Coyote Horizon

by Allen Steele

  It seemed to go on forever. Then I heard a wooden creak from somewhere above, felt a cool breeze. Hesitantly, I raised my head again. Someone had used a rope to move aside the ceiling hatch; bearlight streamed down through the opening, and I saw a thin cloud of insects fly upward, their wings appearing as tiny silver halos.

  For a moment it seemed to me that they were miniature angels, vengeful yet innocent, spiraling upward into the night. Despite the pain, I found myself entranced by their beauty; I laughed out loud and watched their ascent with fascination. Others chuckled, as if understanding what I’d seen.

  “There, see? The way has been prepared.” Cassidy handed me a cat-skin flask. “Drink. Relax.”

  The water in his flask was tepid, yet it tasted like wine. I drank a little, then passed it to the woman sitting beside me. A certain numbness was rapidly spreading through my body; the places where I’d seen stung no longer burned; the wounds itched for a few minutes, but even that sensation gradually passed away. Goldstein was on his hands on knees, violently retching, yet he was no longer my concern. All I knew was that the hogan wasn’t as menacing as it’d once been; indeed, it was as comfortable as my favorite table at the Captain’s Lady, and all the people in it had become my friends.

  Time lost meaning. I watched Bear slowly come into view through the skylight, its silver-blue radiance painting the log walls with colors I’d never seen before. Ash stared up at the stars, humming beneath his breath; the gap-toothed woman rocked gently back and forth on her haunches, muttering to herself as if carrying on a conversation with some invisible person. Across the room, a man and a woman pulled off each other’s clothes and, oblivious to everyone else, started to have sex; I observed their fornication with disinterest, neither aroused nor offended. A skeeter, wandering in from the nearby marshes, flittered above the ball plant, performing a delicate ballet in the bearlight just for me. It was as if a universe I’d never known to exist had opened before my eyes, and I was an astronomer seeing its hidden wonders for the very first time.

  —Do you see…?

  At first, I thought Cassidy had spoken to me. When I looked at him, though, he was staring straight ahead.

  “What?” I said. “Do I see what?”

  —Do you see?…do you hear?…do you feel?

  His lips never moved, and he didn’t look my way. Yet I could hear his voice—no, more than that; I could sense his presence—as clearly as if he’d spoken in my ear.

  “I…I can…”

  His eyes shifted in my direction.—No…don’t speak…don’t need to…open your mind…hear me with your thoughts…

  I stared at him. At first, it seemed as if there was a barrier between us, translucent as rice paper, solid as iron…

  —Concentrate!

  I squeezed my eyes shut, fought against the barrier. A sharp pain within my temples, almost like a migraine headache. Then, suddenly, an audible snap, as if someone had broken a twig within my head…

  (The smell of horse manure, sour-sweet and ripe. A flash-image of a hand holding a brush, gently stroking a coarse brown mane. The horse raises its head, looks at me, love within its dark brown eyes…)

  I snapped out of the trance. What the hell…?

  —You saw the horse, didn’t you?

  Again, I looked at Cassidy. A quiet smile played at the corners of his mouth, yet he continued to gaze straight ahead. “Yeah,” I mumbled. “Yeah, I saw the…”

  Then the shock of what had just happened swept through me, and with it an uncommon clarity. Looking away from Cassidy, I stared at the couple screwing on the other side of the hogan…

  (Flesh moving across flesh, rough hands gripping smooth thighs, soft hands stroking back muscles. The odor of sweat, warm and close. Loins straining for release. The rapture of sex…)

  I glanced away from them, saw Cassidy staring at me.

  —Do you feel them?

  Confused, I hastily looked away, only to find myself gazing at the woman with the missing teeth. All at once, I knew that her name was Alice Curnow, although she now preferred to be known as First Light of Day…

  —Donald I’m so sorry so sorry I never meant to hurt you but you asked too much of me, and I couldn’t Donald I’m sorry so sorry please forgive me I’m sorry so sorry…

  Too much. Far too much. Within the hogan were places where I was never meant to be, secrets I was never meant to share. Sick at the pit of my stomach, feeling an overwhelming urge to vomit, I frantically crawled toward the door. A hard shove, and it fell away before me.

