The rental shack was little more than a front to the stables. Inside the front door was a tiny room and a low counter. A grimy window looked out onto a dirt area in front of the stables. Three horses grazed in the shade of the gray, warped wood roofs.
In the middle of the dirt area, a sleek Ford sedan sat. It was the color of new cream. Chrome sparkled in the sunlight. Around the Ford, traditionally dressed Diné chanted and whirled through a Blessingway ceremony.
Herbert and Frans pushed through the back door to the dirt area and watched the Diné, hands on hips. Eventually, a stable boy came forward to the office.
“Nice of them to do this all for us,” Herbert said, nodding at the ceremony.
Wallace hid a smile. He didn’t know what the Blessingway was for, but he knew it was more likely to protect the land from damage by the car than to assure the safety of a couple of foreigners. But of course they wouldn’t understand.
The stable boy pretended not to hear. After the Blessingway, money changed hands.
Wallace and Niyol loaded the bags into the car. The rental-office men watched them out of the corners of their eyes. None of them could be younger than fifty. Wallace felt he was being measured against some Diné standard he couldn’t hope to understand.
What was the bigger insult? Wallace wondered. Helping the men find their way around Dinétah, or renting them a car?
The sun was setting as they drove off into the eternal west. Herbert drove. Wallace sat beside him, watching the great chrome gauges swing and chatter. The car even had a radio, but it produced only static. Niyol and Frans made the backseat a country of silence.
Wallace tried to imagine the car was a great Elephant Ironclad, like the ones of legend that won Dinétah its freedom. But it didn’t work. It was just another loud, ugly mechanical thing, alien and wrong.
The big Ford roared and bounced into the setting sun. Behind them, the airships were beginning their long trip north.
They didn’t go far before nightfall. The lights of Albuquerque’s airfield were still visible in the valley below when Herbert Noble gave up and pulled the car off the road. He looked back toward Albuquerque with a look like he’d just bitten into a sour peach.
“You weren’t kidding about the roads being bad,” Herbert said. “If you could even call that a road.”
“Not many cars here,” Wallace said.
“Should have gotten an elephant,” Niyol said.
“Really?” Herbert said.
“No,” Wallace said. Niyol was making fun of him.
“Why not?”
Elephants are for Diné, Wallace thought. “They’re not good pack animals. They eat too much.” In the gathering dusk, Wallace could imagine Niyol’s grin, hearing the blasphemous words come out of his mouth.
“I believed Lincoln’s elephants were the reason for Dinétah independence,” Frans said. His accent was thick, guttural, almost familiar.
“Not Lincoln’s,” Niyol said.
Frans raised his eyebrows, politely surprised.
“Some escaped on their way over the Rockies. Most came from the Confederate States, after the American Civil War.”
That was what they taught in school, Wallace thought. He preferred the old story, the one that said the elephants emerged from the ground like the Dinétah themselves, a gift of the Diyin Diné. Still, he remembered old filmstrips showing photos of grizzled southerners working in smithies, riveting iron plate in curves suggestive of an elephant’s flanks. But they’d never shown a completed Elephant Ironclad.
We did it, Wallace thought. The Elephant Ironclads are ours.
Frans nodded. “Nevertheless, they are impressive beasts.”
“Are you German?” Niyol said.
Bang. That was the accent. Wallace had heard it in a dozen bad American war movies.
But Frans just smiled. “I am Dutch. It’s said Dutch sounds Deutsch, if you speak with enough force.”
“Dutch?”
“A small country in Europe, with beautiful windmills,” Frans said.
“I’ve heard of it,” Niyol said. He opened his mouth to say something else, but Herbert interrupted.
“Give me five dollars, and I’d keep going.” Herbert peered out along the road.
“You would break something,” Frans said.
Herbert sighed. “Probably.”
“There will be time tomorrow.”
For what? Wallace wondered. He glanced at Niyol, but his friend refused to meet his gaze.
The two men insisted on setting up camp by themselves. They pitched two camouflage-patterned tents with US ARMY SURPLUS stenciled on the side in dripping black, and sparked Coleman gas lanterns, throwing pale light on the green of the early-spring grass and scrub. They hauled two small, heavy bags into one of the tents and zipped it shut.
Wallace sat with Niyol on a big boulder, watching the last color bleed from the twilight sky.
“What did you get us into?” Niyol said.
“A lot of money,” Wallace said, pulling out the twenty-dollar bill. He’d seen American money before, mainly coins. His mother pulled in dollar bills from time to time for her pretty skystone and silver jewelry. But he’d never seen such a big number printed on a bill. “I’ll have money left over, even after I pay everyone back.”
“We’ll have money left over.”
Wallace felt his face go hot and red. “Yeah. We.”
“They’ll ask us where we got it, back in town.”
“So?”
Niyol rolled his eyes. “Just don’t buy any more elephants.”
Herbert and Frans lit a small camp stove and called them to come over. The stove hissed gas into blue flame. They boiled water for coffee and heated pork and beans from cans.
“How long are you staying?” Niyol said.
Herbert and Frans looked at each other before Herbert answered. “A week, we think. Could be longer.”
