Siege of Stars: Book One of The Sigil Trilogy

  Chapter 9. Examiner

   

  Cambridge, England, Earth, December 2024

   

  Man is the measure of all things.

  Protagoras

   

  “It was that last trip to France that clinched it,” Jack had started to explain, uncertainly, to the thesis committee gathered in a lecture room whose heating had been turned off for the winter. It was a dank, dismal day in December and the undergraduates had left town, leaving in their place an arctic chill that enveloped everything in a sullen lassitude. The committee was, clearly, yet to be convinced by his case. He looked to MacLennane—as his supervisor, one half of the committee—for an encouraging sign, a welcoming smile, but his patron averted his gaze: there was a lot at stake for him, too.

  He missed Jadis—he missed her terribly, on this day, of all days—but this morning, before he’d left, she had seemed wound up tight with some matter so internalized that she refused to tell him what it was. But he’d looked so miserable as he turned to leave that she relented, ran towards him and embraced him from behind.

  “I love you so much, you silly man,” she had said: “I know you can do it. Now, go and show them what you’re made of.” He turned to hug her, but said nothing, and then he left, walking into town through the cheerless fog.

  In truth, he was worried. The remorseless tension in these final weeks before his thesis defense had taken its toll on both of them. Whereas before he’d been lean and sinewy, now he looked gaunt, and thin. She’d seemed distracted, perturbed. He felt, somehow, that he’d committed some offense, done some wrong, and that—cruelly—she wouldn’t tell him what it was, so he could at least apologise. No, she wasn’t ill, she insisted, turning her eyes away from his questioning face and towards the TV. She had taken to watching a Disney film called Fantasia 2000, in which various snippets of orchestral music were accompanied by fantastic animations. She always seemed to be watching the same one, in which a pod of whales gamboled to Respighi’s Pines of Rome. First they leaped and played in the waves, but then, shooting up through the clouds, swam and surged among the stars. Jadis watched that part again and again, enraptured as a child. When Jack asked why, she said she couldn’t explain. There was just something about it, she said, that struck a chord. She found it comforting.

  As he plodded on, the feet in his mind walked backwards to see if he could work out where things had gone wrong—if indeed they had. He knew he’d taken far too long to get down and write his thesis, trying Jadis’ patience. Yet it was she who had brainstormed his thesis into being, gave it birth, gave it life, nursed it to maturity—it was her.

  Her!

  And even this morning, she still swore she loved him.

  Him!

  So now he thought, in dejection quite foreign to his usually calm and level nature, that the great gamble had failed. He really didn’t deserve this thesis, and he certainly didn’t deserve Jadis. By the time he got to the department, his mind was clothed in a fog as thick as the one that laced the streets in funereal shrouds. Go ahead, make my day. In the end he was just too tired. Too tired to panic, too tired to care.

  “Mr Corstorphine—Mr Corstorphine?” This from the tiny but intimidating figure of Professor Ernestine Yanga, the external examiner and the other half of the committee, who, MacLennane had said, was famous for saying almost nothing during thesis examinations until near the end, when she’d skewer hapless candidates with the one question they’d been praying nobody would ask. Ah, thought Jack, we must be near the end, then, and this must be the preamble to the famous Difficult Question that MacLennane had warned him about. Best to get it over with, and get out. So far, the examination had flowed glutinously past him like a river of sludge making its viscid way down to a black and putrid sea: he’d supplied all the answers so mechanically, that once he’d uttered a word he’d immediately forgotten about it.

  “Mr Corstorphine—you were telling us about your trip to France?”

  “Yes—of course—I’m sorry. As you’ve read in my thesis, I had accumulated a great deal of data about hominin influence on geomorphology in Britain. But it was very hard to make anything of it. Thanks to some new methods developed in conjunction with a fellow student…”

  “Yes, I see that this is acknowledged. A Miss Markham, isn’t it?” Jack said nothing: his lips pursed in a thin line of remorse. “Please continue, Mr Corstorphine.”

  “Yes, sorry… I had long suspected the existence of a gradient of human influence on the landscape in England, consistent over the past hundred thousand years at least, in an increasing trend from the northwest—where it is hardly significant according to the variants of the nonparametric tests I’ve used—to the southeast, where it can be said to stand out from natural influence here and there, but still in general not significantly different from expected natural or stochastic variation.”

  “Very good. But enough of Albion’s fair shores, I think? You were about to tell us all about France, I believe. Would you like to enlarge upon that?”

