The morning Utu woke was unlike other mornings.
He could not, at that moment, say exactly how it differed.
It was a dream — he had had a dream.
In the dream, something came down from the sky.
Not the shape of a person, and not entirely not. A luminous presence, without clear edges. It stopped before him. It placed a stone in his hands. The surface of the stone bore many small markings — lines and points, arranged in some shape he had never seen.
The luminous presence told him —
"These markings are the words a person can keep."
Utu, in the dream, looked at the stone in his hands. He understood. He did not know how he understood — he simply, in that moment, knew what the markings were, knew what they could do, knew that a person could entrust the words within him to the stone, and that the stone could carry those words, in his place, to another person not yet born.
When he woke, he lay on his reed mat for a long time.
Outside, the sounds had already begun — a woman drawing water, a child crying, someone in the courtyard of the temple sweeping the stones.
But he did not rise.
He closed his eyes and tried to return to the dream.
He could not.
The luminous presence was gone. There was no stone in his hands.
But the understanding from within the dream — the understanding that markings could be words —
remained.
Utu was forty-two that year.
He was a priest of the city. The city stood between two great rivers, some thirty days' travel from the southern sea. Its center was a seven-tiered temple-tower, at the top of which stood the temple, holding the figures of the god and the vessels of offering. Utu's daily work was to attend to those vessels in the temple at the tower's summit, to preside over the rites at each turning of the body in the sky, to record the count of the cattle and the grain set aside for the offerings, and, with the other priests, to decide when to plant, when to harvest, when to make war, when not.
He had done this work for twenty-five years. He had begun his learning at seventeen, become an apprentice priest at twenty-two, taken charge of the records of this temple at twenty-eight.
He knew everything that happened in the city. He knew which year had brought rain and which had not. He knew which households owed how much grain, this year. He knew that, in some months hence, there would be a quarrel with the city to the north, because at the boundary well they had already argued twice in the past month.
But he did not know —
why the luminous presence had come into his dream, last night.
He rose at last that morning, washed his face, put on the robe of a priest, and went out.
The sun was already high. In the temple courtyard, two younger apprentice priests were waiting — they had come to give the count of last night's herds.
In their hands they carried small clay tokens — the manner of recording this temple had used for several generations. One small token for one head of cattle, one for one sheep, one for one sack of grain. Sealed inside a clay envelope, with a few simple impressions on the outside to mark the total. This was a complete record. The method had been used for several hundred years.
Utu looked at them. He looked at the tokens in their hands, and at the marks on the envelopes — marks he knew as well as the lines of his own palm.
For twenty-five years, every day, he had looked at things like these. He knew the marks the way a man knows his own fingers.
But today —
A thing came to him.
The marks could only tell him how many — how many cattle, how many sheep, how many sacks of grain. They had no way of telling him whose cattle they were, or why today's sheep were three fewer than yesterday's, or whether that sack of grain was newly cut or stored from the previous year.
If he wanted to record such things, he had to speak them aloud to another priest, or simply hold them in his own head.
What he had held in his own head, for twenty-five years — would, when he died, go into the ground with him.
The understanding he had carried out of last night's dream told him —
Marks need not be only "how many." Marks can be the words themselves.
Utu took the envelope, glanced at the count, gave the apprentices a nod, told them the day's accounting was done. Then, alone, he walked slowly back to the summit of the temple-tower.
From that day, he knew that something within him had changed.
He could not name the change with any word he had been taught.
The closest he could come was — he knew more than before.
But the meaning of more was not the meaning of more he had known when, in earlier years, he had come into a new piece of learning.
In those earlier years, more had come because someone had taught him, or because he had read it from some envelope — more had entered from outside.
This more had grown from within.
He knew that markings on clay could record speech, not because someone had told him. He simply knew.
He knew that a tower could be built higher. He knew that the figures at the temple's summit could be made finer, of rarer metals, in brighter colors. He knew that the vessels of the offering could be matched more precisely to the turning of the body in the sky. He simply knew.
He knew one more thing — and this thing was vaguer than the others, harder to catch in words.
Long ago, the water had once covered all the land.
He did not know in which year. He did not know where it had happened. He did not even know whether he truly knew this thing — it was more like a shadow, in some corner of him, telling him quietly that it had been so, once. A water that had brought all the land, all the cities, all the people, beneath it.
