The Klaatu Terminus (29 page)

He went back to the stove and scooped up some warm beans with his fingers and tasted them. Spicy, like Mexican-style beans. Awn’s food had always been tasty, but bland. Tucker replaced the lid and went back outside. The smart thing to do would be to hide in the trees and wait for whoever it was to come back. He was just stepping off the porch when he heard a scream.

The sound came from the woods, a long ways off. He listened, but the sound was not repeated. Could it have been an animal? He didn’t think so — it had sounded distinctly human.

It had sounded a lot like Lia.

Tucker ran. He followed a path toward where he thought the scream had come from, passing several diskos. He reached the creek, slowed, stopped, and listened. Nothing but forest sounds. He crossed the creek and climbed onto a ridge, walking silently, listening for any unusual noises. Nothing. He stopped at the intersection of two paths, and he noticed something odd about the bird sounds. He could hear their peeps and chirps and calls in the woods to his right and directly ahead. Behind him, where he had just walked, the birds were silent. And they were silent to his left.

He followed the path that led to where the birds were not singing. A few minutes later, as he reached the base of a long, low hill, he heard voices.

L
IA HEARD HERSELF SCREAM AS SHE FELL FROM THE
disko. Twisting in midair, she had only a second to orient herself. She glimpsed the rocky, fern-covered hillside an instant before she hit. She heard her right ankle snap — a sickening pain rocketing up her leg — then she was tumbling down the steep slope, the whispery softness of the ferns punctuated by harsh jolts from the rocks. She felt as if every bone in her body were splintering. Then she hit the water.

The water was ice-cold, but only a few feet deep. She fought her way to her feet, the shock of the cold water momentarily suppressing the agony in her ankle, her shoulder, her left hand. Gasping, she splashed toward shore, ignoring the silent shrieks of protest from her ankle, then threw herself onto the bank. She lay facedown on the muddy bank for several heartbeats, taking inventory. Ankle probably broken. Shoulder injured, but working. Something was wrong with her hand. She raised her left hand and looked at it. The nails of two of her fingers had been peeled back. Lia shuddered and looked away.

Master Gheen! They had come through the disko together. Where was he? She rose painfully to her knees and looked up the steep hillside but saw only a confusion of foliage. He had to be nearby. She listened and heard a groan from the slope above her, then the rustling, crunching, of feet shuffling through leaves.

Gheen was alive, and he was moving.

Moments ago, in the barn, she had been ready to kill him. Now she just wanted to get away, to curl up someplace safe.

She tried to stand but her ankle would not support her. She crawled upstream along the bank, gritting her teeth to keep herself from crying out. Her shoulder hurt, but she could use it. She continued up the creek, stopping every few moments to listen. She couldn’t hear Gheen anymore, only the burbling of the creek and the occasional rattling admonishment of a squirrel.

Shortly, she came upon a deer trail leading up the slope, away from the creek. She stopped there and once again examined herself. The sharp, stabbing pain in her ankle had become a dull, throbbing pressure. The sharpest pain was from her ruined fingernails.

Once, when Lia had been hurting after a particularly vigorous dojo session, Yar Song had taught her a trick.
Pain is a coward; it cannot stand in the face of your scrutiny. Find it and face it, and you control it.
Lia closed her eyes and focused on her hand, the fingers, the raw, stinging, bleeding nailbeds.

As Yar Song had promised, the moment she located the source of the pain, it slipped away, up her arm to her shoulder, yet another source of torment. Lia refocused on the new point of discomfort. Again, the pain slid away.
Cowardly pain
, she thought.
Face me! Declare yourself!

It declared itself in her ankle, her neck, and her belly, where Master Gheen had kicked her. The pain was slippery, elusive, persistent. She could shift it, but she could not make it go away.

She heard splashing from downstream, and a muttered curse. Gheen was close. Pain forgotten for the moment, Lia turned away from the creek and crawled uphill along the deer trail for a few yards. She concealed herself in a stand of tall ferns. Through the fronds, she caught a glimpse of Gheen as he passed by, following the creek. He was walking slowly, dragging one leg, using a broken branch as a cane. Lia enjoyed a moment of satisfaction that he had been injured too, although he didn’t look as bad off as she felt. She waited until she could no longer hear him, then dragged herself farther up the path, out of sight of the creek.

I can’t just keep crawling through the woods
, she thought.

What would Yar Song do? She remembered one afternoon when she had been going through her dojo routine automatically, moving from position to position while her mind wandered. Song, watching expressionlessly from the edge of the mat, had suddenly stood up, grabbed Lia’s hair, and rapped her on the forehead with one incredibly hard knuckle.
“Think!”
Song had said in her crisp, penetrating voice. With that, Song left the dojo, and the day’s lesson was over. Lia had looked at that bruise on her forehead for a hand of days before it faded.

She had to
think
. What did she have to work with? One good leg. Two arms. One good shoulder. Eight fingernails. Her clothing. Rocks, sticks, and leaves. She eased off her right boot. Her ankle was visibly swollen, showing purple streaks. She found a piece of broken rock with one sharp edge and used it to cut roughly through her trouser leg, just above the knee. The fabric was tough, but after a few minutes, she had cut it free and dragged the pant leg down over her ankle. She tore the cloth into long strips and wrapped one around her damaged fingertips. They hurt less when she didn’t have to look at them. The other strips she used to bind her ankle tightly. She tried to stand. The pain was not as bad as before, but it still hurt too much to walk. She tried to pull her boot back on over the wrappings. It was too tight. It hurt. Gritting her teeth, she pulled harder. The boot popped on. The pain almost caused her to pass out; the forest spun around her. She focused on her breathing. After a few seconds, the spinning stopped. Her ankle was still a knot of agony, but the wrapping and the tight boot would keep it stable.

