Yet I couldn’t help looking for escape routes. Any depressions weathered into the sandstone walls merited my close inspection, though few of them seemed deep enough to afford proper hand- and footholds. As pretty as the patterns were in the sandstone, with crosshatching that spoke of millennia of grains piling up into dunes, I thought a good name for this place might be Danger Canyon. I felt relieved when the path widened again, and we began to see gaps in the walls. Ahead, a new landscape emerged, white and tan formations shining in the sunlight. It was so beautiful, I almost didn’t notice that something sat in one of the gaps beside the path.
At first I thought it was a large bird. It sat on its knob of rock as if that were its normal spot. Ahi and Ashur walked past it without seeming to notice; Dragonette didn’t look over Ashur’s shoulder when he carried her past, and Kitten trotted along without a glance at the creature.
As I drew even, it fixed me with an exceptional glare.
Its eyes were human. They didn’t belong in that head, with its feathers and its beak. They were blue, and they glared right at me.
“Ashur,” I warned.
He and Ahi must have gone a distance up the path, because there was a long pause, and then I heard them coming back toward me, their feet making muffled sounds in the grit. I couldn’t look away from the blue eyes locked on mine.
Ashur said, “Is that an alien?”
I could see why he thought that. The creature had feathers, though it didn’t have wings. It had feet, but they looked more like fingers than claws. Those eyes …
“That’s not an alien,” said Ahi. “That’s a northern god.”
That broke me out of my freeze. Ahi’s tone had been respectful, but I had to wonder if she was kidding.
Ashur squinted at the creature, trying to make sense of what he saw. “A northern god of what?”
Ahi shrugged. “I don’t know. That’s just what everyone calls them. They were already in the canyon when the first humans arrived. They look different every time you see them. They don’t hurt anyone, but they’ve got strong opinions. You should pay attention to what they say.”
I kept my eyes on the northern god, and it returned the favor. “They predict the future?”
“No,” said Ahi. “Well—maybe. They might complain about what happened in the past, or what’s happening somewhere else. It’s not always about you. Sometimes it’s about someone you’re going to meet, and you may never figure it out.”
Ashur arched an eyebrow. “Are you sure it’s not just nonsense?”
A line appeared between Ahi’s brows as she thought about that. “No. The northern gods have power. Pissing them off is always a bad idea. So do what they tell you to do, and don’t do what they tell you not to do.”
“It’s not telling us anything,” said Ashur.
No one could dispute that. The northern god simply stared at us.
Before I could answer, the northern god bristled. “Stop that!” it cried with a voice too big for its body.
We froze. The northern god glared at Ashur. “Okay,” said Ashur. “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t do it again,” cried the northern god. “It’s the rule!”
“I won’t do it anymore,” Ashur promised.
The feathers settled. The northern god glared at me, as if to say, That goes for you, too, sister! Then it hopped out of sight behind the rock.
We waited a respectable amount of time for the northern god to reappear, but it seemed to have vanished for good.
“Stop what?” said Ahi.
Ashur blushed.
“We were using our brain implants to communicate,” I explained.
“Oh.” Ahi grinned. “Don’t feel bad. Everyone tries to use tech the first time they come in here. Sooner or later, the northern gods get pissed off. They complain, and then you know not to do it again.”
We couldn’t communicate brain-to-brain inside the canyon. I hoped no gods would take offense over the fact that Ashur and I had artificial eyes. I would hate to wake up with that creature on my chest, its fingerlike appendages clawing at my face.
“Are there southern gods?” said Ashur. “Closer to the South Rim?”
“We don’t talk about them,” said Ahi.
“Why not?”
“Because they might hear us.”
She pivoted and walked away before he could ask her to clarify that. It seemed like a warning. Ashur looked at me sorrowfully, since we were accustomed to being able to mind-speak at will.
“Kitten,” I said, “and Dragonette, you had better speak aloud, too, until we leave the canyon.”
“Roger wilco,” said Kitten. “Do you think they’ll get mad if I sing?”
“I hope not,” I said as the four of us followed Ahi toward the shining landscape that unfolded ahead of us. It was so beautiful, it almost kept me from wondering how the southern gods might hear us talking about them—and what they would do about it if they did.
* * *
“I’ve been reviewing the next part of the Sentinel’s message,” Dragonette said while the rest of us nibbled food bars and sipped water. “Under arches shells are dry.”
“Parts of this area were shallow seas for millions of years,” said Ahi. “I’ve seen a lot of fossils of shells. Those are pretty dry.”
“Are there arches?” said Kitten.
Ahi nodded. “Sandstone arches. Maybe we’ll see some of those.”
We stood with our packs. A gentle breeze played with Ahi’s curls, but I didn’t smell rain. Maybe that was why shells are dry.
Sunlight glinted on the spires of the Three. As we started up the path, they remained in sight. Couldn’t we just cut to the chase? I wanted to ask them. Have you even noticed that we’re here?
They were old, and alien, and maybe time didn’t move the same way for them as it did for us. Maybe, in their own way, they were like the walking trees, seeing a huge length of time as a short period, talking to us, but not in a way that we could hear.
