Glyphs

The small craft set down in a field, silent as an owl. Three young women filed out into the moonless night, turning on night-vision goggles. One of them lugged a device on her back and twelve drones flew behind them.

“Are you sure about this?” Astrid asked. In the NVGs everything looked green, including her friends. “I don’t want to get in trouble.”

“It’ll be fine,” Dani said. “We’re grad students on break, we’re expected to have some fun.”

“This is a school trip,” Gwen said.

Astrid grabbed Gwen’s arm and stopped. “How do you figure that?”

“We’re exoanthropology students, and we’re meant to be studying the goats’ culture. How they handle the unexpected is part of that.” Gwen freed herself from Astrid’s grasp and urged the other two to follow. “Let’s go.”

“I hope we don’t run across any of the caprids while we’re here.” Astrid emphasized the proper name for their body type — calling them goats was like calling hominids monkeys — but she was still unsure about the enterprise.

Gwen laughed. “That’s why we only come down on moonless nights. Their night vision is worse than ours, and we can only see with NVGs.”

“How do you think we get all the spy cameras down here?” Dani asked. “I was with the team that planted the cameras by the well. We were almost spotted by the caprids but were far enough away that they could only hear us running away.”

“Okay, that’s legitimate, though. This is…I don’t know.”

Dani put a hand on Astrid’s shoulder. “It’s no different than what the Correlanians did to us. Lights in the sky, holograms of the so-called ‘greys,’ the original Nazca lines—”

Astrid interrupted. “Those were made by first the Paracas, and later the Nazca cultures…humans.”

Gwen said, “The ones that are there now, yes. The original lines were smaller, made by the Correlanians to see how the indigenous humans would react. They reacted by filling them in and making even bigger ones. Didn’t you study the Correlanian texts in exo-anthro 201?”

“No, we studied the Harveran texts about their studies on ZQ497-32.1.”

“Shit, isn’t that the one where they messed up and the xenos started worshipping them and got into a huge religious war and wiped themselves out?” Dani asked.

“Yeah,” Astrid said, “so, I’m sure you can understand my concern.”

Gwen stopped and pointed at the flat plateau in front of them. “There’s our canvas, let’s go to work.” She unstrapped the vibra-trencher from her back. “Dani, fire up the drones.”

The drones lit up, flying in odd formations, but one stayed directly in front of the vibra-trencher, showing where to dig in order to make the design Gwen had come up with. “Let’s make some art!”

A stylized drawing of a caprid, three-hundred meters tall, was dug from the topsoil; the vibra-trencher throwing the dirt clear to each side of the even, forty-centimeter-wide, fifteen-centimeter-deep trench. The design was drawn out in one, continuous line, as fast as Gwen could run.

The caprid drawing complete, a circle was drawn around it from the same line, ending with letters that left Astrid confused and Dani laughing.

“Um, why did you put that?” Astrid asked.

“Because we weren’t here,” Dani said, helping Gwen strap the vibra-trencher on her back. “Start drone program three, Astrid.”

Astrid nodded, and keyed in the command for the drones on the remote that Dani had previously held. They extinguished their lights and three of them overflew the lines, close to the ground, roiling up dust.

The other nine followed the women on their return trek to the ship, blowing away all footprints as they did. The three that had cleared the footprints from the lines flew back to the ship and were waiting when the others arrived.

Once back aboard, Dani said, “I hate this part.”

The ship lifted off the ground and began lurching side to side, turning and tilting, blowing the ground into something that might have been caused by nothing more than the wind…erasing the traces of their landing.

Astrid looked at her in the light of the ship. “You almost look as green as you did in the NVGs.”

“Shut up,” she said.

After a moment, the ship settled and lifted back to orbit where they docked with the research station. Most of the other student shuttles were still gone, so the women decided to hit the bar and get plastered. Some time during the evening, the bar filled with their fellow grad students, along with a group from their rival university.

—

Astrid felt as bad as Dani had looked the previous night. A massive hangover was not the best way to sit through a lecture.

Dr. Arkan stepped into the lecture hall and let the door slam behind him. He was not in a good mood.

“Oh, shit,” Dani whispered.

Dr. Arkan sat as his desk, rather than standing behind his podium. He sipped his coffee loudly while he waited for the room to quiet.

“Oh, double-shit,” Gwen whispered back.

“How many of you,” he asked, “did your undergraduate here? Not, here, here, but with Terra Galactic University?”

About half the hands in the room were raised. “How many of you studied the Harveran texts in EO 201?”

Astrid’s hand went up, along with four others, joining the raised hand of the other TGU students.

Dr. Arkan heaved a heavy sigh and took another loud sip of his coffee. “You can put your hands down now. Everyone who raised their hand will understand why…I…am…PISSED!”

The display screen behind him showed the women’s artwork; a stylized caprid surrounded by a circle, with the conjoined U-T logo for the University of Terra at the bottom. A picture-in-picture popped up in the corner of the display, showing a conversation happening at the well. Another popped up in the opposite corner showing a group of caprids heading toward the bluff.

“For those of you who can’t follow the dialect of this group when they talk fast like this, the conversation is about strange lights over the bluff. There are questions of whether it was gods or fires of their enemies or some strange weather.”

