Storm at the Edge of Time (14 page)

“In rather a hurry, isn't he?” Arni said feebly.

Jamie nodded, surprised to find even that much of her body still working. “He has good cause, but he does kind of overdo things.”

“Not that it will do much good,” Tyaak said staggering to his feet, “since I have no idea where to find that
staff. If it has been taken off the island in my time, it could be anywhere in the universe.”

Wind was sweeping steadily over the moor, but overhead the sky was clear and sunny. Only a few stones of the circle still stood. Others looked like gray whales, their sides just breaking above the blooming heather.

Arni gazed around, then looked down at the coppery jumpsuits he and the others were wearing. “This is your time?” he said in wonder.

The half-Kreeth broke into a smile. “As if I had just left it a moment earlier.”

To Jamie the land looked much as it had millennia earlier. Hardly any roads or buildings, no boats on the water or vapor trails overhead. Yet the stone circle itself was clearly far more collapsed. The twenty-sixth century? Suddenly she felt as coldly lost as Arni must have. She and everything she had ever known were dead. She didn't belong here.

Tyaak, however, happily threw back his head, his dark hair streaming loose on the breeze. “I am back, and all this might never have happened. I could walk over those hills, get in my ship, and go home.”

As he took a few steps, Jamie jumped to her feet. “And not even look for the staff? And leave us stranded in this empty time of yours?”

He turned, a wry smile on his face that suddenly reminded Jamie of Urkar. “I said I
could.
Kreeth and Humans, it seems, may argue a lot, but we do not walk out on duty. Even if it is a duty we did not choose.”

Arni smiled eagerly. “So, where do we look for it?” Jamie could see Tyaak's calm suddenly evaporate.
She stepped in. “Well, if the staff has gone off the island, we'll have to go, too. I suppose you have some sort of spaceship parked around here?”

Tyaak nodded bleakly and pointed north. “We could walk, but if time is that short, I had better bring it here.” He plucked a small device off his belt and looked at it a moment, seeming happy just to have these things with him again. Then he punched a couple of buttons and gazed northward.

In moments, a silver speck appeared above the horizon, moving swiftly toward them. Tyaak walked briskly out of the circle, but Arni, dropping a hand to a belt that held no sword, stayed with Jamie behind the line of fallen stones.

The speck became an oval and dropped smoothly toward the moor where Tyaak stood. Silently it settled onto the heather. Arni looked at Jamie, took a deep breath, and set off toward it.

Soon the young Viking was running his fingers over the ship's smooth silver surface. Then he joined Tyaak inside and began asking a steady stream of questions.

Jamie hesitated by the open door. Suddenly she didn't want to be a part of this. For Arni what he saw now was so removed from the world he knew that it wasn't like the future—it was like magic. But she had grown up expecting a future of spaceships and aliens. Now it was here, and her time undeniably was gone.

Relax, she told herself. Pretend this is a “Star Trek” episode. That got her through the door and into the dental-chair-like seat that Tyaak pointed to. Jamie lay down and closed her eyes. Panic still gibbered at her, but she fought it back. Relax, she told herself again.
This is happening and there's nothing you can do about it except find that staff, take it where it belongs, and go home.

Gradually she did relax; with a sigh she opened her eyes. Having a goal, she thought with a smile, certainly does help stubborn, goal-oriented people.

Tyaak had already closed the door and was sitting in front of a low bank of controls. “This is ridiculous. If this magic is real, I should be able to just feel the right direction to go look for that staff.”

“So, can you?” Jamie asked.

“That is the ridiculous part,” he said in a small voice. “I think I can. It makes no sense, but I know where we should be heading.”

“Then let's do it!” Arni said.

Another moment's silence; then Tyaak sat forward and adjusted some controls. Soundlessly they were rising over the island. Jamie stared into the view screen in front of her seat, safely removed from any sense of height. Purple heather, gray-green grass, dark ocean meeting the coastline in lacy white waves. Where maps in her time had shown the town of Kirkwall, there were still some buildings. The large reddish one might have been the cathedral. Then there was ocean, a few more islands, more ocean, and another coastline. More purple and green, with a few roads and clustered buildings. Scotland?

