The Obsidian Blade

by Pete Hautman

  Tucker opened his eyes. He could just make out the shapes of rough-hewn rafters in the near-dark. He was in Awn’s cabin.

  Thump, thump, thump, thump, thump. . . .

  He had been dreaming, but the thumping was real. He sat up on the edge of the bed, blinking sleepily at the crude wooden walls. He felt as if he had slept for hours.

  Thump, thump, thump . . .

  Tucker stood and walked out of the bedroom. A flickering lantern above the woodstove illuminated the main room. The window and open doorway were dark. Had he slept all through the day and into the night? He looked at himself in the mirror hanging on the wall, felt his soft, scruffy beard.

  He walked to the doorway. Moonlight flooded the meadow. Awn was sitting in her chair, thumping her walking stick, her eyes gazing out over the meadow. The tip of the stick had worn a depression half an inch deep in the soft wood of the porch floor.

  “Have you been doing that all day?” Tucker asked.

  Awn smiled and looked up at him. “Sit.”

  Tucker sat in the other chair. Tapping out the seasons, she had said. And how many seasons could she “tap out” in a day? He tried to add up the numbers. Two taps a second, sixty seconds per minute, sixty minutes per hour . . . That was about, what? About seventy-two hundred? Seventy-two hundred seasons would be eighteen hundred years for every hour . . . and she’d been tapping for at least five hours. Nine thousand years? And she was still tapping.

  “Your calculations cause me discomfort,” said Awn.

  “You can tell what I’m thinking?”

  “Your eyes cloud with numbers. Do not measure the time. Feel it.” She continued to tap.

  “You can stop,” Tucker said.

  “Are you certain?”

  Tucker nodded.

  Awn raised the stick and rested it across her lap. “Did you dream?”

  Tucker told her about the table and the widgets. “I think I’ve dreamed the same dream before.”

  “Dreams are assembled from fragments of memory,” Awn said. “That was a Medicant factory. They used you well.”

  “They had me working in their factory the whole time?”

  “The Medicants do nothing for free.”

  Tucker ran his hand over his jaw, fascinated by its furry texture. A sadness came over him for his lost years. He wondered again, How long? A year? Two? Five? He might never know his true age.

  “You are fortunate,” said Awn, “that they did not take more.”

  That night, over a meal of bean stew, black bread, and braised parsnips, Tucker talked with Awn about his parents. “I’m pretty sure they went through the disko that goes to the — what did you call the pyramid people? The Lah something?”

  “The Lah Sept,” said Awn. “Eat.”

  Tucker ate another spoonful of the stew, then said, “I’m pretty sure they went into the disk — the disko — and that landed them on top of that pyramid —”

  “The Cydonian Pyramid,” said Awn. “You were on the frustum.”

  “Frustum?”

  “A frustum is the flat top of a pyramid. Is that not an English word?”

  “I never heard it before. Anyway, I think my dad took my mom there to get her to the Medicants. Because she was sick.”

  Awn nodded.

  “So did they have to come here to get there?”

  “People come; people go.”

  “I have to find them.” Tucker sat back in his chair. “How do I do that?”

  “I do not know.”

  “These disko things. Do they always take you to the same place?”

  “Yes,” said Awn. “And no.”

  “Thanks a lot.”

  Awn shrugged. “Wherever you go, there you are. Poorly phrased questions produce unsatisfactory responses.”

  “But I —”

  “Eat your beans. Your questions will wait for tomorrow.”

  With Awn refusing to answer any more questions, Tucker retired to the porch, where he sat staring out into the night, listening to the babble of the tree frogs and crickets, the sounds of night. Under the full moon, the meadow grasses became a fibrous ocean of icy silver and pale gold. His thoughts whirled. What did he know? He was in some distant future, if Awn’s tapping was to be believed. He had access to the diskos. He was free to go if he wished. He could walk out into the woods at any time, choose a disko, and travel to another place.

