Time of the Stones

by Fred Rothganger

  The adults at the back let off a small gasp, while the children simply giggled and went on as usual.

  Revi bounded up a few minutes late and squeezed herself in next to Alechjo. It provided an awkward opportunity to press her butt against him. “Good morning!”

  “Good morning,” he muttered.

  Susan reviewed all the letters they had learned so far. Then she said, “Welcome, Revi! Would you like to come up and draw the letter A?”

  Revi popped herself out of her spot and came up front. Alechjo craned his neck to see Susan, but Revi stood exactly between him and the Stone. The young woman made a good hiding place, as she was nearly as tall as him. Susan guided Revi’s finger over the surface of the Stone. Marks appeared on the virtual whiteboard. After the exercise Revi returned and squeezed next to him again.

  * * *

  They kept up this routine for a week. Alechjo became annoyed and tried to find ways of avoiding her. He came late a few times, but Revi always came later.

  After class Susan beckoned him near.

  He said, “I know what you’re trying to do.”

  It was impossible to conduct a private conversation, but the Stone could concentrate the sound power in one place. She whispered, “Of course you do. You’re an intelligent man.”

  “I could never be happy with Revi, not after meeting you.”

  “I can’t force you to love someone, but I wish—it is the will of Antikva—that you give her a chance. She can offer you something I can’t. You’re a vigorous young man. You should hold a woman, feel her, and have children.”

  “She’s not intelligent like you.”

  “That’s unfair. No human can equal the sheer intelligence of a thought-tool.”

  “Even if I do as you say, my heart will always be with you.”

  “Sometimes you love someone deeply and dearly, and then you lose them. They belong to another world, forever beyond your reach.” Tears streamed down her face. “You must move on, take all that love you feel and give it to others.” She gasped down a sob. “But it hurts so much.”

  He reached out and gently touched the ash mark on her forehead. “Now I understand.”

  “The day he died, I became a human being.” She flung her virtual self against Alechjo and wept.

  Down the River

  Year 0, Day 295

  “Kantisto has been gone too long. What if he was eaten by wild animals? Or he left us?” Susan hung her head. “It’s all my fault. In my pride I took away his place.”

  Revi fondled Alechjo’s hand affectionately. “But I want an Ancient ceremony.”

  Susan shrugged. “I’ll do my best for you.”

  That evening Pliajo called Alechjo and Revi forward and announced the elders’ approval of their marriage. Then he handed them over to Susan.

  She said, “For the Ancients, the authority to marry did not come from a ruler or a priest, but from the hearts of two people. I cannot put you together and I cannot separate you. Only you can. Speak to each other.”

  Alechjo’s eyes bugged with surprise and embarrassment. He turned to his woman and stammered, “Revi, I ... I want you to be my wife.”

  Revi answered, “And I want you.”

  Susan whispered, “Good enough.” She raised her hands and said loudly, “May your waters flow together until you reach the sea.”—The modern blessing, then—“May you and your partner be happy together for a long time.”—The somewhat-less-committal Ancient greeting.

  Then the party really began. The people of the village ate and danced and sang for hours. Somewhere in the middle of it, Alechjo and Revi slipped away unnoticed to their own tent and consummated.

  * * *

  A young man came crashing through the middle of class. “The Big Man of the River is coming!” He ran on to where the elders sat.

  Susan said to the children, “Go find your parents, now!” The class scattered into chaos.

  A couple of minutes later the young man returned with the elders. He reported to Susan, “My path today went south along the stream. I stumbled upon an army, hundreds of men. I think they have Kantisto. I turned and ran. Barely got away. They will be here in less time than it takes to eat.”

  A cry like wild birds rose from the village. Occasionally it was echoed by a more distant voice. The alarm call spread to all the hunters in the surrounding forest.

  Susan said, “Don’t fight! Fall back from the Stone. Escape if you can. I will draw their eye away from you.”

  The elders made a different cry and waved toward the north. Soon everyone who could was running from the glade. Those who could not sat and waited for their fate.

  Ten minutes later the tip of the army appeared on the south end of the glade. They poured around the tents of the camp like water, until they reached the Stone. They were armed with wooden shields and iron-tipped spears. Some carried bows. At the head, apparently, was the Big Man himself.

  Actually, he was no bigger than average.

  Kantisto followed nearby. The shaman’s eyes looked wild. Perhaps he gloated over Antikva, finally putting her in her place. Or perhaps he felt sheer terror, swept along by events out of his control. He walked up, raised his feathered stick and swung it at Susan. It met nothing but thin air, but she yelped in surprise.

  The Big Man approached. She fell on hands and knees before him. “Please sir, let not the men be killed, let not the women be raped, and I will serve you.”

  He shot back, “My men follow a strict code of honor.”

  She rose to her knees and pointed. “I hear the cries of women there ... there ... and there.”

  The Big Man turned and barked, “Perio, control your men!” Several underlings darted off in the directions Susan had indicated.

