And in my dream song, flowing through it, are shapes. I have often thought of them as fish, or fishlike, or perhaps whale-like is more apt. Huge and lumbering, in great schools sometimes, or small pods, or sometimes alone. Blurry, as if where they end and the soup of the dream ocean begins is indistinct and porous. Dream whales rather than fish. Knots of song-stuff, maybe. I called them gods. Creatures of the song, maybe. I don’t know.
Gold’s dreams, though, were different. As she told me, she did not slip easily into sleep, into anything like what I have described to you. Her dreams, she said, came upon her suddenly, like fits or seizures. She would fall, as those with the falling sickness will, and thrash and writhe on the ground. She would foam, and gurgle, and grunt. And it would pass slowly, and she would awaken mazed and confused, with only hazy memories of the dream itself, often not knowing where she was or who even I was.
As my dreams were when the gods, the great whale-like shapes in my dreams, listened to what I heard, saw what I saw, felt what I felt, hers were different. In mine, though I felt completely laid bare to them, to the gods, I was not begrudging them their invasions of my life. Why this is, I do not know. I never, before then, questioned it. The gods examined me intensely in my dreams. They saw everything I had done, my every thought, so there could be no dissembling since the gods saw all and knew all. How could it be otherwise? An impossible thought.
But Gold, her dreams…hers were more like nightmares, striking any time her gods wished them. For her, she too was laid bare to the gods in her dreams, but for her, it wasn’t a willing submission in any sense. Her gods took her. They stepped inside her mind and rode her, like a man rides his horse. Or a man rapes a woman. They raped her, raped in her mind. They didn’t listen, they took. She felt they didn’t even see her as a person, merely a tool. They told, they commanded. And yet, she fought back.
Oh yes, she resisted them. They wanted her to build, so she would build. They had wanted her once, she told me, to help a man promoting some religion or other. So she made that man a living god to sit beside her in her pantheon of minor godlings, on her temple of stone, all carved long ago with the skulls of the nation’s enemies. She would give this man everything he asked for, any help he desired.
She had laughed when she told me, as if it were a great joke. Men, she explained, freed from the shackles of humanity when they became as gods became, were in reality, monsters. They abused their power, invariably, and corrupted. Over time, such a system would devolve into madness and irrationality. Tyrannical god-kings would rule the people, and any semblance of the original idea the gods had wanted her to foster in the world would be wiped out or perverted beyond redemption. By this time, Gold told me she was gone, far gone from there.
Periods of chaos, she called it. Her personal political theory. Wave upon wave of it, rippling through societies as she passed. She did it on purpose. The gods punished her, so she punished the gods and stymied them whenever she could. They didn’t listen to her; perhaps they couldn’t listen to her. They were interested, she told me, in stability, so she gave them stasis. They wanted science, and she gave them magic and sorcery; they wanted progress and civilization, so she gave them regression and savagery.
In this way, she had continued through her long lives. She was a wrecker. She was invariably never around when things came crashing down because of overpopulation, ecosystem collapse, and invasion. She was gone, like a tick or a mosquito, off to infect another tribe, another place. It was the pattern of her life. She hated and feared her gods, and while she did as little of their bidding as she dared, she did it, slowly and begrudgingly. She knew if she didn’t, she would be punished, and feared such punishments. She claimed they took her and rode her, and in that place that was nowhere and utter blackness during these dreams, inflicted such pain and horror and torture as one could endure upon her. For seemingly endless times. Her gods were cruel and merciless.
Then one day she was living as a priestess of Mictēcacihuātl, the goddess of death, and heard of an illness spreading from the East and North. Whole villages were sick with it. A fever, sores on the body, and quick, vomiting death. She pondered it as it entered Tenochtitlan, and visited many of those stricken with it. They cried out to her, recognizing her thanks to her retinue who cried out who she was and what god she served, when she came to them with her necklaces of gold wire and human teeth. This was something new she had not seen before, this illness. Many of her retinue and attendants caught it and died.
