Analog SFF, September 2009
Page 15
"I'll just be a moment.” Helki turned to Russell. “Do we have an understanding?"
Russell looked at her for a long moment. Finally, he nodded. “Yes, I think we do."
He left the balcony, taking his cell phone with him. Helki found herself wondering if there had been a bomb at all, or if it had been just another ruse. As she walked Russell to the door, she felt that something important had just been decided, although she wasn't sure what it was. “Remember what I said."
"I will.” Russell turned away. Helki watched as he walked down the hall, then closed the door, drained. She wanted nothing more than a few hours of sleep, but knew that rest of any kind was a long way off.
Jeff was watching her with concern, their daughter in his arms. “He forgot his bag."
Helki followed his gaze to the duffel bag next to the armchair. Before she could talk herself out of it, she knelt and opened the bag. Inside, twined together like a caduceus, were two garter snakes. As the light fell across their bodies, they raised their heads, eyes gleaming like bright jewels. Helki picked up the larger snake, a female, and felt the cool body twining smoothly in her hands. Thousands had died, but these two had endured. It wasn't much. It was enough.
Copyright © 2009 Alec Nevala-Lee
* * * *
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The story so far:
In the still winds before sunrise every morning, those who lived in Jemez Pueblo could hear Nascha Redcliff do her angry sing. The woman would climb to the top of Bear Rock in the desert far west of the village and its cultivated fields. Then she would beat on the rock with her medicine stick and scold the sun she called Glittering Man up from the darkness. Once the reluctant orb peeked over the mesas to face its taskmaster, Nascha would charge the sun with ending all evil in the universe, complete with an extensive list of objects, institutions, and individuals qualifying as evil. She would recite their crimes and issue her horrific prescription: Death. In all cases, death.
Some of the Christians in the village believed she was evil. Some of those who followed the more traditional Navajo religion believed she was a witch. One of the local bloggers referred to her as “the idiot.” The rest of the villagers believed she was insane. Nascha believed what she believed, nevertheless, and there was nothing anyone could do.
When Nascha's child was delivered by a midwife in the hogan she shared with her husband, Niyol, she declared Glittering Man as wholly inadequate to end evil in the universe. She now passed the task to her newborn infant. Her husband abandoned both her and the infant that night, pausing only long enough to name his son Gordon after Flash Gordon as a bitter joke: Flash Gordon, you see, defeated evil and saved the universe. Before sunrise the next morning, Nascha and her baby son were atop Bear Rock scolding Glittering Man into the sky and reciting the list of evildoers, their crimes, and calling for their deaths.
Growing up for Gordon was the loneliness of the outcast, interrupted by fights with other students, fights with police and school officials, and unremittingly more bizarre sessions with his mother. The lone bright moment came with the news of the first successful experiments at spanning time. Time travel: someone had actually done it. The excitement and promise, though, had been immediately swallowed by the overwhelming tide of international scientific, political, environmental, and especially religious hysteria against this form of transportation and investigation. Timespanning was regulated almost into nothingness, becoming something that had no relevance to Gordon's life.
When he was eleven, after yet another fight in school, he vowed to run away and start over again anywhere as anything. He chanced upon a respected elder, Hosteen Ahiga, who the more disrespectful of the pueblo children nicknamed “Iron Eyes.” This old man told the boy of his mother's madness and that there was nothing anyone could do for her except be there—a task too demanding for Niyol. Iron Eyes suggested to Gordon that he might be stronger than his father.
Over the next seven years Gordon continued following his mother to Bear Rock every morning, listening to her hate, powerless to ease her pain. The boy would meet with Iron Eyes and listen to the stories of the Dina, the Navajo people, and what it is to be a man. He heard about the Holy People and especially Coyote, the Trickster who led the unwary down paths into terrible trouble in hopes they would learn why they should consider actions before taking them.
