To THE LAND OF THE ELECTRIC ANGEL: Hugo and Nebula Award Finalist Author (The Frontiers Saga)

by William Rotsler

  "Come on, Doreen," Rio said. "What about you?"

  Doreen made a croaking sound and grasped her throat and made a face, but she got to her feet and followed Rio and Blake as they crossed into and through the big, luxurious outer chamber and passed through the open lock.

  The mountains were the same. It was spring, and fleecy white clouds were heading southeast with perceptible movement. There were flowers around the edges of the small clearing. The hidden explosive packages triggered by Voss and Vogel had blown away the tumble of earth and rock that had covered the tomb entrance. The raw earth and split rock was ugly on the green grass of the hillside, but the entrance was clear. One large rock had been lasered into pieces and shoved aside.

  Blake noticed a pine tree quite close to the entrance, shading the lockport, but he remembered no tree nearby when they had gone in – yesterday.

  He looked out over the forest below and thought there must be differences, but he could detect none. Trees must have grown into maturity, died, were burnt by fire or blasted by lightning. In other areas they would have been logged off and new growth planted, but here was still virginal land.

  Blake looked to the right, where Vogel and Jean-Michel were assembling the aircar. It was an eight-passenger Aeroford with an oversized fusion engine, the very latest design. One hundred years ago, Blake thought.

  Voss turned to Rio after a glance at Blake and at Doreen, who had sat down upon a rock. "We can take off tomorrow. I think everyone will be in shape by then."

  Rio nodded and asked, "Where's Granville?"

  Voss pointed down the mountainside. "He went to look for some detectors be planted. There he is now!"

  Blake looked and saw the tiny figure come out of the trees and start up the slope. The trees were just beginning to thin here at the tomb site and the view over the mountains was gorgeous.

  "It feels good to be alive," Doreen said with a raspy voice, and Blake turned to her.

  "Yes, it does. Can I do anything for you?"

  Doreen smiled weakly. "No, I'll be all right." She indicated the aircar with a tilt of her head. "That thing going to be all right after a century of sitting like a lump?"

  Blake blinked. There is something about the phrase "a century" that is more staggering than "one hundred years." He smiled at himself and told Doreen, "Probably. It was double-sealed and first-grade workmanship."

  Doreen squinted at the machine. "I don't know. It could have been sabotaged. Not everyone is ... uh, was ... a fan of Jean-Michel Voss, you know."

  Blake was a little surprised but made no comment. He patted Doreen's knee, then looked down at himself. He plucked at the thin woven plastic garment. "Care to slip into something more comfortable?" he asked.

  Doreen smiled and took his hand to rise. "Anything I have is now a costume, not clothes. But lead on."

  Doreen and Blake re-entered the tomb. Blake paused for a second at the lip of the lock and looked back. Vogel was looking after them with an expressionless face. Blake shivered.

  Doreen and Blake took showers in adjoining sonic stalls, but the sight of her nude body did nothing for him. It crossed his mind that after a hundred years he should be quite eager. Maybe my body has ignored the signals for so long that nothing is functioning anymore. That gave him a moment of pause. Three or four hundred years of life is an exciting prospect, but not if there will be no sex, not if I've somehow become impotent!

  They dried off and found garments in a Vuitton cabinet. Warford's clothes fitted Blake moderately well, though he found the bodyguard's taste somewhat somber.

  Doreen chose what was, for her, almost chaste coverings even though the garment exposed much of her ample bosom. She was combing out her hair before a mirror when Rio approached them.

  "You look good, both of you. Come and eat. Granville is back and interpreting the detector records."

  Doreen and Blake walked around the wall of the Inner Chamber to the dining area, where Rio had laid out an attractive meal from hermetically sealed dried foods.

  Granville was there, eating with one hand as his other shuffled rectangles of hardcopy. He looked up and smiled at Blake. "Welcome to Tomorrowland, Mr. Mason." He waved a fistful of thin plastic cards. "No great rise in radiation. About, ur, forty-nine years after we hibernated there was a blip, probably just one bomb somewhere. But for the rest of the time the level has been moderate. Slight rise over norm – norm for our time, that is. So ... no atomic wars, no mutations, no big trouble." He looked at Jean-Michel and Vogel as they sat down. "I checked, and it still holds. No radiation rise of any importance. Civilization is probably still out there."

