CHAOS: a story about gods and afternoon recess (#ONC2023)

Prologue

Nadine poked the god in the face with the end of her shovel.

"What the bloody hell do you think you're doing?" Professor Starling pushed her back a few steps and then knelt in the dirt on hands and knees. He removed his glasses, bent low until his scrawny rear was pointing straight up at the puffy white clouds, and his nose hovered an inch from the dirt. Carefully, ever so carefully, he reached behind his back and pulled a soft-bristled paint brush from his pocket and used it to brush away the bits of dusty soil still covering the artifact. "My god," he whispered.

The words rippled through time and space to reach the ears of one who had been asleep for an indescribably long period of time.

It took almost an hour of careful work to get the half-meter statue completely uncovered. Bits of leather hide that might well have been from a mammoth or cave bear crumbled away, and the professor mumbled to his assistants to gather as many as they could. "Careful, now. Use the tweezers. Seal them up tight. We'll want to analyze every fiber."

Nadine squatted beside him, tweezers in hand, and he shook a finger at her. "Not you."

In a huff, she stomped away.

A dozen others, mostly graduate students, crowded in around him.

"The dates are wrong," a young woman on the professor's left murmured.

"They can't be," a man to his right insisted. "The soil clearly shows signs of the freezing and thaw--"

"No one made statues two hundred thousand years ago, Ethan," the woman said.

The professor sat back on his heels and gazed at the beautifully carved artwork in his hands. "Exquisite detail." One could see the individual strands of the god's longish hair blowing across his face and obscuring his eyes. Time had worn away the tip of his nose, but his bow-shaped mouth and the lines of his muscular body remained clear to see. He wore a wrapped loincloth. In the open palm of one hand lay a crescent moon and in the other, a stylized sun not unlike those painted in the caves at Chauvet.

Others gathered and stared. Many agreed with the young woman who'd first questioned the timeline. The dates had to be off. One student echoed the professor's thought about the caves. "This was a hundred thousand years before Chauvet."

"Even more than that," the professor said. "And it is authentic."

"How can you be sure?" one man asked.

The professor looked up and him, beaming with joy. "Because, my boy, this is what we came here to find. I've been following clues to find him my whole life."

Cradling the graven god against his chest as one would hold a newborn infant, he struggled to his feet and crossed camp to the main tent. There, he asked the others to open a padded case and lay his treasure down on the soft, thick foam. "This is an idol of the god, Zatyafan. He is among the eldest gods worshipped by men."

"What about women?" one of the three ladies in camp asked.

The professor ignored her question. He busied himself rifling through boxes and crates of reference materials until he came up with a blue plastic three-ring binder. "Look here." He flipped to a plastic-covered photo of a petroglyph--a man with a star in one hand and the sun in the other. And then to another photo, this time a carved seashell. A third picture showed the same figure, smaller and much rougher--almost abstract.

"I've never heard of Zatyafan," someone said.

"Of course you have." The professor ran his fingertips over the photograph before turning to gaze in teary-eyed wonder at the new discovery. "Now the earth was chaos and waste, darkness was on the surface of the deep, and the Ruach Elohim was hovering upon the surface of the water."

"What's the book of Genesis have to do with anything?"

Annoyed by their stupidity and failure to grasp the immensity of what their expedition had uncovered, the professor sighed. "Ignorant child, Genesis is the beginning." He reached for the statue but stopped just short of touching it. "This is the beginning. In the beginning, there was only chaos." He drew his hand back and held it over his heart. "Zatyafan is chaos. You are looking at one of the oldest pieces of artwork ever made by human hands. It is a depiction of a god that, even then, in that unfathomably distant time, was indescribably old."

In the years following that magnificent day on the dig, the professor wrote beautifully articulate papers about his extraordinary find. He explained that the ancients believed order must be balanced with chaos as day is balanced with night. Chaos caused the lightning to strike the tree, and from that strike, fire was born, and the tribe had warmth and light. Chaos shook the earth and caused the mountains to slide into the valleys, forcing the people to new lands where new, rich food sources could be found. He wrote in glowing terms about how Zatyafan was the god of the traveler who lived a life outside the ordered settlement, allowing those less brave or able to access goods and information from faraway places. Chaos is tricky, he wrote, but it should never be seen as evil to be avoided.

His lengthy articles ended up in the most highly regarded publications in his field, meaning nearly a dozen people read his words. Technicians studied every curve and line of the statue and tucked it in an impenetrable fireproof, air-tight box where it sat until, a decade after the professor's death, some new guy looking for cash to fund a dig in Columbia sold it to the Museum of Natural History in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Twenty-four years after Zatyafan was poked in the face with a shovel and lifted from the earth and two hundred millennia after the god had drifted off to sleep, his totem was placed in a beautiful shrine in a cool dark room. A small brass plate was screwed onto the wall explaining that the statue was among the oldest items in the room, but it did not mention the god's name. Hardly anyone alive had ever heard those three syllables spoken out loud--only the surviving members of the dig and they were, by then, getting on in years.

Nevertheless, the echo of those words, so reverently spoken by a true believer, stirred in Zatyafan's mind. "My god..."