by Chuck Dixon
And there was that calendar. Each new day, the stone moved closer to the day they’d sacrifice their god, Dwayne Roenbach Almighty. And he had no idea when that date with death was circled in their daybook.
The susurrating symphony of toad calls from the lake was giving way to the caws of birds as the sky to the east turned red along the horizon. A rooster’s crow joined the din.
Ranger training left Dwayne with an internal alarm clock that woke him as the night ended. He slipped from the bed to creep past Wahid asleep on the floor. The cook fires were smoldering, a wind off the lake blowing the smoke between the huts. Nothing moved in the gray light. He made his way toward the embarcadero, following a path that led around the foundation of one of the pyramids. Some guards dozed against the wall of a drinking pool. Dwayne’s bare feet padded silently past them.
He found a place in a tangle of low sabino trees that grew at the base of some steps. It gave him a clear vantage point from which to watch the area around the calendar. He took a seat to start his vigil through the feathery fronds of the trees. The clouds were limned with gold, and the pink hem of the sky was turning blue when he heard a tapping sound. Figures were coming through the early morning gloom from the foot of the grand pyramid. A column of priests in full feathers. Marching before them a young boy, naked as a jay, tapped sticks together as he led the priests into the light. The old men were chanting along with the rhythm the boy provided.
The ancients had a hard time dropping to their knees around the calendar. Eagle Head remained standing where he took up a place at the embrasure where the rounded stone now rested. He stooped to pick up the stone and held it, hand outstretched toward the rising sun. He spoke a high keening prayer in a sing-song voice before stooping once again to place the stone in the next embrasure.
The boy went around the ring, helping the old guys back up onto their feet. Once they were all upright, he skipped away, leaving them to wander back to their other clerical duties. Dwayne remained hidden in the shadows of the sabinos until all were out of sight.
All that to move the calendar forward. “What the fuck,” Dwayne said to himself.
He hopped out of cover and moved low to the calendar. A look around to make sure he was alone. He picked the stone out where it rested in the newly-assigned dimple and moved it back five spaces. What would the fuckers make of that?
In addition to all the fresh fruit, meat, and cheese he could eat and all the corn beer and mezcal he could drink, the priests offered him his choice of any of their female attendants that he might want to enjoy. They were willing and curious. The signs were all there. They’d hang around, giving him the eye. Some openly touched themselves and ran wet tongues across their lips.
There were a few pretty ones in the mix, too. Until they opened their mouths. It reminded him of the before pictures in an orthodontic textbook he’d seen at the library. And there was no way to know what kind of parasites and viruses were crawling over their bodies. No penicillin anywhere in this reality, he imagined.
Besides, he was a married man, and his vows meant something to him. Back in the days when he was “young and dumb and full of cum,” he might have been tempted. Early days with the Rangers was a continuous pussy party, and he did indulge. Red-blooded American killing machine and all that. “Party today because tomorrow we die” kind of life.
Caroline changed that. The birth of his son Stephen sealed it. What they had was something he treasured and wouldn’t risk even if offered an opportunity that no one would ever know of other than him. Even if he never got home, Dwayne was determined to remain true.
Nothing like that held back Wahid who worked his way through the willing women. The Arab was a horny one and was more than willing to give Dwayne’s cast-offs a workout.
Wahid brought it up during a late afternoon swim.
“Why do you not fuck them? You have a quadib. I have seen it,” Wahid said.
“I made a promise. To my wife.”
“She is not here.”
“She is here.” Dwayne touched a hand to his heart.
“You know what Wahid thinks?”
“What does Wahid think?
“Wahid thinks you like boys.”
Dwayne didn’t take it as an insult. The statement was made without judgment.
Apparently, the muchachas of Azteca shared this opinion. Dwayne came back to his hut after the swim to find the same naked boy who’d led the priest parade lying in his bed. The boy grinned broadly at him, eyes swimming in his head in a peyote-fueled delirium. He threw the boy from the hut and sent him stumbling off with a few tossed stones. The women stood in a clutch and gabbled at each other about the mysteries of the gods.
“A eunuch. You are without balls, Verangi,” Wahid said.
He shook his head.
“More for you,” Dwayne said.
“Too many for me,” he said. He waggled a drooping finger.
The man had worn out his unit.
“Tell me about when you were a soldier.” Dwayne wanted to change the subject.
Wahid snorted and spat.
“Come on, Wahid. Tell me your bullshit war stories.”
“What is ‘boo shit?’”
“Your legend, my friend.”
Wahid told him a rambling story about an attack on a Verangi fort out on the eastern frontier. They marched for days across desert and forests. The sky was on fire during the day and killing cold at night. Their progress was slow because they brought along huge guns on carts pulled by teams of oxen a hundred strong.
“Cannons? Mudafie? How big are they?” Dwayne said. “Big enough for a man to hide in the barrel. Big enough to throw a stone ball this big.” Wahid spread his arms four feet across.
