Aeon Twelve

by Aeon Authors

  “He told me to stay close to you today, to walk on your right side as we pass through the valley. He said that I would hold an enemy’s weapon in my hands and be a chief of the tribe before the sun sets once more on the land of the Crow.”

  “Hmm.” Powerful medicine. “Heed your dream then, son, and walk on your old father’s right hand.”

  We rode on, giving the buffalo calves and bulls a wide berth. They don’t like it when men get too close.

  We had traveled about ten miles before I heard the shot. A high-pitched whine reverberated from a nearby hilltop. A homing bullet ricocheted off of Harry’s chest plate and struck me in the shoulder, knocking me from my saddle. I hit the frozen earth and felt a bone in my leg snap.

  Harry jumped from his horse, our first aid kit in one hand. The buffalo, slowly at first, began to run. Fear spread through the herd like a fever until hundreds of them were thundering across the meadow in a panic. Harry stood over me, the stun guns on his arms crackling. He shocked a couple of bulls that got too close, just enough to send them careening off in a different direction. In a few moments, they had all disappeared into the snow and fog, driving our spooked horses with them.

  Harry knelt in front of me and tore my shirt over the bullet wound.

  “Ah, it burns,” I said through clenched teeth. “And I think I broke my damn leg.”

  “Yep, it’s broke all right,” he said. “Let’s look at the bullet.” His sensor array turned crimson as he switched to thermal-infrared.

  “Deflecting off of me must have taken away most of its power. It’s lodged just beneath your skin.”

  “Yank the damned thing out of there. Then you’ll need to put a splint on my leg.”

  “This is gonna hurt, Pop.” He gave me a hypo full of anesthetic from our first aid kit.

  “OK, go on,” I said. The pain began to subside.

  His foreleg sprouted a tiny robotic hand designed for fine work. He dug it into the wound and pulled the bullet out. He regarded it for a moment before dropping it into the snow. It burned straight through to the frozen earth beneath.

  I looked around the valley, light-headed, trying to see the poacher who was taking pot shots at the buffalo. I knew it was no Crow; we didn’t use those crummy homing rifles. Damned toys. A real man, a Crow, used a real rifle.

  And if he wasn’t a Crow he was a poacher. There were people in the world who would pay big money for poached buffalo organs.

  “I think I got ’em!” I heard off to the east.

  “Pop, they’re coming!”

  “Steady, Harry, steady boy. I want you to get out of here. Find the horses.” Our rifles were with the horses.

  “I’m not leaving you! These guys could hurt you.”

  “That’s why I want you out of here. You’ll be safe and they won’t know you’re here, boy.” I winked at him. “Find the horses. Get your rifle. It’s up to you.”

  Harry’s red eye scanned the horizon. He hesitated a moment longer, touched my shoulder with his foreleg, and vanished into the fog.

  “Excuse me!” I called. “You got a person up here.” In a moment, I could see them. City folk, three of them, all dressed up like fools for hunting. They were breaking the law by hunting on the reservation, doubly so for hunting our buffalo.

  They got closer and I smelled that they were drunk, too.

  “Aw, shit! Lookit this! An old Indian geezer. What are you doing out here, old man? Little far from town.” The yahoo was all covered in orange so his drunken buddies wouldn’t accidentally blow his head off.

  “Shut up, Fred.” This was from the oldest of the three. “Well, this really complicates things.”

  “What’s complicated, Tony? Let’s just leave him.”

  “Oh, sure. Now that he’s gotten a good look at us? The cops will be on us like flies on shit.”

  “Aw, shit,” Fred said. He pulled a bottle from his pocket and took a pull.

  “You boys don’t need to worry about me. I won’t say anything to anyone,” I said in my best old man’s voice. I slipped my hand inside my coat and wrapped my fingers around the staghorn handle of my knife.

  Tony turned to the third man, a tall blond fellow with ice blue eyes. He had a high-powered rifle, a real man’s gun. “Well, what do you think, Karl? Do we leave him or what?”

  Karl reached over and took the bottle from Fred’s hand. He wiped of the neck and took a long drink. “Kill him. There won’t be nothing but bones left by spring and we’ll be long gone.”

