Mercury Shrugs

by Robert Kroese

  His memories of this time—like those of all angels—were a little fuzzy. Every angel had some vestigial memories of being in Heaven before the creation of the Mundane Plane, but they were vague, like a half-remembered dream. The first few years—decades?—on the Mundane plane were fuzzy as well, as if the angels had been awakening from that collective dream. Or maybe it was like Balderhaz said: before the angels had come into being, they had existed like newborns, fully conscious but unable to process and store their experiences as memories. What remained from before that time was a mainly a sense of loss, a shared notion that they had come from somewhere better, and were returning there some day.

  Mercury sighed and put his hands in his pockets, his right hand touching something that felt like a cell phone. He pulled it out: the miracle detector. The device was simply a plastic box with a screen and a single button on the side. Mercury pressed the button on the side and the screen came to life, displaying an hourglass icon. After a few seconds, the icon was replaced by the words:

  NO ANOMALY DETECTED

  It figured. Tiamat said the range was only a few miles, and even if there were other angels on Earth, it was pretty unlikely any of them would be that close or would be using interplanar energy at this very moment. It occurred to him, though, that the miracle detector would also alert him if the portal re-opened. He could go looking for Christine and come back here if the portal re-opened.

  He wondered if he should use the miracle detector to try to locate the other angels. The device wouldn’t detect angels per se; it could only detect the warping of the energy channels that was caused by an angel’s conscious manipulation of them. Still, if he went airborne and covered a lot of ground, he’d undoubtedly find one of them eventually. He might even run into the earlier version of himself. That would be weird—although not as weird as seeing an alternate version of himself die before his own eyes.

  If he did find other angels, he could warn them about Lucifer’s plan and they could help him watch for his arrival. Was there another Lucifer out there somewhere too? There had to be. He wondered what the future Lucifer’s plan was for dealing with prehistoric Lucifer. Nothing good, in all likelihood. He doubted very much Lucifer would exhibit any sentimental attachment to his younger self; he would simply be another threat to be eliminated.

  Mercury spent the next several hours waiting for Lucifer to appear, but the portal didn’t reopen. His boredom finally getting the better of him, Mercury went back outside and leapt into the air, soaring above the desert plain. He flew toward the mountains in the East, thinking they might lead him to a river or some other water feature near which humans—or angels—might congregate. But still he saw nothing but sparsely vegetated desert plain. The local fauna—gazelles and various rodents—confirmed that he was somewhere in Africa, but there were no humans to be found. As he neared the mountain range, he turned south, continuing for several miles. Occasionally he would check the miracle detector, but it continued to insist:

  NO ANOMALY DETECTED

  When he was a little over ten miles from Eden II, he decided to turn back, as he was unsure the miracle detector would register the portal opening from this distance. But as he checked the device once more, the familiar message disappeared and was replaced by a small arrow pointing to the southeast. It would occasionally switch to a different direction or disappear entirely, but it was pretty clearly pointing to a disturbance in the interplanar energy channels of some kind.

  Mercury hesitated for a moment, uncertain how long he should leave the portal location unattended, but the anomaly would dissipate as soon as the miracle had been performed, so he might not get another chance to locate its source for some time. Ultimately his curiosity got the better of him. He veered slightly to the right and increased his velocity, heading in the direction the arrow pointed.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Somewhere in North Africa; c. 5,000 B.C

  Christine Temetri and Jacob Slater huddled behind a bush, watching from a distance as their village burned. There wasn’t much cover in this terrain, but so far the two of them seemed to have escaped notice. The same couldn’t be said for the other members of their adoptive tribe, who had been slaughtered or rounded up by the Detroit Pistons.

  That wasn’t the belligerent tribe’s real name, of course. Its real name in the local language was some combination of lingual clicks, humming, and impossibly complicated hand gestures. Jacob and Christine and mastered a few basic words and phrases over the four months they had been among the Lakers, but amongst themselves they still used English exclusively—including coming up with their own names for the local tribes. There were six other tribes that the Lakers—their own tribe—had contact with, and it was hard enough to keep them straight without having to remember which one was a hum and three clicks and which one was two clicks, a hum and thumbs-up. Christine had suggested naming the tribes after schools of Western graphic art (the Pre-Raphaelites, the Impressionists, the Cubists, etc.), but even she couldn’t remember if the group to the southeast were Dadaists or Modernists, and Jacob’s scheme of matching tribes to NBA teams won out.

  Most of the tribes—the Lakers, the Nets, the Bulls, the Celtics, the Heat and the Jazz—coexisted more or less peacefully in the region, but recently the Bulls and the Celtics had formed an alliance against the Pistons, who had been on an expansive tear. The chief of the Pistons, Isiah Thomas, had apparently gotten it into his head that it was his divine destiny to subjugate all the other tribes in the region. This sudden belligerence was so out of character for these people that the other tribes had failed to recognize the threat until the Nuggets and Trail Blazers, farther north, had already been wiped out. Even after that slaughter, the Bulls-Celtics alliance remained an informal agreement characterized not so much by any actual strategic cooperation as it was by the hope that the Pistons would pick on one of the non-allied tribes next. That hope proved unfounded.

