The Obsidian Blade

by Pete Hautman

  “Just picking up some stuff. We were getting ready to leave.”

  “Yeah, I don’t know how much longer I’ll last here in Hopeless myself,” Ronnie said. He turned to Lahlia. “Maria’s been looking for you.”

  Bounce flattened his ears and hissed.

  Ronnie grimaced. “That cat never liked me.”

  “Bounce is an excellent judge of character,” Lahlia said.

  “Yeah, well, Maria’s on the warpath. She’ll make you sit through a doubleheader at church come Sunday if you don’t get on top of that berry patch. You don’t pick them now they’ll be bird food tomorrow.”

  “Birds have to eat too,” Lahlia said.

  “Whatever you say.” He turned to Kosh. “Want to run into town? Grab a beer at the Drop? We’re old enough now — Red will probably serve us.”

  Kosh hesitated.

  “It’s been a long time, bro,” Ronnie said. “We got a lot of catching up to do.”

  Kosh looked at Tucker.

  “I’ll be okay on my own,” Tucker said quickly. “Lahlia and I have some catching up to do, too.”

  “What do we have to catch up to?” Lahlia asked.

  Ronnie laughed. “Little Miss Literal.”

  “Seriously, go ahead,” Tucker said to Kosh. “I’ll finish packing some things.”

  Kosh pressed his lips together, then nodded slowly. “There’s a cooler in the car with some sandwiches if you get hungry.”

  “Okay.”

  “We won’t be long.” Ronnie crossed his heart and grinned. The two men walked over to Ronnie’s pickup truck and got in. Seconds later, Tucker was alone with Lahlia. She was staring at him with her enormous dark eyes. Bounce launched himself from her arms and bounded off after a grasshopper.

  “Your uncle Kosh is a fearful man,” Lahlia said.

  “You think he’s scary?”

  “I think he’s afraid. Why else would he wear armor?”

  “Armor?”

  “His animal skins,” she said.

  “You mean his leathers? That’s just so people will think he’s this big tough biker.”

  “He’s afraid of people thinking he’s afraid.”

  “You talk different now,” Tucker said.

  “I’m using what you call contractions. Ronnie told me I talked like a robot. He is not very nice. Kosh is nice. He worries about you.”

  “He’s okay,” Tucker said. A feeling of sadness swept across him; his eyes stung. “He reminds me of my dad sometimes.” He looked away. “I miss my parents.”

  The intensity of Lahlia’s gaze increased. “You don’t know where they are?”

  “They went . . . away. That’s why I’ve been staying with Kosh.”

  “Did they go away because your mother was ill?”

  “I think so.” Tucker felt something change, like a silent electrical discharge, or a sudden variation in the barometric pressure. They both turned to look up at the roof.

  The disk was back, hovering just off the peak.

  “The Gate does not come often,” Lahlia said. “It does not stay long.”

  “You came out of it, didn’t you?” Tucker said. “You and my dad.”

  “No. There is another.”

  “Another one? Where?”

  She pointed toward downtown Hopewell. “Your father found me there.”

  “So he did go through one of those things?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you know where he is?”

  Lahlia stared at his face, her eyes making small jumps from his eyes to his mouth to his nose, as if trying to fix his every feature in her mind. She pointed up at the shimmering disk.

  TUCKER FELT HIMSELF MAKING A DECISION — A LOOSENING in his gut and a lightness in his head — the same feeling he had had the first time he went off the rope swing.

  The disk might disappear again at any moment. He ran to the garage, lifted the aluminum extension ladder from its hangers, and carried it to the house. If he thought too much about what he was about to do, he might freeze up. He leaned the ladder against the eave, and climbed. Seconds later, he was standing on the roof looking into the disk. The surface buzzed and hummed; swirling gray clouds pressed against a perfectly flat, transparent membrane. He hesitated, fear and common sense battling with his need to act.

  “You will not be welcome,” Lahlia said. She was on the roof, standing a few paces behind him, holding Bounce in her arms. “They may attempt to kill you.”

  “Who will?” Tucker asked.

  “The priests. You will know them by their yellow robes.”

  Tucker looked from Lahlia to the disk.