  “I’m not gonna kill a helpless old man,” Fred said.

  “Shut up, Fred,” Tony said. He took a step forward and raised his crummy homing rifle in my direction.

  It was the last thing he ever did.

  A rifle cracked somewhere in the fog. It could have been a hundred or a thousand feet away—Harry could shoot a fly in the ass from a mile off. Tony dropped his rifle and clutched his throat. Blood ran from between his fingers. He dropped to his knees and fell face first into the snow.

  “Holy shit!” A large wet spot bloomed on the front of Fred’s pants. He dropped his rifle and ran.

  Karl dropped onto his belly. He crawled over me and took the clip out of his rifle and inserted another. If the new clip had explosive bullets, it could hurt Harry badly. Karl moved with expert casualness.

  “Come out now,” he yelled into the fog. “Or I kill the old man!” He pointed the rifle at me and pulled the bolt back.

  “Don’t do it, boy!” I said. “He’s gonna kill me anyway.”

  Karl ground the barrel into my nose. “Open your mouth again and you’re dead.”

  “All right, mister. Don’t shoot. I’m coming out.” Harry walked out of the fog, forelegs raised toward the sky.

  “Jesus Christ! A construct.” Karl took the rifle out of my face and pointed it at Harry as he stood up. “I don’t know what you’re doing out here, but it’s the end of the line.”

  He took careful aim at my son. In an instant I buried my knife into his calf. Karl got off his shot before he collapsed and I saw the red disc of Harry’s sensor array shatter into a thousand fragments.

  The stun guns on the end of his forelegs erupted with crackling electricity and he jumped with perfect accuracy despite his blindness. He landed on top of Karl and drove the tips into his ribs.

  “Aiyyyyaaaahhhhh!” Harry’s scream made me clap my hands over my ears. I could see through my tears that Karl was screaming, too, but I couldn’t hear it.

  “Harry! Enough, boy! You’ll kill him.”

  I was not sure if he heard me, but after a moment he stopped screaming and pulled the tips of his forelegs away from Karl. He was unconscious and little tendrils of smoke rose from his hair.

  “Doesn’t he deserve to die, Pop? He was going to kill you! He was going to kill me. He came here to take our buffalo from us. To kill them—to sell them for money!”

  “Enough blood has been spilled today, boy.” I reached over and dragged Karl’s rifle toward me. “Look. You’ve wrested a weapon from an enemy. You’re a chief now!”

  “I can’t look, Pop. I’m blind,” he said.

  “Well, we’ll fix that when we get back to the lodge. I’ll be your eyes for now.” The horses wandered over to us after a while and Paint stuck her nose in my face, anxious to get a move on.

  “What about him?” Harry asked, kicking Karl in the ribs. His eye was gone, but there was nothing wrong with his memory. He had a perfect image of his surroundings based on the picture in his mind of just before Karl shot him.

  “Drag him over here.”

  I reached over, ignoring the reawakening pain in my shoulder and leg, and untied his bootlaces. I tied them together and held them out to Harry, touching his forelegs with them.

  “Throw these up in the tree, Harry.”

  He wound up and threw them toward the highest branches.

  “The clueless son of a whore should be able to climb up there and get them before he freezes to death. And he’ll think twice before
he comes back to the Crow Nation,” I said. “Get my knife. Shoot some fleshfoam into his wound and wrap a bandage around it, Harry.”

  “All right, Pop.”

  I must have fallen asleep after that, because when I woke up my leg was splinted and Harry had me in front of him on his horse. Either his GPS was still working or Nellie knew the way home.

  I limped into the great hall of the lodge, my hand on Harry’s head. A hush fell over the gathered members of the tribe. The lights were dim and a fire burned low in the hearth. The tribal chiefs sat in a half circle before the fire, each dressed in their finest clothes. Harry and I stopped in the center of the crescent. My leg still ached from the regeneration unit.

  Four feathers were tied to Harry’s new sensor array. In his forelegs he carried the automatic rifle he had taken from Karl in the valley. Jimmy had given him a painted leather bag, and he wore it hung across his back. He stepped forward a few paces and laid the gun gently on the hand-woven rug.

