Calendrical Regression

by Lawrence M. Schoen

  Right. This was the big moment, the real reason the Uary had come to me. The alien who taught me had been banished from the speaking of the Svenkali for having channeled a sentient being of another race long before meeting me. I was possibly the only non-Svenkali in existence who had done this thing. I nodded to the Uary and closed my eyes. I gathered my thoughts and memories of that one experience eighteen years ago. The feeling in my mind had been chaotic back then. Kwarum had imposed structure, requiring me to say the full name of the person I wished to invoke.

  The Uary did not know the name of their ancient Mayan priest, but the ring on my hand had been feeding my mind with details of Sho’s ancestor, the identity confirmed from ancient DNA and traced forward to where it resided in this unlikely descendant whom I’d hypnotized.

  It may have been that trancing Sho had heightened my own suggestibility, but I knew that ancient Mayan priest, name or no name. It didn’t matter that nearly two thousand years separated him from Sho. Nor that the memories were confabulated, nor that they lacked a common language. Sho’s ring had done its job. He held in his mind a certainty that he had become that long vanished man. That confidence, backed by the sensitivity to genetic markers that the Uary’s drug had achieved, conspired with my own efforts, sparking an ability that I had come to view as a one-shot gift, not likely to be repeated.

  I could feel the changes in my mind, like a forgotten arroyo suddenly awash and flowing again.

  I reached out, beyond the constraints of distance and time, and touched that immeasurable energy field of sentience that lies beyond death, tapping it as the Svenkali can, as I had managed once before. The Mayan priest came to me, and for a moment his entire life’s experiences took up residence in my mind.

  And then, just as quickly as he had arrived he fled, passing from me through the connections of our rings and into the body of Juan Sho. I felt blown apart, a dandelion gone to seed and scattered helplessly by a spring wind. Every trace of the priest vanished from me, and with it much of myself as well. I slumped sideways onto the grass, my eyes too tired to close.

  From far off I heard a faint yapping sound, but I knew it couldn’t be real, just wishful thinking borne out of a combination of exhaustion and altered awareness. Much as I wanted Reggie to be here and safe with me, that wasn’t the situation. I pushed away from the hallucination, much like a square-dancer ridding himself of a unwanted partner, hoping the metaphor would hold and propel me into the arms of the real world. One of my cheeks tingled; individual blades of grass called my name. I dismissed the name-calling as a product of overactive imagination and figurative language, but I welcomed its source. Grass on my face brought the world back. Sitting up struck me as a wonderful idea, and one that I intended to pursue on some future occasion when my body seemed more inclined to listen to me.

  “Mr. Conroy! Mr. Conroy! What has happened?”

  I opened my eyes to find Nicole hovering over me. She looked concerned, though not necessarily about me.

  “It's okay," I said, my words weak and slurred. "It's done.”

  “Done?" said Nikos. "You mean you have summoned the priest?”

  “Yeah, but you’d better talk to him now. I don't know how long it will last.” With eternal patience and glacial speed I let my eyes close. Nikos and Nicole started making funny noises. Some auditory hallucination brought on by exhaustion and the changes in my brain chemistry, but no, surely they were just speaking another language. I wondered how they'd learned it. Did they have ancient Mayan in their shared memory?

  The Uary spoke slowly, voices calm and soft, taking turns in a way that probably felt natural to them but would have had me turning my head from one to the other, generating me a stiff neck and unconscious resentment. If it hit Sho’s ancestor that way I couldn’t tell. He hadn’t spoken yet, but that didn’t surprise me. He had a lot to take in. Nicole was patiently explaining something to him when he interrupted and spoke for the first time. Nikos laughed.

  “What's so funny?” I said, not even trying to open my eyes again. My words took twice as long to produce as they should have. Even my tongue was tired. “I thought you had serious things to talk about.”

  “He says he knows you,” said Nikos.

  “Knows me?”

  “He says you are a god who has shown him all the children of his future. He believes that we are your priests, and that all of this was foretold, that we are all due the honor and glory of sacrifice.”

