Steele, Allen - Chronospace

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Books by Allen Steele
ORBITAL DECAY
CLARKE COUNTY, SPACE
LUNAR DESCENT
LABYRINTH OF NIGHT
THE JERICHO ITERATION
THE TRANQUILLITY ALTERNATIVE
A KING OF INFINITE SPACE
OCEANSPACE
CHRONOSPACE
for Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams
Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.
—ALEXANDER POPE
Autumn, 1365—8:05Z
The boy began climbing the mesa shortly after sunrise, stealing away from the village while his
mother was making breakfast for his sisters. It wasn’t long before she noticed his absence; he
heard her calling his name, her voice echoing off the sandstone bluffs of the canyon he called
home, but by then he was almost a third of the way up the narrow trail leading to the top of the
mesa.
Darting behind a pile of talus, he cautiously peered down at the adobe village. Pale brown smoke
rose from fire pits within its circular walls, and tiny figures moved along the flat rooftops. There
was no sign of pursuit, though, so after a few minutes he emerged from hiding and continued his
long ascent.
He had hiked to the top of the mesa several times before, but always in the company of his father
or one of his uncles, to set traps for tassel-ear squirrels and desert rabbits. The tribal elders had
decreed that children were never to leave Tyuonyi alone, for it was only within the settlement’s
fortified walls that they were safe from the Enemy. Yet the boy was never very obedient, and he
had been plotting this journey for several weeks now. He knew of a stand of juniper trees that
grew on top of the mesa. Although the morning was warm, the first frost had come to the canyon
a few days ago, and juniper berries would now be sweet enough to eat. He had bided his time
until his father and uncles went away on a hunting expedition, then he made his escape from the
village.
The boy was little more than five years old, but he was almost as strong as a child twice his age;
the soles of his bare feet were tough as leather, his small body accustomed to the rarefied air of
the high desert. He scurried up the steep path winding along the mesa’s rugged cliffs, barely
noticing the escarpments that plunged several hundred feet to the canyon floor. When he became
thirsty, he paused to dig a small cactus out of the ground; he pulled its quills, peeled its skin, and
chewed on its pulp as he continued his lonely trek.
It was shortly after he passed the landmark his father called Woman Rock—a sheer bluff scarred
by an oval-shaped crevasse that bore a faint resemblance to a vagina—that he came to the place
where deep blue sky met the ground. Suddenly, there was nowhere left to climb; the terrain lay
flat, covered with mesquite and sage, with only blue-tinged mountain peaks in the far distance.
He had reached the roof of the world.
The boy grinned broadly. He would find his juniper berries and stuff himself to his heart’s
content, then he would swagger back down the trail to Tyuonyi, where he would regale his sisters
and the other children with his tale of adventure. In his mind’s eye, he saw the tribal elders,
impressed by his courage and fortitude, inviting him into their kiva, where he would undergo the
sacred ceremonies which would affirm his status as a man. His mother and sisters would be proud
of him, and when his father returned . . .
His father would probably tear off a willow branch and whip him to within an inch of his life.
Realizing this, the daydream vanished like so much cookfire smoke. Well, for better or worse, he
was here. The least he could do was find a juniper tree.
He walked over to a nearby mesquite and lifted the flap of his loincloth. A thin yellow stream of
urine irrigated its roots, and he sighed with satisfaction. The sun hadn’t yet climbed to its zenith,
and he had plenty of time to find the object of his desire. Once he had eaten, perhaps he would
locate a shady place to take a nap before . . .
A vague motion caught the corner of his eye.
The boy instinctively froze, not twitching a muscle as his dark eyes sought the source of the
movement. For a moment he thought it might be a bird or a lizard, yet as he listened, he couldn’t
detect any familiar animal sounds. Had it only been . . . ?
There. Just to his left, about twenty paces away. A strange rippling pattern, like the forms hot air
makes as it rises from sun-baked ground.
Turning very slowly, the boy studied the apparition. He half expected it to vanish any second, the
way mirages always do when the breeze shifts a little, yet the pattern remained constant,
spreading out before him like a wavering, transparent wall . . .
