"Does Mike know what we're doing?"
"I told him that we were going up to a water park in Provo. Mike didn't want to come. He's afraid of water."
"Afraid?" Bron grinned.
"I tried to get him into a boat once, and he got so scared he threw up."
They reached Bron's car, and he popped the doors with the keyless entry. He held his door open for a few long seconds, to let the hot air escape, and Olivia took the keys from him, then eased into the driver's seat. Bron got in on the passenger's side.
"Where are we going?" Bron asked when he'd settled in.
Olivia shook her head. "You'll find out when we get there."
Bron fell silent, and Olivia took the road into Saint George. When she reached the corner of Bluff Street and Saint George Boulevard, she took the steep road to the airport, which was atop a mesa that looked down over the city, with the big white Mormon temple at its heart. Moments later they reached the airport and on the tarmac Bron spotted a shiny black helicopter. A pilot in a black flight uniform stood at attention, regarding them from behind mirrored sunglasses.
"We're taking that?" Bron asked. "Why not a plane?"
"I don't think there are any airports where we're going," Olivia said.
When they reached the chopper, the pilot opened the door. "Climb in, folks," he said, "and make yourselves comfortable."
The interior was surprisingly plush, with leather seats and a quiet cab. A radio played light rock music. Bron put on his seatbelt, and sat, nervously excited.
The pilot opened a privacy window and called, "We'll be airborne in a moment, folks. Strap yourselves in. Feel free to grab a drink out of the cooler. We're a little more than an hour out from our destination. The skies are clear, and the trip should be pleasant."
"What kind of helicopter is this?" Bron asked.
Olivia shrugged. "A fast helicopter."
The pilot hit the ignition, and soon they were lofting east out over the edge of the city. They streamed past sun-baked mountains, rocky gorges and barren desert. The sky was a deep blue, like a flawless sapphire.
Sooner than expected, the chopper breezed above Glen Canyon Dam and they reached Lake Powell, one of the scenic wonders of North America, with its sparkling waters butting up against ancient petrified sandstone hills. With over two thousand miles of shore, there were hidden inlets everywhere that one could swim in and explore. Majestic arches rose up in places, providing fantastic scenery, and Anasazi pictographs adorned the rocks.
Bron had seen pictures of it, the surreal slot canyons where sunlight filtered down narrow cracks, glowing like gold over the sculpted stone.
The pilot flew past the marina at Page, Arizona. Houseboats dotted the lake, and long swells, blown by the wind, seemed to crawl toward shore.
Soon, there were no more roads along the lake. The chopper began dropping. Bron tapped Olivia's arm and asked, "Where are we going?"
Olivia pointed in answer—to a fantastic arch of red sandstone rising up almost from the water—Rainbow Bridge. A few boats were moored out front, tourists taking pictures.
The pilot breezed above it, to a secluded inlet, where a single houseboat sat moored. It drifted in a still lagoon upon the blue waters.
The helicopter settled onto a gently sloping rock.
The pilot jumped out and opened the doors. Bron climbed out, peering at the houseboat: it was different from anything he'd ever seen.
The first thing he noticed was its sheer size. They'd passed dozens of houseboats on the way—but none so large. It wasn't a forty-or fifty-foot houseboat. It had to be closer to a hundred.
But it wasn't just size that made it seem so ... stately. Most houseboats on the lake were painted basic white. The color reflected the desert sun, keeping the boats cool. But this one was different. At the waterline it was gold. Not paint, he suspected. It looked like real gold foil. The foil was shaped into scales that reflected like mirrors, showing every little ripple at the waterline.
A walkway encircled the boat, with fluted columns painted ruby and deep blue that reminded Bron of something from ancient Greece. But above them was a deep blue strip of tiles, and upon each tile was an ancient symbol: the eye of Isis. He recognized it from an old history book.
Not Greek, he realized, Egyptian. The houseboat was decorated to look like an ancient Egyptian pleasure barge, something Cleopatra might have taken out upon the Nile when she sought to seduce Mark Antony. Bron almost expected to see Egyptian slaves, all painted in gold, manning the oars while serving girls stood by to fan him with ostrich feathers.
