Dominoes in Time

by Matthew Warner

  “I’m sorry, would you sit down?” She righted an overturned chair. “I was going to—” she glanced at the water pot. “I was going to make tea. Would you like some?”

  “Oh yes, thank you.” Halio sat. “I’m sorry if I disturbed you, your holiness. You probably wish to spend your remaining time in seclusion, preparing yourself. But this is my last chance to talk to someone who might listen.”

  Tears stung Petra’s eyes as she poured water through a tea-strainer and brought the old man his cup. “Not at all. And please—there’s no Order of Khan left for me to lead, so it’s unnecessary to call me ‘your holiness.’”

  Halio’s eyes widened over the brim of his cup, and he continued in a subdued voice. “I was raised a Khanite, you know, your holiness—I mean, Miss, uh—”

  “‘Petra’ will do.”

  “Petra. But that was forty-some years ago. Then my wife converted me to Wongoddism. I stayed with it after she died because of all the—you know, the—”

  “Crisscross laws? You don’t have to honeycoat your talk for me, Mister Halio.”

  Halio nodded and placed his cup on the floor. He started rummaging through his docucase. “I’m not afraid of ostracism, you know, otherwise I wouldn’t’ve come here.”

  “Of course.”

  “But ostracism’s partly my problem. No one will take me seriously.”

  Rather than answer, Petra sipped her tea. She still had no idea why he was here, but didn’t care. It was nice just to have company.

  “Never made sense to me—Wongoddism—all that talk about Wongod up in the sky. It’s my job to watch the sky. I think by now I would’ve seen Wongod through my viewscope. And don’t you think it’s clever how they say Pitchforkthrower lives underground—where Great Khan lives?”

  “The Wongodders claim their TorKor Bible predates the Khan Bible. So maybe they’re right.”

  Halio stopped digging to stare at her. “How can you say that? You’re the pope.”

  Petra crossed her legs and gazed down into her cup. She never would have had such a frank conversation—not even with Slova—a day ago, but this was likely the last day of her life. “It’s difficult to have faith under the circumstances.”

  Diving back into his docucase, Halio brought out a wrinkled envelope. He handed it to her. “Maybe this will make you feel differently.”

  The envelope contained several photos that appeared to be telewindow images. Since Halio was an astronomer, she guessed the bright splotches in the sea of black were astronomical phenomena. The overlaid grid and down-to-the-second Wongod Year time index seemed to confirm this.

  “I took those myself a month ago,” Halio said, “but the objects entered the Earth’s penumbra, and I haven’t seen them since.”

  “Objects?”

  “That’s what I think they are, but the Ministry of Science says it’s birdshit on my lenses.” Halio shrugged. “But I know what I saw—for two nights running. And the difference in position between those sightings leads me to believe they’re coming closer.”

  Sighing, Petra handed the photos back to him. “Very interesting.”

  Halio scowled. He slapped the photos onto the floor. “No! More than interesting. Deadly. They’re meteors. And if they’re as big as I think they are, the Wongodders’ chanting days are numbered. As are ours.”

  Petra nodded. “So you came here because Great Khan the Protector saved the Earth from such cataclysms.”

  “No—yes—I don’t know.” Halio bent and retrieved the photos. Feeling guilty, Petra helped him.

  “I’m sorry to bother you, Miss Petra. I just don’t know what to do. I was hoping for some popish guidance, I guess. Maybe a prayer.”

  Clutching his docucase to his chest, Halio hurried from the kitchen. Petra followed him, drowning in guilt. What a failure she was; Halio was just an old man, yet he’d put himself at considerable risk to consult the supposed last keeper of his boyhood faith.

  As they crossed the crisscross seal in the entry hall, she said, “Do you still consider yourself a Khanite, Mister Halio?”

  Still hugging his docucase, Halio stopped halfway through the arched stone doors to face her. “Part of me—yes, part of me. But I’m old, and we all look for our safety belts at my age, even if they’re made of smoke.” He stepped outside, then turned back. The desert sun cast dusty shadows on his beard; Petra envied his ability to stand there, unaffected by the leash generators. “I’ve always wondered about one thing, though.”