Dwayne imagined huge guns with bronze barrels decorated with bas-relief dragons and tigers. Hundred-oxen teams to drag them over the Sierra Nevada to lay siege to a Viking fortress.
It was snowing when they came upon the Verangi who were not fortified within a simple log enclosure as they’d been told. Instead, they found a massive stronghold of stone built upon the high ground where a river bent around the base of an escarpment.
They set up tents and hacked earthworks in the frozen ground while the Verangi within the fort bombarded them with lead balls and rockets. The Mughal gunners set their big guns and fired day and night and barely made a dent in the thick, angled walls of the Northmen’s walled settlement. It went on like this for months with one foray on the ramparts after another turned away until the glacis before the walls were choked with the dead of the Mughal army.
Disease raged through the siege camp, and men died in their own filth by the hundreds. Starvation took more of them. Soon they were feeding on their own dead. Retreat was impossible. The passes which they came through on their approach were sealed shut with drifts three times the height of the tallest man. Still, men deserted, stole what food they could, and vanished into the trees along the river.
“Is that how you got those scars?” Dwayne said.
“Yes,” Wahid said. His eyes burned with a dangerous light. “And that man you killed gave them to you?”
“Yes. Even though, by running, I saved both our lives.”
“How, Wahid?”
He told Dwayne how, when the river thawed and the snow ceased, an army of Verangi showed up to raise the siege. They came down the river in shallow draft boats, hundreds of them, that disgorged thousands of fresh troops to attack the Mughal’s northern flank. In the chaos of the rout, as the Mughal forces were turned, Wahid threw down his musket and sword and fled the field. He was followed by Tormuq, the man who was in command of his company of musketeers. “He said he pursued me to punish me as a coward. I know he ran as well, ran from the fighting to save his life.” Wahid’s voice was a hiss. His rage as fresh as when he choked the life from Tormuq.
Wahid made his way south along the river, keeping to the densest parts of the wood. He was on foot. His commander and three others were on horseback. Even so, Wahid e
luded them for many days by moving across the roughest ground he could find. His run took him into high country that flattened onto a broad open prairie with no cover.
It was there that Tormuq and his men caught up with Wahid. It was there he was staked out and beaten with a long leather whip. It was there he was left for dead, his blood soaking into the earth to draw ants to bite at his wounds. He credited the ants with saving his life.
“There is medicine in their bite. They ate only the corrupted flesh. My bleeding stopped. The pain melted away.”
He was found after many days by men on foot, red men with their skin painted in many colors. They cut his bonds. They took him to a stream where they treated the ripped flesh of his back with packs of mud mixed with herbs. When he was able to stand on his own, they asked him about the strange tracks they found on the ground near where they came across his body. The shod hooves of horses.
With pantomime and gesture and crude drawings made in the dirt, Wahid conveyed to them the concept of a horse. He described in charades that men rode these horses, men like himself. And that was how Wahid, a slave conscript of the khans, led a war party of Comanche after his tormentor.
It was weeks of travel, with Wahid’s wounds still agonizing despite the administration of peyote and mushrooms to dull the pain. But hate drove him on, trotting along with the braves, following the clear trail of the mounted men riding west.
They fell upon Tormuq and his party fording a river swollen with snowmelt. The Moghul men were exhausted from almost a month of privation and fell easily to the braves’ attack. Tormuq and the others were taken prisoner and their horses eaten.
There was no gratitude for Wahid’s help in stalking down the foreign soldiers. He was bound like the others and marched south. His only satisfaction was that Tormuq would share his fate. All the other soldiers died on the march. One was bitten by a snake. Another fell down a ravine to bust his skull open on a rock. Another was speared through the guts while trying to escape. The braves mocked his suffering. He took an entire day to die.
The two survivors were finally taken across a wide river to a camp where they were sold to the same Aztec party who brought them south. And the only way Wahid endured that entire, arduous trek was through his determination to murder Tormuq at the first opportunity.
“You spared my life so that I might take his,” Wahid said. “For that, you have my gratitude and my word.”
“If you don’t fuck yourself to death,” Dwayne said.
Wahid’s laugh was a hyena bark.
18
An Empty Place
The Ocean Raj was making its way east into the deeper ranges of the Pacific.
A double watch was put in place to scan the ocean ahead for any obstructions. Without charts, the crew relied heavily on the ship’s sonar to alert them to changes in the subsurface topography. There were forests of volcanic cones of lava stone rising from the ocean floor. They needed to steer around any that rose close to the surface. Running afoul of one of them could easily tear a hole in the hull below the waterline.
Equally troubling were floating islands of phytoplankton, miles of green scum suspended in a slimy soup rich in nitrogen and phosphorus freed from the ocean floor by volcanic activity. These needed to be watched for with the naked eyes of crewmen stationed along the weather decks. The colonies were fathoms deep and presented a real danger to the Raj’s engines. The single-cell plants and the oily solution they lived in would play hell with the ship’s propellers should they drift through one of the masses. The ship was already dragging long green streamers of vegetation that had taken up residence along the hull.