“Thirty dollars gets you a week,” Wallace said.
“You’ll get more if we stay longer.”
“What are you doing here?” Niyol said.
Another shared glance. “We’re rock hounds,” Herbert said.
“Rock hounds?”
“People who collect rocks.”
“I know.”
“You flew into Dinétah for rocks?” Niyol asked.
“Niyol,” Wallace said.
“It’s okay,” Herbert said. “If I was you, I’d ask, too. Probably a lot earlier. Wouldn’t want any furriners poking around, taking things we shouldn’t.”
“Is that what you’re going to do?”
Herbert laughed. He looked at Frans.
“We are looking for unusual stones. We will take some photographs. If you do not want us to remove the stones, we will leave them where they are.”
“Why?”
“We’re rock hounds!” Herbert said, as if that explained all.
Niyol nodded and looked down, frowning.
Herbert sighed. “We’re allies. Remember the codetalkers.”
“They won World War Two,” Wallace said.
“They helped,” Herbert admitted.
“Without them, you wouldn’t have a way to whisper secrets. You might’ve lost the Pacific. We read about it in school.” Just like the prophecy said. Diné will save the white man. But you didn’t talk about that to foreigners.
“Maybe.” Herbert drew the word out.
“The atomic bomb won the war,” Frans said.
For a long time, there was no sound except the low sigh of the wind. Wallace remembered photos from the atomic tests in Nevada, and the famous photos of the blast over Hiroshima.
Eventually, Herbert and Frans started clearing the plates and scraping the pans. Wallace and Niyol helped in silence.
The two men shared one of the tents, and the boys shared the other. Night breezes made the dark fabric snap and mutter. It was what Wallace imagined a skinwalker might sound like as it stalked past outside. Their sleeping bags were musty and rough, and th
e darkness was absolute.
“What if we’re gone for weeks?” Niyol said softly in Spanish.
“What if?” Wallace shrugged inside his bag.
“Your mother will kill you.”
“Not when she sees her money back.”
Niyol said nothing.
Wallace sighed and turned over to face the invisible wall of the tent. Eventually he slept.
The Diyin Diné sent Wallace a dream. He dreamed of elephants with shining steel armor, marching beneath a sky full of iron-plated airships. But the elephants carried no Diné. And Wallace knew that armored airships were impossible. They would never fly. The riderless elephants advanced into the setting sun, unstopping, like machines. Wallace smelled acrid smoke and turned. Behind him was the Canyon De Chelly and the peach orchards, burning.
Wallace awoke with a start into pitch darkness. The wind had died to a whisper on the tent’s fabric. Niyol breathed softly beside him.
Wallace squeezed his eyes tight and waited for sleep.
He waited a long time.
After a bland breakfast of powdered eggs, they set off into the west again, through the old Valencia land grant toward el Rito and Paguate. The foothills of the San Mateo Mountains rose in the distance, still wrapped in early-morning mist. The scrub shimmered with dew, silver-green in Dinétah’s brief spring.
The road wasn’t much more than a donkey track, narrow and heavily rutted from the recent rains. The Ford bounced and groaned over the ruts. The tires spun and the engine roared. Herbert cursed and fought the wheel.
In the backseat, Frans Van der Berg looked up from a map that was marked in smeared blue fountain-pen ink. “Beautiful,” he said, pointing at an airship that floated in the west. They could see the tan-colored gasbag above the groundscreen. A blue-painted passenger cabin poked through the screen, pierced by many small round windows that reflected glints of the sun. Perhaps tourists heading for the Grand Canyon.
Or people like Niyol, heading for the opportunities in California, Wallace thought, frowning.
“Creepy,” Herbert said.
“What is creepy?” Frans said.
“That camouflage.”
Frans sighed. “From what I understand, the fabric barrier is not for camouflage.”
“The skyshields keep us from marring the sky,” Wallace said. “In case the Diyin Diné are looking up from their homes in the earth.”
“Diyin Diné?”
“Gods,” Niyol said.
“Gods in the earth, looking up,” Herbert said, shaking his head. “Now I’ve heard everything.”
“Do not insult our guides,” Frans said.
“What did I say?” Herbert asked.
Frans just shook his head. “It is a beautiful way to travel. Silent and slow, like a bird soaring.”
“It keeps us from marking the land with our presence,” Wallace said. Not that it mattered, this far out of Four Corners. But he supposed all of Dinétah should be respected, even if they had overreached their ancestral lands.
Herbert snorted but said nothing.
They didn’t go far before Frans called a halt. The two men got one of the heavy bags out of the trunk and extracted rock hammers and a hinged aluminum box.
Wallace followed the men, but hung back. They knelt at the ground and picked at rocks, turning them over in their hands like raccoons given a blob of dough. The chill of early morning still bit deep through Wallace’s thin chambray shirt.
“I need the money,” Wallace said.
Niyol just looked at him.
“Not just to pay you back. I need to make something for myself.”
“We all do.”
“You’re going to go to The-Years-That-Finish-You. Then you’ll be gone.”
“Who said that?”
