Weighing Shadows

by Lisa Goldstein

  The next day Walker led them to the doctor’s office, the same place where Ann had been examined. The same doctor was there, waiting for them. “Open your mouth,” she said to Ann.

  Ann complied, and the doctor swabbed the inside of her cheek. “What are you doing?” Ann asked, startled.

  “We’re changing your biome, your bacteria. Don’t worry— it isn’t dangerous. Your biome has to match the tace where you’re going—otherwise you’ll get sick, or they’ll get sick.”

  After that they went up to the clothing storeroom and received their fitted clothing. A woman gave her and Franny necklaces made out of rows of beads, jasper, obsidian, garnet, lapis lazuli, and bracelets and earrings of copper and gold. Then a hairdresser placed a wig on her head, made of long braided black hair held back by an embroidered cloth band. A makeup artist circled her eyes with what she called kohl, though it was greenish instead of the black Ann had expected. Gregory got a wig of short black hair curled into rows, and then, poor man, he was taken into another room and covered with some kind of tanning cream that darkened his entire body.

  Her heart was pounding hard as Walker led them into an elevator and up a few floors. They went into a room filled with semicircular rows of desks, where men and women sat and studied computer screens and LED readouts. A larger screen, this one blank, covered the front wall, and there were more people working on a platform below it. The leather bags they had packed several days ago were already there.

  Walker ushered them up to the platform. “Don’t move,” she said.

  Everyone but the four of them left the platform. Somewhere a voice started to count down. The room wavered, began to change. The air smelled of metal, and she heard a high ringing sound.

  She fell down—on dirt, she saw. She was in a field, surrounded by trees. The sky overhead was startlingly bright, chrome bright; the leaves were neon green, the sun a white searchlight. She felt a brief, terrible nausea, which disappeared almost as soon as she noticed it.

  “Shit,” Walker said. “Oh, shit!”

  ANN LOOKED AROUND. THE rest of them were getting up now, all except Gregory. The colors were fading back to normal, yellow, blue, green.

  “What happened?” Franny asked.

  Walker was bent over Gregory and pounding on his chest. “Shit, shit, shit!” she said.

  “Is he—is he dead?” Ann asked.

  Walker moved to give Gregory artificial respiration, then pressed rhythmically against his chest. “Get me my bag, someone. Hurry up!”

  Ann was closest; she grabbed the bag and carried it over to Walker. “Take over here!” Walker said. Ann had never learned CPR, but she tried to copy Walker’s movements as best she could.

  Walker fumbled through the bag, coming finally on a plastic pouch. She took out a syringe, shoved Ann out of the way, and shot something into Gregory’s heart.

  Nothing happened. Walker pounded Gregory’s chest again, breathed into his mouth, pumped his chest. Finally she sat back on her heels. “Yes, he’s dead,” she said.

  “Oh my God,” Franny said. Her voice was high and tight. “What happened? What went wrong?”

  “Quiet,” Walker said.

  “You never said we could die—”

  “Shut up, I said!”

  Several people were coming toward them across the field. Even through her horror at Gregory’s death, Ann felt a shiver at the realization that these were actual people from another time, another place. From Kaphtor.

  Walker thrust the syringe back into her bag, then took out something else, too small for Ann to see. “What happened?” a woman asked. She glanced curiously at Walker’s hand.

  Walker dropped whatever she held into a small hole in the dirt, then covered the hole quickly. “We’re traders, from Egypt,” she said. “We were on our way to Knossos when our companion died.”

  The Kaphtorans put their fists to their forehead and murmured something, a prayer perhaps. “How did he die?” one of them asked.

  “We—we don’t know. He just didn’t get up.”

  The group was looking at her with suspicion now. Did they think Walker had killed him?

  “Well, you can’t leave him here, unprotected and unreturned,” the first woman said. “He has to go to the House of Return.”