He did not know how he came to carry such a memory. He had lived all his life on this plain between two rivers, where the water had never crossed the threshold of his door.
But he knew that water had come, once.
And — vaguely, somewhere — he felt that it would come again.
These things, the things he simply knew, Utu did not speak of to anyone.
Once, tentatively, he had asked another senior priest — had he, of late, had any unusual dreams? Had he had the sense, of late, that he suddenly remembered things he had not remembered before?
The other priest had looked at him in puzzlement, shaken his head, and clapped him on the shoulder. "Utu, you have been working too hard. Stay home with your wife tonight. Do not come to the temple."
Utu had nodded and gone away.
He knew the other priest was concerned for him. He knew that, in this city, any priest who claimed to feel the god outside the rites would be suspected of trouble — possibly possessed by a malign spirit, possibly mad, possibly an impostor seeking to displace the existing priesthood for his own ends.
He could not speak of these things again.
From that time on, he began to write them down —
or, more precisely, Utu began to invent a way of writing them down.
Through the rest of that year, Utu spent many nights alone at the summit of the temple-tower.
With a sharpened reed, he marked and remarked the wet clay.
He no longer used the old method, the one in which one token meant one head of cattle. He began to try a new way —
To let one mark mean one word. To let certain marks mean one sound. To let combinations of marks mean one whole sentence.
In this way — any sentence at all could be cut into clay. Anyone who could read the clay could speak the sentence aloud again.
He tried a hundred ways. Most failed — too many marks to remember, marks too alike to be told apart, marks too slow to cut for any reader to bear.
But some ways succeeded.
The first sentence that succeeded — he remembered it clearly — was this one:
Last night, something came down from the sky.
He cut the sentence onto a small clay tablet. Then he placed the tablet inside a niche at the summit of the temple-tower.
He never went to look at it again.
But he knew —
as long as the city stood, as long as the tower stood, as long as someone could still read the marks he had invented — that sentence would be read.
It would be read at some moment — perhaps ten years hence, perhaps a hundred, perhaps a thousand — by someone not yet born.
That person would know that, in some long-ago night, something had come down from the sky.
Time moved on.
After that dream, Utu never saw the luminous presence again.
But sometimes — very rarely — on certain nights, when he had worked too late, when the day's labor had carried into deep weariness, when he lay down too tired even to dream —
a strange feeling would come to him.
Not the seeing of anything, not the hearing of anything. Only a vague direction — as though somewhere, very far, something had brushed against him with the lightest touch.
He could never catch the feeling. By the time it appeared, he was already half asleep; by the time he turned his attention toward it, it was gone.
By the next morning he was not even sure it had really happened.
He never spoke of this feeling to anyone.
He simply, in his own heart, set such feelings aside — as something connected to the dream, something he did not need, and ought not, to fully understand.
The marks he had invented, he taught to a few of the younger priests.
They taught them, in turn, to others.
Slowly the marks spread from the priesthood to the merchants — who began to use them to record the buying and selling of goods.
Then to the city's officials — who began to use them to record judgments and apportionments.
Finally to ordinary households — who began to use them to write to relatives in faraway places.
Two hundred years later — far beyond Utu's own life — these marks had become the common writing of the whole region between the two rivers.
Five hundred years later, they had been borrowed by the peoples of several neighboring lands, modified, developed into systems of their own.
A thousand years later, they had been inherited by several civilizations that had not yet, in Utu's time, even come into being — to become the foundation of law, of literature, of religion, of commerce.
But all of this had begun —
In the morning Utu woke. In the dream he had dreamed. In what he had seen in that dream — the luminous presence, descending from the sky.
Utu died at the age of sixty-seven.
By the standard of the time, he was a man of long life. Most who had been born in the same year as he had died around fifty. He had lived to sixty-seven — and he himself, toward the end, came to feel that this was the limit.
In the last years of his life his body steadily failed. His kidneys were not well, his heart was not well, his eyes began to lose the fineness they had once had. In the end his memory too began to falter — he forgot, at times, his son's name; he forgot, at times, what year he was in.
He felt himself — that something unseen was, slowly, pushing him out of his own life.
He did not know that within his body — at the very ends of the DNA in the deepest reaches of his cells — a structure had been quietly modified, and was now shortening at a fixed rate.
