The Klaatu Terminus

by Pete Hautman

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PART ONE - CITY OF TREES

  1 - ON THE FRUSTUM

  2 - KOSH

  3 - THE DEPARTURE

  4 - ARUGULA AND GOAT CHEESE

  5 - THE BIG WHITE DRESS

  6 - MEN IN BLACK

  7 - MEN IN BLACK 2

  8 - MEN IN BLACK 3

  9 - ON THE FRUSTUM

  PART TWO - FRAGMENTS

  10 - MEMORIES

  11 - EMMA

  12 - POTPIES

  13 - THE KLAATU FACTORY

  14 - THE DEAD PIG

  15 - YACA

  16 - MARTA

  17 - CHICKEN

  18 - TAMM

  19 - TEMPLE GIRL

  20 - WAHLBERG

  21 - TAMM

  22 - HOPELESS

  PART THREE - THE KISS

  23 - HARMONY

  24 - NETZAH WHORSCH-BOGGS

  25 - SHEM

  26 - SEVERS

  27 - SOUFFLÉ

  28 - JAGUAR

  29 - AWN

  30 - FATHER AND SON

  31 - COURAGE

  32 - HOPEWELL

  33 - RONNIE

  34 - A MATTER OF THE HEART

  35 - DEATH ANGEL HOLLOW

  36 - EX MACHINA

  PART FOUR - THE BACK BARN

  37 - PRETENDING

  38 - DAMAGES

  39 - FIVE MAGGOTS

  40 - GHEEN

  41 - HISTORIES

  42 - CAT

  43 - DETONATIONS

  PART FIVE - REVELATIONS

  44 - FEAST

  45 - HERR BOGGS

  46 - SEVERS

  47 - HOPEWELL, YET AGAIN

  48 - THE BROKEN BLADE I

  49 - PAIN

  50 - THE BROKEN BLADE II

  51 - GENOCIDE

  52 - PROMISES

  53 - THE WALK

  54 - REVELATIONS I

  55 - REVELATIONS II

  56 - REVELATIONS III

  57 - THE FIVE EMILYS

  58 - KNOWING

  59 - PURE GIRLS

  60 - THE ROPE

  61 - IN THE BEGINNING

  62 - IN THE END

  EPILOGUE - AFTER ALL

  After the fall of Romelas, the Klaatu artist Iyl Rayn contacted the Boggsian technician Netzah Whorsch-Boggs and asked him to construct a device capable of transmitting Klaatu through time.

  Whorsch-Boggs, a slender man with a wispy beard, listened to her proposal, then shook his head.

  “You already have the capacity to travel through time. Simply wait for the future to arrive.”

  “I am more interested in viewing past events,” said Iyl Rayn.

  “Consult your memories and your histories.”

  “I wish to witness events of which I have no direct knowledge.”

  “Feh,” said Whorsch-Boggs, rolling his eyes. “If in the future we provide you with a means for traveling back in time, then it follows that you have already succeeded in doing so. Therefore — I repeat myself — you do not need us.”

  “If you help me, I will compensate you.”

  Whorsch-Boggs stroked his thin beard. “With what?” he asked.

  “Information.”

  “Unanswered questions sustain us.”

  “Unanswered questions may destroy you.”

  Whorsch-Boggs shrugged. “Traveling into the past might destroy us as well. In any case, it is impossible. I cannot help you.”

  — E3

  ROMELAS, ca. 3000 CE

  “WHAT HAPPENED HERE?” TUCKER ASKED.

  He felt Lahlia’s shoulders move beneath his arm, a faint shrug.

  They were sitting on the edge of the frustum, pressed together, looking out over the ruins of the city. The partial moon had broken free of the clouds, risen high, and now cast a ladder of shadows down the sides of the stepped pyramid. Below, a carpet of treetops tufted through the pale shapes of low stone buildings, spreading in all directions to a dark horizon.

  “This was Romelas, the city where I was born as Lah Lia. Later, I returned and became the Yar Lia. Now I am simply Lia.”

