by Lou Cadle
“You’d have to ask them that.”
“I’d hate to suggest it, if they hadn’t already had the thought.”
“So what should we do? About Laina?”
“Maybe you can talk to her. I’ve run out of approaches.” She said, “How’s your leg, by the way?”
“Getting there. I’d hate to have to sprint away from danger right now, but in another two weeks or so, I think I’ll quit slowing everyone down.”
“I can tell you for sure, the kids don’t resent that one bit. They like you. They respect you. You’re as close to a parent figure as they have.”
“Some of them don’t seem to need parent figures anymore. I’m watching a lot of them growing up very fast. You see that happen in high school, sometimes. At the beginning of a year, someone is still a child, where at the end, you can’t help but think, ‘young man’ or ‘young woman.’ The kid in them is fading, the adult emerging. But this is like an accelerated version of that. Everyone is changing.”
“Even physically. Jodi has slimmed way down. I think Zach has grown an inch or two, if that’s possible to do in six weeks.”
“Me too, on the slimming,” he said, patting his belly. “I was getting a bit of middle-aged gut, and it’s gone.”
“As long as we don’t slim down too much.”
“Maybe if we get back, we should make a fortune on a new diet. The Paleocene Slimdown.”
“I’d love to get back.” Then she remembered his family. “Not as much as you, but still. I miss the craziest things.”
“Like?”
“Oh, lots. Nail clippers and a nail file. I keep breaking my nails below the quick. Stupid little detail, but it hurts.” She shrugged. “It’s stuff like that, more than cars, or drive-through fast food, or television. Tools that were probably invented in the 19th century, but that made life so much better.”
“We seem to be settling in to living here. Maybe we can find substitutes. I can’t make you nail clippers, but we can hunt for fine-grained stones to use as nail files.”
She waved it off. “There are far more important things to do than that.”
“The soup pot seemed to work last night.”
“Yeah, that’s a load off my mind.”
He ticked off their accomplishments. “We’re okay with food, and with casting the net—or at least some of us are. We have fresh water and a second source at the lake if the spring goes dry. Claire’s fishing is good, and she’s teaching Jodi. And there’s Jodi and her club.”
They both laughed. Jodi was trying to invent some martial art form with the primitive club. Her experiments and failures were a source of amusement for everyone. Hannah said, “And we’re getting better at tempering spear points.”
“And your bowls. Net-making, basket-weaving. We’re doing okay.”
“We’re staying alive, at least.”
“I think we’re doing a little better than that. They’ve even carved out enough time for the soccer game.”
Ted had taken one of the squirrel pelts they’d brought from the Oligocene and stuffed it with leaves, wrapped it with thin vine, and made a sort of ball. Nearer in size to a lacrosse than a soccer ball, they’d been playing soccer with it in free moments the past few days. “It’s the new normal, I suppose.”
“Good, in one way. Depressing thought, in another.”
She couldn’t disagree.
That night before dinner, she pulled Laina over to the fire and had a talk with her, alone. “No one has said anything, but I’m afraid they might be resenting your not doing as much work as others are doing.”
“I’m doing work. Important work.”
“What are you doing? It looks like you’re just practicing your math homework to me.”
“No, that’s not it.”
“Then what is it? You have me a little worried.”
“That’s not necessary. Your worry, I mean.”
“If you could just explain to me, then,” Hannah said.
Laina blew out an exasperated breath. “Okay. Fine. But don’t say anything to anyone else until I’m further along.”
“Okay,” Hannah said, knowing she’d break the promise and tell Bob if Laina’s next words were worrying.
“I’m trying to figure out the timegate.”
“What?” Hannah said. “I mean, how?”
“I have a theory. Or hypothesis, to be more accurate. A series of hypotheses about time and six-spatial geometry.”
“Can you explain it to me?”
“You said once you hadn’t done advanced trig or calc, right?”
“That’s right. But explain it to me in words.”
