The Earth Hearing

by Daniel Plonix

  With the large case slung over her shoulder, she stealthily approached the house from the back and parked herself behind a boulder about fifty yards away. There was one more thing Lee had to do, had to first make sure of. She closed her eyes and instructed the bracelet to identify any calls originating from her house. Hours earlier, the man had made a call. The bracelet played back the recording of an audio-enabled security camera. She listened, learned what she needed to. It was a go.

  She unlocked the case and pulled out a Barrett M95 rifle. She attached to it the bipod stand, screwed in a suppressor, and then the scope.

  Lee was going to shoot him through the wall, where he sat. It was the very reason she had a rifle that used .50 caliber rounds.

  Now came the critical step. She shut her eyes and watched the feed of the pertinent thermal video camera—reimaged by the bracelet to adjust for her outside, lower viewing angle. Taking careful aim, she drew a long breath to calm down her racing heart, exhaled, and pulled the trigger. It sounded like a loud cough, and somewhere inside, the thermal signature jerked and collapsed. She reacquired her target and took one more shot for good measure. She was taking zero chances.

  Lee confirmed the bracelet found no other thermal signature of humans in and around the house.

  If the bracelet had got it wrong, she was probably going to be dead in the next few minutes. She took a deep, shaky breath, pulled out a .45 automatic from the rifle case and approached the house at a run, gun pointed. The bracelet wasn’t wrong. There was nothing but a mangled body of a tall man sprawled between the floor and the sofa. And the part of him left intact looked very dead. Two conspicuous holes in the wall were a silent testimony that for once a plan of hers had worked out perfectly.

  Lee rolled the body in a tarp. Struggling and huffing, she dragged him by his feet. His head banged as she pulled him down the stairs, but she reckoned he couldn’t be any worse for wear.

  Outside, she tied the bundled corpse to her four-wheeler ATV. After a few minutes driving through her property, she reached the site where the portal used to be. Shoving it with her foot, she sent the body tumbling down the spiral staircase and slammed the trapdoor shut. She’d have to deal with the dead man later; she had more pressing issues to attend to.

  Back at the house, Lee scrubbed the room as clean as she could and took a quick shower. She then made herself comfortable. It was time to go on the offensive.

  The call the assassin had made earlier had lasted only a few minutes. But it was enough. It was enough to ascertain he was there to take her out. And it was enough for the bracelet to acquire his speech patterns.

  Lee was going to call the person the man had phoned. She was going to convey her thoughts, brain signals, to her bracelet—and let it transmit them in the voice of her would-be killer. She’d done such a thing before.

  There was a good chance the organization that had sent the man to her house had something to do with what had happened to Hagar.

  Hagar may have been killed in the aerial bombing of Warsaw in War World II. But this couldn’t explain the rest of it: the removal of the entire network of analysts. There was more to it than Aratta had shared with her—or perhaps more than he was aware of.

  She dialed the number, and someone picked up the phone almost immediately.

  “Is it done?” a nondescript man’s voice asked.

  “Yes,” she thought. And her bracelet converted it to electronic signals modified to match the killer’s voice, then transmitted them over the telephone line.

  “Good. No loose ends?”

  “No. She came home after midnight, and I popped her one. I’ll take care of the body.”

  It was time to roll the dice, and it was a long shot. “It was one of Hagar’s people I took out,” Lee thought, the bracelet transmitting it in the hit man’s voice. “What if Hagar comes after me in retaliation?”

  “What the hell are you talking about, man?” demanded the person on the other end of the line, irritation and surprise mixed in equal parts. “Hagar’s in a stasis box in the warehouse in Haiti like you were told. How the fuck is she going to come after you?”

  “Right,” Lee thought and the bracelet transmitted once again. “Okay. I guess I had to ask.”

  Silence. “Don’t spend all your money in Vegas, Kaminski,” the man said. “I’ll see you when you’re back.” The line went dead.

  She sat very still.