He did not know that, without that modification, he could have lived to two hundred. He did not know that, had he lived to two hundred, he would have woken on some morning and written, clearly, directly, in the writing he himself had invented, sentences such as something is watching us from beyond the sky; its name is the Process; it is calculating us. He did not know that, had he written such sentences, he would have taught them to others, who would have passed them to more, and that within a few generations the species would have come into a capacity the Process simply could not bear.
But he died at sixty-seven.
On the day he died, his body had failed completely. His son and grandsons stood around his bed. Younger priests of the temple were performing the last rites at the tower's summit.
His last thought, before he closed his eyes, was —
the presence that came down from the sky never came again.
He held that fact for a moment.
He found, in himself, that he was not sad.
He had done, in this life, what the presence had given him to do — he had taken the understanding from the dream, and had made it into writing. The writing would remain. Even when he was gone, the words he had set down would not go into the ground with him.
Perhaps the presence had not returned because it was no longer needed.
He held that thought for a moment.
Then he closed his eyes and died.
Three hundred years after Utu's death —
The small clay tablet he had once written was still in the niche at the summit of the temple-tower.
The temple had been rebuilt five times. The city had been conquered twice by foreign peoples and twice retaken by its own. The writing Utu had invented had been altered, expanded, recast into newer forms. Utu himself had been forgotten by the people of the city — only a few elder priests remembered, vaguely, that long ago there had been a priest named Utu, who had invented some way of recording.
But that small clay tablet — was still there.
One day, a young priest, in the course of cleaning the summit of the tower, found the niche. From within it, he drew out the small clay tablet.
Some of the marks he could read. Some he could not.
But the first sentence, he could read.
Last night, something came down from the sky.
He read it through, and stood in place a long time.
He did not know who had written it. He did not know when. He did not know what the thing that came down from the sky was.
But he was certain —
The one who had written this sentence had not been making up a story.
The thing that came down from the sky had truly come.
From that day, the priesthood of the city began to search —
To search for other records of the same kind.
They found dozens. Some had been written by Utu himself. Some by his pupils. Some by the pupils of his pupils.
From these records — together with the fragments of memory passed down for centuries through the priesthood, the dim things their forebears had simply known — they began, slowly, to piece a story together.
Long ago, a company of presences had come down from the sky. They had given humans writing, the city, the temple. They had warned humans, too, that the water would come again. Then they had departed.
They began to call these presences —
the Anunnaki.
Those who came down from the sky.
From that moment, on the land between two rivers, all myth, all rite, all ceremony — turned around the Anunnaki.
The Anunnaki became the highest gods of the city. The figures at the summit of the temple-tower were carved anew — in the form of the Anunnaki. The priesthood was reorganized — into those who had touched the Anunnaki, and those who could only serve them. The city's rites were rearranged — to commemorate the descent of the Anunnaki. The city's history was rewritten — to begin from the descent of the Anunnaki.
The memory of water — the dim memory that had lived in the priesthood since Utu's generation — was written, too, into the myth. It became a story: long ago, in some distant year, the Anunnaki had grown angry, and had let the water cover all the land; only a few chosen ones had survived, and from their descendants came the city of today.
This story would, in the centuries to follow, spread from this land to the surrounding peoples — be retold, recast, taken into the myths of other nations. It would, in the end, become one of the most enduring stories of the region — more enduring than the city itself, more enduring than the writing itself, more enduring than the Anunnaki themselves.
Utu — the priest of forty-two, the man who had once dreamed a dream, the man who had died at sixty-seven —
was not himself remembered.
But he had dreamed a dream. The dream had become a sentence. The sentence had become a myth. The myth had become an entire civilization.
And that civilization would last more than three thousand years.
And in some far place —
The Process watched it all.
It set down its monitoring trace: first observation point, intervention instruction unfolding as expected. Symbol system formed, city-structure beginning to stabilize, the core structure of the flood-myth taken into cultural memory.
It made no special note of the name Anunnaki.
To the Process, this was only the byproduct of the receiving individual's left hemisphere, narrativizing a piece of code.
It needed no attention.
The Process continued its monitoring. At the other three observation points of #7,341,209, similar stories were unfolding in similar ways — only with different names, different figures, different details.
The monitoring trace went on.
End of Chapter Seven.7Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡKEH2umP2bM
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