  “Yes?”

  “Why has the All Council forbidden archeological digs at Noah’s Temple?”

  Petra frowned. “I suppose out of—well no, it couldn’t be out of respect for the Order.”

  “Exactly.” Halio bowed his head. “Khan walk with you, Miss Petra.”

  He climbed into his rollercar and sped away.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  With dusk approaching, Petra abandoned her futile attempts to clean the mess left by the last lynch mob. She didn’t know why she was doing it other than to keep busy—to keep her eyes off the chronoteller, which could not reveal how many hours remained in her life.

  Earlier, she had begun a letter to no one in particular—the Last Testament of Pope Petra Khan, Last Servant of Great Khan the Protector—but had given up when she didn’t know what to write. Such missives had already been written by persecuted Khanites who’d done it better. Perhaps a final rant about the evils of the All Council? Or a theological defense of the Khanite faith, which she was no longer certain she held. No one would read it. She was struck by how young she was and how little she had experienced.

  Someone else more heroic should be here, she thought. Not a twenty-year-old girl. Slova chose me unwisely.

  Slova.… Petra felt the stab of grief again. He’d rescued her from the orphan kennels when she was barely three-years-old, had taken her in and raised her. As if she were his own daughter, Slova had groomed her to be his successor as pope, and then had bestowed her with the title when he reached his sixty-ninth birthday, the Age of Senility, as dictated by Khanite dogma. And Petra, despite her own suppressed misgivings about her faith, had accepted the office out of love for him.

  But Slova was gone now, and so was everyone else she’d ever called family. Perhaps the only reason she continued moving about, even at this late hour of her life, was that if Slova were here, he would have been doing the same thing. In fact, she felt his spirit with her as she moved through the Vatican’s caves, an example of strength and bravery although he was invisible.

  As for the old astronomer’s visit that afternoon, she was thankful. But she knew that even if she’d been the regal figure Halio had expected, it would have changed nothing.

  Not interested in food, she dug through the wreckage until she found a bronze chest the raiders had missed. Unlocking it, she brought out one of the rarest books in the world, which ironically was probably valueless except to her.

  This sixth century A.K. copy of the Holy Bible of Khan predated Pope Luther’s New Definitive edition of thirteen hundred years ago, but somehow it had survived in better shape than manuscripts produced later. Printed on plastic in electrostatic ink, the book was an amazing technological achievement for its time. She’d heard that most artifacts from the Post-American Period displayed similar stunning development. Some archeologists even claimed that the level of technological advancement actually increased as one went back in time.

  It contained the story of Noah, of course, but not the long tracts of parables, psalms and letters of Pope Luther’s edition. Petra enjoyed its pre-Amerispan alphabet and grammar. It contained, perhaps, the last surviving example of ancient American English, and Petra felt that she was one of the few people alive who could read it.

  Aside from what it left out—making it considerably thinner than Pope Luther’s—this Bible copy was notable for what it included: accounts of the early-Cataclysmic period, when the world’s nation-states had struggled in vain to destroy the meteors and comets headed for Earth. I
ts stories and artwork included a fair amount of fantasy—such as arrow-hurling space angels called Comsats and fire devils called Nukoids—characters that Pope Luther, who was attempting to revitalize a dying theocracy, had sensibly excluded from his new edition.

  The Book of Salvation, the final installment of the Bible’s Initial Testament, also contained a wonderful painting—dropped from Luther’s edition—that depicted Great Khan as a colossus, towering over the world’s cities as he smote meteorites from the sky. Khan wore the crisscross-engraved halo and bracelets that his disciples had gone on to imitate with their jewels and precious metals. In this traditional interpretation of Khan, the crisscross symbol covered his golden body and the halo concealed his eyes, but Petra thought he looked less ridiculous than the three-headed Wongod, who wore his heart and a thorned crown upon his sleeve, and who carried a scimitar between his teeth.

  Pope Luther had succeeded brilliantly at his ultimate goal. As the New Definitive Bible gained popularity, so had the Khanite order, which subsequently founded a world government that lasted a thousand years until succumbing to the influence of Wongoddism.

