Petroglyph

When he surfaced, the girls were back in the water and they played until the chill drove them back to their clothes.

They walked back to Tobin's truck with Marley between them and his arms over their shoulders. They loaded their gear and began the drive home.

"That was the most fun I've had in years," Tobin told them. She was sitting between them and she put an arm around them both. "Thanks guys. You're fun to be around."

"We like you, too," Aden told her. "I'm glad you're staying with us, Tobin. This is going to be an interesting summer."

When they returned to the house, Lila was in the hot tub and Tobin discovered that the lack of a taboo against nudity extended to their mother as well as she walked naked into the house, drying herself with a towel. She dressed for dinner and they popped popcorn and watched another cheesy horror flick before going to bed.

Chapter Three

Tobin worked on her computer all the next day, uploading her pictures and sending the symbol to everyone she could discover that might know something about it. She had used Photoshop to touch it up and complete some of the broken places. She researched the petroglyphs found in the area and found some similar symbols but nothing that matched exactly.

E-mails began popping up late in the afternoon as researchers had the opportunity to evaluate the symbol.

Around ten people had seen it before. According to them, all but one sighting had been drawn in paint. Five had taken samples and reported that it was not paint at all but human blood. She shivered when she heard that. One reported that she had found the symbol carved into a rock near Cowboy Wash in Colorado.

She forwarded the image to Tobin and she compared it to her symbol.

The symbols were very similar. Research into the Cowboy Wash dig site was very controversial. The initial team had decided that the population had shown signs of cannibalism and abandonment after the cannibalism began. Later comments had objected to these findings. It appeared to Tobin that it was politically incorrect to attribute cannibalism to the pueblo tribes of that era and that the original findings were correct. The discovery of dismembered bodies found at Cowboy Wash matched their discovery and she forwarded her pictures of the bones they had found.

Lila had the day off and Tobin shared her research with the older woman. "It sounds pretty gruesome to me," Lila said. "Did they really eat one another?"

"That's the way it looks. Maybe I'll find out more when we climb down to the cliff houses."

"I want you kids to be very careful out there. I've given enough to that place. The path is very treacherous and you have to crouch down to get under the cliff in a couple of places. You're right out on the edge. Promise me you'll stay roped together and tie off on the rocks in the narrow places."

"We will, Lila. Don't worry about us."

"That's my job."

"I know, but I'll take care of them, or they'll take care of me."

"I know you will, honey. When are you going?"

"If I get done here, maybe we'll go tomorrow. I've got some writing to do and then I'll be ready."

Tomorrow turned out not to be a propitious day as thunder rumbled over the mountain and a light rain was falling when they woke up. They decided to postpone to the following day and Tobin again spent the day on her computer. She was well into her first draft and had incorporated many of the new details into her dissertation. She read it to Marley and Aden in the afternoon.

Her thesis stated that the disappearance of the ancient pueblo people was triggered by a religious upheaval in their society. Their astronomical ancestral religion was abandoned, first in the larger cities and spreading rapidly through the communities. Those loyal to the old gods fled to the mesa tops and then to the inaccessible sides of cliffs. Somehow even those impregnable fortresses had fallen, and the remnants fled south before a rising plague of ritual murder, war, pestilence, famine and cannibalism. The people self-destructed leaving behind only the haunted dwellings and a name, "the people who are our enemies, or "the ancestors of those who are not us," depending on the translation.

Sparking the religious revolution was the attainment of some tremendous leap in power. According to those who fled and passed the legends on to their dependents, the new religious order attained spiritual power beyond anything previously imagined and gained control over the natural forces. They tampered with things beyond their comprehension with catastrophic results. They built religious structures to enhance their powers and worshipped a being depicted as a horned demon in murderous rites. It was unclear where the new religion originated but it rang a death knell over the culture.

A counter revolution began, too late to save their civilization. The revolution dismantled many of the buildings, wiped the cult out and left the ruins of their once great civilization to the wind. They carried warning to the cultures to the south and assimilated with them, disappearing into the dustbin of history. Only the warning and the ruins remained.