One night during the school year when Gordon was eighteen, Nascha died in her sleep. Before night came again, Gordon's mother had been buried and he was on a bus to Albuquerque to join the Army. In his hands he held a hand-tooled leather belt with a silver buckle Iron Eyes had made for him. Both the leather and the buckle showed the head of Coyote, one eye closed in a mischievous wink. Five weeks later, in Army basic training, Gordon learned that Iron Eyes had died just short of his ninety-sixth birthday.
In testing it was learned that Gordon had a unique facility for learning languages. The Army wanted to use this skill. An eighteen-year-old warrior needed to do war, however, and war to a mind as young and angry as Gordon's had nothing to do with talking, listening, or interpreting. After completing infantry training he entered the Sniper School at Fort Benning and thereafter served in several wars in Africa and the Middle East, training foreign snipers and achieving an astonishing number of kills in his own right.
It was while his unit was fighting in support of the Septemberist Student Movement in Iran that he met Phil Andreakos, his new spotter who he learned to love as a brother. Andreakos at times amused himself weirding out new troops by showing them the clumps of horsehair he tied with rawhide and claimed were enemy scalps he and his Navajo brother had taken from fallen enemies. Phil would then sing the nonsense Chant of Fulla Bull: Ha te, makka me te hey, ya ya ... Affectionately, Gordon referred to his spotter's memory as “Scalper of Dead Horse."
A year after Andreakos was killed in battle, Gordon was released from an Army hospital, and the war ended. He left the Army and drifted around the Middle East and North Africa until he signed on as a bodyguard connected with an Egyptian archeological dig at the base of a red sandstone escarpment known as Site Safar in the Western Desert near the Libyan border.
Dr. Ibrahim Taleghani's usual assistant, Harith Fayadh ,being injured, the archeologist requested that Gordon join his exploration of a site four hundred meters down and 139,000 years in the past. The evidence of the human settlement at the base of the red sandstone escarpment could be explored through timespanning without risking the introduction of anything that might affect the present. The village, its people, and the entire region would be destroyed and completely buried in a cataclysmic event that would occur at a knowable point in time. Whatever timespanners did in the period shortly before the event would be irrelevant to the future, except for the information they could bring back, Dr. Taleghani explained. That was how he managed to get permission to make the Timespan.
In complete violation of the world government regulations and his agreement governing his use of the Timespanner, however, Dr. Taleghani intended exiting the vehicle, as well as meeting and talking with the villagers. Once he had done that he would return to the present with one of their number. Being caught up in the adventure, Gordon agreed to accompany the archeologist and to act as bodyguard, linguist, and translator.
Simplistically, Timespanning involved employing sufficient power to hitch rides through existing time on the edges of alternate dimensions, entering and exiting thi
s mode through temporal windows. Taleghani's trip would be the farthest reach into the past ever using this technology, which occasioned a ceremonial sendoff at Site Safar peopled by military, scientific, and political personages, all playing to an international battalion of reporters.
Dr. Taleghani planned that when the vehicle operator, Mehmet Abdel Hashim, returned with the Timespanner empty, the authorities would realize the theoretical leverage the travelers had by being back in that time. Hence, they would authorize the expected pickup in three weeks to prevent the travelers from “turning the wrong grain of sand,” that is, introducing some small difference in the past that could be projected into the future, wreaking significant changes in the present. Once retrieved from the past with their “Squanto” in tow, however, Taleghani hoped the novelty of their passenger would overcome the official outrage over his violation of Timespanning regulations.
The three entered the capsule, spanned the 139,000 years, determined the exact moment when the giant meteor slammed into a nearby mountain, observed the structures in the village before the event, and prepared to enter the window to that past. As they were maneuvering through the window, though, some powerful unknown force slammed into the capsule, its hull cracked, and Gordon blacked out.
