10000 Light Years From Home Part 18

"TEN MINUTES!" shouted a man with a megaphone. "Take your places, friends and strangers."

The Repentance people were filing in at one side, intoning an ancient incantation, "Mi-seri-cordia, Ora pro n.o.bis!"

The atmosphere suddenly became tense. It was now very close and hot in the big tent. A boy from the mayor's office wiggled through the crowd, beckoning Laban's party to come and sit in the guest chairs on the second level on the "face" side. In front of them at the rail one of the Repentance ministers was arguing with an Albertan official over his right to occupy the s.p.a.ce taken by a recorder, it being his special duty to look into the Man John's eyes.

"Can he really see us?" Mira asked her uncle.

"Blink your eyes," Laban told her. "A new scene every blink, that's what he sees. Phantasmagoria.

Blink-blink-blink-for G.o.d knows how long."

"Mi-sere-re, pec-cavi," chanted the penitentials. A soprano neighed. "May the red of sin pa-aa-a.s.s from us!"

"They believe his oxygen tab went red because of the state of their souls," Laban chuckled. "Their souls are going to have to stay d.a.m.ned awhile; John Delgano has been on oxygen reserve for five centuries-or rather, he will be low for five centuries more. At a half-second per year his time, that's fifteen minutes. We know from the audio trace he's still breathing more or less normally and the reserve was good for twenty minutes. So they should have their salvation about the year seven hundred, if they last that long."

"FIVE MINUTES! Take your seats, folks. Please sit down so everyone can see. Sit down, folks."

"It says well hear his voice through his suit speaker," Serli whispered. "Do you know what he's saying?"

"You get mostly a twenty-cycle howl," Laban whispered back. "The recorders have spliced up something like "ayt", part of an old word. Take centuries to get enough to translate."

"Is it a message?"

"Who knows? Could be his word for 'date' or 'hate'. 'Too late', maybe. Anything."

The tent was quieting. A fat child by the railing started to cry and was pulled back onto a lap. There was a subdued mumble of praying. The Holy Joy faction on the far side rustled their flowers.

"Why don't we set our clocks by him?"

"It's changing. He's on sidereal time."

"ONE MINUTE.".

In the hush the praying voices rose slightly. From outside a chicken cackled. The bare center s.p.a.ce looked absolutely ordinary. Over it the recorder's silvery filaments eddied gently in the breath from a hundred lungs. Another recorder could be heard ticking faintly.For long seconds nothing happened.

The air developed a tiny hum. At the same moment Mira caught a movement at the railing on her left.

The hum developed a beat and vanished into a peculiar silence and suddenly everything happened at once.

Sound burst on them, raced shockingly up the audible scale. The air cracked as something rolled and tumbled in the s.p.a.ce. There was a grinding, wailing roar and- He was there.

Solid, huge-a huge man in a monster suit, his head was a dull bronze transparent globe, holding a human face, a dark smear of open mouth. His position was impossible, legs strained forward thrusting himself back, his arms frozen in a whirlwind swing. Although he seemed to be in frantic forward motion nothing moved, only one of his legs buckled or sagged slightly- -And then he was gone, utterly and completely gone in a thunderclap, leaving only the incredible after-image in a hundred pairs of staring eyes. Air boomed, shuddering; dust roiled out mixed with smoke.

"Oh! Oh my G.o.d," grasped Mira, unheard, clinging to Serli. Voices were crying out, choking. "He saw me, he saw me!" a woman shrieked. A few people dazedly threw their confetti into the empty dust-cloud, most had failed to throw at all. Children began to howl. "He saw me!" the woman screamed hysterically. "Red, oh Lord have mercy!" a deep male voice intoned.

Mira heard Laban swearing furiously and looked again into the s.p.a.ce. As the dust settled she could see that the recorder's tripod had tipped over into the center. There was a dusty mound lying against it-flowers. Most of the end of the stand seemed to have disappeared or been melted. Of the filaments nothing could be seen.

"Some d.a.m.n fool pitched flowers into it. Come on, let's get out."

"Was it under, did it trip him?" asked Mira, squeezed in the crowd.

"It was still red, his oxygen thing," Serli said over her head. "No mercy this trip, eh, Laban?"

"Shsh!" Mira caught the Repentance pastor's dark glance. They jostled through the enclosure gate and were out in the sunlit park, voices exclaiming, chattering loudly in excitement and relief.

"It was terrible," Mira cried softly. "Oh, I never thought it was a real live man. There he is, he's there. Why can't we help him? Did we trip him?"

"I don't know, I don't think so," her uncle grunted. They sat down near the new monument, fanning themselves. The curtain was still in place.