  “Yeah, well, thank him for the honor, but I’m too tired for ceremonies. Tell him I'm a tired god.” Nikos and Nicole resumed their questioning of the Mayan priest.

  He began answering them, slowly at first, somewhat slurred and confused, which may have been the trance and may have been the unfamiliarity of his twenty-first century mouth forming sounds and sequences it had no practice with. He picked it up quickly though, and started responding more rapidly.

  In hindsight, having my eyes closed made all the difference. Had they been open, the added sensory input might have prevented me from hearing the faint, high-pitched whistle amidst the babble of a Mayan dialect not spoken aloud in centuries. But I did hear it, coming from above us, and noticed it growing louder. I looked up into a bright blue sky, empty except for a few fluffy white clouds and a tiny mote that grew larger as I watched. The mote expanded to a speck, the speck to a dot, and the dot to a pebble, and that last comparison pushed some switch in my weary brain. I wanted to stand but my legs wouldn’t work. I had to settle for sitting up.

  Nicole broke off from her conversation with the priest. “Mr. Conroy, what’s wrong?”

  I’d never been more tired, and more than a little loopy. My life was draining away and suddenly all I could think about was the pretty Uary next door being decanted or hatched or whatever decades back in the 20th century. “Your boyfriend’s back, and there’s going to be trouble.”

  “My… boyfriend?”

  I couldn’t lift my arm. I let my head drop back, pointing to the sky with my chin. Whether she realized what I was doing or finally registered the whistling sound, she looked up. Me too. The unidentifiable pebble had grown to become a humanoid silhouette plunging toward us at great speed.

  “What’s the whistling?” My head felt clearer; maybe it was adrenaline, maybe I was recovering. Either way, the sentence came more easily to my lips.

  Nikos and Sho’s ancestor had stopped talking. Both stared up at the plummeting figure. Nikos did that thing with his eyes that I’d seen the Uary do before. They returned to normal a second later.

  “Aero-skis,” he said.

  “Aero-skis?”

  “A Clarkeson recreational product. The technology should not be available on Earth.”

  “Kind of like your longitudinal slippage thingamajig?”

  Nicole frowned as my point registered. “Indeed. Our data-broker would seem to also be supplying our adversary. How very duplicitous.”

  The Uary might occupy a niche as the galaxy’s oldest librarians, but they were also proving themselves naïve. “Isn’t that the very definition of a Clarkeson?”

  Nikos frowned at me. “Aero-skis are not approved technology for this world. The Clarkeson’s sale of them would violate several trade agreements and the third seeker’s possession would carry criminal charges.”

  “Yeah… I think you have more pressing worries when it comes to your boy, Lorsca.”

  As if I’d conjured it with its name, the airborne figure drew close enough to resolve into a Svenkali. At this distance I could make out a pair of nearly transparent objects bound to its feet, sized more like individual snowboards than skis. The whistling had grown in volume, assaulting our ears now like a banshee wailing of impending death. Yes, my brain was serving up all sorts of helpful imagery.

  Juan Sho had stood up and spread his arms in the direction of the falling figure. He shouted and gestured and I had no idea what he was saying, but the Uary did. They turned to him, and began arguing about… something. Meanwhile the Svenkali on its
aero-skis had begun braking. Nikos’s advance warning sensors never went off, not even when Lorsca swooped down to our level and barreled into both Uary and Sho, knocking all three of them off their feet.

  Lorsca’s skis dissolved or retracted or maybe simply splintered off on impact. It stood with feet planted firmly in the grass, one arm raised high above its head, holding a shiny new peeler in its hand. The weapon glinted in the sun, a blue to match the sky. Across the Svenkali’s torso my buffalito squirmed in a mesh sack, his furry head sticking out the top as before, but just like last time several bands pinned his body in place and prevented him from eating his way free. His eyes locked on mine and he barked with what I hoped was not misplaced relief.

  The assassin looked over our little picnic, took a step, and with no hesitation kicked Nicole in the head. Then, with its other hand it reached down and hauled Nikos to his feet. The Uary hung like an unstrung puppet.