  “The House of—”

  The woman turned and said something to the group, too fast for Ann to follow. Another woman stooped to lift Gregory at his shoulders, and one of the men took his legs, and they set out along a dirt road.

  It had happened so fast that the group was a good way ahead of them before they realized. “No,” Walker said. She picked up her bag and ran after them. “No, wait—”

  Ann and Franny hurried to catch up with her. “Why not let them take him?” Ann asked Walker in English.

  “Why not?” Walker laughed harshly. “Because he has fake hair, and fillings in his teeth, and he’s covered with tanning cream …”

  She looked after the group, uncertain. More than anything that had happened so far, her expression terrified Ann, made her realize that they were on their own, and far from help. “We’ll say that they can’t interfere with his body,” Walker said finally. “That our customs don’t allow it.”

  Ann had already thought of that. She wondered why Walker was so slow, why she looked so worried. Was there more to this than a death, however terrible?

  She followed Walker’s gaze to the Kaphtorans. The women wore the clothes she had seen in her history class, the ruffled skirts and open blouses, their hair falling in long ringlets to their waist. But the videos had been unable to convey the extent of their confidence, the way they seemed to occupy the space they stood in, to move ahead like a ship under full sail.

  The men looked as they had in the videos as well, wearing breechcloths in patterned fabrics, sandals, silver belts and armrings. The differences in color weren’t as marked as in the frescos, but the men were darker than the women, as if the women were careful to spend more time in the shade.

  The men and women both were small, none taller than about five and a half feet. So that was one of the reasons TI had recruited her, Ann thought, and Franny, and even Walker—all of them were fairly short. She’d attributed her height to the bad food in the foster homes—who would have thought that it would turn out to be an asset?

  The woman who had spoken to them first dropped back next to Walker. “My name is Itaja,” she said. “What did you bring us to trade?”

  “Our—our wares are in our bags,” Walker said. Fortunately this was true; the company had selected objects for them that could have come from Egypt.

  They followed Itaja through a land of rich red earth, checkerboarded with fields and orchards and vineyards. An aqueduct ran parallel to their path, raised up on high brick arches, and tall mountains marched with them on either side, far away in the distance.

  They crossed a bridge over a small stream and came to the base of a low hill. The man and woman carrying Gregory looked barely winded, but they stopped and set him down, and two more people came forward and picked up the body. Walker was rummaging quickly through her bag; when she looked up the Kaphtorans were already climbing the hill and she hurried after them.

  The path curved around the hill, and a tall mountain appeared in the distance. The Kaphtorans who were carrying the body nodded to it, and the others put their fists to their foreheads. It was a religious gesture, Ann knew; mountain peaks were sacred here. But unlike their gesture in response to Gregory’s death it seemed more than just a ritual, not rote but heartfelt.

  Near the top of the hill they came to a small stone hut, its walls painted with a fresco of a fleet of ships. “Stop here,” Itaja said. “You’ll have to wait for the guards.”

  A stack of wood was piled on the other side of the path, as tall as Ann. Was that a beacon, something they lit when enemies tried to enter the city? And what would they make of Walker, with her syringes and God knew what else?

  But Walker had stopped and gone through her ba
g, Ann remembered. Had she been trying to hide everything that looked anachronistic? Did the bag have a false bottom?

  A man and a woman came out of the hut and walked up to them, looking suspiciously at Gregory’s body. “Why are you bringing the dead into Kaphtor?” the woman asked.

  “He—our friend died suddenly, on our journey,” Walker said. “We’re traders, from Egypt.”

  “We’re taking them to the House of Return,” Itaja said.

  “Good,” the woman said to Itaja. She turned back to Walker. “Are you bringing any weapons into the city?”

  “No.”

  “Could we see your bags, please?”

  They dropped their bags on the ground and got them open. Ann watched the guards going through them, trying not to look at Walker. After a long moment the woman said, “You’re free to go.”

  “Goddess show you your path,” said the man.