  Did he want to leave? So far, Awn had shown no inclination to plunge a knife into him or turn him into a factory zombie. All she had done was feed him, offer him shelter, and dispense a few paltry bits of information. For the moment, he felt safe.

  He could hear her stirring inside: the clink of metal on metal, scraping, the creak of a pump handle, the sound of water splashing into the basin. Should he have offered to help with the dishes? She had not seemed to expect it. He wondered again what she was doing here in this cabin and why she knew so much about the disks — diskos, portals, whatever — and why all her answers to his questions simply led to more questions. And what was her deal with numbers? How crazy would a person have to be to spend a whole day pounding a stick on the floor rather than just saying, Nine thousand years — or whatever the number would have come to if she had kept on tapping.

  Nine thousand years! The thought made him feel hollow and unreal — and what sort of person could tap a stick for hours and hours without getting tired? He remembered his nightmarish journey from the pyramid to the hospital of the Medicants. Awn had picked him up and carried him through the woods. The old woman looked like ninety pounds of wrinkles and bone, hardly strong enough to lift a child.

  Maybe this was some sort of virtual reality and he was strapped to a machine and someone was feeding dreams into his brain. That thought brought him a weird sort of comfort, although he did not believe it for a moment. Breathing in the pine-scented air, feeling the rough boards beneath his feet, he knew to the bottom of his soul that this cabin, this place, was utterly real.

  Awn came out of the cabin and, without looking at him, stepped off the porch and walked out into the meadow. The grasses came up to her waist. She stopped midway across and stood without moving for several seconds.

  Tucker heard what sounded like men’s voices filtering through the trees, calling out in some strange tongue. Awn quickly crossed the far side of the meadow and disappeared into the woods. Tucker waited a few seconds, then followed her. As he reached the edge of the field he heard more shouting, and then a hoarse scream followed by a bright-orange flash from far back in the trees. The voices ceased abruptly. He stood still, listening as the night creatures gradually resumed their babble. He took a few steps toward where the sounds had come from, but he had missed the path and quickly became disoriented. After a long quarter hour of crashing through the underbrush, he found himself back in the meadow.

  A pale shape — Awn — emerged from the trees a few yards away.

  “Tucker Feye. Are you lost?”

  “I heard voices,” he said.

  “They come; they go. It is time to rest.” They crossed the meadow to the cabin, Awn using her stick and moving more slowly than usual.

  “Who was that?” Tucker asked as they stepped up onto the porch.

  “No one you would know.” She went inside.

  Tucker stood for a few moments on the porch, trying unsuccessfully to make sense of his situation, then followed her inside. Awn was sitting at the table, motionless, staring into space.

  “Awn?”

  She did not reply. She did not seem to know he was there. Tucker waved his hand in front of her face, but got no response. Not even a blink.

  He sat with her until his eyes would no longer stay open, then took himself to the other room and sank onto the bed.

  That night he dreamed of a long hallway lined with gray doors. The Medicant hospital. One of the doors slid open. Lahlia was sitting on the bed wearing the silver shift and blue boots she had worn during her first visit to Hopewell. She stared back at him with her dark eyes. He tr
ied to ask her about his father, but when he opened his mouth nothing came out. Suddenly he was back in the hallway and all the doors were closed. He ran from door to door, pounding with his fists, certain that behind one of them he would find his parents.

  TUCKER AWAKENED AT DAWN. RUBBING HIS EYES, HE walked into the main room. Awn was stirring something on the stove.

  “Good morning,” he said.

  Awn nodded, lifted the heavy iron pot from the stove, and carried it to the table with no apparent effort.

  “You’re a lot stronger than you look,” Tucker said.

  “I am no stronger than you,” she said.

  “I don’t think I could pick me up and carry me the way you did.”

  “You may be surprised by what you are capable of doing.” She ladled hot spelt into the bowls.

  “Did you sleep?” Tucker asked.

  “I am rested. Eat your breakfast.”

