Текст книги "Ancient Shores"

Автор книги: Jack McDevitt

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 20 (всего у книги 20 страниц)

“You can see what’s happening here,” Markey told his microphone. “Walter Asquith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature last year, has been shot.”

Asquith? thought Gibson. My God. There’ll be hell to pay.

The linebacker knelt beside Asquith, trying to stop the bleeding, while a man with a gray beard tried to make him comfortable. “You guys got a medic here anywhere?” the woman demanded as an ambulance pulled up.

Asquith’s eyes were glazed, and he died clutching the linebacker’s sleeve.

The body was placed in the back of the ambulance. After the vehicle drove away, Gibson came forward and identified himself. “I’ll have to ask you people to come with me.”

“Why?” asked the man with the beard. He was of about average height, and the cast of his features suggested a mild temper, but he confronted the marshal with barely suppressed rage. “So you can go on with your war?”

Gibson stared back. Nothing was easy anymore.

“Just arrest the whole bunch,” said Elizabeth, keeping her voice down.

“Who are you?” Gibson asked the man who had spoken. He had recognized two of the visitors but not this one.

“Stephen Jay Gould,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. The camera moved in, and the spotlight illuminated him for the national audience. “I don’t think we’re going to cooperate. If the government wants to kill anyone else, it’ll have to start with us.”

They were beginning to line up now, forming a human buffer between the sides.

“Gould,” Ben told the microphone, “is a paleontologist.”

The camera panned to a tall, aristocratic figure.

“Charles Curran,” Ben said, holding the mike for him. “Theologian.”

Curran might have been preparing to discipline a disorderly child. “This is more than a dispute about property rights,” he said. “Johnson’s Ridge doesn’t belong to one government, or even to all governments. It belongs to everybody.” He looked directly into the camera. “Tonight, its protectors are under siege. To that degree, we are all under siege.”

“Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Historian.”

Schlesinger’s brown eyes flashed behind hornrimmed glasses. Gibson had a sudden sense of the uselessness of his fire power.

“Scott Carpenter. Astronaut.”

Max’s copilot. Still looking capable of riding into orbit, he nodded to the invisible audience.

“Gregory Benford. Astrophysicist and novelist.”

Benford was of medium height, bearded, wearing an oversized hunting jacket that he’d probably borrowed. He scarcely looked at Gibson. Then he waved the chairman forward. Walker tentatively took his place in the line.

“James Walker. Leader of the Mini Wakan Oyaté. The People of the Spirit Lake.”

“Thank you,” Walker said, looking left and right.

“Harry Markowitz. Economist.”

Markowitz folded his arms in silent defiance.

“Richard Wilbur. Poet.”

Wilbur nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere, tracking the geometry between the artifact and the surrounding hills, as if the pattern were familiar, something he recognized.

“David Schramm. Astrophysicist.”

The linebacker. He was covered with Asquith’s blood.

“Stephen Hawking. Physicist.”

Like some of the others, Hawking did not look properly dressed for the weather, as if he had been snatched from doing something else, in a warmer climate, and thrust on a plane. His eyes measured Gibson coldly.

“Walter Schirra. Astronaut.”

Brown eyes, square jaw, medium size. Gibson knew Schirra, had read somewhere that he was one of the most gregarious and good-humored of the astronauts. But there was no sign of easy congeniality today.

“Ursula K. Le Guin. Novelist.”

She stood staring at the place where Asquith had fallen. She too was stained with his blood.

“And Carl Sagan. Astronomer.”

Like the others, Sagan seemed angry, frustrated, his signature optimism jolted by events. “Walter Asquith,” he said, “was also with us on this journey. Walter was a poet.”

“You know,” said Gibson, in a low, dangerous voice, “you people are not above the law.”

“Sometimes the law is stupid,” said Markowitz.

April Cannon appeared and took her place between Schirra and Hawking.

Gibson was already formulating what he was going to say to his superiors.

33

Our song will enter

That distant land….

