The Theta Prophecy (6 page)

“Find anything down there?” his father said.

“No.”

“When are you going back?” There was no mockery in the question.

“We aren’t, Pa.”

His father drank the rest of his beer. When the glass was empty, he got up, went inside, and returned with two more. But instead of saving both for himself, he pushed one toward Daniel. And that was that. Daniel sipped his beer with his father. They drank in silence because it was easier than discussing what chores they would have to do the next day.

Years passed. He grew old.

After his father was dead, Daniel would sip his beer by himself. Each day, he worked on the farm until the sun went down over the western hills. He had a family of his own. He never stopped wondering why someone would go to the trouble of burying wood planks like that, every ten feet, deep into the earth.

Occasionally, he walked to the edge of the shore and looked out at the island that had tormented him. When he did, he didn’t resent the time he had wasted there. He didn’t belittle himself for getting caught up in the notion that a different life might exist for him out there somewhere. He merely remembered what it had felt like those few days, believing his life was going to change, and what it had felt like to have that fantasy turn into the painful reality of long days on the fields. The life he had always expected.

Year: Unknown

As Anderson settled in and became a permanent part of the tribe, he spoke Mi’kmaq almost exclusively. There were times he still had to ask, “What is the word for,” and then gesture or point to symbolize antlers or burning embers or the many other things he could never keep straight.

Other times, he would ask what their word was for something and they would look at him, confused.

“Betrayal,” Anderson said. “When you trust someone and they do the opposite of what they should do.”

The young man he was talking to gave him a blank stare, and Anderson realized they had no word for
betrayal
because they had no concept that people might not do what they were expected to do. Their language had no words for things that simply didn’t exist yet in their time, but Anderson noticed they also had no words for most negative personality traits.

The young man offered a rough translation in Mi’kmaq: “Evil?”

“Sort of,” Anderson said. “But a specific type of evil.”

He noticed that for the Mi’kmaq,
evil
encompassed everything undesirable. Fear was evil. Killing and not using every part of the animal was evil. Sickness was evil.

“Evil is in her body,” one of the older tribe members said to Anderson one day, pointing at a girl who was grey and shivering, her eyes fluttering in her sleep. The poor girl wheezed each time she took a breath.

Anderson took one look at the girl and knew she would soon be dead from whatever sickness was in her lungs. The Mi’kmaq were not naïve or ignorant; they knew she was sick as well. They just had a different way of expressing the idea.

Despite a degree in engineering and fluency in three languages—four, now that he knew Mi’kmaq—Anderson quickly understood that for all of their quirks and beliefs, many of the tribe members were much smarter than he was.

He would go from thinking he was becoming an expert in their language only to have the people he was speaking with break into terrible fits of laughter.

“What, you don’t care about the snow?” he would say.

“You did not ask about the snow,” a man, lean and tall like an arrow, would reply, wiping away tears. “You asked if we are afraid of your, how do you say, toilet-maker?”

The tribe members never made the same mistakes when they practiced their English with him. The few times he was sure they were mistaken, they showed another way in which they knew more than he did.

“Heavy rain,” a woman said, looking up at the clouds.

“No,” Anderson corrected. “Heavy wind.” To demonstrate, he pointed at the leaves rustling in the trees.

“Yes, I know. But there will be heavy rain before long.”

An hour later, and with no rain, Anderson asked the woman if she wanted to change her forecast. The woman smiled and patted him on the shoulder in a way he found strangely condescending. Later that day, the clouds opened and there was a torrential downpour that lasted for hours. When the rain stopped and people began to leave their homes again, the woman saw Anderson and smiled.

She wasn’t the only person in the tribe who predicted the weather. The tribe held forecasting competitions to see who could make the most accurate forecasts furthest into the future. The winners were held in very high esteem. The best weathermen in the tribe didn’t bother to make predictions unless they were at least a full day into the future. Anything sooner was pointless because everyone else in the tribe would already know the same thing. Everyone except Anderson, who could only look up at the clouds and wonder what they saw that he did not.

“Snow,” a man said.

Anderson frowned. It was at least fifty degrees outside. The tail end of winter had faded away the previous month. There were no clouds.

“Are you sure?”

The man nodded. “In two days. Snow.”

Sure enough, over the next two days, the temperature dropped to below freezing and snow clouds moved in. The tribe bundled inside their homes. Even their homes, Anderson found, were more efficient at keeping warmth inside and cold air out than the homes the Tyranny made. The roofs were made of thick bunches of straw, the walls of wood and birch bark. That was all. And yet he was never cold, even when it was snowing outside, as long as a small fire was going.

Even with their ability to not only predict the harsh weather but to survive in it, and their adeptness at learning his language, the villagers unanimously treated him as their superior. From the very first time they asked if he was a god—because surely only gods fell from the sky—he had admitted he was nothing more than an ordinary man. He had heard the same rumors every other time traveler had heard, that one of them had been sent back too far in time and lived the rest of his life pretending to be an Egyptian god. That was not a life that appealed to him. But whether it was because he appeared out of a brilliant flash of light or because he looked like no other native they had ever seen, they refused to believe him when he said he was just a man. Little did they know that not only did he not possess special powers, it had been pure luck that he managed to survive his reappearance.

“What is the best way to live?” they would ask him, certain he knew more than they did because he was from a different realm.

He would tell them to treat others the way they would want to be treated and to respect all people regardless of their physical or ideological differences. He would tell them to stand up for themselves and for anyone else who needed someone to stand up for them.

“Do not trust anyone who tells you to do something that they wouldn’t do themselves. Especially your leaders. Do not let excuses dictate the way you live your lives. But also, do not let anyone change the type of life you want for yourselves. The tribe knows what is best for itself. Do not let someone come along and tell you that you must live a different way. Their way.”

