I was beginning to see why she hadn’t mentioned any of this to us when we had begun our journey. Oh, by the way, watch out for the snakes. And the time fractures.
“Ahi,” Ashur said in his Nuruddin voice, “how will that keep Sheba and her thugs away from us?”
Ahi nodded, as if affirming her claim. “I’ve seen or heard tech poachers just about every time I’ve been in here. None of them have been allowed to touch me. The Sentinels aren’t the only ones who look after me.”
Dragonette sat silently on Ashur’s shoulder, like the physical manifestation of his conscience. Kitten and I remained quiet, too.
“If that’s so,” said Ashur, “then why do the ships let the poachers in?”
She gave him half a smile. “Believe it or not, they have their supporters in here. Not every ship in this yard is a good one, Ashur. Some of them are crazy. Some of them are evil. Some of them are just so weird, who knows what they’re thinking?”
Others will be journeying into the canyon, too, Crow had said, with the permission of other entities.
“The good ones far outnumber the bad ones,” Ahi continued. “That’s why they keep us separate from the poachers, and from Lady Sheba and her party. Those people may be able to steal some tech from the canyon, and they may be able to make it out alive—but they won’t touch us.”
She was convinced of that, and I wanted to be comforted.
When, in my life, had I been safe from evil intentions?
Never. Not now, either. I met Dragonette’s eyes.
she promised.
We finished our pemmican bars and watched the sun set. The canyon turned purple, then blue as the shadows lengthened. I wondered if the Three would stretch dark fingers over us, but we weren’t in their path. At least not yet.
The stars crowded the sky once it got dark. We pulled our mattresses out so we could gaze at them. They looked as bright to me as they had from the hull of Olympia. The moons hadn’t risen yet, so it was the stars that watched over us as we started to drift off to sleep.
Dragonette and Kitten stayed close, but they focused their unblinking gazes on the trail that led back down to the graveyard.
I turned my head to look at Ahi. She lay with her eyes wide open, staring reverently at the stars.
What else has she kept from us? I wondered. I was sure there was something.
I was right.
* * *
Deep inside Joe’s Canyon, I gazed at the stars until I fell asleep. I felt confident that Dragonette and Kitten would warn us if anyone approached.
I woke again when my implant came to life.
My Servant implant, the one the Executives used to control what I saw and heard. Medusa and I had disabled the command codes long ago.
Someone had just reactivated them, and now I could see what they wanted me to see.
All around me, the ships glowed in moonlight. I seemed to be upright, but I could still feel my air mattress under me.
I tried to get an idea what was talking to me. I moved my eyes back and forth, and saw the shapes of the ships we had passed. When I looked up, the stars blazed in the night sky. I looked down at red rocks and dirt, half expecting to see giant silver robot feet. I felt like Gort, standing outside Klaatu’s ship, and someone had just shined a flashlight on my visor. That evoked more theremin music from Bernard Herrmann’s score: “Nocturne/The Flashlight/The Robot/Space Control,” the two theremins exchanging alien signals with an electric cello and bass.
Something responded to that music, first by searching my father’s music database, and then by following the link from Herrmann’s score to Nuruddin’s movie database. It reviewed The Day the Earth Stood Still in a matter of seconds. Then it selected the music for “Space Control” and showed me a new perspective, similar to the corresponding scene in the movie, except I didn’t see Klaatu moving through the mysterious interior. Medusa navigated those realms, inside a Sentinel.
Her tentacles caressed and explored the things she found, while Bernard Herrmann’s theremin wove patterns of wonder with a celeste, vibraphone, and piano. She seemed to be moving by instinct, and I judged from her expression that she was listening to something I couldn’t hear.
I insisted.
It showed me a new scene. The perspective reminded me of the one the Sentinel had revealed, a view from space, looking in toward a planetary system—but the world at the center of the scene glowed red and gold, because it was on fire. It had turned molten; its atmosphere burned away. That sight alone would have filled me with awe, but a dark mass began to occlude my view of that dying world, a ship that dwarfed Olympia the way a sun dwarfs the worlds in its orbit.
Its details evoked the Klaatu ships, causing me to wonder if they couldn’t come together to form larger ships if called upon to do so. I marveled at the sight, until I noticed details that became apparent as more of the ship moved into sight.
There were catastrophic holes in that structure. I saw the red and gold of the molten world through the gaps. Finally, I saw the ragged edge that had sundered it from top to bottom.
Good Lord—that was just a chunk of the thing. Intact, it had been even bigger. What could have destroyed such a juggernaut?
I felt a loneliness and a grief so deep, they had no bottom. The voice contemplated those depths with an aching familiarity. Then it set those feelings aside and chose curiosity instead, turning its collective mind to the present. My perspective returned to the graveyard of the Klaatu ships. I stood among them like Gort waiting for a signal.
