you are an epileptic!” he started.

“What?”

“When you were in the trance – you slumped down, you were making faces. When I spoke to you, it was like you couldn’t understand me. You tried to speak and a noise like an animal came out! Do you remember anything?”

“Yeah, I… I was in an ocean. Like the one in my dreams, only I could see it clearly this time.”

The hypnotist stared at me, chewing his lip. “Can you describe this ocean?”

“Shallow, lots of light coming through the water. It was full of extinct creatures.” If I concentrated, I could picture it clearly.

“Extinct creatures – perhaps a manifestation of your oneness with all life, past and present –”

“No, no, a real ocean with an ecosystem that’s been extinct for millions of years. Like the fossil record came alive, like I travelled back in time or something.”

He and his assistant exchanged glances. “How are you feeling now?”

“Okay – a little loopy. It’s been a while since I’ve eaten.”

He motioned to his assistant. She put down her phone, dug in her purse, handed me a candy bar.

“I’ve never seen a case like yours,” he said. “If you’re willing, I’d like to see you after tonight’s show. There are a few things I can try that might make sense of this.”

-------

The hypnotist’s assistant walked me down to the hotel restaurant; I think she was afraid I would have another episode on the way. Once I had eaten, I stretched out on a couch in the lobby, but didn’t sleep. If I let my mind wander, I could see subdued colors at the edges of my vision, could feel tentacles drifting loosely around me.

The hypnosis show was over around 10 pm. When the last of the audience had filtered out, I went in for my second appointment.

-------

“You are completely safe and at peace. You are alone in a comfortable room. No one who enters this room can harm you.”

“Okay.” In my mind’s eye, the room looked a lot like the hypnotist’s hotel room.

“There is a knock on the door. It is the source of the visions you’ve been having.”

There was water outside the window, ocean water. A school of finless, heavy-headed fish swam by.

“Remember: nothing that enters this room can harm you. You are completely safe. You open the door and invite your guest inside.”

I did just that.

“What do you see?”

“It’s – it’s an ammonoid. No, it’s an older species. An Ordovician nautiloid.” Awake, I might have been scared. But in the trance it was no worse than coming face to face with a noisy neighbor. Big eyes, with square pupils like a goat’s, stared at me over a mass of gently swaying tentacles; behind them, a shell curved away in a loose spiral. It drifted in, swimming through the room as if still in the water.

“You are completely safe. You can ask it any question you want.”

So I did. “What are you?”

The creature’s eyes turned purple. On the mantle covering the end of its shell, a rippling hounds-tooth pattern appeared.

“It’s changing color. I think – I think it’s trying to communicate.”

“You are one with your guest. You feel its thoughts and feelings as your own.”

He was right. Desire to be understood. Identity. The colors, each with a concept attached to them.

“It’s the name of its species,” I realized. “Purple is happy, blessed. The other pattern – it’s more complex. I don’t quite get it. It’s one of the Blessed Somethings.” Another wash of thought. “It has a question for me.”

“What is the question?”

“It wants to know if I’m – if I’m a squid? A nautiloid? No, it’s asking if I’m a person, like a sentient being. Yes, yes I am. Are you?”

A pale blue swirl of annoyance. Of course I am.

“You can ask your guest any question.”

I mulled it over. “How did you get here? Inside my head, I mean.”

In response, a riot of colors and patterns.

“I don’t understand. Can you show me?”

One long, smooth feeler reached out to the window and touched the glass. I followed it and looked out.

The seaweed was gone, and most of the algal mat. All the coral had turned gray. Overhead, the surface of the water creaked and groaned: ice. The sea was cold and sour.

“Ordovician extinction,” I said.

Death. Empty shells. Only the mindless drift-feeders were left.

The new fracture had been near the top edge of the Ordovician shale. “You were trapped there. We let you out.”

Affirmation. Confused affirmation.

“What do you want?”

The colors turned muddy. It had no idea; it hadn’t asked for any of this.

“Can I talk to you again sometime?”

Affirmation, and relief.

-------

There were six days left in my vacation. I decided to spend them learning to meditate.

The hypnotist offered several theories about what was going on, mainly “past life regression” and “ancestral memories.” My theory, and the one I was going with, was that we had somehow turned loose an ancient ghost, and I was being haunted. Actually, it wasn’t all that frightening once I came to that conclusion. The whole thing had been accidental; far from being malicious, the thing in my head seemed apologetic when I told it all the trouble it had caused.

It wasn’t hard to reach a state of mind where I could talk to my guest, as I’d started to call it. Before the flight home, we’d even worked out a way to share space in my waking mind without causing problems, and my strange dreams had stopped. The biggest hurdle was communication. My guest used a visual language of colors and patterns; emotions and simple nouns and verbs were easy, but more complicated concepts tended to get lost in translation. Playing around with the paint program on my computer, I found out I could transcribe our conversations… sort of. And when I got home, I pulled out my fossil collection to show it.

Stone. I was showing my guest a fossil ammonite shell. When I closed my eyes, I held it with tentacles instead of fingers, turning it over and examining it. Old. Very old.

“Millions of years younger than you. From the Jurassic period.”

City-builders, too?

“What?”

Nautiloids, cities, construction. Descendants build, maybe?

I sat back, mulling over the images and color-words. “Wait – you build cities?”

Not self. Too small. Nautiloid-kind, city-builders. City-dwellers.

“City-builders, like a civilization? 400 million years ago, in the ocean?”

Annoyance and confusion. How was this a question? It was surprised enough that I was a land-dweller.

“We never found evidence of intelligent life before us – none that we recognized.”

Confusion. Denial. It wasn’t possible, there had been so many of them all over the world.

“Maybe we didn’t know what we were looking at. Or maybe… it’s been almost half a billion years. Not much survives that long.”

