Black Hills

by Dan Simmons

  Paha Sapa sees that Crazy Horse’s left arm is rigidly extended above the elaborately carved mane of the stallion and that the war leader is pointing with one finger.

  The whole sculpture is 641 feet wide and 563 feet tall.

  As the raven circles on the powerful thermals rising from the sun-heated stone—the air on this future fifth day of September is even hotter than in the previous vision-future—Paha Sapa can see that the carving of Crazy Horse’s face bears almost no resemblance to what the man looked like in life. That can be forgiven, he thinks, since Crazy Horse never allowed a photograph of himself to be taken or a portrait to be painted.

  What is less forgivable, to Paha Sapa’s large-sculpture-trained eye, is that the quality of the carving and sculpture here is far inferior to Gutzon Borglum’s work. The entire pose is strained and awkward and clichéd and Paha Sapa can see almost none of the nuance that Borglum and his son worked so hard to achieve in their brute-force, pneumatic-drill efforts to evoke even the slightest shadings and tiniest minor hints of the dead presidents’ facial muscles and furrowed brows and most subtle expressions.

  This huge, blocky, gesturing hero-Indian and his strangely European-feeling stone doodle of a prancing horse look to Paha Sapa—in comparison to Borglum’s work—as if they have been carved out of a bar of Ivory soap by a bored schoolboy with a dull knife.

  Without asking the voices within him, he knows that the Sioux and Cheyenne and other nearby tribes hate this thing. He doesn’t know all their reasons for hating it and does not want to know. In a real sense, he does not need to ask; he already knows within himself. He only wishes he had another chance at this new target with his twenty-one crates of dynamite.

  If he had a voice now, Paha Sapa would scream—You brought me forward in time again to see this? Will this punishment never end?

  But he has no voice.

  Still, the raven leaves the giant cartoon of Crazy Horse behind and turns north and gains altitude again, flapping and coasting its way out of the Black Hills and past Bear Butte again, onto the Great Plains.

  THE CHANGES HERE are obvious and immediately visible.

  The endless curving ring of autobahn is still there, but it looks aged and gray and there is little traffic on it. The cities and towns are much smaller. Rapid City looks to be a third the size it was in Paha Sapa’s day, much less in the mindless sprawl he just saw in his second vision. Spearfish is all but gone. Deadwood and Keystone and Casper and Lead, he realizes, are gone—there are no wasichu towns at all in the Black Hills when the raven flies north.

  He has no idea what kind of catastrophe has caused this disappearance of so much and so many but his spirit-skin goes cold considering the possibilities.

  The real shocks are still ahead.

  Just north of the strangely empty autobahn, all former signs of habitation and what the wasichus invariably called civilization simply cease.

  As the raven loses altitude, Paha Sapa can see that the state and county highways are… gone: blown up, broken up, plowed under, or simply overgrown. Only the vaguest traceries of straight lines, overgrown with healthy plants, give a hint of where all those dividing lines were.

  He realizes that all the ranches are also missing. No single war or natural catastrophe could cause that, could it? Removing buildings and leaving not even the foundations, while the autobahn and smaller versions of Rapid City and other towns remain to the south and east? No, not war or plague or some natural catastrophe could account for that. This emptying-out of an entire region has to be the result of a purposeful, planned migration and of a careful deconstructing and removal of the works of man built here over a century and more… but to what purpose?

  Why would the wasichus concievably unbuild and remove the ranches, barns, roads, power lines, sewer lines, stock tanks, fences, vehicles, cities, small towns, dogs, pigs, chickens, cattle, and other imported species—including themselves—that they had taken almost two centuries to seed the earth here with?

  Paha Sapa realizes as the raven continues to descend that a tall fence runs parallel to the autobahn for as far as the raven’s eye can see in both directions. The raven takes care to land not on that fence, but on a nearby old wooden fence post with no wire attached.

  That is something else that is missing beyond this point, Paha Sapa realizes—fences. Barbed wire. All the fences that sliced the prairie through all of the 20th Century and then resliced and resliced it again into ever smaller shapes are… gone.