"That's a pretty bleak tale," Aden said. "I feel so sorry for those people. It seems like they went from a culture of peaceful farmers growing their corn, beans and squash in irrigated fields to a debased, degraded and suicidal gathering of mad men."

"What would people say 1000 years from now if we go down the tubes tomorrow?" Marley asked. "They'd probably say the same thing about us."

"Yes, but even when cultures break down now you seldom see religious murder cults or cannibalism today," Tobin objected. "Maybe if there was starvation along with the cultural collapse you might see it, and maybe that's what's going on here. However, they survived famine before, even worse than they were experiencing when the new religion came crashing down. I think the evidence points to ritual murder and cannibalism."

Lila came home early and the four of them drove into town to eat. Several of the Dolan's friends from high school joined them and they all went to a club. No one questioned Aden's presence and although she didn't drink, they spent several hours in dancing and conversation with old friends. Aden danced with anyone who asked her and Tobin danced mostly with Marley. He led his mother out once and she accepted an invitation from a young man who claimed to be an old friend of the family and the son of the local sheriff.

He was very much in awe of Tobin and was very careful not to offend her. "Marley could break my neck with one hand," he told her. "Not that he ever would, but I remember when Addy was in the first grade and Marley was in the third. This fifth grader knocked her off the swings and cut her lip. I thought Marley was going to beat him to death. We had to pull him off and the kid's parents threw a fit. Luckily, there were a lot of witnesses that saw the kid start the fight. Nobody ever messed with either of them after that. When we were in high school all I ever had to say was I was a friend of Marley's and bullies backed off right away."

"He seems like a big teddy bear to me," Tobin said.

"Yes, but he has a temper to go along with that red hair. It takes a lot to get him going, but I wouldn't want him mad at me. Even the coaches didn't talk to him like they talked to the rest of us. I think they were afraid of him. Well, that and they needed him on their teams. He used to just crush people on the football field. He didn't like football much though. He always liked wrestling."

"What's he majoring in at school?" she asked.

"He hasn't told you? He's majoring in philosophy. His parents are obscenely wealthy and he doesn't need to work. His dad inherited the largest ranch west of Texas and he expanded it constantly until he had the accident. Lila sold most of it off, but they bought heavily into telecommunications just before cell phones got big and I would hate to guess how much they're worth."

"I had no idea. They don't seem at all snooty about it."

"Have you seen their house? I don't know how you met them, but they pretty much keep to themselves up there. You must be someone pretty important for them to take you in like that. I've never been in the house. Marley lets me hunt up there, but not many people have ever been inside the house."

Tobin rolled the conversation over in her mind for a while. On the way home, she was quiet for a long time.

"Are you okay, Tobin?" Lila asked. "Is your head bothering you? We shouldn't have come this soon. I'm sorry, honey."

"No, I feel fine," she said. "I was just wondering about something someone asked me back at the club. He said you guys don't mix much with the locals. He said he'd never been to your house and I must be someone important for you to take me in."

Lila laughed. "I suppose it must seem like that to them. The thing is, I don't care much for many of the people here. They're nice enough in their way, but I've never really needed anyone much except my children. I loved their father deeply and I never wanted to waste a minute away from him and my children. I never practiced after we got married until after he died and the kids went away to college. Do you know I offer free medicine to anyone in this county that doesn't have health insurance? Did they tell you that we donated land for a sports complex, a huge community center and two parks in town? It just seems like the more you do the more they expect. I have five friends in town that visit our house regularly and I go to theirs."

"You are someone special, Tobin," Aden told her. "You're special to us."

Tobin smiled. "Well, I didn't believe any of it anyway. It just made me sad that they don't know you like I do. I've never met anyone like your family. I didn't know anyone existed like you. What does a philosophy major do, Marley?"

"That's what Mom and Addy wonder," he laughed. "We sit around and talk about beautiful women."

"I can believe that," Aden said. "What do beautiful women have to do with philosophy?"

"See, that's a philosophical question. What is a beautiful woman? What is beautiful and what is ugly? Do you think Tobin is beautiful?"

"No, I think she's smoking hot and so do you."