I thought about that. Medusa and I had talked about many things in our time together. Movies, music—murders. The three Ms of our relationship.
The voice cast those things aside as irrelevant.
Well, yes. We had disagreed about a lot of things. My current trajectory disappointed her.
Will you sleep when I die?
No. I’ll bond with someone else, but I’ll miss you, I won’t get over it. Or the next one. Or the one after that.
Medusa had abided in Lucifer Tower when I discovered her. She had stopped thinking about Olympia and my father’s grand plan. In a way, she had been sleeping.
Just like the Three were sleeping.
Don’t wake them, Oichi.
What would they do if they remembered their grief?
Did it ever occur to you to wonder what killed the people who made them?
I waited for the voice to tell me something more. When it didn’t, I wondered if I should ask it a question.
I wasn’t even sure what questions to ask myself.
How do you listen? it asked. I remembered what Medusa and I said to each other, but I hadn’t thought about it. Our agendas had meshed. I assumed they always would.
I had assumed a hell of a lot.
I tried to move, but I seemed to be stuck with my Gort perspective. If the voice had nothing more to say, it didn’t seem inclined to let me go, either.
I could still breathe without effort, so I concentrated on that. Eventually I was able to close my eyes. I felt myself drifting off to sleep.
Until Kitten jumped on me. I opened my eyes and saw her staring down at me.
“Oichi!” she said, “the tree
s are going!”
* * *
I sat up. Beside me, Ashur and Ahi also had come awake, and we blinked at each other in a flood of silver light. Ahi looked up, scanning the sky. The stars wheeled overhead.
Wheeled. As if Graveyard were completing its spin in a matter of minutes instead of hours.
“It’s a time fracture,” said Ahi.
My heart began to thud in my chest. “Stay close,” I warned the Minis, worried that they would get trapped outside the fracture. Dragonette zoomed to Ashur’s shoulder and clung there. Kitten wrapped herself around my waist.
Ahi got to her feet. “We need to see this,” she said, and she started off toward the edge of the plateau.
Ashur and I exchanged alarmed looks, but we hurried to follow her. Sounds reached us from the bottom of the slope, crackling noises and a sort of muttering that made me wonder if people were down there. I couldn’t quite understand the words, but I couldn’t help trying to do so, anyway. We had to travel only a short distance before I understood what Kitten had meant when she said the trees are going.
The walking trees went rapidly down the slope and out of sight down-canyon. They weren’t walking as people would—they flopped over, broke free from their old roots, stood up, then flopped over again.
“It’s like time-lapse photography,” said Ashur. “I’ve seen it in some of father’s movies, flowers blooming.”
They’re pretty much walking their whole lives, Ahi had said. If we were seeing them speeded up, that explained the crackling noises, but what about the other sounds, the ones that seemed like speech?
“They haven’t just been walking, this whole time,” Ahi said. “They’ve been talking to each other! Maybe they’ve been talking to us, too.”
“What are they saying?” said Ashur.
Ahi listened. The rest of us stayed silent, unwilling to break her concentration. The walking trees continued their migration down-canyon until their herd grew thinner, their muttering became less frequent. As we watched, the last of them flopped and uprooted, flopped and uprooted, following its brethren out of sight.
We stared after them in the odd silver light. Darkness dropped on us like a blanket.
We looked up. The stars were moving at their normal pace again (or we were). Ahi studied the sky and said, “There. Maui casting his hook. We’re back when we belong.”
Crack! came a noise downslope, and we saw the walking trees, where and when they belonged, caught midjourney by normal time.
When I had seen those trees’ moving speeded up, I had wondered if normal time were passing our bubble and leaving us behind. Would we emerge in the future, long after our efforts here could do any good for Olympia? Long after people had stopped waiting for us to come back?
Long after they were gone?
“I recorded it if you need to hear it again,” Dragonette told her.
Ahi regarded her with raised eyebrows. “Really? The whole thing?”
“Me, too,” said Kitten. “It was amazing.”
“It showed us where we need to hike in the morning.” Ahi pointed with her chin. “Where they went. That’s our path.”
Ashur opened his mouth, shut it again, then said, “You didn’t have a route planned out already?”
She looked surprised. “In Joe’s Canyon? Maps don’t work in here. Routes get rerouted. You have to go where the canyon shows you to go.”
Ashur looked down-canyon. “Where does that lead?”
“We won’t know until we follow that trail,” said Ahi.
Ashur seemed caught between consternation and wonder. “It’s different every time?”
“Not every time.” Ahi was regaining her old confidence. “I’ve been certain places several times. The order of places is usually at least a little different. Have you changed your mind about wanting to be here?”
I wouldn’t have had a ready answer for that, because wanting to be here wasn’t the issue for me. I had to be here, regardless of the risks.