  “I am Lorsca, third seeker on the path. You have hidden among others, but you cannot disguise your true self from my mission. You are the Uary. Eight hundred and fourteen Uary have I corrected. Today that number grows. I identify you as your kind have named themselves since the moment of your first, unforgivable offense. Acknowledge this truth as your last fact and I will end you more swiftly than you deserve.”

  The setting had changed, and there were more players on the stage, but this was definitely where I had come in.

  Juan Sho — or rather the newly reincarnated Mayan priest I’d helped awaken within his body — started shouting. I still couldn't understand what he was saying, but outrage sounds the same in any language. He’d risen to a crouch after being knocked down by the Svenkali’s landing. He gestured to me, called something, an instruction, an insult, I don’t know. I remembered the Uary explaining that the priest had called me a god. Then his gaze moved back to Lorsca and widened still more as he saw the bison-like face of Reggie poking out of it just below its collarbone.

  Reggie didn’t like the attention and barked at Sho. More of the lethargy from our experiment was fading away and I surged up onto my knees.

  Sho’s eyes lingered a moment longer then darted to Nicole sprawled nearest to him, and then over to Nikos dangling from the Svenkali’s outstretched hand.

  Nikos began speaking, faint mewling sounds of an alien tongue that may have been a string of demands or a refutation of everything the Svenkali stood for, but sounded like pleading. Lorsca ignored them and shook the Uary. “There is a witness, and you will speak the words in his language. Now.”

  He took a breath and switched to English. “I am the Uary. I am no threat to you, but you will do as you will do.”

  “I will,” said Lorsca.

  “No!” I screamed that one syllable, and the effort made me think my brain would hemorrhage or my heart explode. Neither happened but my hand burned with a cold that ran up my arm and across my chest. My hand.

  I spent an eternity bringing my left hand to the middle finger of my right. I pulled at the Uary’s ring, tearing flesh as I forced it off my finger and flung it at the Svenkali.

  He stood less than two meters from me, but my throw had no strength and it landed at Lorsca’s feet. My buffalo dog’s eyes followed the arc like I had initiated a game of fetch and cruel fate kept him from playing.

  Whether a function of my shout, the ring, or Reggie’s sudden petulant whining, the Svenkali’s attention broke for an instant. The peeler it’d been bringing down toward Nikos’s throat paused.

  In that moment, the priest acted. He scooped up Nicole’s padd’s stylus from where it had fallen in the grass and leapt at the Svenkali. He stabbed at its chest, slashing one of the bands that pinned my buffalito. Sho’s free hand grappled with Lorsca’s hand holding the peeler. The assassin maintained its grip on Nikos, but that was about all it could do. The priest possessing Sho’s body, the two aliens, and my buffalo dog fell in a heap. An instant later, Reggie squirmed free and bounded toward me while the others tumbled over one another in the grass, wrestling and writhing. Reggie barreled into me and it required all of my energy to hold him and not pitch over again. I curled my fingers tightly in his fur, my eyes locked on the trio just beyond my reach.

  And then all movement stopped.

  Sho sat up, a wild look in his eyes. One hand still held Lorsca’s wrist, and had brought the Svenkali’s own weapon to its neck. A gash had blossomed like a pebbly chrysanthemum stump. Lorsca’s severed head lay half a meter beyond.

  The priest’s other hand still gripped the stylus and had slammed it into Nikos’s chest just slightly left of center. As I watched he let the Svenkali’s arm fall away and brought both hands together to yank the stylus further to the side tearing the flesh, up and then down, until he'd made enough room to release the implement and plunge his hand into the cavity.

  What little fluid seeped from the gaping wound looked more like thick orange syrup than blood. Surprise flooded across Nikos’s face even as his pallor blanched. He gasped soundlessly. Nicole had sat up, screamed once, and gone catatonic. I had the feeling that I should be vomiting at the sight, if only I wasn't so tired. But the strangest expression was worn by Sho's channeled priest. He looked stricken and fearful. His hand pulled free of Nikos’s chest, holding what appeared to be a cluster of bright orange grapes. I recalled the Uary’s earlier words about sacrifice. Sho had gone looking for a heart and found something else, something he couldn't understand.

