‘There are still things I want to know,’ I told her. ‘I still plan to dig up your bones and take another look at that vase.’
She shrugged.
‘I can’t talk to you here,’ I said to her irritably. ‘They won’t let me have cigarettes. I think that goddamn American antismoking propaganda has spread even here.’
She faded when the nurse opened the door and I realized only then that I had been speaking in English the whole time.
I went home a week after Tony. He went home in a box; I went on crutches. 1 was asked to speak at his memorial service, but I begged off, pleading illness. The department head delivered a fine impersonal eulogy that painted Tony with a rosy hue, flawless and unnatural as the cherubs that flanked the altar.
I went back to my apartment in Berkeley, taking my notebooks. I sent Diane a note, telling her to get in touch when she felt like it. I did not know what else to say.
My leg did not heal quite right. I limped, especially in wet weather, and walked with a cane that Barbara had bought for me in the Mérida market. The university welcomed me back for the fall semester. In the wake of the publicity attending the finds at Dzibilchaltún, three publishing houses were vying for the hardcover rights to my still-unfinished book, City of Stones. I had laid plans to return to Dzibilchaltún to complete the excavation of the tomb and the ceremonial area. Barbara would be assisting me on the project. I watched the shadows of the past, but none of them spoke to me.
On an overcast day, I had paused on a wooden bridge that spans Strawberry Creek to watch an Indian woman weave a basket from water-softened reeds. Someone leaned on the rail beside me, and I looked up, expecting to see one of my students.
Diane was looking down at the creek. For a moment, she did not look at me. When she did, something seemed different about her. She held herself with a new confidence, a certainty that she had lacked before. ‘I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m crazy too,’ she said. Her voice was steady; she did not seem particularly upset. ‘It took a while, but I’ve gotten used to it. In fact, I don’t mind it.’
She paused for a moment, and I could hear the song that the Indian woman was singing to herself, a wandering melody based on an unfamiliar scale.
‘Barbara tells me that you’re planning another expedition to Dzibilchaltún,’ she said. ‘I’d like to go.’
I watched the woman weaving her basket, carefully lacing the reeds together to make an intricate pattern of light and dark. ‘I don’t know what we’ll find there,’ I said.
‘You never do know what you’ll find when you dig in the past,’ she said.
‘That’s true,’ I said.
‘Can I come with you?’
‘I think that could be arranged,’ I said. I turned away from the bridge and Diane offered me her arm. I hesitated a moment, then took her arm.
‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘about the shadows of the past.’
About the Author
Patrice Ann Murphy was born in Washington in 1955, and is an award-winning American science writer and author of science fiction and fantasy. Her second novel, The Falling Woman (1986), won the Nebula Award, and she also won a Nebula Award in the same year for her novelette, ‘Rachel in Love.’ Her short story collection, Points of Departure (1990) won the Philip K. Dick Award, and her 1990 novella, ‘Bones’, won the World Fantasy Award in 1991. She lives in San Francisco.
Also by Pat Murphy
The Shadow Hunter (1982)
The Falling Woman (1986)
The City, Not Long After (1989)
Nadya (1996)
There and Back Again (1999)
Wild Angel (2000)
Adventures in Time and Space with Max Merriwell (2001)
Points of Departure (1990)
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Praise
‘A wonderful and literate exploration of the dark moment when myth and science meet’
‘Murphy’s sharp behavioural observation, her rich Mayan background and the revolving door of fantasy and reality honourably recall the novels of Margaret Atwood’
Copyright
Text copyright © Pat Murphy 1986
Introduction copyright © Lisa Tuttle 2013
All rights reserved
The right of Pat Murphy to be identified as the author of this work, and the right of Lisa Tuttle to be identified as the author of the introduction, has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
This eBook first published in Great Britain in 2013 by
Gollancz
The Orion Publishing Group Ltd
Orion House
5 Upper St Martin’s Lane
London WC2H 9EA
An Hachette UK Company
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 575 13315 0
All characters and events in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.