“I can’t, not easily. Numbers are their own language, and there are matters about which words won’t convey anything near what the numbers themselves would. And, no offense, but no one here is at my level of math. I’m getting better all the time too. The more I work on this, the more it becomes clear to me. Like unpeeling the layers of an onion. I have to stick with it.”
“Why? I mean, to what end? So, you unpeel every layer to the onion, and what’s at the end? A little center of onion, right?”
“Not exactly. Not in this case.”
“What exactly, then?”
“A way home.”
Chapter 29
“Laina,” Hannah said gently. “There may be no way home.”
“I think there is.”
Hannah wanted it to be true—who didn’t? But she couldn’t imagine a few hundred equations scratched into the soil were going to make that be true. “I’m afraid it might be one-way, backward through time.”
“It’s two-way. It has to be. The math tells me it is, and mathematics never lies. And there’s a system. I haven’t worked it out entirely. The equations are incomplete.”
“You can’t be sure. Promise me that you won’t try to do anything with it—anything at the timegate—on your own.”
“No. Not without everyone else. And it isn’t two-way at once—that is, I couldn’t, say, take Claire’s fishing pole and throw bait through and reel it back to now. That’s not how it works. Every trip is one-way, but there are more directions than one. What I don’t know....” And she trailed off and got that spacey look again.
“Laina.”
She held up a finger.
Hannah waited as long as she could stand to, then said, “You’re scaring me.”
“Damn. I lost it. I really need some peace and quiet to work at this next phase. It’s hard. It’s like I can sense the right approach, just at the edge of my vision.” She shook her head. “Gotta think.” And she got up and wandered off.
“Don’t go out of my sight.”
Laina didn’t indicate she had heard, but she did stop twenty yards away. She faced a tree and began to write on the bark with her finger.
Hannah wondered if she was seeing a total mental breakdown, or if the girl was just building a mental envelope of comfort for herself. The chances of a sixteen-year-old girl being able to figure out the secrets of time travel, when people had been contemplating the possibility for hundreds of years? The chance of that was so near to zero as to make no never-mind.
That much mathematics, understanding what zero chance looked like, Hannah could manage to do. She shifted at the fire so she could still see Laina out of the corner of her eye while tending to the stew pot. Things had been going too well the past few days, hadn’t they? Now she had this worry, growing.
Problem was, she had no idea what to do about it. If Laina was losing it, either temporarily or permanently, as in developing schizophrenia, what could she possibly do? There were no psychiatric meds. No therapists. No way to treat it.
In non-technological cultures, sometimes such people were seen as gifted, as having a direct line to the gods. They became seers or shamans. Hannah tried to imagine what changes to group dynamics would have to occur for that to be a role for Laina. Probably it wouldn’t happen in this generation. If there were a second generation, maybe they’d believe.<
br />
You are borrowing trouble. It was probably just a phase, an adjustment the girl was making to the new reality. Laina needed to believe she had control over things she did not. Hannah was no math genius, but in that one sense she related to the girl. She wished she had more control over everything too.
* * *
As the next week passed, Laina moved in and out of her distracted state. At times she seemed a nearly-normal teenager, laughing with the others, pitching in to do the work, asking Bob how his leg was healing. Once, she even joined the soccer game for a quarter-hour. At other times, you had to practically yell in her ear to get her attention.
Hannah talked with Bob about it again, but they decided they could do nothing more but observe, and wait, and hope she snapped out of it.
It rained hard one night, keeping them awake and soaking them through. The good news was, the morning dawned to a world for once comfortably cool. Moisture still dripped from the leaves, but it was a refreshing feeling. The kids made a game of drinking water from the heart-shaped leaves of a katsura tree. Everyone was in a good mood.
Garreth and Nari were her choices for the morning trip to the spring. They each took a cold fish fillet to eat on the way, along with all the empty water bottles the group had, most of them stuffed into Hannah’s backpack, a few into Garreth’s.