Then later, word came of men, strange men from the north coming with armies. You know this story. They came, and saw, and conquered. And she was full of such joy, she said, such happiness. Here was chaos, here was a terminus. A line which is crossed. The Spanish destroyed the Aztecs, and the Inca, and all the native tribes everywhere.
She knew it would happen from the moment she saw them. She had known that the world had a size, and it was large. But she never thought much of the world beyond her borders, not really. She was lazy and was much given over to her little pleasures, as she called them, keeping herself busy. She did not pursue the long term, as things were, in her world, relatively static. She was resigned, she said. Doomed, to a punishment worse than death, for there could be no death for her. She had thought she would go on forever serving these gods, doing what she could to spite them, and never thought beyond it.
But now it came in a flash. The realization. Here was a society she knew nothing of, with new traditions, cultures, and lifeways. Three whole continents of civilizations she knew nothing about. She was, like me, fascinated by this. How could it be? She knew, as I had known, that while the gods directed her world through her, they must have—must have—steered this new world through someone else. Through me. And so she set out, as I set out years later, to find me. Even though we were not sure we even existed, or might be dead and gone, she came looking. Looking for me, as I had for her. And she found me.
Chapter Twenty
Jessica and I drove south, and as I knew we would, we talked. I answered her questions. We talked about history, and I recounted what I could remember of the periods she quizzed me on. Did Genghis Khan really slaughter whole villages and rape hundreds of women? Yes to both. The Golden Horde was frightening and fearsome, but he also brought sanity to a troubled China. A mixed bag, such questions. And the perennial favorites about Rome.
“Rome,” I said, in answer to her questions, “stank.” I thought back to it, smelling it, the spices and thick reek of rot. “It smelled awful, there was so much garbage. Bodies floating in the river half the time. It was nasty. So the rich lived on the hills surrounding the city and made the poor people take their trash away. Oh, they paid them, but it was still a dirty place. I liked Ostia, myself, being by the sea, and it was much cooler in the summer. Better water from springs nearby. I also lived in Herculaneum for a while.”
“When did you live there?” she said. Curiosity, mostly, but also I suspect the journalist’s interrogative reflex. We had talked about this, so maybe she was trying to catch me out in a lie or omission. I didn’t blame her.
“When is hard for me,” I said, “but it must have been during the first and second centuries. Before that I think I was in central Italy? What they call Tuscany, although it had a different word then. I lived in Greece, much before this. All around the Mediterranean. Before I really knew what was going on, one place was much like another, so I would stay a few lifetimes and keep my head down. Or try to.”
“What is going on?” she said. “What is going on? I’d like to know.”
“Complexity,” I said. “That’s the word. Information complexity. First language, then writing, leading to technology and on…up.” I made a staggered, rising gesture with my hand, and shrugged. “I think that’s what the gods might want. More complexity.”
“What makes you say so? Her gods, Gold, you said they were different. Do they want the same thing?”
I was silent for a time. “They might. I’ve thought about this. They
might not. It’s hard to say. Are they the same gods? Maybe. Maybe not. They presented themselves differently to her, but maybe they had to because she was difficult for them, different. I’ve had seizures, plenty, but not for many, many years. Lifetimes, in fact.” I swallowed, remembering the taste of metal in my mouth, waking up with my brain buzzing and feeling washed out. Wrung out. Squeezed. “If they are different gods, it would explain things, or at least be a theory we could build on.”
“They sounded different,” she said. “But maybe they are the same. It’s all so subjective and philosophical.”
“Clocks,” I said. “She said they wanted her to find people who made clocks. Calendars and such.”
“Clocks, as in, ticktock?” she said.
“Ticktock, yes. Timekeeping. It’s hard to do. You try it, living in a small village, and you will lose track in a couple of weeks of what day of the week it is. What are weeks, anyway?” I waved my hand again. “It’s all arbitrary. Even your birthday isn’t really your birthday, because we round up for the leap years. You lose track, and it doesn’t really matter, right? Like on vacation.”