Broad windows looked to be made of cut crystal, and inside, soft lights glowed an unearthly pink, as if someone kept a setting sun inside them. He could see rich cedar paneling, and a fine bar with couches and a big-screen television, and a walk-in refrigerator with a stainless-steel door. It looked almost like a yacht.
Bron glanced at Olivia, dumbfounded. "Is your friend rich?"
Olivia smiled. "It appears that her investments are doing well."
The pilot climbed back into the helicopter. He'd never turned off the engine. Now he rose up, and the wind from the props washed over them, as if driving Bron toward the water.
He headed to shore, where a pontoon bridge invited him onto the boat. The sky overhead yawned wide, and golden sunlight glinted off the waters and reflected from the stony ground.
Bron held back, waiting for Olivia to take the lead. She didn't. He said, "You've met this woman before, right?"
"Yes, we were roommates in college." Olivia suggested, "Go ahead."
He set out over the bridge, which bobbed with each step. "Where did you say you went to college, again?"
"Harvard," Olivia said, "and Juilliard." Bron glanced back in astonishment, and she explained, "Memory merchants do well in school. I got by on scholarships."
Bron walked along the pontoons, and spotted a pair of jet skis docked inside a little built-in marina near the rear of the houseboat. They were high-tech, black, with custom purple-and-gold flames painted along their bodies. Everything spoke of opulence.
Bron climbed onto the deck, and knocked at a wide door to the interior. It was dark inside, almost black after the blinding daylight. He stood for a moment blinking, trying to let his eyes adjust. Olivia halted. He glanced back.
"Aren't you coming?" he asked.
"No," she said. "You have to go alone...."
Chapter 24
Revelations
"When a bit of wisdom destroys your world in a moment and rebuilds it just as quickly, that is revelation."
— Olivia Hernandez
"Come in...." a woman called with a British accent. Bron leapt in surprise, then stood blinking stupidly into the darkness. He could see through the glass door, barely. He opened it and entered, then stood peering into the shadows.
A young woman crouched upon a black sofa. A low coffee table stood poised before her. Some glass balls upon it glowed a hot pink, providing the only interior light. She stood and skirted the table, nearly invisible in the darkness.
"Oh, hi!" Bron said, embarrassed. "I didn't see anyone."
She stood before him. She was shorter than him, and had straight black hair, a slender figure. She wore a flimsy red dress, and droplets of sweat had beaded on her chest. She obviously wasn't used to the heat of Utah. She might have been anywhere from twenty to fifty, for there was an agelessness to her eyes.
She appraised him as if he were a fine stallion. "So," she said at last, "You're the asufaak arru'yah, the dream assassin."
She raised her hand, palm up, as if to wave, and suction cups blossomed in perfect little ovals on her fingertips. Bron stood, unsure what to do. She nodded toward his hands, begging him to do the same. He raised his hand, self-consciously showed his sizraels. She smiled graciously.
"My name is Monique. I'm the Weigher of Lost Souls. Has Olivia told you about me?"
"Not much," Bron admitted. "She said you were friends in college."
"Good," Mo
nique said. She had a commanding presence. She stared, as if looking through him, for a long time. "Olivia can't really tell you who you are. That task is left to me to discern. She can teach you about music, but my... specialty, is people—the history of our people. Would you like to know who you are?"
Despite his clash with the enemy, Bron had been told little about the masaaks. He knew even less about the Draghouls and dream assassins. "Yes," he said.
"Knowledge carries a price," Monique suggested. "Knowledge ... changes you. With it comes responsibility, but I will demand more than just a promise to take responsibility. Before I teach you, I must lay your mind bare."
Bron's stomach tightened. He froze with indecision.
"You're afraid of what I will see?" Monique asked. "You have to overcome that fear. I'll learn everything about you—every lie you've told, every lustful thought or deed you've acted upon. I'll learn the deepest secrets that you fear to tell."
"I'd rather not," Bron said. He glanced around for Olivia, wondering what she'd gotten him into, but she hadn't followed him onto the boat.
