by Pete Hautman
The priests returned to Tucker, dragged him to the altar, and set him roughly upon it. Unable to move his head, Tucker stared up into a star-pocked sky, in the midst of which hung a reddish orb. A red moon? Lahlia had once said something about a “blood moon.” The sky began to vibrate and rotate. It took several revolutions before Tucker realized that it was not the stars rotating, but the altar turning beneath him. The stone block was on a pivot, and the priests were turning it. He could hear their grunts of effort as they spun it faster and faster, like a flesh-and-stone version of spin the bottle. After a few more revolutions, the altar juddered to a stop.
He heard the deep voice of the bearded priest shout out a word: “Bitte!” Tucker was able to turn his head far enough to see the priest moving from one face of the pyramid to the next, stopping at each to call out to the murmuring crowd.
“Bitte!”
After the fifth call, the crowd fell into total silence.
The bearded priest walked up to Tucker and raised his right hand high over his head. Tucker saw the glint of torchlight on a shiny, black, wedge-shaped blade, and the strangely colored moon, and the harsh, angry features of the priest. The black blade flickered. He heard a grunt of effort and felt something slam into his chest. For a moment he thought he had only been punched, but when the priest withdrew the blade, it was followed by a bright red fountain of blood.
THE SKY WAS BLUE, THE TREES WERE THICK WITH GREEN needles and yellow leaves, and an incredibly old woman was bending over Tucker. Her pale eyes, muted jade, searched his face anxiously. Her hair was the color of cigarette ash. He thought he had never seen anyone so ancient, but at the same time she looked familiar, like the way he imagined his own grandmother, whom he had never met.
The air smelled of pine needles, rotting leaves, and wood smoke.
“Trackenspor? Septan? Deutsch?” The old woman pointed a gnarled finger at her mouth. Behind her, a disk shimmered and pulsed.
Tucker tried to speak, but something was squeezing his chest, giving him barely enough slack to breathe. He moved his head from side to side, saying no to whatever the woman was asking.
“Français? Non?” She held a knobby walking stick in her right hand.
Tucker shook his head. He remembered the blood, and being lifted from the altar, and then a familiar inside-out, falling moment. He understood that he had been thrown through a disk but remembered nothing after that until he opened his eyes and found this strange old woman mouthing unintelligible questions at him.
“¿Inglés?” Her eyes widened; her pupils dilated. “English!” Her lips peeled back to reveal a collection of small, even teeth. It took Tucker a moment to recognize the expression as a smile.
“¿Cómo está usted?”
Tucker shook his head.
The old woman rapped herself on top of the head with her stick. “English, English! Too many tongues.” She walked around him, using her walking stick but not seeming to really need it. “Leg coverings, the name, the name . . .” She pointed her stick at his legs. “Pantas? Genus?”
“Jeans,” Tucker managed to whisper.
“Jeans! And . . . and a blouson? Blouse? Prenumerary? Digital?”
Tucker shook his head helplessly. He felt weirdly disconnected from his body. In his head, he was terrified; his heart should be pounding, but his body felt relaxed. He sensed only a steady, calm rhythm from within his chest.
“Your heart has been damaged.” Her voice sounded more normal now. “The Lah Sept are efficient with their knives.” She rapped her stick against his chest. It made a dull clacking sound. Tucker lifted his head enough to see a convex metallic plate affixed to his chest.
“The cardiac support you are wearing is temporary.” She scooped him into her arms, carrying him as if he weighed no more than an infant. “If you wish to live, you must tell me now. Live? Or die?”
“Live,” Tucker croaked.
They climbed a low rise. A few yards to the side of the path, another disk hovered a few inches above the carpet of pine needles.
“I went . . . through,” said Tucker, gesturing weakly as they passed the disk.
“The diskos, yes.” The woman continued to walk.
Tucker drew in as much air as he was able, then said, “My dad . . . was . . . here?” The effort exhausted him.
