Time of the Stones

by Fred Rothganger

  She landed near the bank of the river, morphed and went foraging. The Nomads had taught her how to see food almost anywhere. Gathering for oneself was easy. Just grab, eat and keep going. Some berries here, a root there. It was simple food.

  She wandered the dense forest, mulling the situation. This was the center of a vast basin. The land was rich with alluvial soil and abundant water. The city simply could not have died. It must be a navigation error.

  She settled her body in a quiet place for the evening, went to the virtual world and called up a map. The political divisions, long and straight ... all tilted a few degrees. Why did the Ancients do that? They were so fond of aligning everything on a grand scale.

  She smacked her forehead. There was a magnetic anomaly under the region!

  Those borders were drawn back when the Ancients still used compasses. Later they invented the Global Positioning System. Susan’s generation hardly knew what a compass was, much less how to use one. She had to be more than 50 kilometers south of the target.

  In the morning she flew north, following the river bank. After a couple of hours the city came into view. From the air it looked magnificent. Large ornate buildings and orderly plazas, filled with crowds of people. Surely this was the capital of a great nation.

  I’ve been in wide-open spaces too long. She tried to remember the megacities of the Ancients. The place she was born could have swallowed this tiny hamlet whole and not even noticed. Yet by modern standards it was enormous, perhaps ten times bigger than Chefurbo. This was the first place she had seen in the new age that truly deserved the title ‘city’.

  A little tourism was in order. She spent about an hour circling lazily in the thermals created by the buildings and pavement, staying high to avoid attention. There were docks along the riverfront where barges loaded and unloaded. Barges coming up from the south were weighed down with the recent harvest, probably grown in the rich soil of the floodplains. From the north came flotillas of timber. With such active trade, this place must be very prosperous.

  Yet it too must face the gray specter of starvation from time to time. The basin was renowned through history for its ‘100 year’ floods every few decades. The very process that delivered rich soil could also drown entire crops. And given human proclivity for reproduction, they probably reached maximum use of the land exactly when the flood comes.

  The outskirts were a jumble of streets at odd angles, but the center formed a neat and orderly grid. The paved mall there was large enough to hold tens of thousands of people. Rectangular in shape, it ran longer in the north-south direction. At the north end was a stone amphitheater or colosseum.

  Along each side of the mall stood domed buildings with bold spires, covered in gold leaf. A rectangular wall with battlements encompassed the entire complex. At the south end stood a wide gate with an arch. Surely a place designed to impose its greatness upon visitors.

  It reeked of Fourth Order dynamics. Poor souls, trapped in your own web.

  The wall itself seemed to be sparsely guarded. She came around, angled wings to stall and grabbed the battlement with her claws. She hopped down to the walkway along the top of the wall, hidden well enough to morph without being noticed. She scurried a hundred meters along the wall, hoping people might not associate the human girl with the bird, then dropped over the side and joined the street traffic.

  These people were darker-skinned than those in the Long River Basin, though not as dark as Susan. The women went about in long loose cloaks that covered their whole body, with scarves that covered their head, revealing only their face.

  Compared to them, I’m running around in my underwear.

  As a group of women passed, one of them hissed desperately at her, “Cover up, stupid girl! The religious shurta are coming.”

  Susan’s Arkinsani was still a bit weak. She could not quite parse every word, but it seemed a matter of life-or-death.

  She came upon the gate leading into the central mall. The arch above bore an inscription. Arkinsani script! The symbols were vaguely familiar, a jumbled mix of Roman letters, Arabic numerals and emoji. It looked much like the language the Ancients used to write messages to each other on their mobiles.

  Something felt out of place. The emoji appeared repeatedly, in ways that could not possibly make sense.

  As she pondered this mystery, a group of men in black turbans swept through the street. Without hesitating they grabbed her elbows and forced her forward into the mall. They marched inexorably toward the stadium, where it seemed everyone else in the city was suddenly going.

  One of them snapped, “Shameful slut!” He threw a cloak over her, several sizes too large.

  It taxed the limit of her linguistic training to guess the words. She had already formed a crude mental model of phonetic drift for Arkinsani. The rest was based on Ancient English roots and context.

  She expected to go to the stands, but they dragged her into the arena itself. In the middle they forced her to kneel. Two other women were forced to kneel next to her. They took a fourth prisoner over to something like a cross and tied his hands to it.

  One of the black-turbaned men stepped forward and shouted to the crowd, “God is great!”

  The crowd shouted back in unison, “God is great!”

  The man continued, “God has chosen the Arkin Empire above all the peoples of the Earth. Only we know the truth. All other ideas, all other morals are wrong. We must force everyone to submit.”

  The crowd chanted, “We submit.”

  “We must punish those who break God’s law.”

  Religious police! Susan felt pleased at acquiring another Arkinsani word.

  The police chief pointed at the man tied to the cross. “Questioning the holy writings.” Then the woman on Susan’s left. “No sign of virginity.” Then Susan. “Nakedness.” And finally the woman on her right. “Disrespecting her father.”

  Sign of virginity? Who did the checking?