  Her boss was alive. In a stasis box, which is to say in a timefold. That changed everything. Suddenly, Lee had something she should be doing beyond trying to survive.

  She closed her eyes again. A quick search through electronic records and she uncovered the identity of the man on the phone: one Ernesto Pérez out of Miami. She started to go through his files, bank accounts, and holdings. Within half an hour, she had it. One of the holding companies he was associated with had owned a property for years in Haiti. And it was a warehouse.

  Twenty hours later, Lee walked out of the airline terminal in Port-au-Prince—and into the teeming streets of the city. She was assaulted with humidity tinged with scents of urine mixed with smoldering heaps of trash and vehicle exhaust fumes.

  People. People were everywhere. Young men lounging on the sidewalks next to mattresses; housewives with floral dresses negotiating muddy puddles; scrawny men standing behind steamy cauldrons right on the edge of the road and offering street food to passersby. Lee crossed an open sewer and walked under low-hanging telephone cables and past gaudy billboards.

  She hated this.

  Lee had slept in huts in the rainforests of Borneo and in tents belonging to nomadic Tuareg in a desert in Mali. This was different. Material scarcity didn’t get to her; ugliness did.

  She stood at a bus stop. Minutes later, she was in a crowded tap tap, a dingy minibus painted in a rainbow explosion of colors, lurching and bobbing seemingly to the rhythm of blaring Haitian hip hop as the vehicle jolted its way from one pothole to the next. Lee sat sandwiched between an astonishingly fat woman and a toothless old man, staring stoically through one of the windows. More people. Blue-helmeted UN soldiers. Young people propping buckets filled with water on their heads and rushing in between honking vehicles. Lee turned her head away and closed her eyes.

  Her upscale hotel was located on a quiet street in Petion-Ville overlooking much of the city but far enough away to obscure the cries of vendors, the blare of horns, and the smells.

  She dined, took a long bath, and then slept.

  The next morning Lee rented a Jeep Wrangler and drove it to Cham­brun, a village outside the capital city.

  After crossing and then re-crossing winding alleys that bore no street signs, she admitted to herself that perhaps it was best if she stopped and asked for directions. She spotted a small group of people crouching over something in a small field nearby. Lee parked the Jeep and walked over.

  She approached and saw two blans demonstrating what was unmistakably a charcoal cookstove.

  Blans were seemingly everywhere in Haiti. Every week, airplanes unloaded some: bureaucrats from international aid agencies, do-good Christians, or middle-class young Americans. All wanted to visit the most authentic poverty theme park in the Western hemisphere, where children may still congregate at the sight of white people, hands extended.

  Parting blans from their money had been a cottage industry in Haiti—along with taking part in handling cocaine that made its way from South America to the US markets. There was no “right” or “wrong”; there was just green money and millions of outstretched hands with millions of clever ploys and redirection schemes. A mayor appropriates money allocated to the city for his own development. A doctor diverts medicine from a public hospital to his private clinic. And foreign-aid food aimed for schools ends up repossessed and sold for profit. Some opportunists with connections and cunning had broken out and left Haiti for the fairer pastures of Miami. Others had less l
uck and returned to the ranks of the poor from whence they came. Life was cheap in Haiti. You could get a child slave for $200. Perhaps less.

  She was in a foul mood when she drew near. Lee pushed past the local gathered men and kicked the cookstove and the charcoal. People jumped back, yelling and cursing.

  “Enough!” she yelled in French, turning on the Haitian men. “You’ve already cut down the rainforest. What are you going to burn down next? Look at the shithole you people have made of this island!”

  “So how are they going to cook, exactly?” shouted one of the two blans. German, if to judge by his accent.

  Lee turned on him. “What are you, a moron?” she snapped. “They can use the sun to heat oil in coils. It would run clean and with no fuel.”

  One of the villagers jumped into the conversation. “You want to bring this to Haiti? I help you. We partner, blan. We make good money together.”

  The two Germans muttered in disgust, took their ware, and marched off.

  The villager jabbed her with his finger. “You want to do business together?”