“Do not speak,” said the woman. She stopped walking and looked at him sharply. “What is your name?”
Tucker took two shallow breaths, then managed to squeeze out, “Tucker.”
The woman slowly nodded her head. “Ah. Tucker Feye. I did not recognize you.”
Tucker shook his head, not understanding.
“As the Boggsians say, ‘What goes around comes around.’” She was walking again. “There is an ancient curse: ‘May you live in interesting times.’ You have heard it?”
Tucker shook his head again.
“It may postdate you. Welcome to the Terminus.”
Tucker tried to reply, but he could not get enough air. The old woman frowned and began walking more quickly. “A Medicant disko is near,” she said. “Do not die.” Seconds later, they arrived at another disk, this one with its bottom edge resting upon the pine duff. Tucker’s breathing had become shallower with each step. He felt himself fading.
“Do not be disturbed by their poor bedside manner,” she said. “They cannot help themselves.” She fed him into the disk.
THE DREAMS CAME AND WENT.
Swinging from the tree at Hardy Lake.
The acrid smell of burning jet fuel.
Torchlight reflecting off a black stone blade.
A girl with soft yellow hair and large dark eyes peering into his face. Tucker tried to sit up, but he could not move. “Lahlia?”
Lahlia’s face morphed into that of his mother. “Mom?” He raised his arm, reaching out to her, but she stepped quickly back out of his reach and faded away.
Another dream followed: standing at a long table in a sea of identical tables, performing the same motions with his hands, again and again.
Tucker awakened in utter darkness.
Where was he? Back on the pyramid? No, the surface beneath him was too soft. Home in bed? The surface was not soft enough, and it did not smell like home. It smelled like . . . nothing. He opened and closed his mouth. No taste, good or bad.
Was he alive?
He sat up. A light came on. A featureless beige surface. A wall. He turned his head slowly from side to side. A small room, about eight feet on a side, no windows, one door, a small table attached to the side of the bed. No sheets or blankets, just a smooth, skinlike covering over the mattress.
It all looked strangely familiar.
He looked down at his body. A thin tube ran from the wall behind the bed into a plastic port embedded just above his navel. He was naked except for a pair of filmy shorts, and on his feet . . . From his ankles down they looked as if they had been dipped in thick, rubbery blue paint — the same sort of foot covering that his father and Lahlia had been wearing the day they arrived in Hopewell.
Lahlia. She had known what would happen to him — that the disk would land him on that pyramid. She had warned him about the priests. Tucker flipped through his memories, trying to sort dreams from reality. Had he really been stabbed? He examined his chest and found a jagged white scar that hadn’t been there before. He also noticed several hairs growing around his nipples and across his chest. Chest hair? He sat up and eased himself off the bed. He felt fine — better than fine. He felt strong. The blue foot coverings were remarkably comfortable. He would have walked a few steps to try them out, but he was tethered to the wall by the tube in his belly.
Before he could figure out how to detach it, the door slid back. A bald man in gray coveralls stepped into the room. Several studs of varying colors were arranged in a grid on his chest, and he was wearing a complicated-looking headset with blue and yellow lights blinking over his left temple. He glared at Tucker, his mouth tight. Without saying a word, the man lifted him easil
y and set him back onto the bed.
“Hey!” Tucker said. The man pushed Tucker firmly back until he was lying on the thin mattress, then he touched one of the colored studs on his chest. Tucker felt himself sliding back into oblivion.
The next time Tucker woke up, the same man was running a palm-size plastic device over his abdomen, his hands covered with gloves of the same flesh-hugging blue plastic that coated Tucker’s feet. The lights on his headset were blinking rapidly. Another man and a woman, heads shaved, wearing white coveralls, stood near the open door, watching. Both of them wore similar headsets, but without the blinking lights.
Tucker raised his head. “Where am I?” he asked.
The man ignored him.
“Can I have some clothes?”
No response.
“Are you a doctor?”