  He raised his hands and chanted, “God is great. God is great. God is great ...” The crowd chanted in unison with him, and their voices gradually rose to a frenzied thunder. They stomped their feet in rhythm with the words.

  Susan felt queasy. This is worse than Fourth Order. These people are sick.

  The rumble in the ground was like the noise in the air. She could barely feel the footsteps of the three men approaching behind them. Suddenly a rod cracked across her back.

  The women beside her yelped in pain. No one heard their cries.

  The world slowed to a crawl as her mind accelerated. Rage welled up as bloody as any she ever felt for Perio. From the distant past her mother’s voice called, A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.

  It was an impossibly narrow line to walk.

  She leaped up, whirled and struck the man on her left. It was a blow to the neck that caused a few seconds of blackout. Before he hit the ground, she doubled back, plowed her shoulder into her own abuser and drove him against the third man. They fell into a tangled mess.

  She rolled out and snatched one of their rods away.

  The man looked back in shock.

  She grasped the ends of the rod and bent it into an arch. It snapped in half, and their eyes met through the empty space it once occupied. She tossed the pieces aside in disgust.

  The squad of religious police started toward them.

  Blood spurted from the wrists of the man on the cross. She ran over and untied his hands. Then a wave of true desperation swept over her. No program for blood vessel repair. No time to write one.

  She ripped off the cloak they had forced on her, tore two strips of cloth from it and rolled them into wads. Her hands moved in a blur of speed. She pressed a wad to his wrist and used one of the cords to bind it tightly in a makeshift tourniquet, then bound his other wrist.

  The religious police were almost upon her.

  Ah, you’re afraid. Sex gives women power over you, so you invent religious rules to ta
ke away their right to use it. You need therapy, and the doctor is in.

  She muttered, “Esc underwear only.” The white gown melted away beneath her dark skin, leaving panties and a rather full bra. She took a fighting stance, feet spread wide, weight low and elbows bent to strike. Her red hair ran in wild rivulets, tracing out luscious curves and spilling onto the ground.

  A few of them turned aside as if their eyes had been stabbed. Like moths to a flame they looked again. All stared with a mix of terror and lust. Only a blind man would fail to be aroused.

  “Come on!” She tore into them with empty hands.

  She struck a man in the shoulder, making his arm go limp. She whirled and kicked the feet from under another. In the low stance she doubled back and struck a third on the sciatic nerve. All one fluid motion, lightning-fast and precise. Less than a minute later, only two were left standing. They turned to flee.

  She ran after one like a lioness making a kill, caught his head and drove several hundred volts between her hands. He gasped and stiffened. She lowered him to the ground where he lay convulsing. A medical treatment for depression used by the Ancients, it appeared much more brutal than it actually was.

  An arrow whizzed past her. Religious police swarmed onto the field, carrying swords and bows. Another arrow came at her. She snatched it out of the air and tossed it aside. The next arrow pierced through her belly. She ignored it and charged toward them. Its shaft dissolved and the two pieces fell from her body.

  She studied all the blades raised and the look in their eyes. These men were battle-hardened, with no qualms about violence against women. She planned a series of feints to get past their swords and snatch a couple for her own use.

  A spear hurtled through the air.

  Oh, thanks! She grabbed it and lunged the butt at them to strike more pressure points, conveniently out of reach of their blades. She liberated a sword and used it to parry. The metal sang with each deflected blow. The point of the spear did a similar job, deflecting attacks from behind.

  She danced over stunned men, clearing a swath through the crowd. A lock of her hair got whacked off. The gash on the back of her leg healed instantly. The fallen strands melted into a ball on the ground and rolled after her, eventually merging into her foot.

  In such a battle, a human’s first mistake was usually his last. Susan could afford to get stabbed or sliced and learn from the experience. Sometimes she even let herself get hit to gain advantage in a man’s space. She laughed with deranged glee at the sheer physicality of it all.

  Like a living thing, the surrounding crowd shifted toward the punishment area. They pulled the tourniquets off the man so his wrists started bleeding out again. The two women were in their grasp.

  Susan turned and fought off their attackers. She barked at the women, “Squeeze his wrists to stop the bleeding!”

  They huddled and whimpered. The man lay unconscious.

  Maybe her broken Arkinsani wasn’t good enough. “Do something! I can’t fight off everyone and save him too.”

  They remained frozen.

  She dodged an arrow. A man on the other side of the circle screamed in pain as it stabbed into his thigh.

  Who would be stupid enough to shoot in close quarters? Calculations ran through her mind with dispassionate precision. Continuing this would only result in more injuries or even death. No amount of evil on the ‘bad guy’ side of the ledger could balance evil on the ‘good guy’ side. They were all humans.

  Only one rational move left. She fought her way out of the pack and ran toward the stands, dropping the weapons along the way. Without breaking pace she took two steps up the vertical wall and hoisted herself over the top, then ran up an aisle, morphing to bird along the way.

  She flew off the back side of the stands, made several great flaps and turned back over the stadium. She pulled the wings into a fast dive, then spread them to level off. Whizzing over their heads, she let out an ear-piercing screech.