The weight of the plants and parasitic arthropods were enough to overwork the engines. In the normal course of a ship’s life, the Raj would need to go into drydock for a serious scraping. But an added benefit of taking the entire container craft through the Tesla field was the scouring effect of the electromagnetic shock. The last passage through the Tauber Tube stripped paint from large sections of railings and exterior bulkheads. The higher amperage charge running along the surface and under the waterline blasted the hull clean. A result much-desired by Morris Tauber who didn’t want them bringing back any alien, time-lost species of fauna or flora to The Now.
Mo had more immediate concerns than their eventual return to the present. First among them was the urgent need of the nuclear reactor; its thirst for fresh water to cool its core. He met with the Iranians down in the control room of the Tauber Tube. Parviz and Quebat were anxious to avert a potential meltdown that would strand them all in the past. The pair of nuclear technicians put up with the same deprivations as the rest of the crew on this nightmare cruise. And they suffered inconveniences all their own being the only ones qualified to maintain the baby reactor of their own design. They shared the twenty-four-hour demands of their brainchild in overlapping eight-hour shifts that kept them belowdecks for days at a time.
The uncertainties of a fugitive life attached to the Taubers and the Rangers were acceptable to the Iranians. They were, after all, outlaws prior to being hired by Sir Neal Harnesh. Parviz and Quebat were gay and, while the rest of the world was mostly tolerant or indifferent to their lifestyle, that was a big no-no to the mullahs of their homeland. Probably an even bigger offense to Tehran than their theft of the components needed to construct the DIY reactor they built. They appreciated that they had been taken in without question by their present company. But enough was enough. They wanted, needed, time away from the close quarters they shared in the hidden compartment down in the hold of the Raj. Two weeks in Cabo or Vegas or Wildwood, New Jersey even. Allah make it so.
All in all, the two men were an attentive audience for Morris Tauber’s proposal.
“We open the field and run a hose line back into the past. I mean way back in the past. Precambrian period. We’ll need to go to deeper water to do this to increase the chances that we manifest where there’s water. But most of the planet was covered with it in that period, so we should be good.”
“And that water is pure?” Parviz said.
“Purer than pure. It’s long before any life appeared on the planet. Zero organic matter. It might contain mineral sediment, depending on where we pump from. But most of that matter will settle in the tank in short order,” Mo said.
“There’s still the problem with salt.” Quebat this time. “Actually, no. The Earth’s oceans were initially free of salt.
It’s not until life appears and starts putting carbon dioxide in the air. The CO2 combined with rainfall to make the rainwater slightly acidic. The acids freed salt from the rocks which ran off into the oceans. Still does.”
“So, this water from the far past will supply all we need?” Parviz again.
“A literally endless supply. We only need to fire up the Tube anytime we want to top off.”
“Then let us please get to work,” Quebat said.
“Can you open the thingy to reach that far back, Doc?” Boats asked.
“What do you mean?” Morris Tauber said.
He was in the control room watching monitors. The necessary algorithms had been worked out in advance and plugged into the program. All that was needed now was to manage the tremendous surge of static electricity that would come coursing back into the Tube’s power grid.
“It’s a long way. You never went that deep before, right?”
“The physics don’t work that way. Punching a hole to a particular era isn’t a point ‘A’ to point ‘B’ proposition.”
“Not a straight course?” Boats said.
“Unh uh. Time is not linear. That’s our perspective as we live through it. We experience each second, hour, and day in the order they come at us. We live through time. The Tube opens a field in time. There’s a difference. Do you see?”
“Not even a little bit. I haven’t had a lot of sleep.”
“I’ll think of a better way to explain it. But not today.”
“I don’t know how you keep all that crazy shit in yo
ur head, Doc.”
“It’s not easy. A possible complication just occurred to me,” Mo said.
“Does it directly affect us filling the potable water tanks?” Boats said.
“Not directly.”
“Then fuck it.”
Boats exited the control room and slid down the ladder rails to the floor of the Tube chamber. Geteye and two crewmen were busy with the final connections to the lines they would use to draw water from the Precambrian sea into the Raj’s near-empty tanks. Shan was helping by tightening hose connections. They’d lost almost all their hose during the recent clusterfuck ashore. Boats and Geteye spent the previous night robbing Peter to pay Paul. They stripped PVC piping from non-vital areas to build a makeshift line. The crew and passengers would be sharing the same head and showers until they could put it back in place.
The plan was to load the tanks to their fullest capacity. They were also going to fill a ten thousand-gallon bladder in the keel and as many fifty-gallon drums as they could while the field was open. This wasn’t an operation they wanted to repeat with any kind of frequency.
The end of the line was fashioned from hoses taken from the eight fire stations positioned around the ship. The hose was secured to another immersion pump with a long, water-proof power line running from it. Boats went up the ramp to the Tube platform carrying the pump. Geteye followed, hauling hose behind him.
The Tube was already rimed with ice. A chilling cloud of frozen air built around it. A side-effect of the Tauber process. When the field was opened, a corresponding mist of cold air would form on the other end, billions of years in the past.