  There is a sign on the fence and while Paha Sapa has no idea if the raven with its small but wily brain can read it, Paha Sapa can.

  danger—high voltage

  Twenty yards to their left is an elaborate double gate with a cattle guard of round bars as the flooring. Paha Sapa guesses that the gate is automated. (This is the future, after all.)

  The sign on the gate makes much less sense to him than did the high-voltage warning.

  P.M.R.P. Tracts 237H—305J

  Access with Permits Only

  Warning: No Food, Shelter, or Services for the Next 183 Miles

  Warning: Dangerous Animals

  Warning: Human Contact May Be Hostile

  Permit Holders Proceed at Your Own Risk

  U.S. Dept of the Interior and Sec. of U.S.P.M.R.P.

  The raven hops off the fence post and soars over the fence as if it does not exist. Bear Butte is within this wild area. Paha Sapa can see where there has been a winding road in to the rising butte, perhaps a parking lot and visitors area, maybe even a visitors’ center with restrooms or some sort of small museum.

  They are all gone now, their former presence indicated only by a preponderance of weeds where the concrete and asphalt and foundations have been broken up.

  The plant life is rich and varied both on and around Bear Butte. In Paha Sapa’s day there were mostly ponderosa pines on the hill itself, as well as some scrubby junipers. Now there is a profusion of pine and fir on the butte itself. The prairie at the base of the butte was mostly yucca and low, sparse grasses in Paha Sapa’s time: now it is rich with diverse plants, many of them unidentifiable to Paha Sapa’s eye.

  He sees faded ribbons—prayer flags—and patches of once-colored cloth filled with tobacco hanging from the branches of the scrub oak and other deciduous trees that grow along the creek at the base of the butte. This doesn’t make much sense. The offerings are Sioux or Cheyenne… but don’t the electrified fence and gate sign five or six miles back suggest that all this is off-limits to most people?

  The raven takes wing again, flying north along its now-familiar route to the river where Paha Sapa lost his band’s sacred Ptehinčala Huhu Canunpa sixty years ago and where most of that band and Paha Sapa’s extended family were wiped out by elements of Crook’s cavalry.

  The day is even hotter down here than it was in the Black Hills but the land beneath the raven’s wings is not desert. Far from it.

  The grasses are even richer and taller here than near Bear Butte. Paha Sapa saw only tiny patches of true tallgrass prairie as a child; now it extends east and west and north for as far as the raven’s eye can see from five thousand feet. Its bending in the wind that has come up is slower and more sinuous even than the Hand of God stroking of the world’s fur he remembered from the shorter grass prairie beyond his village.

  He has no idea how the ancient tallgrass prairie could have returned.

  Fire. Bison herds. Burning. Time.

  The voice in his nagi spirit-ear is Rain’s, his great-granddaughter Constance’s, Limps-a-Lot’s, Robert’s, and the wisest of the Six Grandfathers’.

  Paha Sapa is moved to tears he cannot shed, but he still does not understand.

  The raven swoops, clears a grassy hilltop by only fifty feet, and Paha Sapa sees.

  Buffalo. Bison. Filling the valley. Filling the hilltops to the north. The herd stretching off east and west and north for miles. Thousands of buffalo. Tens of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. More.

  The raven banks west towa
rd the river.

  The mountains so far beyond to the west—seen only by the raven’s magical predator’s eye—are totally without snow now. Not even the peaks have a dash of white. The river is narrower, its level much lower, obviously not supplied by melting snow from those now-dry distant peaks. But the water that remains is clear and dark and looks clean enough to drink without worry; even in Paha Sapa’s day there were compelling reasons not to drink from a local stream.

  The raven circles and Paha Sapa gasps—or makes an equivalent nagi spirit–sound to a gasp.

  The wildlife here near the river is extensive. And large.

  Besides the bison herd that stretches on to three of the horizons, there are running herds of small, tan horses. Not the same as the tiny horses he saw from 11,000 and more years ago, but similar. Very similar.