  “Priests in yellow robes? So there’s a church or something on the other side?”

  “There is an altar atop the pyramid at the center of Romelas, the great city of the Lah Sept.”

  Her words made no sense. Tucker understood only one thing. “But my parents are there?”

  “Only your father.” Bounce’s yellow eyes were fixed upon the disk, his tail twitching.

  “How do you know that?”

  “I was there.”

  The disk changed subtly, going from swirling clouds to grainy salt and pepper with a faint green tinge. The surface bulged; several gaseous shapes emerged, skinless balloons of white mist. Tucker stepped back, his heart hammering in his ears, as the shapes metamorphosed into transparent human figures hovering at various heights on either side of the disk.

  “Do you see them?” he asked.

  “Klaatu!” said Lahlia. Her eyes were huge. Bounce was making a peculiar sound somewhere between a mewl and a yowl.

  The mist peoples’ features moved in and out of focus as more of them emerged from the disk, men and women, all looking expectantly at Tucker. One of them, a man with round features and small eyes, drifted closer. Tucker batted at it with his hand. He felt nothing, but the gaseous shape fragmented where his hand passed through. The broken mist man drifted away, then re-formed.

  “What do they want?” Tucker’s voice cracked.

  “They come at moments of terror and triumph,” Lahlia said. Bounce hissed at the ghostly shapes, digging his claws into her arms. “They are hungry for drama.”

  There were more than a dozen of the mist people hovering on either side of Tucker and Lahlia, staying just out of reach. Tucker tried to focus on their individual faces, but when he looked at any one of them straight on, their features softened and blurred. The surface of the disk had changed from grainy green to a cloudy, colorless whirlpool. Bounce squirmed and growled, then let out a horrific screech and exploded from Lahlia’s arms. He hit the roof and made a panicked dash for the edge — straight at the disk.

  “Bounce! No!” Lahlia shouted.

  Tucker tried to grab the cat, but it shot between his legs. Off balance, Tucker stumbled and fell forward. The cat leaped. The disk flashed orange. Bounce disappeared into the whorl.

  Tucker, on his hands and knees, was facing the disk from inches away. He felt it sucking at him, a thousand invisible fingers tugging at his clothing, at his skin, at every hair on his body. He gripped the rough shingles with his hands and tried to push himself back, but the wind had him in its grip. He could hear Lahlia shouting something, but her words were garbled. Slowly, inch by inch, the disk drew him closer until, with the same gulping, slurping sound he remembered from before, he was swallowed up.

  Lahlia stood on the roof and watched the Klaatu drift toward the Gate, their ethereal forms distorting and streaming into the disk like wisps of smoke entering an exhaust fan. The Gate buzzed and flickered. She heard the faint hiss and rattle of wind passing through leaves, and the distant lowing of slave cattle. Turning slowly, she looked out over the land surrounding Tucker Feye’s childhood home. A place of legend. She looked toward downtown Hopewell. A figure in black was walking up the road.

  Kosh.

  She watched him grow slowly larger. Soon, she could make out the details of his face — the missing eyebrows, the off-center nose, the set of his mouth.
>
  Standing before the Gate, she waited for him.

  It was strange spending time with Ronnie Becker. Kosh had thought about him often since they’d split up after a month of vagabonding around the West on their motorcycles. They’d had a lot of fun until that one night when they got in a drunken argument that ended with a bloody nose for Ronnie. Kosh had ridden off on his bike, leaving Ronnie sitting on a curb outside a bar in Flagstaff.

  They’d been little more than kids — immature, impulsive, and stupid. That was a long time ago. They were older now. They were men. They could laugh about it. He told Ronnie about falling off the barn, breaking his nose and collarbone, somehow making it funny, but leaving out the part about the disk and the World Trade Center. Ronnie told Kosh about some of his adventures: a brief period of living with a group of Hare Krishnas in Denver, a month in the county jail in Albuquerque — Ronnie wouldn’t say what that was for — and two years as a deacon in an evangelical mega-church in Nebraska. He’d been kicked out of the church after getting caught in a motel room with the preacher’s teenage daughter. Ronnie had always had a knack for trouble. Now he was back, living with his parents, but he said it wouldn’t be for long. He’d gotten a job working for the new preacher.