  Lee turned her attention to him. If he could go around poking his finger, she could do the same. He moved back, startled. “You want some­thing better than soot to breath in your home and this desert you created with your machetes,” she told him, “you build it. I’m not going to do anything. You guys have been on the dole for so long, you’ve forgotten how life actually works.”

  That set everyone arguing and shouting.

  “Is this sun cooktop real, you crazy bitch blan?”

  “As real as you’re ugly,” she retorted and looked pointedly downward. “Zozo ou gro tankou yon tik tak.” There was a moment of stunned silence, then the villagers exploded in laughter. The men held to each other, and two howled and kicked the dirt, guffawing. All except the man whose manhood was slighted. He stood there, glowering and ignoring the slaps on his back by his comrades.

  “Blan, you show us how to make this?” asked one of them, when the merriment had died down.

  “What if it’s cloudy?” demanded another.

  It was clear nothing would ever get built. They knew it, and she knew it. But this crazy blan was fun, and the men had nothing better to do at the moment. Lee hoped, as she always did, that some seeds of what she was sharing with people would germinate. So they squatted on the ground as she drew with a stick, outlining. It was modeled on something she’d once seen in the hospital kitchen of the Gaviotas community in Colombia.

  She gestured. “Imagine cottonseed oil flowing in a bank of tubes on the rooftop. On a sunny day, the oil can reach 170°C. You should be able to cook everything under this heat. With an insulated storage unit, the oil is kept hot, so it is possible to cook at night or on an overcast day.” She thought some more. “In a village-wide system, with piping and a big storage tank, the oil could stay hot for up to a week, enough to get you through cloudy spells.”

  One of the men was laughing. “Now you are dreaming.”

  She looked at him. The dream of heating oil for cooking under the sun.

  Finally, it was time for her to go. The men were in high spirits and shook her hand with enthusiasm. They wanted to escort her to the warehouse, but she declined. Eventually they relented, giving her detailed instructions on how to get there instead.

  Fifteen minutes later, she stood in an alley in front of the door leading into a giant dilapidated building. Her heart was pounding. Could a stasis box be inside this warehouse with Hagar in a timefold, frozen between one moment and the next?

  The instant she picked the lock, Lee realized she’d set off an alarm. She smashed the security device with the blinking light but knew it was too late. Whoever monitored the security alarm had been tipped off. Time was of the essence.

  She darted inside what turned out to be a colossal storage facility filled with dusty cargo boxes and rusting industrial equipment. It didn’t look like anyone had visited the place in ages. She swept through the aisles, sizing up the larger crates. After a few minutes, she heard the squeal of tires followed by the slam of multiple car doors.

  They’d mobilized a lot faster than she had imagined they would. She slapped the bracelet, activating it. “Aratta, it’s me. I believe Hagar is alive, but maybe I won’t live to see it through.”

  “What! How?” came his voice. Then: “Where are—Oh. You’re in Haiti. I’ll come as fast as I can. Try to hold on.”

  Lee tore down the next aisle and abruptly stopped at the sight of an upright casket-like box bound in metal chains. Her pulse quickened. This must be it. She pressed her bracelet against its padlock. The shackle on the lock glowed brightly, and after a moment melted. What remained of the lock fell with a clatter followed by the clang of the chains hitting the concrete floor. Lee swore under her breath at the ruckus. From the far end of the warehouse, she could hear people yelling and calling each other. Shit.

  Lee flung open the upright casket. And there was the person she worked for and her parents before that: an attractive, young-looking blonde woman in khaki cargo pants and a form-fitting black tank top, hands clenched by her sides.

  One of the people reached the aisle Lee was in. He pointed, shouting something to his associates. She ignored him. Her bracelet remolded and latched for a moment onto the control panel on the side of the box. There was a click.

  The woman in front of her gasped and stumbled out of the upright stasis box. Her eyes narrowed as she took stock of Lee. “Who the hell are you?”

