The Obsidian Blade (19 page)

Tucker heard what sounded like men’s voices filtering through the trees, calling out in some strange tongue. Awn quickly crossed the far side of the meadow and disappeared into the woods. Tucker waited a few seconds, then followed her. As he reached the edge of the field he heard more shouting, and then a hoarse scream followed by a bright-orange flash from far back in the trees. The voices ceased abruptly. He stood still, listening as the night creatures gradually resumed their babble. He took a few steps toward where the sounds had come from, but he had missed the path and quickly became disoriented. After a long quarter hour of crashing through the underbrush, he found himself back in the meadow.

A pale shape — Awn — emerged from the trees a few yards away.

“Tucker Feye. Are you lost?”

“I heard voices,” he said.

“They come; they go. It is time to rest.” They crossed the meadow to the cabin, Awn using her stick and moving more slowly than usual.

“Who was that?” Tucker asked as they stepped up onto the porch.

“No one you would know.” She went inside.

Tucker stood for a few moments on the porch, trying unsuccessfully to make sense of his situation, then followed her inside. Awn was sitting at the table, motionless, staring into space.

“Awn?”

She did not reply. She did not seem to know he was there. Tucker waved his hand in front of her face, but got no response. Not even a blink.

He sat with her until his eyes would no longer stay open, then took himself to the other room and sank onto the bed.

That night he dreamed of a long hallway lined with gray doors. The Medicant hospital. One of the doors slid open. Lahlia was sitting on the bed wearing the silver shift and blue boots she had worn during her first visit to Hopewell. She stared back at him with her dark eyes. He tried to ask her about his father, but when he opened his mouth nothing came out. Suddenly he was back in the hallway and all the doors were closed. He ran from door to door, pounding with his fists, certain that behind one of them he would find his parents.

T
UCKER AWAKENED AT DAWN
. R
UBBING HIS EYES, HE
walked into the main room. Awn was stirring something on the stove.

“Good morning,” he said.

Awn nodded, lifted the heavy iron pot from the stove, and carried it to the table with no apparent effort.

“You’re a lot stronger than you look,” Tucker said.

“I am no stronger than you,” she said.

“I don’t think I could pick me up and carry me the way you did.”

“You may be surprised by what you are capable of doing.” She ladled hot spelt into the bowls.

“Did you sleep?” Tucker asked.

“I am rested. Eat your breakfast.”

Tucker ate, planning his next request for information. He worked his way through the bowl of spelt, composing and rejecting questions. When he finally spoke, the question that popped out was not the one he’d meant to ask.

“Am I dead?”

“Yes,” said Awn.

Tucker stared at her in shock.

“But not here,” she added. “Not now.”

Tucker relaxed — slightly.

“Your question is casuistic,” Awn said.

“Huh?”

“Am I using the wrong language?”

“I don’t know what that word — ca-zoo-whatever.”

“Your question is not answerable in its present form. Time is not symmetrical. You cannot uneat your spelt, yet the uneaten spelt exists in the recent past. You will die — in a sense you are already dead — but you are not dead in the here and now.”

“You know when I’m going to die?”

“You will live the life you will live. Is that not sufficient?”

“Um, not really.”

Awn stood up. “Come. I will give you a tour of the diskos.”

“They are fickle,” said Awn. She stopped walking and thrust her stick into a disko. The surface pulsed and formed a whirlpool around the stick’s point of entry. “This one leads to the site of the assassination of a politician, but rarely to the assassination event itself.”

“Why doesn’t it suck in the stick?” Tucker asked, standing several feet back from the disko. “Every time I got that close to one it sucked me up like a vacuum cleaner.”

“They find you more interesting than they do me.”

“You mean . . . like, they’re alive?”

“Not in the sense you mean.” She withdrew her stick from the whorl. “But they are attracted to those who can perceive them. Most corporeals are blind to the diskos and are therefore not drawn to them.”

“Do you mean some people can’t go through?”

“Anyone may be transported, but some must forcibly encounter the field. As you have seen, most diskos are located inconveniently, where the unwary are not apt to stumble into them. Except here at the Terminus, of course.”

“Why is here different?”

Awn ignored the question. “Few of the Lah Sept, for example, can see the diskos.”

“But there were thousands of —” Tucker stopped when Awn winced at his use of
thousands.
“I mean, there was a whole plaza full of people watching when I was on that pyramid. They couldn’t see the diskos?”

“Of the Lah Sept, only the priests, the Yars, and others who have received training actually
see
them. The sacrifices are hurled from the edge of the pyramid into a disko, but the people on the zocalo see only a flash of orange. Though they imagine more.”

“How come I can see them?”

“As I said, they find you interesting.” She gestured at the disko with her stick. “The reverse side of this would take you to France during the bubonic plague, a destination popular with the Klaatu.”

“Klaatu?” Lahlia had called the ghosts Klaatu. “Are they like . . . dead people?”

“They are not dead. Nor are they alive, in the usual sense.”

“Why are they called Klaatu?”

“The inventor of the technology that allowed them to transcend the physical was a connoisseur of ancient video projections.”

“You mean movies?”

“Yes.” Awn resumed walking, her pace as regular as a metronome. Tucker followed her to a disko hovering over a mossy boulder.

“This disko leads to a place called Auschwitz, where many were killed with terrible efficiency.” She walked around the boulder to the other side of the disko. “This side I do not know. Another attempted genocide, perhaps. Come.” She followed a faint path through a patch of gooseberry bushes and stopped before another disko that seemed to rest on its edge beneath the sagging branches of a white pine. “This is the disko where I found you. It leads to the Cydonian Pyramid in the city of Romelas near the end of the reign of the Lah Sept priesthood. You are fortunate that I was nearby when you were cast through. The other side also leads to Romelas, but to a later point in that city’s history. Pure Girls who survive the frustum often choose to return home by this route.”