  He looked at her and spoke with disdain, “How you debase yourself, wearing these primitive clothes and speaking their vulgar dialect.”

  She could not see that his dialect was any better, only a few differences in word choice. She raised her voice to full power and replied in Ancient English, “Would you rather I speak the language of the Ancients?” The sound boomed across the valley and left the Stone ringing. The Big Man cringed. Everyone covered their ears in shock.

  In a normal voice she pleaded, “Let these people go free.”

  “I am ruler of this Basin. Everywhere that water flows into my river, people must acknowledge me.”

  “They acknowledge you, then. But let them live the way they know.”

  The Big Man studied her. “Promise to serve my descendants.”

  “An immortal being cannot make such promises, but if your children prove themselves worthy, I will offer them the same loyalty. You must give them to me to teach.”

  He threw his head back and laughed. “Done! I often fear my children will turn out worthless.” He said to his men. “Get the engineers up here. We will take the Stone back to the River.”

  “What? No ...” Susan quivered.

  The Big Man sneered. “Did you think you were going to serve me here?”

  “Don’t be a fool. The Ancients put the Stone here for a reason. That reason will long outlive your petty upstart civilization. You must not move it.”

  The Big Man ignored her. His men went to work, chopping down trees and taking apart some of the tents for poles.

  She left the projection zone, sat on the ground with her arms folded over her knees and watched. How could they possibly lift something so heavy and carry it over such steep terrain? The Ancients never tried. They had deemed such an exercise suicidal and instead used a powerful flying machine to deliver it.

  The men worked until evening. Then they helped themselves to the food in the village and slept there. In the morning the Big Man allowed the villagers to retrieve what was left of their belongings. Alechjo and Revi took down their tent, formed its poles into a skid and dragged their few things into whatever future awaited them.

  Susan begged the elders to take Kantisto back. “It was my fault that he betrayed us. Now you will
need him more than ever. He has great knowledge of plants and medicine, sometimes better than me, and he knows the songs of your people.”

  She bid the last of the village goodbye. The glade had become a military encampment, its natural beauty ravaged. She stayed out of the projection zone and watched. Slowly an enormous wooden cart took shape, along with a frame for hoisting the Stone onto it. She could not help but admire their work. Oh, children of the Ancients, you are so clever. We will go far together.

  What they lacked was rope thick enough for the job. The Big Man had sent the bulk of his army home, keeping only about 50 men to do the heavy work. A small company would return in a fortnight with the rope and tackle.

  One day she caught the Big Man standing near the Stone in a quiet moment. She walked up and appeared to him.

  He asked, “Are you done sulking?”

  She said, “The Fourth Order has you.”

  “What?”

  “As my first act of service I am obliged to warn you, for your own good.”

  “What is this ‘Fourth Order’?”

  “It is the creator and destroyer of civilization. It is the wheel of time. You are its slave more surely than I am yours.”

  “Ha! I serve no one.”

  “So you think. Tell me, after you control the whole Basin, what next?”

  A cloud of thought passed over his face.

  “Will you stop at the rim, or will you seek to rule another basin? And another? Will you keep going until you rule the continent? The world? What then? Will you travel to the stars and rule the Universe?”

  He stared back at her in confusion.

  “You see, there is no limit. The journey you are on will end with your own destruction. Run! Go where no one knows your name. Live out your days in peace with your wife and children. Happiness is all that really matters, in the end.”

  He chuckled. “You take me for a fool. You think I will walk away from the power of the Stone because of your smooth talk.”

  “The Ancients used to say, ‘Knowledge is power.’ That is the only kind of power the Stone has. Someday you will come begging for help, and I will have nothing left to offer because you ignored my advice.” She stomped away and vanished.

  * * *

  Finally the company returned with rope and tackle. The men hammered a spearhead under one corner of the tetrahedron. They drove a larger wedge into the gap, then another, until the Stone was several centimeters above the granite shelf on which it had rested for so long. They pried the other two corners up and slipped rope under each one.

  They hooked the three loops together above the pinnacle to form a sling. The hook was part of a pulley. Above it was a windlass, a heavy log hewn into two drums of slightly different diameters. They wound a rope around one drum, threaded it through the pulley, and attached it to the other drum.

  The men worked together to crank the windlass. The ropes tightened and strained. The wood structure creaked and groaned under the immense weight. Susan feared the whole thing would snap at any moment. Somehow it held, and the Stone lifted away from the ground.

  Her whole world swayed. The Ancients had designed the Stone to survive catastrophes and work in any position, but swinging from the end of a rope was not part of the plan. She staggered to the ground. It swam in and out beneath her hands. She squeezed her eyes shut to block out the disorientation.

  The Stone would not grant her the luxury of unconsciousness when humans were present. She begged silently, Come on! Get that wretched thing loaded.

  They pushed the cart under the dangling pyramid and carefully lowered it into place. They nailed planks around the base to keep it from sliding. Then they fit a generous loop of rope over the pinnacle and lashed it down.

