The Obsidian Blade (18 page)

“Whether you know it or not, you paid them,” she said. “You are alive, and they have given you a pair of Medicant boots.”

Tucker looked down at his blue foot coverings. He had forgotten all about them.

“Do they come off?” He reached down and peeled back the top edge.

“Once you remove them they are useless to you. Wear them. They will carry you far. Now eat.”

Tucker spooned warm cereal into his mouth. The more he ate, the better it tasted.

“Slow down,” said Awn. “You have not eaten solid food in quite some time. You will make yourself sick.”

Tucker set down his spoon. “How long was I in the hospital?”

“Long.”

“Like a week?”

Awn stood, walked to the far corner of the room, lifted a small mirror from a hook on the wall, brought it back to the table, and held it up so Tucker could see himself.

The boy in the mirror was not him.

Rather, it
was
him, but not the Tucker Feye he knew. The Tucker in the mirror had a narrower face, longer hair, and a scanty but definite beard.

He ran his hand over his face, feeling the soft, unfamiliar whiskers.

Awn, watching him, nodded.

“A long time,” she said, setting the mirror aside.

“I look old!”

“
I
look old. You are simply older than you were.”

“Yeah, like sixteen! Or seventeen!”

Awn waved her hands in front of her face as if to fend off a bad smell.

“What?” Tucker was not sure what he had done. “How many years was I there?”

“We do not number the years,” she said. “Eat.”

Tucker ate another spoonful of cereal.

“What is this stuff?” he asked.

“Rolled spelt.”

“Spelt?”

“A type of wheat.”

“Oh. It’s good.” He chose his next words carefully. “What exactly happened to me?”

“You were injured. Dying. I sent you to the Medicants. They repaired the damage to your heart, and they took their fee.”

“What fee?”

“Sometimes they take organs.”

“You mean they took a kidney or something?”

“I do not think so. In your case, I think they took a portion of your life.”

“I don’t get it.”

“Let me see your hands.”

Tucker held out his hands; Awn held them gently, feeling each of his fingers.

“Your skin is thick and hard here . . . and here.” She indicated a ridge of thickened flesh along each of the thumbs, and on his index fingers.

Tucker stared at the unfamiliar calluses. “What does it mean?”

“If you try, you might remember.”

“I don’t remember anything.”

“The Medicants will have suppressed portions of your memory. They think it a kindness. Your mind, however, retains more than they know.”

Tucker pulled his hands away. A panicky feeling rose from his gut. Too much had happened, and too quickly — the pyramid, the knife, the dreams — and now he was sitting in a cabin surrounded by a forest full of strange portals with an old lady looking at him as if he were a lab rat.

“You should rest,” she said.

“I’m not tired. Why don’t you tell me what this place is? Where are we?”

“This is the Terminus.”

“Terminus?”

“The endpoint of the diskos.”

“Diskos?”

“The means by which you arrived here.”

“But where is ‘here’?”

Awn stood and picked up her stick. “Come.”

Tucker followed her outside onto the porch. The sun had risen above the trees; a faint mist hung over the meadow. Awn sat on one of two wooden chairs and directed Tucker to the other.

“We are alone here. The forest extends far in every direction. You could walk day and night, night and day, and you would find no others.”

“Yeah, but where are we? I mean, is this even the United States?”

“Geographically, this place was once known as Hopewell County, Minnesota. But that was very long ago.”

“You mean we’re in the future? Like those Medicant people?”

“The time of the Medicants is long gone.”

“Like the pyramid people?”

“The Lah Sept came to power after the Medicants, at the end of the Digital Age, but still, it was long ago.”

“How far in the future is this?”

“This is the true present. The diskos do not yet exist beyond this moment.”

“But what
year
is it?”

“I do not number the years.”

“You don’t know how long it’s been?”

“Been since what?”

“Since . . . I don’t know . . . since the Hopewell where I grew up.”

“Is it so important to you?”

“Yes!”

Awn nodded and began to tap her walking stick on the wooden porch deck —
thump, thump, thump
. . .

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“I am tapping the seasons,” said Awn, still tapping. “Fall, winter, spring . . .”

“Why?”

“You asked me how long it has been.”

Tucker watched the stick go up and down with metronome regularity.

“I lost count.”

“Do not
count.
”
Thump, thump
. . . “This will take some time. Are you not tired?”

He
was
tired. He had walked through the woods for . . . how long? Hours? And that rhythmic tapping. . . .

“There is a room, with a comfortable bed. Why don’t you rest? We can talk more when you awaken.”

Tucker could hardly hold his head up — he wondered if he was being hypnotized, but could not rouse himself enough to care. He managed to ask, “How do I know I won’t fall asleep and wake up an old man?”

Awn nodded seriously. “Sometimes I feel that is what happened to me. I turned around three times and discovered myself as I am.” Still tapping, she laughed at his expression. “Go. Rest. I do not exact blood for porridge.”

Tucker thought he might just lie down for a few minutes. He needed to think, to order the questions whirling through his mind. He went inside. There were only two rooms in the small cabin: one main room and a smaller room with a bed. He lay down on the thin mattress.

The regular sound of wood striking wood continued.

Tucker slept.

A
NARROW TABLE EXTENDED AS FAR AS
T
UCKER COULD
see, in both directions. It held a large number of gray plastic objects that looked like palm-size clamshells, each one filled with complicated-looking circuitry. The devices moved slowly along the table from left to right, propelled by some invisible force. As each clamshell reached Tucker’s position he took a small gray piece of plastic from a tray at his elbow and snapped it into the circuitry. With each snap came a small jolt of pleasure.