  Ann let out a breath, and they continued on. Finally another turn in the path showed them houses on the outskirts of a city, two and three story buildings of pale greens and blues and pinks, the colors of the candy hearts kids gave each other on Valentine’s Day. Flowers twined up the walls or were painted on, surrounded by painted birds and bees and lizards, so lively they appeared almost real. The path broadened out, changed from dirt to smooth stone.

  They saw people on the streets now too, all of them as self-assured as the men and women leading them, their heads high, their step firm. Some of the older men and women wore long robes tied with a sash instead of skirts or breechcloths. So Professor Strickland had been right—not everyone looked like the beautiful people on the frescos. She felt relieved to see it.

  A few of them nodded to Itaja, and one or two stopped to talk. They spoke too fast to follow, but it was obvious that they were asking her about the body.

  The houses grew higher and more complex, with rooms added on in every direction. If the city had suffered any destruction from the volcano they seemed to have rebuilt nearly all of it in the past thirty years. And it smelled surprisingly clean; no sewage, as she had expected, just a hint of jasmine and a hot, dry spice she didn’t recognize.

  Itaja put her fist to her forehead again, and Ann, following her gaze, saw a small painted shrine filled with fruit and flowers, shells and silver necklaces, at the base of one of the houses.

  “This way,” Itaja said finally, turning down a small street and into one of the buildings ahead of them. A fresco on the wall showed a line of tall women holding sheaves of wheat, stepping toward a queen or goddess on a throne.

  The room inside was empty, lit by oil lamps made of stone. The two people carrying Gregory laid him carefully on the floor.

  They could see little in the dim light. There was another shrine in the corner, with foot-high clay walls painted with a mural of a snake eating its own tail. Ann peered inside and was startled to see several snakes, moving as sinuously as flames. She could not hear anything from within the building, but she caught a brief odor of decay, overlaid with lavender and that dry spice again.

  Finally a man and a woman came through a far door, murmuring to each other. Itaja went up to the woman and spoke to her, indicating the body. Suddenly Ann realized something. She had been about to talk to the man, figuring that he would be the one in charge. Their history classes had stressed that the Kaphtorans were matriarchal, but she saw now that she hadn’t fully understood what that meant. Women hern were bosses, managers, artisans. Priestesses, queens. Her world turned upside down for a moment, swayed like when she had traveled through time, and then righted itself.

  “Arudara here will help you with your friend,” Itaja said. “Goddess show you your path.” She and her group left.

  Arudara called out. Several people came and picked up the body, then carried it further into the building. “Wait!” Walker called after them.

  “What is it?” Arudara asked.

  “Well, where are they taking him? When are we going see him again? We have—we have some customs, ways we have to arrange the body …”

  “We can’t embalm him, if that’s what you mean. We don’t have the materials.”

  That’s right, she thinks we’re from Egypt, Ann thought. “No—we don’t do that either, where we’re from,” Walker said. “Just the opposite—we don’t change the body at all, just wrap it and put it in the ground.”

  Arudara nodded. “And what token will you put in with him?”

  “What—what do you mean?”

  “To give the Bull. The Earth-Shaker.”

  No one said anything. They hadn’t studied funeral customs in their history class—why should they, after all? No one had expected them to die during insertion.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t understand,” Walker said finally.

  “The Bull conducts his soul to the goddess,” Arudara said. “Your friend has to have some gift, some token, to give him.”

  “What—what do you usually give?”

  Arudara turned her head to look one way, then the other. It seemed to be a shrug. “A vase, some jewelry … Some object that meant something to him in life, that gave him gove.”

  She used a word that Professor Tran, their language teacher, hadn’t been able to translate exactly. It meant “whole” or “entire”—“a whole loaf of bread”—but also something more, something the linguists at TI hadn’t completely understood.

  “All right.” Walker looked through Gregory’s bag and took out a carved ivory statue of a cat.