Ashur shook his head. “Did you figure out what they were saying?”
“They said we should get out of the rain.”
Ashur frowned. Maybe he was about to ask what she was talking about. Then light flashed overhead, illuminating our startled faces. The thunderclap that followed was cataclysmic. Rain dropped on us as if someone had overturned a gigantic bucket, in sheets, rather than drops.
“That’s not funny,” Ashur grumbled as we ran for cover.
But it was. Kind of.
19
Follow Them and See
Blue lightning breaks time. Hide with the merman.
Regardless of anything that might come later, this is what I will remember: the ruins of Evernight clustered behind us, perpetually trapped in the moment just after every living soul had vanished. Ahead of us, the desert stretching all the way to the feet of the North Rim.
Ahi sets one foot into the desert, and a blue light swells over the horizon. Ashur and Ahi are frozen in the glare. It stutters out again, crackling like an electrical charge.
It races across the desert toward us on spider legs.
I have seen something like it before.
* * *
The morning of the second day, I woke next to the twistifer trees with a start. The rain had not lasted—it had expended its energy within minutes, then moved on, down the canyon. The lightning flashed for hours, making me glad we had taken shelter under our limestone ledge.
Eventually, the night became peaceful again. Just in time for the sun to come up, climbing over the horizon on rays of rosy light.
Not the worst manifestation of the day I could think of, but I found, as I lay there on my air mattress, that all the relaxing I had tried to accomplish when I was trying to sleep the night before had finally paid off—now that it was time to get up.
Ashur, Ahi, and I attended to our morning routine, and I woke up pretty fast. A cup of coffee would have been nice, but the water tasted good.
I glanced toward the top of the stone staircase. Nothing had come creeping up there during the night. I felt a fleeting urge to go take a final look at the spaceships, but I didn’t give in to it. I didn’t want them to take any more notice of me than they already had.
You didn’t listen.
Yeah. I didn’t.
So she doesn’t answer.
Right. Thanks for sharing.
Dragonette waited for us to fish out our breakfast bars. “I believe I’ve deciphered something,” she said.
Ahi grinned. “I’m sure you have.”
“I apologize for not seeing it sooner.” Dragonette dipped her head. “I got very wrapped up in my recording of the trees, and the rest of my attention was focused on watching for Sheba’s poachers, but this morning, it just popped into my head.”
We waited attentively.
“The Sentinel,” said Dragonette. “I’ve looked at the transcript of her remarks to you, Oichi. The first thing she said was, Time and trees are telling. Follow them and see.”
Ahi’s smile was like the sunrise. “Yes! And it happened!”
They’ve been talking to each other, Ahi had said last night. Maybe they’ve been talking to us, too.… It showed us where we need to hike in the morning.
Ashur frowned as he thought it over. “So there was a time fracture, and the trees talked to us, and now we’re supposed to follow them. What did the Sentinel say after that?”
“Under arches shells are dry,” said Dragonette. “Time is hanging, but who makes the loops? Gifts, but gone, then what? Bite the ones who take. Running ruins and sad! Can you keep your feet? Prosper! Oichi, where is the cannon?”
“I hope no one is going to shoot a cannon at us,” said Ashur.
“
The cannon is missing,” said Kitten, “according to the Sentinel.”
“I don’t know about a cannon,” said Ahi, “but we know where we’re going today.” She nodded at the line of walking trees. “Let’s finish up here and get moving.” She stood. “For anyone who needs a privy—there’s a little spot around back. All sins wash downslope.”
She disappeared around that bend for a few minutes, and then returned. “Next!”
That was my cue.
* * *
The light grew steadily around us, but it was shining at our backs, and that felt very good in the cool morning. Ahi kept us close to the ridge where the walking trees continued their slow march. They were our hiking companions.
The Three remained in sight for most of the morning. Eventually our path veered north again, and we picked our way into a narrow side canyon, whose walls blocked the view.
“This canyon is like a giant zigzag,” said Ashur. “How come they didn’t just name it Zigzag?”
“Because Joe got here first,” said Ahi.
“No, the ships did.”
“They’ve got their own names for things. Don’t worry.”
The Maisy River had diverged farther from our path by then, though it was still close enough to see. The sound it made from that distance was reassuring. We had consumed half of what was in our water bottles by then, and I liked to think we could hike down there and get more if we needed to, though it would take us out of our way.
Ahi didn’t seem to be worried about it. She stopped to peer at the walking trees and get a sense of where they were headed. Then she marched on, and we followed.
Ashur frowned at the canyon walls.
I couldn’t see much of a purchase anywhere. The ground under our feet was covered in a sand so fine, it felt silky to the touch.
Medusa in the Graveyard (The Medusa Cycle) Page 23
