by Jack Dann
Sairie shook her head. "When Dave blew up Joe you lost. Big Bone Chief lost, science, all lost." Cope blushed, started as if to tip his hat, realized it was long gone, and hurried aboard the train.
Sairie walked the horses south of the tracks and found Jessie Crooked-Knife. The sounds of the Essence of Frankincense medicine show covered the whistle as the train left for Denver.
Strata
by
Edward Bryant
In some parts of the American West, there are places where the living rock has been deeply scoured by erosion, or sawed through by fast-moving rivers, or blasted open by the road-building activities of humans, and, in such places, it is possible to travel in only a few moments past strata that took millions of years to form; and, if you know how, you can read one by one the traces of eons of vanished time that have left their only record in the rock.
As the evocative story that follows suggests, time also lays down strata in the human heart, and perhaps in the fabric of the universe itself; strata that can be dangerous to try to read . . .
Edward Bryant became a full-time writer in 1969, and over the years has established himself as one of the most popular and respected writers of his generation. He has won two Nebula Awards for his short fiction, which has appeared in almost all of the well-known magazines and anthologies, as well as in markets outside the genre such as Penthouse and National Lampoon. Bryant is also well known as a critic, his reviews appearing regularly in such places as Mile-High Futures, The Twilight Zone Magazine, and Locus. His books include the acclaimed short-story collections Particle Theory, Cinnabar, Among the Dead; Wyoming Sun, a novelization of a television script by Harlan Ellison; Phoenix Without Ashes; and, as editor, the anthology 2076: The American Tricen-tennial.
* * *
Six hundred million years in thirty-two miles. Six hundred million years in fifty-one minutes. Steve Mavrakis traveled in time—courtesy of the Wyoming Highway Department. The epochs raveled between Thermopolis and Shoshoni. The Wind River rambled down its canyon with the Burlington Northern tracks cut into the west walls, and the two-lane blacktop, U.S. 20, sliced into the east. Official signs driven into the verge of the highway proclaimed the traveler's progress:
DINWOODY FORMATION
TRIASSIC
185-225 MILLION YEARS
BIG HORN FORMATION
ORDOVICIAN
440-500 MILLION YEARS
FLATHEAD FORMATION
CAMBRIAN
500-600 MILLION YEARS
The mileposts might have been staked into the canyon rock under the pressure of millennia. They were there for those who could not read the stone.
Tonight Steve ignored the signs. He had made this run many times before. Darkness hemmed him. November clawed when he cracked the window to exhaust Camel smoke from the Chevy's cab. The CB crackled occasionally and picked up exactly nothing.
The wind blew—that was nothing unusual. Steve felt himself hypnotized by the skiff of snow skating across the pavement in the glare of his brights. The snow swirled only inches above the blacktop, rushing across like surf sliding over the black packed sand of a beach.
Time's predator hunts.
Years scatter before her like a school of minnows surprised. The rush of her passage causes eons to eddy. Wind sweeps down the canyon with the roar of combers breaking on the sand. The moon, full and newly risen, exerts its tidal force.
Moonlight flashes on the slash of teeth.
And Steve snapped alert, realized he had traversed the thirty-two miles, crossed the flats leading into Shoshoni, and was approaching the junction with U.S. 26. Road hypnosis? he thought. Safe in Shoshoni, but it was scary. He didn't remember a goddamned minute of the trip through the canyon. Steve rubbed his eyes with his left hand and looked for an open cafe with coffee.
It hadn't been the first time.
All those years before, the four of them had thought they were beating the odds. On a chill night in June, high on a mountain edge in the Wind River Range, high on more than mountain air, the four of them celebrated graduation. They were young and clear-eyed: ready for the world. That night they knew there were no other people for miles. Having learned in class that there were 3.8 human beings per square mile in Wyoming, and as four, they thought the odds outnumbered.