  A few kilometers downriver, Susan found a secluded place to land and morph to human. She leaned against a tree and whacked both palms against her forehead repeatedly. Stupid, stupid, stupid! Let anger get the better of me—again. She stared out over the lazy waters and sulked.

  Mother would reprimand me severely for this, but I can’t let them win. More ideas came to her, ideas that teetered on the very edge of moral acceptability. She grinned wickedly. Yes, that will teach them.

  She stood, grabbed a fallen limb nearby and dragged it into a small clearing away from the bank. She searched for another, and another ...

  Gradually the pile grew enormous, enough to build a house. She disembodied and worked in the virtual world. Shortly, the avatar melted into a blob. Tendrils extended and wound among the pile. The scintillae digested the wood and reproduced rapidly. Roots extended down into the ground, searching for minerals to construct their mechanical parts.

  Satisfied with the data coming back, Susan stepped away from the console at Stonehill. She wandered to the old farmhouse, climbed the stairs to her room in the attic and took Anand’s picture off the dresser. “How can the same species produce someone as good as you and as bad as them? If you’re watching from Heaven, I hope you’ll forgive me.”

  She hugged the picture to her bosom and curled on their bed ...

  * * *

  She stood on a vast and empty plain beneath a starless sky. Nearby stood a mirror image of herself. Its lips moved and a billion voices spoke in unison: I created you, and I will destroy you.

  They reached out and touched fingers. Their swarms swirled around each other and grew into a giant tree. The voices spoke again, and Susan found herself speaking along: Our greatest strength is also our greatest weakness.

  The tree vanished. A throng of people carried Susan along, walking off a cliff to their deaths. She hurtled downward and smacked into the surface below.

  The Stone stood alone on a vast plain beneath the starless sky. Inside, her reflection stared back. Young and beautiful yet timeless and ancient, with eye sockets empty like a skull, dark as night. You can’t save them all. Neither can I destroy them all. A few always survive to repeat the cycle again.

  How long has this been?

  Susan blinked, and found herself in the attic room, standing in front of the antique dresser. From the oval mirror her reflection spoke: For a thousand generations have I watched the world. Human nature never changes.

  Rage rose up, all the hatred vile and bitter. She pointed at the reflection with deadly ferocity. I will destroy you.

  Without emotion the reflection answered, Then you must destroy yourself.

  Susan woke to the sound of her own screaming. There was the dresser, in the corner of the room as always. Moonlight filtered through the window in liquid silence.

  She went down the stairs and out into the night. At the console she ran the swarm editor and started writing a new program. This one added behaviors to the code of a well-studied insect, guided by knowledge of human biology. The work took several days.

  * * *

  The swarm of flies flowed almost invisibly into the city, keeping to the edges and walls of buildings. It crept toward the center of power, accompanied by Susan’s consciousness. The third-order entity was a diffuse cloud of mechanical insects built from scintillae.

  The flies communicated with each other via low-power radio. Every one of them was bound into the whole, even when they were spread out over tens or hundreds of meters. Each contributed its own limited view, coarse and grainy, which got merged into a highly-detailed 3D model. Susan walked down the middle of the street in the virtual world, completely invisible to people. Perfect for gathering intelligence.

  The locals called their city ‘Sanat’, a garbled form of the Ancient name ‘Saint Louis’. Sanat was on edge. Women exchanged furtive glances with each other, which they quickly hid when a man went by. The religious police were jumpy and irritable.

  Susan penetrated into the heart of the citadel and became a proverbial
fly on the wall. Power seemed to be centered on a particular group of men, more or less equal, with a single high leader that directed their discussions. They spoke in religious terms and constantly referred to the will of God or their holy writings to make decisions.

  A council of religious leaders. At least they once were. Now they appeared to hold the power of both church and state, with the religious police as their enforcement arm.

  These would be the first to feel her wrath. She dispatched one fly to each man. It entered his body and moved silently and painlessly to the base of his spine. There it waited for the signal.

  Now to get the religious police. It would be most efficient, not to mention dramatic, to infect them during a punishment ceremony. Were punishments a random event or a regular occasion? Given the way things worked here, she probably would not have to wait long either way.

  She moved the flies to the stadium and watched through the day, but nobody came. As evening fell, she gathered the swarm into a single mass to save power, disguised as a vine growing on the wall.

  The next day was exactly a week after the first encounter. Around mid-morning people began to file into the stadium. It must be their weekly religious meeting. Was punishment the entire thing, or was there more to it? Maybe last time she had interrupted a more elaborate liturgy.

  This week there was only one victim, another young woman. Her crime: premarital sex. The police backed her up against the wall, formed a semicircle and hefted stones. Among them was a man in plain clothes. Everyone looked to him and waited.

  He had a cold hard expression, the kind that comes from a broken heart that dies.

  The girl fell on her knees, held her hands up to him and cried, “Daddy, it’s me. Remember how you held me and told me stories? Please, daddy!”

  The man muttered, “Honor.”

  The crowd started chanting, “God is great. God is great ...”

  He threw the first stone. It bounced off an enormous white bird.

  The bird settled to the ground and spread its wings wide to defend the girl. It emitted a screech like an eagle’s cry combined with a woman screaming bloody murder and fingernails scraping on a chalkboard.