"Did we change the past?" Serli laughed, looked lovingly at his little wife. For a moment he wondered why she was wearing such odd earrings; then he remembered he had given them to her at that Indian pueblo they'd pa.s.sed.

"But it wasn't just those Alberta people," said Mira. She seemed obsessed with the idea. "It was the flowers really." She wiped at her forehead.

"Mechanics or superst.i.tion," chuckled Serli. "Which is the culprit, love or science?"

"Shsh." Mira looked about nervously. "The flowers were love, I guess... I feel so strange. It's hot.

Oh, thank you." Uncle Laban had succeeded in attracting the attention of the iced-drink vendor.

People were chatting normally now and the choir struck into a cheerful song. At one side of the park a line of people were waiting to sign their names in the visitors' book. The mayor appeared at the park gate, leading a party up the bougainvillea alley for the unveiling of the monument.

"What did it say on that stone by his foot?" Mira asked. Serli showed her the guidebook picture of Carl's rock with the inscription translated below: WELCOME HOME JOHN.

"I wonder if he can see it."The mayor was about to begin his speech.

Much later when the crowd had gone away the monument stood alone in the dark, displaying to the moon the inscription in the language of that time and place: ON THIS SPOT THERE APPEARS ANNUALLY THE FORM OF MAJOR JOHN.

DELGANO, THE FIRST AND ONLY MAN TO TRAVEL IN TIME.

MAJOR DELGANO WAS SENT INTO THE FUTURE SOME HOURS BEFORE THE.

HOLOCAUST OF DAY ZERO. ALL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MEANS BY WHICH HE WAS.

SENT IS LOST, PERHAPS FOREVER. IT IS BELIEVED THAT AN ACCIDENT OCCURRED.

WHICH SENT HIM MUCH FARTHER THAN WAS INTENDED. SOME a.n.a.lYSTS.

SPECULATE THAT HE MAY HAVE GONE AS FAR AS FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS AHEAD.

HAVING REACHED THIS UNKNOWN POINT MAJOR DELGANO APPARENTLY WAS.

RECALLED, OR ATTEMPTED TO RETURN, ALONG THE COURSE IN s.p.a.cE AND TIME.

THROUGH WHICH HE WAS SENT. HlS TRAJECTORY IS THOUGHT TO START AT THE POINT WHICH OUR SOLAR SYSTEM WILL OCCUPY AT A FUTURE TIME AND IS.

TANGENT TO THE COMPLEX HELIX WHICH OUR EARTH DESCRIBES AROUND THE.

SUN.

HE APPEARS ON THIS SPOT IN THE ANNUAL INSTANTS IN WHICH HIS COURSE.

INTERSECTS OUR PLANET's...o...b..T AND HE IS APPARENTLY ABLE TO TOUCH THE.

GROUND IN THOSE INSTANTS. SINCE NO TRACE OF HIS Pa.s.sAGE INTO THE FUTURE.

HAS BEEN MANIFESTED, IT IS BELIEVED THAT HE IS RETURNING BY A DIFFERENT.

MEANS THAN HE WENT FORWARD. HE IS ALIVE IN OUR PRESENT. OUR PAST IS HIS.

FUTURE AND OUR FUTURE IS HIS PAST. THE TIME OF HIS APPEARANCES IS SHIFTING.

GRADUALLY IN SOLAR TIME TO CONVERGE ON THE MOMENT OF 1153.6, ON MAY 2,.

1989.

OLD STYLE, OR DAY ZERO.

THE EXPLOSION WHICH ACCOMPANIED HIS RETURN TO HIS OWN TIME AND.

PLACE MAY HAVE OCCURRED WHEN SOME ELEMENTS OF THE PAST INSTANTS OF.

HIS COURSE WERE CARRIED WITH HIM INTO THEIR OWN PRIOR EXISTENCE. IT IS.

CERTAIN THAT THIS EXPLOSION PRECIPITATED THE WORLDWIDE HOLOCAUST.

WHICH ENDED FOREVER THE AGE OF HARDSCIENCE.