They crossed the ferny expanse between the forest and the plateau, looking every direction for the terror crane. It did not seem to move until after the sun had begun to dry the dew. Was it cold-blooded, she wondered? Or was its night vision so poor that it needed to wait for full light to hunt?
They went to the pool, which held only a couple inches of water. That was bad. After that rain, it should be overflowing.
“I think we have a crack, maybe,” she said. “Let’s fill the bottles, drink all we want, and then empty it out.”
“How?” Nari said.
“I guess dip it all out, see if the crack is obvious.”
Forty minutes of work later, she saw the problem. Something had kicked a side rock loose, and the water was draining there, at the edge. The clay mortar at the bottom of the pool still looked intact. The pool should still fill up to the level it had been at when they arrived, without any repair work at all. But she still wanted to repair it so it was deeper. The psychological benefit to being able to bathe and keep their clothes clean was well worth it, and they needed the full depth of the pool to have that.
“Do we need a fire?” Garreth said.
“For curing the mortar, yes. A small one will do.”
“I’ll deal with that.”
Nari said, “I’ll help. You go for the bigger fuel, Garreth. I’ll hunt for some of those fuzzy pods. They’re the only thing likely to be dry right now.”
Hannah kept two of the larger fossil collection bags filled with clay now, for just such an eventuality. She took one out and poured some water into it, sealing it again, and then kneading it to turn the dry soil into mortar.
Getting the fire started with all the wet fuel wasn’t easy, and it was made more difficult by the fact they hadn’t brought Dixie’s lighter. There was only the magnesium fire-starter. Hannah let Garreth try, and then Nari. Then she tried on her own, for more than ten minutes, and finally gave up. “We need this stuff to dry more.”
“It’s clear this morning,” Garreth said. “We just need to let it sit in the sun for a little while.”
Nari said, “They’ll worry about us if we don’t come right back.”
Hannah said, “Maybe not.”
“Let’s climb the plateau,” Garreth said. “Spread all this out on rocks up there, where it’s probably drier. Shred it more, get it really small, and it’ll dry fast up there, away from the dew on the plants.”
“Okay,” Hannah said. “Let’s.”
They went the easy way, around the plateau and up the gentle slope. There was still no sign of the terror crane, but the sun was up, and now it would be starting its hunt for food. Hannah gave Garreth her knife to make wood shavings, and she and Nari used their fingernails to tear the pods apart. They laid out the pieces in a patch of sunlight.
As the tinder dried, the gentle morning wind blew the light pieces along the flat rocks, and Nari volunteered to chase them down.
She was stooping to pick up a scrap of kindling when the scream of the terror crane split the air.
“Nari, come back over here. And get down,” Hannah said. They were drying the fuel near the middle of the plateau, and she’d just as soon the predator bird didn’t catch sight of them at the edges. The one side of the plateau was high, with a drop of a hundred feet to hard rock. The opposite side sloped. Between those two ends was the intermediate cliff she had climbed up and down with Ted.
Nari stood frozen in place not far from that spot. Had she not heard?
“Nari!” Hannah said, trying to keep her voice low but still urgent.
She didn’t budge. “There’s a little family of horses. I think they’re going to get hurt.”
Garreth jumped up and went to join her.
Hannah got up too, intending to pull them back and make them sit down, but when she reached Nari, she saw that they were safe from the crane for now. Its attention was elsewhere. It was indeed focused on a small group of horses, three adults and two youngsters that seemed oblivious to the danger. “Shh,” she said to Nari, who she was afraid would yell to save the horses—and in so doing, put the three humans in danger.
“I know,” the girl said miserably.
They watched as the crane waited for the prey to come closer. It wasn’t stalking, just patiently waiting for its meal to come within striking distance.
As it was. The five horses were grazing among the vines, heads down. One of them looked up, but the bird was standing motionless, and the horse seemed not to see it. The little animals edged forward, and forward more.
