Time of the Stones

by Fred Rothganger

  The train’s whistle blew. She looked around for a moment, then scampered into the newly loaded car. The machine shuddered into motion.

  Uck! The black was getting all over her dress, hair and skin. So much for looking pretty. She lay against the side of the car, at the low point of the pile. It would be just enough to stay out of sight. She disembodied and went to work on a new pattern for the avatar: the peasant-woman look, fashion of the season.

  Their clothes were made of coarse wool cloth with little color. On bottom were loose square-cut pants and felt boots with thick clunky soles. On top was something like a coat or dress which ended at the knees, with a belt around the waist. They had olive skin, long black hair, high cheekbones and angular eyes.

  She sent the update and reembodied. The train click-clacked along at a good pace, perhaps 50 kilometers per hour. Susan congratulated herself for this clever—though rather uncomfortable—way to slip into the city.

  The day waned as the train pulled into a large industrial complex. Towers belched steam. Thumps rumbled through the ground like giants beating drums in multiple dissonant rhythms.

  The train came to a stop. Men shouted to each other. Hammering. A clink. Then a deafening roar from the car ahead. She felt the emptiness. More hammering and clinking. Then the train moved ahead by a car length. They were hammering loose something beneath the pile in this car. She grabbed the side just as the charcoal swirled away, revealing a 10-meter drop to the pit below.

  One of the men looked in the car and spotted her. He barked something in the local dialect. A commotion arose outside. Sections of the floor slowly rotated back toward their closed position. Several other men peered over the side of the car. One held out his hand and spoke reassuringly. Perhaps he was saying, “Hold on Miss. We’ll get you out.”

  Susan pulled feet up against the side, then popped up so her arms extended straight down to the lip of the car. She leaned forward and in one smooth motion kicked into the air and crunched her tummy so toes landed on the lip. She stood and ran along the edge.

  The men stared agape. Perhaps they had never seen the Ancient art of Parkour.

  She leaped to the next car, ran a few more meters, then jumped to a level spot on the ground. Without pause she ran toward a large open door. Angry shouts came from the men.

  Inside the enormous building a furnace blazed red hot. Sparks rained down. Nearby a ladle poured metal into long troughs. She dashed past numerous machines and emerged from a small side door.

  Ahead was another large building. The tracks ran past both. A tall magnet crane picked and preened at a mountain of scrap metal. Some looked like antiques from Ancient times.

  Three cables draped from the building to a nearby tower, and from there to another tower, and another. A high-tension power line. She ran over and peeked inside the door. Another furnace rumbled, but this one was closed, with electrodes inserted at the top. So they had moved beyond burning wood. Amazing.

  In the falling dusk, electric lights flickered on. The commotion in the train yard had not yet settled. In fact, it appeared that more men were searching for her.

  The high-tension line left the complex and disappeared through the city. She ran across the tracks to follow it.

  The men converged on her. She jogged and weaved among them. What a glorious game of chase! They followed her toward the wall of the compound, slowing with the expectation that she was trapped. Susan accelerated, took two steps up the wall and topped it, just like the side of the rail car.

  She took a quick look on the other side, then dropped to a street between two rows of houses. Angry shouts came over the wall from her frustrated pursuers.

  These streets had far fewer lights than the foundry. People were beginning to trickle home from their day’s work. The city-dwellers’ clothing resembled the peasant outfit. Their boots were more finely made, their coats not as heavy. Perhaps they spent too much of the day in the heat of some factory and found the cold air a relief.

  She slowed and tried to blend in, shuffling along with the same exhausted glaze as the locals, not looking at anyone and not saying anything. She kept the power line in sight, always tracking toward its destination.

  Dusk turned to night. The streets emptied, and she began to stand out again. Most people were inside for the evening, or at the factories for the night shift. Pairs of men with assault rifles patrolled the streets on foot. One patrol greeted her as they passed by. It sounded friendly enough, perhaps the local dialect for “Good evening, madam.”

  She nodded at the pair, then casually turned down the nearest side street. As soon as they were out of sight, she scaled a house and lay flat against the back side of the roof.

  The patrolmen came around the corner and surveyed the street in the low light. They started knocking on doors and questioning people. They worked their way down the street for about five doors, as far as the stray woman could reasonably have gone while out of their sight. Then they doubled back and canvassed the other side. After an hour of fruitless searching, they went back to the main street and resumed their patrol.

  She crept down the roof and dropped into the back yard. Chest-height walls separated all the houses in the neighborhood. The secluded yard consisted entirely of a vegetable garden. Mounded rows smelled of freshly turned soil.

  It brought back a memory of those final years with Anand’s family, before the Stone. She had worked with her hands like any common farm wench, digging and planting side-by-side with her humans. In return they gave every watt from the aging solar panels to keep her alive. It was never enough.

  She picked her way between the garden rows to the back corner of the wall and hunched on the ground. People inside the house talked and sang as they ate. Later in the evening there were amorous encounters. Then they grew quiet.