  On hands and knees, I crawled out of the lodge. Cold air blasted me like an arctic wind; at once I was chilled to the bone. I managed to get a few feet from the hogan before my guts betrayed me. I vomited across grass that looked like a plain of emerald stone.

  Then I passed out. Yet not before Cassidy’s voice came to me one last time…

  —You’re not ready yet.

  I awoke in the same place where I’d lost consciousness. It was early morning, the sun just beginning to rise above the trees at the edge of the clearing. Someone had thrown my jacket over me, yet my clothes were damp with dew, my arms and legs stiff from sleeping on bare ground. My head throbbed with the worst headache I’d ever had.

  For a long time I simply lay there, feeling every ache and pain in my body. If I could have, I would’ve gone back to sleep again, but I was kept awake by the sore places on my neck, arms, and hands where I’d been stung. I finally rolled over and sat up, and found Joe Cassidy staring at me.

  He sat cross-legged upon the ground, a blanket wrapped around his shoulders. Behind him, burned-out torches smoldered; a cool breeze caught their acrid black smoke, caused it to drift past the hogan. Its door was shut once more. No one else was in sight.

  Walking Star and I regarded each other for several long moments, neither of us saying anything. After a while, he closed his eyes, lowered his head slightly. A few seconds passed, then he raised his head again, opened his eyes.

  “You didn’t hear that, did you?” he asked. I started to shake my head, but it hurt too much, so I simply looked at him. “Didn’t think you would,” he added, a smile touching the corners of his lips. “If I concentrate really hard, I can send an image to someone who’s gone through this only once, but it usually takes several sessions for”—a pause, as if he was groping for the right words—“the change to become permanent.”

  “Permanent?” There was a copper taste in my mouth. I spit, saw that my saliva was tinged with blood. Apparently I’d bit my tongue sometime during the night and not even realized it. “What change?”

  “You really have to ask?” He squinted at me, as if searching for something. “You know what happened. You just won’t admit it to yourself.”

  All I knew for certain was that I was thirsty, although my stomach roiled at the very thought of food. Without my asking, Cassidy picked up a cat-skin flask from the ground beside him. “You probably won’t want to eat for a while,” he said, tossing the flask to me. “No one ever does.”

  A shiver ran down my back as I picked up the waterskin. “You can read minds, can’t you?”

  Cassidy gazed at the camp, motionless within the early morning haze, the silence disturbed only by the songs of grasshoarders stirring within the field. “We all do, now,” he said after a time. “Telepathy, you might call it, although I prefer to think of it as a form of mental gestalt…a joining of minds. After a while, you don’t even need the pseudowasp venom. It just…happens, y’know?”

  The water rinsed away the blood in my mouth. I spit out the first mouthful, swallowed the next. “I don’t believe it. I think we were all just…”

  “Hallucinating?” A wry smile. “Just a weird experience we all shared at the same time. That’s what we thought, too, back when we first started using sting. I thought it was nothing more than peyote dreams. But then…”

  He held out his hand, and I passed the flask back to him. “Well, it became obvious this wasn’t just a drug thing, that we might a
ctually be onto something. It would take a neuroscientist to explain it to you, but there’s a theory that a small part of the brain…just a few dormant neurons, really…contains a certain potential for psychic ability. Sort of a throwback to primitive times, when our forebearers had to rely on their senses for survival. No one’s ever been able to explain it, or at least test it to any reliable degree, but…well, it’s there.”

  “And you think sting has something to do with this?”

  “No.” He took a drink of water. “Sting only gave us a hint. The stuff we found in the colonies was always diluted. Usually with sugar water, but more often with other drugs to make it more potent for guys who just wanted to get high.” He shook his head. “That’s not what we were after. We were…we are…searching for a more transcendental experience. A way to open the doorways of the mind.”