“Are we headed south?” she asked.

“It seems so. I set the coordinates by … instinct. Frightening.”

They flew on, passing over more empty land. If this was Scotland and England they were flying over, Jamie
thought, there ought to be more cities. She and her parents had passed through a lot on their drive north. But Tyaak looked so drawn and tense, she didn't want to ask him anything more.

Instead, Jamie played with the controls on the screen in front of her. She could change the focus, zoom in for closeups, or switch the view to the back or sides or even straight up into high deep blue. She walked over to show Arni how to do the same with his. He was so excited by the whole thing he could hardly sit still.

Then there was a city ahead. Not huge, perhaps, but a real city, a cluster of sun-glittering buldings along a river.

“This is it,” Tyaak said. “The third staff is down there somewhere.”

“Where is this?” Jamie asked.

Tyaak read off his screen. “A native town, capital of a former nation-state, name: London.”

“London?” Jamie peered at her screen. Surely it had looked bigger a few days ago when she flew in to it. A few days ago? She shook herself and tried to focus on business.

“Arni, can you sense anything about the staff here?”

His brow furrowed under the thatch of red hair. “It's high. Not as high as we are now, but high. And there are a lot of strange things with it.”

Jamie sighed. That wasn't much help. A lot of “things” in twenty-sixth-century London would seem strange to a Viking.

“What about you?” Arni asked in return.

Jamie was surprised. She hadn't given it a thought, but now she could see the staff clearly. “It's the horse
carving, of course, the only one left. But the wood is very pale, pale as bone.” She jerked back. She was sure of something more. “There are hands holding it, green hands. Pale green, like celery.”

“Celery I do not know,” Tyaak said, “but
pale
green would not be Kreeth, it would be Valgrindol. Not many Valgrindol on this planet, I should think.”

“Not many people at all, by the looks of it,” Jamie commented, scarcely wanting to ask the next question. “Why? I thought the historical trend was for populations and cities to keep growing.”

“On Earth?” Tyaak said scornfully. “Humans had pretty well used up the planet when the Kreeth and others arrived. Most were eager to leave the place and settle elsewhere. That is what my mother's ancestors did. The planet is coming back, though. The oceans, land, and air have been cleaned up, and much of the plant and animal life is returning. But most Humans have set roots elsewhere. The ones here now are mostly hermit types or academics or people promoting tourism. There is not much trade, though, that a backward, used-up planet like this can offer.”

Jamie decided all that didn't bear thinking about just now. Instead, she watched the screen as they dropped toward a field pocked with oval, round, or triangular craters of different sizes.

Tyaak was continuing his own thoughts. “That is what puzzles me. Valgrindol are largely traders—high-class ones. What would one be doing here on Earth?”

The movement of the ship was so smooth that Jamie could tell they had landed only because the view on her screen was stationary. Arni was still playing with his
controls, scanning the city on one side and green fields and woods on the other. He zoomed in on the tall gleaming buildings towering into the afternoon sky.

“We're going out there?” he asked in awe.

“Yes, in a minute,” Tyaak replied. “But I cannot go out looking like this.” He walked to a section of wall and pressed something; a hood projected outward. He stood under it, and the long blue-black hair now falling in a flat mane down his neck was suddenly pulled up and out in a spiky crest. Then the hood retreated. Jamie and Arni just stared for a moment, then burst out laughing.

“You look,” Jamie said between gasps, “like an electrified hedgehog.”

“And here you were just starting to look normal,” Arni said wiping his eyes.

Tyaak sniffed indignantly. “
Now
I look normal. Like a normal Kreeth—or close enough, anyway. A full Kreeth's hair grows this way naturally, but I have to work at it. Now, if you are through showing how provincial you are, let us go.”

Opening the door, he led them out. They weren't in the open, as Jamie had thought. Transparent roofing ran between the landing craters. Some of these dimples held huge ships, blocks and blocks long. Others held vessels whose sizes ranged from a jumbo jet to that of a small compact car. Most were empty.

“How do we get out of here?” Arni said, looking over the vast field and its maze of ships.

“On one of these.” Tyaak walked to a corral holding various sizes of large tall boxes. All were silvery on the bottom half and clear on the top.