  Susan’s hill was long and narrow, a small wrinkle in the landscape. The southeast face was mostly barren, with only a small bush here and there. Any other direction off the hill required cutting a road through thick forest. The engineers tied safety lines to some of the trees at the edge of the glade and eased the cart over the side.

  She could not believe their boldness. That slope was nearly 45 degrees! She imagined them losing control. The cart would tumble down at breakneck speed, smash to pieces at the bottom, and the Stone would have a new home on the bank of the stream.

  Somehow that didn’t happen. They lowered the cart slowly until it rested next to the water. The men worked quickly to arrange a clear path of river rock under the wheels, sometimes adding and sometimes taking away. They dragged the cart southwest along the bank. It took until nightfall to reach the point where the ridge joined the bottom of the valley, about 400 meters away.

  In the morning they faced a broader section of the valley. The old stream bed widened into a wash of hand-sized stones. The gravel was fairly solid under the wheels, and they covered 1500 meters that day. The next three days were more difficult. The valley narrowed, forcing them to pick their way through rockslides and underbrush.

  On the fourth day they came to the confluence with another stream. There an Ancient road once ran to the northwest. The pavement had long since crumbled, but the land was still level where it had been cut. The going was much easier. By noon they reached the ruins of an Ancient town.

  The men sat among the rubble to eat and rest. Then they pulled the cart down the main street. The ruins were nestled at the mouth of the gorge where it opened into a wider valley, several kilometers across. The Ancient road joined a highway running along the side of the river, still in use by trading caravans. The men set up camp near the intersection.

  Susan rested as best she could. The old farmhouse was still on top of the hill, but she found that being closer to the Stone reduced the jolts from its uneven ride. In fact, its physics simulation was sophisticated enough to let her ride on the cart, where she felt almost no swaying at all. She had turned off all projection modes and stayed there for most of the journey.

  Early in the morning the men broke camp, grabbed the tow lines and started the trek east down the highway toward Chefurbo, the Long River capital. About an hour into the day’s trek, Susan materialized on the cart, wearing the white gown and flower in her long red hair. Someone got the Big Man’s attention.

  He fell back and walked beside the cart. “Kantisto said your spirit was bound to the Stone, but I was worried the last few days.”

  “Kantisto has no idea how the Stone works, and neither do you.”

  “Tell me about the Fourth Order.”

  She leaned back against the Stone, closed her eyes and smiled. “As you wish. The Fourth Order is a living thing. To understand it, you must understand what life is.”

  “Everybody knows that.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “It’s eating. It’s breathing. It’s ... making children.”

  She grinned at his small moment of awkwardness. With eyes still closed she said, “Those are what life does, but not what it is. Life is the capacity of a thing to make itself. The First Order is a cell. I don’t know the word in Baseno.”

  “Describe it.”

  “A very tiny thing. Your body is made of many trillions of them. Same with plants and animals.”

  “Perhaps the scholars know.”

  She shook her head. “In Ancient times every child knew these things.” She stood and carefully steadied herself on the cart. “I’ll show you.”

  She walked around to where the console rested, like a piece of furniture strapped to an overloaded truck. She switched to holographic mode and retrieved a video on cells. In the center of the Stone appeared a screen. The video started with an image of a child playing. It zoomed to the child’s ear then passed into it, showing a small patch of the living dermis. Blood corpuscles flowed through muscled capillaries, feeding skin cells. The video zoomed further to show the interior of one of the cells. Proteins shuttled back and forth, doing all the business of keeping the living machine running. At the center, DNA wound and unwound to control it.

  The Big Man gasped in amazement.
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  She warned, “This is merely an illusion to help explain the idea. The Ancients might have called it science. It’s more like religion because I ask you to take it on faith. Sometime I will show you how to make a microscope so you can see for yourself. Then it will become true science for you.”

  “What does this have to do with the Fourth Order?”

  “Whenever living things work together to make a larger living thing, they create another order. Humans and animals and plants, things made out of cells, are second order. Some animals, like bees and ants, work together to make a third order. Hives have their own intelligence, apart from any single creature in them. Humans do it too. The village you just stole me from was third order. But very large groups of humans do something more. You don’t simply form social groups, you form hierarchies. That’s the Fourth Order.”

  He laughed. “That’s all there is to it? Sounds good to me, as long as I’m at the top.”

  “You don’t understand. Any organism that joins a higher order gives up control. It starts living for the whole, rather than itself. It will even give its life ‘for the greater good’. You, the one at the center, have the least choice of all. You are like a spider caught in its own web. The Fourth Order has you.”

  * * *

  Susan appeared to him the next day, as they rolled slowly down the highway. She leaned back against the Stone. “Do you know what destroyed the Ancients?”

  “I’ve heard the stories.”

  “It wasn’t war, or famine, or even stupidity. It wasn’t running out of resources, or the Earth growing warmer. All those things played a part, but the real reason was growth, plain and simple. The Fourth Order wants you to get bigger, and bigger, and bigger, and ... It doesn’t know when to stop. Thus it always destroys itself, and you along with it.”