  A gunshot sounded, followed by more. They both ducked. “I’m Lee—the Lainraads’ daughter. I came to rescue you.” A burst of gunfire punctuated her words, perforating the stasis box, wrecking it. Fragments of wood and metal flew over their heads.

  “You call this a rescue?” shouted Hagar over the roar of gunfire.

  “You’re welcome!” Lee yelled back.

  Hagar shook her head in disbelief. She disappeared then reappeared behind a concrete column a few yards away, a pistol in hand. Taking a quick aim, she fired a few times. At the far end, two of their assailants dropped. A man emerged from around the corner, and Lee kicked him in the groin. As he doubled down in pain, she stepped in and landed a vicious blow with her forearm on the side of his neck. The man collapsed in a heap.

  “Is this Egypt?”

  Egypt? “This is Haiti! The year is 2013.”

  Hagar cursed. Then she cursed again, more vehemently. She’d been out of the picture for seventy-six years! More to the point, the Earth people were very much in the picture during that time period, further trashing the ecosystem, no doubt. “Did the humans here managed to keep their numbers under three billion?” she hollered again.

  “No. It’s over seven now.”

  Hagar swore again. Nothing was more important than to get a mes­sage through and convene a hearing to determine the fate of the Terraneans. She resolved to do it the moment she could muster the concentration needed to form a rift.

  From somewhere to their left, someone opened up with an automatic. Lee bolted and joined Hagar behind the concrete column. More men arrived and started firing. Wood shards and masonry bits exploded nearby.

  “I rang Aratta for help earlier,” called out Lee during a brief lull. “He’s on his way.”

  “Aratta?” Hagar whipped her head around, eyes blazing. “You idiot! He’s the one who put me in the timefold in the first place!”

  Lee stared back in obvious shock.

  “We have to get out of here, fast. And deactivate that damn bracelet of yours. He can track us through it,” Hagar hissed and vanished. She reappeared in another corner of the room. A shot rang. A few moments later, there was another shot. Then another. “All clear!” Hagar announced.

  “You can teleport?”

  “Teleport, hell. I shifted to the netherworld, ran over to the target, and shifted back.” She dashed toward the exit, Lee close behind. “T
hey’ve locked the door from the inside!” shouted Lee as they were drawing near.

  Faster than Lee’s eye could follow, Hagar spun then kicked. The door exploded outward, torn from its hinges and flew, landing a dozen feet away. If she could tear a metal door with a kick, sending it flying, thought Lee, woe to the Terranean who tried to get in her way.

  They came out sprinting. And Hagar’s arm shot out, halting Lee.

  A man in a three-piece suit was resolutely marching toward the building. From his shoulder, hanging by a wide strap, was a multi-­barreled rotary minigun.

  “Back inside,” snarled Hagar and all but pushed the other woman in.

  “Hagar!” came Aratta’s shout.

  Hagar concentrated, willed it.

  “Do not—”

  There! The world around them faded away as they left the real Earth.

  Chapter 11

  Stifling heat and impossible humidity engulfed Lee and Hagar as they tumbled on a heaving wooden deck and came to a stop against a metal railing. They were on a ship at sea, apparently somewhere in the tropics.

  They were not alone. Under a cloudy sky, they saw dozens of people in gaudy checkered gowns sprawling about. A few were conversing in low voices. Most looked disoriented or plain resigned.

  “What!” gasped Lee. “Where are we?” Hagar clamped her mouth for a moment. “Shhh, we’re in the past,” she said softly, “of a sort.” She held Lee down, who jolted in shock noting the other woman’s dark brown skin and black, kinky-curly hair. “It’s an illusion. It is me, Hagar. And it is still you, even if you don’t look the part, either.” She gave Lee a friendly smile, which appeared to calm the other woman some.

  As Hagar leaned in and hugged Lee, she dimly wondered what the other woman would have said had she realized they were conversing in Umbundu. The veil over the true nature of reality was stretched thin here, thinner than she cared to expose the human to.

  “Aratta said something about reflections. Are we in one of these things?”