A group of children asked if people were different where he was from.

“In their hearts, people are the same everywhere in the world. Most people just want to be happy, to have a family, to grow old.”

“Even where you come from?” a boy asked.

“Even where I come from. The difference, though, is that where I come from there are a handful of people who do not want these things. They want as much power and wealth as they can get and they control everything.”

“Control?”

“They rule. They command everyone to act a certain way. They make rules that benefit themselves and punish everyone else. If you don’t abide by the rules that benefit them and make you worse off, you are punished. They tell you what you can say and what you can’t say. They watch everything you do. They destroy anyone who questions them.”

“Why?”

“They like the power they have. And no matter how much power they have, they always want more. Because with more power, they own more of the world.”

One of the village’s elders, a short, balding man named Benio, put a hand on Anderson’s shoulder and said, “Even villages must have leaders, right?”

“Yes, of course.”

“Tell me the best type of ruler.”

Anderson smiled but he also closed his eyes and felt his chest seize with a spark of pain. He couldn’t help but feel as though he were stuck in one of Plato’s dialogues. Every time he had one of these conversations, he thought about never seeing Debbie and Carter again. He hadn’t left them just so he could talk about the Tyranny. He risked his life to change the Theta Timeline, not to carry on philosophical debates.

“The best type of ruler is one who is not concerned with whether he is popular or unpopular, but one who is only concerned with what is good for the greatest amount of his people. The first time a ruler sacrifices the good of the many for the benefit of the few, he has turned his back on his people. He no longer serves them the way a true ruler should.”

“What is
turned back
?” Benio said.

“Given up. Ignored. He has broken the agreement between a ruler and his people to have their best interest in mind. He has given them a reason to look for a better leader, someone who will look out for them instead of trying to keep himself in power longer by giving powerful men whatever they want.”

They were at the edge of the tiny village, near a collection of caves and boulders. There were fewer than eighty homes in the town Anderson lived in. Although there might be other neighboring villages in other parts of Nova Scotia that he hadn’t seen yet, to him at least, this was the extent of the Mi’kmaq tribe. The people around him had no concept that great empires would one day arrive on their shores and want this piece of land, and every other, for themselves. They had no idea that not all people were as innocent and welcoming as they were.

When one of them wanted a slab of meat, they traded their goods or labor for it. When a woman needed more vegetables, she went to one of the farmers and traded cloth or craftwork or whatever else she had that the farmer’s family needed. From the time they were still quite young, kids helped their parents. It was impossible for any of the village elders to find something they treasured more than the love and support of the people. And because of that, the people truly respected them and went along with the elders’ judgments even when they disagreed with the decisions because they trusted the elders to do what was best for everyone.

The elder nodded toward the caves and Anderson followed.

“Where I come from,” Anderson said, looking back at the spot of sky that had burst with light and dropped him into the water, “the leaders do not care about what is good for the people. They care only about controlling everyone so they can remain in power. Everyone lives in fear of what the leaders will do next.”

They entered one of the larger caves. Anderson had to put his hand against the cold, wet wall to keep from stumbling.

Benio frowned. “Why let that happen?”

Anderson knew what the man was thinking. He was trying to envision someone from his village hoarding all of the cattle for no other reason than he could have it all and no one else could have any of it.

“It wasn’t the way things were supposed to be,” Anderson said. “But things changed a little bit at a time. It used to be that my village was just like your village. The leaders represented the people. But then they started listening not to everyone around them, but only to a few. Little by little, things changed. It took a long time for people to catch on to what was happening, and by then, there were laws in place to keep them from doing anything about it. The more people tried to change the system, the more the leaders tightened their control. The longer the leaders stayed in power, the more they did whatever would keep them ruling even longer.”

“Pick a different ruler,” the elder said, holding his torch up so Anderson could see where he was stepping.

“We were only given a choice between two rulers. We could have Ruler One or Ruler Two. They were made to look different, but they were the same. It didn’t matter which ruler we chose because we were still choosing someone who didn’t care about the villagers, only about making the powerful men happy.”

“What did the villagers do?”

They were fifty feet into the cave now. Without Benio’s flame lighting their way, the cave would be completely dark and Anderson would be lost.

“There wasn’t much we could do by then. Any time someone spoke out, they were silenced. If they protested outside the ruler’s home, they were beaten and run off. If they made the ruler unhappy, they were killed.”

“But there were more villagers than leaders, right?”

Anderson thought of all the Mi’kmaq adults and their children. The people trusted their elders, but if they ever felt differently, it would be very easy for the few hundred natives to march on the homes of the village leaders and demand that they act differently.

“Yes. But sadly, a lot of people have seen what happens when you go against the ruler. They have seen people beaten and killed. And so they either throw their hands in the air and give up, or else they choose to believe things aren’t so bad and remain silent. A lot of people would rather play games or sit around watching—he almost mentioned people’s propensity to watch hours of mindless television before realizing that would only require much explanation—“birds, than march on the ruler’s house and insist on change. The leaders are smart; they make things worse a little bit at a time so the people don’t get too frustrated all at once.”

They came to the end of the cave. Each rock seemed to change shape as the light flickered here and there. Benio held the torch out so the walls around them became illuminated. Instead of shining black, the color of lava rock, or green, the color of moss and fungus, the walls sparkled a deep crimson.

“My god,” Anderson said, putting his hand to a section of the wall, letting his fingertips glide over the smooth stones.

Rubies.

“Pretty, eh?” the elder said.

All around him, the walls glowed with what looked like red energy. There were more rubies than he had ever seen. Enough to fill a jewelry store. Enough to fill a hundred jewelry stores. He had seen the women with red stones worked into their necklaces, the men with red stones engraved into the gold handles of their knives and daggers. Now he knew where they came from.