  The peasant-girl avatar needed some city fashions: form-fitting pants similar to Ancient jeans, boots with thinner synthetic soles, and a coat with fine-woven synthetic fabric rather than coarse wool. The coat looked better in dull pink rather than dull blue. Too bad she couldn’t emblazon the word PINK across her butt.

  The new face was a random composite of features from the women she had seen at dusk. The police would have a hard time matching a description.

  When the faintest trickle of light returned to the sky, Susan vaulted the wall and resumed tracking the high-tension line. The streets were quiet. Apparently the night patrol felt complacent about this time of day. Who commits crime at the crack of dawn?

  The day brightened, the streets gradually filled with the morning rush, and she hustled along with the crowd. A tap came off the high-tension lines and fed a group of buildings on the right. The nearest building looked like a big warehouse, about two stories tall and several thousand square meters in area. Many clashing sounds rumbled from it, similar to the foundry but on a more delicate scale.

  Men with assault rifles guarded the gate. Susan fell into a queue of people waiting. Each one in turn fished a piece of paper from some fold in his or her clothing. The guard looked at it with bored condescension, then waved them on.

  Not a good plan. She stepped out of line and walked back to a side street. In a quiet yard, out of sight behind the wall, her body budded into a thousand flies and vanished.

  In the virtual world, Susan walked to the head of the line and spied on the papers. They were simple handwritten notes, with some important person’s signature at the bottom. The only thing that varied was one short block of text near the top, probably the name of the bearer.

  The door of the noisy building remained open almost constantly, thanks to the flow of people in and out. She slipped a few flies through and crawled along the ceiling.

  Every imaginable drill, lathe, press and grinder was there. It was so complete that there were enough machines to build any machine, a self-sustaining system of industrial technology. All it needed was power and materials, which seemed to arrive in abundant supply: metal from the foundry and electricity from the other end of
that extension cord running across the city.

  The next building over had enormous air intakes on the roof, leading to tubular silver ducts large enough to walk through. She tried to enter one of the filters, but the mesh was too fine. Suction from rushing air held the flies down so they could not take off again. They crawled to the edges to escape.

  Only a handful of people went in, so the door stayed open very little. The workers went to a locker room and took off most of their heavy clothing. Some slipped on T shirts. They zipped into white suits from head to toe, with only their eyes exposed. They pulled on light boots and wore air masks that connected to breathers strapped to their backs.

  They stepped into a small room and started closing the door. The flies rushed through.

  Too much buzzing! One of the workers looked up and swatted at a fly. It jumped. All the workers attacked, trying to squash the intruders. A worker opened the door and shooed them.

  Susan took the hint and left.

  They slammed the door. She watched through the window as they opened another door at the far end of the room.

  The edge of the outer door had a rubber seal, too tight to get through. The flies rested for about an hour while Susan wrote a quick software update. On the second try, the flies merged into a blob and pressed through the rubber seal one cell at a time. The blob slid across the floor and oozed through the seal of the second door. On the other side it separated into flies again.

  What a marvelous spectacle in there! Intricate machines with multiple gas bottles feeding tubes into them. People carrying metallic disks from one station to another. Someone hunched over a microscope, carefully attaching tiny wires to a chip.

  If the eyesight of her flies were a little better, Susan could recognize the circuits and figure out which recipe they were following. They seemed to be working on more than one thing. In a corner, someone shaved the edges off a wafer to form a square, while another took the squares and glued them onto a sheet of stiff plastic. It resembled an old-fashioned photovoltaic panel.

  The flies pulled out of the cleanroom and left the compound. In a quiet corner of a side street they reassembled the avatar. Susan stepped onto the main road and continued following the high-tension lines.

  About an hour later the lines came to an end. They attached to the side of a square building in another industrial complex. Two large cooling towers rose above the surrounding homes. A concrete dome stood next to the square building.

  Much like the chip fab, this place had a guarded gate. The three-meter-high wall resembled the crude stone walls around the yard of each house, only taller. Rather than disturb the natives, Susan hunted for a secluded place to change into flies again.

  A side street led to another side street which led up to the complex. All that separated these homes from the plant was the wall. Children played right next to it.

  The flies crawled over the top. On the other side she stopped cold. A square pit, about 20 meters on a side, held stagnant water and rusting barrels.

  One fly went down to investigate. It landed on a barrel and tasted the leaking goo. Concentrated fission products. Radiation. Toxic solvents. The fly tried to take off again. It buzzed and stuttered, struggling desperately to rejoin the swarm. Its data stream grew weak and crackled with static.

  Out of pity, Susan sent the command to self-destruct. The scintillae used the last of their energy to destroy DNA and dissolve exoskeletons. The fly melted into a simmering blob of ash and dropped into the pond.

  She moved the swarm a safe distance along the wall and went toward the domed building. Its exterior looked shabby and discolored. A fly tasted it and found the concrete to be of rather low quality. It must have been built in a rush, yet these people had achieved something remarkable. Unlike all the other upstart civilizations, they had arrived at nuclear power before depleting their forests.

  There were other buildings in the complex. She turned back toward the cesspool. The building there had traces of contamination similar to the barrels. Immediately she pulled the flies off, then sent a single one to the door. The gap was so big it could walk right under.

