The Klaatu Terminus (17 page)

“Disko?”

“Disko, Gate, time-travel portal.”

Shem walked around the fire pit for a closer look.

“I wouldn’t get too close,” Tucker said.

Shem reached out with his hand. The disko buzzed and turned orange. Shem snatched his hand away and backed up a few paces. He looked frightened.

Tucker said, “Or, if you want, you can step into it. It might take you someplace interesting.”

“No thank you,” Shem said.

“I wonder if the people that lived here went into it. The woman, their leader, told me they were waiting to be transported. Maybe they decided that this was their transportation.”

“More likely, they ran off in terror.” Shem recovered his confident demeanor. “Ignorance breeds fear. This”— he gestured at the disko —“is my father’s doing.”

“How so? It’s only been a few hours since he decided to build a disko. How could he do it so fast?”

“Is it not clear? Once he made the decision to proceed with his plans, the technology became inevitable. In the same sense, you were conceived in the moment your father first met your mother. Intent is the platform upon which reality teeters. We are dealing with displacement of information in time, therefore events appear to occur out of sequence. No doubt my father is at this moment back in Harmony attempting to build his device. Even if many months pass before he achieves success, the devices already manifest themselves.”

“A while ago you were saying he would fail, that the diskos were an impossibility.”

“I adjust my thinking to account for observed realities,” Shem said with a flutter of his fingers. “And now, I will return to Harmony to assist my father.”

“What about me?”

“I have brought you here at great inconvenience to myself. I wish you luck.”

Shem began to walk away. Out of the corner of his eye, Tucker saw something move within the dark interior of one of the huts.

“Shem!”

The Boggsian glanced back at him, annoyed. Tucker pointed toward the hut. Two greenish-yellow eyes were gazing out at them. Shem saw the eyes and went rigid.

“Get on the other side of the disko,” Tucker said.

Shem, transfixed, could not move. The jaguar oozed out of the doorway like slowly flowing liquid, taking soft, silent steps with its enormous paws. Tucker had seen housecats stalking birds exactly that same way.

“Back up slow,” Tucker said. Shem took a step back, fumbling in his pocket with his right hand. The jaguar froze in midstep, its tail twitching.

“Two more steps,” Tucker said. “Come on, Shem!”

Shem pulled a metal object from his pocket. Tucker could see the cat was about to leap. He ran to Shem, grabbed him by the shoulders, and pulled him back behind the disko. Startled by Tucker’s speed, the cat hesitated. Tucker watched it through the wavery lens of the disk. Shem was panting loudly.

Keeping one eye on the jaguar, Tucker grabbed a charred stick from the fire pit. The jaguar’s mouth opened slightly, showing the tip of its pink tongue. Shem raised his arm. The metal object in his hand looked like a small version of a Lah Sept
arma
.

The jaguar hunched its back and sprang. Its leap took it straight toward the disko. Shem screamed, and a gout of blue fire erupted from his hand. The jaguar and the flame hit the disko from opposite sides. The disko hissed and flared brilliant orange, swallowing both fire and cat in the same instant.

In the stillness that followed, Tucker could hear his own heartbeat. The disko returned to its diaphanous, semitransparent state. Shem dropped to his knees and began muttering in the Boggsian language. It sounded like a prayer.

So much for no religion
, Tucker thought. He scanned their surroundings. Every shadow looked as if it might hold another jaguar. A crackling buzz interrupted Shem’s chanting. The disko had turned to green. Tucker grabbed Shem and dragged him away just as a smoking apparition jumped out of the disko and landed in the middle of the fire pit, sending ashes scattering in all directions. For a fraction of a second, Tucker thought the jaguar had returned, then he realized it was a man with a sooty face and wisps of smoke trailing from his collar and hat brim. The man looked a great deal like Shem’s father, Netzah Whorsch-Boggs, only with much of his beard singed off.

The man’s eyes moved from Tucker to Shem and fastened upon the weapon, still in Shem’s hand.

“Dummkopf!”
he shouted. “Idiot!”

It was definitely Netzah Whorsch-Boggs. He stepped out of the fire pit, grabbed the weapon from his son, shook it in his face, and threw it to the ground, all the while delivering a stream of Boggsian invective. Tucker didn’t understand any of the words, but the tone was clear. The man was apoplectic.

He was also, Tucker noticed, considerably older than the Netzah Whorsch-Boggs he had met that morning.

I
T TOOK
L
IA THE BETTER PART OF THE DAY TO FIND A
place to cross the river. Eventually she came upon a bridge. She crossed, then headed downstream. The banks were tangled with roots and brush; in some places she had to veer well away from the river to get around impassable snarls. She kept moving, and by early afternoon she detected the reek of decaying pig offal.

The pig’s head was gone, along with most of the entrails. Some animal or animals had been at it. Lia looked around nervously, hoping that whatever had eaten the pig was not still around. It took her a few minutes more to find the tree where she had been grabbed. She called Tucker’s name, softly at first, then louder.

She listened, but heard no response from Tucker. He might be searching for her. He might have been captured by the forest people. He might be injured. He might be dead. The only sounds were the mindless chatter of birds, the scurry of small ground creatures, and a distant rapping noise. Lia at first thought it was a woodpecker, but the
tok, tok, tok
was too irregular, and not so fast as a woodpecker. It sounded more like someone chopping wood.

Her curiosity soon overcame her fear. She gathered some sticks and made a large arrow on the ground, pointing in the direction of the rapping sound. If Tucker showed up while she was gone, it would tell him where she was headed.