  Cassidy was persuasive, to be sure, yet there was something within me that remained unconvinced. “So you came all the way up here just to camp out in a field full of ball plants, when there’s plenty in New Florida and Midland…”

  “Being wiped out as fast as they’re found. And this far north, their pollination season occurs later in the year. Besides, we needed isolation for our experiments.”

  “Experiments. Yeah, right…” Tents on the verge of collapse, trash scattered here and there, a group of men and women suffering from malnutrition. “You’re making a lot of progress.”

  Cassidy was quiet for a moment. “One of the drawbacks,” he said after a moment. “You get to the point where you can easily read another person’s thoughts or emotions, it’s hard to be around them. Everyone here has their secrets, their hidden pain. We’re still learning how to cope with that.”

  “Sure. Okay.” I sat up a little straighter, pulling the blanket around me. What I wouldn’t have given for a bottle of aspirin just then. “So you decided to come straight to the source. Build a shack around the biggest ball plant you could find, and crawl inside every night to get a mighty fix of…”

  “Your full name is Sawyer Robert Edward Lee,” Cassidy said, looking straight at me. “Your parents…Carl and Jessica…named you after your father’s older brother, and added your middle names because the family likes to believe they’re related to Captain Lee. Although you have personal doubts about your ancestry, you didn’t have many qualms about using your name to your advantage once you immigrated to Coyote.”

  I felt my face go warm. “How did you…?”

  “You’ve got a lifelong fear of reptiles,” he went on, “which is lucky for you because there are none on this world. You prefer dark-haired women to blondes, unless they wear glasses, in which case you feel yourself drawn to them because the first girl who let you kiss her was a blond-haired girl who wore glasses…That was when you were about nine or ten, right? You’re good at poker, but you like to cheat sometimes just because you know how to. You drink, but when you get drunk, you feel guilty about it because your father—”

  “Shut up!” I hastily pulled on my jacket, yet I couldn’t keep myself from trembling. “Just…shut up.”

  “Sorry. There was no other way. If there was any other way to make you believe…”

  “Okay. All right. Just…no more, okay?” I shuddered, not willing to meet his eyes. “So…what is it that you want from me? Why are you telling me this?”

  Walking Star slowly let out his breath. “From you, very little. So far as I can tell, you’re just some guy caught up in all this.” Then he rose to his feet, offering a hand to help me up. “But Morgan Goldstein…that’s another issue entirely.”

  We found Morgan in his tent, in no better condition than I was. His face was haggard, and he slumped on his sleeping bag, clutching at the waterskin Ash had brought him. The other man quietly nodded as Cassidy and I came in, then left the tent without a word, leaving the three of us alone.

  Or at least so it seemed. I noticed that several of Cassidy’s friends were beginning to gather near the fire pit. They said nothing, only quietly observed us. I wondered if there was a limit to the distance for their newfound abilities. Did it even matter? If they now shared a mental gestalt, then there were no secrets among them…or, indeed, with anyone with whom they came in contact.

  “So it’s true, isn’t it?” Goldstein stared at Cassidy with haunted eyes as he gently touched the side of his head. “I heard your voice in here last night, Joe. Goddamn it, I felt you in my mind…”

  “It’s telepathy, Mr. Goldstein.” Although he hadn’t spoken to me, I felt as if he needed an explanation. “The pseudowasp venom, it’s—”

  “He knows.” Cassidy folded his arms together, regarded him with implacable stoicism. “In fact, he’s known all along. Just one more thing I found out about him last night.”

  Not believing this, I looked down at Goldstein. Unwilling to meet my gaze, he hastily averted his eyes. “I didn’t, no,” he murmured. “At least not for sure…”

  “Yet you suspected.” Cassidy’s gaze didn’t waver from him.

  Goldstein sharply looked away. “One of my people in New Florida reported to me that you were trying to…to do this. I didn’t think it was possible, but…”

  “But you had to find out for yourself, didn’t you?” Cassidy squatted down to sit at the toe of Goldstein’s sleeping bag. “Don’t feel so abused, Sawyer. What he told you was true…somewhat, at least. He really was concerned for my well-being.” A sardonic smile played upon his face. “And for that, at least, I’m grateful. So glad to know that I have a true friend.”

