Domains

Komila Chandra

The Bean Counter’s atmosphere is bright without glare and just crowded enough at any time to suggest the site’s quiet popularity.

Komila is seated, as is her custom most days, alone at a small high-top near a street-side window, cup in one hand, foldie in the other, scanning headlines without much interest.

Not for the first time, she marvels at the coffee’s aroma, its heat in her nostrils, and the visceral certainty of each luxurious sip. She sets the cup aside and her fingertips graze its surface as she releases the handle. Its ceramic context is undeniable.

That such nuanced sensations as these can be conveyed within a construct always manages to baffle her. The craftsmanship of the experience here is among the best anywhere, and she looked around with deliberation before choosing this one.

Likewise, the continuity of the scene proceeding streetside is completely convincing.

Unlike most fee-comp nodes, as The Bean Counter has ever been, the exterior view architecture and activity is impeccable. She’s watched it with curiosity over the course of many subjective hours and the virtual tableau through her high-top by the window—always hers, no matter the time of day nor the volume of clientele, well worth the extra simoleons—proceeds without a detectable loop or even a subtle reordering of recognizable components.

The Bean Counter has become her preferred entry portal, a casual, unpretentious ambiance from which she can decompress after work, review and select from a menu of experiences, meet with friends, play, relax, commune.

The value of such experience is proven to be therapeutic.

She swipes across the foldie, shifting all the content into a corner, scrolls through a short list of personal messages without reply, and schedules a day trip with her friend, Yunie, to visit a mountaintop monastery in Nepal this weekend. A breathtaking teaser assures her the monks themselves have developed a masterful virtual reflection of the vertigo-inducing site.

No one seems to pay any attention to Eric as he makes his way between knots of patrons engaged in animated exchanges and others, like Komila, in quiet pursuit of personal interests. He stops at a polite distance from her table and graces her with an open smile.

Komila’s avatar is of the current trend for many older citizens of the virtual milieu, an unpretentious representation of the corporeal without excessive post-correction. She appears a plump, fortyish woman with pleasant, dark-complected, East Indian features. She wears an ornamental bindi with a small peridot on her forehead. She stares at him over her cup with a narrowed brow.

“Whoever you are, everyone knows that face. You should go away.”

“You are correct, Mrs. Chandra,” he says. “That is why no one else would try to wear this face but me. You are also correct to be skeptical. Here is my validation.”

A Character wouldn’t know her name outside of a scenario and this isn’t one. Komila has an unclocked moment. The documentation is authentic; unless the concrete foundations of AsReal have broken down, there is no question. It really is him.

“You’re really him,” she says and wishes she could have those words back.

She places her cup in front of her. “Why are you here at my table, sir?”

“I apologize for the interruption in your experience, Mrs. Chandra. I have a matter of personal importance to discuss with you.”

He has a likeable, boyish face and all the lines in it turn upward, as if they’ve done it often. A good-looking man, as famous for his asocial behavior as for his numerous accomplishments and, if one can believe recent accounts, questionable, possibly terrifying motives.

There are so many things she thought she might say to this person, should the implausible opportunity ever arise. Flustered now, she settles for, “I’m not sure whether to be flattered or afraid that you even know who I am, Mr. Gerzier.”

She pronounces his name with the proper French-Canadian articulation, rather than the American bastardization so typical among those who do not like him. She places her cup between them with deliberate care. “I am, as you may imagine, confounded as to why you would need to speak with me at all. Discuss what?”

“Your son, Rahm, Mrs. Chandra.”

Komila blinks.

“This venue is an open one,” he says. His tone is unhurried, as if time and consequence were distant concerns. “More so than is prudent for our conversation. Will you spare a few minutes of your time to accompany me so we may speak privately?”

Her peridot tips into the furrow between her eyebrows and she gives the surroundings a critical review. She considers a number of responses as she does so, some of them civil.

She is not concerned for her safety; wherever he might take her to ‘speak privately’ must exist, if that’s the right word, within AsReal. As bizarre as this moment has become, she reminds herself, she is in no real danger from this man. Or anything, really. Her Autonomy and Exit Right guarantees it. Aside from any of that, what does the notorious Eric Gerzier have to do with her child?

“May I ask where we are going?”

“My home. And I apologize in advance for the abrupt transition.”

“What?”

Komila is weightless for a startled heartbeat or two as the coffee shop motif dissolves before the new site’s physics capture and settle her into an overstuffed chair.

“Oh!” she pipes and cannot get that back either.

Eric’s chair faces hers at a discrete distance.

“Again, Mrs. Chandra, I apologize,” he says, “but this was the first opportunity I’ve had to reach out to you. Are you all right?”

She’s had rougher transitions.

They say the more coherent the communication becomes between AIs on either end of a transfer, less visceral responses will become commonplace rather than exceptional. Sometimes it seems like two pilots trying to land the same aircraft, each only able to control the opposite side of the plane. A soft landing like this is a memorable one.

Her personals have followed her as well, as they should, steaming cup on a side table, clutch and foldie next to it.

“I’m fine, thank you.”

Her first assessment of the interface is a quick one. Impressive presentation, stunning aesthetics. Her natural curiosity would draw her straight in, but she knows enough not to be spellbound by a site’s glamour until it’s time to do so. The nature of this particular interaction precludes it anyway.

“What is your interest in my son, Mr. Gerzier?”

“Rahm has made direct application to my Promethean Project School. It is unusual, given his age… twelve next week, is that correct?”

“No.”

“He’s not?”

“I mean no, I will not co-sign his application. I will not allow him to join your cult army. He is a boy. He does not understand what he is doing and you…” Komila is surprised that she is able to keep her voice level. “You cannot have him.”

Eric’s expression does not alter, except maybe around the eyes, as if perhaps she’d stung him with that ‘cult army’ jab. She expected him to look angry or something, but he doesn’t.

She’s waiting for his rebuttal. It doesn’t come. He just sits there and twinkles at her. She notices herself noticing that this irritates her quite a bit and knows that’s not a good place for her next words to come from, but here they come anyway.

“I have heard things about your students and your school,” she says. “Even if they are not true, the accusations disturb me deeply.

“It is common knowledge, I’m told, those enrolled in your school stand to lose their American citizenship and that alone is reason enough to decline your offer.” She watches for him to react, a hint of a smirk or scowl, a hasty denial, something to confirm her words. If anything, he looks solemn.

“I have asked to speak with you like this because it is the School’s responsibility to notify you of your son’s application within a very specific and prohibitive timeframe. Any number of my associates could deliver this information to you in a formal setting, but this is personal to me. It is precisely young people like Rahm for whom the School was created. I consider it a courtesy to bring you into this moment personally and as directly as possible. This I have done. In similar fashion, I have made it possible for you to bring your husband, Madhu, into this moment as well, if you wish it.”

Oh no, she thinks.

“No,” she says.

Dammit, she thinks. Madhu will be all for it.

“Very well,” Eric says. “A moment ago, you mentioned declining my offer. I have made no offer. Rahm has made application, quite on his own initiative, and I am following protocol.

“He is a gifted young man. That much is obvious. He has a window of opportunity to understand and develop those gifts. The fact that he understands this and has taken responsible action, at an age when an overwhelming number of his peers are adrift, is significant. The Promethean Project School was created to nurture talented young people like Rahm, help them focus their abilities toward overcoming the challenging aftermath of the so-called End Times. You have, no doubt, seen some of the work that’s being done around the globe by my teams, my ‘cult army’, as you say.”

Komila is not swayed. “I know you’re trying to change the world by bullying governments into doing things your way because you think no one can stop you.”

“That is an opinion gaining recent exposure, an unproductive exaggeration, at best. We are striving to help heal the damage our species has done to the planet. We are not alone, but we have taken bold steps others cannot or will not. We are not trying to change the world, Mrs. Chandra. We are trying to change how we live with it while it will still allow us do so.”

Komila knows it will be unproductive to say, “You sound just like Madhu,” but there it is anyway, right out there, word for word.

Her peaking frustration, both at her own impetuous speech and at this shadow celebrity’s obvious ploy—attempting to weave Rahm’s uncharacteristic and troubling recent behavior into what she knows to be twisted facts about his own lofty actions and motives—have given her medications in Real a test.

She can feel her anxiety spiking. “What I mean is, I see no reason to continue this conversation. Rahm is not of age to make this choice for himself and I will not change my mind.”

She stands, and Eric with her. “Will you have your agent return me now, or must I exit here?”

“Your previous frame will be restored, Mrs. Chandra, as you left it. Before you go, I will ask you to share this with your husband.”

Eric extends an open hand. There is a peculiar something in it she’s heard about. She does not reach for it.

“What’s in it?”

“It is the complete four-dee record of Rahm’s application exam submission to the School. I am still following protocol, Mrs. Chandra. As a minor, Rahm understands he is not legally entitled to Privacy and, by his submission, has allowed this record to be made. It is your parental right to have it.” He holds the thing between them in the steepled fingers of one hand.

“Is this the original and only iteration?”

“The original, yes. The School will retain a copy for its records, of course.”

It is the size of a robin’s egg, but angular, and its surface seems to be indistinct, shifting in conflicting Escher-esque motion. It is unpleasant to look at.

“Of course,” she says and plucks it from his fingertips. It squirms in her palm. She snatches her clutch from the side table and releases the weird thing into it, snapping it closed even as her cup bounces and coffee splatters the carpet.

“Oh!” Hand over her mouth, furious at her gracelessness and the mess it’s caused.

She reminds herself this is vee. There is no mess, no good reason to feel foolish. She looks at her cup on its side, the dark blot contrasting with the carpet pattern, splattered drops on Eric’s shoes.

She expects to see on his face the look her father would show her whenever she spoke or acted without thinking; he showed it to her often enough. Instead, Eric’s eyes are kind. She can’t remember ever seeing a validated image of him without an expression of good-natured patience.

Her favorite channeler often likens it to the vacant look of a lobotomy patient. Ha ha. Up close and personal, Komila isn’t seeing it that way.

Yes, this is vee, but she reminds herself, this is a Person, not a Character. His manner seems genial and respectful. Even here, in his own space, he maintains a polite distance and demeanor, not quite the arrogant, polarizing figure as he’s been depicted.

She has a brief glimpse of how her information stream has narrowed, and her views with it. She wonders what’s become of her old skepticism and inquisitiveness. And she is curious.

Behind the man, the entire long wall from floor to ceiling is cabinetry crafted from some rich vermillion wood. An eclectic assortment of mementos and artifacts, some of them recognizable, and objects of either artistic or inexplicable purpose dominate open shelving. Books stack, stand, or slump between them all.

Nearby, a wide stair curves upward to a mezzanine and what appears a spacious, softly illuminated common area beyond. At the far end of the study, a single painting commands the wall, an energetic abstract backlit to allow translucent elements to stand out in colorful relief.

Turning to see what’s been at her back the whole time, she realizes her tari has begun walking toward it, a single, monolithic transparency. It spans the entire length of the room.

A few steps carry her to what seems a precipitous edge. Beyond is an undulating sea under a crystalline half-moon. Dark, roiling surf scours the lagoon below.

Komila realizes she’s allowed herself to be drawn in against her best intentions and drags her attention from the view, back to the contradiction of the man.

“I understand your reticence,” he says, “and I don’t presume to know the precise narratives that dominate your perception of my work. I trust you haven’t predicated all your hopes and prayers upon their guidance alone. More immediately, however, I trust you and Madhu will choose to understand why Rahm has made this decision. I believe he wants that understanding from you more than anything.”

She wants to ask why he thumbs his nose at laws and governments where he has no right to involve himself at all. They say his workers are given implants and become robotic. And does he really grow inhuman creatures in tanks as laborers and soldiers? And why, maybe the most telling question of all, does he care what one disturbed little boy does or doesn’t do?

Her opportunity to probe the celebrated recluse will never be any better than this and Komila is disoriented once more to find herself in The Bean Counter, seated alone at her high-top by the window. The transition was flawless.

There is a small node the size of a pea behind her right ear—not really; it’s an AsReal thing—but pressing it just so initiates the exit protocol.

Her cubicle is a low, soft-cornered booth as immaculate as it is austere.

A luxurious reclining couch covered in a tough synthetic hide is central and a low, integrated shelf runs the length of one long wall for personal belongings. These, a charging stack on the shelf, and a double hook at the door to hang her coat and hat, represent the only differences between a virtuary and a cramped walk-in closet.

She reaches into her handbag, fingers questing for her foldie within. The back of her hand brushes the encapsulated vorp. The momentary thrill of contact is sickening, obnoxious.

She opens her foldie to its margins and a three-dee three-sixty of Eric Gerzier’s study displays on its seamless matte surface. A linking icon accompanies the image with a personal note from Gerzier in a casual, cursive script. It seems merely a polite close with no answers to the questions she was not even allowed an opportunity to ask. She folds the sheet into neat quarters and slips it into her clutch.

Well, maybe she will ask them.

She cups her mask to her face and it seals below her eyes and under her chin. A breath in and out to test it, she steps into the hallway toward the exit with a purpose.

There will be no more socializing in virtua for Komila today. No time for further diversions of any kind. Nor will there be, as much as she is committed to maintaining her rigid fitness regimen, time for an energetic workout. She’s got something in her clutch that will make Madhu just absolutely shit himself.

~ ~ ►

Komila Chandra Read More »

The Lens

Domains, LocUS

“D’kin Remert. Why has it taken you so long to respond to my summons?”

“Lord Shiric, I… ” Remert swallows a knot, fear and elation at war within, held at bay by an effort of will. “I never thought to hear from you again. I believed you had abandoned the undertaking.”

Lord Shiric’s voice rumbles from the lens. “What are you talking about?! Have you lost your faculties? I spoke with you not five turns past.”

Myriad faces, some of them disturbing at a visceral level, are suggested in the swirling eddies of Lord Shiric’s smokey Visage. They stare out at him in their turn and Remert struggles to maintain outward calm as the implications of Lord Shiric’s words strike home.

“Lord Shiric,” Remert adjusts his stance and bearing, “it has been nearly twenty-five thousand turns—one hundred and forty-nine years as they measure cycles on this Gog-forsaken world—since last you spoke to me.”

A long, uncomfortable silence ensues.

Within the lens, smoke becomes mist blowing away to reveal the faces of two human specimines.

“Do you recognize either of these t’sunguc, D’kin?”

It could have been no others, of course. Perhaps something in his eyes spoke for him, or maybe it was the way he drew his next breath.

“So.” A boil of dark vapor eclipses the images. “A temporal disruption has occurred to separate you from me, D’kin; one beyond my power to prevent and too late now to rectify. I must assume the state of preparations, events, and outcomes previously reported to me have all been redefined subsequent to the disruption itself. Be succinct, D’kin. What is the status of your mission?”

“My Nee’m, the primary objective has been met. Centralization of the transfer locus is established. Our secondary and tertiary objectives have yielded mixed results. Even so, the several positive outcomes have been exceptional.”

“Elaborate upon the latter for me, D’kin.”

“The effort to foster Gray Moct’unguc has succeeded beyond expectation. Significant increases in both fertility and intelligence have been nurtured with auspicious results.

“Efforts to force development of Gray Troct’unguc, however, were hampered by the destruction of the original breeding stock and a favorable phase one mutation. The genetic foundations of the Grays on this world do not lend themselves to such radical hybridization without altering the outcomes in unanticipated, reliably unacceptable fashion. Still, a promising hybrid stock has displayed unique characteristics and I am enthusiastic about the potential these specimens represent.”

“I find your optimism encouraging.” Lord Shiric sounds pleased. “More than that, I am moved by your perseverance in the face of what you perceived as abandonment. Tell me, D’kin, why did you persist in what must have seemed fruitless effort?”

“The Method guides me, My Nee’m. My Mission was given with your aegis, but with or without it, I could not stand one day before Mong and excuse my failure by decrying my circumstances.”

“This is why I chose you over more highly-positioned applicants to be my surrogate on this world, D’kin Remert. Your resolve and persistence have surpassed my expectations. I look forward to celebrating your accomplishments.”

Remert is unused to effusive praise. He likes it, and it balances well against the blossoming uncertainty this conversation has birthed and nurtured.

“Due to the disruption and the presence of my adversary’s minions,” Lord Shiric says, “I have chosen D’nal Kudlac to assume the responsibility of Minister of the Change. You have three hands to prepare yourself for return to Kal’un Shiir’n. Here you will have sufficient opportunity to provide the D’nal with the detail he will require before he translates across the gulf, at which time your charge to me will be completed.

“You will be given a champion’s welcome with holiday and feasting throughout Kal’un Shiir’n, all in your honor before I return you, with my gratitude and endorsement, to your Congregate and certain elevation.”

The lipless slash beneath Remert’s blade of a nose opens to form the words that will lead him home, then closes again, his throat working to swallow them before they can leak out

He tries to recall how long ago he had despaired such a moment as this might ever be possible. The end of his exile, recompense for all he has endured, and the fruition of his paramount personal aspiration, that of elevation to the Second Circle, to be D’nal.

“Lord Shiric, I am exultant that the rift separating us has contrived to bring me back to you again. I am grateful beyond measure that my humble accomplishments have met with your approval.”

He performs a stiff, formal obeisance.

“I would beg your indulgence, My Nee’m. Processes currently in motion regarding the ’unguc variants of which I spoke have reached a critical juncture. I am loathe to leave them in the hands of those less intimate with their nature and development. If you would permit me to remain until this pivotal phase is completed, I will have served you to the best of my ability.”

A viscous plume roils Lord Shiric’s ceremonial mask, churning like liquid smoke, rising beyond the limit of the lens to capture it. His vaporous expression within the boil might be an intimation of displeasure at having to revise plans at this late hour, or perhaps Remert’s racing mind is assigning meaning to random, shifting patterns. Vague suppositions, difficult to dismiss.

This late hour, Remert muses. How unconsciously he has come to think in the conventions of this world. After these many years—fifty-nine point six yarnn on this chaotic ball of confusion—who could blame him for adopting these conventions in the interest of survival and sanity? How long, he wonders, might it take to restore proper patterns of thought once returned among his kind?

His kind. How like them is he now? Will the Congregate hierarchy honor him for his accomplishments and, more to the needle’s point, will the First Circle and The Methshe forgive him for his deliberate transgression?

How could they not with Lord Shiric’s benefaction? Lord Shiric is speaking again.

“I will send the D’nal at the rising, to whom you will relinquish operational responsibility. He will oversee the displacement and ensure continuity, leaving you sufficient autonomy to continue administration of your secondary and tertiary directives. Will that satisfy your need for closure, D’kin?”

