Departures

He closed this volume with the same care he’d used to open it, then stowed it in his leather sack. He had more than a little hope that he would be able to get it safely back to the encampment. Unlike the real Journal of American Veterinary Medicine, the magazines that had hidden behind the lying binding were made from a shiny, coated paper that was better at withstanding the ravages of time than was the more common kind.

The shaman plucked out more books, searching for others printed on the coated paper. He found a couple and put them into the sack. Several others, made from the ordinary variety, disintegrated as soon as he opened them. He murmured a prayer of regret at having destroyed so much irreplaceable wisdom, but did not know what else he could have done.

He picked up the heavy sack, closed the office door behind him, and left the ruin by the window through which he’d entered. He was surprised to note how far the sun had crawled across the sky; he hadn’t paid attention to the shadows as he ransacked the Old Time office.

He hallooed for Jorj, and felt a good deal of relief when the chief hunter hallooed back a moment later. Jorj had the knack for moving quietly through the undergrowth; in a couple of minutes, he simply seemed to appear in front of Madyu out of thin air. He pointed to the bulging leather sack. “Ha! No demons, eh?”

“None that I saw, anyhow,” Madyu answered. He’d only meant to be strictly accurate, but saw he’d also succeeded in frightening Jorj. Well, that wasn’t such a bad thing. Hiding a smile, he went on, “No snakes, either.”

“Good, good. What do you have in there, anyway?”

“Some little knives of good steel, some hollowed needles, glass and metal junk, and some books.”

“Books,” Jorj’s voice informed the word with scorn. “Why bother bringing out books, shaman? What good are they?’’ Like almost everyone else in the tribe, the chief hunter was illiterate.

“You’ll like some of them. Pictures from Old Time.” Madyu’s hands shaped curves in the air. As they did so, he thought again of Neena.

Jorj’s eyes lit up. “You’ll trade some?”

“Why not?’’ Madyu said. “I see you’ve also done pretty well for yourself.’’

More than a dozen dead songbirds, their little yellow legs bound together with twine, hung head down from Jorj’s belt, along with a possum and a couple of chipmunks. “Could be worse,” the chief hunter allowed. “I just wish there was more meat to each one. But as long as I do even this well, we won’t be down to eating grubs and grasshoppers the way we had to a couple of years ago.”

“The gods be praised for that,’’ Madyu said, and meant every word of it. Grasshopper stew was vile; no matter how long the insects cooked, they crunched horridly between the teeth. And Chief Raff had been about to run him out of the tribe for weak magic before the famine finally broke. Madyu never had figured out why the gods got so angry at him, or why they finally decided to relent.

Shaman and chief hunter walked back to the encampment in companionable silence, each well enough pleased with his day’s work. Thanks to his tasty burden, Jorj got the big half of the wishbone’s worth of greetings, but Madyu created some enthusiasm among the men when he told them about the pictures of Old Time girls he’d found.

Neena happened to be standing close by just then, and let out a sniff loud enough to make him regret for a moment having come across the volume with pictures. Soon enough, though, thoughts of profit ousted regret. It wasn’t, worse luck, as if Neena were his woman.

After supper but before sunset made reading impractical, Madyu settled down with the other two books he’d brought back from the ruin. One of them, its title page proclaimed, was about the diseases of cats. He read three or four pages, then put the book down with a grunt of disgust. It was as incomprehensible as the one with which the other shaman had cheated him.

He wondered if he was the problem, but shook his head. He read pretty fluently, and the Old Time language wasn’t that far removed from the English his tribe spoke (he never had figured out why the language bore that name; he didn’t know of a place called Eng anywhere within shouting distance of Eestexas). But this book was crammed full of words he not only didn’t know but couldn’t define from context: What did distal mean, for instance, or pancreatic function?

He thought about trading the book to a Maykano; maybe the peculiar words were Spanyol, not English at all. If they were, someone from a southern tribe might get more out of the volume then he could. And if not, well, it wouldn’t be the first time he’d diddled someone in a trade.

He picked up the other volume with a certain amount of resignation, convinced from the outset that it would be even worse than the one he’d just set aside. Even its tide looked like a nonsense word: Taxonomy. “Tax-on-uh-me?” he said, sounding it out. He had some idea what taxes were-tribute that you paid to your chief, or that a weak tribe paid to a strong one next door. He couldn’t see why anyone would want to write a book about that, or why a veterinarian would need it once it was written. He also doubted Old Time folk had had to worry about anything so mundane as taxes.

But, being a stubborn sort, he decided he would keep going in the book until he found out what its name meant-names, after all, were powerful. He turned to the preface and found, to his surprise, that not only did it tell him what he wanted to know, it did so in a fashion he had little trouble understanding.

Taxonomy, he gathered, was a way of organizing living creatures by how they were related to one another, something like the genealogical charts some shamans drew for their tribes. He whistled softly to himself. The Old Time folk thought big if they aimed to keep track of how everything was related to everything else. He admired their presumption without wishing to emulate it. Just to begin with, how did they propose to keep track of all the different names every living thing had?

Two paragraphs further on, the preface told him: binomial nomenclature. That formidable pair of words almost made him put down the book then and there. But the preface went on to explain what it meant: two names, one generic, to tell what sort of creature an animal was, and the other specific, to tell exactly what sort it was.

That had the shaman scratching his head again. But this Taxonomy book, despite its intimidating title, did a much better job of explaining things than did the volume on the diseases of cats. It gave the example of the dog-which, for no reason Madyu could see, it called Canis familiaris-and the wolf-which it styled Canis lupus. The generic name they shared said they were closely related to each other, while their different specific names said they weren’t the same.

“Makes sense of a sort,” Madyu admitted. It made enough sense, at any rate, for him to keep reading. His eye lit on a sentence in the next paragraph and would not go away: The so-called scientific name attached to any organism remains constant throughout the world, enabling researchers to communicate effectively and accurately regardless of their native languages.

He stared at those words until darkness made them illegible.

If they meant what he thought they did, he’d just stumbled across the biggest Old Time treasure ever, bigger than gold, bigger than jewels, bigger even than the usable firearms and ammunition that still turned up every once in a while. If the whole world had once recognized a single (or rather, double) true appellation for every animal and plant, was he not holding a book full of secret names?

He wanted to run screaming through the encampment, shouting, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” He wanted to get drunk. He wanted to get laid. He wanted to beat Chief Ralf at checkers and then laugh in his face. He wanted to do all those things at once. But none of them, or even all of them at once, would have given him a tenth part of the exaltation he felt sitting there quietly in the dark.