–Southern Paiute poem

They spent the evening camped on the other side of the port, along the shore of the unnamed sea. Sagan and Schramm lay with their heads propped on backpacks looking up at strange constellations; Carpenter, Wilbur, Hawking, Benford, and Schirra sat by a dying fire, talking little, listening to the murmur of the tide, feeling, perhaps, what people have always felt when they’ve been washed up on an unknown coast. LeGuin, Curran, and Walker had tossed off their shoes and walked out into the water, where they wondered what lay on the other side. Schlesinger, Gould, and Markowitz were comparing notes with April on the transportation system that had brought them here, and what its adaptation to local use might mean. “The end of the city,” said Markowitz.

Gould was not so sure. “Cities have a social utility, if only as places to get away from,” he suggested.

Max stood off to one side, intimidated, until April noticed and handed him a Coke, bringing him within the circle of friends. “I don’t know whether we thanked you,” she said. “None of this would have happened without you.”

Markowitz laughed and put an arm around him. “Yes, Max,” he said. “Like it or not, you got us here. Whatever happens from this point on, you are responsible.”

“The real question,” Sagan said later, when it had grown cool and they’d all moved close to the fire, “is, where do we go from here?”

“How do you mean?” asked April.

“I think he means,” said Wilbur, “that the government has a point. And I believe he’s right.”

“I agree,” said Schirra. “If we exploit the Roundhouse, we move completely outside human experience. For one thing, we’re going to have to have a whole new type of economy. Wouldn’t you say, Harry?”

Markowitz nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “But we can prepare for it. Adapt to it.” He smiled and pointed out to sea. “The future lies that way.”

“We,” said Hawking, speaking through his electronics, “have incurred a responsibility. After all, we took it upon ourselves to make a decision today. I don’t see how we can back away now.”

The air moved. The long shoreline curved beneath the stars.

“But there are risks,” said Walker.

Curran nodded. “The risks are proportionately high, as are the fears.” He grinned. “We may have a lot to answer for.”

“We have nothing to fear,” said Schramm.

“Stephen is right,” Schlesinger said. “We’re looking at a new world. New worlds are always hard on old ideas.”

Benford opened a box of marshmallows, stuck one on the end of a stick, and put it over the flame. “Are we saying that we should lead the charge?”

“I think you have to,” said Max.

Several faces turned in his direction. They looked, he thought, not uncomfortable with the prospect. LeGuin poked at the fire. It crackled, and a cloud of sparks rose into the night. “It seems arrogant,” she said.

Schramm opened two beers and passed one to Benford. “Of course it is. But I think we might need a little arrogance here.”

“We might not be around to help,” said Curran. “I’m not sure yet, but I think we committed a federal offense out there last night.”

Sagan smiled. “I don’t think we need worry. Matt Taylor’s going to need all the help he can get.”

“Yeah,” said April. “I’d really like to help the President. He almost got us killed.”

“He was in a box,” said Schlesinger. “Right now everyone in the world may be in a box, and we’ve helped put them there.”

“I agree,” said Hawking. “And I think we should begin to consider how to get them out.”

Benford nodded. “For a start, we need some positive PR.”

“Precisely,” said the chairman, who had seen a demonstration that day of the power of public relations.

“Maybe a TV show,” said April. “Let people know what this place really is. What it can mean.”

“And what the risks are,” suggested Carpenter. “We need to be honest. Speaking of which—” He looked at Walker. “What about the Sioux? Are you willing to help?”

All eyes turned toward the tribal chairman. “I think we will insist that this world not be turned into a second North America. And we will control the use of the port to that end. Beyond that, yes, we will be proud to help.”

The Horsehead Nebula was in the northern sky, out over the sea. The illusion that it was an approaching storm was very strong.

“We’ll have our hands full,” said Schirra.

They looked at the stars, listened to the wind coming off the sea, felt the warmth of the fire on their faces. “I wish we could all have made it,” said LeGuin.

Wilbur nodded. His eyes were lost in shadow. “I have Asquith’s notes on this project.”