“My Nee’m, you honor and humble me. I am grateful beyond measure for your gracious consideration of my request and for allowing me…”

“Nothing has changed. I require results from you and the D’nal on each element of your respective commissions. It will be your responsibility to deliver all specimens to the transfer locus prior to the displacement. My timetable is unaltered. You have five turns.”

So soon! So much yet to do! Finally!

If Remert is in the least unsettled by the immediacy of his Nee’m’s deadline, his face exhibits none of it. “Measured here,” he says, “ten point six six days. Deviation?”

“No more than one half-turn.”

“Plus or minus twenty-five hours thirty-eight minutes,” Remert says to himself, calculating the least time remaining for him to accomplish everything.

“All will be in readiness, Lord Shiric. You may rely upon me.”

“I continue to do so, D’kin.”

The lens darkens and Remert’s axe-faced stoicism reflected in it alters not at all. The revelations of the last minute are stupendous. The appalling weight of the task before him and its immediacy is invigorating.

The soon-to-be disastrous addition of an unprepared and officious D’nal to the equation is the very last thing he needs now. There is nothing for a D’nal to do but meddle and confound well-laid strategy. He exhales a fervent prayer to Mong for Precision With Haste and unseals the door. It swings inward to reveal H’seven at the portal.

“I told you this was a bad idea,” Remert says.

“Move.”

“The audience is over. He’s gone.”

“No, he’s not.”

Confounded, Remert looks back at the lens.

H’seven grasps the collar of Remert’s ceremonial raiment and drags him from the portal. Stepping through, he approaches the darkened lens, squares up to it, and says, “I am H’seven. I have something you need. Let’s talk.”

A profound stillness answers. The lens is blank.

Remert, from the vestibule, “I told you. He’s gone.”

H’seven is strident. “I know you can hear me. You gain nothing by your silence.”

The door to the chamber closes and seals with a soft, solid finality. Remert, excluded in the vestibule, fumes.

Total darkness pours from the lens, flooding the chamber, engulfing H’seven in absolute night.

Shiric’s voice is ponderous. “You speak as though you believe yourself my equal. I do not know you.”

“How fortuitous, then, that we have come to this intersection.”

“What do you have that I need?”

“An object of power you believed was lost to you.”

“The object is in your possession?”

“I have only to reach out my hand.”

“Then do so. Show it to me.”

“When we meet, I will present it to you. A gift.”

“Show it to me now. It is within my capability to reach out my hand and end you where you stand, if only for your presumption.”

H’seven shrugs. “Which is why I will not present this prize for you to have absent an agreement. I would prefer to consider this a collaboration of mutual benefit. As to equals: such speculation invites unfair comparison. I offer you the solution to riddles that currently vex you. In return I ask only a modest boon, one you may effortlessly grant.”

“You appear to have a measure of comprehension well beyond the scope of anything my agent there could have conveyed to you. Some might deem the knowledge you possess uncommon. You should consider such familiarity perilous.”

“I consider it currency.”

“What is it you want in exchange for this intangible object of indefinite potential?”

“To stand with you in the place where worlds are made and unmade and receive your aegis as Marshal in the war to come with your upstart adversary.”

“And?”

“Nothing more. Well, parades and feasting and revelry, of course. Same as Remmy. But no, just those things and that.”

Silence draws out so long the blackness pouring from the lens seems to breathe.

Shiric breaks it. “No.”

“Just like that?”

“The object you speak of is better lost on your world than mine.”

“Lost? Did I say it was lost? It is in motion. Do you assume that motion to be in your best interest?”

“So. It is NOT in your possession.”

H’seven taps the lens with a steely forefinger. “Is this thing on? I said it is within my grasp.”

The darkness laughs as though he had said something hilarious. It winds down to a chuckled, “Thank you for that, anyway, but the answer is still ‘no’.”

“Who is to say, when I reach out MY hand,” H’seven says. “the object might choose to return to you in a way less conducive to your exaggerated primacy?”

The darkness is not laughing now. “Are you… attempting… to challenge me?”

H’seven taps the lens again. A fragment of its dark material chips off and plinks onto the stone floor. “Pray I do not.”

A pulse of Black power smashes against the chamber walls with sufficient force to shatter stone. Flechettes cast about in total darkness as the great door buckles with a metallic scream and pieces of its frame splinter off with gunshot sounds. Illumination does not return.

. . .

Her nametag reads “Kami”. She is standing just inside the the lens chamber vestibule, watching Remert. He appears stunned, staring at the heavy portal door, twisted, hanging askew.

“Are you all right, Director?” she says.

He straightens himself. “Yes,” he says.

He takes a step back from the portal and turns her way, fixing Kami with a haunted expression. “No,” he says.

He recognizes the insignia on her uniform. If he was wondering what she was doing in this highly restricted area at this inopportune moment, at least her classification is appropriate.

“May I take you somewhere, Director?”

“No. Thank you, Technician. I trust you will arrange damage assessment and clean-up.”

“Of course, D’kin.”

“Then I will leave you to your responsibilities.”

Kami follows him out into the corridor and watches him make his way to the nearest bounce. He enters and does not reemerge.

She rummages up a spreader from her waiting runabout’s toolbox, using it to pry the blasted door open enough to peer inside. The lens is intact, but the clean-up detail is going to need a high-pressure hose and some wire brushes to remove the erstwhile Deputy Director from the surfaces of the chamber.

“Doctor Ahn,” she says to the air. A few seconds tick by. “Yes, I am. Thank you, Doctor. I’m ready for an upload, are you? Good. No, not yet; another Seven will be fine. Ten minutes. Wait, hold on… “

Another runner slews to a stop beside Kami’s idling rig. A lanky fellow, whose uniform displays the same emblem and nomenclature as her own, steps out onto the raw stone floor of the corridor and affects a casual amble in her direction.

“Make it twenty,” she says. A pause to listen produces a laugh. “You’ve got a filthy mind, Doctor. I’ll try that. Get a fresh one out of the vat and I’ll be there by the time you have it warmed up for me.”

◄ ~ ►

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

The Lens Read More »

Remert’s Perspective

Domains, LocUS

The door to Remert’s private office snaps back into the pocket behind the armoire and the Director’s hurried exit is blocked. The Deputy Director is an unwelcome obstacle to egress.

“I have business elsewhere,” Remert says.

“I’ll bet you do.” H’seven appears unwilling to step back out of the doorway. He speaks an abbreviated command to the media wall and excerpts from the incident at the Sandia Pueblo fill the multiplex projection.

“I do not have time for this now. I am needed…”

“Make time.”

The door has sealed again behind H’seven and he leans against it, pointing at the montage of images. Remert gives way with a scowl and turns in frustration to see the woman in white disappear with the young police officer.

“You had them bound in chains when I first saw them,” H’seven says. “If she’s able to pull shit like that, why do you suppose she didn’t?”

Remert’s thoughts are distant, attempting to process a rush of discordant, troubling possibilities. The Call, unexpected after all this time, will change everything. Exactly what, how much, and how soon will be known after this inconvenient episode has concluded.

He returns his intention toward the door and his apostate Deputy. “I can extrapolate two plausible reasons.”

“So can I. They were playing you from the jump.”

“Your hindsight is flawless.”

“What the Hell are they?”

“They have the potential to invite a level of trouble the likes of which we have not seen before. I trust you are following these events and individuals with diligence. I will be prepared to entertain your progress report when I return. My business now is urgent.”

“Where ya goin’?”

“My responsibilities here are not yours and I have imperatives that do not require your attention or participation. Let me pass.”

“It pisses me off when you try to lie to me, Stretch.”

H’seven strides forward. Remert takes two steps back and bumps up against the media wall.

H’seven sits in the chair that doesn’t touch the floor and says, “I think you’re developing a dangerously cavalier attitude toward our relationship. Your kind prides itself on its ability to absorb and incorporate the impact of important lessons. Odd that you’ve failed to do so. Maybe this place has rubbed off on you. Still, it has been some time since our little understanding, hasn’t it, D’kin?”

The use of Remert’s honorific sounds disrespectful, striking a defiant, scornful note. H’seven’s stare becomes a perturbation in the aether between them. Remert tries to look away and cannot.

He feels his pulse dancing, skipping, leaping. His heartbeat has doubled, tripled, but it isn’t pounding; it flutters like a bird on the ground, unable to rise. A sensation of lightheadedness is followed by a crushing weight in his chest and a rush of agony. His groan is stifled, reshaped into a few words of a familiar litany by an effort of intention only Mong and this grievous creature will ever witness.

A spear twists in his entrails, wringing a strangled cry. He gulps air like a fish and every muscle in his body tries to contract at once. He pitches to the floor screaming out his last breath with barely a sound.

Eyes wild, unseeing in a mask of terror, Remert experiences the crystalline recognition that all his single-minded purpose and sacrifice have come at once to nothing, his goal beyond his grasp, his commitment unfulfilled.

Writhing. Helpless.

Dying.

Like a bubble popping, the pressure in his chest, the auger in his intestines, the bone-shattering contraction in his limbs… gone, nothing more than a phantom of pain and a blistering memory not to be touched again. His heart rate is accelerated, as dying in anguish is likely to do to anyone, but its rhythm is strong and vital.

Quaking, drawing convulsive breaths as if he’d just run kilometers, Remert drags himself to a sitting position against the media wall. Stone against his back feels somehow reassuring. The damp squishiness in his trousers, not so much.

H’seven is sprawled in Remert’s chair. His voice and face are cheerful.

“How’s that for perspective, Remmy? Will that do you for a while, or would you like to go again?”

Remert raises a trembling, dissenting hand.

His relief at being alive has overshadowed his studied Methodic aplomb, but the brutal truth is this: his life, his survival, and the furtherance of his efforts to fulfill his mandate to Lord Shiric is bound by a tenuous thread of compliance and faithfulness to this being whose existence may well be beyond the vast comprehension of Mong Himself. If that be heresy, may Mong Himself prove him wrong. And soon.

“All right, then,” H’seven says, claps his hands and rubs them together. “Let’s get back to business, why don’t we? I was asking you to tell me about these two Blacks with the halfblood. I need to know what they are.”

Remert’s tremors have not subsided. His protruding Adam’s apple works up and down. Twice. His voice quivers. “They are of the Aca’chi Aht-U’chah, known everywhere on Hevn as the Fayneem Bloch—Fayne’s Hammer. The Faceless Ones. A warrior caste nurtured by and unquestionably obedient to The Fayne and no other.”

“What the fuck is a fain?”

“A glorified jailer and a despot. He is far from here, imprisoned by his responsibilities, and no threat to either of us.”

“I’m sorry. Perhaps I stuttered. Give me a straight answer, Remmy, or I swear to—what’s his name? Mung?—I’ll give you some more perspective until you shit yourself hollow.”

Remert swallows his instinctive wave of fear and compresses his fury until it looks and sounds like compliance. “According to excerpts from ‘The Book of Turns’, The Fayne is the emissary of the Tu’chah Aht-T’sungahn, the so-called ‘Lords of Order’. To place it in a Terran framework, he is the marshal in town and the Fayneem Bloch are his sworn deputies.”

“And these two are significant why?”

“They are progeny of Hevn’s Black Lands and exhibit the physical characteristics of their kind. How they came to be in company with the Fayneem Bloch is a puzzle only less confounding than how they have come to be here. Nevertheless, these are The Fayne’s minions. As such, in addition to any individual innate gifts either of them may possess, The Fayne has doubtless granted them augmentation. If allowed to gain proximity, these two could present a formidable imposition to our plans.”

“Two people? Don’t be stupid.”

“They are NOT ‘people’. They are thinking weapons of extraordinary capability.”

H’seven stands, towering over the Director. “I’m not exactly ‘people’ either. Pick your nasty ass up off the floor and get yourself cleaned up. Take care of your ‘imperatives’. I’ll meet you there.”

“What?”

“I think it’s time I introduced myself to him, don’t you?”

“Introduce… “ Remert realizes that somehow his mouth is hanging open again. “To HIM?! No… NO! That is an incredibly dangerous idea.”

“Yeah, I know, that’s why I like it.”

“No! I forb…” The Director is astonished to discover he is unable to complete his pronouncement, unable to make a sound.

The door snaps back into the pocket behind the armoire and the Deputy Director steps aside.

“You get along now. I’ll catch up to you.”

◄ ~ ►

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Remert’s Perspective Read More »

Remert

Domains, LocUS

The private office of the Director of Advanced Concepts Methodic might be likened to a monk’s cell in a mountainside cloister.

It is a compact, windowless space relieved from stone in the fashion of his Society with a ceiling proportional to the Director’s height. What it contains that a monk’s personal space does not is a massive armoire crafted from a single monolith of exotic hardwood native to no place on Earth, and a chair that does not touch the floor. These are the only furnishings.

Between him and a passageway beyond, a heavy door fashioned from the same unfamiliar wood stands at the center of one long wall. Opposite it, a wall-to-wall, floor-to-ceiling collage of images is in constant motion.

Remert’s feet find the floor and his joints grate as he rises. This discomfort is insufficient to alter his bearing, of course, as he straightens to his full height, a decimal over two meters.

The armoire crowds one side of the door. He palms open a panel and removes a tray. An aide assigned to support the Director’s daily routine, an individual he’s never seen nor heard, left it there for him. Remert nods in approval of that one’s proper execution of fundamental duties.

A handful of gel capsule supplements washes down with a catalyzing liter of liquid nutrient infused with a generous percentage of the good water.

He closes the panel and turns to scrutinize his shifting global mosaic, hands resting on the sharp projections of his hip bones. Hairless, pale skin stretched over a grim, hatchet face, Remert’s wide, lipless mouth is set in a line. Leaden gray eyes sweep the montage, a multiplex viewport of everything from two-dee footage to vee-centric feeds. The whole is continuously culled from domestic and international sources and curated for his consumption by Sonder itself.

Scenes of sporting events are discarded out of hand by Sonder’s presets unless flagged by the Director. Rare instances of pageantry, performance art, episodic or formulaic productions, either dramatic or comedic in nature, and celebrity fluff-pieces that leak through the filters, all receive similar dismissal.

One such is a cursory motion from removal when recognition prompts Remert to bring focus and enhancement to the item instead.

Two women and a man arranged in a casual studio setting present just the sort of tribute to meaningless drivel the Director finds an unacceptable waste of time. One of the women, however, is a respected helioseismologist with a near-unpronounceable Nordic name. Remert’s spider-leg fingers gesture in the air and the program’s volume achieves a satisfactory level.

“… continue to collate data,” the scientist is saying. She is tall and dowdy with shapeless blond hair and penetrating sky-blue eyes. Unpretentious and plain-spoken, her manner marks her as the most intelligent person on the set.

“The upward extent and duration of these perturbations,” she says, “are hypothetical at this juncture. Unguessable. I know that’s not the answer you were seeking, Gretta, but nothing of this magnitude has ever been encountered before. We are learning, quite literally, moment by moment. It requires the concerted efforts of scientific professionals across multiple disciplines to not only decode the information we are receiving, but also to give us guidance on how to prepare for and, Gods willing, weather the potential worst-case scenario.”

The female host, her avatar looking as young and vital as she did a decade ago, nods with a sage expression. “It is a stirring tribute to how far we’ve come as a species, I think, that we are able to acquire this great depth and breadth of useable information, as we have done, to be analyzed by those who will guide us through these difficulties.”

“Shut your mouth, you stupid cow,” Remert says, “and allow the one with a modicum of actual knowledge to speak.” Here is one of the prime reasons he eschews these types of programming beyond the obvious fact of their reliably insipid content: they make him disagreeable. That outburst will cost him penance later.

Gretta Carsten, the grand dame of talking heads, drawing on her years of broadcast and early three-vee experience as a news personality, adopts a look of deep concern—no doubt solicitude for all humankind—and says, “Would you give our audience your impression of what that worst case might look like, Doctor?”

Doctor Astrid Koninklijke appears reluctant. She fidgets, matching her words. “I am uncomfortable adding my own conjecture to the already inflammatory media furor I see taking hold among those more… excitable members of the population. This is not a time for wild presumption and unfocused alarm.”

“I understand your reticence, Doctor, but our viewership is comprised statistically of well-educated and reasonable individuals. Won’t you share with us please, at least an educated guess?”

The scientist sighs reserved acquiescence. “Worst case? If the new planet were to be expelled farther outward from what we believe to be its cradle orbit around the sun, and depending upon a host of variables too random to even consider at this point, given its significant size, orbital shifts of the inner planets is seen as possible outcomes. Such adjustments could alter every facet of the Earth’s already compromised biosphere and revise the conditions that support life as we know it.”

The male host, spray-tanned and moderately handsome, but otherwise an unremarkable generic foil, reveals an impressive battery of perfect white teeth. Ignoring the implications of his guest’s apocalyptic speculation, he grins a question at her any member of his well-educated viewership would have deemed, by now, redundant.

“The name that has achieved acceptance among so many of the scientific community, seems an unusual choice, Doctor. If I am not mistaken, the name “Vulcan” is an homage to an iconic two-dee science fiction entertainment franchise that continues to enjoy a broad cult following even today. Why has the scientific community chosen to adopt such an obvious popular-culture reference?”

“I’m afraid you are mistaken, Matthew,” the scientist says. “In the year eighteen sixty, a French mathematician named Le Verrier advanced the premise of a planet in orbit between Mercury and the Sun. He encouraged a number of astronomers to help him verify the existence of that body he named Vulcan, in accordance with accepted convention of naming astronomical bodies after figures in Roman mythology. Some of those he enlisted reported findings, other did not, and eventually, the search stagnated. The name and concept of Vulcan, however, has remained and is perhaps the foundation of the popular cultural reference you mentioned.”

Matthew’s flustered, “Oh…” is preempted by the scientist.

“While it is generally believed that previous sightings and suppositions were based upon mistaken assumptions and the limitations of the technology of the times, today we know that within the last seven years, a body nearly three times the size of our Earth is being expressed outward from the sun. The actual mechanism of its genesis remains the focus of intense scrutiny, as you might imagine. We are watching it happen; we just don’t know how it’s happening. Or why. But, as we assemble data, we can make some informed assumptions.”

“You know what they say about assumptions.”

“Shut up, Matt,” says Gretta.

Koninklijke continues. “Vulcan is separated from the solar sphere by a mere eight thousand kilometers, and connected to its parent by a plasma stream sufficiently large the Earth would fit inside it.”