  “The miracle cure dude?” Kosh asked.

  “You got it, bro.” Ronnie winked. “My ticket to heaven.”

  After one beer, Kosh said he should be getting back to Tucker. Ronnie wanted to keep drinking and talking.

  “One beer? Since when does Kosh Feye stop at one?”

  Kosh stood up. “Sorry, man, I gotta go.”

  He left Ronnie at the bar with Henry Hall, who would drink and talk with anybody, and walked back to his brother’s house. It was a relief to leave Ronnie behind — again.

  As he walked up the driveway toward the house, Kosh noticed Lahlia on the roof. And a few feet in front of her, floating just off the peak, was the faint outline of a disk.

  The fear rose up inside him. “Don’t get too close to that thing!” he shouted.

  Lahlia gave him a small wave, stepped off the edge of the roof, and was gone.

  Kosh stood frozen, staring up at the empty space where the girl had been, hearing his own breathing and the pounding of his heart. Then something inside him broke free, and he was climbing the ladder, running along the roof ridge toward the disk. He stopped himself just in time. The disk hummed and crackled with malevolent energy.

  Taking a step back, Kosh tried to think. Whatever was happening, it was real. Either that or he was truly insane. What was he supposed to do? Follow the girl into the disk? He was certain that Tucker had preceded her. He should have known. He should never have left him. The kid had as much as told him that he thought Adrian and Emily had been swallowed by a disk. Kosh hadn’t taken him seriously. It made no sense, but Tucker was a teenager with the same reckless disregard for his own safety as Kosh had at that age.

  Could he follow them? Would it do any good? Or would it be like jumping into a volcano? He would take a bullet to save Tucker — to save any kid. But this thing — this disk — it terrified him to the depths of his soul.

  With that realization there came a faint hissing sound; the fuzzy surface of the disk turned clear, then disappeared completely. Kosh reached out with his hand, but felt nothing.

  He sat down on the ridge with his back against the chimney and waited there for a very long time. The disk did not reappear.

  In theory, it was not possible for a Klaatu to feel tired. With no physical body, there could be no accumulation of waste products in the bloodstream, no muscle fatigue, no drowsiness, no hunger, no thirst. To be a Klaatu was — in theory — to experience every moment in a state of blissful awareness.

  Nevertheless, as the millennia passed, many of the Klaatu became inexplicably listless and torpid. Attempts by the Cluster to reenergize these “tired” Klaatu were not entirely successful. Those afflicted showed no desire to reignite their vitality. Efforts to engage them were greeted with apathy and the Klaatu version of sighs. Some feared that the tired would slowly fade until their consciousnesses dissipated completely.

  A few Klaatu theorized that such dissipation would lead to another form of transcendence, but none of them was willing to put it to the test.

  The artist and disko designer Iyl Rayn, who had never questioned her own vitality, one day discovered within herself the weariness of a traveler who has reached the midway point of an arduous journey, the purpose of which has been long forgotten. Fearing that she herself was becoming tired, she once again called upon the corporeal Boggsians for their technical expertise, directing them to employ the diskos to obtain a sample of her original corporeal DNA.

  — E3

  TUCKER LANDED ON HIS HANDS AND KNEES ON A HARD stone surface. The stone was warm, like a sun-baked sidewalk, but this was no sidewalk — the surface was sandpaper rough, made of close-fitting limestone blocks.

  He sat back on his knees. It was night. He was looking down a steep, stepped wall of stone blocks, wider at the bottom than at the top. To either side of him, burning torches were affixed to ten-foot-tall poles set into the top step. The disk from which he had fallen floated in the air just above him, so close that he could have reached out and touched it.

  Far below, at the base of the stepped wall, thousands of people crowded an enormous plaza, torchlight reflecting off their upturned faces. He felt rather than heard their voices, a thrumming in the thick, humid air.