  Tucker tasted the name with his mind. Lia. It seemed too short, too small, too slight for this hard-faced girl in her shiny black vest and thick-soled boots. He thought of the last time he had seen her, striding confidently into the tent in Hopewell Park, where his father and Master Gheen had planned to sacrifice him on their makeshift altar.

  “The Romelas I knew is gone.” Lia broke a chunk of limestone from the edge of the frustum with her fingers. “This stone is crumbling. The streets have become forests. How long does it take for a tree to grow taller than a building?”

  Tucker did not know.

  “I’ve seen no lights,” she said, tossing the broken stone down the steps of the pyramid. “No people.”

  “How long have you been here?”

  “Not long. The sun was low when I arrived. For me, it’s been only a few hours since I last saw you. In Hopewell.” She turned her face toward him. “I knew you would come.”

  In the light of the half moon, he could see the faint scar inscribing her cheek from the corner of her eye to her jaw. Tentatively, he reached out. She flinched slightly, then held still as he traced the scar with his forefinger. “How did this happen?” he asked.

  She touched his chest. “It was the same blade that left that scar over your heart.”

  “The priest?”

  Lia nodded.

  Tucker looked into her dark eyes. He wanted to kiss her, but he was afraid she would pull back. He did not want to risk driving her away. She was all he had.

  “I jumped into the maggot right after you,” he said. “But I ended up back in Hopewell, before I was born. I saw my dad. And Kosh. When they were younger. Tom Krause was there, too. Then these Boggsians came after us and sent us through another disko. I don’t know where Tom ended up. I landed at the Terminus, and I saw Awn, and she said you’d just been there.”

  Lia frowned. “That was before I returned to Hopewell to save you.”

  “Yeah, that’s what I finally figured out. She told me you walked to Harmony to see the Boggsians. I went after you.”

  “It’s good you didn’t catch up with me,” Lia said. “If you had, I might not have stopped your father from killing you.”

  Tucker sat with his mouth open for a few seconds, trying to wrap his head around that.

  “How did you get here?” Lia asked.

  “Well, it’s kind of a long story. For a while I was stuck at the North Pole, but eventually I made it to Harmony. The Boggsians were gone, but there was a disko. A Klaatu sent me into it, and I came out here.”

  Lia nodded slowly. “A Klaatu sent me through a disko as well. There was a Boggsian in Harmony. He had a device for communicating with the Klaatu.”

  “I wonder what the Boggsians have to do with the Klaatu.”

  “The Boggsians made the Klaatu. They call it transcendence. They once tried to make me into a Klaatu.”

  Tucker did not speak for a few moments. He was thinking about how little he really knew about Lahlia. Lia. He had once thought her a young girl with a small but mysterious past. Now both she and her past seemed larger.

  “The Klaatu knew I was looking for you,” Lia said.

  “I bet it was the same one. But why did we end up here?”

  Before Lia could answer, an animal sound rippled up the tiers — something between a snarl and a roar — raising the hairs on the back of Tucker’s neck.

  “What was that?”

  “That,” said Lia, “was a jaguar.”

  “There are jaguars here?”

  “When I lived in Romelas, there were jaguars in the forests south and east of the city. They ate wild pigs, and sometimes people. The woodcu
tters would venture into the forests only in pairs.”

  “But aren’t jaguars from South America? I thought this place, Romelas, was the same as Hopewell. In Minnesota. Just a different time.”

  “In Romelas we grew limes and mangos. I never saw snow until I came to Hopewell in your time. Everything changes. The jaguars migrated north.”

  She turned again to face him. “As for why the Klaatu sent us here, I don’t know. I expect we will find out.”

  The cry of the jaguar came again. It sounded closer.

  “I suppose we should stay up here until it gets light,” Tucker said.

  “I think that would be a good idea.”

  They listened to the night sounds drifting up from below.

  Lia leaned her head on his shoulder. “In this time, everybody we ever knew is dead.”

  Tucker thought for a moment, then said, “Kosh was alive when I left him. He’s alive in Hopewell.”

  “I liked Kosh.”

  “I have to go back,” Tucker said. “He’s the only family I have left.”

  Lia gestured to where the disko had been, now an empty place in the air. “The Gate is gone.”

  “There must be others.”