Indifferent now, Remert swipes the program into obscurity. A scene of sweeping urban devastation catches his attention, but his focus shifts to another frame. This one presents a scene from within the facility and two particular individuals who rarely interact.

Doctor Ahn Soo Rin, as stiff and intractable an individual as Remert has ever encountered—qualities that have endeared her to him—appears to be having words with the current operational lead of the single most important program in process within the whole of his downward-tall complex.

Doctor Denise McIntosh’s posture and facial expression suggest an abnormal level of emotional investment in the exchange and Remert’s interest in such a conversation is keen.

“… you abandoned the prosthetics we designed for ST-One,” McIntosh is saying with unmistakable heat, “patterned upon our unambiguous specifications, in favor of your own radical redesign at the last minute and have demanded additional modifications far beyond the mandated scope of the project. Your interference has compromised our timetable and jeopardized the ultimate viability of ST-One himself. I will not allow any further hindrance. If you have…”

“Doctor,” says Ahn in a voice as flat and hard as her face, “you enjoy the freedom to pursue your work in this facility, quite outside the restrictions of the conventional moratorium against such activity. You do so only insofar as it pleases us, I might add. ST-One is not YOUR project, Doctor. You and your staff are the tools we have selected to implement the ST project objective.”

“Without me and my staff, there would be no ST-One and you know it. I’ve cleared each phase through Ten Eyck and…”

Ahn waves a dismissive hand. “I’ve heard from Doctor Ten Eyck about your very creative contributions to ST-One’s self-image. Try to understand this. ST-One is also a tool, nothing more. The shape of its delicate self-image is meaningless. Do not make the dangerous, unprofessional mistake of attempting to attribute to it a soul.”

“Or to you, apparently. ST-One is a person, as intelligent, intuitive, and as human as you and… well as human as I am, anyway.”

“ST-One is a product. Because of your misguided attempt to imbue it with some imprudent belief that it is human—which it is not—I believe it to be too expensive and mentally fragile to be of great utility in the end. I hold you responsible for the project’s degradation and imminent failure.”

“It’s fortunate for us all, then, that yours is not the last word.”

“You are wrong, Doctor. I have been given administrative responsibility for the continuance and success of this project. You have a new timetable and additional objectives to meet within that framework. You will report to me daily until I am satisfied the ST program is back on track.”

“I don’t believe this! Even with all the resources the foundation has at its disposal, no one else could have brought this project halfway to where it is today. Despite your continued attempts to retard the program and your relentless obstruction, ST-One is on schedule and performing to the specifications set by the Director himself. If you want to keep it that way, conduct your administrative tasks away from my facilities, my staff, and ST-One in particular. Do you understand? If you impede this project further, I will take this to the Director and we’ll see how he feels about your deliberate efforts to sabotage my work on the one program that we both know has his singular attention.”

Doctor Ahn is without emotion. “As I have mentioned and will not do so again, you have new specifications. ST-One is only one of several options being explored to meet our needs. If another project bears fruit before yours, I will be delighted to dismiss you, your staff, and your anatomically correct, but useless tool. Try to find another facility in the world where you can work and create with such toys as these, Doctor. Either way ST-One’s life, such as it is, will be mine to direct.”

Remert observes McIntosh with a sour expression. It fails to convey his curiosity and mild amusement at her fierce, most un-Methodic attachment to the project and her defiance in the face of Doctor Ahn’s uncompromising rigidity.

McIntosh remains motionless in the corridor and appears to be projecting a volatile current of molten hatred at the retreating backside of the thick Korean woman. He hears her say something about a “sanctimonious rice-faced bastard-flavored sack of assholes” before discarding the tile.

Fresh images of destruction receive prominence. Splayed fingers of both hands gesture and a matrix of still and moving images fans out in front of him. Central to them is an orbital view of the northern tip of South America and Remert uses it to zoom in.

The aspect shifts to the bottleneck linking Lago de Maracaibo to the Gulf of Venezuela. A meteorite crater half a kilometer across has obliterated an area of the upper left quadrant of the scene and carnage radiates outward from it in concentric waves.

One of the views holding Remert’s interest presents scant imaging, but a wealth of plots and projections of the meteor’s path, from the point of its discovery to its starting point, accompanied by a progression of scientific notation. Remert follows this cascade of data until a specious assumption makes the results moot and his attention shifts to another vee-cast he was tracking in his peripheral vision.

An artful holographic banner splashes behind the avatar of the most ubiquitous and prolific field reporter in the virtual continuum. He is just taking his mark as his veedio team pans in from the devastation all around him.

“Hello, everyone. This is Stanford Seib reporting from Maracaibo, Venezuela. I am standing at ground zero where a rogue meteorite believed to be another resultant of the astronomical phenomenon dubbed, ‘The Stir’, has struck northwest of this vibrant, thriving city.”

Seib’s tari appears to be standing, without the benefit of protective garb, at the blasted rim of the crater. His aerial cam sweeps across the city beyond.

“Where wide, tree-lined boulevards had once woven through plazas and modern high-rise intermingled with colorful traditional architecture, a bludgeoning shockwave of force and heat has leveled everything within a two-kilometer radius of the impact site and rained destruction for several kilometers beyond. Emergency services are only now able to move into the outlying areas.”

Four-vee imaging arrays digitize and parse the devastation for those gathering to gawk at it in the virtual realm and Seib provides narration. As he speaks, two enormous aircraft are on approach from the north and Remert’s eyes betray an unguarded emotion.

They appear identical, these massive ships gliding in tandem, silent. Although each sports paired, swept-back, flying wing configurations, neither looks remotely aerodynamic. They slow to a halt and hang motionless, one over the city, the other on station above the crater.

Seib’s tari looks into his second mark and says, “Presidente Medina has accepted an offer of humanitarian aid from Eric Gerzier and his CleanSweep^® teams to assist with rescue, rubble removal, and recovery of the space rock itself. We have just witnessed two of Gerzier’s physics-defying motherships taking position as we speak.”

The floating behemoth over Seib’s head appears to be perhaps two hundred and fifty meters from one conjoined set of wingtips to the other with a deep-bellied fuselage slung between them. Even so, it seems to hover motionless, as if lighter than air. There is no characteristic hazy blue distortion beneath it from pressors. No turbulence buffets the reporter. His avatar is excluded from the physics of the environment, but his surroundings are not.

Remert’s scowl of vexation at the power maintaining these gargantua aloft is a bitter one, guaranteed to reoccur every time one of these craft makes an appearance.

A cascade of smaller craft spill from the aft bays of the suspended platforms like hornets chivied from their nest. Some are tiny, darting vehicles, others are small only in relation to the gigantic shapes from which they have emerged. A few of these pause among the devastation to release squads of technicians onto the rubble, then rise to hover over the operations. Others settle into the debris and begin dislodging the bones of collapsed structures with an eerie combination of care and efficacy.

Remert is about to move on from this distant calamity, the plight of yet another huddled mass of these insufferable round-worlders with their fragmented belief systems and disjointed thinking, too aggressive and habitually confused to ever be converted without overwhelming direct motivation.

A comment from the correspondent, Seib, gives Remert pause.

“… before we speak with Presidente Medina,” he says. “My producer tells me Eric Gerzier is on-site with his team and has consented to a brief interview.”

“Sonder!” Remert refrains from shouting. “Eric Gerzier has just manifested in a Community network node. Source him now.”

“Eric Gerzier is not present in the LocUS register.”

Gerzier’s tari steps into frame with Seib and they exchange a backhand bump.

“Eric,” Seib says, “previous efforts to utilize your craft for rescue purposes have left civilian emergency operations unable to function and, obviously, given the circumstances, those services are right now critical to those who may be still alive and require life-saving measures to survive.”

“Unacceptable!” Remert says. He stabs a spear-like index finger. “I am looking at his avatar! The timestamp is this Gog-damned second. Run self and system diagnostics against this inconsistency.”

“Thank you for leading with that, Stanford,” Eric says. “I’ve been able to suppress the energy damping field that’s caused such inconvenience in the past. Local emergency services are fully operational alongside my workers and their vehicles.”

Sonder’s response is without emotion. “All processes and routines relevant to the administration of Community’s access, use, and client management are operating at design parameters. There is no indication of compromise at any security level. Eric Gerzier’s ident and validation subset is both verified and unverified at the Maracaibo location.”

“… will strive to save every life possible,” Eric says. “My people are already arranging to resupply power to the city and outlying affected areas, restoring essential services. I have two teams from each of the platforms on-task providing shelter, food, and immediate critical care sites at the periphery of the current no-man’s-land.”

“What does that mean?” Remert’s pique has gained a Methodic edge. “You reported a moment ago his ident did not appear in the register.”

“It did not, D’kin. It did validate at the node, however, and, at the timestamp that validation was made, the register recorded the same.”

“How do you explain this discrepancy?”

“I cannot without more information, D’kin.”

Seib’s tari has a let’s-get-down-to-business expression on his face and Gerzier is saying something about a tour of one of his motherships and Remert resists an impulse to whisk the frame from the virtual tableau and crumple it, if only subjectively, in a bony fist. A gesture stores the vignette for later review instead.

“I will disassemble your core with my own hands if you do not provide me with a satisfactory interpretation of this aberration and a workable solution to this annoying individual’s ability to use our proprietary version of subjective reality as if it was his private playground.”

Two unanticipated things occur so closely together they seem to be part of a singular event and Sonder’s reply is lost in their passage.

A physical wave, paralytic, but painless, flows from Remert’s feet to the top of his head. It lasts but an instant, leaving him light-headed, ears ringing, his next breath a luxury.

H’seven’s face appears full screen on the world-wall, eclipsing the entire viewport, and somehow Remert has lost his balance. He recovers with a graceless two-step, hop, and shuffle.

“What the hell are you doing? Dancing?” The Deputy Director seems to be laughing. Laughing at him.

The lens has called him. There is no mistake. Its nature and urgency are unambiguous.

So many years have passed, as these chaotic Grays record time here, since the last Call. So many changes have taken place, he did not think to anticipate another Call. Ever.

Improbable as it seemed moments ago, everything has changed and he must answer. With haste. His uncontrollable second, however, is an unwelcome interruption at this moment.

Remert’s face communicates nothing. It is the expression all learn in early Methodic teaching, a tight-lipped, emotionless detachment and penetrating eye contact. H’seven returns the stare with a scornful twist of the lips and spreads his hands, revealing a captured vorp. In it, a mismatched trio of figures assumes sharp focus.

Remert’s life of rigid self-discipline meets open-mouthed, pop-eyed astonishment in a collision that rattles his cadaverous frame. He reaches a tentative hand to manipulate each of the images in turn.

The face of the White warrior, clad in an incongruous, indigenous culture vestment, is obscured by his mask, but the woman’s features are not. Even after all this time, her features are unmistakable. Both of them wear the trappings of the hated Fayneem Bloch.

The half-blood drifter, too, is recognizable. They had traded words face to face, and that one’s lack of proper deference is memorable.

He appears exactly as Remert remembers him. Beyond all expectation, he seems to have aged not at all after nearly a yonn. How that might be possible for a t’sunguc of this world, challenges Remert’s curiosity. It will be an intriguing line of inquiry when the hybrid is finally pinned down and unable to wriggle free.

“Where are they?”

“Close enough.”

“I want them here.”

“As do I. But what I don’t want is further involvement by Homeland Security.”

“I concur. I believe you have all the resources you need.”

“I’ll make do.”

H’seven’s face dissolves into the multiplex window on the world. Remert’s immediate preparation for his audience represents a level of exigency to which he has become unaccustomed.

Of all the revelations received this day, not the least is the realization that he can feel fear again.

~ ~ ►

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Remert Read More »

Pojade

Domains, The Riven

The images displayed are as sharp and clear as the best law enforcement recorders can generate under the circumstances and the burly brown bear peering over the shoulder of a somber technician is experiencing an unaccustomed level of anxiety.

It’s not the content arrayed before him causing his misgiving, although the subject matter is disconcerting for a variety of reasons.

Nor is it the luxurious pelt of body hair matted beneath his clothing that’s challenging the efficacy of his anti-perspirant. Rather, it is the certain knowledge that the images the system has just filtered for review are going to require Henry Pojade to do something he most definitely does not want to do.

Sweat has begun to trickle down his back and beads upon the brow of his big, pink, baby-face.

“What do you make of that irregularity?” he says.

The technician, a slight Hispanic woman with a poker face, says, “The woman in white?”

“Yes. Has the record been edited?”

“No, sir. The corruption we’re seeing is sunfade.”

“The trainee?”

“Medical on-site reports he is physically unharmed.”

“Do you have a marker at the disappearance of the woman and the trainee?”

“Yes, sir. I have markers at each instance of her anomalies.”

“Show them to me.”

He watches each of the records twice, reviewing, despite the degradation, the detail from both officers’ personal recorders and the one in their vehicle. The unidentified woman vanishes from her place in front of the local civilian, materializes in front of the junior officer, and both vanish. A momentary pucker in the air marks the spot where they stood and nothing more. The junior officer’s body cam ceases working at that time.

Seventeen seconds later, the woman reappears alone to confront the senior officer who simply disengages and returns to his vehicle as though nothing had happened. He drives off the Pueblo property to a McDonalds drive-thru in nearby Bernalillo, where he purchases three Big Meals and consumes them with an eerie urgency.

There is nothing in Pojade’s experience to help him place this in a reasonable context.

“Can you clean it up so we can see more detail?”

He’s just stalling now and he knows it.

It is an aversion stronger even than his embarrassing and inexplicable fear of amphibians. While the proximity of a toad may drive him to an illogical state of apprehension, the thought of contacting the Deputy Director of LocUS, even in vee, spawns within Pojade a wave of unreasonable dread difficult to drive down or rationalize. After all he’s experienced in his often-violent career, something about Jacob Hergenrather repels him at a primal level.

Regardless, he’s committed and the connection is initiated.

The obligatory ‘announce and validate’ protocol is acknowledged without haste. Almost a half-minute passes before Pojade’s unease is rewarded.

The ‘accept’ cue is followed by full engagement in subjective space. Resolution is instantaneous and, as expected, troubling.

The Deputy Director is cast in near-silhouette against a sickly, greenish-gray phosphorescence. The color, intensity, and subtle motion of the envelope remind Pojade of things pustulent and poisonous. It never fails to make his stomach churn.

Hergenrather’s suit is a razor-edged shadow, but his eyes are the color of sunlight through an iceberg. Shaved head and scowling facial hairstyle only accentuate Pojade’s perception of malevolence.

He’s seen dangerous men before. Lots of them.

He’s experienced the deadly, surgical precision of a textbook military insertion, the randomized mayhem of a well-planned incursion gone hopelessly awry, and known the inhuman brutality of men to whom torture is a craft. He has survived mindless violence spawned of desperation and faced the murderous aggression of street thugs and professionals alike.

This one is like none of them.

No one has ever accused Pojade of being a churchgoing man. The constraints of organized religion have always tended to run more or less counter to his personal set of principles. The antithetical concepts of Heaven and Hell seem designed to keep the ignorant and gullible in line, and he perceives himself as neither.

He doesn’t believe in angels and yet, given all he’s seen in his circuitous path on this bloodthirsty rock, the existence of their dark counterparts seems more than likely.

He’s a big fellow, Pojade is—not Samoan rugby player big, but enough to make him a noticeable presence. Hergenrather is head and shoulders taller.

Perhaps it’s merely his experimental and, as yet, unbalanced anti-depressant talking here, but assuming for the sake of argument that the demon Beelzebub contrived to walk the Earth in the guise of a man, he imagines it would look and sound like Jacob Hergenrather.

The only thing that ameliorates Pojade’s anxiety and the knot in his stomach is his own self-loathing at the realization that this meeting is in vee, for Christ’s sake. Nobody dies in vee, not in a NoASR regulated environment, and certainly not with the kind of failsafes his agency’s interface has in place.

The smile on Hergenrather’s face carries nothing of warmth nor humor, his silence broken by neither greeting nor inquiry, merely a narrowing of the eyes and tilt of the head.

Instead of meaningless pleasantries or unnecessary verbiage, Pojade conjures a virtual portal cloned from his technician’s feed.

Within the vorp, five individuals are imaged near a well-used personal cargo vehicle, a roller with a vintage body type. It’s a custom job of a style popularized at the beginning of the transportation reboot, a cheap conversion, functional and unattractive, just the kind of heap one would expect to find on Indian land.

The vehicle and two of the individuals have linking icons afloat in the virtual air beside them, catalogued references. One of them is an indigenous man, a local, and the other, a short, rotund woman, is far from her home of record. The other three are unidentified, not in the uncharted depth and breadth of Sonder’s memory, unrecognized by any linked agency database.

A watchdog program, however, some kind of legacy routine embedded in the system, had lit up like a proverbial pinball machine, flagging them for immediate scrutiny.

The pair in white garb are unaccountably bizarre.

Of the two, the big one looks armored up, packing a hefty sidearm on his right side that looks as though it could use some counterbalance.

The smaller one, a hardbodied female, appears unarmed and carries herself with a self-assured poise he’s seen before. He thought she looked every bit as troublesome as her much larger companion, even before he saw what she is able to do.

Their cosmetic choice, an all-over black as deep and complete as he’s ever seen, is curious.

The third among them is a male, early-mid forties at a guess, a lean, ropey fellow about six-foot nothing, maybe a buck sixty. Pojade refuses to internally calculate the metric equivalents. Long, straight black hair, high cheekbones, prominent nose, hard lines, likely Amerind.

This one, Pojade surmises, might belong to any segment of a small, but recalcitrant population of unchipped, disenfranchised, rebellious trash who think their disdain for the society they reject insulates them from the responsibilities of citizenship.

Hergenrather walks around the vorp, a slow turn, stopping to stare at the man in the battered, wide-brimmed hat. It’s pushed back on his head enough to reveal a weathered, stony face, a hawk nose, and eyes green like new grass. His hair is long and black, but the stubble on his jaw and upper lip is an unexpected red in the bright sunlight.

If it had seemed Hergenrather could not appear more unnerving, Pojade watches his features transformed by undisguised joy. The effect is grotesque. And short-lived.

“Where is this?”

“It was recorded within the Pueblo of Sandia in New Mexico, a sequestered community that does not embrace uninvited visitors.”

“How long ago was this acquired?”

“Four and a half hours.”

“And I’m just hearing about it now?”

