Chapter 4: A Candle in the Dark

My resolution to keep an open mind about the journal was under heavy stress. Several "modern grimoires" have been written in modern history; some as hoaxes, others reiterated "spells" from earlier works, or became the foundation of modern sects.

The intricate figures and exotic characters made me think it may be a renaissance-era alchemy text. Many of those writings used codes as well as symbols, and allegories to protect the art from the "uninitiated."

Still, the language of Colt's Grimoire, as I started to call it, seemed too elaborate, and too explicit for those alchemical writings. Once again I decided to put off speculation about the nature of text, and focus, like a good epigrapher, on deciphering it.

There were many words I didn't know; most others I had more than one tentative translation for. This is my field, though – as time went on, I indexed the collection of sentences based on interpretation of the words; I tightened up my understanding of the text. It was rather like a crossword puzzle; a crossword puzzle as big as the campus, and with clues written in a foreign language. I loved it!

On Tuesday I had an early morning conference with two people in London. They were convinced that a fragment from Afghanistan was in an Indo-European language. I was less so. It was tentatively dated 2100 before present.

I was less convinced. The fragment was too short for a good analysis, and the symbols resembled the oldest Turkic inscriptions, although much older. We finished without consensus, agreeing to examine several additional inscriptions for similarity.

The classes went well. Most of the remaining students had settled down to work, and a number of them seem to enjoy the subjects. I teach mostly language-related courses, so I was pleased to share my interest.

For the last few weeks I spent all my free time on Colt's Grimoire; that helped distract me from Caroline's leaving. We exchanged a couple of emails, but it was clear the relationship was over.

I did not go out at all during the last two months, despite numerous offers from Brenda. I also skipped departmental outings, which were often organized on Friday afternoons by the unmarried faculty and staff.

Now the weather turned warmer, and I realized that I had gotten over the worst of it. I was interested again in female companionship, and I realized that my classes had some tasty eye candy. Alas, looking was all I could do; hitting on my students would be the quickest way to get fired.

Jenny Sanders, in particular, dressed to show off her figure, and did not hesitate to smile at me. I forced my eyes not to linger on any single student as I explained techniques to reconstruct sound change.

I was now pretty comfortable reading the Grimoire. Despite the amazing amount of material, there was very little about the culture itself. Still, some things could be inferred.

There were several exercises which required pronunciation. The section defined the shape of the mouth, the tongue, and so on. I now had sound values for many of the building blocks. Like with word meanings, several of them were tentative, but I was able to find enough sentences about counting syllables, and what I thought was rhyming, to narrow down most of the phonemes.

The people of the Grimoire called themselves Nalu. It meant something like "the real people", which did not help much in identifying their language family.

The grammar and the sounds had some similarity with other languages, but never all that much. The grammar was regular enough to be artificial, but there are a number of natural grammars which are nearly as regular. With all my experience I could not find enough cognates to place the language in any known family, living or dead. That did not mean much: as I taught Language Change, I knew that over time, sometimes connections between languages became so attenuated that any relation between them was a matter of interpretation or wishful thinking.

I have searched the literature for something similar, but so far have found no plausible match, not even as tenuous as between the Afghani fragment and any known Indo-European. Either the Grimoire was written in a completely invented language, with grammar, alphabet, and over 30,000 words; or it was from an advanced, highly literate culture unknown to modern scholars.

The former was a more likely possibility, but it was still a stretch. I considered whether to publish my findings. I could not advance any evidence based on the tinted signature that no instruments could detect; so only the text itself would be the evidence. It was an interesting piece of decoding, but with no further evidence it would be clearly judged a more-or-less modern hoax. It would be no more than a curiosity, accompanied by a suspicion that I was a part of the hoax – not something I wanted for my scientific reputation.

Worse, the word would get out, and the "fringe science", the types who proved that the Egyptian pyramids had been built by aliens, and Ancient Greece founded from Atlantis, would make a sensation about the "magic of the ancients". This last decided me against trying to share the Grimoire. Besides, I could change my mind later if I decided to write an article on it; on the other hand, once disclosed I could not hide it again.

What I decided to do, now that I've largely decoded the Grimoire, was to read it in order. I would read it, not as an anthropologist trying to glimpse the culture behind it, but as one in that culture. I would be a student of magic, and work through the exercises.

Having come to the decision I went to the pool. Using my body instead of my mind released the tension that I did not realize was gripping me, along with indecision.

I was working on an article for American Linguist when Jenny knocked. This time she was in jeans instead of her customary short skirts. But the jeans were skin-tight, and I had to tear away my gaze from her legs and buttocks lest I start drooling.

"Hello, Professor Acker!"

"Hi, Jenny. What can I do for you?"

"Well...". Jenny stopped. I wonder what she wanted to say. After a second she started again.

"I am doing fine with the course. Now that I am used to your pace I like your lectures just fine. I really enjoy how you can convey so much detail while still making it interesting. I almost wish to switch to linguistics."

"Thanks, Jenny. I've noticed you've been getting A's on your assignments. Congratulations on catching up with the course."

"Thanks!" Jenny paused before continuing. "Changing the subject entirely, Professor Acker, do you, um, have a girlfriend?"

It was time for me to pause and to make sure I was looking at her eyes when I answered, and not at the very appealing figure below.