  The Lakers were in talks with the Heat and Jazz about what to do about the Piston threat, but these tribes were fiercely independent and exhaustively deliberate in their decision-making; nothing firm had been decided by the time the Pistons emerged en masse from the scrub and chased the Lakers from their huts. Most of the men had been killed; the women and children had been captured. The Pistons had set fire to the Lakers huts and returned to their own village, leaving only a handful of men behind to look for stragglers.

  Christine and Jacob had escaped the carnage only because they had been assigned by the tribe to gather blackberries that morning. It was rare for the Lakers to send two members of the tribe off by themselves, but they made an exception for Christine and Jacob, who were hopeless at hunting, weaving baskets, and just about every other task the tribe needed done. Jacob was fairly certain it wasn’t even blackberry season; the two of them had been gone all morning and still hadn’t found any. They couldn’t help wondering when the Lakers’ charity was going to run out, but that was a moot question now.

  “Do you think it’s safe?” Christine asked.

  “For—unck—what?” asked Jacob. Jacob had a chronic verbal tic that had mostly subsided since their arrival in prehistoric Africa, but it tended to return in high stress situations.

  “To go back to the village. Maybe we can scrounge enough food to make it to the Timberwolves.” The Timberwolves’ village was about forty miles to the south.

  “I’m pretty sure the Timberwolves are cannibals,” said Jacob. “We would—unck—have better luck with the Heat.”

  “The Heat are even farther,” said Christine. “We’ll never make it. There are lions down that way.”

  “There are lions everywhere,” said Jacob. “That’s why I didn’t use NFL teams.”

  “M’boutoo [click click]!” said a voice behind them, and they spun around to see a man with a spear watching them. He bore the tribal markings of the Pistons.

  “Son of a bitch,” said Christine. Jacob nodded. For a moment, he considered running. These tribesmen were ridiculously f
ast, but this guy looked fairly old and gaunt by local standards, and Jacob thought he could outrun him. But that would leave Christine alone, and in any case, there was no place for him to go. Better to be killed quickly now than to be eaten by a lion. Or a Timberwolf.

  “[Click click] Mootoo [click],” the man said, pointing his spear to their right. They got to their feet and began walking in the direction he indicated. After a few minutes, they encountered another Pistons tribesman. This one was younger and healthier looking, and the sheer surface area of his tattoos seemed to suggest some importance. He and the man who had taken them captive engaged in a long exchange, punctuated by silences in which they would stare curiously at their two captives. Christine and Jacob were used to this; they were the lightest-skinned people any of these tribesmen had ever seen. Even Jacob, who was considered “African American” in twenty-first century America, was an anomaly with his coffee-and-cream complexion. In fact, it was Jacob who appeared to be of most interest to these two men—it seemed to Jacob that they were having trouble categorizing him. Christine was obviously different, but what was Jacob? And how would their determination affect his fate? He wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer to that.

  After some time the two men seemed to come to a decision, and the old man again click/hummed an order at them and pointed in the direction they had been traveling. Christine and Jacob started walking, with the two men following close behind, their spears at the ready.

  Coming over a small ridge, they found themselves looking at a group of several dozen people standing huddled together, guarded by half a dozen men with spears. Christine and Jacob were prodded toward the group, whom they recognized as members of their adoptive tribe, the Lakers. Jacob realized with some discomfort that he was the only man among them. The warriors of their tribe had all been killed—even poor old James Worthy. Why hadn’t they killed Jacob? Was it merely because they didn’t think he was a threat?

  After a few more stragglers had been added to the group, someone click/hummed another order, and the group began shuffling to the north. Christine and Jacob went with them.

  They spent the next five hours walking across the desert with the other captives. It was hot, but not unbearably so, which was good because the attackers had apparently only brought a minimal amount of water with them. Once an hour or so, they would stop and pass around a skin of water, each of them getting a single swallow. Occasionally one of the women would collapse. The first time this happened, several of the others went to her aid but were mercilessly attacked by the captors. One young woman was impaled with a spear and left to die alongside the woman she had been trying to help. The next time someone fell, she was left to die on her own. The Pistons didn’t seem concerned that the women might be faking; everybody knew that being left out here alone was a death sentence.

  Eventually they reached the Pistons’ village, which could easily have been mistaken for the Lakers’ village except for one major difference: in the center of this village was a roughly circular stone altar, about three feet tall and ten feet in diameter. The surface of the altar was stained with blood.

  The captives all around Christine and Jacob were variously seized and prodded, disappearing to other areas of the village, until only Christine and Jacob remained, encircled by a ring of men with spears. They stared uneasily at the altar.

  “I don’t suppose we’ve been—unck—selected to be guests of honor at some sort of welcoming ceremony,” said Jacob.

  “That’s one way to phrase it,” said Christine.

  To their left, a pair of men wearing elaborate headdresses exited a large hut. They walked to the altar and stood, one on either side, their spears planted on the ground in front of them.