“Tribal Police protocol doesn’t require continuous feed. This was captured during a global upload following the most recent sunfade and an algorithm that’s been running for—hell, I don’t know, so long it’s become canon—pushed these three records through CBP. The Assistant Commissioner handed it off to me thirty minutes ago. I allocated a drone to locate the vehicle’s transponder and acquire visual confirmation of the target before I contacted you. Who are they?”

“Walking dead. Where are they now?”

“Northwest New Mexico, near Four Corners. They’re off the trac network, westbound on an unconverted highway. We won’t be able to detour or shut them down directly, but I can have them detained within the hour.”

“No. Do nothing. Wait while I bring this to the Director.” His avatar recedes into the dead, gray-green backlight and the air of frigid malignance relaxes.

Seconds crawl past as Pojade observes how the phosphorescence seems to demonstrate occasions of fluid movement within. It reminds him of weirdly glowing urine. He works to relax the gorge rising again in his throat.

Hergenrather’s return to the conversation is not a relief.

“Show them to me,” says the Deputy Director. It sounds like an order.

Chaffing, Pojade delivers terse instruction to his operator.

A new vorp opens in the space between the two men and envelops them, each sharing an aerial panorama. Beneath them, a near-deserted highway stabs through hundreds of square kilometers of bleak, high desert barrens.

The highway begins to fall toward them, accelerating in a precipitous plunge that terminates an abrupt, gut-wrenching two meters above the pavement.

Neither man is moved, as anyone might be, even in the virtual realm, to clutch instinctively at a nearby stationary object. There are none and Pojade observes Hergenrather with grudging approval.

The eye’s relative position and speed is displayed in an unobtrusive optic in the upper left corner of Pojade’s vision. It does little to distract him from Hergenrather’s glacial stare as their view levels on the target vehicle.

Ocher light from a lowering sun washes the front end of the geriatric utility van and highlights the two individuals in the cab.

The abbreviated nomenclature of the boxy roller’s linking icon is sufficient to indicate its license and inspections are current, and another icon floating in the virtual air beside the roly-poly driver indicates her file has already been catalogued for reference. Right now, it is enough to verify the target has been correctly acquired.

The woman in the passenger seat with no linking icon and jeweled eyes confirms it.

“She looks like her skin is dyed black.” Pojade says. “What the Hell’s that all about?”

“Irrelevant. Are you sure the other two are in the back?”

“They made a rest stop twenty-five minutes ago. Everybody piled out, including those two big dogs from the pueblo. Everyone did their business, climbed back inside, and off they went. No stops since.” Are you certain you don’t want us to intercept?”

“Under no circumstances will you make contact with the subjects. Do you understand me?”

Pojade’s “Yes,” comes at the end of a reflective pause to reconsider his tone. “I understand you.”

“Then transfer full copies of all records to me and release the eye to my control. I’ll take it from here.”

“I can’t do that.”

“You can’t do what?”

“I can’t give you the drone.”

“Why not?”

“My operator is copying the SPD records to you, everything the eye’s recorded so far, and a stream of everything it continues to record, but I don’t have authority to turn the asset over to you.”

“I don’t think you want to start a pissing match with me over a fucking drone, Henry.”

“I have revised directives from the AC-IOC. Our inventory has been decimated by the so-called Vulcan storms. Models sporting avionics and telemetry hardened to maintain operational integrity against the electromagnetic interference are spread thin. I’ve stretched my own authority just keeping a valuable asset that’s been requisitioned elsewhere focused on your persons of interest, although the level of that interest has unquestionably been justified.”

“Wake your Operations Chief and have him give you authorization.”

“No, Mr. Hergenrather. I’m not going to do that.”

“And I thought we were pals, Henry.”

The technician, invisible at Pojade’s right hand, says in his earbud, “Sir, are you seeing this?”

The woman in the van’s passenger seat is pointing. Afternoon sun sets her jet features in vivid relief and, despite its glare in her face, she is pointing as though she has somehow seen the tiny thing pacing almost half a klick ahead of the vehicle. She appears to be pointing at them.

“Take it up. Now!” Pojade says and the technician’s response is a stomach-churning vertical ascent for those within the virtual portal.

The drone’s pressors slingshot it a full kilometer above the vehicle in seconds. Tiny, silent, its chameleon skin renders it effectively invisible.

Pojade straightens himself, shaking off the visceral effect. Hergenrather appears unmoved.

Below them, the van slows to a stop off the blacktop’s edge. The passenger-side cargo door opens. The largest of the subjects steps out and looks up. He seems to be scanning the bottomless blue of late afternoon sky. His eyes cease tracking.

A swash of burnished metal sweeps up in his hand. A bright turbulence becomes a burst engulfing the vorp for an instant before man, van, highway, and desert are erased in a silent flash.

Outside her supervisor’s virtual envelope, the operator is pressed back against her seat, squinting at her deck. Save for a couple rows of small function tiles at its margin, her viewport is blank. Her hands twiddle virtual controls in an attempt to reestablish connection to the asset.

“It’s gone, sir,” she says.

Blinking against a dazzling afterimage for the moment it takes the agency’s AI’s physics to catch up, Pojade’s tari is surrounded by the envelope of putrid ambiance once more. Beelzebub is beside him and its expression is furious, a thunderhead.

The sweat rolling down Pojade’s back feels cold, though his tari does not exhibit the shiver he feels in Real. He silently curses this sense of dread he cannot shake off. This creature can’t harm him.

“I will contact the Assistant Commissioner and task another drone,” he says. “I’ll notify you when the target is reacquired.”

“You do that.”

The sickening backdrop and the razor silhouette wink out.

Two calming breaths are barely enough. Wrestling a pill bottle from a deep pocket, Pojade turns to his technician.

“You alright?” he says and pops a couple tablets into his mouth, swallowing them dry.

Poker face restored, she says, “I may have found another eye we can redeploy. Top of the call list. There will be some blowback.”

“I just lost a drone I misappropriated from the call list earlier today. Of course there’s going to be blowback. It’s nothing like what will happen if we lose that vehicle and its occupants.”

“I have your authorization, sir?”

“You have to ask?”

“Yes, sir. I do.”

“All right, then; you have it. Make it happen and alert me when you have a lock on them. And… don’t let them see this one.”

◄ ~ ►

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Pojade Read More »

Tradition & Obligation

Domains, The Riven

Jonas watches the uniformed man return to his sleek, metallic buggy. Its odd, wing-like doors close with a hushed solidity and the conveyance moves away under its own queer, whirring power.

The dogs complete a couple exuberant revolutions around and shoulder up against him. He lowers the burden of his gear to the ground.

A city has sprung up overnight it seems like, spread out across the high desert in the distance and roundabout, even up into the folded skirts of the mountain and against its southward range. Distant somethings in the air, skimming among the structures, might be birds, but they don’t move like birds.

Short days ago, by his reckoning, he’d found himself in a bizarre little bugtussle perched on the tableland’s edge far to the north of here, called by its peculiar inhabitants, Woebegone. Now there’s a curious word that does not mean the departure of woe, like you’d think, but the opposite. A fitting epithet for that twisted place.

Before awakening to an unscheduled captivity there, he’d been given a vision, a powerful, harrowing foreknowledge, frightening in its depth and implications.

In that dreamwalk, near its end, he saw coaches moving under their own power, both on roadways stretching into hazy distance and through the air as well. Wonders like them and more presented themselves, but he was detached from it all then, a phantom observer only. Not now. He’s certain this is not the same place he was shown, but if his vision of such oddities was accurate, then the other matters that accompanied them, vivid and terrible, are likely accurate as well. That he’s standing here now should be proof enough.

It is an inconvenient fact that often times his knowing is less a blessing than one might imagine. The incomprehensible workings of the Great Mystery have set his life adrift without benefit of map or compass. There is no wonder without terror, his grandfather had assured him long ago. Old Standing Elk sure knew what he was talking about.

“Tunkasila, wakinyelo omakiyayo,” he says, and rests his hands on the great rumpled heads on either side of him, anchoring him to the world.

Close by, waiting at the edge of the paved street, is another coach, larger than the one that just drove away and not nearly as smart-looking. It’s big and square and, like the other, there appears no place to hitch a team to pull it, nor need for such. This one, too, has small metal wheels rimmed in thick India rubber or some such, and inside, enclosed behind a wide glass window that matches the thing’s contours, are what look to be cushioned seats. Behind that resides a fair-sized compartment which, through the wide-open side door, seems to have received the brunt of an avalanche of someone’s personal belongings.

A short woman of generous proportions stands nearby in a long, earthen-hued skirt that reaches nearly to the ground. Her feet are bare. An unconstrained cataract of reddish-brown hair whips in a momentary gust as she turns her face to acknowledge him with a nod.

In her left hand is a sturdy branch of twisted willow, as tall as she. It is an eye-catching instrument and Jonas can’t decide which, the woman or the staff, is supporting the other. The hint of an impish smile brushes her lips and lifts her chubby cheeks. Whoever she is, she’s more than just a bystander, that much is sure. He touches a finger to the brim of his hat.

The stern-looking native man, youngish with darkened, angular features, has squared up to Narregan and Brin. In a clear ceremonial voice, he begins a solemn harangue in his own language. Fused oration and song, it progresses without apparent conclusion in sight.

In the intimate connection of the taproot, Brin’s “voice” is in Jonas’s mind.

‘Jo’nas, this one names himself Tonjuh. Do you understand his speech?’

‘Not a word. I reckon he figures you do. Likely he’s pegged you both as a couple of his tribe’s deities and he’s offering his people’s sincere regards.’

Narregan’s inclusion in the tap is a deep harmonic. ‘Whether this is an address prepared well in advance of our emergence, or an impromptu obeisance, we have been treated properly, honorably, and I suspect, at some risk had we been discovered, vulnerable to those less invested in our safety. We will allow him to find conclusion before we withdraw from this place before it becomes necessary to conflict with these t’sunguc further.’

Jonas’s opinion is that with Ile Slohan holding them as they slept, they were likely never vulnerable at all, but as Narregan has demonstrated some tangled emotions regarding the spirit-stone in the past, he decides it best to hold that thought close.

This one Brin called ‘Tonjuh’ seems to reach a coda in his formal address and falls silent, studying the kachinas with expectation. He appears to shy from Brin’s eyes and Narregan has none he can find. Finally, he settles his stony gaze on Jonas. Tonjuh’s spirit-face fairly shouts of inner conflict between doubt and conviction and, regarding Jonas in particular, an abiding suspicion.

Jonas paces forward until he’s even with his companions and plants himself beside Brin. The brindle wolfhound rocks back on his haunches beside Jonas’s caboodle. The fawn noses her way between Jonas and Brin, jostling them just enough to allow her space to add her weighty stare to those of her people as they consider the lone man facing them.

Martin eyes this rough fellow with skepticism, this supposed “sorcerer” who, in his turn, levels a solemn scrutiny from the shade of his hat.

The old stories say the kachinas arrived outside the pueblo in a storm of power unlike anything ever witnessed—everyone saw it—power wielded by the brujo who accompanied them. His great grandfather, Poeyeh himself, witnessed this wonder with his own eyes.

Martin knows how stories grow and change in the telling. Embellishments creep in, pertinent details creep out. Critical thinking, skepticism, and scientific method were not even remotely part of his peoples’ early belief system. If these dogs are only dogs—and despite their great size and intelligent appearance, they are just that—perhaps this man too is only a man, an ordinary man who seems more out of place in this moment than either of the inscrutable beings beside him. More so even than the dogs, for that matter.

The towering kachina, Choktotoochanay, as the Brin named it, is an imposing, armored mass of unknowable potential. And what of she whose display of inhuman ability is beyond his understanding? The question that presents itself thus to Martin is a valid one. What ordinary man travels with such as these? Martin is moved to recall once again old Poeyeh’s recollections. It is a dawning possibility he may have judged this one in haste.

The man speaks up, calling Martin by his ceremonial name. His voice is measured, his intonation traditional.

“I am Jonas Sunka Nunpa of the Sicangu Oyate. I am son of Burns Red and grandson of Standing Elk, a wicasa wakan of our band. You honor us with your recognition and the powerful words you’ve spoken to mark our re-entry into the world of Men. The generosity of your people, the gift of shelter within your sacred space, and the protection you and your people have given us will never be forgotten. We are in your debt and that’s a fact. Your people and their selfless contribution to our safety will remain in our memory and prayers as long as we draw breath from the Mother.”

This one who names himself Jonas Shoonka Noompa withdraws a coin from the watch pocket of his denims and holds it out for Martin to accept. Sunlight flashes off a silver dollar.

It would be an insult if considered as remuneration for all his people have given to protect these visitors, but that is not its purpose, nor its true value, and Martin knows it. The coin properly satisfies a traditional protocol. It anchors the story he will tell his people of this momentous day. Almost anything the man would have given him would have sufficed.

He is not a numismatist, but Martin recognizes a Seated Liberty stamped eighteen seventy-seven. It’s shiny and possibly worth tens of thousands on the collector’s market. He nods acceptance.

“I can tell it plain enough you have misgivings,” Jonas says. “It don’t much matter what you think of me,” he gestures to indicate the Travelers with him, “but my friends here and me,” he sweeps a hand to indicate the wolfhounds, “and these two brave hearts, have a narrow path and a dire purpose before us. Time is short and our presence here’s been exposed. We need to be away from this place.”

Martin arrives at a decision. He reaches to withdraw a bone-handled knife from its ancient rawhide sheath, the leather cured and hardened by time until it is almost as rigid as the wootz steel he slips from it. He holds the sacred thing in both hands for Jonas to see.

“This gift,” he says, “given to my twice great grandfather, has remained with each Watcher over the years. Do you recognize it?”

The sorcerer’s eyes trace the mysteries whorled in the blade.

“I do. My father won it in battle ‘fore I was born. Gave it to me when I was ten winters.” He raises his eyes to Martin. “Wait. You said your… GREAT grandfather?!”

“Twice great.”

“Poeyeh?” Emerald eyes sweep the horizon behind Martin as if he’d become transparent.

“We went into the ground near the end of July thereabouts,” the brujo says. He seems to be speaking from far away. “Eighteen an’ seventy-eight.”

“Jonas Shoonka Noompa, you are in the Pueblo of Sandia. The city you see grown up around us to the south and west is Albuquerque, New Mexico. Today is the thirteenth of September and the year is two thousand twenty-seven. We have watched over you for a hundred and forty-nine years.”

Jonas’s mouth opens, as if he’s thought of something to say in response, then closes again.

“Grandfather Poeyeh understood,” Martin says, “after you had gone into the kiva to rest, that when you awoke, it would be appropriate to square with you. He did not want you to go back into the world without a knife of your own. I believe he intended to give you his own, but when you did not awaken and he grew too old to maintain his vigil, he passed on that responsibility in the same way as this,” he lifts up the wootz blade, “passed down to the next Watcher. And the next… and so on to me.

“This knife, your gift, has become a part of the story of my people. It will not pass on to another, because today, with your awakening, I am the last Watcher.”

He sheathes the blade. Unfastening his belt, he draws it from its loops to release the rawhide scabbard at his hip and, with it, another sheath. He slips the first into a back pocket and holds the second like something fragile between his outstretched hands, eyes low, offering it to Jonas in ceremonial manner.

Jonas extends both hands and the gift is laid in them. It’s heavy.

The sheath is blood-red leather, hardened, but with a pennant of fringe so fine the breeze stirs it. Adorning it is an unfamiliar pattern of beadwork. The handle is fashioned from a small antler with a projecting spike about halfway along its length that slips into his grip between middle and third finger.

He exposes the blade, just a sliver, enough for breath to catch in his throat. He withdraws its full length—a slab of snowflake obsidian six or seven inches long shaped like a spearhead, knapped to a point, its edges twin razors.

Ton’ja makes a circular pass with his open hand, palm down, indicating the gift. “Today is only the second time this blade has seen the sun since it was made. I have kept it only for this day. My grandfather made this when he was Watcher. It took him years working it with a patience and precision that continues to elude me. It is sharper than any steel and, though it can be broken, its edges will never dull.”

Jonas watches his hand slide the knife back into its sheath, feeling its weight and presence, hearing the whisper of the leather caressing it. That one, who sat vigil above the kiva from the day he was given the sacred responsibility as Watcher until he was no longer able to carry it, that one, created this beautiful and deadly thing. Created it for him and no other.

“Your grandfather, what was his name?”

“His name was Miguel. As Watcher he was named Ca-pen.”

Around his neck, beneath the drape of a bandana that had once been blue, is a braided leather cord joined to a leather bag hardened by sun and sweat and years. Jonas lifts it out from his shirt and works it open. His fingertips slip inside past Ile Slohan.

Delving, small familiar objects with personal significance shift aside until, at the bottom, he touches his mother’s earrings. He traps one between fingertips and extracts it. Without haste, he cinches the little bag, drops it back inside his shirt and repositions his bandana over its near-insignificant bulge.

Jonas presents the precious thing to the Watcher.

“The eye teeth of a bull elk are ivory. Two of ’em were given to me as a remembrance of great affection. Nothing I have means more to me. Take this one and the thing’s done.”

Ton’ja extends an open hand and Jonas lays the small treasure into it.

“In my prayers I will remember your grandfather, Miguel Ca-pen, and the unbending honor your lineage and your people have demonstrated to bring all of us safely to this moment.”

Martin’s nagging sense that none of this looks or feels like it should, is overshadowed by the reality in front of him. He draws himself straight, his voice is clear.

“This is a momentous time. Long we have waited for this day. There is so much for us to talk about. So much you have to teach us.” He gestures toward a row of modest structures across the roadway. “I understand your desire to be away from this place, but my home is there, a simple dwelling, but removed from the kind of misunderstanding that has occurred here.

“I ask that you do not judge us by the actions of those men. They did not understand, did not know who you are, did not comprehend the magnitude of this event, of what your presence among us means to our people. Tasked with protecting this community, the rules they must follow are narrow. Your existence is beyond the scope of their statutes, beyond their limited experience.

“Know that you are revered guests. I will alert the elders. They will come and draw their circle of protection around you. There will be no further confrontation. The entire community will come together to celebrate your awakening, a proper ceremony and feast to honor you, as you have honored our people by coming among us.” Ton’ja motions toward the street. “Let me show you the way.”

Brin’s words stall him as if she had reached out with her power and locked his knees. “Ee’eh! No, Tonjuh. I am… sorry. Jo’nas is right. We cannot remain here with you.”