  “Good,” Arudara said. She smiled for the first time. “And he liked this cat? It was precious to him?”

  “Yes,” Walker said.

  He had seen the cat exactly once, when he’d packed his bag. Ann realized that she hadn’t given much thought to Gregory, that she’d been too fascinated with the newness and excitement of everything around her. She felt a wave of sadness, remembering how eager he had been to visit Kaphtor, how excited he’d been. Did he have a family, someone who would miss him in the twenty-first century?

  She glanced at Franny, expecting to see her mourning as well. Instead the other woman looked furious, her expression hard.

  Arudara was asking Walker about Gregory now, what he had been like, what he had done in life. “I didn’t know him all that well,” Walker said. “He was a trader, and—and he liked to travel.”

  “He was looking forward to visiting Kaphtor,” Ann said. “He had heard a lot about it, and he was sure he’d like it.”

  “Ah,” Arudara said. “Sad.”

  “When is the—” Ann began. She didn’t know the word for funeral, she realized. Maybe there wasn’t one. “When do you—”

  “When will we take him to the Lands of the Dead, do you mean?” Arudara asked.

  Ann nodded, then realized that the other woman didn’t understand the gesture. “Yes,” she said.

  “The day after tomorrow,” Arudara said briskly. She ushered them out into the street, and they found themselves alone for the first time since they had come to Kaphtor.

  “All right,” Franny said in English. She sounded mutinous. “You’re going to answer my question now. Can time travel kill you?”

  “No,” Walker said. “Well, there was one person who died, in the early stages of the program. But it turned out that he had a heart condition.”

  “So what were all those physicals for? Shouldn’t the company have found out if there was anything wrong with us? With Greg?”

  “Sure. And we do, usually. But we can’t find everything.”

  “You might have warned us,” Franny said sarcastically. “You might have said, I don’t know, ‘We’ll send you back in time, show you history, have you change things, and, oh, by the way, it might kill you.’”

  “We did. In the release forms you signed, that day we gave you your tests.”

  “Do you really think we read those forms all the way through? There were pages and pages of them.” She turned to Ann. “Did you read yours?”

  Ann shook her head.

  “Gre
at, so you’re covered,” Franny said to Walker. “Good for you. Greg’s still dead. And what about us? We still have to go back—are we going to die then?”

  “You’ll be perfectly fine,” Walker said.

  “Listen, if something happens to me”—Franny looked hard at Ann—“if I die, I want you to go to my husband and make sure he sues these bastards.”

  She had never mentioned a husband before. And if she was married, why had she flirted with Gregory?

  This was obviously the wrong time to ask, though. “Sure,” Ann said.

  They looked around. It was growing dark; people were extinguishing their lamps and shutting their workshops. Some of them were in the street, heading home, but more, Ann knew, lived over their places of work. “We have to get to our lodgings,” Walker said. “And I want some dinner—I’m starving.”

  Ann still had questions, what seemed like dozens of them. “What was that thing you buried, back when we first got here?”

  Walker led them through the darkening streets, more confident now that she seemed to know where she was going. “It’s a key. It’ll take us back to your time, when we’re ready to leave.”

  “Why is it all the way out there? Why don’t we take it with us—wouldn’t that be safer?”

  Walker sighed. “I’ve never had a group that asked so many questions. It’s ‘all the way out there’”—Ann could hear the quotation marks in her voice—“because we always enter and leave a tace somewhere unpopulated, so no one sees us. And we don’t carry it around with us because someone could search us and take it away.”

  “Well, but what if someone digs it up?”

  “How could they possibly know about it? But don’t worry—there are always backups.”

  “What did they mean by the Lands of the Dead?” Franny asked suddenly. “Where they’re taking … Gregory?” It seemed hard for her to say the name.

  “Some cemetery, obviously,” Walker said. “We’ll ask about it later.”

  They came to a building painted with what looked like an orchard, the trees heavy with golden fruit, and they went inside.