  “Go to hell, Joe.” There was murder in Goldstein’s eyes. “I meant it when I said I’m your friend.”

  “Morgan…” Cassidy shut his eyes, shook his head. “I know how you feel about me. More than you realize. But Ash was right…it’s the affection one might have for a favorite dog.” A wan smile. “Or one of your horses, to be more precise. I know that, and if you were honest with yourself, you’d know it, too. And when I dared to slip the reins and run away, you came after me to take me back to the stable.”

  “You’ve no right to…”

  “Just as you had no right to intrude on our privacy.” As with me, Cassidy was perpetually one step ahead of the conversation. “You should’ve left us alone. Yet you decided to seek us out, because you thought that, if your suspicions were true, just perhaps…”

  “You could take advantage of this.” Things were beginning to come clear to me; I didn’t need to be a telepath to figure out the rest. “It’d be a real asset to have a mind reader on your payroll, wouldn’t it? Awfully handy to have one for your next business deal…”

  “Get out of here.” Goldstein angrily gestured to the open flap of the tent. “Make yourself useful and find your satphone. Call Mike, tell him I want a gyro pickup in—”

  “Find it yourself. I want to see how this plays out.” I looked at Cassidy. “Go ahead. Sorry for the interruption.”

  “No problem.” Cassidy picked up the flask at Goldstein’s feet, treated himself to a sip of water. “Let’s get to the end of this, all right? Then we’ll get you a ride out of here. First, I quit…”

  “You can’t…!” Goldstein stopped himself, then shrugged. “All right, go ahead. Sort of figured that was coming anyway.” He hesitated. “I’m going to miss you, Joe. Despite what you say, you’ve been a good friend…”

  “I’m not your friend.” Joe re-capped the flask, dropped it on the ground. “But it doesn’t mean we won’t see each other again. Because now that you know what we’re doing here, you’re going to help us.”

  Goldstein’s expression became puzzled. “What? I don’t…”

  “Understand? Let me make it clear.” Cassidy rested his elbows upon his knees, clasped his hands together. “You’ve already remarked upon the sorry condition of this camp. Well, you’re going to make it better. Soon as you get home, you’re going to hire a construction crew to come up here and build a permanent settlement for us. A few cabins, to start…just to get us out of these tents…but we’ll nee
d something better than that. A large building where we can all live together. Solar electrical system, wind turbine, toilets, artesian wells, and water-filtration systems…”

  “Like hell!”

  “More like a monastery really…or a perhaps a sanctuary.” A sly grin appeared on Cassidy’s face. “Come to think of it, I sort of like the sound of that. The Sanctuary.” He chuckled quietly. “The people you hire, of course, won’t be told the purpose of this place, and you yourself will say nothing about it to anyone. Is that clear?”

  “And you expect me to pay for it?” Goldstein was incredulous. When Cassidy nodded, he shook his head. “Forget it. There’s no way you can expect me to…”

  “You don’t understand. This isn’t a request.” Cassidy stared straight at him. “I found out a lot of things about you last night, Morgan. Here’s what I learned…”

  Once again, he closed his eyes, lowered his head. His brow furrowed, and he gritted his teeth for a few moments. Morgan was about to say something just then, yet then his jaw went slack. Only a few seconds went by, yet in that brief time, I saw his eyes go wide, the color drain from his face.

  What Cassidy revealed to him, I’d never learn. Perhaps it was just as well that I didn’t. All the same, when the moment passed and Walking Star opened his eyes again, Morgan Goldstein looked as if someone had just told him the worst thing anyone could ever imagine. Which was what you might expect, if someone revealed your darkest and innermost secrets to you.

  “You…you’ll have it,” he said, very quietly.

  “Thank you. I thought you’d see things our way.” Cassidy pushed himself to his feet, then turned to me. “You can call Mike now,” he said, reaching into his jacket pocket to produce the satphone. “He can have Merle pick you up same place he left you yesterday”