No. Not transparent . . . reflective, like the shallows of the creek that wound through the canyon.
Indeed, he could see the reversed image of a nearby tree against its surface.
Remaining absolutely still, his heart thudding against his chest, he regarded the manifestation
with dread and fascination. Then, ever so carefully, he knelt and, without taking his eyes from the
strangeness, picked up a stone. Gathering his courage, he hesitated for another moment, then he
leaped up and hurled the rock at the wall-of-air.
The boy had always possessed a keen eye. He had learned how to kill lizards when he was only
three, and more recently had refined his talent to the point where he could knock a squirrel off a
tree branch from twenty paces. The stone he threw now hurtled on a straight trajectory toward his
selected point of reference, the center of the air-wall where the juniper tree was reflected . . .
The rock hit something that wasn’t there. It made an odd hollow sound, and in the briefest of
instants, the boy glimpsed concentric whorls spreading outward from its point of impact. Then
the rock bounced off the invisible surface and fell to the ground.
He was still staring at the place where stone had fallen when a ghostly hand touched his left
shoulder.
“Go away, kid,” a voice said, in a language he couldn’t understand. “You’re bothering me.”
The boy leaped straight into the air. When his feet touched ground again, he was already running.
His terrified scream echoed off the canyon walls as he sprinted back down the trail, the coveted
juniper berries utterly forgotten.
A few moments passed, then the air shimmered around the place where the boy had stood.
Thousands of tiny mirrors gradually assumed a man-shaped form until it solidified into a figure
wearing a loose-fitting environment suit. He raised his gloved hands and pulled off his hood, then
grinned at the invisible wall.
“Did you ever see someone run so fast?” he asked. “I bet he’s already halfway home.”
“That wasn’t a very nice thing to do,”a woman’s voice said within his headset.“You could have
hurt him.”
“Oh, don’t worry so much. Just gave him a scare, that’s all.” Tucking the hood beneath his arm,
Donal Bartel wiped sweat off his shaved head as he walked to the edge of the mesa and peered
over the side. Although he could see the top of the trail, the boy was nowhere in sight. “All right,
he’s gone. Let’s finish up here.”
He turned to watch as the spectral wall began to materialize, taking the form and substance of a
saucer-shaped craft. Perched above the rocky ground on five petal-like flanges, its
electrochromatic outer skin resumed its natural appearance until the vessel’s silver hull dully
reflected the hot sun overhead. Hemispherical pods beneath its lower fuselage emitted an amber
glow which pulsated within the craft’s shadow.
“You’ve got everything you need?”From within the single porthole on theMiranda’ s low turret,
the timeship’s pilot peered out at him.“We could stay a little longer, if you think we’re not going
to be bothered anymore.”
Donal pondered Hans’s question as he unzipped the stealth suit and shrugged out of it. The suit
was useful for hiding from contemporaries, but in the desert heat it threatened to suffocate him.
“He’s not coming back, but once he tells his folks what he’s seen up here, someone might come
up to investigate.”
“I agree.” The woman who had spoken earlier was climbing down a ladder set within one of the
landing flanges. “The Anasazi are a very wary people. Someone down there might think the boy
saw a scout from an enemy tribe.”
Donal nodded. For the last two days, he and Joelle had studied this isolated settlement of pre-
Pueblo native Americans. Seven hundred years from now, this place would be identified on maps
as Burnt Mesa, overlooking Frijoles Canyon within the Bandelier National Monument, not far
from the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. By then, the village of Tyuonyi would be a
collection of ancient ruins carefully preserved by the United States government. The site would
have a gift shop and a museum, and thousands of tourists would visit this place every year to
saunter among the crumbling remains of what had once been a thriving settlement.