“Why not?” Martin’s consternation at the way this improbable episode has so far played out has robbed him of his stony composure, his oft-imagined sense of how one conducts oneself in the presence of mythological beings and mixed-race sorcerers notwithstanding, he realizes his tone might be construed an impertinence, too late to call it back.

“Because, if we stay,” Jonas says, “there’s gonna be a ruckus. That won’t be good for anybody here, nor for them lookin’ on neither.”

“Do you suppose the Council has not the authority to intervene? The council is the authority here and I am their immediate representative.”

“I mean no disrespect to you or your council, Tonjuh, but I don’t s’pose nothin’. I can see it. Trouble’s coming and by the time we get through talkin’ about it, it’ll be on us like flies on a cow chip.”

“I will intercede with them. Once they understand who you are and why you are here, there will be no trouble.”

“You’re tellin’ me how it’s s’posed to go in your mind an’ I’m tellin’ you what’s fixin’ to happen. The cavalry’s gonna come ridin’ in with their narrow rules and guns drawn and the big guy here’s gonna loose his child-like equanimity.”

“How do you know this?”

“How d’ya know when you try to put your boot on the wrong foot?”

Ruby’s penguin shuffle carries her forward, staff chattering. She plants herself too close to Martin to be disregarded. “He’s right,” she says. “Two body recorders and one in the car, even if no one was monitoring at the moment, somebody will review the record soon enough.”

She turns to Brin. “Hi, I’m Ruby. I’m a human being too.”

“He’alowa, Roobee. I am Brin.”

“Pleased to meet you, Brin. Listen, that fellow you disappeared… where’d you take him to?”

Martin cannot believe the woman’s audacity and he opens his mouth to end her interference.

Brin indicates the church with her chin. “There. Below.”

“In the kiva?” Martin is incredulous. This has gotten completely out of control.

“Keeva… Ha’eh! Yes.”

“He’s unharmed?”

“Yes.”

“And the other one?”

“The soft one who went away? I showed him a different purpose. He will follow it for a time. What is a ‘cheeseburger’?”

Ruby’s grip on her staff tightens, head back, her body ripples until she breaks wind and, still chuckling, shifts a meaningful glance back to Martin. “As soon as either of those officers establish contact with their base, we’re going to be surrounded by flying assholes in riot gear and NO bodycams. You don’t suppose your ‘sacred guests’ have any ID, do you?”

Martin wheels on her imbued with all the authority his position carries. “This is a tribal matter in which you have no part.”

He notices the blanket she gave him from the corner of his eye, blues and greens against desert bland, and wonders when it slipped from his hands.

“Your immediate interest and personal safety will best be served if you leave us right now. In fact, I am telling you to leave. Right now.”

Ruby stares at him from far away.

Martin meets her gaze. “You say you were led here to find two dogs,” he gestures, “and you say these two are not the ones. I believe you, Ruby Bones. You are done here. Leave us.”

“It wouldn’t be the first time Spirit World has pulled my leg to get me moving the right way. You see I am here at this moment in time. You say you don’t believe in accidents.”

“Accident or not, your welcome has run out. You are trespassing on tribal land. If you’re still here when the police arrive, you will be arrested.”

“Enough.” Brin has not raised her voice, but Martin’s ears are ringing.

She steps forward, close enough to touch him, and his heart breaks into a crazed pow wow rhythm. He doesn’t want to look into her upturned face, but she speaks his name and he does. He looks away. It isn’t her eyes he remembers in the next distinct moments, but the starburst around the right one. Was it spinning around, or was he? He has to know.

Quiet calm enfolds him. His inner turmoil is not altogether gone, but he has no need to act upon it right now. He can hear the echo of his words in his mind, flinching inwardly at his loss of self-control.

Ruby scuffles closer to him and grounds her staff with barely a sound.

“I understand your entire life and purpose is invested in this moment. I don’t blame you for wanting to keep them here, but there are forces stirring. Can’t you feel it?”

Martin can feel it. There is nothing to say.

Something is nagging Jonas, like a tiny burr in his boot that won’t abate until he stops to root it out, and it turns him about. “Beg pardon, ma’am,” he says to the eccentric woman, “but what was that Tonjuh here said to you just a minute ago?”

A foot shorter, Ruby cranes her neck to afford him a searching look. “About my welcome running out?”

“Nope, ‘fore that. ‘Bout the dogs.”

She reminds him of old Standing Elk who often had that same expression when he was listening to something no one else could hear.

“Like I told him before you all showed up, spirit sent me here to find two dogs. Why?”

“I am Two Dogs.”

Ruby looks at the wolfhounds. The wolfhounds return an impassive consideration. She looks to Martin, whose open-mouthed bafflement says enough.

“The children of my band started callin’ me Sunka Nunpa when I was just a pup,” he says. “They meant it to be an insult. My father convinced me otherwise. Either way, it sorta stuck.”

Ruby blinks. “I did not see that coming.”

“Yes, ma’am, but lest we’re prepared to entertain company, we really need to vamoose now.”

“Yes. Yes, I do see THAT coming.”

Circumstances have devolved beyond Martin’s ability to control any facet of them. He turns to the half-blood and strives to keep his voice level.

“Will you be leaving us as you came?”

Jonas, hoisting his burdensome saddlebags once more, pauses. “What?”

“In a storm of power.”

“That was a knee-slapper, wasn’t it?”

“By all accounts.”

“Nope. Reckon we’ll be leavin’ with her.” Jonas tips his head toward Ruby.

“And what of us?”

“Beg pardon?”

“You were given shelter within one of our most sacred places. We watched over you, protected you from the outside world for a century and a half, waiting for you to emerge and bend your powers to heal our land, restore the river, to renew and lift up our people, if for no other reason than in return for our faithful stewardship. Instead, you’re just going to leave? You never came here to help us at all, did you?”

“No,” Jonas says. “No, we didn’t. We were guided to the old, blind shaman who… “

“Ta’luli. His name was Ta’luli.”

“Well, Tululi knew why we’d come and gave us what we needed. You’re free to question his decision, I s’poze.”

“How could Ta’luli refuse such as you?”

Silent up to this moment, the big kachina speaks. His voice a pulse in the air, felt as surely as heard.

“The eld you name T’loolee was not afraid of us. Neither was the gift of his aegis given with the thought of what might be gained in return. The generosity of your people was conferred without stipulation. If this faithful stewardship you value is simply leverage against a benefit you believe we are capable of bestowing, one we are obligated now to bestow, what was your constancy beyond a calculated self-interest?”

Traditional teachings offer no clear guidance in this circumstance. Martin’s higher education included no practical tools to navigate the empirical fact of mythic beings intruding upon the here and now. It has, however, provided him a sharp understanding of the big kachina’s meaning. Martin fixes Jonas with a wild, searching gaze and the crushing disappointment of unrealized possibilities informs his words.

“You say you are in our debt. If you have the power to restore balance to the world, why would you not do it?”

Jonas scans the horizon, inhales dry heat and lets it out slowly.

“That’s a tall order. My friends an’ me just woke up. I always like to have breakfast before I restore balance to the world.”

The big kachina’s voice rumbles, “You have assumed a host of facts nowhere in evidence, Tonjuh. Your immediate advantage will best be served by swift reconsideration of your place in current events and undesirable results to follow if this talk is not followed by action.”

Ruby’s impish smile has disappeared into the void. “Is there a back way out of here?”

Martin’s emotions fail to correlate with his sacred responsibility. None of the possibilities presented seem to match either his expectations or his perceived duty to his people and their future.

“Old Ta’luli saw way better than I do where our trail leads from here,” the brujo says. “Tell me, Tonjuh. What has your own vision shown ya?”

Martin jolts.

The memory of his journey beyond the boundaries of reason at the kiva’s doorway in the ground—less than twenty minutes ago!—returns with sufficient force to stagger him.

Is it possible his terrifying vision and these Visitors could somehow be bound together? A novel idea with nothing to substantiate it. Still, the synchronicity is as compelling as it is disturbing.

Nothing in this extraordinary sequence of events conforms to reason. There is no tradition, no historical guidance at all to match this instance, to offer direction. He is alone, immersed in a circumstance that, to his knowledge of his people’s history, has happened only once before. Martin’s opinion of Old Ta’luli’s judgment and decisions made in that other place and time has appreciated in the last minute. Who will advise him beyond the spirits of those who have preceded him? He had supposed them mute as he prayed for their guidance. He realizes now they are shouting to him across generations—as if across a gulf of stars.

Hand outstretched, palm down, Martin indicates a direction. “Head north,” he says. “Past the softball field there is a gate at the end of the paved road.” He extracts a slim ring of keys from the front pocket of his jeans, tosses it to Ruby. She plucks it from the air.

“One of those will open it. You won’t need them again. Lock it back up and drop them in the scrub beside the gate.”

Ruby nods.

“North Santa Fe Trail will take you into the town of Bernalillo. Stay off the CanAm Highway. It’s trac. Highway Three Thirteen hasn’t been converted yet.”

Ruby extends a pudgy right hand. Martin considers it only a moment, then brushes her fingers with his own.

“Throw your luggage and yourselves inside my rig,” she says to the travelers. “Half a minute we’re gone.” She pivots around her staff and does a creditable quick-march toward her vehicle’s street-side door, the syncopated stutter of her twin rattles providing the beat to her feet.

Brin reaches out a hand to Martin, an echo of Ruby’s gesture. A sensation like an electrical current accompanies her touch and he allows his fingers to rest in her palm for several seconds, indulging in the momentary thrill of contact. She graces him with a tender smile.

“You have lost far less this turn than you think,” she says.

He is careful not to meet her gaze. “How do you suppose?”

“You waited, as those before you had done, for this moment to come, and when it did, you looked for Source to reach out through us, like the Hand of ONE, to touch your life and the lives of your people. Has it not occurred to you that ONE has never done otherwise? Look to the multitude of small things that have transpired while you were waiting.”

“So often,” she says, “it is the pivotal event with far-reaching consequence one desires in the hope new marvels and favor will accompany the occasion. See us now before you, Tonjuh, and know we have experienced such an alteration of circumstances as you may not be prepared to fathom, yet from it, I can tell you this: marvels are many; favor far less abundant.

“Where we come from, there is a truth all children know: There is no Color the darkness cannot occlude. When full Night blankets all, the light you require must come from within you.”

“I… I don’t understand,” Martin says.

“I know.” She smiles again and turns away.

He watches her go. The crazy woman motions for her to sit with her up front, and she does. The door seals behind her with a hollow, metallic clap.

Martin’s attention pans back to find Jonas. A volume passes in silence between them.

Martin offers his hand. Jonas grasps Martin’s forearm. His grip is a strong one. Martin mirrors it and nods once his acknowledgement. He watches as Jonas treads the gravel interval to the waiting vehicle, the dogs circling. He follows his saddlebags through the van’s side cargo door and the dogs pile in behind.

Choktotuchaanay towers; his blank Face is turned Martin’s way and Martin is astonished to feel his knees tremble. Words are dust in his mouth. He’s certain the kachina can hear the blood pounding in his temples. He strives to control his breathing, searches his spinning thoughts for something to say that won’t sound weak or stupid when he revisits this graceless episode with the tribal elders. None occur. He hangs pierced in this great Power’s deliberation.

The kachina reaches inside its makeshift poncho and withdraws something small in its hand. As though from a distance, Martin observes his own hand reach out to take his baseball cap.

There is nothing more. Martin watches the probably-not-a-kachina clamber into the waiting vehicle with an agility and lightness he would not have imagined of one so large, or so encumbered. The side door slides closed behind him and seals with a grinding complaint. The heavy electric drive whines to life and the van glides forward.

It eases through the quiet heat and a neighborhood of low structures separated by narrow expanses of dirt. The entire insulated community still appears to have been abandoned.

No weathered faces peer out as they pass. No children or animals are in evidence. With the exception of vagrant insects congregating in lethargic eddies, there is no indication of life or movement anywhere.

Clustered housing gives way to open ground and the indicated ballpark, a diamond of bare dirt with a patchwork backstop, rickety bleachers, and a sagging chain-link perimeter fence. As promised, a boundary gate of substantial construction offers egress and, beyond it, the desert fans out, broiled to a dingy, sterile beige.

The way is clear and the van attains an impressive, albeit illegal speed.

Martin stands at curbside watching the squared-off rear end dwindle northward with its preposterous passengers. Six discrete beings, six impenetrable mysteries, have passed beyond the boundaries and the complex story of his people, here and gone in the space of less than half an hour. It defies reason.

The elders are going to have to ponder this one for a while.

A small dust cloud is kicked up in the distance by their passage. He watches it spin up into a thin, twisting column, a common enough occurrence in this land, yet somehow it seems to him a signature. The wind whips it away toward the mountain, dispersing it to nothing.

Squinting beneath a fierce midday sun, Martin notices the cap in his hand and settles it onto his head. Its shade is refreshing.

A rumpled bundle lies in a heap nearby—blues and greens, Northwest colors, an anomaly against the drab desert grit underfoot. Martin lifts it from the ground, brushes it off, and folds it under his arm. His sigh is a long one filled with resignation, regret, and perhaps a residual smattering of resentment.

A jolting electric buzz splits the air. Cicadas’ song, missing since the first kachina stepped into the sunlight, returns as though it had never gone.

◄ ~ ►

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Tradition & Obligation Read More »

A Warrior’s Perspective

Domains, The Riven

When first I am awakened from that dreamless torpor to which we had abandoned ourselves, I sense time has passed, but not how much of it, and that beyond the stony vault sheltering us, the world has changed.

It is not a surprise to find Brin has arisen first, gone, and the beasts with her. I am unconcerned for her safety outside the bounds of our covert sanctuary. One does not become Guardian without mastery of certain innate gifts and hers are uncommon.

The tap between us is alive with her customary inquisitiveness and a reassuring sense of ease. I can attest that extraordinary circumstances are required to shake her composure.

The fingers of my left hand have healed well enough. I lost none of them to infection and, although some stricture was expected, the persistent tingling numbness was not. I was fortunate.

Jo’nas begins to stir, rousing from a profound dream, and with neither haste nor delay, we gather up our few belongings and quit the immobile vessel that has carried us from one moment in time to an, as yet, unrevealed other.

The open, mud-walled court Jo’nas and I remember is enclosed now within a crude wooden structure.

Stone decomposed to grit still crunches beneath my feet as it did before, a carpet of it from corner to corner and, at the center of this closed quad, the dark aperture from which we have emerged, gapes. Its cap lays where I cast it aside to give us egress. A tangle of tubular metal and fabric protrudes from under it.

Beyond the compact trample Jo’nas and I have so far made, I mark the tracks of Brin and the beasts, a rough depression where someone has fallen, and, near it, an object in the gravel. I scoop it up, a fabric hat with a low crown and a stiff protruding brim. It seems well-worn and trained to a human-size head. An unfamiliar sigil is emblazoned on it.

From here, all footprints describe a retreat to a narrow doorway standing open at the rear of the enclosure. Together Jo’nas and I step into the light and heat of a world transformed.

This world’s brilliant sun rides the sky near zenith. It radiates an illumination more intense than Fayne’s Eye, sufficient to overwhelm my enhancements should I attempt to look again upon its face.

Nothing of the crude khenn I remember remains above the ground. Gone while we slumbered are the rude hovels of sticks and hardened mud occupying an arid expanse. Grown up in their stead are marginally sturdier dwellings and the same sense of exclusion.

The great squatting bulk of the mountain remains at the forefront of a humped and folded range marching into distant heat-haze. A sprawling kal’un has established itself across the wide plain and up into the mountain’s splayed toes, engulfing the community that gave us refuge.

Beyond it, I see evidence of more sophisticated construction, aggressive enterprise, and lively, regulated movement; streams of vehicles in purposeful transit on the ground and in the air suggest a vital society comparable to any of those on Hevn sufficiently advanced to refine architecture, implement production, and cultivate trade.

The air ripples my hair and tugs at my improvised cloak as we cross the space to where, near a pair of wheeled vehicles, Brin, and a knot of four t’sunguc are gathered.

One of them, a youngling in some sort of uniform blusters, advancing with a small weapon in his hands. He trains it upon us to gain our compliance, yapping at us in what he must believe to be an intimidating manner.

I doubt his toy packs sufficient firepower to penetrate my battledress, but I forego the idea of contesting with him. It is an unfair mismatch, and rebound scatter, should he inadvertently discharge his noisemaker, might harm another.

Even as his uniformed ally is plunging forward to offer his support, the hapless newb is distracted by both of the dogs bearing down on him. He trains his little gun on this new menace. Brin sets herself between them and jinks him away, doubtless saving his life.

Perhaps the air and sun-light, after my time underground, have made me giddy. Witnessing the youngster’s unhinged moment of incomprehension as my Guardian took him, strikes me as hilarious.

I have an early memory of being folded between spaces like that, not once, but many times, occasionally in rapid succession, by my newly-bonded Guardian. Thus my initiation into a practice the Sisterhood calls “passage”.

My first jink with her was merciless beyond any test, any heavy sparring, any punishment I might have received in my training. Subsequent foldings that followed were equally harrowing. I thought I might have vomited out everything I had eaten since I was born, most of my intestines, both lungs, and possibly a fair portion of my spine. The recollection of my own perceived dismemberment and random rearrangement of body parts during a jink was terrifying at first, a reaction of the mind only to the very real occurrence of physical displacement.

Of course, over time, I have acquired a perverse enjoyment in that same momentary dissociation and the peristaltic recoil has long-since abated. Knowing this brash youngster is even now sharing that elementary experience does not enhance my composure by the least amount. Warrior I may be, but I am not immune to a good joke and this one, at the tattered edge of an unlikely confrontation, is rich.

Better none can see my expression, it would not convey the gravity I wish to instill among these t’sunguc.

The remaining man in uniform is blinking at empty air, apparently too stupefied to realize his little handgun is still pointed in our direction.

The other man in the group steps forward and speaks to him in a soothing voice. This one carries himself with assurance, presence without pretense. He regards us with an energetic halo of veneration and fear. I wonder what characteristics he has assumed in us. He reaches out to the other and lower’s the hapless sloke’s weapon, a sensible action.

Brin returns, unfolding in front of the distressed functionary. He is unable to marshal his wits sufficiently to affect a flinching withdrawal and she gentles him, transmuting his disbelief into ambivalence and a near-somnolent disengagement.

I watch as he moves with a purpose he must believe is his own toward his vehicle and climbs into it. Its doors lower and latch. Its motor scales up and gears engage.

