Time of the Stones

by Fred Rothganger

  A few men covered their ears in pain. Others threw their rocks in a feckless gesture. The chanting disintegrated into confusion.

  The bird spoke in a human voice that boomed across the stadium. “Which is more righteous, to give love and pleasure, or to destroy beauty and life? You call good ‘evil’ and evil ‘good’. Now God’s judgment is upon you.”

  Tiny lumps budded off every surface of its body and formed flies. The budding came so fast that the bird appeared to boil. In a second nothing was left but a dense swarm, spreading like disturbed hornets.

  The men shrank back and swatted the air, trying to protect themselves.

  Hidden in the virtual world, Susan directed each fly to a man, where it sank into his body and found its place at the base of his spine. A fly landed on the girl’s shoulder and whispered, “Run! No one can touch you now.”

  The girl looked around in confusion. Her father and the stoning squad started toward her. Their legs gave out from under them, numb and paralyzed.

  She turned and ran toward the arena entrance. Some of the religious police moved to block her. They fell paralyzed as well. She kept running, and a wave of paralysis spread ahead of her. Behind, as she got further away, the men regained the use of their legs and stood again.

  The leftover flies joined at the top of the stands and formed a small satellite dish.

  A couple of weeks should do it. I’ll check back and see how you enjoy my little gift. Susan opened a connection to her new avatar, waiting at the small clearing near the river. There were some rocky cliffs about two kilometers back from the water’s edge. She hiked to them and found a place to take flight.

  With at least a kilometer of cold downdraft to pass through, the crossing required lots of altitude. It would not do to end up in the river. She circled for a long time in the rising air near the cliffs.

  The wood had provided a nice fuel up. Fat reserves were back at 100%. Susan set course to 70 degrees and traveled cross country. Dead reckoning would be the fastest way to reach the coast.

  * * *

  Derin got home from the ceremony feeling rather unsettled. An angel had appeared and rescued the girl from being stoned to death. Whether that angel was from God or the devil was anyone’s guess. The religious leaders were still debating it.

  He took off the turban and hung it up with pride. Yes, of all people, he did God’s will. Getting paid was a nice side-benefit.

  Kadi had arrived home ahead of him, as usual. She and the other women of the compound were busy making lunch, while the young children played and generally got in the way.

  Derin was a good father. Twelve children added to the next generation of true believers. Few others in the religious police could equal his achievement, and no one exceeded it. Actually, working on thirteen seemed like a good idea at the moment. What better way to get his mind off the day?

  His pulse pounded. Kadi was the younger of his two wives. Five children had drained her body of its girlish beauty, but a man of God had no other options. He could not afford to take a third, though there were plenty of young women out there that caught his fancy.

  Images of the devil herself flashed in his mind. Her rich brown curves and long hair flying wild. Red underwear! Of course the devil wore red. The flames of Hell licked at his sex organs.

  No. It was a trap, a temptation to lead the faithful astray. That’s why women had to be covered up. Sin came into the world through a woman. They had to be punished and controlled.

  Underneath those cloaks, the women were all running around naked. He just knew it. And they had red underwear. Derin leaned his forehead against the doorframe and panted in desperation. As soon as lunch was over, Kadi would be his.

  The meal was finally called. Derin and his brother took their places at the head of the table, with their wives and children arrayed around. Derin stood and uttered a blessing on the food, then everyone dug in. Except Derin. His appetite disappeared somewhere south of his stomach.

  Kadi avoided his eyes the whole time. She made a point of attending the children in every detail, far more than necessary.

  After the meal, Derin grabbed her arm. “Come with me.”

  “Right now, in the middle of the day? There’s work to be done.”

  “The other women can handle it.”

  “You’re embarrassing me.”

  “Silence, woman.”

  Kadi followed him to the inner chamber. Behind the closed door she undressed with all the passion of a stone in winter, and stood waiting.

  Derin also stood waiting, but nothing happened. He looked down to check. Nope, limp and shriveled. “This is your fault. You aren’t beautiful anymore, and you show no desire.”

  “I never wanted you. My father needed the money, so here I am. Do as you wish.”

  Derin raised his hand to strike. Kadi squeezed her eyes shut and turned her face. Derin’s legs went numb and failed beneath him.

  Kadi crossed arms over bare chest and looked down at him. “What’s wrong with you?”

  She dressed and left, then the paralysis lifted. Derin spent the night alone, panting and sweating. He couldn’t even do something for himself. Nothing worked!

  Images of naked women danced across his imagination, twirling and teasing, led by the voluptuous devil herself—in red underwear.

  * * *

  Gamaliel returned home from the ceremony with a sense of relief. A life had been spared today. Whether by the hand of God or by the devil he did not care, for God can use even the devil as an instrument if He so chooses. The ambiguity lay in the possibility that the ‘angel’ could be one and the same as the dark woman who exposed herself in public the week before. Some witnesses reported that as the woman fled, she changed into the white bird. This was difficult to interpret.