  "We saw a contrail," Vogel said. "Going north."

  "Polar route," Granville said, nodding. "Good! Good!"

  "We leave at dawn tomorrow," Voss said. He looked around the table. "All of us."

  Blake raised a fork of something dark and grainy to his mouth and Rio caught his eye. She was bent over a second food package, turned away from the group, but Blake could see her biting her lower lip.

  Later, Blake lay on a couch trying to sleep. The lights in the outer chamber were turned low. He could hear Vogel's snore, Voss's heavy breathing, and Granville's soft, sighing wheezes. He couldn't understand how they could sleep. They have traveled in time! A one-way trip, sure, but they're in the future!

  Blake wondered what had happened to the world in the nearly eleven decades they had been sleeping like Barbarossas in a mountain. Man didn't seem to have killed himself off in a war. But he just may have starved to death, Blake thought. And my business, my unfinished projects ... what happened to them?

  Blake hoped his letter had been posted. A trust should have been established. Elaine, Sebastian, and Aaron had been given the business. Blake had no close relatives, or none he liked, and his parents were dead. There should be money in a trust, maybe quite a bit, if we can get to Los Angeles...

  He stared at the dimly lit ceiling and his thoughts were jagged and chaotic. Maybe I shouldn't have come ... No! I had to. Don't have any second thoughts now! For one thing, it's too late.

  Either they accepted the papers and a trust had been established, or not. With the money that Voss's companies would have paid for my end of the tomb deal, plus what I had, plus anything the company might have earned ... for a hundred years at six percent ... Not bad. Maybe things weren't so bad. They knew where I was. I wasn't legally dead. There might have been some legal problems, but Elaine would have fought for me. I'll have enough money to take care of Rio. I'll start another company. I'll be hopelessly outdated as an environmentalist, unless there's a nostalgia fad going on – or I can start one.

  On the other hand, he realized he might have been declared legally dead, his estate settled, and he would be a dead man without even a tombstone.

  Blake sighed, and turned onto his side. Tomorrow we find out, he thought. Around the outside curve of the Inner Chamber he could hear the rustle of someone moving. Rio or Doreen, perhaps just as sleeplessly contemplating the future.

  The future doesn't lie ahead, it's here.

  He closed his eyes, and for the second time in more than a hundred years Blake Mason went to sleep.

  Chapter 14

  The aircar rose slowly, the helicopter blades kicking up dust from the earthen terrace. Blake looked down at the tree they had felled to hide the entrance to the tomb. Vogel banked away and the tomb was lost to sight.

  They headed straight south, angling over the Bitterroot Range and climbing to ten thousand meters. The first town marked on the map was Salmon, but they couldn't make out anything from that height. The rugged Salmon River Mountains were beneath them for kilometers, then the Sawtooth Mountains and the Snake River plain.

  "Want me to go lower?" Vogel asked his boss.

  "No, keep on. These are the provinces."

  The bodyguard shrugged, and the aircar bore steadily south. They could see some evidence of civilization at Minidoka, but it could have been either ruins or a bustling city. Both the height an
d clouds obscured their vision.

  They crossed over into Utah and saw smoke over Logan and definite signs of life at Brigham City. As they approached Ogden, Voss ordered them lower. The Great Salt Lake sparkled off to the west and Blake averted his eyes from the glare, looking again at the gold bars that covered the floor around the base of the seats. They were only a fraction of Voss's cache and that mountain of gold was only a small part of his immense fortune placed in Swiss and other banks, and in trusts and foundations.

  Just a little pocket money, Blake thought.

  Ogden was a multiple-domed cluster stretching for kilometers. It looked like a soap-bubble blob at the edge of Salt Lake's basin. The domes were white or gray, with hundreds of projections: antennae, landing platforms, observation blisters, radar towers, cargo waldoes, hatches, locks, service catwalks, and here and there a statue.

  "They've put it all under a dome," Rio said. "The whole city."