  —Przewalski’s horses.

  Paha Sapa has no idea who Mr. Przewalski is, but he likes his horses—tiny, tough, wild, black-maned, as alert as any wild prey. And he absolutely loves the sound of the sweet voice.

  A line of camels comes out of the deciduous forest to drink.

  —Bactrian camels from the Gobi Desert to stand in for the extinct Camelops hesternus—Western Camel—that evolved here and was so successful in the Pleistocene. But it’s amazing how similar the DNA is.

  Paha Sapa has not the slightest clue as to what DNA is or was, but he could listen to this voice forever. He wants it to never stop.

  —There were four species of Proboscidea here during the Pleistocene, Paha Sapa—Mammuthus columbi, the prevalent Columbian mammoth; Mammut americanum, the American mastodon; Mammuthus exillis, the Dwarf mammoth—not quite so common—and your and my old friend Mammuthus primigenius, the Woolly mammoth we saw reconstructed at the Chicago World’s Fair.

  Paha Sapa weeps silently at that.

  —After much testing, we decided that the genotype of the endangered Asian elephant was the closest to our missing friends. And it adapts well to the warming climate across the Great Plains. But there are several thousand African elephants here as well—if only to save them from the environmental disasters in Africa over the past thirty years.

  Elephants? Paha Sapa thinks just as a group of them comes out of the high, blowing grass of the low hills and lumbers down toward the river. One of the smallest wants to run down ahead of the herd, but the mother—or at least one of the females—restrains the youngster with the gentle curve of her trunk.

  A cluster of drinking Bactrian camels and groups of pronghorn antelope scatter at the approach of the elephants. But they scatter along the east side of the river.

  On the west side, a large pride of lions crouch to drink.

  —From southern Africa. The last of their kind. But they are doing wonderfully well here. The prides in the PMRP’s eastern tracts beyond the Missouri River number in the thousands now. For some reason it makes it a more popular area. There are only four hundred trekker permits given out for that area each year and we get more than a million requests.

  Trekker? Paha Sapa mentally repeats to himself.

  A jaguar has just emerged from the tall grasses beyond the river, then effortlessly disappears again. Paha Sapa wonders if he actually saw it. Something like a very large sloth is watching the jaguar from the trees. The sloth’s curved claws are long and black. The plants along the river—whose banks are no longer tumbledown from cattle—grow in almost shocking variety. The grass here looks like a manicured lawn in places.

  —One of the side effects of diversified grazing.

  Hundreds of yards upstream, a bald eagle is circling, looking for carrion or fish. Paha Sapa’s raven does not react as if threatened this time. Paha Sapa thinks—The one constant. There are always eagles.

  But the raven rises again anyway, turning southeast. The tour must be over. Paha Sapa wants to shout; he wants to weep; but most of all, he wants to hear the chorus of beloved voices once again. But he knows his tour is over.

  —It’s not over yet, Paha Sapa. You haven’t even seen the best part yet.

  A minute later he glimpses them through the raven’s incredible eyes. A tiny scattering of white marks there, miles away and miles below in that river valley. Then a tiny scattering of white triangles there, miles away and miles below in the opposite direction, along a tallgrass prairie ridgeline.

  The raven banks right and swoops toward the ridgeline.

  Dear All, thinks Paha Sapa. Dear Wakan Tanka. Let this death-dream be real.

  Out in the valley this side of the white triangles, boys watch over a small herd of horses. These are the largest versions of the strange, wild horses Paha Sapa has just seen running wild across the prairie. They are pony sized but not docile. The boys here obviously have to be on their toes to keep these small herds of captured horses captured.

  The raven continues rising toward the ridgeline.

  It is a small tiyospaye, no more than twenty lodges, but the tipis are tall and well made, the tipi poles made of stripped lodgepole pines of just the right length—like the fingers of a hand—the first three poles making a star and the star shape making a vortex of powerful light for those who will live within its welcoming power. If arranged correctly, the full ten poles of each tipi represent the universe’s deepest morality—the oho¸ki˙cilaþi of mutal respect toward all things—and the ten oho¸ki˙cilaþ poles are arranged correctly and covered with the clean, bright hides of buffalo with the hair scraped off properly. The lodges are arranged in circles as commanded to the Natural Free Human Beings by Bird Woman and by the Six Grandfathers, so that people’s homes will repeat the sacred-hoop pattern of the universe itself.