Paul Onoda, eighteen. He was Sansei—third generation Japanese-American. In 1942, before he was conceived, his parents were removed with eleven thousand other Japanese-Americans from California to the Heart Mountain Relocation Center in northern Wyoming. Twelve members and three generations of the Onodas shared one of four hundred and sixty-five crowded, tar-papered barracks for the next four years. Two died. Three more were born. With their fellows, the Onodas helped farm eighteen hundred acres of virgin agricultural land. Not all of them had been Japanese gardeners or truck farmers in California, so the pharmacists and the teachers and the carpenters learned agriculture. They used irrigation to bring in water. The crops flourished. The Nisei not directly involved with farming were dispatched from camp to be seasonal farm laborers. A historian later laconically noted that "Wyoming benefited by their presence."
Paul remembered the Heart Mountain camps only through the memories of his elders, but those recollections were vivid. After the war, most of the Onodas stayed on in Wyoming. With some difficulty, they bought farms. The family invested thrice the effort of their neighbors, and prospered.
Paul Onoda excelled in the classrooms and starred on the football field of Fremont High School. Once he overheard the president of the school board tell the coach, "By God, but that little Nip can run!" He thought about that and kept on running ever faster.
More than a few of his classmates secretly thought he had it all. When prom time came in his senior year, it did not go unnoticed that Paul had an extraordinarily handsome appearance to go with his brains and athlete's body. In and around Fremont, a great many concerned parents admonished their white daughters to find a good excuse if Paul asked them to the prom.
Carroll Dale, eighteen. It became second nature early on to explain to people first hearing her given name that it had two r's and two l's. Both sides of her family went back four generations in this part of the country and one of her bequests had been a proud mother. Cordelia Carroll had pride, one daughter, and the desire to see the Hereford Carrolls retain some parity with the Angus Dales. After all, the Carrolls had been ranching on Bad Water Creek before John Broderick. Okie illuminated his Lost Cabin castle with carbide lights. That was when Teddy Roosevelt had been president and it was when all the rest of the cattlemen in Wyoming, including the Dales, had been doing their accounts at night by kerosene lanterns.
Carroll grew up to be a good roper and a better rider. Her apprenticeship intensified after her older brother, her only brother, fatally shot himself during deer season. She wounded her parents when she neither married a man who would take over the ranch nor decided to take over the ranch herself.
She grew up slim and tall, with ebony hair and large, dark, slightly oblique eyes. Her father's father, at family Christmas dinners, would overdo the whiskey in the eggnog and make jokes about Indians in the woodpile until her paternal grandmother would tell him to shut the hell up before she gave him a goodnight the hard way, with a rusty sickle and knitting needles. It was years before Carroll knew what her grandmother meant.
In junior high, Carroll was positive she was eight feet tall in Lilliput. The jokes hurt. But her mother told her to be patient, that the other girls would catch up. Most of the girls didn't; but in high school the boys did, though they tended to be tongue-tied in the extreme when they talked to her.
She was the first girl president of her school's National Honor Society. She was a cheerleader. She was the valedictorian of her class and earnestly quoted John F. Kennedy in her graduation address. Within weeks of graduation, she eloped with the captain of the football team.
It nearly caused a lynching.
Steve Mavrakis, eighteen. Courtesy allowed him to be c
alled a native despite his birth eighteen hundred miles to the east. His parents, on the other hand, had settled in the state after the war when he was less than a year old. Given another decade, the younger native-born might grudgingly concede their adopted roots; the old-timers, never.
Steve's parents had read Zane Grey and The Virginian, and had spent many summers on dude ranches in upstate New York. So they found a perfect ranch on the Big Horn River and started a herd of registered Hereford. They went broke. They refinanced and aimed at a breed of inferior beef cattle. The snows of '49 killed those. Steve's father determined that sheep were the way to go—all those double and triple births. Very investment-effective. The sheep sickened, or stumbled and fell into creeks where they drowned, or panicked like turkeys and smothered in heaps in fenced corners. It occurred then to the Mavrakis family that wheat doesn't stampede. All the fields were promptly hailed out before what looked to be a bounty harvest. Steve's father gave up and moved into town where he put his Columbia degree to work by getting a job managing the district office for the Bureau of Land Management.