Brin has already dismissed him.

While the dogs circle Jo’nas in snuffling welcome, she stands beside me and we face this remaining khennsman.

He is similar to Jo’nas in stature with a hard face and straight black hair spilling over his shoulders. He has the characteristics of those who offered us refuge, save that his skin is not yet tanned to leather. He looks upon us with obvious deference.

“This one,” Brin says in low speech, “says his name is ‘Tonjuh’, that he is a human being, and that he has been waiting for us.”

She speaks to this Tonjuh in the language Jo’nas knows as Ing Glish. I have heard little else from those we have encountered here. It seems the low speech of this Land.

She indicates me with an outstretched hand. “This is my a’chi kah. You may call him T’chokt-ot U’chah ne.”

Tonjuh’s gaze shifts from Brin to me and I see him work to swallow his emotions.

He straightens and begins speaking in an unrecognizable language. It has the texture of that spoken by the old sha’man, T’loolee, who offered us food and haven. I perceive it as ceremonial expression—an invocation, perhaps, or an extemporaneous articulation to our praise and glory. Either way it is incomprehensible.

Courtesy dictates I allow him to achieve conclusion. It takes an impressively long time.

◄ ~ ►

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

A Warrior’s Perspective Read More »

Small Worlds Collide

Domains, The Riven

Recumbent in the van’s open side panel, a cushion between her back and the door post, Ruby is content to wait for the next scene in the unfolding mystery story her life has become.

To go out seeking pieces to the puzzle, chasing her unbridled imagination for clues, has never rewarded her with satisfying results. This place, right here, is where she is. There is nowhere else for her to be and no reason to be elsewhere.

The sun and hot, dry air feel pleasing on her skin and ease the discomfort in her joints.

Those magnificent dogs are off somewhere, running together as if they hadn’t done so in days. The raven-fleshed woman stands nearby like a statue clad in sunlight, her garb a glare against the drab background of desert soil and desiccated foliage. Her face is turned upward to the sun, eyes closed.

Martin stands dividing his confounded attention between the two women who seem to have lost all interest in him.

Ruby grounds her staff with a clack and hoists herself upright. Her shuffling step brings her closer. She’s looking past him and he follows her gaze.

An official-looking vehicle is tooling down the otherwise deserted street, a sleek and rugged roller with wide desert tires and substantial ground clearance. Two uniformed men eyeball the van and the odd assortment of individuals curbside in front of the church. The cruiser angles in front of Ruby’s rig and whispers to a stop. Gull-wing doors flap up in unison and both men step out into the heat.

A momentary swirl of dust kicks up in front of them, fleeing to the east and away toward the mountain.

The driver, ball cap pulled low over mirrored shades, has the look and bearing of one recently separated from the military: A.J. Squared Away, tightly wound, hyper-vigilant. He remains where his tactical boots hit the ground, on station, hand resting on his sidearm, head on a swivel.

A stocky fellow in crisp uniform exits from the passenger side closest to them and approaches, pinching his mask over his nose. He marks the squat Yoda-looking woman with a nod and acknowledges Martin with a cheerful wave.

“Eh, Martin. Hossit goin’?”

The presence in white observing him in silence brings his feet to a stumbling halt. Her flesh is so black it doesn’t even seem to reflect the sunlight. Her eyes…

“Look at me, Manny.” Martin’s voice is firm.

The officer’s attention flickers toward him.

“She’s come from the kiva,” Martin says.

Sergeant Manuel Sanchez attempts with moderate success to match Martin’s assembly of words to other words he knows.

Sure, the language is familiar, but that specific arrangement of syllables, as simple as they might seem, is one he’s never in all his thirty-seven years imagined would be cobbled together in the same sentence. They leave him with an incredulous expression that will make him cringe sometime later when the cruiser’s on-board recorder is played back for official review.

It is not the only thing that will cause him distress.

He knows the legend, of course, the story of the brujo and the kachinas who came to the pueblo an old shaman’s dream ago. It is an integral element of the clandestine oral chronicles of his people. Yet all his adult life he has considered the mysterious kachinas to inhabit the exclusive realm of fantasy, affording them the same credence he’s saved for dragons, mermaids, and graviton particles.

Martin Montoya, however, is the Pueblo’s appointed Lieutenant War Chief, a member of the Tribal Council, and the current Watcher in an unbroken chain of those tasked with the guardianship of the kiva and its apocryphal occupants.

Manny has known Martin all his life. There’s no one more solidly credible. If he says this is an entity of inhuman capability and purpose then, by God—he begins to cross himself, thinks better of it—the world is no longer quite like he believed it to be a minute ago.

Almost against his better judgment, Manny turns his face once more to the being that should not, in a sane world, exist.

His heart is rattling in his chest and an unprofessional thrill of fear washes through him, weakening his knees, as the kachina-woman rivets him with her gaze. He wants more than anything to turn away, but her eyes glitter, shifting hues in the sunlight. There is a configuration of scar tissue around her right eye, black on black flesh, eight… no, nine narrow lines precisely raised and arranged in a starburst pattern.

For an unnerving instant it seems to Manny they form a sort of lens through which she surveys the conflict stirring within and around him. Her expression is one of quiet amusement. The contradiction is disarming.

Manny might have been able to find safe passage through his internal turmoil then, had proof of his apparent derangement not stepped into the sunlight through the open door at the rear of the church.

By himself, the long-haired cowboy striding across the threshold, heavy-laden saddlebags slung over one shoulder, settling his broad-brimmed hat against the sun, strikes a discordant note. Alone he might have even seemed kind of funny in a misplaced, lanky extra from an old two-D Western movie sort of way.

But he’s not alone.

Behind him, barely able to fit through the narrow doorway, is a formidable figure clad head to toe in what looks like spotless white tactical armor and draped in a crudely repurposed Navajo rug. Above and around a featureless white faceplate, a mane of black hair ripples as it comes straight on across the church yard with the wild-west anachronism at its side.

The most fearsome of the kachinas from the old stories appears exactly as described in them.

It is no giant, as Manny had imagined proper kachinas of legend to be, but its size and the power of its movements force a shockwave of apprehension ahead of it. Manny has difficulty believing his eyes and maybe it’s just the coffee he drank ten minutes ago, but his bowels are threatening to betray him.

“Sarge?” The tension in the rookie’s voice is impossible to misinterpret. “What the Hell is this?!”

“Take it easy, Jakey.” Manny realizes the younger man’s complete unfamiliarity with the tribe’s secret history would render any attempt to answer nonsensical. “Stand down, son. I’ve got this.”

Somehow it doesn’t seem like quite enough.

Officer-recruit Diego Aguerre—whose nickname, for some reason known only to his Corps squad-mates, is “Jakey”—is still holding his place beside the vehicle. What little he’s heard or understood of the brief exchange between his partner and Montoya notwithstanding, the increasing headcount is adding to his agitation.

People who clearly do not belong here are coming out of the woodwork.

The cowboy doesn’t look like a problem yet, but the big guy must be near seven feet tall in what looks like a scaled-down, Q-powered Schwarzkopf battlesuit. This one’s head is up, face shield opaque and featureless.

There is no way this can be good. And yet his pudding cup of a partner acts like this is all somehow acceptable.

“I’m calling it in,” the rookie says and opens a circuit. “Dispatch…”.

“That seems a bad idea, Manny.” Martin’s voice sounds calm. “Lights and sirens and a possible armed response is not what’s needed here. These are sacred guests.”

Manny nods dumbly as the kachina-woman, having observed the two newcomers emerging from the church, shifts her attention in the direction of the young officer.

“There’s nothing but static on the comm, Sarge.” Jakey hauls out the dash-mounted shotgun.

“Ten-three, Jakey! Ten-three! Goddammit, son, look at me! This is not in the book! Stand down! Do it now and I’ll explain everything!” Manny realizes he’s shouting in the kachina-woman’s immediate presence and prays she will not misunderstand and incinerate him or anything. “And put that thing away!” He puts iron in his voice. “Do it, recruit!”

The mismatched pair has crossed half the distance between the church and the assortment of individuals loosely clustered near the roadside vehicles. A whorl of hot air whips up, lifting the cowboy’s hat and flagging his hair. Jakey recognizes the butt of a carbine protruding from its scabbard at his back. The improvised cloak over the other’s armor flails too, enough to reveal the artillery snubbed at his side and a rigid protocol is awakened.

“GUNS! They’re ARMED!”

The distinction between warfare and public safety has blurred, activating a far more visceral training. He chambers a round as he’s dodging around the car’s stubby nose and advances on the implausible duo, short-barreled pump carried at high ready.

“Police officer! Stop where you are!”

Both men slow their pace to a leisurely halt.

Manny, sensing the folly of this hostile course of action against incomprehensible beings, shouts. “GODDAMMIT, JAKEY, STAND DOWN! THAT’S AN ORDER!”

There were other words, but the escalation of circumstances, by way of his ability to assess them accurately—as opposed to his senior partner, who evidently has not managed to do so—has forced Jakey to take decisive action. This place is not his home. These are not his people; he just works here, but he knows his job.

His sergeant’s order is irrational. These men have weapons. The law is unambiguous.

“Hands on top of your heads,” he commands them. “Both of you! Right now!”

“Simmer down there with that scattergun, Wild Bill,” the cowboy perp says. “Nobody’s wavin’ iron here but you.”

Jakey cannot understand why his partner hasn’t moved to back him up. This is the most dangerous time of any armed suspect encounter and that jolly, flabby doofus is telling him not to do what he was hired and trained to do. How Jakey misses the Corps where everyone knows their role and follows procedure, simple progressions with reliable, repeatable results. Regardless, he has the drop on these two and the initiative is his.

“You are both under arrest for trespassing on private property and possession of firearms within the pueblo. Put your hands on your head and get on your knees.”

Cowboy perp looks up at the other and says, “Seems prickly, don’t he?”

Everything would be so much easier if he could just shoot one of them to show he means business. It had worked spectacularly well in both desert and jungle theaters.

His comm is still filled with electronic grass. Jakey’s shotgun is aimed between center masses. Whether anything he’s got is able to penetrate the big fellow’s armor is doubtful, but it looks like there may be vulnerable flesh just behind the faceplate where his hair spills out, a serious design flaw.

Inside his head, Jakey’s voice is infused with authority. “Do NOT fuck with me, assholes! Do what I told you and do it now!”

Motion flickers at the edges of Jakey’s vision. Both sides at once. The movement to his right is Sergeant Sanchez double-timing his lard ass over to assist, at last. A glint of sunlight there is Manny’s service weapon being drawn to cover the perpetrators, which is convenient because whatever is on Jakey’s left was much farther away a moment ago.

Across the church yard, two enormous dogs are bearing down on him at a dead run.

Where they’ve come from is a distant concern. They are both bigger than he is. Jakey trains a can’t-miss, hot, double-ought round on the larger one, a brindle less than thirty meters away and closing.

Something bright presses his weapon aside and occludes his target.

The woman in white is centimeters from him. He can feel her breath on his face. It has a spicy fragrance he will recall later.

The soles of his feet press flat against his kidneys as his head and rectum exchange places in some painless, inexplicable fashion. A second later he is on his hands and knees on a surface of smooth stones barking his breakfast burrito and coffee all over his shotgun.

He tosses his sodden mask aside and rolls onto his back with a groan. The darkness is not enhanced by deep-tinted glasses designed for high desert work. He fumbles them off his face.

The floor is hard and his guts are churning, but all his parts seem to be in their proper order, which is reassuring. High up, maybe two meters above him, light seeps in through a square aperture centered in heavy timbers. It offers no clue to where he is, or why.

As to the how, well… she’s standing over him. And then she’s not.

Sergeant Sanchez is astonished to realize his partner and the kachina-woman have just vanished in a blink before his eyes. Also, he seems to be holding his sidearm in the general direction of what may well be an inhuman being of unknown intent and potential.

The dogs, skidding to a halt where Jakey and the woman had been standing, are poised less than a meter from him now, lips skinned back from bayonets.

Montoya is beside him.

“I told you it was a bad idea,” Martin says. His voice is gentle, as is the reassuring hand on Manny’s arm, lowering his weapon’s muzzle toward the dirt.

If these are truly the supernatural beings of his tribe’s history, then this misplaced character in the hat must be the brujo. He looks more like an unchipped denizen of one of those throwback enclaves that still dot the nation like a bad rash. On the other hand, he did just appear to come from the kiva with the hulk in white.

Manny’s deliberation on this subject is compromised by that same hulk’s featureless mask turned full upon him and by the unknowable motivation of imaginary beings provoked to anger by discourteous treatment.

The air in front of Manny seems to distort and presses outward against him. The kachina woman is so near he can feel the heat of her.

His partner is not with her.

Manny’s personal recorder registers another spike in his vital signs.

Impossible, inhuman beings of antiquity and legend, beyond all common sense and reason, are REAL. They not only exist, their attention has turned upon him. This is not some virtual experience he can step out of and comforting normalcy will be restored.

She is right here. Right now. She is close enough to touch. She is close enough to touch him.

Sunlight on her flesh produces waves of warmth and the scent of her is in his nostrils. Her fingertips on his chest are light, a delicate grazing contact, devoid of menace or even the vaguest hint of peril. In fact, as she traces an obscure pattern upon his chest, his certainty in her goodness and authenticity is confirmed.

She awards him a gentle smile.

His sidearm has dropped into the dirt at his feet. Martin picks it up, slips it back into its holster, and secures the clasp. Manny pats it and, with a purposeful step, returns to the cruiser.

The motor’s idling hum scales up to a business-like frequency as the doors fold him inside. He backs away from the curb and accelerates down the street. At the end of the block, he bears left and is gone.

◄ ~ ►

Small Worlds Collide Read More »

Crows Come Around

Domains, The Riven

Cast your gaze down here, if you will, and see the lone figure whose trail leads him through rolling treelined corridors. He remembers the smell of this damp earth. He’s been in this country before, at least two lifetimes ago.

His name, if such matters to you, is Jonas. Who he once was matters less now than who he is becoming in the slipstream of events and perceptions far beyond anything he could have dreamed in his previous life, before the star people came and changed everything.

. . .

A single, staccato note, cut short, like a bubble of sound popping in air, punctuates the quiet. A lone winged shape glides overhead toward the northwest.

It sounds again, an almost musical tone, too brief to be so, pitched to carry across the folded, forested hillsides. Three more times, into the distance, the beacon reaches out, “Here I am. Where are you?” The farther away, the more plaintive it seems. A damp stillness answers.

The way bends up and around great splintered stone outcroppings, broken teeth sprouting from mossy gums. Wind soughs in evergreen crowns. Ancient timber complains in slow, creaking rhythms. Small flickering motions at the edges of vision trill and chatter across verdant glens. Downfall litters the forest floor.

A carpet of fir needles and duff flows underfoot with a silent, liquid quality. His way is clear and his progress swift and light. What’s bothering him, though, is not so much what’s beneath his feet, but what’s on them. For one thing, these’re not his boots and it would cause him some concern were he not surely dreaming.

Thing is, these ain’t them. Instead, they’re calf-high moccasins with leather thong laces lashed up Apache-style.

There’s a braided leather cord bound around his right ankle, too. Although that bit of his history’s been right there with him for many years, somehow now it seems oddly out of place. Perhaps because the other end of it’s tethered around the left ankle of a figure beside him, matching his pace.

His childhood friend, Jumping Otter, full grown and scarred, but alive and whole, shows Jonas a familiar crooked smile. Jonas breaks stride. The fetter between them contradicts their divided momentum, and both men blunder headlong, sprawling across the path.

“You were always the clumsy one,” Otter chides, brushing mulch from his face.

Jonas laughs aloud. “Is that how you remember it?”

“One must only see you to know it.”

Jonas reaches to whisk debris from the dude shirt he bought in Dodge, only to discover he’s wearing little more than those odd moccasins and a simple loincloth. An unfamiliar knife with an antler handle wrapped in red leather hangs from a fringed sheath at his hip. His old medicine bag lays against his chest. A pair of raven feathers are caught up with strands of sinew in his unbound hair.

Otter stands nearly eye to eye with him, hair braided and banded around with red cloth, three eagle feathers splay forward over his crown. His hairpipe breastplate is cool against Jonas’s bare chest in an embrace of lost friends found. He claps Jonas on the shoulders.

“We must hurry. Do you remember how to keep up with me?”

Without waiting for an answer, he sets off at a run with Jonas at his shoulder. The trail seems barely wide enough to accommodate progress single file, yet they pass through, their footfalls a single muted drumbeat on the forest carpet.

Jonas and Otter hurdle the obstruction as one. The cord between them drags on a projecting knot and Jonas plants his face on the forest floor.

By the time he finds his feet, Otter, unfettered somehow, has perched himself a good stone’s throw away on a rocky prominence, laughing at him.

Rushing water boils around the outcrop where Otter stands, an islet jutting from a cascading current, dividing it. Otter has to shout to be heard over the roar of the cataract breaking on its stony prow.

“You are the only one who can save her, brother.”

“Save who?”

“The piebald woman. She is wiya wakan. Your life and the lives of others depend on her.”

“Piebald woman…? I don’t understand.”

“Living among the wasicu has dulled your senses, Sunka Nunpa. Perhaps she will have to save you.”

There seems so much more to say, yet time is short. Jonas can sense it. “What of the People?” he asks.

“You do not yet know how far down this path you have come, brother, and I do not know whether to cry for you or laugh at you.”

“I miss your laughter I miss most, kola.”

“If I could walk this trail with you, Tanglefoot, I would.”

“I know.”

Again, a hawk pipes overhead. Otter raises an open hand to it. Jonas looks to see a red-tail sailing in the deep blue slice of sky above the river. By the time he turns back, of course, his friend is gone.

As is often the case in dreams, inexplicable changes manifest and improbabilities are greeted as natural occurrence.

The crash of water hammering stone has become wind in the trees. The river is a narrow wagon road, hard-packed and lightly rutted by infrequent use. Bordered by deep timbers and heavy undergrowth, the track is easy going, winding in a slow curve around and down a gentle incline into a wide, grassy meadow.

At the far end of this field stands the dilapidated remains of a barn, not quite yet a shambles, rather a forlorn shell fallen into disrepair. Its rusty tin roof looks buckled, one corner stoved in. The big double doors hang askew and the hay loft has none, gaping open and empty. Even at a distance the interior appears vacant except for shadows. Jonas doesn’t like the look of it.