Tucker was not the only person standing at the table. Every few feet, another man, woman, or child stood ready to add his or her own modification to the device. All were tethered to their stations by tubes leading from a port just above their navels to identical ports along the edge of the table.

Tucker snapped another widget into place, felt a familiar, satisfying bump of joy, then waited for the next incomplete clamshell to arrive, counting his heartbeats.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump-thump. Thump —

Tucker opened his eyes. He could just make out the shapes of rough-hewn rafters in the near-dark. He was in Awn’s cabin.

Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump.
. . .

He had been dreaming, but the thumping was real. He sat up on the edge of the bed, blinking sleepily at the crude wooden walls. He felt as if he had slept for hours.

Thump, thump, thump
. . .

Tucker stood and walked out of the bedroom. A flickering lantern above the woodstove illuminated the main room. The window and open doorway were dark. Had he slept all through the day and into the night? He looked at himself in the mirror hanging on the wall, felt his soft, scruffy beard.

He walked to the doorway. Moonlight flooded the meadow. Awn was sitting in her chair, thumping her walking stick, her eyes gazing out over the meadow. The tip of the stick had worn a depression half an inch deep in the soft wood of the porch floor.

“Have you been doing that all day?” Tucker asked.

Awn smiled and looked up at him. “Sit.”

Tucker sat in the other chair.
Tapping out the seasons,
she had said. And how many seasons could she “tap out” in a day? He tried to add up the numbers. Two taps a second, sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour . . . That was about, what? About seventy-two hundred? Seventy-two hundred seasons would be eighteen hundred years for every hour . . . and she’d been tapping for at least five hours. Nine thousand years? And she was still tapping.

“Your calculations cause me discomfort,” said Awn.

“You can tell what I’m thinking?”

“Your eyes cloud with numbers. Do not measure the time. Feel it.” She continued to tap.

“You can stop,” Tucker said.

“Are you certain?”

Tucker nodded.

Awn raised the stick and rested it across her lap. “Did you dream?”

Tucker told her about the table and the widgets. “I think I’ve dreamed the same dream before.”

“Dreams are assembled from fragments of memory,” Awn said. “That was a Medicant factory. They used you well.”

“They had me working in their factory the whole time?”

“The Medicants do nothing for free.”

Tucker ran his hand over his jaw, fascinated by its furry texture. A sadness came over him for his lost years. He wondered again, How long? A year? Two? Five? He might never know his true age.

“You are fortunate,” said Awn, “that they did not take more.”

That night, over a meal of bean stew, black bread, and braised parsnips, Tucker talked with Awn about his parents. “I’m pretty sure they went through the disko that goes to the — what did you call the pyramid people? The Lah something?”

“The Lah Sept,” said Awn. “Eat.”

Tucker ate another spoonful of the stew, then said, “I’m pretty sure they went into the disk — the disko — and that landed them on top of that pyramid —”

“The Cydonian Pyramid,” said Awn. “You were on the frustum.”

“Frustum?”

“A frustum is the flat top of a pyramid. Is that not an English word?”

“I never heard it before. Anyway, I think my dad took my mom there to get her to the Medicants. Because she was sick.”

Awn nodded.

“So did they have to come
here
to get
there
?”

“People come; people go.”

“I have to find them.” Tucker sat back in his chair. “How do I do that?”

“I do not know.”

“These disko things. Do they always take you to the same place?”

“Yes,” said Awn. “And no.”

“Thanks a lot.”

Awn shrugged. “Wherever you go, there you are. Poorly phrased questions produce unsatisfactory responses.”

“But I —”

“Eat your beans. Your questions will wait for tomorrow.”

With Awn refusing to answer any more questions, Tucker retired to the porch, where he sat staring out into the night, listening to the babble of the tree frogs and crickets, the sounds of night. Under the full moon, the meadow grasses became a fibrous ocean of icy silver and pale gold. His thoughts whirled. What did he know? He was in some distant future, if Awn’s tapping was to be believed. He had access to the diskos. He was free to go if he wished. He could walk out into the woods at any time, choose a disko, and travel to another place.

Did he
want
to leave? So far, Awn had shown no inclination to plunge a knife into him or turn him into a factory zombie. All she had done was feed him, offer him shelter, and dispense a few paltry bits of information. For the moment, he felt safe.

He could hear her stirring inside: the clink of metal on metal, scraping, the creak of a pump handle, the sound of water splashing into the basin. Should he have offered to help with the dishes? She had not seemed to expect it. He wondered again what she was doing here in this cabin and why she knew so much about the disks — diskos, portals, whatever — and why all her answers to his questions simply led to more questions. And what was her deal with numbers? How crazy would a person have to be to spend a whole day pounding a stick on the floor rather than just saying,
Nine thousand years
— or whatever the number would have come to if she had kept on tapping.

Nine thousand
years
! The thought made him feel hollow and unreal — and what sort of person could tap a stick for hours and hours without getting tired? He remembered his nightmarish journey from the pyramid to the hospital of the Medicants. Awn had picked him up and carried him through the woods. The old woman looked like ninety pounds of wrinkles and bone, hardly strong enough to lift a child.

Maybe this was some sort of virtual reality and he was strapped to a machine and someone was feeding dreams into his brain. That thought brought him a weird sort of comfort, although he did not believe it for a moment. Breathing in the pine-scented air, feeling the rough boards beneath his feet, he knew to the bottom of his soul that this cabin, this place, was utterly real.

Awn came out of the cabin and, without looking at him, stepped off the porch and walked out into the meadow. The grasses came up to her waist. She stopped midway across and stood without moving for several seconds.