With a movement so quick, you would not expect it of such a huge animal, the terror crane lunged at the herd. Quick as that, one of the horses was swept into its beak, and it crunched down.
The other horses scattered, except for one of the young ones, the smaller of the two, which stood still.
“Oh, move,” said Nari to it. “Please get back to the trees!”
“Shh,” Hannah said.
The terror crane tossed back its head and, in a blink of time, the adult horse was gone, swallowed. It seemed to stick in the terror crane’s throat or something, for the bird shuddered and coughed.
That noise made the tiny foal move, finally. It turned tail—their tails were long, nearly the length of the rest of their bodies—and galloped straight toward the nearest cover.
“It’s going to get lost,” Nari said. “That’s not where the other horses went.”
Garreth said, “They’ll find each other.”
“Can we make sure?” Nari turned to Hannah. “Go look for it?”
“Once it’s safe to move,” Hannah said, knowing she wouldn’t have any peace until Nari satisfied herself about the little horse. “Now let’s the three of us get down and stay quiet, and wait until the bird moves along.”
They all lay flat on the plateau, quiet, for several minutes. The sun rose higher, and the shadows cast by small irregularities in the rock smoothed out and disappeared. When she had heard no sound for a good five minutes, Hannah got to her hands and knees and crawled to the edge of the plateau. The terror crane was nowhere to be seen.
She circled the plateau and saw it, nearly opposite to the area of the pool, and a quarter-mile from where she stood. It was picking in the ferns. Apparently a horse was only good enough to serve as appetizer. How many calories did the bird require every day? Thousands, no doubt. Something this experience had brought home to her: a lot of animals had to eat all day long just to survive. The more meat an animal ate, the less often it needed to refuel. And that applied to human animals as well as to all the others.
Returning to the kids, she said, “Okay. Let’s get back down there.”
&n
bsp; “And check the baby horse,” said Nari.
Hannah stifled a sigh. “Yes, and check the baby horse. But gather up the dried fuel first, please.”
They climbed down from the plateau the easy way and crossed the treeless expanse, trying to find the spot where the little foal had disappeared into the shadows of the forest.
Garreth said, “Even in bare ground, they don’t weigh enough to leave much of a track.”
“It was about here,” Nari said, and plunged into a patch of cocoa bushes.
Hannah took an easier path a few feet to the side. “Let’s not get lost from each other,” she said.
“Shh,” said Nari. “Don’t scare it.”
“I’m going this way,” whispered Garreth, from the other side of Nari.
Hannah turned at the next break in the trees, heading for him. She stepped on some old leaves, but because of the rain last night, she barely made a sound. The trees thinned over in that direction, and she could see both kids.
Garreth was standing still, his arm held up, palm outward. Nari had stopped, and when Hannah came up to Nari, Garreth turned to them and pointed at a mounded bush. “Here,” he mouthed.
The bush put her in mind of rhododendron. Maybe it even was one, an ancient form. With dark green leaves, and a circular growth habit, it must have a space near the trunk for the little horse to hide.
She glanced around, looking for a sign of the other three horses, but they were nowhere to be seen.
Slowly and quietly, Garreth squatted in front of the bush. He stared for a moment, and then he pointed to the left, and to the right, drawing a semicircle in the air each time. He wanted them to circle the horse.
Hannah wanted to argue that the horse was alive, and fine, and Nari’s curiosity about that had been sated. It was so small, it wouldn’t make a mouthful of food for each of them, and they had the fish—not that Nari was likely to allow her to kill it for lunch. She didn’t entirely understand why she went along with this, but she did, taking the left-hand circle while Nari took the right. When they had encircled the bush—though with only three of them, “encircle” was an overly optimistic way of looking at it—Garreth began to move. She couldn’t actually see him, but she could hear the creaks and rustles as he did. Hannah stayed alert, knees flexed, ready to pursue the horse should it come dashing out of the bush her way.