  Tommy Longbarrel stood up and hefted the rifle, his face as impassive as a stone. He turned it over in his hands. “Humph.” He gave it to Kicks-the-Coyote who passed it to his right without looking at it.

  “Tell us the tale of your coups,” he said.

  “I stole the horse of my enemy,” Harry said, and he told the tale of the laxatives and the horse and the broken branch.

  “I led a band of braves in victorious combat,” he said and he told the story of the great battle at the lodge and the triumph of an enemy beaten and befriended.

  “I smote my enemy with a coup stick.” And he told them of San Francisco and the Sioux and Parcheesi.

  “I wrested a weapon from the tribe’s enemies.” Harry pointed at the gleaming black rifle and told them tale of the ducks and the bullet that burned through the snow and the boots hanging in the tree.

  When he finished the telling, Harry stepped back and sat at my feet, his six legs folded beneath him.

  A great silence once again filled the hall.

  The chiefs looked at Tommy and he met each of their gazes, one at a time. No one spoke.

  Tommy looked at the floor, his chin in his hand.

  “I say a machine is no Crow.” He fixed me with an icy stare. Then an amazing thing happened, a thing I had not seen in over thirty years: a smile cracked his face. “But this is no machine. This is the son of Chester Laughing Crow.”

  A thunderous cheer shook the hall.

  The booze went to my head and I stepped outside to get some air. The moon was full and inky purple shadows danced on the snow. A coyote padded at the edge of the woods, vanishing and reappearing like a spirit. The party was in full swing and loud voices, muffled in the night stillness, rose and fell from inside.

  My head was buzzing nicely and I smiled, truly happy—for myself, for Harry, for Tommy.

  The click of one of the lodge’s many doors made me turn. Bright light spilled out into the night, cutting the shadows like a knife. The noise of the party rose for a brief instant then fell when the door was shut again.

  Harry stepped out into the moonlight. I opened my mouth to speak, but stopped without knowing why. Instead of calling out, I stepped back into the shadows.

  Harry took the leather bag from his shoulder and took out something I could not quite see. He drew back one of his forelegs and a dark shadow spun from his outstretched hand to land a hundred feet away in the thick snow of the wood.

  Harry looked around, but he didn’t see me. He turned and went back into the lodge, shutting the door quickly behind him. I limped up the hill. The snow was up to my waist when I reached the hole in the snow.

  I reached down into the hole and felt something hard and bumpy. I grabbed it and pulled it out, my fingers almost frozen. It was a pair of hunting boots, the ones I’d told Harry to throw into the tree. I stared at them for a long time, oblivious to the cold.

  It had never really occurred to me before, but perhaps I had wrought too well. My son was human. Somewhere in Lamar Valley, under a few feet of snow, the bones of his enemy lay.

  Fitzwell’s Oracle

  Lawrence M. Schoen

  “About twenty-five years ago, in the last days of the summer before my first semester of graduate school, a metaphor popped into my head. I rolled it around a bit, and wrote it up for the last issue of the university’s newspaper before the new term. For whatever reason, they took it and printed it, despite the unflattering implications of the metaphor. My advisor wasn't amused by my ‘editorial,’ but let it slide. Mercifully I don't believe any of the other departmental faculty ever read it, or if they did they hadn’t yet learned my name and didn’t associate it with me. If any of them read this story, well, it’s too late to take away my doctorate anyway. And besides, it’s Fitzwell’s metaphor now.”

  HE FOUND “CASSANDRA” JOHNSON slumped at the end of the bar of a hotel lounge on the city’s south side. She didn’t look like an oracle, but what did one look like anyway? Fitzwell almost walked back out, right at that moment. Then he remembered the stony faces of the tenure review committee and how they’d sneered at his feeble preliminary application. If he didn’t do something then he’d already lost. At thirty-five, he’d already been denied tenure at two other universities. No matter how well his students rated him, he wasn’t quite playing the game right. The ivory tower continued to elude him. He needed a new perspective, and his desperation had led him here.

