Atlantis Endgame (26 page)

She saw, and felt, their reaction of shock, disbelief, terror, grief, anger, all emotions human enough to strike deeply into her heart.

"Who?" she shaped the thought, and the reply was an echo from them all:

The Kayu.

——————————

"
HERE," GORDON ASHE
said, pointing.

Eveleen paused, wiped her stinging eyes, and surveyed the scene. It looked more alien than the alien landscapes she had visited in her travels away from Earth: rubble, fragments of jars painted with stylized seed pods, stacked reed-matting beds, and all around landslides, lit by the glowing-coal smolder from the north.

It was the glimpse of dancing monkeys that snapped the puzzle pieces together, altering the scene from unfamiliar to familiar, just as Kosta said, "I remembered those monkeys. It was about here last night that I felt the need to turn away, turn back, and I heard you being attacked." He pointed at Ashe. "And so I ran down that way." He indicated the darkness to the south, toward the harbor.

"I know where this is," Eveleen breathed. "It's that square we told you about. The one with the weird compulsion."

Ross, who had been slowly circling the rubble, looking high and low, paused, hands on his hips, looking back. "I feel it," he said in a short voice.

They all stepped toward the rubble-surrounded walls of the square house. At once Eveleen felt that inner tightening of danger, and she could see, even in the ruddy dim light, that the others were tensing up.

Ross stepped up next to Ashe. His voice was low, but his wife, attuned to his moods, to the softest utterances of his voice, heard him breathe: "Remember what I said."

Ashe did not react. He motioned to the others. "Here's what we do."

——————————

LINNEA GASPED. "THE Kayu? Who are they? Some kind of futuristic super-villains?" Though the Baldies had said those words about conflicting meaning and statement earlier on, she wondered if it was the seeming-truth of the master liar: if she were being manipulated not just through words, but mentally.

"They believe in noninterference."

"Blowing up a sun is not noninterference," Linnea answered back, before the Baldies could organize and send to her the mental images that they wished to accompany their words.

You must wait,
one responded mentally.
You cannot communicate with our speed in this way, and you are forming false understandings.

Linnea paused and received a series of images: the Kayu with their furry appearances and their warm robes, creatures of a very cold world, an old world. Not all thought alike, as one would expect from a race that did not share a common mental plane, but they did believe in leaving life to progress as it would toward eventual reunification in Telos.

Telos?
Linnea thought, fighting for comprehension. That simply meant "goal" in Greek, but underlying the word were feelings or images of light and energy and awesome power. Were they talking about the Big Bang? Or the Big Crunch at the end of time? Everything was coming far too fast, though she could feel the Baldies' efforts to slow down, to keep their images simple.

"When they discovered that we had learned how to travel across time as well as distance, they began to follow. They are here now, having perceived across several centuries our efforts on this island."

Linnea struggled now not to comprehend the
what
but the
when.
Of all the tenses in English, the future perfect progressive is the most clumsy: "by [future date] we will have been making . . ." Now she realized that the Baldies could not possibly share their language, that they had several modes and conditionals within that single tense that she couldn't understand any more than she understood quantum physics.

"Most of our people are gone, except those who were on missions," the Baldy stated. "Many do not know yet what has occurred at home. We are here to complete our mission because it would guarantee a peaceful world here. And when you do reach space, you will not go as a plague."

"We are also here to find Kayu and eradicate them, that our time might restore our world," another said.

But we do not know which of their individuals carried out that mission; many of the others are also travelers like you, and have been forbidden to interfere except by truthful exchange of information.

Linnea struggled, and struggled, and finally burst out, "When is your time? Is it now? Is it in my time? Is it beyond my time? Because if it's not beyond my time, how do you know that our world takes destruction to the stars? And if it is . . ." She faltered in a welter of conditional verbs.

"The time-line we give to you with our interference here does not kill a whole people," the Baldy stated.
It gives your world a future of peace.

"But it also takes me out of it, or if I were stuck here, it takes my children out of it," Linnea said, fighting against tears. But they clogged her throat anyway, making her voice quiver like an old woman's and her eyes sting and blur, so that the Baldies became mere forms standing before her. "My children have a right to their existence. Everyone who is born has a right to existence, everyone, including you. I am sorry for your world, but don't destroy mine. My children want to make a better world, as do all the people I know and value—"

It was right then that the sizzling crackle of laser fire sheered into the doorway.

The Baldies turned as one, their mouths open in consternation. Swiftly they withdrew in the other direction, leaving Linnea standing there.

She heard a shout. "Linnea! Are you in there?"

It was Ashe.

She moved to rip the cloth from over her head, but paused. The Baldies were disappearing, some of them taking some oddments she realized hazily must be part of their technology.

Dark figures entered, bringing a sharp smell of smoke and sweat and hot, burning metal. Lasers lanced out again, not at anything living, but at the few bits of Baldy tech left in the room.

She slapped her hands over her eyes, bewildered, confused, but above all desperate for answers. She flung out the mental cry:
You talked about my time and time now but not our future time. Which future is it?

No answer.

Are you us?

No answer.

Then someone pulled the cloth from her head and flung it away, and the world slammed round her again, imprisoning her thoughts inside her skull.

She was still standing there, her hands over her face, and tears smearing down her palms, when she heard Eveleen's soothing voice: "It's okay. We're here now. The Baldies hightailed. They can't do anything to you."

CHAPTER 27

"IT'S GOING TO blow!"