-He was falling, losing control, failing in his fight against the terrible momentum he had gained, fighting with his human legs shaking in the inhuman stiffness of his armor, his soles charred, not gripping well now, not enough traction to brake, battling, thrusting as the flashes came, the punishing alternation of light, dark, light, dark, which he had borne so long, the claps of air thickening and thinning against his armor as he skidded through s.p.a.ce which was time, desperately braking as the flickers of Earth hammered against his feet-only his feet mattered now, only to slow and stay on course-and the pull, the beacon was getting slacker; as he came near home it was fanning out, hard to stay centered; he was becoming, he supposed, more probable; the wound he had punched in time was healing itself. In the beginning it had been so tight-a single ray of light in a closing tunnel-he had hurled himself after it like an electron flying to the anode, aimed surely along that exquisitely complex single vector of possibility of life, shot and been shot like a squeezed pip into the last c.h.i.n.k in that rejecting and rejected nowhere through which he, John Delgano, could conceivably continue to exist, the hole leading to home-had pounded down it across time, across s.p.a.ce, pumping with desperate legs as the real Earth of that unreal time came under him, his course as certain as the twisting dash of an animal down its burrow, he a cosmic mouse on an interstellar, intertemporal race for his nest with the wrongness of everything closing round the rightness of that one course, the atoms of his heart, his blood, his every cell crying Home-HOME!-as he drove himself after that fading breathhole, each step faster, surer, stronger, until he raced with invincible momentum upon the rolling flickersof Earth as a man might race a rolling log in a torrent. Only the stars stayed constant around him from flash to flash, he looking down past his feet at a million strobes of Crux, of Triangulum; once at the height of his stride he had risked a century's glance upward and seen the Bears weirdly strung out from Polaris-but a Polaris not the Pole Star now, he realised, jerking his eyes back to his racing feet, thinking, I am walking home to Polaris, home! to the strobing beat! He had ceased to remember where he had been, the beings, people or aliens or things he had glimpsed in the impossible moment of being where he could not be; had ceased to see the flashes of worlds around him, each flash different, the jumble of bodies, shapes, walls, colors, landscapes-some lasting a breath, some changing pell-mell-the faces, limbs, things poking at him; the nights he had pounded through, dark or lit by strange lamps, roofed or unroofed; the days flashing sunlight light, gales, dust, snow, interiors innumerable, strobe after strobe into night again; he was in daylight now, a hall of some kind; I am getting closer at last, he thought, the feel is changing-but he had to slow down, to check; and that stone near his feet, it had stayed there some time now, he wanted to risk a look but he did not dare, he was so tired, and he was sliding, was going out of control, fighting to kill the merciless velocity that would not let him slow down; he was hurt, too, something had hit him back there, they had done something, he didn't know what, back somewhere in the kaleidoscope of faces, arms, hooks, beams, centuries of creatures grabbing at him-and his oxygen was going, never mind, it would last-it had to last, he was going home, home! And he had forgotten now the message he had tried to shout, hoping it could be picked up somehow, the important thing he had repeated; and the thing he had carried, it was gone now, his camera was gone too, something had torn it away-but he was coming home!

Home! If only he could kill this momentum, could stay on the failing course, could slip, scramble, slide, somehow ride this avalanche down to home, to home-and his throat said Home!-said Kate, Kate! And his heart shouted, his lungs almost gone now, as his legs fought, fought and failed, as his feet gripped and skidded and held and slid, as he pitched, flailed, pushed, strove in the gale of timerush across s.p.a.ce, across time, at the end of the longest path ever: the path of John Delgano, coming home.

FOREVER TO A HUDSON BAY BLANKET.

Dov Rapelle was a nice person, personally. He was so nice you didn't notice that he wasn't overpoweringly bright in a survival sense. He also owned a long skier's body and a lonesome dreamy Canuck face that he got from his fifth grandfather who came out to Calgary, Alberta as a dowser. By the time the face came down to Dov a solid chunk of Alberta Hydroelectric came with it. But the Rapelles lived plain; Calgary, Alberta was one of the few places in the twenty-first century where a young man could be like Dov and not be spoiled silly.

Calgary has the tallest water-tower on the continent, you know, and all that tetra-wheat and snow-sports money. And it's a long way from the Boswash and San Frangeles style of life. People from Calgary still do things like going home to see their folks over winter vacation. And in Calgary you aren't used to being phoned up by strange girls in Callao, Peru at 0200 Christmas morning.

The girl was quite emotional. Dov kept asking her name and she kept crying and sobbing, "Say something, Dovy, Dovy, please!" She had a breathy squeak that sounded young and expensive.

"What should I say?" asked Dov reasonably.

"Your voice, oh, Dovy!" she wept, "I'm so far away! Please, please talk to me, Dovy!"

"Well, look," Dov began, and the phone went dead.

When his folks asked him what that was he shrugged and grinned his nice grin. He didn't get it.

Christmas was on Monday. Wednesday night the phone rang again. This time the operator was French, but it was clearly the same girl."Dovy? Dovy Rapelle?" She was breathing hard.

"Yeah, speaking. Who's this?"

