The Cydonian Pyramid

by Pete Hautman

  “No such thing as Plague?” Lia’s head whirled. “How can you say that?”

  “I say only what is true. ‘Plague’ was invented by the Lambs to explain behaviors that they chose not to understand.”

  “You’re saying they just made it up?”

  “In a sense. They accused us of spreading this so-called Plague, and then they destroyed us.”

  “How is that possible? When I was in Mayo, the city was enormous and the Lambs were few.”

  “The Mayo you visited existed before my time,” Severs said. “Before the Transcendence.”

  Artur, the Boggsian, had used that word: Transcendence.

  “Are you talking about the Klaatu?” she asked.

  “The Klaatu, yes. By the time the Lambs rose up, the Transcendence had reduced our population drastically. By the time I was born, there were fewer than seven thousand Medicants in Mayo, while the Lambs numbered in the tens of thousands. And now I find myself in the midst of another senseless war. It is all madness. I want no part of this terrible, cruel time.” Severs’s face remained the same bland mask it had been, but her eyes were moist, and Lia realized that the Medicant felt as lost as she did.

  “What is stopping you from walking out of here, climbing the pyramid, and stepping through the Gate?”

  “I attempted to do so,” Severs said. “The disko is guarded. They threatened me with their weapons and told me to go.”

  “But you could walk out of the city if you wanted?”

  “Where would I go? I am lost here. Hidalgo says I may one day be allowed to return to my people, but she has given me no cause to believe her. In the meantime, I perform my function. I heal.”

  Lia thought back over her conversation with Hidalgo. “It seems I am a prisoner here as well,” she said. “When I am better, I will find a way to leave this city. If you still want to go, I will take you with me.”

  The destruction of virtually every existing written word in the city-state of Romelas — both digital and paper — was a political masterstroke on the part of the Lah Sept priests. When the purging of written information was complete, it was replaced by The Book of September. In this way, the priesthood came to control what their people knew and what they thought.

  The Yars — those Pure Girls who survived their own sacrifice — were able to retain a select few of the forbidden texts and thereby undermine the political power of the priests. They did not realize until after the Uprising that the priests had concealed a treasure of their own.

  — E3

  THE SUBMARINE SHUDDERED AND GROANED.

  “What was that?” Tucker asked.

  Dr. Arnay got up quickly and left the cabin, closing the door behind him. Tucker tried to remember everything he knew of the USS Skate. It wasn’t much. He remembered reading that the submarine had surfaced at the North Pole and that it had returned safely. If that held true, then nothing too terrible was about to happen. But maybe his being here had changed things — he sure didn’t remember anything in his submarine book about the Skate finding a teenage boy on the North Pole.

  Tucker looked at his hands, at the new, pink skin. The Medicants had made him stronger and faster and, apparently, able to heal from frostbite. Maybe if he were frozen solid, he could be thawed out. He could freeze himself for fifty years or so and wake up when global warming melted the Arctic. Not an experiment he wanted to try. But if these submarine guys decided he was some sort of enemy agent, they might lock him away in a military prison. Even if they let him go, by the time he got back to his own era, he’d be almost seventy years old.

  His only way out was through the same disko that had brought him here.

  Dr. Arnay returned. “It’s just the ice shifting against the hull,” he said.

  “Oh. That’s what I thought.”

  Arnay half smiled. “You being an expert on nuclear subs and all.”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  Arnay sat down in his chair and crossed his legs. “You were telling me you were on the roof of your parents’ house, and you think this girl, Lahlia, followed you into the . . . um . . . disko? And then the next time you saw her she was different?”

  “Yeah . . .” Tucker wasn’t sure what parts of his story to tell. He had left out the World Trade Center, and he figured he’d better leave out the part about the crucifixion, too. “Um, a whole bunch of stuff happened, and I ended up back in the future hospital, and they sent me through another disko, and, well, I finally got back home, to Hopewell. Except everything was different. There was this new church, and the guy in charge was . . . this old guy called Father September. And another guy was there, the priest who tried to kill me on the pyramid. And they decided to kill me all over again. Anyway, that was when Lahlia showed up, and like I said, she had changed.”