"Jenny, it may be presumptuous for me to anticipate this line of conversation, but let me say something lest I mislead you. You are an exceptionally attractive woman, but the university code of ethics prohibits personal involvement between faculty and students."

Jenny blushed, but didn't pause this time. "You anticipated correctly, Professor. Pity. But with my course load I plan to graduate this year, at which point I will no longer be a student."

"I am very gratified by your interest, Jenny. Alas, any discussion of future possibilities must remain until the future." I wondered if I sounded as pompous to Jenny as to myself. Unfortunately I didn't know how to steer this conversation safely without being stiff and pompous.

"Oh well. I meant what I said about your lectures, though. You being a hunk is merely a bonus. Have a good day, Prof." Jenny waved and closed my door.

I made sure nobody was seeing me, before standing up and adjusting my pants. That conversation became "stiff" in more ways than one. I was really attracted to that girl. And she certainly wasn't shy in going after what she wanted. Was the new generation of girls so brash?

I laughed at myself. With me being a prodigy, and her a graduate student, I was probably only three years or so older than her. But I was faculty, and she was a student, and that was that.

For a minute, I daydreamed about a clandestine affair, but I knew it wouldn't work. I sighed heavily, and got back to my article.

I went out with some colleagues to Frank's. I ended up talking to Laksh Gupta, a physical anthropologist, about Dreenk's obsession about fieldwork.

"I don't know what you have against fieldwork, Mitch. I can't really teach my students about bones without showing what they look like in situ. And it gets me away from the routine of grading, reading other people's papers, and trying to figure out what to publish and what needs further work.

"And besides, it's always more fun to see where my bones are coming from, rather than receive them in cardboard boxes!"

Despite being slightly morbid, Laksh was a pretty nice guy, and his enthusiasm about his subject – namely bones – was sometimes contagious. As long as the bones were clean; I don't deal well with fresh ones.

"Thing is, Laksh, my main tool is my brain, enhanced with computer, pen and pencil. I am not going to be thinking any better in the jungle or the desert, and the computer access is far more difficult in the field. Actually, I left out one important tool – collaboration. Most of the progress is made by a small team. I need to bounce my ideas off others, and have them bounce theirs off me. Most of my teams are scattered across Americas, Europe and Asia.

"The inscriptions on which I work are usually small and fragmentary, carefully excavated and photographed by people on the digs. Some of them are decades old, but still need decoding.

"I've gone out on a few digs as a student, but I am not really trained for general archaeology, and me standing over the shoulder of somebody waiting until he finds an inscription that needs decoding is pretty useless. In most cases the writing is easily understood, like in Latin, or it's a pre-historic site. Only a small portion of the digs had inscriptions that need my skills.

"In short, going to the field for me would be a complete waste of time, unless something really extraordinary happens."

I thought that I wouldn't mind going on a Nalu dig, but I had no idea where to search. Italy? It was well explored, and if Colt's account was to be believed, only the monkey skeleton and the Grimoire were unusual in a typical Roman dwelling.

In the meantime, Laksh was saying, "I see what you mean. Well, I hope you can convince Dreenk on this, he does seem determined."

Of course, it was easy to say for my older friend: he had tenure, and there was little Dreenk could threaten him with. I, on the other hand, was on a tenure-track, which is very different than having a tenure.

Still, with my recent progress on Grimoire, I had more important things to worry about.

The next three evenings I was tied up with grading assignments. I also started preparing for the first of the mid-term tests – I gave two of them during each semester.

I was able to do some of the breathing exercises from the beginning of the Grimoire, but I couldn't do any of the dream control drills, or the visualization ones.

I did some of my thinking during swimming, but I couldn't do the breathing stuff, so it wasn't until the following week that I started going through the lessons in earnest.

Not surprising, the visualization exercises worked with the tints. According to the Grimoire, what I was seeing was a kind of life energy generated by every living thing. Some of it dissipated, but some of it flowed in patterns not controlled by gravity, but still tending to go lower, and pooling or streaming in larger quantities. Every bit of life produced it, but only a few organisms could perceive it. Specifically, Nalu. I guess I was one of the Nalu. Further, it was perceived by visual organs in the brain, not the eye. The discussion of brains was brief, but very modern-sounding, not at all like the typical conception of physiology in old manuscripts.

The tint designated some qualities of the life energy. I wondered if I should call it the Force, but finally decided on plasm, based on a science fiction book I read once and liked. Apparently, in its native state, plasm did not interact with normal matter, but it could be altered in phase? Direction? Temperature? None of these were correct, but in any case, properly shaped plasm could and did interact with matter. The Grimoire taught one to shape plasm, and it could only be done if you could perceive the tint. Oh well, it looked like old F. Pitt Colt and yours truly were both potential Plasm-shapers.

The weather was getting warmer. That meant cold rain, most of the time, instead of snow or slush, so I did not consider it much improvement. Jenny continued to flirt mildly, and I continued to ignore her.

I went out with Brenda a few times.

"Hi, Mitch, looks like you are not moping over Caroline anymore. Are you ready to start dating?"

"Thanks, but no thanks. I am taking a break from romantic involvement and focusing on my work. I have three articles in progress, five inscriptions that I am working on as part of various teams, a grant application, and two project reports. I am good."