  Tucker ate, planning his next request for information. He worked his way through the bowl of spelt, composing and rejecting questions. When he finally spoke, the question that popped out was not the one he’d meant to ask.

  “Am I dead?”

  “Yes,” said Awn.

  Tucker stared at her in shock.

  “But not here,” she added. “Not now.”

  Tucker relaxed — slightly.

  “Your question is casuistic,” Awn said.

  “Huh?”

  “Am I using the wrong language?”

  “I don’t know what that word — ca-zoo-whatever.”

  “Your question is not answerable in its present form. Time is not symmetrical. You cannot uneat your spelt, yet the uneaten spelt exists in the recent past. You will die — in a sense you are already dead — but you are not dead in the here and now.”

  “You know when I’m going to die?”

  “You will live the life you will live. Is that not sufficient?”

  “Um, not really.”

  Awn stood up. “Come. I will give you a tour of the diskos.”

  “They are fickle,” said Awn. She stopped walking and thrust her stick into a disko. The surface pulsed and formed a whirlpool around the stick’s point of entry. “This one leads to the site of the assassination of a politician, but rarely to the assassination event itself.”

  “Why doesn’t it suck in the stick?” Tucker asked, standing several feet back from the disko. “Every time I got that close to one it sucked me up like a vacuum cleaner.”

  “They find you more interesting than they do me.”

  “You mean . . . like, they’re alive?”

  “Not in the sense you mean.” She withdrew her stick from the whorl. “But they are attracted to those who can perceive them. Most corporeals are blind to the diskos and are therefore not drawn to them.”

  “Do you mean some people can’t go through?”

  “Anyone may be transported, but some must forcibly encounter the field. As you have seen, most diskos are located inconveniently, where the unwary are not apt to stumble into them. Except here at the Terminus, of course.”

  “Why is here different?”

  Awn ignored the question. “Few of the Lah Sept, for example, can see the diskos.”

  “But there were thousands of —” Tucker stopped when Awn winced at his use of thousands. “I mean, there was a whole plaza full of people watching when I was on that pyramid. They couldn’t see the diskos?”

  “Of the Lah Sept, only the priests, the Yars, and others who have received training actually see them. The sacrifices are hurled from the edge of the pyramid into a disko, but the people on the zocalo see only a flash of orange. Though they imagine more.”

  “How come I can see them?”

  “As I said, they find you interesting.” She gestured at the disko with her stick. “The reverse side of this would take you to France during the bubonic plague, a destination popular with the Klaatu.”

  “Klaatu?” Lahlia had called the ghosts Klaatu. “Are they like . . . dead people?”

  “They are not dead. Nor are they alive, in the usual sense.”

  “Why are they called Klaatu?”

  “The inventor of the technology that allowed them to transcend the physical was a connoisseur of ancient video projections.”

  “You mean movies?”

  “Yes.” Awn resumed walking, her pace as regular as a metronome. Tucker followed her to a disko hovering over a mossy boulder.

  “This disko leads to a place called Auschwitz, where many were killed with terrible efficiency.” She walked around the boulder to the other side of the disko. “This side I do not know. Another attempted genocide, perhaps. Come.” She followed a faint path through a patch of gooseberry bushes and stopped before another disko that seemed to rest on its edge beneath the sagging branches of a white pine. “This is the disko where I found you. It leads to the Cydonian Pyramid in the city of Romelas near the end of the reign of the Lah Sept priesthood. You are fortunate that I was nearby when you were cast through. The other side also leads to Romelas, but to a later point in that city’s history. Pure Girls who survive the frustum often choose to return home by this route.”

  “Lahlia said she was a Pure Girl,” Tucker said, more to himself than to Awn.

  Awn tipped her head as if consulting an inner voice. She nodded. “The Yar Lia, yes.”

  “Lahlia was here?”

  “She called herself Yar Lia. She and many others have passed through the Terminus. Come. We have far to go.”

  The next disko stood at the crest of a hill.