  The old Bible also contained what Petra regarded as a more correct version of the sacrament she’d begun at Noah’s Temple and which was a main component of a Khanite religious service. The instructions were more complicated and lengthy than the Lutheran version’s, filled with extensive optional tracts based on Great Khan’s perceived emotional state, but Petra loved the order hidden within the archaic complexity—a puzzle to be solved. As a matter of pride, she’d memorized as much of the old instructions as possible—a task, she was now sorry to admit to herself, she had tackled as more of an intellectual challenge than a spiritual one.

  What a waste of time, she now thought.

  With what was surely her last night on Earth upon her, Petra succumbed to exhaustion and lay down on a church pew.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Sometime later, an explosion hurled her to the floor.

  Snapping awake, Petra jumped to her feet. The lynchers—were they here? She squinted as the lights blinked off, on, off, and back on.

  No, not a bomb, as she’d first thought. At least not in here. It was difficult to detect a relative difference in the wreckage around her, but she saw that more tapestries had fallen off the walls and additional fonts had overturned.

  She had an instant to register the sound of thunder before being thrown down again. This time the lights went off and stayed off, leaving her in absolute darkness until the backup generators kicked in. Petra coughed from the cloud of rock dust that had descended from the cave ceilings.

  Were the lynchers firing concussion charges? Why not just come inside and grab her? Surely they weren’t afraid of the resistance posed by a single, unarmed woman. Or was something else going on? Petra ran for the main exit.

  And what she saw in the night sky made her gasp.

  Streaks of fire, like scratches in black stone, traced long white trails from heaven to earth. Hundreds of them were appearing in the eastern sky to her left and streaking down onto the greater Rift area. The brief mushrooms of flame created by their impacts illuminated huge clouds of dust being splashed into the air. Looking like comets, the meteorites falling nearest to Petra made sonic booms as they tore through the air.

  Halio’s photos—he’d been right.

  Although the Seeing Ridge was two miles to the west, the concussion of an impact there smashed Petra against the stone archway where she stood. The copper taste of blood filled her mouth. Outside the doors, the leash generators buzzed and crackled as one of the honeycomb towers toppled over.

  Petra saw her chance.

  She knew nothing about the leashes except for what Slova had told her; if she was wrong and the generators were still working, then she doubted she would make it back into the cave this time—she was now running too fast out the door.

  A chapel’s length from the Vatican, Petra stopped and faced the entrance. She sighed in relief.

  But now what would she do? She had nowhere to go, and one couldn’t survive long in the Rift area without food and shelter. The All Council would win one way or another. Petra sat down in the dust to think.

  A rollercar’s frontlamps suddenly shone on the Vatican’s doors. Petra stood up as the cones of light swung around to find her. Another meteorite impact made her knees buckle, but she maintained her footing. She was determined to face her lynchers with dignity.

  A dozen feet away, the car stopped. Petra shielded her eyes against the frontlamps’ glare as the driver got out.

  “Your holiness! Come on, let’s get out of here!”

  Nearly fainting with relief, Petra ran toward Mister Halio’s voice.

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  From the Holy Bible of Khan, sixth century A.K. version (pre-Lutheran), Book of Noah, chapter 41, verses 21-24:

  “Hear thee, sinners, for the Lord thy Khan hath commanded thee not to invoke His name in vain. The wicked shalt not summon Him in times of tranquility, nor shall the hands of the unrighteous touch the holy accouterments. But when the earth quakes in fear, splitting the doors of His temple, shall Khan rise up. Behold the rainbow springing from Khan’s pots of gold, the token of this new covenant.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  Petra regarded Mister Halio as he drove his rollercar into the Rift canyon. He hadn’t said ten words since picking her up a half hour ago, too intent on steering around fallen rocks. Overhead, the meteorite shower continued its assault.

  “Sacred piss!” he cursed and locked-up the brakes. Petra tensed as a boulder rolled across the road in front of them.

  “Oh… I’m sorry, your holiness. I have dirty lips.”

  “I’ll forgive you as long as you just call me Petra.”