We marched up that path. Day Two, I thought, feeling relatively sure of that, but who knew how time was passing outside the graveyard? Somewhere, Ahi’s mother might be looking toward Joe’s Canyon, wondering if her daughter was okay and if she would be home soon. If Ahi’s mother felt confident that one thousand years weren’t going to pass outside the canyon while three days passed inside, shouldn’t I have some faith, too?
I did. Mostly.
Walking all day does a lot to settle your nerves, if nothing else. I liked our high path, which allowed us to look down on canyons inside the canyon and upon the battleship buttes sitting inside their arid harbor. Anyone who imagined a canyon was a mere hole in the ground had never seen Joe’s Canyon, with its spires, giant-sized steps, a river with multiple tributary streams, slot canyons, side canyons, even hills and small mountains. The population of Olympia would have been lost in there.
No footprints marked the path, save ours, which we were beginning to see in drifts of pale sand.
By noon, that sand piled up in dunes below our path, but Ahi said it wasn’t just sand. “Evaporites. This area must have been full of water that dried up.” She wet a finger and tasted a bit of the sand. “Salty. A little bitter, too.”
“You should taste it,” Kitten suggested, so I indulged her. “Interesting,” she concluded.
Ashur sampled some for Dragonette’s benefit. Once she had a chance to assess the taste, she asked, “Could we take a little sample home?”
“I don’t see why not,” said Ahi. “It’s not as if you’re stealing tech.”
While Dragonette was gathering her sample, Kitten trotted to a bend in the path and stretched her neck. “There’s an arch, right over our trail,” she announced.
The sun beat down on us without mercy. The pale rocks around us glowed with the light, and I felt a bit dizzy. I pulled out my water bottle—it was running low. I took three sips and put it back. Then I brought up the rear as we rounded that corner and got a good look at Kitten’s arch.
It had eroded out of a slab of rock that loomed far over our heads, effectively blocking our view of the terrain ahead. “Looks like mudstone with calcium carbonate in it,” said Ahi. “A stream must run through here during the rainy season.”
Once we passed under that bridge, it turned out to be more of a tunnel. It felt cool inside, and we couldn’t help lingering.
“Hey—” Ashur pointed to something on the wall.
Something in the wall, a shape that curled into a big spiral. Ridges from its form extended out of the rock.
“This mudstone is fossiliferous,” said Ahi. “That’s a shell.”
Shells couldn’t get much drier than this one, if that’s what the Sentinel had meant. My mouth was dry, too, and I suspected we might be in for a bit of discomfort ahead.
That was an accurate prediction—technically.
The walls of the tunnel distorted the slight noises made by our feet, turning them into whispery sounds almost like speech. At the far end, bright light blazed on the white rocks. The holes eroded out of that stone looked like a sort of face, peering anxiously into the tunnel, but it was looking past us, not at us, and I couldn’t help turning to look the way we had come. Nothing moved there. I wondered about Sheba, whom Ahi seemed convinced couldn’t touch us, despite the fact that someone had still managed to dog our steps.
“More spaceships!” announced Ashur. “I think…”
I had fallen behind. My heart skipped a beat when I saw the others at the end of the tunnel, which seemed to have stretched. They looked so far away. I lurched after them. I could have sworn they were getting farther away, not closer.
Suddenly they were within reach. I burst out of the tunnel half a second after Kitten, then had to pull myself up short to avoid plowing into Ashur and Ahi.
I looked over my shoulder. The tunnel should have been just a few feet away. Somehow we had ended up several yards up the path.
“We’re inside a time fracture,” said Ahi.
Time stuttered, then slowed.
“Whatever happens here,” said Ahi, “it’s going to feel like forever.”
* * *
Ships and other artifacts perched among high limestone rocks. White sand piled up at their feet. I could see why Ashur had doubted his first conclusion, because the ships looked like gigantic fossilized seashells.
Or at least, they did at first glance. I couldn’t see what engines might move those ships, but they had structures that looked like pressure doors. Their spires reminded me of the communications array on the leading edge of Olympia. More than anything else, they had a presence, like the Klaatu ships. The people I expected to see stepping out of the doors or turning a corner—they were the ships themselves.
“What now?” Ashur said, his voice a whisper.
The time fracture stretched Ahi’s pause into an eternity. “We have a path,” she said. “We can’t go backward. So let’s go forward.”
We began our journey through that eternal place, ancient ships looking down on us from all sides as if they had been cemented into a massive coral reef. Moving forward might have been our only choice, but it wasn’t easy. My steps didn’t have their normal rhythm; each thrust forward felt as though the space through which I moved was also thrusting back. At first, this frustrated me, but I got used to it. Once I had done that, it seemed to me that our movement through this once-shallow-sea was like the tide: rushing in and flowing out. This place was the dry version of Ashur’s Sunken Cathedral program.
Something tickled my memory. For a long time, the First One had taken refuge inside Ashur’s Mermaid program. What had she said about ancient seas?
The place in which we Three abide was once an inland sea.…
That must be the Gorge. Before its rocks were metamorphosed by titanic pressures, they may have looked more like these.