  There are people moving around the tiyospaye as the raven lands atop a tipi pole, and Paha Sapa sees that the men and women are wearing handmade clothing similar to that he wore as a boy… similar, but not a museum re-creation. Many of the skins and hides are the same, antelope and deer and buffalo, all scraped smooth, softened by women’s chewing, but there are other textures and colors he cannot identify. He sees a war shield propped against a tipi and realizes with a shock that the hide of the shield is made of elephant skin.

  An older man walks by, someone important, Paha Sapa guesses based on the beadwork on his moccasins and the perfection of his fringed tunic and trousers, but on this warrior’s shoulders and head are the hide, mane, and roaring jaw of a lion.

  Paha Sapa would blink if he had eyelids.

  These are Natural Free Human Beings. Paha Sapa can hear through his raven’s ultrasharp ears as the people speak in a soft, oddly accented Lakota. Then Paha Sapa realizes what the Lakota accent reminds him of—Robert’s slight accent when he learned the language from his father. Perhaps some of these men and women were English speakers before they adopted Lakota. Or perhaps the dialect has just changed over time, as it does in every language.

  Then something strange happens.

  Four boys are sitting on a log nearby, tossing knives at a circle drawn in the dirt in a game Paha Sapa knew well as a boy, when suddenly there are soft musical notes in the air.

  One of the boys excuses himself from the game, reaches into a pocket on his deerskin trousers, and answers something that must be a telephone but that is no larger or thicker than a playing card. The boy speaks for a minute—still in smooth Lakota—then folds away the impossible phone, returns it to his pocket, and comes back to the game.

  —Have you seen enough to understand, Paha Sapa? It took us years before we understood that the ecosystem of the Pleistocene Megafauna Rewilding Project would be worthless unless we rewilded the most central of all the late-Pleistocene megafauna predators—man. But this time, there will be no mass extinctions because of our presence. Herd population management applies not just to the four-leggeds. And Connie was the first among us to see who deserved the choice—the right—to live in the PMRP Reserves, as long as they did so by the rules of the epoch they had come to live in. The children’s phones… well, some things cannot be denied, in any culture, and it was agreed that t
hey were an important safety feature. Adults may choose to live among jaguars, lions, and grizzly bears, but children should be able to phone for help. Even so, the phones work only within the confines of the preserve and the children must give them up when they turn fifteen if they want to remain living in the preserve.

  Paha Sapa knows that he’s dreaming now but it’s all right. Like Hamlet, what he always feared most about death was the possibility that one might still dream.

  But this is all right.

  The raven launches itself into the air and flaps for altitude, circling first to gain height and then heading southwest.

  Once airborne, Paha Sapa sees something to the northeast that he missed before. A ribbon of silver steel running along the east-west river valley and silver-and-glass glinting carriages moving slowly beneath the ribbon.

  Paha Sapa knows at once what it is. He has seen pictures of the Wuppertal Schwebebahn—the monorail in Wuppertal, Germany, built and opened sometime around 1900. Just as with that Schwebebahn, he can see the sleek carriages hanging under the thin rail line here, the view unimpeded from the mostly glass-walled cars. With his raven-vision, he can see the silhouettes of the passengers even from miles away and from thousands of feet higher. Some are seated; some are standing. It reminds Paha Sapa of the joyous passengers in the 1893 Ferris Wheel.

  —Three hundred trekker permits and a few commercial safari camps, of course, carefully regulated, but more than forty-two million people a year—tourists—pay to ride through all or part of the Great Plains Pleistocene Megafauna Rewilding Preserve. It’s become North America’s preeminent tourist attraction. But it’s time for you to go home, Paha Sapa. As much as we hate to see you go.