* * * *
He awakened in extreme pain, his head having been injured. The air was freezing cold and smelled of wood smoke. When he opened his eyes Gordon saw he was in a lean-to facing a fire and that he was being cared for by a woman in her twenties wearing a beautiful fur suit. Her complexion was tannish-sandy caramel, quite fair, her hair straight, pinkish brown in the firelight, and braided with little white dried flowers. Her face was roundish, her dark, almost Asian eyes separated by a very Roman-looking nose. He learned her name was Pela and that she already knew his name: “God'n.” Gordon also learned that both Taleghani and Hashim were dead and that Pela had buried them. In addition, the Timespanning vehicle was crumbling as he watched. Everything metal, from the capsule hull to his silver belt buckle, appeared to have lost its metallic properties and had turned to powder. Two pieces of equipment that survived were the locater, allowing a rescue vehicle to find him, and the shockcomb, a weapon using Timespan technology that needed to be reset every so often otherwise it would pucker itself out of this dimension taking with it everything within a twenty-five centimeter radius.
Gordon began the task of learning Pela's language and recovering from his injuries, which seemed to have left him seeing two shimmering figures which appeared to come and go but could not communicate with him. Ghosts? Hallucinations? Beings from that other dimension? He didn't know. Talking with Pela, he learned why she had been sitting on top of that particular hill in the middle of an early winter night. She had been there for many days sitting toahmecu—god waiting. At the instruction of a shaman named Tonton Annajaka, Pela had been waiting for Tana, wolf-goddess of maidens and widows, to end her loneliness by replacing her dead husband with a man. Enter Gordon Redcliff.
After a couple of more days recuperating and learning the language, Pela approached Gordon as to his intentions. Was he “thinking for her?” Was he the gift for her from Tana?
Gordon thought about it, reviewed his life and relationships, aware that he never really belonged anywhere. In a matter of a few months, the meteor would hit Black Mountain, the radiant energy and shockwave killing almost everything within twenty days ride from the peak. What chanced to remain alive would then be buried in the flood of melted snow, mud, and debris that would fill all the valleys and bury all the hills. Before then perhaps a rescue Timespanner would come for him. Perhaps not. In addition to that, he felt a great deal of affection toward this woman who had saved his life. Pela wasn't looking for a proposal. The custom was to think about it.
He informed her he was “thinking for her.” Then, after a tender and tearful moment, Pela began screaming the happy news down to the village. The village women yodeled back their congratulations, their thanks to Tana for their sister, and their prayers and good wishes. Then they yodeled the news on to the ends of the village and beyond. The calls went on and were relayed for almost an hour. Long after Pela fell asleep, Gordon remained sitting before the fire, still catching occasional glimpses of the shimmering images, waiting for the secret visit from the village he was sure was coming.
* * * *
*IIII
The came long after moonset. Motionless in the shadows, the figure stood near the trailhead examining Gordon. He kept his gaze upon the figure as she moved nearer the fire. Her dark hooded garment brushed the ground and was made from rich sable. Within the hood was a woman's face, her age hidden by the paint she wore. The right side of her face was black as soot. The left was colored burnt orange. “You know me,” she stated at last, her voice thin and reedy.
"Tonton Annajaka,” Gordon answered. “You sent Pela to sit toahmecu praying for a man to share her life."
She nodded.
Gordon raised his eyebrows. “This face of mine not same face you sent up this hill, Tonton Annajaka."
The woman's eyes narrowed for an instant. “Different,” she said, giving him the word for “not same.” She touched her left thumb momentarily to her tongue, and waved her fingers at her right temple. “Pela's call to village say your name, God'n.” She gestured toward his trousers and boots. “God'n from where?"
"Hard question,” he said as he held out his hands toward the fur he had placed to his left, indicating an invitation for the naticha to sit.
Tonton hesitated a moment then walked around the fire and sat cross-legged upon the fur facing him. She reached out her hands, bent forward, and placed one hand over Gordon's heart and the other over his eyes. He could suddenly smell a sharp odor of death. Tonton Annajaka lowered her hands and sat back, her eyes wide. “I know you, God'n, from old dreams of storm to come."
"You see much, Tonton Annajaka."