Monique said, "Olivia is not allowed in here. Not now. This is for me and you alone." She said it in a tone that made Bron suspect that Monique wasn't just Olivia's old friend, but some sort of superior.
"Have a seat," Monique said gently. "I mean you no harm. You and I must talk." Bron felt suddenly nervous. He was stuck on a houseboat in a wasteland with a strange woman who seemed to have unnerving power. She gestured toward an overstuffed recliner, and Bron sat, found himself falling backward into its cushions, as if dropping into a cloud.
Monique knelt before him, and took his left hand in both of hers. The low-cut top of her flimsy dress was tantalizing. She wore no bra, and her small breasts reminded him of Whitney's, and so she filled him with embarrassing longings. He didn't believe that Monique was trying to tempt him. He suspected that she was dressed scantily only because it was so hot. He tried to look up into her heart-shaped face, into those ageless eyes. Monique smiled.
"You lust after me," she said. "Don't be ashamed. You're at an age when your hormones are awakening. It's not just me that tempts you, it's almost everyone—girls at your school, teachers, strangers on the street."
Bron said nothing. He wanted to deny it, because it made him feel embarrassed and out of control, but she was going to peer into his mind. He couldn't hide what he felt.
"I have seen into the minds of a thousand men," Monique said. "Some were criminals, but others were visionaries, and men of profound virtue. Even the greatest of them suffered the same temptations that you do. Some people were so craven that they could not qualify as human. Yet I've also encountered nobleness and beauty, order and insight, and longings for greatness. The mind is like a container, and it holds mainly what you decide to let it hold, what you treasure. I don't expect to find anything inside you that I have not encountered before. At your age, you're like a sponge. You take in everything you see and hear, and you're still learning what thoughts and ideas are of value and what can be discarded."
She began to rub his hand, his wrist, and suddenly his sizraels popped. She studied them.
"But I want you to know, Bron, that there is nothing you have done that others have not done. There is no longing so strange that I have not seen it before, no desire so perverse. You think that your greatest secrets, your greatest fears, are unique to you. But they're the same secrets and fears that we all share. I will leave the choice to you. I can teach you, but first I must be sure of you. The world is infinitely more vast and strange than you can imagine, Bron. You see it through a thin filter of the things that you know of and have learned over the past dozen years. But we can share with you memories of people who have lived over the past million years, through tens of thousands of lifetimes. Have you ever wondered how Einstein saw the world? Or Rasputin? Or William Shakespeare? Or Jesus? The memory merchants can reveal it all to you—the secrets of those people and others vastly more interesting, ancient people whose legacies have been lost in time. If you will but permit me, I can show you something you would never have imagined."
Bron didn't entirely trust this woman. She was too intense, too strange, and the way that she looked at him hungrily as she studied his hand, left him unnerved. His mouth suddenly went as dry as the desert, and his palms began to sweat. He felt an electric tingle pass through them, a current that went up through his body and warmed him. She smiled.
She wasn't very old, he realized. She couldn't have been more than thirty, about Olivia's age. He would never have admitted it, but he suddenly wanted to kiss her, and he could tell by the way that her pupils went wide that she felt something, too.
His palms had begun to sweat, as if the heat in the room were growing. He tried to pull his hand back, to wipe it off, but she clutched it all the tighter.
Almost against his will, he nodded.
Monique reached up with her left hand, as dainty as a child's, and tenderly touched his temple, as if to sweep the hair back from his brow. He felt an electric tingle, heard a sizzling. Golden lights flashed around his head like a halo.
"I want to show you something," she said. "I won't add it to your memories, just show you something that has been passed down among memory merchants now for a quarter of a million years."
She closed her eyes and planted her fingers across half of his face, touching the eyelid under his brow with a thumb, his forehead with her forefingers, and others spread out until her pinky reached just behind his ear.
Suddenly Bron's eyes seemed too heavy to stay open, and he found himself....