  Lia searched his face. Her eyes were enormous.

  “I will go with you,” she said.

  A shadow detached itself from the wooded margin of the zocalo. A mottled silhouette, stealing from shadow to shadow, wove its way across the sapling-studded cobblestones. The jaguar paused at the base of the pyramid and looked up. Tucker could see glints of moonlight reflected in its eyes.

  “It knows we are here,” Lia whispered.

  Tucker exhaled — he had been holding his breath.

  “Can jaguars climb pyramids?” he asked.

  “They climb trees.”

  “Oh.”

  HOPEWELL, 2012 CE

  “DESTINY? MY DESTINY IS WHAT I MAKE OF IT!” With those words, Tucker Feye stepped into the maggot and disappeared in an orange flash. Kosh Feye, holding a Lah Sept arma in one hand and a shock baton in the other, blinked back greenish afterimages.

  Father September let out a despairing moan. “You have destroyed us all,” he said.

  “Shut up,” Kosh said. He needed time to think. Too much had happened in the past few minutes — the fight with the priests, Tucker blowing off Ronnie Becker’s leg at the knee, the shock of seeing Adrian, his brother, transformed into an old man calling himself Father September, the girl Lia jumping into the maggot, and Tucker, who had grown half a foot since Kosh had last seen him a month ago, following her. He looked at what remained of the maggot, a sagging band of pink flesh surrounding the crackling disko.

  “Curtis, you don’t realize what you’ve done,” Father September said in a shaky voice.

  Master Gheen, unconscious on the floor of the tent, groaned and shifted. Kosh jabbed the baton against his neck. Gheen convulsed, then lay still. Kosh walked to the doorway and looked out of the tent at the sea of people gathered in the park waiting for the revival to begin. Some of them were seated on folding chairs; others were sitting on the grass. All of them were undoubtedly wondering what all the commotion in the tent was about. On the steps of the pyramid, the man whom Kosh had knocked senseless was stirring. Kosh closed the tent flap and looked back at his brother.

  “Is it true?”

  “Is what true?” Father September said.

  “What Tucker said. That Emily is here.”

  “That is none of your concern, Curtis.”

  “If you call me Curtis one more time —”

  “It is your God-given name!”

  “God gave me nothing. My name is Kosh. Where is she?”

  Father September’s shoulders sagged; he seemed to grow smaller. “What does it matter? We are all lost.”

  “You might be lost.” Kosh pointed the baton at his brother. “I know exactly where I am. What I want to know is, where is Emily?”

  Father September scowled petulantly. “The woman Tucker saw is at the house where you grew up. It is where she belongs. But she is not the Emily you seek.”

  Without another word, Kosh turned and triggered the arma. A jet of blue flame ripped through the back of the tent. Kosh strode through the smoking gash. A moment later the roar of his motorcycle shivered the tent fabric. Father September groaned and sank to his knees beside the unconscious Master Gheen.

  “What have we done?” he asked, but there was no one to answer him.

  Kosh hit the park exit at sixty miles per hour. The bike’s tires chattered on the washboard surface of the dirt road as a black cyclone of memories, hopes, and fears raged inside his head. Tucker had said that his mother, Emily, was alive, brainwashed by those strange priests. As unlikely as that sounded, Kosh believed him — it was no more insane than everything else that had happened that day, beginning with the sudden appearance of the girl on the roof of his barn that morning. The crazies in the park. Tucker, looking and acting years older. And Adrian — what had happened to him? Images flickered and whirled through Kosh’s brain: Ronnie Becker’s leg, the futuristic weapons now in his saddlebags, the disko, maggot, whatever . . . He had let Tucker follow the girl into that thing. What had he been thinking?

  He downshifted as the dirt-surfaced park road curved toward the highway; his back tire skidded and he nearly lost control. Too fast. He slowed and turned onto the paved highway, then brought the bike up to a relatively sedate seventy miles per hour. As he came around the bend just north of downtown Hopewell he saw a swirling, twisting gray cloud dancing just off the highway over a field of recently harvested wheat.