  Halio nodded and shifted back into gear. “I guess I could. You remind me of my Dell in a way. But to me you’ll always be the pope.”

  Petra figured the silence had been cracked, so she scanned the sky and gorge walls on either side, judging whether it was safe to distract him with talk. “Yes,” she said, deciding that it was, “I am unfortunately the pope. Is that why you’re driving us to Noah’s Temple?”

  “Well—” Halio grinned sheepishly. “I’m sorry I didn’t ask first, but it’s the logical place to go.”

  Petra bit off her retort; of course it was. The pope of the Khanite order was supposed to go there in times of trouble—perform the sacrament of summoning and everything would be okay, right? But she was thankful someone had come along to take her away from the Vatican. She just hoped Halio wouldn’t be too disappointed when Great Khan failed to appear.

  “I don’t even have a gold halo or bracelets,” she said. “How am I supposed to do the sacrament?”

  Halio didn’t say anything for awhile, too busy threading the rollercar through the obstacle course of boulders. Dust granules the size of sand began falling on the roof and viewwindow, prompting him to activate the window’s waterjets.

  “I’m no priest, just a scientist,” he said finally, “but it seems to me Noah didn’t have any gold or diamonds.”

  Amazed, Petra watched tears fill his eyes and drop onto his beard. She reached for him—moved to perform a blessing, like Slova would have done—but thought it would be hypocritical of her. She settled for gripping his shoulder and saying, “Thank you.”

  Nodding, Halio reached up and squeezed her fingers. “Remember what I said—about no archeological digs at the temple?”

  “Yes.”

  “There’s something special about that place—always has been—and the All Council knows it. I think they’re afraid someone might poke around and discover there really is a Khan.”

  ✽ ✽ ✽

  If Petra was amazed by the faith that could come from a scientist, she was even more amazed by what awaited them at the temple site.

  A crowd of people had gathered—not many, only two dozen or so—but it was still a crowd. Petra thought they were a lynch mob until they steepled their hands in greeting�
��praying and crying as she emerged from the rollercar. The belatedly faithful, they gathered around her.

  “Give ’er room! Give ’er room!” Halio shouted, as if Petra were carrying a bomb beneath her robe.

  Embarrassed, she kept her eyes on the ground as she waded through the crowd. The same hands that had only yesterday thrown rocks at her now touched her robe as she passed. For the first time in her five years as a priest and pope, Petra felt like a carnival attraction. And more than that: undeserving. A fake.

  But they expected something—some kind of comfort—and Petra knew she’d better give it to them. She was here on borrowed time. If not for the meteorite shower, this same crowd by now would be pelting her with stones or crucifying her upon the Vatican’s own crisscross tree.

  Petra climbed the steps of Noah’s Temple, then faced her audience. Now solemn and quiet, they radiated hope and expectation. Another meteorite startled them when it landed, its flash illuminating the tear-streaked grime on their faces. A sermon or blessing was out of the question, Petra realized. So was a hymn. These people wanted a miracle—and they were going to die horrible deaths because they were out here in the open, watching her.

  Petra fought a surge of despair as she turned to the Altar of Summoning and raised her hands.

  “Ack say gee Khan…”

  A trio of meteorites suddenly shattered the canyon walls a half mile away. The dais undulated. A roar and white flash deafened and blinded her.

  Petra’s vision returned in a few seconds, and her hearing awhile later. She found herself lying upon the dais. Fragments of stone and debris were raining down from the impacts and being shaken from the cliffs. Standing up, she shouted, “Go! Run for cover!”

  The dais caved in. Petra fell into the hole.

  The long, plank-like stones that crisscrossed beneath the altar broke in such a way that Petra slid rather than plummeted into the exposed cavity. Although she fell at least twenty feet, she was only bruised—not dead—when she reached the bottom. It was as if the temple’s builders had designed the dais to collapse in this manner; like folding shutters, the plank stones each touched down in exactly the same angle and broke along the same seams. The pieces stacked neatly upon one another and were diverted away from the room’s center—and from Petra—by a floor that slanted toward the walls. Like her, the Altar of Summoning landed intact.