  "It's an alternative to the arcology concept," Voss said, "as long as your population is low, or controlled."

  "Do we land?" Vogel asked.

  "No, go on to Salt Lake City."

  The clusters of domes thinned and grew smaller as they flew south, then multiplied again, never quite forming a distinction between the cities. Green, bountiful fields stretched in every direction, and the long half-cylinders of hydroponics housing looked like seams.

  Suddenly four jets dropped out of the sky ahead of them, rocketing by at terrifying speeds, flanking the air-car on every side, top and bottom. Their passage rocked the Aeroford, and Vogel struggled to right it, swearing at the jets in vehement curses.

  In a few seconds they returned, their speed slowed to match the aircar, and dangerously slow for the military craft.

  Blake stared at the odd markings. "What does LDSAF mean?"

  "Could it be Latter-Day Saints Air Force?" Doreen said with a nervous laugh.

  Vogel snorted in disgust, but Jean-Michel looked at the planes thoughtfully.

  "Beautiful," he said, almost to himself. "About as advanced as air craft can get. They're motioning us down."

  "I don't hear anything on the radio," Vogel said, twisting channels. "They must be using–"

  "–identified aircraft, repeat, unidentified aircraft, you will proceed to Ezekiel Field and land. Further instructions will follow ... Acknowledge." There was a pause before Vogel picked up the mike. "Unidentified aircraft, unident–"

  "This is Voss Electronics 7TR640, acknowledging landing instructions."

  "Very well, 7TR640. Keep this channel open."

  "Verify, uh, LDSAF flight. What is this about, anyway?"

  "Land as instructed, 7TR640."

  Vogel shrugged, looked at Voss, then put the mike to his lips again. "Uh, LDSAF, where is this landing field?"

  "Continue south fifteen kilometers, make ten-degree turn, and descend to one thousand meters. Escorting aircraft will rendezvous."

  The jets started climbing, increasing their speed, and circling back.

  Voss peered at them through the canopy. "They'll be watching us. Do as they say."

  Small, fast aircars rose to meet them, with several on each side and two more high up and to the rear. The pilots peered at them with some interest, but no hostile moves were made. Each helicraft bore the LDSAF logo, and all appeared heavily armed.

  Ezekiel was a large airport, fringed with service structures, and packed thickly beyond were larger and larger domes. Beyond them were a number of arcologs, massive buildings a half-kilometer high. Toward the center of the city an immense low dome spanned at least ten kilometers of downtown Salt Lake City, using the arcologs almost as posts around the outer perimeter.

  "Look, almost every building seems to have gun domes and radar disks," Rio said.

  "They're armed for something," Voss said.

  "Have we arrived in the middle of a war?" Doreen asked.

  "No damage," Vogel said, looking down.

  The LDSAF aircars landed smoothly as Vogel set the ship down. The military ships ringed Voss's, all heading inward, their weapons pointing at the invader.

  "What do we do now?" Vogel asked.

  "Wait."

  "Unidentified aircraft, you will disembark," a new voice said. "Stand clear of your ship with your hands on your heads. Do not move once you have achieved stationary status. Execute orders immediately."

  "Come on," Voss said.

  Granville was the first out of the plane. He had been silent throughout the flight, carefully checking his radiation detectors and the other devices, checking ground features with a map, and keeping a sharp eye out. He left the ship almost eagerly, his head turning one way and another as he looked. at the ships and the approaching file of armed men.

  "Come on," he said encouragingly to the others.

  The file of visored soldiers kept efficient, looking rifles trained on the newcomers while a small group of officers inspected the aircar.

  One officer walked over to the group, inspected them briefly, and spoke to Voss. "Are you the leader?" Voss nodded. "What is the meaning of invading our air space in that?" he said, pointing at the Aeroford. "Why reproduce an antique aircraft? Who are you?"

  "I am Jean-Michel Voss. That is not a reproduction, but an original. My crew and I have been in a cryogenic vault for one hundred years, and–"

  "One hundred seven years, eight months, two days," Granville said, and the officer gave him a lightning glance, then returned his attention to Voss.

  Blake found it strangely annoying that the officer would automatically assume that Voss was the leader, but it did not surprise him. Voss had that kind of bearing.

