Tales of the Wold Newton Universe (38 page)

John Gribardsun had had to evaporate his own urine to obtain the phosphorus. He’d also had to make an impromptu vacuum pump with the guts and bladders of assorted animals and, the trickiest part, to seal the glass bulb with fire without losing the vacuum inside.

But it had been done, nonetheless, and now he was ready to visit one of only two known nuclear reactors on the face of the Earth created not by human (or even alien) hands, but by a whim of Mother Nature. Both had been already inactive when discovered by man.

The one in Africa had been shut down by natural processes two billion years before discovery. But the one in South America had been dead for just a few centuries when scientists found it, in the 2030s. Which meant that in Gribardsun’s present today—the beginnings of the seventeenth century—it was still generating power.

He’d been somewhat surprised to find civilized people—as far as sixteenth-century petty European nobility might be considered civilized—already in the place.

The Rio de Janeiro Sierra, which would someday be called Serra dos Órgãos National Park, was relatively close to the Brazilian shore, and the Portuguese had claimed the Brazilian coast for themselves more than a hundred years before.

Even so, Gribardsun had surmised that the new European masters of the land would be quite daunted by the sheer mountains—part naked granite, part impenetrable forest—and equally entranced by the riches easily found closer to the beach. And that this mixture of awe and greed would prevent them, for at least one more century, from trying to live uphill.

The time traveler had been quite surprised when he discovered the imposing structure, a commixture of medieval castle and Neolithic fort, perched on a rock shelf high above the great river, Paquequer, which coiled around the mountains and jumped down gorges.

His first instinct had been to avoid the Europeans completely—he was quite sure the natives, the fierce Aymoré people, would give him all the trouble he would need. Although recently, while he was performing an autopsy on a mutant jaguar, some white men, slavers or smugglers perhaps, had happened upon him, assumed he was just another Indian performing some primitive rite, and continued on their way. Which was just fine.

But then hed seen Cecilia. Naked. Having a long, delightful bath. She was in her late teens but Gribardsun had been without a female sex partner for more than a year now, since the end of his quite intense, but finally doomed, affair with the regrettably flea-infested self-appointed vampire-princess of Machu-Picchu. So, Cecilia seemed gorgeous enough. The problem was, how could he try and engage her attentions (and favors) without scaring her to death? Could it be possible she had something to do with the strange fortress he had seen the day before? That place, with its massive stone walls and circular design, few windows no more than holes, and large, solid wooden doors, was so like some early civilized domes he saw millennia ago, down by the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Could it be possible that some ancestral architectural concepts had survived for so long? But that was for later. Now, he had more important matters to deal with.

He’d been going consistently upriver for quite a while when he found the pool and waterfall with the naked Portuguese girl in it. Without a GPS network in orbit and with some four hundred years of geological evolution and human intervention to discount, he’d been counting on the flora and fauna to clue him toward the reactor’s precise location.

His idea was to photograph it, to document it thoroughly, and perhaps to collect a few samples. He was curious about the impact of time travel on the radioactive decay of isotopes, among other things. He had puzzled, from time to time, about the carbon-14 content of his own cells.

Marching upriver had presented him with more and more mutant life forms. He’d spotted the jaguar a few weeks before, and tracked the animal to a thick part of the bush. The huge cat had jumped into the trees to stalk its pursuer, believing itself the hunter, not the hunted.

The arrival of the smugglers distracted the predator, perhaps inducing it to ponder if horse meat might offer a more substantial meal than the well-muscled, tanned frame of Gribardsun.

One of the white men, and a particularly ugly one, raised his musket to the beast. This man had an uncouth black beard falling to his chest and eyes that shone, perhaps in an unconscious—but nevertheless doomed—attempt to conceal the propensity to violence therein. It was clear that he wasn’t trying to save the “Indian,” only to have some sport with the big cat.

But the time traveler dismissed such an abortive “rescue” with a gesture and a word. The troop then left, the coarsely bearded one derisively calling him “chief” before vanishing into the woods. Gribardsun retained the man’s scent and face in his memory for future reference and then returned to the jaguar.

