Sky Coyote (33 page)

“Thank You,” he called after me.

O
UTSIDE THE HOUSE I COULD
hear the stranger’s voice raised in earnest entreaty.

“No! He will preserve you against harm. It’s only the unbelievers upon whom He looses his avengers. You have only to agree to this, and I will initiate you into the Hidden Mysteries.”

Imarte’s voice was strained but courteous: “Please believe that I have nothing but the greatest reverence for your sacred stories. Myths tell us many beautiful truths about ourselves—”

“They are NOT stories!” shouted the stranger. “They are Sacred Truth! Can’t you understand that if you deny them, you will be damned for all time?”

“He wants you to convert, doesn’t he?” I said, ducking in through the doorway. “Hell, honey, go along with it. He’ll be a lot more cooperative.”

“I won’t insult him by lying to him,” she replied stiffly. In Chumash, she told him: “Sir, I want to know more of what you have to tell me. But you must understand that I am only a vessel of the truth. My personal faith is not the issue here.”

“Yes, it is.” He was staring at her with the most betrayed
expression—where had I seen a face like that recently? “If you yourself have no faith, you can’t carry it to others. I can never reveal what is hidden to the likes of you! You are hollow!”

“Never worked with one of this kind, have you?” I said, crouching down across from her. “True believers aren’t real receptive to the idea that what they’re telling you is just mythology. Doesn’t matter how appreciative of their culture you are, Imarte. You want my advice, you’ll fall down on the floor this minute in a foaming-at-the-mouth screeching fit of revelation from Chinigchinix Himself. Otherwise you’re not getting a step further with this guy.”

But it seemed my advice was badly timed. The stranger turned his head to stare at me, and he was wroth.

“Now I see the trick!” he hissed. “You’ve wasted my time with this woman, when I might have been out doing His Will! Oh, Thief, you are pathetic. Do you think a few hours’ delay will prevent me from accomplishing what I set out to do?”

I had a snappy comeback on the tip of my tongue, but the guy vanished before I could use it.

It seems that all the while he’d been praying so loud, in there by himself, he’d also managed to free his hands. Then (so far as we could tell later) he’d managed to make a hole in the wall directly behind him, and cover it again with tules so it wouldn’t show. This was Super Commando Missionary, after all. Since he’d fixed himself an escape route he could have used at any time, it must have been only the prospect of converting a couple of spirits that made him stick around.

“Oh, no!” Imarte sobbed, but I was out the door ahead of her.

Security! Your rabbit’s loose and running!
I broadcast.
Contain only! No force! Do not lay hands on the guy!

Shocked affirmatives bounced through the ether. The missionary was going for his martyrdom, I’d bet. However things turned out now, nobody could see me or mine so much as touch him, or I’d be playing into his hands. He was running ahead of me, dodging and feinting, and he was quite a little sprinter; but he hadn’t played for the Black Legend All-Stars like I had. We paralleled each other all the way to the sacred enclosure, with the astonished Chumash watching us. Some of them took up the chase. Oh, great: now he’d have his audience. In front of the whale bones he pulled up, daring me to come closer and prevent sacrilege. I kept my distance, but an outraged priest came out to see what was going on and caught him by the arm. He whirled and struck the reverend gentleman hard. The priest oophed and dropped to his knees, clutching his stomach.

“You see, people of Humashup?” the stranger cried. “It is a sign! The Thief has not caught me, and your own priest kneels to my Lord! The One True God has sent me as a friend to you, to tell you the danger you’re in! Coyote told you a story about invasions, and persuaded you to go with him to an unknown place, lest you all be destroyed—and all the while
he
has destroyed you! Look around at yourselves! What’s become of your village? Where are the things that made you what you are? You’ve sold them all to spirits! You are as naked as corpses, without even gifts to take into your graves! And make no mistake about it, people of Humashup, you’re going to your graves. Do you know where he’s taking you? I have seen the place! He’s taking you to Raven Point, where the spirits of the dead travel! Let him deny it, but I’ve seen his spirits preparing the place!”

Sir? Containment achieved
.

Gosh, thanks a lot. Are you in range to try a disruption?

That’s against the code, sir—

Heads were turning, people were staring at me. “Of course we’re going out on Raven Point,” I replied. “That’s where the Rainbow Bridge is. You know any other way to get to paradise?”

“But he’s not taking you over the bridge!” riposted the stranger. “You’ll all go down under the water, where the Lord’s avengers will tear you to pieces, flesh and souls! Don’t let him do this to you, people of Humashup! There are no white men coming! At Syuxtun, at Humaliwu, at Muwu, your neighbors are living in peace, preparing to receive the Glad Truth of the Lord! They aren’t uprooting their lives and casting off their property, like people about to die!”

Nobody was looking at me now, they were staring at the ground or looking at one another with fear in their eyes. There were murmurs.

I’ll take responsibility. I don’t want you to kill the guy, anyway; just give him a seizure. Grand mal, preferably.

On your order and under protest, then
.

What a bunch of Goody Two-Shoes. The old Enforcers wouldn’t have blinked at an order like that; but then, they’d never have let the missionary escape in the first place.

Fine! Wait for my signal
—

“People, don’t worry about it,” I told the growing crowd. “He’s crazy, that’s all. Listen, guy, who’s going to believe a little runt like you? Can your god come down and talk to these people the way I have? You’re only a man! Why should they believe you instead of me, anyway?”