"Is she attractive?"

"What do you mean? Attractive how?"

"Exactly, take it any way you want."

"Well, if you mean sexually attractive, I'm not usually attracted to women, but if I was I'd sure pick her. I think most men would think she is very attractive."

"What makes her attractive?"

"Well, she has all that hair. It's a beautiful, blue/black color and it's so long. I think long hair is attractive. She has those tilted up grey eyes and a cute little nose. Her lips are all puffy and beautiful. She has a bubbly personality and she's so, I don't know, squishy."

"Hey," Tobin objected, "is that a fat joke?"

Aden laughed. "No, I meant like fun to squeeze. I guess I do find her attractive."

"Aden!" Tobin exclaimed.

"What? I think you're beautiful and I like beautiful things. When you see a beautiful statue, don't you want to run your hand across it? If you see a cute kitten don't you want to hold it and squeeze it?"

We've strayed from our subject," Lila said. "You were telling us how beauty is a philosophical idea."

"Have you ever seen old paintings of beautiful women?" Marley asked.

"Yes, but I don't think they're very beautiful," Aden said.

"Why not?"

"They just look like fat women with big noses. They look like me if I gained 75 pounds. They've got fat bellies and butts but little boobs. They look kind of gross."

"The men who painted them obviously thought they were quite beautiful. I guess standards have changed. That's what philosophy decides: important questions about what's real and what's cultural. Beautiful is cultural. Is someone beautiful because they have symmetrical features, because they have a certain body type, or because some fashion guru says they are? No, someone is beautiful when they look in the eyes of their lover and see desire. That's what philosophy is about. We talk about why things are the way they are. It's the greatest science in the world."

"Well, it's interesting, but it's not the greatest science," Aden told him.

"Enlighten us, oh wise one."

"It's agriculture, that's why I'm majoring in it. We feed the world."

"I think that's where you're wrong. I think the invention of agriculture is humanity's greatest mistake."

"You're such a hypocrite," she told him. "What do you call ranching? That's agriculture and you're doing it."

"I never said I wasn't doing it. In fact, you're the one that manages the ranch. I help you any way I can because I love you, but it's still a mistake."

"Go on," Lila said. "This is one I want to hear."

"Well, let's think about it like this: Suppose we have a nomadic hunter thousands of years ago. He hunts game, he picks wild fruit and eats wild grain. He digs for wild roots and catches fish. Studies show that he would have spent from two to 6 hours a day looking for food. His tools are dangerous and sharp and everyone leaves him alone. The group of raiders in the area are afraid to mess with him. One day he's out hunting and he thinks that if he grew some of the wild grain he could us it as bait to get the animals to come to him instead of chasing them. He scratches up a field close to his house and plants the grain. He starts feeding animals and when they come to eat the grain, he kills them. Eventually the animals become used to him and he builds a pen and domesticates them. Now he's raising grain and feeding it to his animals and he raises a surplus. He stores his surplus in jars he learns how to make because he needs to store grain. He's doing very well for himself."

"How is that a bad idea?" Tobin asked.

"So far it's not. However, there's that group of raiders in the area and they come riding by one day. They see he has a pretty sweet deal. They make him a proposal that for some of his surplus they'll protect him from other groups of raiders in the area and he won't have to protect himself and can spend his time growing things instead of worrying about raiders. So he makes a deal with the devil. He can now spend all his energy on agriculture and he gets even richer. The raiders make the same deal with other farmers in the area, and because of the agricultural surplus, a parasite class is born. They don't produce anything of their own; they live off of the labor of the farmers."

"That sounds like a government," Lila said.

"It is a government," he said. "That's what governments do. Pretty soon, the raiders go to the farmers and tell them that they need roads from their headquarters to the farms so that they can get to them quicker and protect them better. Since it's for the farmer's protection, he should donate some of their surplus to hire people to build roads."

"Don't the roads help the farmers?" Aden asked.