All of that taught Steve to be wary of sure things.
And occasionally he wondered at the dreams. He had been very young when the blizzards killed the cattle. But though he didn't remember the National Guard dropping hay bales from silver C-47's to cattle in tweive-foot-deep snow, he did recall, for years after, the nightmares of herds of nonplused animals futilely grazing barren ground before towering, slowly grinding bluffs of ice.
The night after the crop-duster terrified the sheep and seventeen had expired in paroxysms, Steve dreamed of brown men shrilling and shaking sticks and stampeding tusked, hairy monsters off a precipice and down hundreds of feet to a shallow stream.
Summer nights Steve woke sweating, having dreamed of reptiles slithering and warm waves beating on a ragged beach in the lower pasture. He sat straight, staring out the bedroom window, watching the giant ferns waver and solidify back into cottonwood and box elder.
The dreams came less frequently and vividly as he grew older. He willed that. They altered when the family moved into Fremont. After a while Steve still remembered he had had the dreams, but most of the details were forgotten.
At first the teachers in Fremont High School thought he was stupid. Steve was administered tests and thereafter was labeled an underachiever. He did what he had to do to get by. He barely qualified for the college-bound program, but then his normally easygoing father made threats. People asked him what he wanted to do, to be, and he answered honestly that he didn't know. Then he took a speech class. Drama fascinated him and he developed a passion for what theater the school offered. He played well in Our Town and Arsenic and Old Lace and Harvey. The drama coach looked at Steve's average height and average looks and average brown hair and eyes, and suggested at a hilarious cast party that he become either a character actor or an FBI agent.
By this time, the only dreams Steve remembered were sexual fantasies about girls he didn't dare ask on dates.
Ginger McClelland, seventeen. Who could blame her for feeling out of place? Having been born on the cusp of the school district's regulations, she was very nearly a year younger than her classmates. She was short. She thought of herself as a dwarf in a world of Snow Whites. It didn't help that her mother studiously offered words like "petite" and submitted that the most gorgeous clothes would fit a wearer under five feet two inches. Secretly she hoped that in one mysterious night she would bloom and grow great, long legs like Carroll Dale. That never happened.
Being an exile in an alien land didn't help either. Though Carroll had befriended her, she had listened to the president of the pep club, the queen of Job's Daughters, and half the girls in her math class refer to her as "the foreign-exchange student." Except that she would never be repatriated home; at least not until she graduated. Her parents had tired of living in Cupertino, California, and thought that running a Coast to Coast hardware franchise in Fremont would be an adventurous change of pace. They loved the open spaces, the mountains and free-flowing streams. Ginger wasn't so sure. Every day she felt she had stepped into a time machine. All the music on the radio was old. The movies that turned up at the town's one theater—forget it. The dancing at the hops was grotesque.
Ginger McClelland was the first person in Fremont—and perhaps in all of Wyoming—to use the adjective "bitchin." It got her sent home from study hall and caused a bemused and confusing interview between her parents and the principal.
Ginger learned not to trust most of the boys who invited her out on dates. They all seemed to feel some sort of perverse mystique about California girls. But she did accept Steve Mavrakis' last-minute invitation to the prom. He seemed safe enough.
Because Carroll and Ginger were friends, the four of them ended up double-dating in Paul's father's old maroon DeSoto that was customarily used for hauling fence posts and wire out to the pastures. After the dance, when nearly everyone else was heading to one of the sanctioned after-prom parties, Steve affably obtained from an older intermediary an entire case of chilled Hamms. Ginger and Carroll had brought along jeans and Pendleton shirts in their overnight bags and changed in the restroom at the Chevron station. Paul and Steve took off their white jackets and donned windbreakers. Then they all drove up into the Wind River Range. After they ran out of road, they hiked. It was very late and very dark. But they found a high mountain place where they huddled and drank beer and talked and necked.