  “Changed how?”

  “She seemed older, and she had a scar on her face. Not a fresh scar. A scar that had completely healed.”

  “And it had been how long since you’d seen her?”

  “It’s kind of hard to say. It seemed like just a few weeks, but I’d gotten older, too, because the Medicants made me work in one of their factories for a couple years. But I don’t remember much about that.”

  “Medicants . . . These are the futuristic doctors?”

  “Yeah. They were really weird. They wore these strange headsets and talked mostly in numbers. Like they were half machine and half human.”

  Dr. Arnay grunted. “Not so far-fetched. A lot of younger doctors I know are focused on test results and percentages. They forget that their patients are people.”

  “That’s what my dad thought. Anyway, I think they made me so I heal faster.”

  They both looked at his hands. The pinkness was subsiding. His hands looked almost normal.

  Dr. Arnay asked, “How are they feeling?”

  “Fine.” Tucker flexed his fingers.

  Arnay shook his head. “A few hours ago, I was sure you’d end up with stumps. You say these people from the future gave you this remarkable healing ability?”

  The way the doctor was looking at him made Tucker wish he’d never mentioned the Medicants. He might end up in some government laboratory for the rest of his life while they tried to figure out how he healed so quickly.

  “I’ve always healed pretty fast.” Tucker grinned, trying for a boyish, disarming look.

  Arnay didn’t go for it. “Nobody heals that fast.”

  “What’s it like outside?” Tucker asked, to change the subject.

  “Cold.”

  “Did you go out?”

  “I poked my head out. It’s rather nice right now. The sun is out, and the wind has died down. Still, it’s twenty below.”

  “Any chance I could go out? Just for a minute?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you get kind of claustrophobic in here? I mean, how long were you under the ice?”

  The doctor frowned. “That’s classified information.”

  “Who am I going to tell?”

  “I have no idea. You know, you still haven’t told me exactly how you got here.”

  “Oh, okay. Like I said before, I got swallowed by a maggot — that portable disko thing I was telling you about. But it wasn’t the first time I went into a maggot. The first time was when Lahlia saved me from getting killed by the same guy who tried to kill me before on the pyramid. They had this maggot strung up on a metal frame, and they were going to kill me and then throw me into the maggot’s disko. But then Lahlia — the older version of Lahlia — showed up. There was a fight, and I shot this guy’s leg off —”

  “You what?”

  “I had to. Anyway, the priest made Lahlia go into the maggot, and then I jumped in after her, and —”

  “Stop!” Arnay said, holding up one hand and clamping the other to his forehead. “You’re making my head spin.”

  “Sorry.” Tucker’s heart was pounding from the memory.

  Arnay lowered his hands. “All right, assuming for the moment that what
you’re telling me is true — which I very much doubt — why would you jump into one of these diskos when every time you do, you almost get killed? Are you suicidal?”

  The question surprised Tucker. He’d never thought about suicide at all.

  “Most of the time, if I’d stayed where I was, I’d have gotten killed anyway. But this time I’m telling you about, I was going after Lahlia. In case she needed help on the other side. I figured since she’d gone into the disko just a minute before, we’d end up in the same place. . . .” Tucker paused, thinking back to that moment.

  “And?” Dr. Arnay said.

  “It didn’t exactly work that way. . . .”

  WHEN HE HAD JUMPED INTO THE MAGGOT AFTER Lahlia, Tucker had braced himself for a fall, but unlike his previous trips through the diskos, he found himself, with no perceptible impact, standing on a flat, level surface in a brightly lit cavern.

  Ten feet in front of him, a tall black-bearded man wearing a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat was bent over Ronnie Becker. Ronnie was unconscious. The tall man was attaching a plastic appliance to the stump of Ronnie’s left leg — the leg Tucker had blown apart with the arma back in Hopewell. The bottom half of Ronnie’s leg was on the floor a few feet away, seeping blood.