Drenched, shivering with more than cold, Jonas plants his feet against the unflagging pressure behind him and waits just short of the barn’s lopsided doors for the low thing within to show itself.

It steps out of the darkness wearing Rubin Strawn’s face and a body far too large and muscular to fit it.

What was once Rubin’s youthful, cock-sure countenance is beaten to a fare-thee-well, lips pulped, jaw and one cheek smashed in. The eye socket is shattered, the eyeball poorly attached, shot with blood, useless. Stretched taught across that powerful body, the front of what might at one time have been a white shirt is scored on a diagonal from hip to neck, drenched in blood. Its left arm is shredded from the elbow like strands of gruesome pasta.

The thing’s one good eye is fixed on Jonas and a voice issues from its pulverized mouth, but it’s not Rubin’s high, fractured quaver. It rumbles, brimming with contempt.

“Surprised to see me, aren’t you, Two Dogs Fucking? That’s the name the children gave you all those years ago, isn’t it?”

Jonas’s scalp bristles. Ice sluices down his spine. The terrible, wild creature he thought had met its own appropriately violent death is before him, speaking to him as if in this moment, this meeting was somehow real. The crystalizing certainty the thing still exists beyond this dream realm and into the waking world is a stone in his chest.

“That ain’t ‘zac’ly a good look for you, Squirrel,” he says.

It scowls. “I’m not particularly fond of it myself. I just wanted to make sure you recognized me, that’s all.”

“Well, okay then. I recognize ya, nagi. Why don’tcha go ahead ‘n’ skedaddle now before I hafta kill ya all over again?”

An explosion of laughter and spittle from that ruined face causes Jonas to flinch. Loud, long, and dripping with an uncontained hilarity, the patchwork brute’s feral amusement leaves it gasping for breath.

“OH… ! Oh, that’s rich! You kill me, Jonas.” This prompts another bout of uproarious laughter. It winds down to a chuckle, a snort, a sigh, and an abrupt solemnity.

An impassioned moan escapes the thing’s mangled lips.

“Oh, half-blood, I have such exquisite plans for you. Before I’m done, you’re going to beg me to let you die.”

It laughs again, a humorless sound. “I’m going to shred your mind and spirit beyond hope of salvation of any kind and when I take you, you hapless meatsack, I’m going to allow just enough of YOU to peer out from behind your eyes to see everyone and everything you care about destroyed … by your own hand. And you know me, don’t you?” Rubin’s one good eye winks at him. “I have nothing but time.”

Stillness pours into the space between them. The monster’s hatred boils off it like steam.

Jonas lifts his eyes to it and says, “You still talk too much.”

Not-Rubin leans closer to sneer in Jonas’s face.

“I’ve worn thousands like you. I’ll wear thousands more after you’re worm food. But before I end you, I will fill your ears with the screams of those you love most.”

“Yer too late fer that, skinbag. Everyone I love is gone. Your screams will do in their stead.”

A wave of white-hot fury crackles in the air between them and the creature lunges. One hand a claw with talons, the other a bundle of thrashing tatters. One of them snaps like a whip inches from Jonas’s left eye.

Perhaps unwilling to be torn to pieces, even in dream-time, the thing falls back into the shadows with a withering howl.

The maelstrom shifts, beating the air around Jonas. He holds fast and the storm settles beside him, pooling into a single, silent shape. The blue-black of their feathers is her hair. It falls to her waist in waves. She smells of sweet grass and wild mint.

“Ina!” Jonas breathes, his voice and heart cracking open in the same instant.

The People do not wear their emotions for all to see as the wasicu do. Instead, she had pressed her elk tooth earrings into his hand and smiled her mother’s love into his heart. She wears that smile now and touches his cheek, a tender warmth.

Beneath their low, rocky perch, a gently rolling surf washes a beach of smooth pebbles. Sea birds wheel in the air above a stony outcrop and squabble over morsels out on the exposed strand. Diamond-bright in sunlight, the ocean surges against low, rocky masses capped with stunted, wind-sculpted trees and stalwart shrubbery. A ghost of land rises in the misty distance, a suggestion only.

“I know this place,” Jonas says. “I was here once, years ago.”

“Our ancestors, yours and mine, lived here long, long ago,” she says.

“I remember your stories of the Sneheeshniquah,” he says. “Many of them Father wrote down so they wouldn’t be lost; only now, I have no one to pass ’em on to.”

Her expression is remote, staring out across the water, as though she’s seeing something he does not.

“This land was much different when the First Ones lived here. The sea had not found its way so far in and it was much colder then,” she says. “Still, Grandmother was abundant.”

She shows him a beast, in a manner he doesn’t think to question, larger by twice than a buffalo and every bit as wooly. It examines him with curiosity. Instead of horns atop its boulder of a head, grand sweeping tusks bracket a long and articulate snout. Jonas saw elephants at a traveling circus in St. Joe when he was thirteen winters. This thing his early ancestors had hunted in this place were like elephants covered in a heavy coat of shaggy hair.

“They were easy to find,” his mother says and gives him a gentle smile, “but very hard to kill.”

Given their great size and the primitive weapons of those early hunters, Jonas allows as how that doesn’t tax his imagination much.

“In time, Grandmother warmed the land, the sea closed in to take the low places and the people thrived. They fished in the rivers. Some came here to the sea and they lived in peace in Grandmother’s arms … until the Others came.”

Jonas knows this part of the story too. It’s not a comforting one. It seems, however, Crows Come Around is not intent on that demoralizing chapter.

“When you and your father left us,” she says, “I knew your path would be a hard one.”

“I dunno. I just took one day at a time and strung a bunch of ’em together. Nothin’ hard about it. Hard part was not knowin’ what came of our people. My family.” The word catches in his throat. “You.”

“Changes come, my son.”

She extends her hand. The sun-drenched beach has been swept away, as if by her gesture alone, replaced by a land drop both perilously sheer and too near for comfort.

Beyond that precipitous edge, a turbulent dark sea churns under a pallid and unfamiliar moon. An expanse of restless waters reaches away into indistinct distance in every direction but behind. It seethes beneath a feeble illumination insufficient to suggest its extent.

Above, the single, sickly lamp hangs alone in a deep, starless emptiness. There are no clouds overhead, nothing to obscure its strange, dead light.

A very different kind of chill has enfolded Jonas and he stares into the nothingness above them. If he could slow the pitch and plunge of questions racing behind his astonishment to find words in any language to frame them, he would, but the void is a ponderous weight. He’s forced at last to look away before that trackless dark snuffs his reason.

Jonas finds his voice. “Is this the vision Grandfather saw? The world broken?”

“My father did not see this,” Crows Come Around says. “I did. This is the center upon which life and death will turn. Not only for you, my son, but for all.”

“All who, Mother?”

In this feeble half-light, his mother’s eyes mimic the emptiness above.

“All.”

Below them, the sea is liquid thunder. Breakers explode against the foundation of their rampart and perhaps it’s only imagination that makes the ground beneath Jonas’s moccasins seem to tremble with each impact.

“What am I s’posed ta do?”

“Like any of us, you can only do what you do.”

Crows reaches out to him. The fingertips of her left hand tap once upon Jonas’s forehead, her right on his heart. She reverses them and thumps an old, near-forgotten memory into him.

She lays her hand upon his chest. “Follow your heart, Wakiela. You cannot do it wrong.”

His arms enfold her. She lays her head against his chest and he breathes in her fragrance. How long has he dreamed of such a moment as this since he and Burns Red rode away from the band for the last time?

Crows Come Around raises on her toes and lays a tender kiss on her son’s cheek. “You have to go.”

His throat closes on words crying to be spoken. Like stepping through a doorway that closes behind and finding oneself in unfamiliar surroundings, the moment has passed. Whatever he might have said to her is released in a bitter sigh. The timbers supporting the kiva’s roof offer only mute strength and no empathy.

Fading is the sense of elation and wonder and dread and the warmth of her affection. Renewed is the memory of loss and the grief that always follows it, an old companion.

“That was a deep message, Jo’nas.”

Narregan is seated across the chamber from him on the stone ledge encircling the sacred space. His head is down, hair spilling over his face. In the faint illumination provided by the glowb beneath Jonas’s duster, he’s cradling his weapon in his lap. It looks smaller than Jonas remembers it, much less a cannon than it once seemed when trained in his direction.

“You… you saw that?”

“No. But I felt it.”

“Well, your English’s improved.”

Narregan reaches up, taps once into the hollow at the back of his neck. Jonas feels a single, painless start at the base of his skull.

“We slept,” the warrior says without looking up. “Takt-ot-sutoc did not.”

Jonas brushes fingers beneath his hair, encounters the small bud nestled in the hollow of his neck. Its petals are tough and seem to press back against the intrusion of his hand.

“Are you… all right, Jo’nas?”

Jonas shrugs away a familiar stiffness that’s settled between his shoulders. “Right as rain. The skinwalker’s alive, though. Seems proper to mention it to ya. He’s mad enough to chew barbwire, lookin’ for me in particular. How ‘bout you?”

Narregan flexes his damaged fingers in front of his face. Jonas watches him make a fist, unfurl it with a scowl, and lift his weapon into its open palm.

His wrist turns something this way. The business end alters by some arcane science Jonas is unwilling to explore until the whole is as Jonas recalls it, a segmented blunderbuss with a muzzle he could fit his hat into.

A spark within paints the floor near Narregan’s boot with incandescence, fierce in the semi-darkness. Ripples of heat waver in the air around the smokestack opening. A twist that way extinguishes the tiny inferno. The barrel retracts onto itself with a whisper and Narregan lays the handful against his armored right thigh. The surface molds itself to the weapon.

He works the slit in his makeshift poncho over his head. It drapes over his habiliment almost to his knees.

The last of his kit stowed in the square saddlebags, Jonas tests the lashings of his carbine scabbard and the demon blade bundled into his bedroll. He hoists the load over a shoulder. It seems weightier than he recollects it.

Narregan drags fingers through his mane, pulling it back with one hand, conjuring with the other a featureless mask from beneath his impromptu cloak. It seals over his face from jaw to hairline.

Jonas regards him with a sober stare. “Why the blank look, Festus?”

“Prudence.”

At Jonas’s recommendation to leave nothing behind, Narregan causes the glowb to dissipate, its substance dispersing into empty air.

◄ ~ ►

Cast your gaze down here, if you will, and see the lone figure whose trail leads him through forested hillsides. He remembers the smell of this damp earth. He’s been in this country before, at least two lifetimes ago. His name, if such matters to you, is Jonas. Who he once was matters less now than who he is becoming in the slipstream of events and perceptions far beyond anything he could have dreamed in his previous life, before the star people came and changed everything.

. . .

A single, staccato note, cut short, like a bubble of sound popping in air, punctuates the quiet. A lone crow glides overhead toward the northwest. It sounds again, an almost musical tone, too brief to be so, pitched to carry across the rolling, forested hillsides. Three more times, into the distance, the beacon reaches out, “Here I am. Where are you?” The farther away, the more plaintive it seems. A damp stillness answers.

His feet are on the path. It’s a well-traveled animal trail bounded by lush greenery, ferns and groundcovers, trailing blackberry, salal, and poison oak. Sunlight, bright and friendly, beams through the canopy in a hundred slanting rays. The way bends up and around great splintered stone outcroppings, broken teeth sprouting from mossy gums. Wind soughs in evergreen crowns. Ancient timber complains in slow, creaking rhythms. Small flickering motions at the edges of vision trill and chatter across verdant glens. Downfall litters the forest floor. A carpet of fir needles and duff flows underfoot with a silent, liquid quality. His way is clear and his progress swift and light. What’s bothering him, though, is not so much what’s beneath his feet, but what’s on them. For one thing, these’re not his boots and it would cause him some concern were he not surely dreaming.

There’s a few things a man knows for sure and one of them’s his own footwear. His are waxed, black Spanish leather, scuffed by stirrup and obstinate vegetation, dingy with trail dirt caulked into the permanent creases and a lash across the left toe from an errant strand of barbed wire. A little on the high side of three years old, they’re a finely-crafted pair of grafted, mid-calf wellingtons with a Cuban heel, made for him custom in the shop of Thomas C. McInerney of Abilene, Kansas, in the fall of eighteen and seventy-five. It took nigh-on a month and more than a couple hurtful blisters to break them in proper. Thing is, these ain’t them. Instead, they’re calf-high moccasins with leather thong laces lashed up Apache-style. There’s a braided leather cord bound around his right ankle, too. Although that bit of his history’s been right there with him for many years, somehow now it seems oddly out of place. Perhaps because the other end of it’s tethered around the left ankle of a figure beside him, matching his pace.

Tasnaheca, full grown and scarred, but alive and whole, shows Jonas a familiar crooked smile. Jonas breaks stride. The fetter between them contradicts their divided momentum, and both men blunder headlong, sprawling across the path.

“You were always the clumsy one,” Otter chides, brushing mulch from his face.

Jonas laughs aloud. “Is that how you remember it?”

“One must only see you to know it.”

“We must hurry. Do you remember how to keep up with me?”

The way turns upward. Bright sunlight through the trees defines a ridge and cool mist on the breeze weaves itself into the rumble and rush of turbulent waters. The path jogs toward the churning sound. A fallen log thick as an iron horse’s wheel has blocked the path. A hawk cries above. Jonas and Otter hurdle the obstruction as one. The cord between them drags on a projecting knot and Jonas plants his face on the forest floor. By the time he spits out a mouthful of duff and finds his feet, Otter, unfettered somehow, has perched himself a good stone’s throw away on a rocky prominence, laughing at him.

Water boils around the outcrop where Otter stands, an islet jutting from a cascading current, dividing it. Otter has to shout to be heard over the roar of the cataract breaking on its stony prow.

“You are the only one who can save her, brother.”

“Save who?”

“The piebald woman. She is wiya wakan. Your life and the lives of others depend on her.”

“Piebald woman…? I don’t understand.”

“Living among the wasicu has dulled your senses, Sunka Nunpa. Perhaps she will have to save you.”

There seems so much more to say, yet time is short. Jonas can sense it. “What of the People?” he asks.

“You do not yet know how far down this path you have come, brother, and I do not know whether to cry for you or laugh at you.”

“I miss yer laughter most, kola.”

“If I could walk this trail with you, Tanglefoot, I would.”

“I know.”

Again, a hawk pipes overhead. Otter raises an open hand to it. Jonas looks to see a red-tail sailing in the deep blue slice of sky above the river. By the time he turns back, of course, Otter is gone.

As is often the case in dreams, inexplicable changes manifest and improbabilities are greeted as natural occurrence. The crash of water hammering stone has become wind in the trees. The river is a narrow wagon road, hard-packed and lightly rutted by infrequent use. Bordered by deep timbers and heavy undergrowth, the track is easy going, winding in a slow curve around and down a gentle incline into a wide, grassy meadow. At the far end of this field stands the dilapidated remains of a barn, not quite yet a shambles, rather a forlorn shell fallen into disrepair. Its rusty tin roof looks buckled, one corner stove in. The big double doors hang askew and the hay loft has none, gaping open and empty. Even at a distance the interior appears vacant except for shadows. Jonas doesn’t like the look of it.

Heavy clouds have closed over the sun, great dreary shutters ushering in premature twilight. The stiff breeze rustling treetops earlier has become harsh, bending low the tall grass, and pressing him forward. When he resists, a gale hurls frigid rain at his back like bullets. Drenched, shivering with more than cold, Jonas plants his feet against the unflagging pressure behind him and waits just short of the barn’s lopsided doors for the low thing within to show itself.

It steps out of the darkness wearing Rubin Strawn’s face and a body far too large and muscular to fit it. What was once Rubin’s youthful, cock-sure countenance is beaten to a fare-thee-well, lips pulped, jaw and one cheek smashed in. The eye socket is shattered, the eyeball poorly attached, shot with blood, useless. Stretched taught across that powerful body, the front of what might at one time have been a white shirt is scored on a diagonal from hip to neck, drenched in blood. Its left arm is shredded from the elbow like strands of gruesome pasta. The thing’s one good eye is fixed on Jonas and a voice issues from its pulverized mouth, but it’s not Rubin’s high, fractured quaver. It rumbles, brimming with contempt.

“Surprised to see me, aren’t you, Two Dogs Fucking? That’s the name the children gave you all those years ago, isn’t it?”

Jonas’s scalp bristles. Ice sluices down his spine to his puckered asshole. The terrible, wild creature he thought had met its own appropriately violent death is before him, speaking to him as if in this moment, this meeting was somehow real. The now-crystalizing certainty the thing still exists beyond this dream realm and into the waking world is a stone in his chest.

“That ain’t ‘zac’ly a good look fer you, Squirrel,” he says.

It scowls. “I’m not particularly fond of it myself. I just wanted to make sure you recognized me, that’s all.”

“Well, okay then. I recognize ya, nagi. Why don’tcha go ahead ‘n’ skedaddle now before I hafta kill ya all over again?”

“OH… ! Oh, that’s rich! You kill me, Jonas!” This prompts another bout of uproarious laughter. It winds down to a chuckle, a snort, a sigh, and an abrupt solemnity.

“I knew you were out there. I could feel it. Just like I can feel you now… beyond my reach and I don’t know why. I don’t know how you survived, either, and I don’t know where you are, but you can trust me when I say that I will find you. And when I do…” An impassioned moan escapes the thing’s mangled lips. “Oh, half-blood, I have such exquisite plans for you. Before I’m done, you’re going to beg me to let you die.” It laughs again, a humorless sound. “I’m going to shred your mind and spirit beyond hope of salvation of any kind and when I take you, you hapless meatsack, I’m going to allow just enough of YOU to peer out from behind your eyes to see everyone and everything you care about destroyed … by your own hand. And you know me, don’t you?” Rubin’s one good eye winks at him. “I have nothing but time.”

Stillness pours into the space between them. The monster’s hatred boils off it like steam. Jonas lifts his eyes to it and says, “You still talk too much.”

Not-Rubin leans closer to sneer in Jonas’s face.

“I’ve worn thousands like you. I’ll wear thousands more after you’re worm food. But before I end you, I will fill your ears with the screams of those you love most.”

“Yer too late fer that, skinbag. Everyone I love is gone. Your screams will do in their stead.”

A storm cloud of screaming, twisting fury descends upon the horror in borrowed skin. Crows, a whirling mass of them, batter it from every side, shredding with beak and talon. Its screams of rage beat against the frenzy of their cries and the clamor is deafening. Perhaps unwilling to be torn to pieces, even in dream-time, the thing falls back into the shadows with a withering howl.