The man nodded curtly, then turned to the woman. “Nine eight six neurotypical,” he said in oddly accented English.
The woman unfolded a small plastic tablet and typed rapidly with one hand.
“Nine eight six?” Tucker said. “Nine eight six what?”
The doctor produced a device that looked like an overengineered screwdriver and touched it to the spot where the tube entered Tucker’s body. Tucker lost all sensation below his rib cage. The doctor grasped the end of the tube, twisted, and pulled. Four inches of tubing came out of Tucker’s abdomen with a sucking sound, leaving a hole behind. Tucker felt nothing. The doctor quickly placed a palm-size, flesh-colored patch over the wound. The patch melted and merged with Tucker’s skin. A few seconds later, only a slight pucker marked where the hole had been.
The doctor said, “Twenty-two.”
The woman held her tablet out. The doctor pressed his gloved thumb to one corner. The woman refolded the tablet and returned it to her pocket.
“Am I okay?” Tucker asked. Sensation was returning to his lower body. He felt no pain, but the spot where the tube had been began to itch.
“Nine eight six,” the doctor said, frowning at Tucker as if to say, Why are you wasting my time?
“I don’t understand,” said Tucker.
The doctor shook his head disgustedly and snapped off his blue gloves. “Eighty-six,” he said to the woman, and walked out of the room.
“I want my clothes,” Tucker said.
The woman slid aside a panel in the wall and handed him a pair of gray coveralls.
“Where are my clothes?” he asked.
Wordlessly, she opened a second wall panel and produced his T-shirt, underwear, and jeans, all cleaned and carefully folded. Tucker quickly pulled on his underwear, which felt a bit snug, then his jeans. The jeans had shrunk — they were three inches too short, and he could barely get them buttoned. He gave the woman a puzzled look.
“What did you do? Boil them?”
The woman did not reply.
Tucker stepped out of the shrunken jeans and put on the coveralls. They fit him perfectly.
“What about my shoes?” he said, looking down at his blue feet.
She shook her head. The two orderlies — that was what Tucker had decided they were — took him by the arms and led him out of the beige room into a long gray hallway lined with beige doors.
“Where are you taking me?”
“Eighty-six,” said the male orderly. They walked down the hallway, the male orderly’s hand firmly on Tucker’s back, urging him along. Many of the doors were open; Tucker caught glimpses into rooms exactly like the one he had occupied. In one room, a yellow-haired girl was lying on her back. Her face was bandaged, several tubes pierced her abdomen, and her legs were supported by a complex metal armature. Lahlia? Tucker stopped, but the orderly grabbed his arm and kept him moving on down the hall.
“Eighty-six!” said the orderly.
Tucker tried to pull away. The female orderly grasped his other arm; they lifted him so that his feet were a few inches off the ground and continued down the hallway, deaf to his protests. Tucker squirmed and tried kicking at their ankles, but his kicks had no effect.
At the end of the hallway, they entered a small cubicle and set him back on his feet. Tucker felt a pressure against the bottoms of his feet and realized they were in an elevator, going up. A few seconds later one wall slid back to reveal a flat, open rooftop overlooking a vast city. For a panicked moment, Tucker’s mind flashed back to the Twin Towers — but this was not New York. These buildings all had a blocky sameness, and their colors were variations on the beige and gray of the hospital.
A hazy orange sun floated just above the horizon. Sunrise or sunset? He had no idea.
The orderlies turned away from the sun. A few yards in front of them stood a disk framed by a metal armature. The disk’s edge just touched the pebbly gray surface of the roof.
The orderlies released him. “Go,” said the woman, urging him toward the disk.
“Where does it go?” Tucker asked suspiciously.
The male orderly gave him a shove. “Vamos,” he said.
The surface of the disk abruptly changed texture and color, becoming grainy like a malfunctioning television, then pulsing bright green. The orderlies grabbed Tucker and pulled him away.