“Everyone can see it,” Wallace said. “You’re smart.”
Niyol shook his head. “Nothing’s certain.”
Silence for a time. The men moved to a shallow stream channel, already dry from the last rains. Wallace and Niyol followed. Niyol walked closer and watched them carefully.
“What do you think they’re doing?” Wallace asked.
“I don’t know.”
“You seem worried.”
“I’m worried they’ll find something they want.”
“So? They said they won’t take anything we won’t want them to.”
“What if they come back with more men?”
“Then we bring more men, too.”
“And if they bring the army? Will your beloved Elephant Ironclads appear out of the earth, to save the Diné once again?”
Wallace looked away. Compared with the powers that strutted on the newsreels, even armored elephants and airships seemed small, easily swept away. He remembered his dream from last night and shivered, wondering what it meant.
“What do we do?” Wallace asked, finally.
“Just watch. For now.”
The two men knelt in the streambed and picked at rocks in its side and bottom. They opened the aluminum box, did something with it, shook their heads. After a while, they moved to another location and did the same thing.
When they finally headed back toward the car, Herbert wore a fake smile and Frans a convincing frown. Wallace suppressed a grin. Whatever they were looking for, they hadn’t found it. Maybe there was nothing to worry about.
The rest of the day was the same routine, endlessly repeated. Drive west, stop, pick at rocks. The San Mateo Mountains seemed as remote as ever. Wallace scuffed his foot on the thin brown dust, wishing something would happen. The men came back with the same expression, a little grimmer every time.
At their last stop, a Diné shepherd watched them. He stood silent and motionless as his sheep milled and cropped the new grass. His black, unblinking eyes were like a weight on Wallace. Like an accusation.
Is this a sign? Wallace thought. Is this a man, or one of the Diyin Diné, clothed in the form of a man?
Wallace walked closer to the two men, who were using the aluminum box again. Frans took a slender metal wand out of the metal box and held it near some of their rocks.
Niyol jumped, as if he had been goosed.
“What?” Wallace said.
Niyol shook his head and walked closer. Wallace followed. The metal wand was connected to the aluminum box with a coiled black cord. Inside the aluminum box was a big dial and a cluster of black Bakelite switches. It made a slow clicking noise.
Frans looked up as Niyol approached. He saw him looking at the box and put on a big fake smile.
“What’s that?” Niyol said.
“It’s an instrument.”
“What does it do?”
“It tells us what the rocks are made of.”
Wallace felt his stomach lurch and slide. Something seemed wrong, very wrong. Would rock hounds have something that was so obviously sophisticated and expensive? Was America that rich? For once, he wished he knew more about America than the newsreels and whispers from the radio stations in Kansas and Colorado.
Wallace expected Niyol to ask more questions, but the other boy nodded, as if satisfied. They walked back toward the car. The shepherd still watched from amid his sheep.
Niyol’s eyes flickered from the shepherd to Wallace and back again. He rubbed his hands together, as if trying to scrub the dirt off them.
“What’s wrong?” Wallace said.
“We have to get out of here,” Niyol said.
“Why?”
“Shh.” The men were coming back from their little dig, looking more disappointed than ever. Wallace noticed that their ties had disappeared during the course of the day, and their suits were smudged with orange and brown earth. Herbert had a handprint in the center of his forehead, dark against his pale skin.
Before they got in the car, Wallace drew Niyol aside and said, in Spanish, “What’s happening?”
“Not now,” Niyol said.
Wallace ducked into the car. The sound of the door slamming was leaden and final.
The two men eventually drifted off to the car and came back with a bottle of whiskey, which they shared in little tin cups. Wallace watched them, feeling a slow burn of anger. That’s why I don’t have a father, he thought. White man’s booze.
Niyol saw his gaze and pulled him away into the darkness, claiming he needed to take a piss. Wallace didn’t know whether to be angry or relieved.
“That was a Geiger counter,” Niyol said, pissing.
“A what?”
Niyol sighed. “You should stop making fun of the newsreels and watch them once in a while. A Geiger counter measures radiation.”
Wallace started, remembering similar clicking wands from the footage of Hiroshima. Except those didn’t click. They buzzed. “So they’re going to bomb here?”
“No,” Niyol said. “I think they’re looking for uranium.”
“Uranium?”
Niyol rolled his eyes. “The stuff they make atomic bombs out of. Didn’t you pay any attention to that American film, The Promise of the Atom, in Science Track?”
Wallace shook his head. He might have slept through it. Or skipped class.
“Why do they want more uranium?”
Niyol frowned. “To make more bombs, probably.”
“Why would they want to do that?”
Niyol laughed, long and hard. Wallace saw the two men swivel to look their way, then go back to their bottle. “Why would a boy want to buy an elephant?” he asked.
Wallace looked down. Because it was my destiny, he thought. He remembered his excitement. Coming home from Pepe’s Bar, his head ringing with the thought that here was an elephant, almost affordable. He’d even started to rebuild his father’s burned-out workshop. He’d even started to imagine beating steel into shapes that would cover his elephant.
The Del Rey Book of Science Fiction and Fantasy Page 2