Who shouted that? Eveleen couldn't tell; the roar of groaning, cracking rock was louder than the biggest thunderstorm she had ever experienced.

The violent red glow all across the northern horizon had visibly increased during the short time they'd stormed the Baldy hideout.

Eveleen watched Ross gape at it and then force his eyes away. She knew what he was thinking: he would deal with what it meant later. Right now, that spectacular lava fountain cast enough light for them to see by.

They began picking their way down the landslide. Ross and Eveleen had just reached a wall and were about to vault it when Stav let out a shout and raised his weapon.

All of them stopped, ready. Down the trail from them was a cluster of figures. But the figures turned, none of them yelling or fighting, and in the weird red light they recognized that they were all women.

Linnea Edel gave a gasp. "The priestesses! They have let them go."

"We've got to get them off the island," Ashe stated.

Yes, but how? Eveleen had an unpleasant inward vision of their ship crowded with women who belonged in a world three thousand years in the past, but then Kosta smacked his hands together. "The scavengers' ship."

Ashe grinned. His teeth glinted in the bloody light.

"We might have to scuffle for it," Ross warned.

"Then all four of us can go," Ashe said. "The scavengers can see to themselves. These women deserve a chance to get away from the blow, but if they don't do it soon, they might not make it." He turned to Eveleen. "You get them some supplies off our ship. Stuff they'll understand," he added. And to Linnea, "I take it you know how to communicate with them?"

She nodded.

"Then explain that they need to get going, now, fast, either south to Crete, or if they're afraid of missing the island, then northwest to Greece. Anywhere but east."

She nodded again, and started speaking to the women.

Eveleen, after the first few sentences, stopped listening. Linnea was talking in Kallistan terms, making it all simple. Eveleen realized that the preparations for food would be entirely up to her; time was running out, and she'd better hurry.

When Linnea paused, Eveleen whispered, "I'm going to run ahead and row myself to our ship. Take them to the beach and wait. We have radio," she added. "Here. Take mine. If I need to, I'll contact you with a spare from the ship. If the guys beep a signal, beep back four quick ones, which is the emergency code." She sighed. "At this point, I suspect Gordon will break silence and come on in the clear and talk to you."

The older woman looked tired and worn in the terrible red light. Her eyes were puffy, but her gaze was alert and focused. "All right," she said in a soft voice. "I will meet you on the beach, then."

Eveleen ran the rest of the way down, or rather slid, skipped, hopped, and once rolled. Even with the roll—a painful one, over what seemed to be every pointy stone on the island—she was glad to be going down, not up. The air was hotter than ever and filled with smoke that smelled of hot rock.

She found the rowboat, cast off the covering, and was about to jump in it when two figures emerged from the shadows under an outcropping of rock.

A guttural-sounding roar from one gave her enough advance warning that this was no friend and to pull out her weapon. She aimed at his feet and fired.

Hot, smoking sand blasted up.

"Ow!"

A gargling howl of anger from the other presaged a berserker attack. She jerked up the weapon, realized she still couldn't bring herself to fire, and reversed it, dodging the flying fist that came at her head, and pistoled the man across the mastoid bone. He went down like a felled tree, stinking of years-old sweat, stale wine, and uncured goat skin.

Gagging, she turned around to deal with the second one, to see him running westward down the beach, his pumping legs flinging sand up behind him.

Using her breathing techniques, she tried to calm her jangled nerves and forced her watery legs to function as she shoved the rowboat down to the water.

Having learned the hard way about rowing, she wrapped some old seaweed around her palms before picking up the oars. A few good, hard pulls, and she launched into choppy waves. The water looked as black as ink, except for the oily reflections of the distant lava shining an unpleasant red in spilled ripples of color.

She reached the boat, guided by a faintly glowing buoy bobbing around in the water, tied the rowboat to the stern, and clambered aboard.

There, she hesitated. For the past few days they'd moved the boat right into the harbor at sunset, trusting to darkness to hide it, and then they'd returned to their little cove, sheltered by crumbling cliffs, at dawn.

But Linnea had clear orders, and she couldn't see to execute them without lights.

Maybe the danger is over,
she thought, and went ahead and turned on the lights. Not the ones she knew would light the deck, if needed, just the ones below.

Then, trusting to the murk outside to hide any cracks of light, she got busy.

——————————

LINNEA FORCED HERSELF to concentrate on walking, which was a challenge perilous enough. The terrible red light from the north was bright enough to distract one but not bright enough to highlight the many places on the walk down where the foot could get stuck in a hole or cause one to slide.

The priestesses had given Eveleen mildly curious looks, though in the darkness her mixture of modern clothing (khaki trousers) and Kallistan (her knee-length thin linen robe) had barely been visible. Linnea did not worry. She knew by now that what you expect to see you see. The priestesses were not looking for visitors from the future any more than they had recognized the Baldies as beings from another world.

Their only conversation was about the strangeness of the blue priests. Between the time Linnea had been taken away and their subsequent freeing, they had managed to convince themselves that the priests had sought someone from Kemt.

"Perhaps," Ela said as they trod in single file, except for the two helping Stella, "they wish to go there, as our island is where the spirits have chosen to battle."

"Yes," several of the other women said.

"Our island is no longer a place for the living." The seer's old, cracked voice was wry.

Stella stumbled; the other two caught her up but necessarily jarred her arm. She gave a hiss of pain but made no protest. The others fell silent, the youngest two smoothing the road with their sandaled feet so that Stella would not trip.