He slammed his palm down on the table. “The FIRST DAY that University of Terra students are allowed on this site, and they do this. Those assholes have CONTAMINATED our study! No trace means NO TRACE!”

Astrid took a breath to speak, but Dani punched her in the leg to shut her up.

“We don’t know which of those Terrors did this, but when we find out, they…will…feel…my…wrath.”

Several of the class fought to hold in giggles at hearing the professor refer to the UT students as Terrors, the bastardization of their mascot: Terriers. UT did the same with the TGU mascot, calling the Pilots the Pyros.

“Those of you who studied the Correlanian or Vistuvan texts in EO 201 might wonder what the big deal is. Yes, we hope that this will go at least as well as it did for the Correlanians. We fear what happened with the Harverans.”

Dr. Arkan sipped at his coffee again. “No lecture today. I’ll be spending the next few hours welcoming the Terrors to our study. In the meantime, I want a ten-page essay on what impact this may have on the caprids at site 14-G, and the surrounding locations, with a compare and contrast of the Correlanian and Harveran results.”

The class sat stunned, most of all Astrid who felt guilt gnawing at her bones.

Dr. Arkan set his coffee down and turned off the corner pictures. “One thing, though…whoever did this has studied the artwork from 14-G and done it true to style. Part of me wants to say, ‘Well done,’ but I’m still pissed.

“Now get out of here!”

Everyone rose and gathered their tablets, but Dr. Arkan raised a hand. “Gwen, Dani, Astrid…hang on a minute.”

Astrid’s hangover fought with the guilt to make her sicker than she’d ever felt. Gwen’s face was unreadable, but Dani had the kid caught with a hand in the cookie jar look.

Once the room was empty of everyone else, Dr. Arkin looked at the trio. “I know it was you, and I honestly believe that this will turn out at least as fine as the Correlanian experiment, if not better.”

Astrid opened her mouth to say something, but he stopped her. “This is not the official policy of TGU, and if anyone asks, I never said this.

“I did my doctoral thesis on what went wrong with ZQ497-32.1 and it is nothing like this. One of researchers decided it was taking the indigenous population too long to invent writing. Without approval, he showed himself to what the Harverans called the ‘prinikal’ which means four-footeds in their language.

“Anyway, he showed himself to them, and using a laser, engraved pictographs of the stories they told as they were telling them! He did this in full view of ten or more prinikal — sources differ on that from ten to over a hundred.

“Regardless, they saw this as proof that he was a god and began to worship him. He was sent away immediately, but the prinikal began preparing for his return. The disagreement was in how they should prepare, and how they should worship.”

Astrid felt a mix of relief and shame and hangover pain. “But you were so mad….”

Dr. Arkan smiled. “It was all a show. I need everyone convinced that I’m convinced some of the new UT students did this. It wouldn’t do to have to boot my best and brightest.”

He pointed to Dani. “You programmed the drones?”

Dani nodded.

“And Gwen ran the trencher.”

“Yes, sir,” Gwen said.

“What was your part, Astrid?”

“I drew the glyph that Dani programmed into the drones and Gwen carved.”

“Including the UT logo at the bottom?”

Astrid shook her head.

Gwen said, “The circle and logo was all me, sir. I was…hoping to throw the trail somewhere else.”

Dr. Arkan laughed. “Well, as far as anyone knows, you’ve done just that. I…may…have messed up when reading the logs from your shuttle and accidentally erased them,” he said. “Of course, that menu is fiddly, and I think I might have erased four or five shuttle logs.”

“Th—thank you Dr. Arkan,” Astrid said. “We won’t ever do anything like this again.”

“Oh, you’ll do something similar, soon.” He smiled at her. “You’re going down with the next group to add cameras around the bluff. I have a feeling it’s about to be important to the caprids…at least those in 14-G. Also, if you could draw up a few similar glyphs in the same style, it would be interesting to see how close you get to what they follow up with.”

Astrid nodded. “Sure.”

Dr. Arkan rose. “All right, now get out of here. I’ve got to get my ire up again before I go talk to the UT group. Damn Terrors.”

“Go Pilots!” Gwen said, getting a harsh look from Dr. Arkan.

The three of them hurried out of the lecture hall. “I think you got him started again, Gwen.”

“What can I say, Dani? I’ve got spirit!”

“And I’ve had too many spirits,” Astrid said. “I’m going back to my dorm and sleeping for a week.”

“Don’t forget the paper,” Gwen said.

“It’s just a riff on a paper I did for EA-451 at CalTech,” Astrid said. “One day touch-up, tops.”

“You think we can use the stuff he told us about the laser and stuff?” Dani asked.

“Not unless you can find his doctoral thesis in the library,” Astrid said. “If you want, I still have my old 201 textbook somewhere if you want to borrow it.”

“Only if I can’t find enough sources in the library,” Gwen said. “It’s kind of a bummer to know that it’s not the whole story.”

“I have a feeling that a lot of textbooks are that way,” Astrid said. “Somebody did something, and someone else tried to condense it into a few glyphs and that’s all we get.”