"Oh, Dovy. Dovy! Is that really you?"

"Yeah, it's me. Look, did you call before?"

"Did I?" she said vaguely. And then she started crying "Oh Dovy, oh Dovy," and it was the same dialogue all over again until the line quit.

He did not get it.

By Friday Dov was beginning to feel hemmed in, so he decided to go check on their cabin on Split Mountain. The Rapelles were not jetbuggy types; they liked peace and quiet. Dov took his plain old four-wheeler out behind Bragg Creek into the pa.s.s as far as the plows had been and then he put on his pack and skis and started breaking trail. The snow was perfect, dry and fast. In no time he was up past the bare aspens and larches and into the high spruce woods.

He came out on the moraine by the lake at sundown. The snow was heavily wind-drifted here. He cut across bare ice and found the front of the cabin buried under a six-foot overhang of snow. It was about dark by the time he'd shoveled in and got a fire going from the big woodpile in back. He was bringing in his second bucket of snow to melt when he heard the chunka-chunka of a copter coming through the pa.s.s.

It zoomed over the clearing and hovered. Dov could see two heads bobbing around inside. Then it settled down twenty yards away sending a wave of white all over and somebody tumbled out.

The first thing Dov thought of was trouble at home. The next thing was his fire. He had just turned to go put it out when he realized the chopper was lifting back up.

It went up like a yak in a feather factory. Through the blizzard Dov saw a small pale body floundering toward him.

"Dovy! Dovy! Is that you?"

It was the girl, or at least her voice.

She was stumbling like crazy, up to her crotch in the snow in the fading light. Just as Dov reached her she went down on all fours and all he could see was her little stark-bare pink a.s.s sticking up with a glittery-green thing on one cheek. And about a yard of silver hair.

"Yo ho," he said involuntarily, which is a Stonie Indian phrase meaning "Behold!"

She turned up a pretty baby face with a green jewelbug on the forehead.

"It's you!" she sneezed. Her teeth were chattering.

"You're really not dressed for snow," Dov observed. "Here." He reached down and scooped her up and toted her indoors, snow and green b.u.t.terflies and rosy a.s.s and all. His frosty pink Christmas cake with a razorblade inside.

When he got the lamp going she turned out to be as naked in front as she was in back, and about sixteen at the oldest. A kid, he decided, on some kind of spinout. While he wrapped her in his Hudson Bay blanket he tried to recall where he could have met her. No success. He plonked her on the snowshoe chair and built up the fire. She kept sniffling and chattering, but it wasn't very informational.

"Oh, Dovy, Dovy, it's you! D-Dovy! Speak to me. Say something, please, Dovy!"

"Well, for starters-"

"Do you like me? I'm attractive, amn't I?" She opened the blanket to look at herself. "I mean, am I attractive to you? Oh, Dovy, s-say something! I've come so far, I chartered three jets, I, I-oh, Dovy d-darling!"

And she exploded out of the blanket into his arms like a monkey trying to climb him, whimpering "Please, Dovy, love me," nuzzling, squirming her little body, shivering and throbbing and pushing cold little fingers into his snowsuit, under his belt. "Please, Dovy, please, there isn't much time. Love me."To which Dov didn't respond quite as you'd expect. Because it so happened that this cabin had been the prime scene of Dov's early fantasy life. Especially the winter fantasy, the one where Dovy was snuggled in the blankets watching the fire gutter out and listening to the storm howl ... and there comes a feeble scratching at the door... and it turns out to be a beautiful lost girl, and he has to take off all her clothes and warm her up all over and wrap her up in the Hudson Bay blanket... and he's very tender and respectful but she knows what's going to happen, and later he does all kinds of things to her on the blanket. (When Dov was fourteen he could only say the words Hudson Bay blanket in a peculiar hoa.r.s.e whisper.) The girl in one version was a redhead named Georgiana Ochs, and later on he actually did get Georgiana up to the cabin where they spent a weekend catching terrible colds. Since then the cabin had been the site of several other erotic enactments, but somehow it never came up to the original script.

So now here he was with the original script unrolling around him but it still wasn't quite right. In the script Dov undressed the girl, Dov's hands did the feeling-out. The girl's part called for trembling appreciation, all right. But it didn't call for shinnying up him like a maniac or grabbing his d.i.c.k in ice-cold paws.

So he stood for a minute with his hands squeezing her baby b.u.t.tocks, deliberately holding her away from his crotch until something communicated and she looked up, panting.

"Wait, oh," she gasped, and frowned crossly, apparently at herself. "Please ,.. I'm not crazy, Dovy, I-I-".