If everything had gone as I planned, he’d have fallen down then in a fit, a clear sign to anyone watching that he most definitely did not have God on his side. But Sepawit pushed through
the crowd, carrying a stone cooking bowl. I swung to point my muzzle at the stranger.

“And another thing!” I barked. “You serve such an angry god: why don’t you tell us what fate befell the boy these people sent out to spy on you? What did His avengers do to Sumewo? What awaits those who defy Chinigchinix?”

“Hideous death!” The fool couldn’t resist scaring them with hellfire and damnation. “See the consequence of being His enemy? The spy could not hide his presence from us, and with coals and scorpions his tongue was loosened, with the flaying knife his soul was liberated! But he was more fortunate than you shall be, for at the end he accepted the Lord, and so his spirit is at rest. You will envy him, when the avengers come for you! And they will come—”

But the crowd gasped.

“Sumewo is dead?” Anucwa put her hands to her mouth in horror, and somebody else said incredulously, “Little Sumewo?” and there were moans of dismay, and a couple of people burst into tears. The missionary must have thought he’d hit the mark big time.

But Sepawit stumbled forward, unable to take his eyes off the stranger’s face. “You did kill the boy, then,” he stated.

“Not I, but the wrath of the One Lord!” shouted the stranger in his triumph. He made no attempt to dodge the stone bowl as Sepawit smashed it down on his head.
Sickening crunch
is a cliché for the sound it made, but an apt cliché. He dropped. There were brains in the dirt. Sepawit sank into a crouch and covered his face with his hands.

I went to him and knelt beside him. “Sepawit. I’m sorry. I told you about these people.”

“I just bought that bowl,” he said in a stunned voice. “Kaxiwalic
won’t want it now.” He began to shake, and finally burst into tears. He threw his arms around me and wept his heart out, as unashamedly as though I were a sympathetic dog.

“Let’s get this trash out of here and burn it,” said Nutku grimly. He and a couple of other men took the stranger’s body by the heels and dragged it away. People drifted off like ghosts, unwilling to intrude on Sepawit’s grief.

T
HERE WERE CONSEQUENCES, OF COURSE
. There was a whole inquiry and report. Imarte made one hell of a scene, but the final ruling was that if she hadn’t been such a fatuous ass, the situation wouldn’t have deteriorated to the point it did. Interestingly enough, none of the Future Kids was particularly shocked at what Sepawit had done. After all, he was only a savage, wasn’t he, and didn’t they do things like that all the time? And maybe the mortals from the twenty-fourth century were still human enough to wonder what they’d do if they found out that one of
their
children had been tortured to death.

But my fellow immortals were mostly on Imarte’s side. I had set in motion the chain of events that led to the death of a mortal; and while the older operatives understood that this had been necessary for the good of the mission, they were a little disgusted by the debating trick with which I’d beaten Imarte. None of them were Facilitators, naturally. The anthropologists, of course, were outraged and horrified at what a slimy little guy I was. The younger operatives agreed with them.

Except for Mendoza. She’d barely noticed any of it.

I was sitting in splendid isolation at my table in the commissary, pretending not to notice as people avoided sitting near me. Not that I blamed them; I wouldn’t want to watch me eat, either, with this coyote muzzle. Mendoza came in and got a bowl of soup and some crackers. She carried them straight to my table and sat down across from me, to my surprise and shock. I looked up at her to see if she was maybe expressing a comradely solidarity. I should have known better; she was staring absently into space, crumbling crackers into her soup in a way that suggested she’d forgotten how to eat.

“It’s tomato bisque today, you know,” I told her.

“Uh-huh.”

“With real synthetic cream.”

“How gross,” she said, but not as though she meant it.

“So, how’s it going lately?” I inquired. “Haven’t seen you in the village much, now that the operation’s winding down.”

“I’ve been in the field, doing a survey,” she said, bringing her stare back from a great distance and focusing on me at last. “I went for a walk. I was gone seven days and seven nights, and never stopped walking. I went a long way up this country, Joseph, more than a hundred miles. You wouldn’t believe the things I’ve seen.”

“What did you see?” I leaned forward. She leaned forward too, and there was a warmth in her eyes for the first time in a long time, but it wasn’t for me.

“I saw a high desert, a bitter, chill place with no water, a desolation of spines. But one night of rain, and there were flowers there stretching for miles, rolling away in every direction: violet, blue, crimson, and every shade of gold, pale gold like the morning or saffron yellow, and green-gold like brass. They just swept on forever, and the color pulsed and flickered like a bed of coals. There were clumps and stands of boulders rising from the desert
floor, and they were
pink
, Joseph, like strawberries bleeding juice into cream, colors of the strangest innocence for that place of death.

“I turned my face north and went on, and looked down out of the mountains into a valley floor. It ran five hundred miles, with a river winding down it, and was so wide, a mortal wouldn’t have been able to see across, and on the bottom was a lost sea. Only salt marshes left, marooned in the land, and cracked earth white with salt and bleaching bones. There was still a smell of the sea in the air, which was hot as a furnace. I walked across the valley and found mussel shells in the rocks. Condors drifted in the thermals over it, and dragonflies mottled green and orange, big as birds.

“I walked up that valley, following the edge of the hills, and crossed over west into the green coastal range. North of here, Joseph, are oak forests that run on unbroken for miles, every kind of oak tree, every species that exists! Some are so old, so huge, one tree might shelter a whole valley in its shade. But you should see the redwoods!