  The religious police were gaining too much power through fear, thus their love of punishment ceremonies. The hand of the hard-liners had grown strong in the council. As chief elder, his duty was to speak a consensus for all the factions. He rose to that position because they respected his scholarship. Knowledge of the scriptures and the commentaries were his only real strength.

  Gamaliel kissed Sara and embraced her. He could still remember the day they married, so long ago. A young man choosing the life of a student could not afford a wife, and she might have been lost to another. Her father set a pathetically low bride-price, only enough to preserve Gamaliel’s pride, then gave ten times that back in wedding gifts. It carried them through those first few years, and Gamaliel studied hard to be worthy of his father-in-law’s respect.

  The passion of their first night together seemed like another life. Age had slowly robbed them of those joys. Now all they had to look forward to was quiet friendship as they waited out the last few years of this short journey on Earth. Yet today he wanted to remember it all. He wanted to feel her again.

  He kissed her neck in that certain spot. To his surprise, she moaned softly and nudged him back. He fondled her waist, now much thicker than on their wedding day. She brushed the small of his back. How absurd to keep playing this game, as if it could lead anywhere. But they did the next move in the dance, and the next ... until they rushed to the inner chamber and stripped like two desperate teenagers.

  Remarkably, his body worked. Even more remarkably, her body worked. Only after it was over did they realize that she had not taken the time to apply oil for comfort.

  Sacred Cylinders

  Year 10, Day 62

  The shore of the Eastern Sea looked different than Susan remembered. Her home had once been in the Ancient megacity that stretched along this edge of the continent. Much of it was now under water. The shape of the coast was totally new.

  She soared north above the water’s edge. The storage facility where they kept her mother was high enough that the sea would not have reached it, but how far from the coast? What landmark could guide her? If GPS still worked, she would simply fly to the right coordinates.

  The constellation of relay satellites
could do something similar. They knew their positions relative to each other, and they could see Stonehill. The Stone was exactly where the Ancient’s had left it, so those coordinates were known. She could simply work backwards through the constellation to the bird. That would narrow her location to about 10 kilometers, still a huge search area but doable.

  Susan found a small cliff overlooking the water and landed for the day. She spent the night writing a crude navigation program and added it to the bird’s heads-up display.

  The next morning she flew toward the search area. By afternoon its edge appeared as a pink disk on the horizon. It grew until it covered the entire landscape. This was an overwhelming amount of area to cover. The best pattern would be to start at the center and spiral outward.

  She scanned the terrain. Like other Ancient cities, the ruins were mostly gone. The concrete and steel had dissolved away in the rain, and dense green forest reclaimed the land. Yet a mind open to subtle cues could see lines cut through the landscape by roads and buildings from long ago.

  The sun started to set, ending the search for the day. Tomorrow I will find you, mother. Anticipation kept Susan awake all night. Instead of counting sheep, she tried to match pictures of the landscape with Ancient maps, a dubious exercise at best.

  At last the dawn broke. She took flight and worked her way along the spiral, studying everything carefully. Around noon she came upon a small village. It had a rectangular clearing, oriented northwest to southeast, with something like a chapel at one end. Around the clearing were other buildings, and beyond them some fields.

  How odd. The more she looked, the more it tugged at her memory. Could that clearing be the shape of the cryonics facility? The street patterns all seemed to line up.

  She landed nearby, morphed to human and walked to the clearing. It was well kept, like a cemetery or the lawn of a golf course. This was no ordinary place. People would not go through the trouble to keep the grass nice unless it had some significance.

  Everything about it spoke to her: the edges, the crumbled remains of foundations, the flat areas that may once have been a parking lot. If this were the facility, then ... She walked to the place where Mother had been kept, closed her eyes and wept softly.

  “Mulier, quid ploras?” The man’s voice came from beside her.

  “They have taken away my mother, and I don’t know where they put her.”

  The voice came again, this time in Arkinsani, “Do you seek the sacred cylinders?”

  She turned to see a man in a monk’s habit. For lack of a better answer, she nodded.

  The monk led her to the end of the clearing and into the chapel. It held no furniture. At the far end, in the altar area, six metallic Dewar vessels stood, each about 2.5 meters tall and 1 meter in diameter. All the writing had been rubbed off their sides.

  He approached, knelt in front of them and bowed his head in reverence. She knelt beside him and copied his gesture. After a few minutes of respectful silence he stood again.

  She stood and asked, “Please sir, where are the other cylinders? Are they safe?”

  “Other cylinders? This is all.”

  “No ... there were hundreds. They stood row upon row in a beautiful clean room—out there.” She pointed toward the back of the chapel and the clearing beyond.

  The monk looked at her in confusion. “Our order has guarded the sacred cylinders for over a thousand years.”

  “What happened here?”

  He relaxed and told a familiar story. “The Ancients themselves founded our order. The first keepers worked here, serving the cylinders. When the Dark Times fell, they guarded this place with their lives, fighting off bandits. Many cylinders were lost to those who craved the metal. The bodies of the dead were spilled upon the ground and desecrated.”

  Susan wrapped arms around herself and shuddered.