  Jack had had so much to say about France. About how his solo trip there, inspired by the earlier jaunt with Jadis, had changed everything, given him hope—rooting his vague instincts in something more tangible, more real. About how, after looking at the British landscape, scored, ravaged and broken by glaciers at least eight times in the course of almost a million years of human history—glaciers so powerful that they had literally erased rivers as broad as the Severn from the map—his personal antennae had become so tuned to every nuance of landscape that, when he had come at last to a region that had seen a million years of relative and continuous calm, the signs of human influence shone out at him like blinding beacons. Britain had only ever been a sideshow, an outlier: he’d seen immediately what had occurred to no-one, that nothing south of the Loire was wilderness—nothing—and had not been so for a very long time. But right now, he didn’t feel like explaining anything. His answers were bland, apathetic, hesitant. Looking down on the scene, as if he were hanging from the ceiling, he saw MacLennane rise slightly from his chair, as if in concern—and then Jack snapped, jarringly, back. He blinked, disoriented. It occurred to him that he must have blacked out.

  With her well-controlled perm, her neat dove-grey two-piece and pearls, Ernestine Yanga could have been the president of the local Womens’ Institute, except that she’d been raised in a grass hut on the western shores of Lake Turkana, until the age of five, when her village had been razed by Ethiopian bandits and the rest of her family had been raped, macheted, burned to death, or combinations of all three. She’d only escaped because she’d been a mile away at the time, gathering pathetic twigs for the cooking fire, and sluicing the filthy puddle that passed for the village waterhole into a chipped enamel bucket. On returning home to find it so casually expunged from the face of the Earth, she’d walked thirty miles to the nearest fly-flecked bush town in search of work. By the time she was thirteen she was handy with a Kalashnikov. She’d been a drug courier, a fruit seller, a goatherd, a moneychanger, a news vendor, a prostitute, a pimp, a cattle rustler, a copper’s nark, a murderess (twice), and was riddled with at least six chronic, parasitic infections.

  Having understandably decided that she’d had quite enough of all this, she’d walked, blagged, whored and hitch-hiked her way to Nairobi. One night, completely exhausted, she camped out on the steps of the National Museums of Kenya, where she’d decided she’d await the Lord’s Salvation. The Lord took the shape of a kindly assistant curator, whose prayers for the Almighty to send him a child to ease his wife’s shameful barrenness had now, it seemed, been answered—and who took her in and cleaned her up.

  A week later she was the illiterate, unpaid assistant to the janitor. After thirty-five years, the Director of Palaeontology. And now, at the age of fifty-five, what Ernestine Yanga didn’t know about the influence of early humans on landforms in the Rift Valley wasn’t worth knowing.

  She knew far more than that, however, about th
e symptoms of human suffering, to which she was as sensitive as Jack’s spirit chimed to the shape and history of every hanging valley, every drumlin, scarp and oxbow. Her reputation as a terrifying examiner was justified—after all, a woman in her situation could never succeed in life without what she called ‘true grit’ (she was an avid fan of old westerns)—but in Jack she saw a good man who’d been worn almost entirely away by worry, and, like so many men, he was suffering as much from injured pride as from lack of food and sleep. He had tried his hardest, but despite all his efforts, all his denial, he’d felt he was not quite up to the task, and this insulted his being, his masculinity. But he need not have been so concerned, she thought. The evidence he had from that final trip to France was right there, in front of them. And from what Roger MacLennane (such a charming man!) had told her, Jack was a dedicated field worker, the kind of person she preferred infinitely to pallid, deskbound museum types, who so often built their intellectual castles on the sweat of others.

  More importantly, it was clear that Jack fulfilled the first criterion of a doctorate candidate—to venture, without fear, outside the small, cozy nest of knowledge, and into the dark and infinitely greater continent of ignorance that surrounded it. That Jack had ventured so far out that no techniques yet existed to make sense of what he’d found indicated extraordinary fortitude, a brazen and almost breathtaking resolve. If Jack could make no headway with it, then that was hardly his fault, because nobody else (she thought) would have had the ability either. Not MacLennane (he’d admitted as much) and certainly not herself. And yet, if Roger had thought the task impossible, he surely would not have assigned it to a doctorate student. This in itself, she felt, indicated that Jack really must be a man of extraordinary talent, and—she thought back to the fortune that had smiled on her on the Museum steps—talent was precious, and must always be nurtured.