Using her ears to guide her, Lia wound her way through the woods. The sound became louder, then stopped abruptly, and was followed by the crackle of breaking branches, and a decisive thump. Lia moved forward, slowly and silently, and soon arrived at a small sunlit clearing. The underbrush was trampled. Several stumps jutted from the earth. She could smell the bright odor of fresh-cut wood.

At the center of the clearing, almost invisible in the bright sunlight, was a Gate. At the far edge of the clearing, Lia saw a neatly stacked quantity of trimmed, debarked logs, each of them as big around as Lia’s waist and several arm-spans in length.

From the forest beyond, she heard a new sound, a ripping, scraping noise that went on for a few minutes, then stopped. The Gate went from translucent to gray-green. Lia concealed herself behind a bush. The end of a log emerged from the Gate, then the person who was carrying the log: a woman wearing plain, earth-colored trousers and an identically hued long-sleeved shirt. She carried the log, four times as long as she was tall, on her shoulder, balancing it with one hand as if it were weightless. She rolled the log off her shoulder onto the pile of logs, where it landed with a heavy thump.

The woman had only a shadow of colorless hair on her head. Her facial features were smooth and regular, as if they had never expressed an emotion. Clearly she was not a Boggsian, nor one of the forest people. A Medicant, perhaps? Lia did not think so. Even Medicants carried more expression on their faces than this.

The woman walked back into the disko, stepping into it with the ease and confidence of one entering a familiar open doorway. Seconds later, the distant chopping resumed.

Lia crossed the clearing. Behind the stack of logs, a rectangular area had been cleared down to the dirt, and leveled. Along each side of the rectangle, logs had been placed, overlapping at the ends. The woman was building a log cabin.

Lia returned to her hiding place. The chopping resumed, then another crash, and the sound of scraping. Again, the woman came through the Gate with a trimmed log. This time, she was carrying a double-bladed ax in her left hand. Lia wanted to ask the woman who she was and what she was doing, but caution kept her still. The woman was immensely strong, and therefore potentially dangerous.

The woman unloaded the log, then went to work with the ax, carving a deep notch into each log end. Lia did not like the look of that ax. It might slice through muscle and bone as easily as it cut through wood. Best to leave this frightening woman to her work, and return to the place where she hoped Tucker would come looking for her. She edged back from her vantage point until she could no longer see the woman, then began to walk quickly through the forest. She found the path she had been on earlier, but had gone no more than a few hands of paces when the woman appeared before her, leaning on her ax, standing calmly on the trail as if she had been waiting for some time.

“Trackenspor? Septan? Deutsch?”
the woman said.

Too surprised to speak, Lia simply stared back at the woman. Close up, her features looked more unformed than ever, as if she had been pressed from a mold, like a mannequin. Her voice was familiar, however. Lia was certain she had heard those words before.

“Inglés? Español?”
the woman said.

“I am from Romelas,” Lia said.

“Ah.” The woman smiled. Her cheeks stretched oddly, as if she had never smiled before. “You are Lah Sept?”

“Not anymore . . . Are you
Awn
?”

“An awn is a bristle growing from a grass flower. I am an Augmented Whorsch-Novak golem. You may call me Awn.”

“Are you human?”

“That is a very good question. Are you?”

“Yes!”

“Then I am human, as well, though I have been modified.”

“I think I met you before.”

“That is unlikely. I am new.”

“You were a lot older.”

“Ah, you have been traveling.”

“I met you in the future. Thousands of years.”

Awn blinked and waved a hand in front of her face. “Please keep your numbers to yourself.”

Lia was puzzled. She had never met anyone outside the Lah Sept who did not use numbers.

“You must live a long time,” she said.

“My enhancements include a telomere regenerator. Still, I will age, and I will die. The Terminus will go on.”

“This is the Terminus, then?”

Holding her ax by the blade with one hand, Awn swept the handle slowly through the air, indicating all that surrounded them. “Already the diskos arrive.”

“When I was here before — I mean, later — there were lots of them. Everywhere.”

“Yes. My creator is busy.”

“Your creator? Somebody
created
you?”

“Are you not made?”

“I suppose I was. By my mother.”

“And so it is with me. Why are you here?”

“I’m not sure. I came here with my friend, and we got separated. I’m trying to find him.”

“Who is this friend?”

“His name is Tucker Feye.”

“Ah yes, a figure from your Lah Sept mythology.”

“He’s a real person.”

“I did not say otherwise. When you find him, what will you do?”

“We hope to find a disko that will take us to Hopewell. There are things we need to do there.”

“Hopewell was long ago. Perhaps you have already done them.”

“Only if we go back. Can you help us?”

“Possibly. Where did you last see your friend?”

“He was climbing a tree, and I was on the ground. Then the forest people grabbed me and tied me up and sold me to a Boggsian. I got away and went back to the tree, but Tucker wasn’t there. It’s not far from here.”

“There are many trees.”

“It was close to a place where somebody killed a pig.”

“Ah! I know that place. The forest people trapped a pig not long ago.” A few yards behind Awn, a Gate materialized on the path. Awn walked up to it and pushed her ax handle into the swirling gray surface. Lia expected it to be sucked in, but the disk remained inactive. Awn removed the ax and looked at the handle.

“This disko is local. Come, I will help you find your friend, and we will talk.” She stepped into the Gate.

Lia hung back. Could she trust this half-human woman? Entering a Gate was not something to undertake lightly, but Awn was promising to help, and she had helped Lia twice before.

Awn stuck her head out of the disk. This was an effect Lia had never seen before. It looked like a disembodied head sticking out of a big swirly gray plate.

“Are you coming?” the head asked.

Lia took a breath and entered the Gate.