  She sat swirling a thin red straw through the icy clumps of a half melted strawberry margarita. Fitzwell figured her for about nineteen, and either the bartender didn’t care or couldn’t tell. Fitzwell could tell. He knew nineteen, saw it every day at the university, endless variations of sophomores stumbling through his classes. She was slender, with flowing ringlets of dirty blonde hair that turned her plain face into something vaguely pretty. Her nose was crooked, and reminded him inexplicably of something out of Hemingway, but he couldn’t put his finger on what. She wore one of those ubiquitous black cocktail dresses, shorter than most, revealing long, toned legs. She turned slowly as he eased onto the adjacent stool, and as she looked him over he realized her eyes were different colors, one blue and one green.

  “You want a metaphor,” she said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “You’ve come for a vision, but you don’t want prophecy, you want a metaphor, a different way of looking at your situation, to help you shape the future.”

  Fitzwell nodded, “Something like that. I don’t believe in oracles. I’m not that gullible.”

  “But you believe in hookers? That’s kind of funny, Professor.”

  He froze. “You know me?”

  She nodded. “I had you for Freshman Lit last semester. Is that a problem for you? Don’t tell me you never banged a student.”

  He had of course, but that wasn’t the point. He looked at her more closely, trying to place her, and failed. He’d taught two sections of the lecture course last term, each with more than three hundred students. He’d personally met only a couple dozen during office hours, and left most of the one-on-one to his graduate teaching assistants.

  “Sorry, it’s a large class. I don’t remember you.”

  He saw laughter twinkle in her blue eye. The green eye gleamed with seriousness.

  Cassandra laughed. “Don’t worry about it. For what it’s worth, I liked it. Way too much reading for my taste, but you made it really interesting. Not a lot of professors bother to do that. So, anyway, it will cost you five hundred.”

  “Five hundred? That seems pretty high for this.”

  She shrugged. “A hundred for the hotel, four hundred for the vision. I’m throwing in the fuck for free ’cause you taught me about Keats and that Byron guy. That was way cool.” She pushed the margarita away from her and slid off the stool. “Come on, let’s get you your metaphor.”

  He followed her through the lobby and up to a third floor room. It was a nicer hotel than he’d expected, the kind of place he’d stayed at plenty of times during conferences and out-o
f-town trips. She hung up his coat after locking the door and waited for him to count out the five hundred. Then she led him over to the bed.

  He couldn’t look at her. His gaze kept fixing on other things: the clock radio, the mini-bar, the crappy painting bolted to the wall. Paying for sex didn’t make him feel powerful like he’d imagined. He felt foolish instead. You’re not paying for sex, he told himself, you’re here because she’s an oracle. But he didn’t really believe, did he?

  “You want tenure that bad?”

  Her voice shattered his uncertainty, startling him.

  “What? How did you—”

  She smiled with just the corners of her mouth and pointed to the side of her head. “Oracle, remember? Tapping into the cosmos takes work, but picking up stray surface thoughts is easy, especially when someone’s broadcasting as strongly as you are. Anyway, is tenure that tough? That competitive? That you’d come to me?”

  He flushed. “You—you came recommended. By a colleague in another department.”

  Cassandra chuckled. “Oh, right, the chemist. Travalero, right? Kind of makes me wish I’d took some science classes. He got his grant?”

  Fitzwell nodded. “One NSF reviewer called it the most original thinking he’d seen in decades.”

  She winked. “I give good oracle. Now, let’s work on your problem.” She shrugged, tossing her hair back over one shoulder, and did something to her dress that caused it to slip from her body and pool at her feet. Her hands moved behind her back and her bra came free. She smiled at him again and stepped up to him, wearing only her panties. Her fingers glided over the buttons of his shirt, and she began to undress him.

  Fitzwell put all thoughts of prophecy away and joined in removing his clothes. When he was naked she knelt in front of him, grasped his cock with one hand and closed her lips over the head, lightly stroking and sucking him until he was hard. Then she rose, peeled off her underwear, and led him to the bed. He positioned himself between her thighs and with barely a caress of foreplay slid into her.