  In any case, Jack was not entirely alone, without help. As Professor Yanga understood it, Jack continued to enjoy the best help possible in the form of the acuity of his young associate, Ms. Markham, who seemed to believe in him and who, Roger had assured her, would go far—especially if she and Jack continued to work as a team. As he freely admitted, Roger MacLennane owed his place in the front rank of academia not to any special cleverness in himself, but to a knack of surrounding himself with clever people. And Roger’s instincts about people were rarely wrong. Jack was, indeed, a fortunate man, as fortunate as he was deserving.

  “Mr Corstorphine, of course, I understand. But please don’t worry yourself. Oh my, you look so tired,” she said, and she smiled—a warm, radiant, motherly smile that made Jack want to dissolve. This woman, this supposedly ferocious, hard-bitten creature who took no prisoners, had smiled at him. She had looked straight at him, into him, and she understood. She knew. And in that moment he knew that there was hope. And so he started again, clearing his throat, which seemed unaccountably to be full of damp sandpaper.

  “I’m sorry—please excuse me. When we think of the French Palaeolithic, we tend to see the landscape as a wilderness, punctuated with some interesting and picturesque cave sites. But that’s a view conditioned more by our prejudices about brutish cavemen than by the facts on the ground. When I got there, accustomed as I had been to the far more challenging and—in any case—more sparsely populated British terrain, France looked to me like nothing more than an almost completely artificial, settled—even industrial landscape, continuously shaped by human influence for perhaps a million years.”

  “What form does that influence take, Mr Corstorphine?”

  This really must be it, the Difficult Question that went to the heart of the matter. But the Professor continued to smile. Now he could not be stopped. The influence takes many forms, he said. Just to take a couple of things more or less at random: virtually no watercourse south of the Loire or west of the Rhône has been natural for any significant part of its length since the Late Middle Pleistocene. At the very least, watercourse curvature has been altered by 16 per cent during the Brunhes magnetostratigraphic interval, with the confidence limits that you’ll see on page 176, I think you’ll find (the committee members turned to their copies of his thesis as Jack felt, at last, to be in the driving seat). In support of this (he continued), the overall number of river channel infill deposits indicative of buried oxbow lakes is very much less than you’d expect by chance, had nature been left to take its course. This means that something—or somebody—has been altering the lower courses of rivers in a systematic way for a very long time.

  And then there is the general topography. Volcanic activity aside, no hilltop exists in this part of France that has natural surface run-off characteristics, possibly an indication of the former presence of earthworks or other structures. In fact (Jack paused to draw breath), I could find no grade that has been completely free of human influence over the same period. There’s one hill, at a place just not far from Aurignac, called Saint-Rogatien-Les-Remillards…

  His mind drifted to when he’d explained all this to Jadis, with mounting excitement, promising her again that after this wretched thesis defense was over, he’d take her there and show her. It was about a month ago, their last evening sitting out in the Nest before it became too cold: they’d had a bottle of wine he’d brought home from the off-license. Retreating to the sitting room, she’d removed a stack of printouts from their sagging old sofa, sat down, pulling him close.

  “This is it, Jack,” she had said—“This is the key. This proves it. This settles everything.” She unbuttoned his shirt—her big black eyes cross-eyed with concentration—and rested her face on his chest, letting him tousle her hair into a blanket, covering and embracing him. He explained to her—to Jadis—to Professor Yanga—that his close survey of this unusual landform revealed to him that its geology was entirely at variance with the underlying bedrock and, furthermore, that its location could not be explained in terms of any local, structural faulting. It couldn’t be a glacial erratic, either, because there had been no glaciers. Much of the landform had been worn away by wind and weather, but with an estimated original volume at least a thousand times that of Saint Paul’s Cathedral—he was proud to have worked out this comparison—it was just too enormous to have been set down by any kind of fluvial transport short of a catastrophic flood of the kind that had created the scablands of the Pacific Northwest, or which had carved out the English Channel—and there had been no sign of any such activity, either. In fact, its location was inexplicable unless…

  At this point, on the sofa, Jadis had trapped his gesticulating hands in hers, and forced them to encircle her. She’d seemed so warm and content, he’d felt that at any minute she’d start to purr. He kissed the top of her head, and said that the only way to explain Saint-Rogatien—the only way—was that it had was an artificial structure. That someone had put it there.

  He’d once read about an ancient pyramid at a place called Cholula in Mexico. By the time the conquistadores got there, it had been abandoned for centuries, its masonry stripped away, and was covered in grass and trees. Assuming it was just a hill (after all, that’s what it looked like), the Spaniards built a town around it and a church on the top. And that was only a few centuries. Imagine, then, if it had been left for a thousand years, a hundred thousand, a million? It would look entirely natural, revealed as artificial only by its strange geology and situation—and only then if somebody first suspected that something was amiss—which nobody had ever done. But when Jack had seen it, his antennae vibrated into overdrive. He knew it didn’t belong there. He just knew.