  A thin, shorter man, dressed the same as the tall man, stood nearby, watching and holding a thin tablet the size of a clipboard. Behind him, on the other side of the room, was a row of large glass-fronted tanks, each of them containing a maggot suspended in clear, pink-tinted liquid. Several other men were seated at a long bench, working intently on complicated-looking devices the purpose of which Tucker could not imagine. All of the men were wearing hats.

  These had to be the Boggsians he had heard about — the technologists who had built not only the diskos but also the cybernetic creatures known as maggots.

  Tucker saw no sign of Lahlia. But she had to have come here — she had entered the maggot’s disko shortly after Gheen threw Ronnie and his leg through, and only a minute or two before Tucker had followed her.

  A buzzing, crackling sound came from beneath Tucker’s feet. He looked down. He was standing on a swirling gray surface — a disko set into the floor. He hopped off quickly. The disko fell silent and went black.

  None of the men in the cavern had looked up to acknowledge his presence. Tucker took a breath and walked over to a hawk-nosed, clean-shaven young man who was peering through a lens into the interior of a device that looked like an incredibly intricate and impractical toaster oven.

  “Excuse me,” Tucker said.

  The man did not so much as blink.

  “Excuse me,” Tucker said again, a bit louder.

  No response.

  Tucker had a disturbing thought: what if he had become a ghost, like the Klaatu? Maybe he was invisible to these strange men. He reached out and tapped the man on the shoulder. The man shot his hand out and slapped Tucker’s hand away without looking up from his work. Tucker stepped back, shaking out his hand. At least he was not a ghost.

  The big Boggsian had dragged Ronnie onto the floor-level disko. He fetched the severed leg and balanced it on Ronnie’s chest, then said something to the man with the tablet. The disko began to hum. The big man stepped quickly off the disko.

  The disko flashed orange. Tucker blinked away greenish afterimages. Ronnie Becker was gone. The big Boggsian turned his attention to Tucker.

  “Zurück!” He pointed at the disko.

  Tucker took a step back. “I can’t understand you,” he said, although he was afraid he understood perfectly — the Boggsian wanted him to enter the disko.

  “Zurück!” the man repeated.

  “Was there a girl here?” Tucker asked. “A blond girl? Just a few minutes ago?”

  The smaller man, the one with the tablet, answered him in strongly accented English. “The girl is gone.”

  “Gone where?”

  The man shrugged and waved a hand at the disko.

  “Zurück!” the large man said, raising his voice.

  “What’s he saying?” Tucker asked the smaller man.

  “Albers, he says you must go back.” The man consulted his tablet and tapped it with his fingers. The disko sputtered, and its black surface became grainy.

  “What is this place? Who are you?”

  “I am Yonnie-Dav. This is a Boggs-Lubavitch crèche.”

  “Is this the future?”

  Yonnie-Dav’s mouth curved up into a smirk. “This is now. Wherever you find yourself, you cannot escape the present.”

  “What year is it?”

  Yonnie-Dav consulted his tablet. “Six. Seven. Seven. Nine.” He pronounced the numbers carefully.

  “That’s like . . . almost five thousand years!”

  “You were born before Abram?” Yonnie-Dav shook his head. “I think not.”

  “I was born in 1998.”

  “Ach. I have given you the Hebrew date. In Gregorian”— he squinted at his tablet —“it is three-zero-one-nine. Thirty nineteen.” He looked up. “Better, nu?”

  “Not really,” Tucker said. It was still a thousand years in the future. He looked nervously at Albers, who was shifting from one foot to the other and scowling at him.

  “You must go,” said Yonnie-Dav.

  “Wait. This disko — can you make it go where you want it?” Tucker asked.

  “Meh. The time, ah, you would say, wiggles? Precision is not a property. You, for an example, should not be here. The . . . you say disko . . . it is automatic, to redirect anachronisms to their point of origin. You ask about the maidel. She comes for the beat of a heart, then”— he snapped his fingers —“back.”

  “Back . . . to Hopewell?”

  “If that is her point of origin, yes.”

  “What about Ronnie, the guy who was just here? And his leg?”

  “Damaged persons we send to the Medicants. Are you damaged? No? I do not understand why you are here. You should have backwarded.” He looked at Albers, and the two exchanged several sentences, none of which Tucker could understand. Yonnie-Dav tapped his tablet, looked at Tucker, and said, “You must go.”