  Kosh backed off the accelerator. For a moment, he thought it might be smoke, but there was a deliberateness to the cloud, a sense of intelligence and purpose. As he drew nearer, the cloud resolved itself into tiny specks. Kosh laughed at himself. Birds! He was so paranoid from all that had happened, he’d let himself get freaked out by a bunch of birds!

  The flock settled onto the field. What were they? Crows? They didn’t look like crows — too pale, and there was something odd about the way they flew. He slowed as he came abreast of the field. They looked like big doves, or pigeons . . .

  Pigeons! Suddenly he knew what he was seeing. Passenger pigeons. He pulled to the side of the road and stopped.

  Kosh had seen a recent news headline about the passenger pigeons, but he’d dismissed it as another unconfirmed sighting. There had been sporadic reports of passenger-pigeon sightings in the Hopewell area ever since Lorna Gingrass had killed those two birds with her car, back in ninety-eight. All the subsequent sightings had remained unconfirmed and, as far as Kosh was concerned, pure fantasy.

  This, however, was real. The nearest bird was about fifty feet away from him — a large, blue-gray, rose-breasted creature.

  “Hello there,” Kosh said.

  The bird regarded him suspiciously with one red eye.

  “Aren’t you supposed to be extinct?” Kosh asked, half expecting an answer. With all the other weird stuff he’d seen, a talking bird seemed perfectly reasonable.

  The pigeon took flight. The rest of the flock followed as if they were all connected by invisible elastic strings. Kosh sat back and watched as the birds twisted and flowed into a bullet-shaped mass and shot off to the east. There had to be thousands of them.

  Just one more impossibility piled atop all the others. Kosh wondered if the pigeons had arrived in Hopewell through the diskos. If so, what next? Dodos? Dinosaurs? He shook his head at his own foolishness and dropped the bike in gear. Maybe he was strapped to a hospital bed in some asylum and this was all happening in his head. It seemed as likely as anything. But if what Tucker had told him was true — that Emily was here — he had to see her.

  Kosh pulled back onto the highway and headed for his childhood home, thinking about the last time he had seen Emily, almost fifteen years ago. The house came into view. It seemed so small now. As he approached the driveway he saw a young woman with long coppery hair and pale skin standing in the ga
rden. Emily? Kosh’s heart filled his chest. As he slowed and began his turn, he sensed another presence and glanced at his rearview. The chrome grille of a truck filled his mirror. Time slowed. With a screech of tearing metal, his bike exploded from beneath him and he was airborne, hurtling toward a spinning sky.

  I’m flying, he thought, and then all went to black.

  JUNE, 1997 CE

  THREE DAYS AFTER KOSH FEYE’S SEVENTEENTH BIRTHDAY, HE HUGGED his brother for the last time. Adrian, older by ten years, was an awkward hugger. Kosh wasn’t much better. They held each other for about two uncomfortable seconds, then let go and stepped back. Adrian, the taller and leaner brother, nodded to Kosh, acknowledging the relief they both felt at having gotten past that awkward ritual, and the unbreakable bond that remained between them. Kosh faked a punch at Adrian’s right shoulder, but Adrian did not respond by fake-punching back. He had become so serious over the past several years. Kosh couldn’t remember the last time he had heard Adrian laugh.

  “You two are ridiculous,” said Emily Ryan, a half smile on her face, tears welling in her eyes.

  They were standing on the train station platform in Winona. The Amtrak Empire Builder, bound for Chicago, was about to depart. In Chicago, Adrian would be joining a group of Bible scholars on a seven-month pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

  Adrian turned his head toward Emily. “The time will pass quickly,” he said, holding out his long arms. “I’ll be back by the end of January.”

  “I know.” Emily stepped into his embrace. Adrian Feye’s arms came around her like two jointed sticks; his oversize hands flapped against the back of her T-shirt. He kissed her forehead and then, clumsily, her lips. Kosh watched, his mouth curved into a wide smile. He couldn’t help it — any emotion other than anger produced a smile on his long, angular features. Kosh hated that about himself. His only family — Adrian — was leaving for the other side of the world, and here he was, grinning like an idiot. He still remembered the time Adrian caught him smiling at their father’s funeral. He had only been nine years old then, but still carried the shame of it with him.