“Ina!” Jonas breathes, his voice and heart cracking open in the same instant.

She appears in every detail as he remembers her on that day, the last day of his life among the People. There was no tearful farewell. Not even a yearning last embrace, although he wanted nothing but to hold her and be held. The People do not wear their emotions for all to see like the wasicu do. Instead, she had pressed her elk tooth earrings into his hand and smiled her mother’s love into his heart. She wears that smile now and touches his cheek, a tender warmth.

“I know this place,” Jonas says. “I was here once, years back.”

“Our ancestors, yours and mine, lived here long, long ago,” she says.

“I remember your stories of the Sneheeshniquah,” he says. “Many of them Father wrote down so they wouldn’t be lost; only now, I have no one ta pass ’em on to.”

Her expression is remote, staring out across the water, as though she’s seeing something he does not.

“This land was much different when the First Ones lived here. The sea had not found its way so far in and it was much colder then,” she says. “Still, Grandmother was abundant.”

She shows him a beast, in a manner he doesn’t think to question, larger by twice than a buffalo and every bit as wooly. It turns to examine him with curiosity. Instead of horns atop its boulder of a head, grand sweeping tusks bracket a long and articulate snout. Jonas saw elephants at a traveling circus in St. Joe when he was thirteen winters. This thing his early ancestors had hunted in this place were like elephants covered in a heavy coat of shaggy hair.

“They were easy to find,” his mother says and gives him a gentle smile, “but very hard to kill.”

Given their great size, obvious strength, and the primitive weapons of those early hunters, Jonas allows as how that doesn’t tax his imagination much.

Jonas knows this part of the story too. It’s not a comforting one. It seems, however, Crows Come Around is not intent on that demoralizing chapter.

“When you and your father left us,” she says, “I knew your path would be a hard one.”

“I dunno. Just took one day at a time ‘n’ strung a bunch of ’em together. Nothin’ hard about it. Hard part was not knowin’ what came of our people. My family.” The word catches in his throat. “You.”

“Changes come, my son.”

She extends her hand. The sun-drenched beach has been swept away, as if by her gesture alone, replaced by a land drop both perilously sheer and too near for comfort. Beyond that precipitous edge, a turbulent dark sea churns under a pallid and unfamiliar moon. An expanse of restless waters reaches away into indistinct distance in every direction but behind. It seethes beneath a feeble illumination insufficient to suggest its extent.

Above, the single, sickly lamp hangs alone in a deep, starless emptiness. There are no clouds overhead, nothing at all to obscure its strange, dead light.

Jonas finds his voice. “Is this the vision Grandfather saw? The world broken?”

“My father did not see this,” Crows Come Around says. “I did. This is the center upon which life and death will turn. Not only for you, my son, but for all.”

“All who, Mother?”

In this feeble half-light, his mother’s eyes mimic the emptiness above.

“All.”

“What am I s’posed ta do?”

“Like any of us, you can only do what you do.”

Crows reaches out to him. The fingertips of her left hand tap once upon Jonas’s forehead, her right over his heart. Slowly, deliberately, she reverses them and thumps an old, near-forgotten memory into him.

She lays her hand upon his chest. “Follow your heart, Wakiela. You cannot do it wrong.”

Crows Come Around raises on her toes and lays a tender kiss on her son’s cheek. “You have to go.”

Still trembling from the power of visitations and revelations, Jonas swings his legs off his stony bed and rises, stretching his frame until back and neck crackle in a promising way. Smooth stone beneath his bare feet is neither cold nor warm. The air is tepid and heavy. Fading is the sense of elation and wonder and dread and the warmth of her affection. Renewed is the memory of loss and the grief that always follows it, an old companion.

“That was a deep message, Jo’nas.”

“You … you saw that?”

“No. But I felt it.”

“Well, yer English’s improved.”

Narregan reaches up, taps once into the hollow at the back of his neck. Jonas feels a single, painless start at the base of his skull.

“We slept,” the warrior says without looking up. “Takt-ot-sutoc did not.”

Jonas brushes fingers beneath his hair, encounters the small bud nestled in the hollow of his neck. Its petals are tough and seem to press back against the intrusion of his hand.

“Are you… all right, Jo’nas?”

Jonas shrugs away a familiar stiffness that’s settled between his shoulders. “Right as rain. The skinwalker’s alive, though. He’s mad enough ta chew barbwire, lookin’ for me in particular. Seems proper to mention it to ya. How ‘bout you?”

Narregan flexes his damaged fingers in front of his face. Jonas watches him make a fist, unfurl it with a scowl, and lift his weapon into its open palm. His wrist turns something this way. The business end alters by some arcane science Jonas is unwilling to explore until the whole is as Jonas recalls it, a segmented blunderbuss with a muzzle he could fit his hat into. A spark paints the floor near Narregan’s boot with incandescence, fierce in the semi-darkness and ripples of heat waver in the air around the smokestack opening. A twist that way extinguishes the tiny inferno. The barrel retracts onto itself with a whisper and Narregan lays the handful against his armored right thigh. The surface molds itself to the weapon. He works the slit in his makeshift poncho over his head. It drapes over his habiliment almost to his knees.

Jonas observes these things in the full light of the glowb as he lifts off his duster to pack it away. He knocks his boots against the rock shelf to shake loose the random scorpion. None appear and he leans up against a pilaster to pull them on. The last of his kit stowed in the square saddlebags, Jonas tests the lashings of his carbine scabbard and the demon blade bundled into his bedroll. He hoists the load over a shoulder. It seems weightier than he recollects it.

Narregan drags fingers through his mane, pulling it back with one hand, conjuring with the other a featureless mask from beneath his impromptu cloak. It seals over his face from jaw to hairline.

Jonas regards him with a sober stare. “Why the blank look, Festus?”

“Prudence.”

At Jonas’s recommendation to leave nothing behind, Narregan causes the glowb to dissipate, its substance dispersing into empty air.

◄ ~ ►

Crows Come Around Read More »

The Bones of It

Domains, The Riven

Her nav signals its disconnect from the trac pattern and glides the vehicle onto a well-maintained surface road. She resumes manual and squints into the middle distance ahead for a glimpse of something she’s never actually seen before.

It’s been a good many years since she was last in these parts. The nature of things everywhere guaranteed in advance she would find conditions gone downhill.

She had crossed over the ribbon of the Rio Grande half an hour ago on her way into Albuquerque, saddened to see what had been the life-blood of the central valley reduced by drought and an almost third-world level of management to little more than a trickle of sludge.

A few hearty cottonwood sentinels remain near the river’s edge and up the bosque, last representatives of the stands that once thrived there. The rest are desiccated and skeletal, choked to death by thickets of salt cedar—delicate, opportunistic invaders with a ravenous thirst and unparalleled adaptability to this environment.

Altogether the whole reminds her of nothing so much as a spectacular accumulation of tinder.

And there it is. A featureless turn-off from the thoroughfare, deliberately absent clear signage, gives the only access to an historically eclectic enclave community. The tribal police blockhouse and checkpoint appears to be unmanned. Her rig passes through like a ghost.

It is an island, disassociated by intention from the suburban phage sprawling outward from Albuquerque’s enchanted Old Town nucleus. The Pueblo of Sandia and its people have ever maintained their unique integrity, their scrupulous estrangement.

Their residences, modest, stick-built homes of a low, blocky style are arranged in a series of paved, asymmetrical loops. Without the quaint adobe huts the occasional naïve tourist might expect, it looks like any other dust-blown, low-income subdivision wizened by the high desert clime. Yet, there is something indefinably dismal in its character, a cheerlessness perhaps compounded by bare dirt lots, a meager scattering of sparse, haggard-looking trees, and the lack of any serious attempt at ornamentation.

She swings wide onto one of the perimeter streets near what appears a small, but conventional-looking Christian church. It’s marked by a workmanlike steeple and a couple unpretentious stained-glass windows. She steers to a stop at the curb just beyond it.

The driver-side door opens with minimal complaint and she steps, staff in hand, from the running board of her war-ravaged van into a hot, dry breeze.

She walks, penguin-like with a pronounced hitch, and she looks, upon approach and departure, like a red-headed apple. Hers is a chubby-cheeked, almost jolly, elfin face with a cataract of auburn hair churning around it. It’s the eyes that spoil the illusion of cheerfulness. The light in them is from stars that died before the Earth was formed.

Not counting the AIs, of course, less than a dozen people know her real name. Only three of them ever use it. Everyone else though, those who respect, love, or fear her, call her Ruby Bones. Some say she is a medicine woman. Others might use the term ‘shaman’. She will tell you instead, if you’re indelicate enough to inquire, that she’s just a crazy old woman.

Raw sunlight many would find uncomfortable warms her most agreeably. Barefoot in the coarse soil at curbside, she circles slowly in place, senses open, questing.

A directionless, droning buzz infuses the air. The mating song of cicadas is the sound of heat, a subliminal racket that bores its way into one’s calm.

There are no people, children, dogs… no traffic, nor movement of any kind, save an errant insect or two. If she didn’t know better, she’d think she was alone and the whole place deserted.

A voice abrasive as a rasp carries on the hot air, a single, emphatic caw. A pause and it comes again, insistent. A second voice like the first picks up the cry and then others, many others.

A congress of black-winged disharmony has formed a hasty council along the roofline of the church. In the space of a half-minute, the dreamy afternoon stillness has become pandemonium. She plants her staff beside her like an exclamation point, producing a single, sharp clack, surely inaudible in all that braying.

“No need to shout,” she says. “I can hear you.”

The convocation’s uproar scales down to a mumble. Blue-black flutters and cocked heads accompany a return to silence by all but one, a plaintive comment that might be an assertion, or a dare.

Ruby regards the baleful gallery and addresses its spokes-crow. “Thank you, little sister. All I needed was a whisper. Instead, you brought the whole choir. I am honored. “

“Yawp,” the lone delegate replies.

A masculine voice behind her is a surprise. “The welcoming committee is rarely so enthusiastic.”

Her turn is measured by the memory of how sudden motion transmutes a familiar and tolerable ache into misery. Despite the crows’ raucous caucus, she should have felt the approach of another.

Maybe twenty years her junior, the man has the unmistakable look of a pureblood; straight black hair past his shoulders, sun-hardened features, eyes dark as the underside of a boulder. His open, benign expression is an unexpected contradiction to a countenance carved in flint.

“You’re a good bit off the tour route.” His voice is pleasing, conversational rather than authoritative. “Are you looking for someone in particular?”

“As is often the way of it,” Ruby says, “I was led here. Can’t say exactly why, other than I’m to find two dogs.”

“That seems a curious charge.”

“I’ve learned to just go where Spirit directs. Sit, stand, turn this way, go that. Today I am here.” She extends a hand. “Most call me Ruby Bones.”

Martin reaches to lightly brush her fingers with his own. Nothing more, a formal act. “You may call me T’onja.”

“T’onja. A human being,” she says.

“You know the Tiwa language?”

“No. I don’t know anybody anywhere that does. You’re not afraid to touch me?”

“Should I be?”

“Recent history as a guide, most folks hold to the notion fewer people die from being too careful than not.”

“You are not masked. Are you not afraid the gonji might be lurking in me? In the air around us now?”

“I’m not afraid.”

Ruby’s careful turnabout and shuffle back toward her van is braced by the unique topography of her walking stick, a sturdy, twisted willow staff as tall as she. The hardened leather rattle affixed to its crown is a twin of the one tucked in her belt. Both contain tarsal bones of badger and shape a snappy syncopated rhythm to match her hitching step.

At the curbside panel she gives the recessed handle a firm yank. Its sensor engages at last and the door creaks itself fully open with a lugubrious metallic complaint.

Martin watches her wrestle with something just beyond arm’s reach, her rattles chattering as she does so.

Leaning inside just at the edge of tolerable discomfort, she reaches with her staff to draw something closer, her legs pumping air as she works to right herself again. She emerges dragging an old tan suitcase with one broken clasp from the conglomerated heap of her belongings.

She beckons him closer. Martin has a brief view of patterns in deep blues and greens as she withdraws a woolen blanket, bundles the fabric in half a couple times, and presents the gift to him in both hands.

“It’s no accident we’ve met here today,” she says.

He receives the gift with a somber nod. “I haven’t believed in accidents for a good many summers.”

Ruby closes her eyes and breathes in mid-day’s buzzing heat, the dusty smell of this place’s history, and a wisp of the river’s stench. She can almost smell the sense of honor and duty in this pueblo’s warrior come to meet her.

“Well, there are dogs about, sure enough,” he says.

“Could’ve fooled me.”

“But I suspect not just any two of them will do, will they?”

“I see you know how this works.”

Ruby unearths a water bottle from just behind the passenger seat and assumes a marginally comfortable semi-recline just inside the cargo door, digging her toes into the hot sandy soil to find a cooler layer beneath. It’s deeper down than she had expected. She takes a draught from the container and casts a meaningful glance toward the church. Martin’s gaze follows.

Among the congregation gathered atop the building, the lone representative utters a long, near-articulate remark and holds its place as the rest of the assembly vacates with only the sound of wings slapping air. Thermals rising from the baking soil lift them and they glide in eerie silence to the west and the river.

The remaining sentry calls down a single, sharp warning, hops along the ridge top and out of sight on the opposite side.

At the rear of the house of worship, a small door that should not open without the key in Martin’s pocket, does so and, from it, a myth given substance and flesh steps into the light of day.

The song of the cicadas, as hypnotic an intonation as ever cast itself through the air, ceases.

She is a vision, a stunning, painfully sharp presence of contrasts. Purest white covers her from neck to toes in something neither fabric, nor armor, resembling both. Her cloak, its cowl thrown back, ripples in the hot breeze. Her face and hands are blue-black in the sunlight, like raven’s feathers. She looks regal, a being of unknown purpose gazing at them across an infinite gulf.

A pair of large, powerful four-leggeds, each one the size of a man, exit the building close behind her. Heads high, they take in their surroundings, marking the presence of Martin and Ruby with little concern, testing the air.

The brindle spins in place, circles the woman once and bounds away at a gallop with the other on its heels. They round the corner at the rear of the church and are lost to sight.

The woman approaches them with an easy, feline gait. Two paces from Martin she stops.

Not a being of imposing, supernatural stature, she has to look up slightly to meet his eyes. He is careful not to meet hers, but mid-day sunlight dazzles on her attire and defines the sunburst embossed around her right eye. Martin knows this mark. The story of it is burned into tribal memory.

He swallows his trepidation with difficulty. His mouth is dry.

“I am T’onja,” he says to the kachina in his native Tiwa. His voice does not falter. “I am a person. A human being.” It is a ceremonial greeting, one he had assumed he would never have to use.

Once he had prepared words that might meet such a moment, but they are far away now and this is high ceremony. It has come upon him without forewarning, but it is his charge, nonetheless. An accurate record of it is now his sacred responsibility. He begins again to address the being before him, employing words his elders likely would approve.

She regards him in silence. He catches himself glancing at her tattoo, then into her rainbow eyes, and words fall away from him.

“I am T’onja. I am a person. A human being,” he says in English as an afterthought he doesn’t remember thinking.

“He’alowa, Tonjuh. Meliha a’chi, T’choct ot U’chah na. T’sunguc,” she says.

Martin is uncertain whether communication has been established. He touches a hand to his heart and says simply, “T’onja.”

She echoes the gesture. “I am Brin. I understand this speech, Tonjuh.”

Having never dealt with a power being before, Martin deems this an auspicious beginning.

“Since I was able to understand my rightful place among my people,” Martin says, “I have waited for you.”

The two great beasts come loping around the front of the building and straight on to bracket the kachina, Brin. They eye Martin and Ruby with quiet gravity. Their manner would seem stately if not for their rough, unkempt appearance. Their size is impressive, daunting.

Martin’s consideration shifts from one to the other and, finally, back to the Brin. She lays a hand on each rumpled head and speaks to the dogs bracing her sides. Her language is unfamiliar.

Wolfhounds. Martin’s not seen the like of these before in Real, but he’s seen images and recalls something of their ancient origins. His great grandfather thought them kachinas also when he saw them, power beings in the form of animals accompanying the others on their inexplicable sojourn among the People.

Dogs. Not mythical beings. That much is clear enough. This singular Brin, however… well, she is something else altogether, is she not?

She has half-turned away, scanning the surroundings with unhurried interest. The squatting bulk of the sacred mountain in the middle distance to the east holds her gaze for a long count. Martin’s attention is fixed on her profile.

The brindle takes a step, closing the space between them. Its manner conveys no threat and Martin extends a hand almost chest high, fingers closed in a loose fist, as he’s learned to do with any unfamiliar canine. The beast stops just short of his flesh offering, sniffs it, looks him up and down with an imperious detachment, then crosses the intervening space to where Ruby sits in the vehicle’s open side door.

She coos to the dog as he approaches and gives him a rigorous caress. He nuzzles her neck.

The fawn looks up from the kachina’s side with expectant eyes.

“Yoosh,” The Brin says and waves a casual hand toward the pair.

Ruby dislodges a wooden bowl from a substrate of accumulated paraphernalia within the van’s spacious bed and fills the vessel with water from the bottle still close at hand. The brindle’s muzzle is mustache-deep in the basin as she leans back to watch him. The fawn joins her mate and a duet of vigorous lapping sounds ensues.

The eccentric woman, propping herself within the van’s doorframe, seems to be disinterested in what may be the most consequential human interaction in recorded history. Instead, she’s refilled the bowl and seems to take pleasure in the simple act of watching the beasts empty it once more. The Brin, too, is observing them, her features in repose.

“Ruby Bones, I do not believe in coincidence any more than I do accidents,” Martin says, “but you have come seeking two dogs and here, beyond all reasonable expectation, are two dogs.”

The presence of these wonderful creatures is beyond expectation. Truthfully, she had no idea what to expect when she drove in here, but coincidence or no, the synchronicity of intention and manifestation in a matter of minutes is not remarkable at all; that’s just how Spirit moves in the affairs of one poor, pitiful, crazy old woman.

Besides the dogs, however, there is way more going on here than seems typical for this sleepy place. Whatever it is she’s swerved into was none of her business before she parked here. Now Spirit says she’s in it until it’s done with her.

The dogs, sated, whirl, circling each other with yips and growls, and sprint away. Ruby shakes her tumbling mane and chuckles as if mystified by the words coming from her mouth.

“These are not the ones.”

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. . .

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Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.

Copyright © David R L Erickson 2022
All rights reserved.