  Reggie resumed barking. My exhaustion had begun to dissipate once I’d thrown away the ring. I staggered to my feet, desperate for something to do before the priest decided to try his game of organ show-and-tell on anyone else.

  I stumbled closer, letting gravity pull me back down to my knees, one hand dropping to Sho’s shoulder to break my fall and get his attention. I knelt among two alien corpses and the murdering Mayan priest I’d hypnotically reincarnated. I locked my gaze with him and we swayed together for a moment as I caught my breath.

  Taking that moment was a mistake. Without looking away from me he drew the stylus from Nikos’s body and jammed it into my chest even as I issued a command.

  “Sleep!”

  He collapsed, tumbling backwards to the grass.

  If I’d said it a few seconds sooner I might have been able to stand up and check on Nicole. As it was, I’d been stabbed in the chest and my body decided the best course of action was for me to collapse as well. I sprawled across the decapitated Svenkali and the gutted Uary and the world went away.

  Consciousness returned in stages. I had a sense of being flat on my back and a clear realization that I couldn’t move. Proprioception informed me that my legs lay stretched out with my feet slightly apart. My arms were by my sides and my hands were turned downward. Grass tickled my palms and the back of my neck. I had a dull pain in my chest. I remembered Juan Sho stabbing me, and that was sufficient to pull me the rest of the way to wakefulness. I opened my eyes and immediately wished I hadn’t.

  A purple and pimply face loomed over me, though calling it a face required equal parts charity and imagination. The visage lacked traditional sensory organs and it looked more like a brain than a face, organized into lobes by a series of vertical sulci that oozed some vaguely transparent gunk. It attached via a neck of raw, ringed muscle that in turn flowed into a torso of what I can only describe as tiger-striped gelatin. For good or ill this apparition appeared only half naked; from the waist down it wore avocado slacks that reminded me of the ones Nikos had been wearing. Nikos, who had not only also been stabbed, but eviscerated before my eyes. Had this creature stolen the Uary’s pants for its own use?

  I tried to get away. I wanted to crawl, scramble, run. I was all about the flight; the fight option never popped into my brain. Which would have been swell except I couldn’t move. Nor could I scream or plead or call for help. The monster that had stolen Nikos’s pants waggled one of its hands over my face, revealing seven spatulated digits somewhere between fingers and tendrils. Each of these was capped with a disc of blu
ish metal. Its other hand cupped something that I recognized as Nicole’s padd, and as it waggled the one hand over me its attention was rooted on the object in its other. I should mention that in all my traveling I'd never seen an alien that looked even remotely like this thing, nor had I ever heard a matching description. We’re talking alien even by alien standards.

  I heard a familiar bark and Juan Sho’s face entered my field of vision. He stood above and behind the weird creature, holding my buffalito with both hands. He smiled down at me and an instant after he set Reggie on the ground I was on the receiving end of a massive face washing with a generous side of extra slobber. That continued for a couple minutes and, despite the horror hovering above me, went a long way to calming my nerves.

  When my buffalito felt reassured enough to ease up on the face-licking, I turned my attention back to Sho. He had some blood on his shirt which was probably mine, as well as a generous splash of that orange syrup that Nikos had very thoughtfully previously kept inside his body. I assumed that Sho’s stylus wielding ancestor had faded or fled and the sorghum magnate was himself again. He knelt on the other side of me from Reggie, one hand aiming for my face, and tapped something that had been placed on my forehead while I’d been unconscious. At that touch, I experienced a sensation like water rushing off your skin when you sit up in a bathtub. The paralysis that had kept me silent fell away, taking my panic with it and leaving behind a sense of well-being. Knowing it was artificial didn’t dampen its effect one bit.

  “Hey, Juan,” I muttered through the euphoric haze. A string of mellow questions flittered through me, several of them involving whatever he’d touched on my forehead that had me so dopey.

  “Shh, try not to move. Nikos is almost done. He’s tending to the last little cosmetic bits now. He says you won’t even have a scar.”