  Other voices, close and angry, came from behind him. Tucker turned. He was on the edge of a stone platform about thirty feet across. Four more disks, just like the one he had fallen from, hovered over the other sides of the platform, each of them flanked by a pair of tall torches. At the center of the platform was a waist-high block of black stone. An altar? A pale-haired girl was standing upon it — Lahlia! But she looked younger, her hair was shorter, and she had on the same silvery shift she had worn the day she had arrived in Hopewell. Her feet were bare.

  A flash of gray caught his eye. Bounce leaped from the platform onto the altar and into Lahlia’s arms. The two of them stared down at Tucker — Lahlia in wide-eyed astonishment, as if she had never seen him before, while Bounce watched him with slitted, knowing yellow eyes, his tail twitching.

  On the other side of the altar, near the far edge of the platform, three men in hooded yellow robes were crowded together, bent over something. They had their backs to him and had not seen him arrive. Were these the priests Lahlia had mentioned? Two of them had their hoods up; the third had his hood down, revealing a shaven scalp and a scraggly beard. They were speaking in a strange language.

  Tucker couldn’t see what it was they were looking at — the stone altar blocked his view. Lahlia, hugging her cat to her chest, looked terrified. Tucker edged to his left to see what had the priests’ attention. A figure was sprawled limply at the edge of the platform, wearing jeans and a flannel shirt.

  “Dad!” He cried out without thinking.

  The priests looked up, startled.

  Forgetting Lahlia’s warnings about the priests, Tucker dashed across the platform to his father. The Reverend Feye’s eyes were half-closed and unfocused. Tucker shook him.

  “Dad! Wake up!”

  One of the priests grabbed Tucker by his collar. Tucker twisted free and backed away.

  “What did you do to him?” he shouted.

  The bearded priest, a dark-eyed man with harsh, hawklike features, answered him with a string of nonsense words that sounded like a mixture of Chinese and Spanish.

  “Speak English!” Tucker said. “I can’t understand you.”

  The priest raised his black eyebrows. “¿Inglés?” he said, pointing a short black baton at Tucker.

  Tucker backed away. The bearded priest lunged toward him, jabbing the baton at him. Tucker dodged the thrust, looking around frantically. He kept backing away from the priest, following the edge of the platform. Each of the sides ended in a long, widening series of steps down to the crowded pla
za — he realized that he was on top of an enormous, five-sided pyramid. Other than jumping into one of the disks, the only way off was to climb down the sides, but the pyramid was completely surrounded by the crowd of people.

  The priests were coming at him from both sides. Tucker grasped one of the torch poles, pulled it free, and swung it at the nearest one. The priest jumped back, tripped, and fell over the edge, screaming as he tumbled down the steep side of the pyramid. Tucker swung the torch back toward the other two priests, but before he could swing again, the bearded priest rushed in and chopped at the torch with his baton. The baton struck with an explosion of blue sparks; the torch separated from the pole and fell smoking to the platform.

  The priest gestured with the baton and said something, again in the strange language. The other priest had circled the platform and was coming up behind Tucker. Tucker swung the broken pole from side to side, trying to keep them both at bay.

  While the priests were focused on Tucker, Lahlia had climbed down from the altar and moved toward the far side of the platform, carrying Bounce. She stopped in front of the disk nearest Tucker’s unconscious father and looked back at Tucker and the two priests.

  Bounce yowled.

  The bearded priest looked back at her and shouted something. Lahlia shook her head and, with an expression that was both terrified and triumphant, stepped into the disk. The disk flashed orange, and she was gone.

  The priest cried out in frustration, then turned back toward Tucker, his face contorted with anger. Tucker jabbed at him with the broken end of the torch pole. The priest knocked it aside contemptuously and touched the baton to Tucker’s hand. A jolt of pure pain rocketed up Tucker’s arm and exploded at the base of his skull. Every muscle in his body went slack, and he collapsed to the stone platform.

  A hypnotic, almost subsonic murmur from the crowd below filled the air. Tucker could see and hear, but he could not move. The priests standing over him were speaking more gibberish. The bearded one gestured at Tucker’s father, a few yards away, and said something that sounded like “Heid.” Tucker could see the two priests drag his father across the platform. Each priest took an arm and a leg, lifted him, and threw him into one of the disks. Another orange flash, and his father was gone.