The cat delayed its gaze on the horses for a while. The moment of distraction was ended by three small darts, quickly shot from Gribardsun’s bow into the cat’s body, piercing an eye, an ear, and a shoulder. The effect was just what the hunter wanted: focusing the attention of the beast to the business at hand, and goading it to attack.

Like a thunderbolt, the animal jumped for Gribardsun’s throat.

The jaguar was probably used to having its prey duly impressed and generally horror-stricken, fear-pissed by its fierce appearance, quick action, lightning leap, long white teeth, and astonishing claws. With this particular piece of human flesh, however, it was in for a surprise.

The time traveler had at his side a long dependable and quite strong fork of fire-hardened wood, which he raised as soon as his eyes detected the slight contraction of muscle under the cat’s skin—the unconscious and almost imperceptible movement that marked, as a split-second warning, the creature’s decision to jump.

The animal’s neck was caught in midair between the two prongs of the fork, and in the next second both prongs had penetrated the soil, being forced almost a foot under the earth by Gribardsun’s powerful arms and quite effectively pinning the cat, belly up, to the ground. It was the biggest specimen he’d ever seen, with longer paws than average and fearsome claws that retracted into soft sheaths. The fangs were also longer than those of the average jaguar, and sharp as knives. But the eyes were the
pièce de résistance,
black and yellow, but with a curious blue glow.

With a quick shot of the bow, the time adventurer killed a fat rodent that scurried nearby. Pressing the dead furry creature as if it were a ripe orange above the cat’s mouth, he created a trickle of blood that fell between the jaguar’s teeth.

The eerie blue glow in the eyes intensified. Even with its neck pinned down, the animal might have tried to roar, but it didn’t, keeping perfectly silent. Gribardsun nodded to himself and, feeling a small pang of regret but recognizing the need, killed the beast mercifully with the long, Spanish-steel-bladed knife that he had obtained during his stint among the Incas. For a few centuries now he’d started collecting blades here and there, so he might spare the knife he’d brought from the future. Ten thousand years of sharpening could wear even the finest steel too thin after all.

Then he proceeded with the autopsy.

It was immediately obvious why the animal had not vented its hatred with a powerful roar: it couldn’t. If its throat could emit any sound, it would have been outside the human spectrum of hearing. A most curious adaptation.

The blue glow to the eyes came from nictitating membranes, translucent third eyelids in each eye. Polar bears had them to protect themselves from snow blindness and beavers used them to see underwater, but it was unheard of in felines. Until now. The belly was one-third full of raw meat, not quite fresh, and not human. This jaguar was slow in digesting its meals.

Finishing the examination, Gribardsun skinned the animal—its fur would provide a nice coat against the cold he expected to find at the top of the mountains—and partook of some of the hard raw muscle of the cat in a rite of respect for the fallen enemy. Old habits die hard, he told himself, and those pertaining to proper etiquette in killing are those that die hardest.

He then lit a fire to prepare a proper meal from the flesh of the smaller, softer, and more palatable rodent. Finishing dinner, he poured some herbs on the fire, creating a dark, pungent smoke, and using sticks for support, spread the cat’s skin over it. It wasn’t proper tanning, but that would have to do.

A few hours passed before he was quite confident that it would be possible to wear the jaguar mantle without offending all the noses for miles. As soon as the smoke cleared, Gribardsun sniffed the wind that blew in his direction. There was a faint smell of human bodies. Diluted, weak, but increasing. He then placed his ear on the ground, and heard the approach of the Aymorés. At least a dozen pairs of feet treading softly, but surely coming.

He’d seen signs that the mutant beasts were somehow sacred to them, and knew that his treatment of the jaguar had been, in such a perspective, nothing less than sacrilegious. Gribardsun had no idea what the Aymoré penalty for heresy and blasphemy would amount to, and wasn’t especially curious to find out. So, tying the skin over his shoulders, he took to the canopy and vanished.

From the highest branch of a tall tree, Gribardsun watched the fearsome group of Indians. The Aymorés used wooden discs under their lower lips and in the earlobes, a decoration that made them look like living gargoyles, as if some medieval stone demons had turned into flesh.