“We have no luggage or goods, so a smaller transport will do.” He looked at his companions and shook his head. “And I doubt you are up to driving individual models.”

They climbed into what looked like a large shower stall with several rows of seats. Tyaak sat behind the controls and soon had them gliding off. “Sorry if I'm slow,” he muttered tensely. “I am not used to navigating by instinct.”

Jamie didn't want to disturb him, but one question wouldn't go away. “I didn't see wheels. How do these things move?”

Tyaak shot her a superior, pitying glance that she would have liked to slap off his face if he hadn't been the driver. “Wheels are hopelessly primitive. They require smooth-surfaced roads to travel on. Null-gravity can run over all surfaces.”

That wasn't much of an answer, but, deciding not to expose any more ignorance, Jamie sat back and watched the parked spaceships and the looming city. Among the other transports gliding by were some that looked like glassed-in skateboards with seats. She figured it was a good thing they each didn't have one. Twenty-sixth-century London might not be ready for a wild young Viking on one of those.

But at the moment, Arni did not look very wild. He was sitting quite still, watching the strange sights, particularly the buildings.

These soared and arched and looped, like taffy stretched into odd shapes and then frozen. Surfaces gleamed with metallic harshness or with soft pastels. Nestled among these gravity-defying forms were older
buildings of stone and brick. They looked so familiar and human, Jamie wanted to get out and hug them, though she supposed the whole lot looked equally strange to someone who'd grown up in a one-story hovel with dirt and grass for a roof.

The people who walked or rode around the buildings, Jamie found equally astonishing. Many, she realized, must be full Kreeth. Their skin was green—not Tyaak's muddy green, but a bright emerald. And their hair, full-bristled or shaved in various styles, came in every shade of blue from robin's egg to turquoise to vibrant cobalt, though she saw none quite the inky shade of their companion's. The Humans in the crowd looked rather inconspicuous and colorless beside the Kreeth.

There was also a sprinkling of different species. Some had two arms, two legs, and one head. Some did not. At the sight of these, Arni grabbed instinctively for a dagger that wasn't there, then shrugged and just stared.

The transport stopped, and Tyaak leaned back with an exhausted sigh. “If I have not been acting on some incredible delusion, the staff should be somewhere around here.”

They were in a plaza surrounded by three buildings. One, of brick, was squat, with square towers and peaked roofs. Another looked like a stretched wad of pink bubble gum. The third, a metallic lavender, rose in a more conventional rectangle except that its corners were rounded and it pinched together in the middle. Its sides seemed to be splattered with giant dribbles of glue that might be sloping balconies. There were no obvious
windows on the latter two buildings, but clear patches seemed to be scattered over their surfaces like transparent fish scales.

“What do you say, Arni?” Tyaak asked.

The boy closed his eyes. “Up—way up. Old things about, and odd things, too. But many old things. At least they feel old from now.”

“Old things,” Jamie said. “That might be the brick place.”

Arni looked at the five-story old Earth-style building. “No, a lot higher.”

“Better see what the signs on the others say,” Tyaak suggested. Stepping from the transport, he led them toward the bubble-gum building. Signs in several languages identified it as the Galactic Music Institute, Earth Subsection. The other, they saw when they walked to it, was the Institute of Earth Archaeology.

“Sounds more promising,” Tyaak said, “if we are looking for old things.”

Jamie nodded abstractly. “But what I'd really like to find is a restaurant. I'm starving.”

“Me too,” Arni added. “You do eat in this time, don't you?”

Tyaak laughed and walked toward the arched entrance of the lavender building. “There will be food dispensers in the lobby here. They are designed for a variety of species, so we should be able to find something for you.”

The lobby was high and filled with free-form columns that looked to Jamie like wax dribbles on candles. She found the creatures walking between the columns even odder. Several Humans and a Kreeth were in a
heated conversation with what looked like a rusty scrubbing pad. Something yellowish on tripod legs was walking between a Human and an almost transparent wormy creature. They approached what had to be an elevator. It opened and let out a Kreeth and a gray creature that reminded Jamie of the dancing hippos in
Fantasia.