  “I once saw a large red-and-blue parrot fly squawking from this disko,” Awn said. “It did not survive the winter. I have seen other tropical birds in the forest; they may have come from here as well. Entering from the opposite side of this disko would take you to the landing of the Viking spacecraft on Mars.”

  “Mars the planet?”

  “Yes. You would not wish to go there in your corporeal state.”

  “How come there’s a disko there?”

  “So that the Klaatu might witness the Martian tragedy. It was before your time, yes? You would not have known. The Viking spacecraft infected the Martian ecosystem with terrestrial prions and other organic matter. Biocide on a planetary scale. Generations passed before anyone realized that Mars had once supported life, and that the entire Martian biota had been infected and destroyed as a result of human trespass. Come.”

  Awn led Tucker down a steep path to the edge of a tamarack swamp, where three diskos hung a few feet above the peaty soil. Two transparent figures, a man and a woman, hovered before the middle disk. They were looking right at Tucker.

  “Are those Klaatu?”

  “Yes. You fascinate them,” said Awn. She swept her stick through the two figures. They broke into shards of mist, then dissipated. “They have abandoned their corporeal existence, yet they retain consciousness without measurable physical presence.”

  “But I can see them. Isn’t that physical?”

  “No. The Klaatu are composed of information. You become aware of them through other means, then your mind constructs an appropriate image. There is no actual seeing involved.”

  A male Klaatu swam out of the central disko. Awn poked at it with her stick. The Klaatu broke apart.

  “When you do that, are you killing them?” Tucker asked.

  “I am merely disrupting our awareness of them. It amuses me.” Awn pointed at the left-hand disko. “The Krakatoa explosion, observed from a ship in the Sunda Strait. You would not survive.” She pointed at the other disko. “A cavern in Gibraltar where the last true Neanderthals were slaughtered by their Cro-Magnon neighbors.”

  “How come practically every one of these disko things leads to something awful?”

  “The Klaatu are fascinated by the terrible, the horrific, the irreversible. Because the Klaatu are, in a sense, already dead, they are endlessly fascinated by the true deaths of others. Their fear of what they are is what drives them to use the diskos. They devote the
mselves exclusively to their own self-absorption, and it is for this that they are ashamed. Shame was what ultimately led Klaatu known as the Gnomon to declare the diskos morbid and atavistic — even as other Klaatu continued to access them.”

  “Who made the diskos?”

  “The diskos were constructed by Boggsians under the guidance of a Klaatu artist known as Iyl Rayn.”

  “What’s a Boggsian?” Tucker imagined something with eight legs and sharp claws.

  “The Boggsians supply digital technology to anyone who will pay, though they eschew such technologies for their own use. You will meet them one day. Recognize them by their beards and black hats — they are the descendants of Amish Jews.”

  Tucker said, “Amish Jews? Aren’t the Amish and Jews complete opposites?”

  “The sonnets of Shakespeare have yet to be typed by a monkey, yet stranger things have occurred.” With that cryptic comment, Awn continued on down the path. Tucker shook his head and followed. As they entered a boggy grove of soft-needled, moss-draped tamarack trees, Tucker heard a crunching and splashing in the distance. He looked through the trees and saw a man wearing a red jerkin and a metal helmet, leaping from hummock to hummock, running like a frightened deer.

  “Who was that?” Tucker asked.

  “He is lost. Do not worry; he will find his way. Come.” She continued along the path. Tucker noticed that Awn never slowed or stumbled.

  They came to a disk jutting up through a pool of stagnant water. Only about a third of it was visible. “This one emits snakes and lizards,” Awn said. “They do not survive here for long, which makes me think the reverse would be true as well.”

  “Don’t any of these things go to someplace normal?”

  “There is no normal.”

  “I mean normal like Hopewell, where people aren’t getting killed and things aren’t exploding and stuff.”

  “The diskos lead to interesting times, as defined by their designer.”

  “So, can I get home from here?”

  “Yes,” said Awn. “And no.” She continued along the path. Tucker followed.

  “I wish you wouldn’t do that,” he said.