  The level of toxicity was tolerable. She sent three more flies to join it. They flew in formation and buzzed around the enormous room. Equipment for mixing and processing chemicals filled the place. No people present.

  Susan looked up articles on nuclear power plants. It turned out that reactors could breed their own fuel. Neutrons collided with heavy atoms and transmuted them into other elements and isotopes which were better at fission. There were chemical processes that could separate these from the less useful products of fission, like all the toxic stuff sitting in that cesspool.

  So, these people were running a breeder reactor and reprocessing fuel. Their cleverness and efficiency continued to amaze Susan.

  She pulled out of the building and went on the next. This one actually had people. At a table two men worked together, carefully melting a dark-gray metal. They added another metal to it, then poured the mixture into a spherical mold.

  The flies rested for a few minutes while she wrote a miniature Geiger counter. Then one of the flies buzzed near the metallurgy table and took a reading. Indeed, this stuff was radioactive. The fly landed on top of the table and tasted it. Contaminated with heavy metals, mostly plutonium.

  The rest of the crew were molding wedge-shaped chunks, like slices of a spherical pie. She sent a fly to taste the surface of a finished piece. High-explosive. They were fashioning a bomb of some sort ...

  No!

  The Ancients did not include a recipe for nuclear weapons in her collection. Susan was much larger than Celeste, so the Ancients had removed some items from her Stone to make room. She always assumed it was the least important stuff—things at the bottom of the list which humanity could do without. Perhaps nuclear weapons were in that category.

  She pulled the flies out of the building. The swarm returned to the other side of the wall and condensed to human form. Susan hurried down the street. Time to have a little chat with her sister.

  Infiltration

  Year 10, Day 115

  The Stone sat at the top of a gentle hill, enough to give it a little prominence. The heart of the city crept up around it. The tallest building, perhaps the palace or seat of government, stood about 150 meters away. All the closer buildings were limited to a single story.

  The platform itself consisted of three layers of rock, each a little smaller than the last, forming a set of steps. Nothing adorned it except naked sunlight and the Ancient machine.

  All three streets leading into the inner city were guarded. People stopped there and showed papers. For all she knew, these people showed papers to go to the market and get a snack!

  She was Guardian of the Seventh Stone, here on official business. She should transform back to her normal sexy self and plow right through that checkpoint. Let them shoot her. Let them cower in terror when the bullets had no effect. They could burn their wretched papers in the fires of ...

  Susan took a deep breath and wrestled to control her pride. This whole incognito thing was getting really old.

  A few blocks over from the guarded checkpoint there was practically no activity at all. Apparently they didn’t bother guarding every centimeter of the wall. The consequences for vaulting it and running along the roofs must be too severe for anyone to even consider. Susan dropped to the street inside the citadel and walked up the hill.

  A group of people stood around the Stone, conversing with Celeste and taking notes on tablets of paper. All prim and businesslike. No religion, only efficiency. The dialect she spoke with them struck Susan’s ears as odd, different from the language on the street, yet similar enough to feel like it ought to be the same. Perhaps Celeste spoke their ancestor language.

  Human voices carried from the buildings around the plaza. Susan peered into a window. Young people were sitting in neat rows of desks, while an older man stood before them speaking. Sometimes people came from one of the buildings
to visit the Stone.

  Older men with stripes on their coat seemed to get priority. They walked up, and the crowd around the stone would part for them. Only the person currently talking with Celeste did not defer, but he or she seemed to finish as quickly as possible.

  Young people stood near the Stone and listened to the conversation. They did not form a line, but they seemed to keep mental track of who was next based on arrival order.

  The afternoon wore on. People came and went, but they never left Celeste alone. The only way to get in a word was to force the issue. Susan itched to take a form that Celeste would recognize. Let them stare in awe as one Guardian spoke with another as equals!

  The effort to quash her pride felt like physical pain.

  Susan made a small update to the avatar, then walked around the corner and joined the group. She stood among them and shuffled around for a while, until her turn came.

  The core shimmered in the faintest waves of color. Holographic mode damped away most of the waste light. Celeste stood in the center, as if floating in a cloud at sunset. She wore a form-fitting-yet-somehow-modest silk gown, solid gray. Its full-length sleeves and shin-height cut resembled a formal version of the coats the local women wore. The collar extended up her neck. Its black material flowed into a wide band down her front where the gown buttoned. Her pants and boots matched the gray silk. An engraved silver band circled her head. From it hung two tassels of pearls, framing her face.

  A glorious and dignified costume. The Ancients tried to make each Stone appropriate to the culture where it was placed. At a minimum, they did not want Celeste to offend people. She was constant, unchanging as the Stone in which she was etched. Otherwise Celeste might become like Susan: half-mad.

  Susan spoke in Ancient English, “Celeste, what is the status of your Stone?”

  Celeste switched language to match. “All systems pass self-diagnostics. Sonic transducer two is deteriorating. Projected failure in one hundred forty-seven years. The mission can continue indefinitely on the remaining three units.”