They heard the voice of the wind and nothing else beyond that. They saw no lights of cars or outlying cabins. The isolation exhilarated them. They knew there was no one else for miles.
That was correct so far as it went.
Foam hissed and sprayed as Paul applied the church key to the cans. Above and below them, the wind broke like waves on the rocks.
"Mavrakis, you're going to the university, right?" said Paul.
Steve nodded in the dim moonlight, added, "I guess so."
"What're you going to take?" said Ginger, snuggling close and burping slightly on her beer.
"I don't know; engineering, I guess. If you're a guy and in the college-bound program, you end up taking engineering. So I figure that's it."
Paul said, "What kind?"
"Don't know. Maybe aerospace. I'll move to Seattle and make spaceships."
"That's neat," said Ginger. "Like in The Outer Limits. I wish we could get that here."
"You ought to be getting into hydraulic engineering," said Paul. "Water's going to be really big business not too long from now."
"I don't think I want to stick around Wyoming."
Carroll had been silently staring out over the valley. She turned back toward Steve and her eyes were pools of darkness. "You really going to leave?"
"Yeah."
"And never come back?"
"Why should I?" said Steve. "I've had all the fresh air and wide-open spaces I can use for a lifetime. You know something? I've never even seen the ocean." And yet he had felt the ocean. He blinked. "I'm getting out."
"Me too," said Ginger. "I'm going to stay with my aunt and uncle in L.A. I think I can probably get into the University of Southern California journalism school."
"Got the money?" said Paul.
"I'll get a scholarship."
"Aren't you leaving?" Steve said to Carroll.
"Maybe," she said. "Sometimes I think so, and then I'm not so sure."
"You'll come back even if you do leave," said Paul. "All of you'll come back."
"Says who?" Steve and Ginger said it almost simultaneously.
"The land gets into you," said Carroll. "Paul's dad says so."
"That's what he says." They all heard anger in Paul's voice. He opened another round of cans. Ginger tossed her empty away and it clattered down the rocks, a noise jarringly out of place.
"Don't," said Carroll. "We'll take the empties down in the sack."
"What's wrong?" said Ginger. "I mean, I . . ." Her voice trailed off and everyone was silent for a minute, two mi
nutes, three.
"What about you, Paul?" said Carroll. "Where do you want to go? What do you want to do?"
"We talked about—" His voice sounded suddenly tightly controlled. "Damn it, I don't know now. If I come back, it'll be with an atomic bomb—"
"What?" said Ginger.
Paul smiled. At least Steve could see white teeth gleaming in the night. "As for what I want to do—" He leaned forward and whispered in Carroll's ear.
She said, "Jesus, Paul! We've got witnesses."
"What? " Ginger said again.
"Don't even ask you don't want to know." She made it one continuous sentence. Her teeth also were visible in the near-darkness. "Try that and I've got a mind to goodnight you the hard way."
"What're you talking about?" said Ginger.
Paul laughed. "Her grandmother."
"Charlie Goodnight was a big rancher around the end of the century," Carroll said. "He trailed a lot of cattle up from Texas. Trouble was, a lot of his expensive bulls weren't making out so well. Their testicles—"
"Balls," said Paul.
"—kept dragging on the ground," she continued. "The bulls got torn up and infected. So Charlie Goodnight started getting his bulls ready for the overland trip with some amateur surgery. He'd cut into the scrotum and shove the balls up into the bull. Then he'd stitch up the sack and there'd be no problem with high-centering. That's called goodnighting."
"See," said Paul. "There are ways to beat the land."
Carroll said, " 'You do what you've got to.' That's a quote from my father. Good pioneer stock."
"But not to me." Paul pulled her close and kissed her.
"Maybe we ought to explore the mountain a little," said Ginger to Steve. "You want to come with me?" She stared at Steve, who was gawking at the sky as the moonlight suddenly vanished like a light switching off.
"Oh, my God."