The disk hissed, gasped, and spat. A body wrapped in a cocoon of blood-spotted white fabric thumped onto the roof. A man. Long black hair, beard, dark skin, prominent eyebrows, and several deep, unhealed scratches on his forehead and cheeks. His brown eyes were open, unblinking, and dry. His lips had pulled back in a frozen grimace, revealing a set of large yellow teeth. He looked extremely dead.
The female orderly fingered her tablet urgently. Seconds later, four men emerged from the elevator with a floating gurney. They affixed a device that looked like an armored breastplate onto the dead man’s chest, shoved a long tube down his throat, inserted a probe into his side, lifted him onto the gurney, and floated him into the elevator.
As soon as they were gone, the male orderly nudged Tucker toward the disk, which had returned to its previous cloudy shimmer.
“Vamos.”
“Not until you tell me where it goes,” Tucker said. He did not want to end up back on that pyramid — or worse.
“Home,” said the woman.
“Home?” Tucker said.
The man gave Tucker a hard shove, sending him stumbling into the disk.
Not home.
The tangy, rich smell of autumn forest was overpowering after the sterile, odorless hospital. Tucker could feel the pine needles beneath his palms and hear the soft, mosquitolike buzz of the disk behind him. He crawled quickly away, putting a few yards between himself and the disk, then stood and looked around. His eyes adjusted. A full moon, low in the sky, filtered through the trees, casting weird shadows on all sides.
For several minutes he stood without moving, trying to sort things out. Had he been to the future? To some alternate universe? And what was this place? He remembered an old woman carrying him through a forest. This forest?
After a time, his thoughts stuttered and slowed. He noticed two faint moonlit paths leading away from the disk. He chose the one to the left and followed it.
A certain Theory of Revocable Causality came into vogue among a subcluster of the Klaatu. The Theory stated that alterations to past events would inevitably affect future events and that the further in the past the alteration occurred, the more profound would be the changes to the present. In other words, causing a Jurassic Period archosaur to flick its tail at the wrong moment might kill the ratlike protomammal that might have become the ancestor to Homo sapiens.
The faction embracing this theory became known as the Gnomon.
A vigorous debate ensued, including the following widely quoted exchange between the Gnomon Chayhim and the artist Iyl Rayn.
Chayhim: Damaging the established timestreams might preclude our very existence. Iyl Rayn: The simple fact that you exist is sufficient to disprove your theory.
Chayhim: Iyl Rayn makes the assumption that our present state is more profound than that which we might hav
e achieved had she not created the diskos. There is no proof of this. We believe we are greater than ourselves.
Iyl Rayn: You, sir, are a moron.
The Gnomon, unconvinced by Iyl Rayn’s arguments, employed a team of Boggsian technicians to create a force of semi-intelligent cyberorganisms they called Timesweeps. These Timesweeps employed portable, self-contained diskos to travel through time and space. Their mission was to unwind the acts of corporeals who used the diskos and, having done so, to destroy the offending diskos so they could not be used again, much like an army burning bridges during a retreat.
— E3
ON THE MORNING AFTER THE ESCAPE OF THE PURE GIRL Lah Lia and the subsequent sacrifice of the intruder who had interrupted the ritual, Brother Mynka, acolyte to Master Gheen, was on his hands and knees atop the Cydonian Pyramid using a short-bristle brush to scrub clean the stone surface of the frustum. He was rubbing out a particularly stubborn bloodstain when he was startled by a sharp popping sound.
Brother Mynka thought one of the torchères had fallen over, but when he looked up, he discovered a pinprick of orange luminescence dancing just above the surface of the altar stone. As he watched, the orange spark swelled into a fist-size sphere, then stretched itself horizontally to become a fat halo.
Brother Mynka dropped his brush and backed away until he reached the edge of the frustum. The halo-shaped light continued to expand, even as it appeared to be falling into itself. Brother Mynka gasped as understanding blossomed. He had been taught that such things existed, but he never imagined he would confront one in real life.
Only one creature grew larger as it consumed itself.
A maggot.