  “Send me where you sent Lahlia.”

  “The maidel? Ah, a romance, perhaps?”

  “I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

  “Is her home not safe?”

  “No! It’s —”

  Without warning, Albers launched himself. Plate-size hands slammed into Tucker’s chest. Tucker staggered back, arms wheeling, teetering at the edge of the disk. The big man stepped up to give him a final push; Tucker grabbed his thick wrist and pulled. Albers lurched forward, startled by Tucker’s speed and strength. Tucker used the big man’s weight to swing himself away from the disko, then let go abruptly. Albers stumbled into the disko and disappeared in an orange flash.

  Tucker whirled to face the other Boggsians. The men seated at the bench were gaping at him, their work forgotten. At least he had their attention. Yonnie-Dav blinked at the disko as if he could not believe what he had just seen. He shook his head slowly and began to laugh.

  “What’s so funny?” Tucker wanted to punch him right in his laughing face.

  “Albers will be very upset,” Yonnie-Dav said, still chuckling.

  “That’s his problem. Why won’t you just let me go after my friend?”

  Yonnie-Dav waved a limp hand, dismissing Tucker’s request as irrelevant. “The Gnomon forbid it.”

  “Gnomon. That’s a kind of Klaatu, right?”

  “Klaatu, yes. We have contracted with them to reknit the timestreams. Our . . . golems”— he gestured at the maggots in the tanks —“recover those who are lost or misplaced. They bring them to this place, like you, then we return them to their proper place and time. The Gnomon believe that this will protect them from oblivion.” He smiled and shrugged. “They believe many things.”

  “You don’t believe it?”

  “We perform according to our contract.”

  “Then it doesn’t really matter to yo
u where I go.”

  “That may be true. However —”

  The disko flashed green. Albers, his coat stained and torn, missing his hat, erupted from the disk. Before Tucker could react, Albers grabbed him around the waist, lifted him into the air, and threw him.

  TUCKER LANDED ON HIS BACK IN THREE FEET OF SOFT, wet snow. He got up and brushed the snow off himself. He was back on the roof of Hopewell House, but now it was winter, and it was snowing, and it was night. A few feet above his head, the disko crackled and hummed. The layer of snow around him was marked with another set of footprints, partially filled with fresh snow, leading from the disko, wandering back and forth, then ending at the open trapdoor. He was not the only person to have used the disko recently. Maybe the tracks were made by Lahlia — a disko had brought her to Hopewell once before.

  The disko flashed and emitted a pair of Klaatu. Tucker ignored them and trudged through a knee-deep drift to look over the edge of the roof. The street below looked different from how he remembered it. Across the street was the Pigeon Drop Inn, but the red neon sign in the window identified it as Red’s Roost. Hopewell Casualty, the small insurance agency next door, looked the same as it always had. The hand‑painted sign above Janky’s Barbershop was brand-new — maybe old Emil Janky had finally decided to spruce up the place. Nearly every business displayed Christmas lights or other holiday decorations.

  Several pickup trucks and cars were parked on the street. There was something odd about them. For a moment, he couldn’t figure out what, then he realized that the cars were all fifteen or twenty years old, at least. He leaned out over the parapet and looked south down Main Street. In the distance, he could see the blocky shape of the old Save Rite store, which had been closed and vacant since Tucker was a little kid. It wasn’t closed anymore. A bright neon sign out front read, friedman’s save rite.

  This was Hopewell, but not the Hopewell Tucker knew. This was a Hopewell that had not existed since before he was born.

  Tucker realized he was freezing. He was still wearing the thin gray coveralls he had gotten from the Medicants. The only parts of him that weren’t cold were his feet, protected by his Medicant boots. He trudged through the snow to the trapdoor and climbed down into the abandoned hotel. Inside, it was dusty, with spiderwebs and the acrid smell of bat droppings. Everything looked really old, as if time had stopped back in the mid-twentieth century. This was what Hopewell House had looked like before it was refurbished during the short-lived passenger pigeon craze back in the 1990s.