“The Aztecs had a sophisticated calendar, you’re right,” she said.
“The Mayans had the calendar. Everybody else sort of borrowed that from them, I think. The Aztecs were just the most recent thugs, really, who had come out on top in some brutal tribal warfare in the previous generations. They weren’t all that sophisticated. It’s hard to grasp, really, how that worked, since that dynamic is gone from the world. We don’t have tribal wars squabbling over the ruins of previous civilizations anymore. Probably for the best,” I said.
“So how do clocks play into this?” she asked.
“Gold thought it was complexity. Look what you can do with a clock. You can time things. You can record when a thing happened. If you study the stars, really study them, you need a clock you can rely on. The Mayans used water clocks and sun-based clocks. They sat in wells and observed the sun and stars. You work with what you have.” I paused, sipping my coffee. It had gone cold. “But the more you observe, and write, the more complex your information base, your corpus, the more technology you can develop. This is Gold’s theory, not mine.”
“It’s racist,” she said, looking out the window. She glanced at me. “This theory, that the new world couldn’t have developed without…” She waved her hand at me. “Without gods. Or aliens, or ancient mariners spreading Egyptian civilization to the new world before Columbus, Atlantis. It’s all colonial racism.”
“People love their racism,” I said, nodding. “Some things never change.”
“I take it people have always been this way?” She asked.
I nodded. People don’t really change. “We’re mostly the same way we used to be, I think. Money helps people pretend they’re not animals, for a while. But it’s mostly isolated, people living apart from the land. Until recently.” I looked at her. “Like, really recently. Two hundred years ago, and before, people were more animal. More wild.”
“Do you think that’s what the gods want?” She asked. “Your gods, I mean.”
I smiled. “I know what you mean.” I thought for a minute. Pretended to. “I think it is what they want. To tame us, steer us, shape us,” I said.
“Taking their time about it,” she said. “And into what? Change us into what?”
“Toolmakers. Storytellers. Healers. Builders,” I said. “To make things last, to build clocks.”
We were in the south, now. Southwestern states. Just leaving Texas, we were on route 40, a stretch of road that was lonely, as I recalled. I had driven this way in the ’60s, in a big Cadillac Eldorado. I had laughed at the name of that car, I recall, when I bought it. There was a car a few miles ahead, and one a few miles back. A part of my brain keeps track of such things for me. Who is around, threat assessment. Constantly aware.
“So if you have better clocks, you can record more?” Jessica was dubious.
“Clocks, calendars, who ruled when and where. Who fucked who and had which kids. How many bushels of corn did this province pay us last year? Is there a trend?” I said. “Once you’re keeping time you’re keeping track, and keeping track means paying attention, which leads to more knowledge, more and better clocks, more exploitation of the environment, more expansion. More civilization.” The car behind us, was it closer?
“Ah, so her gods wanted her to foster this development. Of…civilization?” I could hear the frown in her voice. I watched the mirror. Two cars behind us, one larger than the other.
“Well,” I said, “I think it was more that they wanted it, so she didn’t, being her contrary, pig-headed self. So she wrecked it when she could.”
“But how? How could she do that?” she said. “She was just one woman.”
I laughed. One woman. “Sorry,” I said, after a moment, “forgive me. But you just don’t know what you’re talking about. You’ve seen how I am with people, right? I’m good. I can make people like me, easy as this.” I snapped my fingers. “Just smiling at them will do it, usually. We’re wired this way, humans. Social monkeys. Easy to trick. With enough practice.” I smiled at her. “Gold had much practice, and she is devious. I can read people, you know? It’s a skill I have. Read them like books when I meet them. Are they happy, angry, sad? Do they trust me? Are they interested in me? Like books. She can do it too. Men. Men are trivial to steer, to shape, to mold if you bring all your thought to doing it.” I checked the mirrors again. Yes, they were closer. Speeding up. The car ahead resolved from a blur with glints into a recognizable car shape. Sedan. “She could do it, easily. She told me how, it didn’t sound hard. Just get men to hate each other, and they do the rest. Rarely requires much.”