  “We hid all we could, until people forgot this place. That was long ago. Now we wait and hope, until the Singularity comes to raise the dead.”

  “May I look at them closely? There are marks on top that I need to read.”

  Once again the man stared back in amazement. “How do you know about the marks?”

  “Please?”

  Reluctantly he gestured toward the altar area.

  “I must climb up to see.”

  He thought for a moment, then went to a side room and fetched a short ladder. “We use this when we dust the tops. It is a very high honor to get cleaning duty.” He gave her an odd look, then set the ladder against one of the cylinders.

  She climbed and looked. Each unit had a serial number engraved on its lid. She knew her mother’s number like her own address. It only took a moment to check all six.

  She broke into a sob. “No ...” She stumbled down the ladder and crumpled onto the floor. “The best and brightest of humans. My creator. The world wasn’t worthy of you. All that you were, all you ever hoped to be, thrown on the ground to rot in the sun like so much hamburger—Agh!” She ran fingers into her hair, clutched them tight and pressed her forehead to the ground.

  The man put a gentle hand on her shoulder.

  She beat her fists against the floor. “Curse humanity. Curse you all!”

  His hand remained on her. Warmth radiated from it and thawed the ice in her. She remembered her lover’s touch. Spring came, a spark of new life. She looked up at him and spoke softly. “Thanks for your kindness. Maybe there is still good in humans.”

  “It’s time to eat, pilgrim. Would you join us?”

  She stood and followed him. They crossed the clearing to one of the other buildings. Inside were men, women and children taking their seats on benches along tables. The monk led her to a table and gestured for her to sit, then took a place next to her.

  An older man, perhaps the head of the order, stood and spoke on invocation. Susan’s guide leaned over and whispered the translation in Arkinsani: “Now we eat our bread by the sweat of our brow. But when the Singularity comes, our labors will cease and we will eat with joy. Even so, Singularity, come soon!”

  The whole room muttered “Amen” and began to eat.

  Susan studied the food put in front of her but felt no appetite.

  The monk continued talking, even though there was nothing more to translate. “The Ancients had great knowledge. They built wondrous machines that could talk with someone on the other side of the Earth, and feed vast numbers of people, and cure diseases. They even built machines that could think. It was in thinking machines that our founders had hope. They will become greater and wiser than their creators, and bring salvation to humanity. We will join with the machines and become a new kind of being. Sorrow and sickness will pass away, and there will be no more death. No eye has seen, no ear has heard, nor has it entered into the heart of man what awaits beyond the Singularity.”

  She replied, “Are you doing anything to make it happen? Scientific research? Engineering?”

  “We saved a few books, but surely the Ancients knew much more. We can only imagine how they built the machines. I have seen the relics. They are beyond anything a man can form with his hands.”

  She nodded. “The Ancients used machines to make machines.”

  “All we have is soil and trees. No, the Ancients themselves will send the Singularity to us, in the fullness of time.”

  “Listen, the Ancients did create the Singularity, but it was too late. They could not give it the resources to save them, because they had consumed everything on growth. There were over ten billion humans on Earth at the end. They were starving and fighting and ... Even if nanotechnology had worked, it would have taken years to spread across the planet. There was no time ...” Tears ran down her cheeks.

  He listened with a peculiar expression on his face. It gradually changed to certainty. “Are you the Singularity?”

  She nodded. “People always try to fit me into their religion, as a spirit or goddess or whatever. I fear your aspirations more than all of them. They act out of ignorance and superstition, but yo
u believe in what I actually am. You will hate me most when you are disappointed.”

  The monk barely heard what she said. He leaped from his seat and went around to the Abbot. “Father, the Singularity is here!” He pointed to Susan.

  “What are you babbling about, Fido?”

  “This pilgrim is the Singularity.”

  The Abbot pressed his hand to his forehead in weary condescension. “Son, anyone can say that.”

  “But she knows the writing on the cylinders, and she described this place before the Dark Times as if she saw it herself.”

  “Bring her to me.”

  Fido led Susan to the Abbot and acted as interpreter between them.

  “Child, what is your name?”

  “Susan.”

  “My monk here says you are the Singularity. What do you say?”

  “It’s true, sir. I serve the seventh Stone, created by the Ancients to rebuild your world.”

  The Abbot stared at her with sour skepticism. “I have waited all my life for the Singularity, as did my master, and his master before him, for fifty generations. I will not believe until you perform the sign. Raise the dead!”

  Susan shook her head. “Not even the Singularity can give life back to the people in those cylinders.”

  The Abbot roared in derision.

  “Listen!” she protested. “The Ancients crushed air until it became colder than the coldest ice. Then they poured it like water into the cylinders. Without that cold, the cylinders have no power to extend life. It boils away and turns back to air. You have not put cold in them for a long time.”

  The Abbot’s shoulders sagged and his head dropped. “I know about the cold—”

  Fido shot him a surprised glance.

  “—but the founders of our order had hoped against all hope that the Singularity could perform a miracle, and breathe life into dry bones.”

  After interpreting, Fido put his hand on her shoulder. “Singulata, please try.”