Seeing a fallen tree a few yards away, she crawled over to it and used the sharp rock to hack off a branch. She fashioned the branch into a crude crutch. With the crutch, she was able to walk upright in a sort of hopping, foot-dragging fashion, similar to the way she had seen Gheen moving along the creek.

Now she could put some distance between her and Master Gheen, and give herself time to figure out what to do next. Continuing up the deer path, she arrived at the crest of the hill, upon which stood a Gate.

As she approached the Gate, it began to hum and glow green. Lia backed away from it, holding her breath. The Gate emitted a waft of reddish mist, then settled back to gray. The pine needles beneath the Gate were sprinkled with red dust.

I have been here before
, she thought. This was the Gate that Awn had told her led to a genocide.

There would be more Gates. Awn might be here too. The strange woman had helped her before. Maybe she would do so again.

“Yar Lia.”

Lia whirled, automatically assuming a defense posture despite the pangs from her damaged body. A few yards away, almost invisible in his camouflage garb, Master Gheen was sitting on a fallen tree, watching her.

“D
O NOT BE AFRAID
,” M
ASTER GHEEN SAID
.

Afraid?
Fear was not what she was feeling. It was more like rage.

Gheen held up one hand, palm forward. “I mean you no harm.” He reached behind the log, came up with the blaze-orange hunting cap, and placed it on his head. Using his stick like a cane, he stood up and took two unsteady steps toward her, dragging his left leg. “Look at me. I am no threat. I can hardly walk.”

“Best you stay still, then,” Lia said.

Gheen’s mouth stretched into a smile intended to be friendly and reassuring. It looked to Lia like a leering devil mask.

“We are both injured,” he said in a soothing voice. “Let us set aside our differences. We can help each other.”

“I do not need your help.”

“Of course you do. You are crippled.”

“As are you.”

“This is my point. Do you know where we are?”

“The future,” Lia said.

Gheen nodded. “The future.” He pointed off to his left with his stick. “The Cydonian Pyramid is only a few minutes walk in that direction. It is now, of course, a ruin, even more decayed and sunken than it was the last time I was here. The Gate that once hovered above it is gone.”

“There are many Gates,” Lia said. She pointed at the Gate that had produced the red dust. “Why don’t you use that one?”

Gheen looked at the Gate and sniffed dismissively. “I think not.”

“Then choose another.”

“I do not trust these Gates. In any case, it seems I have little to go back to. You and your friends have destroyed us.”

Lia did not reply. Gheen shrugged. Using his stick as an aid, Gheen walked back to the fallen tree and sat down heavily.

“I am not a bad person,” he said. “You are angry with me for the things I have done. I accept your anger. We do what we are meant to do, as the winds of time blow us hither and thither. I wonder sometimes if even God, in all his magnificence, has any real choices.”

“You are saying you are not responsible for what you have done?”

“I am just a man.”

“An evil man.”

“What is evil? I once thought the Yars to be evil. Apostates such as yourself. Now I understand that we are all victims. You may never call me a friend, but I am your father, as you know.”

“I would just as soon forget it,” Lia said.

“Be that as it may, we are connected. I come to you now asking your forgiveness.”

Lia considered the man sitting before her. Was it possible he was sincere? If so, did it matter? He had tried to kill her more than once — her and Tucker both. Could such a man change so quickly? She did not think so.

“You think me insincere,” said Gheen, as if reading her thoughts.

“I think you a liar,” Lia said.

With obvious effort, Gheen held on to his smile. “I have lied in the past,” he said. “This is the future.”

“Not for you.”

“What would you have me do?”

Lia pointed at the Gate. “Leave.”

“As I told you, I am done with the Gates.
This
is where the Lord wishes us to be. The Lah Sept we once knew are gone — the Lord found them wanting. But we are here. We have been blessed with the chance to begin anew, to rebuild without repeating the mistakes of the past.”

“You want to start the Lah Sept all over again?”

“And why not? I do not believe we are alone here. There must be others — lost souls who need guidance. It is my hope that you will join me. You are, after all, my daughter.”

Lia laughed. She was startled by the sound that came from her throat — a laugh harsh with bitterness and bile, pain and fury. It resembled the snarl of a jaguar more than any sound from a human throat.

“I am building nothing with you, old man,” Lia said.

Gheen’s face darkened. He lifted his improvised cane as if to strike her.

Please try
, Lia thought.

Gheen lowered the stick. “Come, now,” he said in a syrupy voice. “There is a cabin nearby to provide us with food and shelter. Come with me, and there we will talk some more. In time you will understand.”

Lia gave him a look of disgust and loathing. “I understand that I am done with you.” She turned her back and began to hobble back down the hill. She had gone only a few steps when she heard a movement and turned.

Gheen was limping after her, teeth clenched, raising his stick.

Yes
, she thought,
this is the father I know
.