He’d seen all kinds of body ornamentation and modification during his travels of nearly fourteen thousand years. Besides, his training as an anthropologist and his peculiar upbringing in Africa had made him somewhat impervious to prejudice, and strongly non-judgmental. Even so, Gribardsun couldn’t figure out why that tribe had their noses decorated with strange blue, shining metal rings. Blue, he thought with irony, seems to be the color of jungle fashion these days.

Few human communities had, through history, developed the habit and the skill to live and move upon trees. Gribardsun was quite sure that the Aymorés wouldn’t be able to track him if he kept to the canopy and did not do anything to call their attention. So, treading softly and silently, he moved on.

Even now, perched on one of the tallest trees close to the pool’s perimeter and entranced by Cecilia’s beauty, he was aware of the movements in his surroundings. It would not do, after all, to let a cousin of the dead jaguar sneak up on him.

He noticed the Aymorés approaching the pool a few minutes before the girl. He had always felt protective toward women—beautiful young women, especially—and this one was naked and alone, with a troop of armed savages bearing down on her location. But he refrained from acting too early: after all, he didn’t know enough about the situation. She might be their nymph, their goddess; they might be her lovers.

It was only when she screamed with terror and the arrows started to fly that he decided to enter the fray. The idea was to save the girl and to impress the heck out of her in the process. He left the Spanish knife in the tree, along with the leather bag he used to carry his other possessions, and jumped down armed only with a heavy piece of wood.

Twirling the club above his head, Gribardsun hit the closest Indian right in the face, splitting it from forehead to chin and producing an ample arc of blood and teeth fragments.

The unnatural sound of the exploding skull—comparable to a ripe coconut falling on hard ground from a very tall tree—made the other attackers stop in their tracks and turn toward the source of the
bang
!—just to have arms and ankles dutifully clobbered, the pain—and one broken bone or another—making them fall down, or at least to drop their weapons.

Heavily tanned, with longish, matted hair and a foot taller than the average Indian, wearing nothing but a one-shoulder tunic of coarse cotton that left a good part of his broad chest and abdomen naked, bound at the waist by a cord of feathers, Gribardsun looked like nothing but the hero of some old Italian sword-and-sandal flick. A reference which would have been lost on the scattered, scared, and smashed Indians.

Then the largest of the Aymorés made a feint in Gribardsun’s direction and quickly jumped back, trying to get out of the mysterious man’s reach and perhaps to compromise his balance. But the time traveler was also, by inclination and necessity, an experienced warrior. With a quick turn of the torso he almost overstepped himself, but instead kept both feet firm on the ground and smashed the cudgel into the Aymoré’s ribs, cracking at least two of them and sending him backwards, splashing into the lake where Cecilia was.

Flying into the water in pursuit, Gribardsun grabbed the Aymoré’s hands and, with a swing, lifted him over his head, as if the man was a prize cup he had just won.

The Indian was shorter than the time traveler, but heavier: his body was dense, well-muscled, and compact. He was called Aymberê by his peers, meaning hard, unflinching, immovable. He was considered a powerful hunter. He’d once killed a huge tapir, ten feet long and weighing six hundred pounds, with his bare hands, breaking the animal’s neck in his grip.

But now this bold, strong and unflinching hunter was screaming for help. His companions, however, fled—limping and crawling, but fled, nonetheless—leaving him to his doom.

The time traveler knew that even if he killed the Indian, the rest of them—probably all the rest of them—would soon lick their wounds and return for revenge.

He needed to put the fear of god—or, at least, the fear of Gribardsun—in their hearts. A good strategy would be to break the Aymoré’s spine, leaving him crippled but able to talk. But that would certainly terrorize the girl more than the remaining warriors of Aymberê’s tribe, and he didn’t want to be labeled, in her eyes, as someone as savage as his foes.

So he talked to Aymberê in his own tongue. The Indian’s face assumed a ghastly gray hue as he listened. When he was finished, Gribardsun—who had kept the Indian in the air all this time—merely threw him clear of the water. Aymberê fell outside of the pool, his shoulders connecting painfully with a flat rock, and he then scampered, rolling at first, and then running.