Yet their mission hadn’t been merely to record what Tyuonyi had looked like when it was
inhabited. Twentieth-century archaeologists had already done that task, three hundred years
before theMiranda had traveled back through chronospace. There was also the enduring
controversy over the forces that had brought an end to the Anasazi civilization. Some CRC
researchers, holding to theories first advanced during the late twentieth century, believed that
some tribes had begun raiding others, committing atrocities that went beyond rape and slaughter
to include ritualistic cannibalism. This was what had eventually forced many tribes to abandon
their adobe homes and seek refuge in cliff dwellings; the Tyuonyi villagers had already built their
own Long House within the talus walls of Burnt Mesa. Indeed, the very wordAnasazi, given to
the pre-Pueblo tribes by the nearby Navajos, meant “Ancient Enemy.”
“We might learn more if we stayed longer, but . . .” Joelle Deotado pushed back her long blond
hair as she gazed at the distant village. “I don’t want to risk exposing ourselves, and we may have
done that already.” She glanced over her shoulder at Donal. “You might have done the wrong
thing, but it probably doesn’t matter. They would have found us sooner or later.”
“I’m sorry it worked out that way, but . . .” He shrugged. “You’re right. We’ve been
compromised. Better pack up.”
“Very well,”Hans Brech said from within the timeship.“I’ll begin laying in a return trajectory, if
that’s what you want.”
“That’s what we want.” Joelle walked toward the miniature cameras and listening devices they
had concealed within foliage upon ledges overlooking the village. As expedition leader, it was
her decision whether to call off a survey. “Let’s get ready to go.”
Donal sighed as he neatly folded the stealth suit. He had donned it when the motion sensors they
had placed around the top of the trail detected the approach of the native boy. When Brech put
theMiranda in chameleon mode, the timeship should have been adequately disguised, the
energized fractal coating of its outer hull enabling it to blend in with its environment, yet the boy
had the eyes of a cat and the curiosity to go with them. Joelle might not have liked the way he
chased him away, but . . .
Something flashed. For an instant, he thought it was sunlight reflecting off theMiranda, until he
realized that it was coming from the wrong direction, about 30 meters from the timeship. He
turned his head, looked that way . . .
“Donal!” Joelle snapped. “Do you see . . . ?”
“I see it,” he whispered.
Just above a large boulder near the top of the trail, not far from where the boy had emerged, a
bright halo of white-yellow light had flickered into existence. About three meters in diameter, it
surrounded an indistinct form lurking within its nucleus: a bisymmetrical figure, vaguely human-
formed save for the pair of broad, winglike shapes that expanded outward from behind its body.
“Hans, are you getting this?” Donal spoke quietly, not daring to move a muscle. “Tell me it’s not
a hallucination.”
“I’ve got it.”Brech’s voice was subdued.“Sort of. I mean, it’s not registering on . . . no, there
it . . .”
Then, just as suddenly as it appeared, the haloed figure vanished.
Not all at once, though. When it disappeared, Donal noticed that the nimbus seemed to collapse
into itself, much as if it had created a miniature wormhole. As it did, sand and gravel were sucked
into the vortex, and the surrounding scrub brush was violently yanked toward it. A half second
later, there was a loud thunderclap as air rushed in to fill the vacuum. Donal’s hands went to his
ears as Joelle yelled something unintelligible.
No one said anything for a moment.
“Was that an angel?” Joelle asked softly.
“If it was,”Brech said,“then it’s another good reason for us to leave.”
P A R T 1
Monday Times Three
Monday, January 12, 1998: 7:45A .M.
The train from Virginia was crowded, as it always was during morning rush at the beginning of
the week. Murphy could have driven into D.C., and in fact had left his home in Arlington
intending to do just that, but when he heard on the radio that an accident on the Roosevelt Bridge
摘要:

BooksbyAllenSteeleORBITALDECAYCLARKECOUNTY,SPACELUNARDESCENTLABYRINTHOFNIGHTTHEJERICHOITERATIONTHETRANQUILLITYALTERNATIVEAKINGOFINFINITESPACEOCEANSPACECHRONOSPACEforGardnerDozoisandSheilaWilliamsFoolsrushinwhereangelsfeartotread.—ALEXANDERPOPEAutumn,1365—8:05ZTheboybeganclimbingthemesashortlyaftersu...

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