  By this time Jadis had been on the edge of sleep. “You really are a very silly man,” she had said, yawning. “You’ve just about wrapped it up. The ancestors of the first Neanderthals built gigantic pyramids all over France…”

  “… pyramids that made the Great Pyramid look like a sandcastle—and they were doing it for hundreds of thousands of years.”

  “Well then, you don’t need statistical methods to prove that, so wh
y worry? That’s just basic geology and good ol’ masculine intuition.” She looked up at him, blearily. It occurred to him that her face looked drawn and thin, that what she needed most was sleep. So he’d taken her in his arms and laid her gently on the bed, still in her purple sack, pulling the duvet on top of her. He climbed in beside her, and, together, they slid slowly off to contented, companionable sleep on a smooth, even grade rather shallower than about one in a couple of hundred (he’d estimated), that of a languidly meandering river that makes its mazy, lazy way down to a delta in which it becomes blissfully lost in oozy, woozy thickets.

  As if from an immense distance, he thought he heard Professor MacLennane and Professor Yanga commending him for a splendid thesis.

  “Congratulations, Doctor Corstorphine!” Hands were shaken, but it was clear to both academics that Jack wasn’t really there. They looked worried. The Professors exchanged nervous words that Jack didn’t catch, and Yanga left, looking anxious.

  “Come on, Jack, I’m going to take you home,” MacLennane said as he put his arm around Jack’s shoulders, walked him outside into the quad and steered him towards MacLennane’s ageing but highly polished Volvo saloon. Jack was drained, utterly, to the dregs, alternately assailed by waves of light-headedness and nausea. On the other hand, if he’d stepped out of the car, he didn’t think he’d have sufficient energy to walk, or even stand up. He couldn’t remember having eaten more than a couple of bites of anything for three days. They drew up outside the flat: MacLennane had to haul Jack out of the car. When they knocked at the door, there was at first, no answer.

  “Just coming!”—he heard her lovely voice, after a few more seconds: “in the bathroom! Won’t be a minute!”

  As soon as Jack had left, Jade collapsed on the sofa, eviscerated, as if her heart had burst from within her and now bounced along the street after the dwindling Jack, the world on his broad shoulders, an old gunslinger who, racked by his internal demons, seemed to be losing the will to fight. But she had things to do, an errand of her own, and so, grimly, she dressed, grabbed her bag, and left the house.

  Poor Jack had never looked so down. But as she was sympathetic (how could she not be?) she was, it has to be said, a little annoyed. Not for the simple fact of his low spirits, his anxiety—anyone could forgive him these—but perversely, that his mood seemed so entirely out of character, and that was harder to accommodate. Not that she minded being there for him, to cheer him up, even for weeks on end, because she didn’t. She loved him, and she wanted to make him happy. But where once had stood an imperturbable rock, there had now limped, in the hallway, half-sunk, a fractious, fretful, friable thing she didn’t recognize, and didn’t want to. Realizing how selfish this was, she wanted her old Jack back, the granite-hard Jack, the Jack who had become her secure foundation, tying her surely to the solid rock of this planet Earth. Were he to crumble, she would slip, lose her footing, and float off to who knew where.

  But there was that other thing, too. That when you’d accounted for the relentless work, anxiety and more work of the past year, there was still, lately, a residue of nauseating wretchedness. When it had continued for weeks, making her feel wan and drained, vitiating desire, it occurred to her that something other than the general preoccupation with Jack’s work might be responsible.

  Jadis was almost sure she knew, but, being Jadis, she craved certainty, even within statistical limits, explaining why she had now returned home from the supermarket with a pregnancy testing kit: and—even as Jack, his ordeal over, was allowing his rangy form to be folded passively into the passenger seat of MacLennane’s car—was undressed, in the bathroom, peering awkwardly down at herself and wondering how a mere woman could aim so accurately at a target as narrowly defined as a test strip. Oh, that a man should have to do this, she grinned to herself, he’d at least be in a position to take better aim.

  And just as she heard the knock on the door, presaging the proud return of her conqueror, bloodied for sure, but all dragons slain, the line in the small, crystalline window coalesced, like a chromosome in the very expectancy of division, of the prolongation of a life stretching back to when the world was young, and forward into illimitable futurity—from a yellow nothingness into a single shaft of clear blue.