Ammonite

She filled a nosebag for Pella, then lay down and listened to her heart beat and the wind howl over Tehuantepec.

When she was young she had lain awake in the sticky heat of Macau and listened to the chirrup of insects and the beat of her heart. It had frightened her that her life depended upon such a fragile organ, that a lump of muscle hardly bigger than her fist was all that kept the blood pumping around her body. She wondered how thick the heart walls were, and if it ever just got tired and gave up, decided it had had enough of sucking and pushing and squeezing blood around her veins. She lay with her hands over her ears, only to discover that made the sound more distinct. Humming herself to sleep worked, or drumming little rhythms on her futon.

As she grew older, she learned to listen more to the beat that underlay her whole life: how it speeded up when she was tense or tired; how it was smooth and confident when she exercised regularly; how she could make it change if she breathed fast and hard, or slow and easy. It fascinated her. She took up yoga, then chi kung and tai chi, until she could increase blood flow to various parts of her body at will. Then she went to Beaver, and had all her confidence beaten out of her.

The months in Wales afterward were full of anxieties and short breath, phobias and panic. Her doctor referred her to a meditation specialist; he said to do this, and do this, but she could not relax enough to try. The specialist referred her on to the experimental‑psychology department in Llangelli.

They hooked her up to machines that measured her alpha waves, her blood flow, her temperature, the electrical activity of her skin, the gaseous content of her blood and its pH, the dilation of her pupils. With different words, they helped her relearn that her body was an intricate mechanism made of interco

Later, on her own, she took her training further, experimenting with sensitizing her body to magnetic and electrical fields. She had hoped to write a paper on biofeedback, autogenics, and the supernormal experience in myth.

Pella snorted, too hot under her makeshift blanket. Marghe took it off, checked the nosebag, scratched the mare behind her ears. The blizzard howled.

Woman and horse were hunched and dark against the snow; veils of cold mist filtered the afternoon to pearl. The only sound was the crunch of hooves and the creak of leather as Marghe’s weight shifted with her mare’s walk.

“Faster now, Pella.”

Her quiet voice was sucked away, swallowed by the silence. Not for the first time, she swung in the saddle and peered into the mist behind her. There was nothing there, nothing but white quiet and the snort of her mare’s breath.

Her nose began to drip. There was nothing to wipe it on.

Something was different. She lifted her head, reined Pella to a halt, turned her head this way and that. There, to her left: a darker patch. The air seemed to thrum, tickling the fine nerve endings under her skin as though she was in the presence of a strong magnetic field. She clucked the horse into a walk.

A megalith loomed before her, others curved into the mist. She nudged Pella closer and leaned from the saddle to run a gloved hand down its side. Where she rubbed away frost, the stone was dark and pitted. She dismounted and walked around it. It was twice her mounted height, three times the thickness of her waist.

Who had made this? And why?

Not bothering to remount, she led Pella from one stone to another. The sleeve of her overfur was stiff with frost; with difficulty, she uncovered her wristcom, touched RECORD.

“There are twenty‑seven stones ranged in a circle but I can’t judge how perfect its dimensions are. The purpose of these stones is unclear, but it should be noted that the tribes in this area utilize a twenty‑seven‑day lunar calendar.” She ran her fingers over the pitted stone, wondering at the tingle she felt. She looked more closely and the electric tingle was replaced by excitement. “The tool marks appear weathered to an extent incompatible with the surmised landing date of the first settlers. These stones are very old.”

They were impossibly old. These stones should not be here, unless humans had landed on Jeep hundreds, thousands of years earlier than supposed; or unless whoever, whatever, had quarried these megaliths, carefully shaped them with crude tools, and raised them up, was not human.

She stood in the snow, rubbing absently at her cold‑numbed buttocks. Who made this? The large animals of Lu Wai’s theories? But then they would be sentient animals. She stopped rubbing, cocked her head to the mist. All she heard was Pella pawing at the snow to get at the grass.

The day was fading. Marghe uncinched the girths and swung the saddle into the snow. It was lighter than it had been. Just outside the circle, she scraped away a big patch of snow for Pella. The tent took two minutes. It was dark inside; when her wristcom beeped she had to fumble for the FN‑17, which she swallowed with a mouthful of icy water.

She popped the memory chip from her wristcom, replaced it with one on which she kept her personal journal. “I don’t know what to make of these stones. Even here, in the tent, I can sense their presence. It’s not quite like anything I’ve felt before. I wonder what their significance was, and to whom. Perhaps I should say is. Even assuming their makers are long dead, I feel sure they’d still be a focus of ritual activity. On a plain like this, stones this size would really mean something.”

She rubbed her forehead. Of course they meant something.

She hit OFF, curled up against the pack and saddle, and pulled her furs closer. She was tired. Outside, Pella munched loudly on half‑frozen grass. They were both tired, tired and sick of the monotony of the almost‑void where the only changes were ones of brightness, a brightness that dimmed as they plodded north.

Maybe she would be more coherent in the morning. She sighed and pressed CHIP EJECT. Nothing happened. She tried again. Nothing. Perhaps it was the cold. She took the wristcom off, held it between her palms, tucked her hands between her legs. While she waited for it to warm up, she breathed deep and slow, concentrating on finding a still, calm place in her center. She came out of her light trance and tried the eject button again.

Nothing. She tapped in a request for diagnostics. The chip was still accessible, but it suggested she take the wristcom to a reliable service outlet, as the port was jammed. She turned it over in her hand thoughtfully, then requested a chip map. The chip was almost full. She tried to run an erase, but the jam had triggered automatic erasure protection. There was room for perhaps fifteen hours of dictation. The operating memory would add another hour or so.

Fifteen hours was not enough to keep a decent record. Her trip would be useless. How much time would she lose by going back? She slid her map from its pocket and studied it. It would take weeks to get back to Port Central, weeks to return here. Not an option. She tried looking at the problem from another angle: how else could she record her observations? She had a little paper, not much. Perhaps she could persuade the women she met to give her cloth, and dyes to use as ink.

A sudden thought occurred to her. She tried the compass. The stones sent numbers flickering at random; useless. She was alone on Tehuantepec, plateau of myth and magic, strange beasts and wild tribes, with a malfunctioning compass, out of range of any communications relay, and with a SLIC that for all practical purposes was useless. Was this what had happened to Wi