  Voss smiled faintly. "Correction noted, Mr. Franklin." To the officer he said, "I am the director of Voss Electronics, Voss Investments, Voss Oil, Voss Marine–"

  "Stop," the officer said without much agitation, but Voss stopped his litany, calculated to impress everyone, even the unimpressionable. He looked annoyed. He had been interrupted twice in one explanation. That must be a first, Blake thought with some amusement.

  "Your papers, please," the officer said, holding out his hand. With his other he indicated that all of them should present identification. He took Voss's wallet, handed it to an aide without looking at it, and passed on the others' IDs also without examining them.

  "What is your explanation of the illegal gold we found on your ship? Are you smugglers for the Guardians?"

  Blake looked at Voss, and Jean-Michel looked at Granville Franklin.

  "No, we're just out of cryogenic sleep," Granville said.

  "We've just traveled to the future," Voss said. "Our future, your present ... and now our present. What is going on?"

  "The Archangels? Skypilots? Any of the Orders?" The officer's eyes narrowed. "You aren't believers in any of the old faiths, are you? Catholics? Hebrews? Baptists?"

  At those words Blake saw the hands of the soldiers tighten on their weapons. Rio drew close to him, looking at him around the curve of her arms as they rested folded on her head.

  "No, no, of course not," Voss said. "We have no such affiliation."

  The officer's eyes narrowed warningly. "No affiliation?" he said softly.

  "If anything, I'm an atheist," Granville said, and the soldier recoiled.

  "Arrest them!" he said sharply.

  The soldiers crowded about closely, and over Voss's protests they were driven across the field to a waiting armored van. The steel door clanged behind them, and Blake joined the others sitting on the metal benches lining each side.

  "I think you said the wrong thing," Rio told Granville with a smile.

  The generalist shrugged. "A peculiar reaction. They seem to be very religious, or at least militantly partisan. Most peculiar for Mormons."

  "Are they Mormons?" Voss asked.

  "LDS, Latter-Day Saints, Salt Lake City," Granville said, gesturing around him. "Their own air force and army. Most peculiar."

  "A church with an army?" Doreen asked incredulously.

  "
It's happened before," Granville said. "The armies of the Old Testament, the Crusaders, the armies of the Borgia and the Medici popes, of many of the Hindus and Muslims. Any land where church and state are one. The Saracens, Spain of the Inquisition, the old armies of the emperors of China and Japan."

  "Enough!" Voss said quietly. "We get the point. Now how do we get out of here?"

  "The gold," Vogel said.

  "It's back at the ship," Rio reminded them. "But if we can convince them we are not smugglers, it will be ours again."

  Voss was deep in thought. Blake examined the van as it rumbled along. Solid steel painted dark gray. A guardport at the cab end, through which a guard could be seen watching them. Near Doreen's head on the opposite side of the van someone had scratched "The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away."

  No one had any contributions, so they fell silent. After a while the sounds around them closed in and echoed. "We're inside something," Vogel said. The van continued with undiminished speed.

  "A dome?" Rio asked.

  Voss and Blake nodded.

  After a time, the van stopped and the rear door clanged open. They were inside a large room. Huge metal grilles closed passages at both ends, and beyond them were solid doors. Gun and gas ports were everywhere, looking down at them.

  Visored soldiers directed the prisoners into a corridor, then put each one of them into a separate room.

  Blake looked around. He was not handcuffed, or even searched. They must be supremely confident, he thought. Then the door opened and in walked a soldier with the traditional staff of Hermes – the caduceus – upon his collar. He ordered Blake to strip behind a screen and to hand out his clothes, which he did. He expected a rectal search but instead was given a loose gray jumper to put on. Then he was instructed to stand before an opalescent panel higher than his head. An X-ray of some sort, Blake thought.

  Satisfied, the medic departed with all of Blake's clothes, and he was left alone for almost an hour. Then a burly officer entered and politely asked Blake to sit in the room's only chair.

  "Now keep your hands flat upon the arms," he said amiably. A polygraph! "My name is Colonel Calkins, of the LDS Intelligence Service. Your name, please?"