"I would understand what I see."
He laughed. “This is my prayer, as well. The spirit I ask answers with fog."
"You talk in fog and brambles, God'n Redcliff."
He glanced down, thought for a moment, and said, “I come from after now. That is the truth I have."
The naticha moistened her lips, let her gaze slip from his face, turned her head, and looked back at Pela in the lean-to. The widow was sitting amidst her furs, her face ashen, her gaze fixed on Gordon. Without looking away from him, Pela nodded in quick respect to Tonton, and said, “Forgive Pela, God'n, for hearing talk not mine."
He reached back and took her hand. “If I talk where you can hear, the talk is yours."
She moved to the edge of the bed of cedar boughs and sat kneeling, holding Gordon's hand to her face. “Pela understand true? God'n born after now?"
"Yes."
Pela turned to Tonton. “Tana bring God'n to me from after now?"
The naticha studied Gordon for a long time. At last she said to him, “How far after now you born, God'n? Bean-by-bean."
He smiled at the term for “exactly.” Reaching back to his right, he took his leather backpack from where it rested at the edge of the bed and pulled it next to him. He took the locator from the bag, checked the date, and placed the locator back in the bag. With a piece of charcoal from the fire, he began building a number upon one of the stones from the fire circle. First, one thousand, multiplied by one hundred and thirty-nine on the left, then added to one hundred and fourteen on the right.
* * * *
[]XXX*IIII X[] [] XIIII
"This many summers,” he said, “two moons, twenty-one days from now."
The naticha studied upon the number Gordon had written while Pela looked at Gordon, her eyes frightened. He took Pela's hand and faced Tonton.
"I saw great storm coming, God'n,” said the naticha, a slight tremble in her voice. “When Itahnika gave me my eyes, I first see it. You bring this storm?"
"No,” he whispered, his eyes closed.
"But you see it,” she insisted. “You know it."
Tonton stared into the fire for a moment. “You talk with Tonton more?"
"Whenever you wish, naticha."
She looked at him as he raised a hand, palm facing down, and passed it once across the space between them. “We speak no more of this until we talk more."
"Yes, naticha."
She looked at Pela. “About this, speak no more."
"Yes, naticha."
Tonton rubbed out the number Gordon had written upon the stone. She then stood and walked silently from the fire.
Pela wrapped her arms around Gordon's left arm and rested her head against his shoulder as the naticha was swallowed by the shadows. He pulled the bearskin cover from the bed and wrapped it around both of them. They sat that way, watching the fire, until Ekav touched the goddess of the night sky birthing the new day.
* * * *
X
After a breakfast of yams and rabbit, Gordon visited the graves. He squatted between them, wondering if the two shimmering images he saw were Coyote's fulfillment of his prayer for his two dead companions. Had the spirit world been touched by that other dimension producing a couple of interdimensional ghosts?
"Perhaps I walk in dreams,” he said to the quiet as he stood. “We go to the village today, doctor. I'll see what I can learn.” Out of the corner of his eye he saw a shadow move just into the cedars. Whatever it was, it left in a hurry. Gordon stood and walked to the edge of the trees, his eyes instinctively checking the new snow for tracks finding wolf, squirrel, rabbit, birds, and the impressions of human feet too small to be his and too large to be Pela's. The impressions were smooth, moccasin-like. Gordon silently followed the human tracks to where their distance increased, showing the visitor running. Likely they belonged to Pela's designated gift from Tana.
He saw the shimmer of distorted light edge from behind a wall of existence. “Do you understand me?” he asked.
The image seemed to lift an appendage made of the same distorted light. “Are you carried by something from a dimension we touched?” Half suspecting he was hallucinating, Gordon watched as the thing seemed to wave again. There was, however, no proof that he was crazy. “If your spirit can travel between times as well as dimensions,” he said to the shimmer, “tell Harith perhaps my mission really is simply to see what happens next.” He turned and headed back to the fire where Pela was packing.