“Lahlia said she was a Pure Girl,” Tucker said, more to himself than to Awn.

Awn tipped her head as if consulting an inner voice. She nodded. “The Yar Lia, yes.”

“Lahlia was here?”

“She called herself Yar Lia. She and many others have passed through the Terminus. Come. We have far to go.”

The next disko stood at the crest of a hill.

“I once saw a large red-and-blue parrot fly squawking from this disko,” Awn said. “It did not survive the winter. I have seen other tropical birds in the forest; they may have come from here as well. Entering from the opposite side of this disko would take you to the landing of the Viking spacecraft on Mars.”

“Mars the planet?”

“Yes. You would not wish to go there in your corporeal state.”

“How come there’s a disko there?”

“So that the Klaatu might witness the Martian tragedy. It was before your time, yes? You would not have known. The Viking spacecraft infected the Martian ecosystem with terrestrial prions and other organic matter. Biocide on a planetary scale. Generations passed before anyone realized that Mars had once supported life, and that the entire Martian biota had been infected and destroyed as a result of human trespass. Come.”

Awn led Tucker down a steep path to the edge of a tamarack swamp, where three diskos hung a few feet above the peaty soil. Two transparent figures, a man and a woman, hovered before the middle disk. They were looking right at Tucker.

“Are those Klaatu?”

“Yes. You fascinate them,” said Awn. She swept her stick through the two figures. They broke into shards of mist, then dissipated. “They have abandoned their corporeal existence, yet they retain consciousness without measurable physical presence.”

“But I can see them. Isn’t that physical?”

“No. The Klaatu are composed of information. You become aware of them through other means, then your mind constructs an appropriate image. There is no actual
seeing
involved.”

A male Klaatu swam out of the central disko. Awn poked at it with her stick. The Klaatu broke apart.

“When you do that, are you killing them?” Tucker asked.

“I am merely disrupting our awareness of them. It amuses me.” Awn pointed at the left-hand disko. “The Krakatoa explosion, observed from a ship in the Sunda Strait. You would not survive.” She pointed at the other disko. “A cavern in Gibraltar where the last true Neanderthals were slaughtered by their Cro-Magnon neighbors.”

“How come practically every one of these disko things leads to something awful?”

“The Klaatu are fascinated by the terrible, the horrific, the irreversible. Because the Klaatu are, in a sense, already dead, they are endlessly fascinated by the true deaths of others. Their fear of what they are is what drives them to use the diskos. They devote themselves exclusively to their own self-absorption, and it is for this that they are ashamed. Shame was what ultimately led Klaatu known as the Gnomon to declare the diskos morbid and atavistic — even as other Klaatu continued to access them.”

“Who made the diskos?”

“The diskos were constructed by Boggsians under the guidance of a Klaatu artist known as Iyl Rayn.”

“What’s a Boggsian?” Tucker imagined something with eight legs and sharp claws.

“The Boggsians supply digital technology to anyone who will pay, though they eschew such technologies for their own use. You will meet them one day. Recognize them by their beards and black hats — they are the descendants of Amish Jews.”

Tucker said, “Amish Jews? Aren’t the Amish and Jews complete opposites?”

“The sonnets of Shakespeare have yet to be typed by a monkey, yet stranger things have occurred.” With that cryptic comment, Awn continued on down the path. Tucker shook his head and followed. As they entered a boggy grove of soft-needled, moss-draped tamarack trees, Tucker heard a crunching and splashing in the distance. He looked through the trees and saw a man wearing a red jerkin and a metal helmet, leaping from hummock to hummock, running like a frightened deer.

“Who was that?” Tucker asked.

“He is lost. Do not worry; he will find his way. Come.” She continued along the path. Tucker noticed that Awn never slowed or stumbled.

They came to a disk jutting up through a pool of stagnant water. Only about a third of it was visible. “This one emits snakes and lizards,” Awn said. “They do not survive here for long, which makes me think the reverse would be true as well.”

“Don’t any of these things go to someplace normal?”

“There is no normal.”

“I mean normal like Hopewell, where people aren’t getting killed and things aren’t exploding and stuff.”

“The diskos lead to interesting times, as defined by their designer.”

“So, can I get home from here?”

“Yes,” said Awn. “And no.” She continued along the path. Tucker followed.

“I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said.

“Do what?”

“That ‘yes . . . and no’ thing.”

Awn laughed. “As I have told you, this
is
Hopewell. In a sense you are already home.”

“I want to go back to
my
Hopewell.”

“There is no direct route from here to your Hopewell.”

“I can’t get there from here?”

“You could return the way you arrived.”

Tucker thought back to his brief and violent moments atop the pyramid. Even if he could get past the priests, he did not think he would be able to tell which of the five diskos had brought him from Hopewell.

“That’s the only way?”

“There are others.”

“Is any way not dangerous?”

“No.”

“So, every one of these things goes to someplace where I might get killed?”

“I did not say that.”

“What should I do?” he asked.

“There is no
should.
”

“I can’t just stay here forever.”

Awn stopped and pointed her walking stick at Tucker’s chest. “You must gather information. When you feel you are ready, you select a disko and leave this place. It is what everyone does, even that man we just saw. You learn and you choose. Choose well, and you may find yourself where you wish to be.”

“You said the diskos always lead to the same places, but what about when you go back through? Do you always end up where you started?”

“Reentering a disko will often return you to your approximate geographical point of origin, though not always. If you were to return to the Cydonian Pyramid, you would likely find yourself facing the same priests, who would attempt to kill you again. Or you might arrive somewhat later. Others entering the same disko might be taken to a different time, or even a different place. The diskos are an instrument, like those — what do you call them?” Awn held out her hands and wiggled her fingers.