"Yes they do. But their surplus is smaller because they're now supporting the road building crew and the road maintenance crew. Soon the raiders need to recruit more protectors so they go to the farmers and ask for more. Since they have a bigger force, they need a bigger barracks. They also need someone to supervise the surplus gathering and some priests to bless their protection efforts and the growth of the crops. These all are for the farmer's benefit. Because he has a big surplus, he gets married and has children and the population swells. Soon it's so large that hunting and gathering can no longer support it. This requires a larger protection force and soon the farmer's surplus is melting away through his fingers. Are you with me so far and do you agree that this is what has happened?"

"I suppose," Tobin said. "Are you sure that's what happened?"

"Give me another explanation. Since he's no longer making a profit, he thinks for a while and he invents a plow that can be used to grow more grain. He breeds better animals, maybe ones that have twins. The raiders see how this is useful. They come to him and tell him that they need scientists that can invent things like plows and that for a little of his new production they will hire people to invent better plows."

The farmer is displeased with this, but he has a crop in the ground and animals to think about so he agrees. He has a family to think about now. His neighbor doesn't agree. The raiders arrest him and put him in prison. If he fights, he is no longer as dangerous as he once was because he just can't afford to take the time to be proficient with his old tools like a spear or a bow. He knows how to plow, not fight. So, they kill him and all the other farmers are afraid to resist and the business of the raiders and the parasite class becomes protecting the farmer out of all his surplus. Since he's tied to the land, he can't just vote with his feet and leave. Pretty soon he can't afford to eat his animals. They're too important as draft animals or they provide clothing, milk or offspring. He's reduced to eating grain. It's usually a single staple crop and if it fails, he starves. He's working far longer hours than when he hunted and with far less nutrition. He does bone deforming labor from dawn until dark while the raiders take the produce of most of his effort. They eat meat and have good nutrition and they are soon far larger and more intelligent than the poor farmer class. That's what happened to your pueblo people, Tobin. Their population grew to an unsustainable size and when the parasite class went mad, the whole civilization crumbled. It was all due to the invention of agriculture."

"Everything you say might be true, but if the raiders had left him alone the invention of agriculture would have made him better off," Aden said.

"Maybe so, but it's debatable. The problem is that the raiders never leave anyone alone. There are always those who want to live at the expense of everyone else. Besides, farming is against our nature."

"How is that?" Lila asked him.

"Take a look at your teeth. Is that the dental hardware of a grain eater or a killer ape? We were hunter/gathers for all of human history until about five minutes ago on the cosmological scale. Thousands of years of historical trend were laid aside and we became something else. Are we as happy and successful as we would be if there were about a third as many of us as there are and we followed our nature?"

"I don't know," she admitted. "I just know the way things are. The raiders are in charge and there's nowhere we can go to get away from them."

"Sometimes the farmers have risen up and thrown off their yokes. It may happen again. The problem is that they became the raiders as soon as they could and oppressed the other farmers. Maybe someday people will wake up and it will become a crime to live off other people. That's what I'm hoping for. Someday we may become rational."

"That's the most depressing account of history I've ever heard," Tobin told him. "Now I feel like a helpless farmer."

"Well, I'm not depressed," he told her. "I'm actually quite happy. I have Mom and Addy, and that smoking hot woman of Addy's is sitting across the car from me. I think that makes me the luckiest guy alive."

She slid across the seat and laid her head on his shoulder and he put his free arm around her and pulled her closer. He turned on the stereo and they listened to music until they reached home.

Chapter Four

The next morning they got up early, and the Dolans got climbing equipment and loaded it into Tobin's truck. Marley got a snorkel and a mask and some fins and packed them as well. Aden packed lunch and they drove to the canyon.

They pulled the truck to the edge of the cliff and tied their ropes off to it. Marley lowered the girls over the edge and they dropped 70 feet down to the ledge. He lowered their gear and dropped down himself. When he arrived, the girls were using string to mark off a grid. They would systematically map the ledge and tag anything they found with the grid coordinates. It didn't take them long to figure out how the inhabitants had reached the ledge from below. Several tall poles, notched to form ladders stood under the overhang and Marley believed they could still be used. They lowered one down and he descended, his harness clipped to lines they belayed as he descended. The pole was sturdy and he soon climbed back up.