Denial. Denial. But then: Understanding. Yes, time eats all.

Red was the color of Nautiloid grief. Red like an ancient sunset filled my mind for the rest of the evening.

-------

“Will you show me?” I asked one day. “I want to know about them. About your kind, what they were like.”

I closed my eyes and saw them. My guest’s family, or something like a family. They were the group that had raised it, but none of them were genetically related. Many weren’t even the same species; as I saw more and asked questions, I learned that my guest was one of several intelligent nautiloid species. It showed me straight cones like wizards’ hats; loose curlicues; tight curlicues; talkative, half-naked little things like cuttlefish darting around. Not only had they existed at the same time, but they used the same color languages, lived and worked in mixed groups, raised their young together. Their civilization was founded around the idea that each species was necessary to the lives of the others.

My guest showed me things it had seen, things it had heard of. The civilization of the nautiloids had lasted nearly a million years, in all its various iterations and divisions. I saw shining cities of gel and silica stretching up the walls of continental shelves; I saw the ocean floor vents around which their technology centered. Household items of cast cement and water-fired clay, delicate metallurgy that had long since corroded away to nothing. They had domesticated the giant drifting orthocones, they hunted the arthropods that tried to prey on them. They had learned to live in all corners of the ocean and at all depths. They had even begun to explore the barren, alien land.

But then the cold had come. And not every species had been able to weather it.

Food animals disappeared first. Then disease began to spread as hunger and cold took their toll. Those that lived in the shallow reefs suffered most. Attempts to build shelters were too late; within a few years, whole segments of society were extinct.

Symbiosis. If the surface-people do not farm, the depths-people cannot make. If the egg-raisers do not nurture, the city-makers cannot build.

“Did anybody make it through?”

Unknown. Maybe. Not self, but maybe others.

-------

They had a written language, if you can call it that. My guest taught me. Strands of colored fiber, knotted, strung with shells and beads. We had to make a lot of substitutions; some of the modern materials weren’t exactly right. But a nautiloid would have found it readable. My nautiloid did.

I would sit up late into the night, stringing yarn together while my guest dictated. It was a book, but it felt like a rosary, like a prayer that could be handled. Do not forget us. We lived. We mattered.

I had gotten used to my guest. It had a name for me; I don’t know what it meant, but it looked like dark blue tie-dye with a spray of stars. I had a name for it: Shelby Squidsworth. We would talk about geology, the species that had come after the nautiloids, what might come after humanity. It was fascinated by life on land.

When the book was finished, we celebrated with a trip to the beach.

Descendants? It wanted to know. I sat on the sand, drying in the sun.

“Your descendants, you mean? Do you have any?”

Maybe. An image of my Jurassic-era ammonite. All stone, maybe. All empty.

“There are still creatures like you today.” I concentrated on an image of a nautilus, of squid and octopi. “They’re not as smart as you guys, not in a city-building, history-recording sort of way. Not that we know of. But they might get there.”

Maybe. Images of its family group; it missed them.

I dug my toes through the sand. “Did your people believe in an afterlife?”

Yes. A whirl of colors; I didn’t grasp the meaning, but it seemed to comfort my guest. I wondered why it was with me and not there; quietly, I hoped, but it noticed.

No burial. No rites.

“If you got a proper funeral, would you be able to rest?”

Maybe. Hope.

“Tell me what I need to do.”

-------

400 million years ago, when the nautiloids laid their dead to rest, they would separate the body from the shell. In deep-water countries, the shell would be painted and displayed by the family group; in shallow waters, where my guest was from, it was floated on the surface or pushed onto land, to dry and crumble in the sun. The body was ritually eaten by family and close friends, so that their loved one could remain with them in a way and strengthen them.

Old custom. Dawn-of-time custom.

“My people don’t really approve of cannibalism.”

Amusement. Different species. Have comfort.

I bought a big ceramic shell online, and about a pound of calamari from the store. It was as close as I could get; the spirit of the thing was what mattered. I ate the calamari alone, in silence. I had the sense that my guest ate, too, for all the other nautiloids who had died alone. Then, with the ceramic shell on a little raft I’d built, I drove to the beach and waded out past the surf.

“Do you think humans and nautiloids go to the same afterlife?”

Maybe. Hope.

“I’ll see you later, then. Godspeed, good friend.”

I laid a garland of knotted yarn over the shell: a nautiloid benediction, written out. I knew a few of the words humans use, and I said those as well. Then I pushed the raft off, away from the shore.

When I climbed out of the water, I was alone in my head.

-------

“You’re different,” Greg said. It was my first day back at the site. “You have a good vacation?”

“Yeah. I had to attend a funeral right at the end, though.”

“Man.” Greg winced. “Family?”

“A friend.”

“That’s rough.”

“It was time. And the service was just the way my friend wanted.”

“Timing still sucks.” Greg shuffled. “Oh hey, you’ll like this: the museum was running an exhibit on ancient sea life. I had my daughter last weekend, so I took her to see it.” He handed me a flier. “She wants to do her school project on these nautilus fossils. I told her you could help her with the research.”

“I don’t know how much I can help, but I’ll try.” I smiled at the picture on the flier.

My friend’s book was coiled neatly in my backpack; I had already started the translation. I doubted most people would want to read it, and even fewer would believe it. But it would be there, at least for a while: a faint, brief echo of a people long gone. A chance for them to be remembered.

I can only hope that when my time comes, someone will offer me the same kindness.

#writing #my writing #sci fi #science fiction #prehistory #paleontology #sapient cephalopods #who's to say there hasn't been intelligent life on this planet before?#there wouldn't be any evidence one way or the other #very little survives that length of time #ghost stories #funerals #cannabalism #sort of

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