“Enough to publish?” asked Hawking.

“Oh, yes.” Wilbur reached behind him for a jacket and pulled it around his shoulders. “And it’s pretty good stuff. Maybe, in the end, he’ll outlive us all.”

EPILOGUE

April Cannon watched her duffel bag disappear in a blaze of light. Her seven companions (one of whom was her retired boss, Harvey Keck) were making last-minute checks of equipment.

She turned to Max. “You’re sure you don’t want to come?” She was lovely in the green-tinged light.

“No,” he said. “I don’t like surprises, and I think you’re going to find a lot of them out there.”

She touched his arm. “We’ll be careful.”

They were planning on exploring the links to the Eden terminus. The expedition had an ample supply of food and water. They carried pressure suits and oxygen masks and contamination test kits and spare parts and a wide array of sensing equipment. If everything went well, they would be back in two weeks with a wealth of detail about the worlds beyond Eden. (For the time being, at least, the Maze was being left alone.)

“Max,” she asked, “what are you going to do? Buy an island in the Bahamas and retire?”

He grinned. “I’m going to try to track down our visitor.”

She shivered. “It seems to be gone now,” she said. “I’d let it be.”

“I think we have an obligation to try to find it.”

“An obligation to whom?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe to the creature. I have a certain fondness for it.”

“It might be dangerous.”

“Maybe. But we know it has a sense of humor. And it rescues kids. I’d like very much to talk with it.”

Harvey signaled her. Ready to go.

“Be careful, Max,” she said.

“Sure.” He was having a little trouble with his voice. “You too. Come back, okay?”

“Count on it.” She moved suddenly, unexpectedly, into his arms, warm and yielding, and turned her face up. He kissed her, long and deep and wet.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

Lake Agassiz existed. I’ve taken a liberty or two with the shoreline, but other than that I’ve tried not to assault the facts unduly. Anyone who cares to may fly over the western limits of the valley of the Red River of the North, up near the Canadian border, and the ancient coast will be quite visible.

“Lightnings in the Sky,” in Chapter 2, is quoted from P—38 Lightning in Action, by Larry Davis. Reprinted courtesy of Squadron/Signal Publications.

Native-American poetry epigraphs are from American Poetry Volume Two: Melville to Stickney, American Indian Poetry, Folk Songs and Spirituals (New York: Library of America, 1993); George Copway, Life, History, and Travels of Kah-Ge-Ga-Gah-Bowh (1847) (Chapter 25); John Mason Browne, “Indian Medicine,” Atlantic Monthly (1866) (Chapter 26); Fannie Reed Giffen, Oo-Mah-Ha-Ta-Wa-Tha (1898) (Chapter 29); Don D. Fowler and Catherine S. Fowler, eds., Anthropology of the Numa: John Wesley Powell’s Manuscripts on the Numic Peoples of Western North America, 1868—1880 (Smithsonian Institution Press, 1971) (Chapter 33).

Excerpt from “Sonnet III,” George Santayana, The Complete Poems of George Santayana (Bucknell University Press, 1979) (Chapter 22). Reprinted by permission.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to express special appreciation to those who graciously allowed their fictional alter egos to be flown into a desperate situation during the closing chapters. Also, I am indebted to Galen Hall and Brian Cole for their comments on an early version of the manuscript; to Major Jim Clark, U.S. Air Force (retired), and John Goff, for technical advice; to Lorna Sharp, at the Devil’s Lake Sioux reservation in North Dakota; to Christopher Schelling at HarperCollins, and Sue Warga for editorial assistance; to my wife and in-house editor, Maureen, who maintains a sense of humor about it all. And to Jim Karas, who first called Lake Agassiz to my attention.

About the Author

JACK MCDEVITT is the author of A Talent for War, The Engines of God, and numerous prize-winning short stories. He has served as an officer in the U.S. Navy, taught English and literature, and worked for the U.S. Customs Service in North Dakota and Georgia.