Straddling the back of a woolly mammoth, his legs lost in thick hair. At this season in the year, the mammoth's fur was burnt orange on top, bleached by the sun, and hung in long ragged wisps that fell out in the slightest breeze. The mammoth was shedding, its winter coat coming in. The hair smelled rancid, almost moldy.
Ahead and on either side, the land was scarred and torn. Mastodons had come this way on their migration north in the spring, tearing down trees and eating every green plant in their path—grass, bush, tree.
It had been a hard year, and now weeds cropped up among the rocks, while broken trees with scraggly limbs clung to life. What should have been fertile ground had been trodden to mud, creating a broad highway that wound through the hills.
His mammoth suddenly grew wary, paused in its tracks, raised its trunk and waved it in the air as it sought an elusive scent. Its small ears flapped forward. Then it drew back and blew a warning call, much like that of an elephant, but far deeper.
Tutuk, for that was the rider's name in this memory, peered across a broken horizon, covered in rough hills and rocky bluffs, and searched among the rocks for any sign of a hill tiger, or a pack of dire wolves. To the left, a river ran. Wheat grew beside it to a height of fifteen feet. This was ancient wheat, Bron realized, a species that had become as extinct as the mammoth.
Tutuk could smell the autumn-ripe grain, but the air also carried a taste of cold and coming winter.
He did not trust the wheat field, for too often he had found that humans hid in there, and the humans in this area were craven things that hunted their own kind by night and wore the skins of their enemies. They worshipped serpents and jackals, and smelled of putrefaction, for they believed that if they smelled of death, death would love them and pass them by.
Tutuk dug his heels into the mammoth's neck, and stopped. He pulled a ram's horn from his pack and blew hard upon it, twice. If an animal heard that call, the horn would give them pause. If friends heard it, they would reveal themselves. If humans heard it, they would merely hide and wait for a chance to strike.
Wheat stalks swayed, and something rushed out. At first Tutuk thought that it was a tawny lion, but instead a woman with a broad nose and weak chin burst from the rushes. Her skin was pale and creamy, her hair a light red. She wore a skirt of woven reeds, and had lines running down her chest, tattoos created by poking a sharp stick in ashes and then sticking it under the
flesh. The ashen tattoos circled her small breasts in double rows, and an ivory nose ring announced her wealth. There was wisdom in her eyes, and she smiled in relief to see Tutuk.
"Tcha khaw!" she called in greeting. Come, member of my family. "Tcha khaw!"
She was short and stocky, Bron thought. Stockier than any person he'd ever seen, and there was something odd about her face, deformed. She had deep-set eyes, and almost no chin.
Tutuk recognized her immediately. She wasn't human. She was Neanderthal, or as he called them, "the hunting family." Humans were scavengers, eating mussels and locusts and nuts, stealing dead kills from lions. But the khaw were a nobler sort, taking only fresh meat that they hunted with their own spears. They were brave in the face of danger, gentle with one another.
The woman raised her hand, palm outward, and Tutuk did the same, flashing the sizraels on his fingertips.
The Neanderthal woman smiled at that and gave a shout of joy. She was so happy to meet Tutuk that she did something Bron had never seen before—she broke into dance, leaping forward a couple of steps, then leaping back, swaying and singing, "Yi, yi, yi!"
Soon more Neanderthals came lunging from the wheat, dancing and singing. There was a young man with a scraggly beard that could have been the female leader's little brother, and old men with rheumy eyes, and naked children, and a dozen warriors with spears.
One of the warriors shouted, and girls ran out of the tall wheat, bearing fine skins—an offering of tiger hides—along with bone knives. A pair of boys came out bearing the skin of a wooly rhino, and upon it was part of a recent kill, the rhino's haunch. Last of all, the leader of the tribe motioned to the tall hay and called out the name, "Neptu!"
A girl of thirteen or fourteen crept forward. She wore a skirt of woven grass, and she had green ivy and wild pea flowers in her hair. She blushed prettily and ducked her head.
These Neanderthals had seen memory merchants before, and they knew what Tutuk had to offer. Wisdom was valuable beyond measure, and anything that he wanted in the village was his for the taking—their clothing, their weapons, their food, their daughters.
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