Jessica opened her mouth to speak. I reached up and rolled back the sunroof cover, then hit the switch to open it. I raised my eyebrows at her. “Hang on a sec,” I said.
I carefully set the cruise control, steered with my left hand, and braced my feet on the seat so my head was out the sunroof. Hot desert wind whipped my face, as I quartered the sky and scanned each quarter twice. On the second pass I caught it and dropped back inside. Drone, high and behind us. I had almost missed it in the sun.
I sighed. Things were moving more quickly than I expected. I was also afraid, but I suppressed it. I’ve been afraid before. You can work through it with practice, which I have had. Drones could carry missiles. We had recently fled the scene of a murder; an agent of the government who was probably working in his official capacity. The cars behind and ahead were closing, but were still a respectable distance away. I closed the sunroof and waited until it closed completely before speaking.
“Okay,” I said to Jessica. “We have a situation. The cars ahead and behind are probably federal agents. There is a drone above us. I don’t like this, so I will change the equation.”
She went still. “Drones are bad news. I’ve seen that shit. They don’t leave much.”
“Nope. So, here’s the plan. I will stop, and you will hop out.” I began to slow.
“Get out? But I don’t want to get out. I don’t want to leave…you,” she said. “Give up, they’ll take you in. I’ll tell them.”
“No time for that. Grab your shit. Get out.” The tires ground hard on the shoulder gravel as I slewed the little SUV to a stop.
“OUT,” I said sternly, pushing her. She got out. Before her feet hit the ground, I was turning, speeding up back towards the other two cars. Her door slammed of its own weight as I slewed the Jeep around. The Cherokee had a small engine, built for off-roading, but I was under no illusions what would happen if I struck out across the country. It was flat as a pancake out here and with a drone overhead they would have no problem tracking me, or killing me. I just needed to get the car, their target, away from Jessica. So I sped down the highway, blaring the horn because, hey, I was coming the wrong way.
I flashed past the two black SUVs. I counted at least six heads behind the darkened glass. Three in each. They had moved to bloc
k me, but too late, and I had swerved around them. A hundred yards past them I pulled over into the far-left shoulder and grabbed my go-bag, scrambling out. I could hear them turning their vehicles, but they were well away from me and I had twenty or thirty seconds at least as a head start. Now, to see how quick they were on the draw. I headed towards a low rise that had been on my right when I first spotted the drone. I ran, pumping my legs and sprinting, pushing myself hard over the rough terrain. Weeds, sagebrush, rocks left over from the road construction. Down a gully and up, I was clawing my way up the rise when I heard the whop whop whop of the helicopter.
So, they didn’t want me dead. That was something. I was not getting away, though, and I’m smart enough to know when I’m beat. I climbed the top of the rise, and scrambled over it, keeping low and trying to put as much of it between me and the guys in the cars. Just in case somebody did take a shot at me. I sat, panting, and took a sip from my go-bag’s water reservoir. Clever things, these bladder systems. I looked up and spotted the chopper.
Not an attack profile, all wasp-thin and bristling with guns and cameras. This was a Huey type, straight out of a Vietnam movie. It brought back memories of that place. Of the jungle on fire and the snap, crackle, and pop of small arms in the distance. Living in tunnels and hearing that distant chop. Sour, hard rice and stolen American cigarettes. I squatted and waited. I almost missed my old AK.
It circled me, spiraling in. I kept my hands where they could be seen. I looked up the road for Jessica and saw a knot of men around one of the SUVs near to where I had dropped her. She would be safe and I decided that was best. Out of my hands, anyway. The other SUV had stopped near the Jeep, and there was a cordon of black-suited men deployed around it. One of them was sprawled in the road, with a lethal-looking rifle pointed at me. Presumably he had orders not to fire. I didn’t like it, but could do nothing about it. So I sat and calmed my breathing. I looked up at the chopper. Guns trained on me from its open door, as it came down about fifty feet from me.
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