Corals lived there. They built their castles. Life flourished, then was buried many times over. The seas dried up, and sand dunes covered the salt flats. They moved in the direction of the wind, one grain at a time.…
That’s how it felt like we were moving, and how time was passing. Unless you’ve been inside a time fracture, you can’t know what eternity feels like. We knew.
I could feel the pulse of that ancient sea in motion. I abided in stillness once it diminished and became landlocked. I tasted brine as it evaporated and surrendered its minerals to the mudstone on the bottom.
Now all was dry. I longed for the sea breezes that would never come again.
Yet—that place must be beautiful at night, the rocks glowing under the light of Tombstone and Cherub. When had the ships arrived? Why were they arranged in this place, as if they had gone looking for a nice place to retire? They seemed happy there.
A dry wind whistled through the rocks and ships. I liked the sound. We made our way through it with our to-and-fro pace. Not the most straightforward progress, but it seemed to be getting us somewhere. Did I imagine that the light had taken on a blue tinge, as if we were walking at the bottom of a brightly lit lagoon?
I’d like to tell you that I had an epiphany as I made my passage through those eons. Instead, I couldn’t stop thinking how much I appreciated the clothes we had been given. They shrugged off the sweat of millions of years. That’s got to be just about the best selling point you can imagine.
I also started to think it might be a nice place to live. Crazy, right? Take away the whole fractured-time thing, add a few balconies from which you could sit sipping ice tea and contemplating the passage of time across the dunes, and it might be nice. How deep would you have to drill to find water? Maybe it just wasn’t there, no matter how deep you went.
The path meandered to a spot that branched, forcing us to stop.
“I think my ears just popped,” said Ashur.
I felt a similar sensation. It was a little easier to breathe, too. “Is the fracture—unfracturing?”
“No…” Ahi said. “But—sort of yes, too. I need to think.”
We waited for inspiration. Dragonette clung to Ashur’s pack frame, and I realized she had been recording the whole time.
Kitten stood near me, but she faced away, looking down one of the paths that branched from our junction. Ashur stood tall, with his shoulders squared, but I could see how tired he was. I assumed I must look twice as bad.
“You two always look so calm,” Ahi said. “You must be made of steel.”
I was amazed she couldn’t see how tense we were. “You look pretty steady, yourself,” I offered.
“Oh yeah, but I’m used to it. I know how it’s supposed to feel, so I don’t get nervous unless something changes.”
As if taking Ahi’s words as direction, Kitten started down the path.
She trotted with purpose. Her body language was tense—her tail stuck straight out behind her.
“We’ve got to follow,” said Dragonette. She remained perched on Ashur’s shoulders, but she sat stiffly, her eyes riveted on her sister.
We hurried after Kitten. This time, our motion through space seemed unencumbered. No one tried to talk to Kitten or distract her, she was so intent. We could see she was headed straight for one of the larger ships. She walked through the giant pressure door without pausing. We followed.
Inside, the floor sloped up into a spiral around a central point. Kitten was about to disappear around the bend.
“Kitten,” I called, “stop!”
She paused and looked over her shoulder.
“What are you seeing up there?”
“I haven’t found it yet,” said Kitten, and she began to walk again. We followed her up the spiral.
Finally Kitten halted and stretched her neck to look
around the last bend. She waited for a long moment, staring at what lay beyond. “Okay,” she said. “I think this is it.”
The rest of us crept up to her position and looked where she was looking.
A model of a solar system hung from the spiral-vaulted ceiling, suspended from a baffling network of loops. Could it be some sort of navigation system? If so, it was awfully literal.
Ahi moved closer, then stopped and pointed. “I think that orb is Charon, but where are Hellas One and Two?”
I can’t say I was intimately familiar with the trinary system of which Charon was a distant member, but I remembered what it had been like to see Hella One and Hella Two from the Last Sentinel’s point of view. “Maybe it’s the system these ships came from?” I guessed.
Ahi pointed again. “I’m pretty sure that’s Graveyard. What are these loops? They all pass through Graveyard, and they don’t represent its orbital path.”
The floor sloped around the model, so we all walked farther up to get a different perspective. I kept my eyes on Graveyard, hoping to use it as a reference, but when I moved, I felt an odd sensation, as if I were staring at the real Graveyard from a distance, with the perspective very much like the Sentinel’s.
“Time is hanging, but who makes the loops?” said Dragonette.
“What…?” I couldn’t look away from the illusion—if that’s what it was.
“It’s what the Sentinel told you.”
The longest loop reached through the ceiling, then back again, and I couldn’t quite tell how the whole thing was strung together.
“Is this a model of Time?” Ashur asked before I could.
“I’m leaning in that direction,” said Ahi.
“Why are we—why does the graveyard want us to see it?”
“I think we’re supposed to study it—learn from it.”
Ashur put his hands on his hips and sighed with some exasperation. “I don’t think we can fit this into a backpack.”
Ahi laughed with pure delight. “Me neither. We’ll just have to remember it.”
Medusa in the Graveyard (The Medusa Cycle) Page 24