  Then a third man emerged from the hut. He was older and heavier than the other two, and wore an even more elaborate getup. Jacob could only assume this was the chief of the Pistons tribe, the man he knew as Isiah Thomas. He was a little disappointing, truth be told. Even the actual Isiah Thomas was more intimidating than this guy. But then the actual Isiah Thomas didn’t have a flaming sword. This guy did.

  “Shit,” said Christine.

  “Well, now we know what happened to Nisroc’s sword,” said Jacob. Nisroc was the angel who had chased them out of Eden II four months earlier. He was supposed to be guarding the entrance to the garden with a flaming sword, but he claimed to have lost it on the way over. The last Christine and Jacob knew, he was still scouring the plains looking for it. Apparently Chief Isiah Thomas had found it. He stopped in front of the altar and whirled the sword in front of him in an obviously practiced manner.

  “I wonder if this explains the Pistons’ sudden belligerence,” said Christine.

  “What do you mean?” asked Jacob.

  “These tribes were so peaceful before. Maybe the sword inspired them to violence, like—”

  “Like the monolith in 2001,” said Jacob.

  “I was going to say the Coke bottle in The Gods Must Be Crazy.”

  Jacob shook his head, still watching the chief twirl the sword. “The noble savage is a myth,” he said. “These people were peaceful because their environment checks their population growth, making it largely unnecessary to quarrel over resources. Also, they don’t have the technology to administer a political unit larger than a village. No roads, no written language…”

  “So how do you explain this sudden turn toward violence?”

  “Aberration,” said Jacob. “Possibly precipitated by the acquisition of the sword.”

  “That’s no answer,” said Christine. “Did the sword turn them evil or not?”

  “Not in the way you’re thinking,” said Jacob. “It’s not The One Ring.”

  “The Evil Thing,” Christine corrected.

  “Whatever,” said Jacob. “The point is, you’re regressing into animism, the belief that inanimate objects have spiritual properties. Besides, violence is not in itself necessarily—”

  The chief had ceased his show and was now pointing the fiery sword directly at Christine. He click/hummed an order and one of the spearmen stepped toward Christine.

  “You were saying?” she said.

  The man grabbed Christine by the arm and dragged her toward the altar. Jacob protested, but the other spearman growled at him and pointed his spear. All around him were other men, also with spears at the ready. There was going to be no escape this time.

  Christine tried to resist, but it was no use. She was already weak from hunger and thirst, and there was nowhere to go even if she could break free. The man dragged her forward and threw her down on the altar. She raised her hands as she fell, catching herself as she hit the hard stone. She could smell the blood of those who had died there before.

  The chief was clicking and humming something fierce behind her, and she rolled onto her back to face him. He was walking toward her, swinging the fiery blade over his head. As Christine tried to scurry away, two men approached, one on either side of the chief. Each man grabbed one of her ankles while the two more ornately festooned men took hold of her wrists. The four of them pulled her flat on the stone surface while Jacob watched helplessly, a man barring his way with a spear. He’d never felt more useless in his life. He could only hope that the chief killed him as soon as he was done with Christine; Jacob didn’t think he could live with himself after failing to protect Christine from these psychopaths.

  The chief stood next to the altar, uttering some sort of prayer to a god or gods that would die out thousands of years before Jacob was even born. When the chief finished, he raised the fiery sword over his head. Christine clamped her eyes shut and turned her head away.

  He brought the sword down in a decisive arc toward her neck.

  Jacob closed his eyes as well, unable to watch. He wasn’t sure what cue he was waiting for; some kind of bloodthirsty hum/click of exultation, he supposed. But it didn’t come. All he heard was the equivalent of confused muttering. He opened his eyes to see the chief, sword outstretched mere inches from Chri
stine’s neck. A look of frustration had overcome him; he seemed to be trying to drive the sword downward, but without success. Finally he pulled the sword back over his head and made a second attempt, swinging once again at Christine’s neck. Again Jacob grimaced and turned away. But this time, Jacob kept his eyes open, and he saw the blade halt three inches from Christine’s neck, just as it had before. It was as if an invisible barrier was protecting her. After a few seconds, Christine opened one eye and then the other, staring at the blade. The men around her clicked and hummed in confusion and fear.

  Jacob heard someone speaking behind him—it sounded like the local language, but a dialect he hadn’t heard before, as if the speaker was not a native. At the man’s words, the men released Christine. The chief turned toward them, clicking angrily, but whoever the newcomer was, the men seemed more frightened of him than they were of the chief. Turning to see their mysterious stranger, Jacob literally didn’t believe his eyes.

  No, he thought. It can’t be him. He’s ten thousand miles and seven thousand years from now. This is some kind of fantasy my subconscious has concocted because I can’t deal with the thought of Christine being executed. But as he turned back to look at Christine, he could see she was just as stunned as he was.

  “I’d leave now if I were you,” the tall, silver-haired man said. “I’m not entirely sure if I told them I’m a god who is displeased with the chief’s choice of sacrifice or if I’m a constipated gazelle who wants to date the chief’s sister.”

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Mercury led them away from the village while the Pistons were still arguing about how to deal with this silver-haired stranger. When they had gotten a safe distance from the men with spears, Mercury stopped and turned, smiling at them.