Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True Part 1

Enigmatic pilot: a tall tale too true.

by Kris Saknussemm

About the Author.

Revelation Creek, Dakota Territory, USA, 1869

A U.S. SEVENTH C CAVALRY L LIEUTENANT WITH THE UNGAINLY NAME of Mortingale Todd peered through his government-issue field gla.s.ses across the steep-sided flash of frothing ditchwater that on his still crude reconnaissance map had no name, and now seemed to be running much higher and faster than when he had arrived at the bank only moments before. of Mortingale Todd peered through his government-issue field gla.s.ses across the steep-sided flash of frothing ditchwater that on his still crude reconnaissance map had no name, and now seemed to be running much higher and faster than when he had arrived at the bank only moments before.

As a pa.s.sable scout and a skilled surveyor, his attention focused first on terrain, and beyond the many thoughts that were pa.s.sing through his mind-princ.i.p.ally the threat of a Sioux arrow ripping through his gullet and the likelihood of ambush (just the concept of ambush)-he was forced to accommodate a very unsoldierish, or at least un-surveyor-like notion that the landscape he was confronting was changing before his eyes in a way that he could not quite pin down. "How odd," Todd mumbled to himself (and whenever he used the word "odd" he was made uncomfortably aware of his name and memories of childhood heckling).

Rapidly rising ground always raises questions in a mapmaker's mind, and the young point man for his division was beginning to get consciousness-raising ideas that he felt were unmanly and demonstrated the lack of internal discipline that his father, back in Turnip, Illinois, had warned most of their neighbors about.

Indeed, they brought to mind a whole tribe of concerns and speculations that he had been doing his young man's best to suppress. Most of these circled their horses around the question of what he and his unit were doing in such a beautiful but hostile place-which now seemed to him to be simultaneously dishearteningly barren and lushly blooming. What were they really really doing? doing?

On the surface, it appeared to be a scout mission for the United States government. Investigation of further routes for railroad development-Indian reconnaissance and possible negotiation and/or a show of military presence, if not force. He acknowledged in a loyal, simple soldier way that his outfit's brief was not limited to one specific objective. General intelligence gathering would cover everything about the Dakota or Sioux people's movements and mood (and numbers, of course), along with more information about the land itself. Better maps. More detail. Weather. Wildflowers, even. Maybe.

Of course, there was the implicit and inevitable goal of acquiring more land from the Indians, or at least more control of the land-for naturally there was not going to be any more land made. Who could do that? He accepted this underriding purpose for sending organized military forays into the frontier. To push the frontier west and, ultimately, to dissolve the barrier. This was the infest destiny of America.

But then there was the shadowy factor of the organization calling itself the Behemoth Mining Company, which young Todd did not warm to at all. Back at the fort it had been undeniable that there was some relationship in play with this body, and he could not help but wonder what the true nature of it was and how the chain of command was supposed to work. Acting on behalf of such an enterprise seemed to run counter to his understanding that he was in the employ of the U.S. Army. If the Seventh Cavalry could be dispatched to represent the interests of a private mineral consortium, what other errands were his comrades in arms running-what other fortunes were they protecting? It niggled at his Turnip-born sense of the sovereign independence of his government. It made his government feel less his.

There were also the rumors-rumors not just about gold but also about some other kind of mineral hidden in the Black Hills. He had heard one of his cohorts in the mess tent muttering about a meteorite mountain just waiting to be dug up under the buffalo wheat. Other whispers suggested that it was not a mineral at all that they were seeking information about but some living thing that had not yet been described. Todd did not like this kind of talk. He felt it was not good for morale, especially his own. Unsubstantiated scuttleb.u.t.t about some unearthly substance sought after by a mining giant or some kind of creature unknown to science were not among the reasons he had joined the military.

Much worse than these stray yarns and tomfooleries, however, were some of the other things he had heard mumbled under the canvas of the latrine, between bunks, and under saddle cinches-vague, meandering remarks about things that had been seen and experienced, things that never were and could not be. Unnatural lights and sounds. Things Things.

But what outright got his goat were the scenes and interceders that he had himself witnessed. Of what tribe, for instance, were the supposed "scouts" who had arrived so late that night at the fort? They looked like none of the native peoples he had seen in the Territory, or anywhere else for that matter. He could not help but wonder what region they were native to. And what had become of the men-some of whom, presumably, were fellow soldiers, as well as mountain men and lone trappers-who had observed the strange phenomena sufficiently directly to report it, if only in dry, desperate whispers?

And why in G.o.d's name was this area not better mapped already? From the point of view of his particular skill, this seemed the most unexplained matter of all. Cavalry divisions had been pa.s.sing through for years-hired Indian trackers and raiders, outriders for the railroads, hunters working for the government, ant lines of brave and greedy settlers, prospectors, renegades, religious pilgrims, and certainly a few small teams of well-armed scientists. How else had the mining companies formed any plans? By all the rights of reason, he should have been braced in the saddle holding a much more detailed and accurate map.

Pleased initially as he was to have some sense of discovery and a chance to demonstrate his capability, it seemed outrageous to him that he had no more than what amounted to a stick-in-the-dirt scrawl that had been acquired not from a past scout mission or any approved federal expedition at all but from a saucer-eyed man he guessed had been a deserter in the War Against the South and had fled North and West to live with mountain lions and night spirits-whatever could stand his stink. That the wretched fellow had expired on the armory floor of the now distant fort at the end of some sort of epileptic fit shortly after unwrapping the sweat- and whiskey-stained excuse of the map did nothing to inspire further confidence.

No, there was something not right about all this. Something was at work in this region, between the Badlands and the Black Hills, that did not follow the pattern he had been accustomed to. Before he had crested the rise and come upon the creek, which was not where it should have been according to the map, or anything he knew about topography, he had had a creeping intuition that there was some presence in this area that posed a far more dangerous threat than any Indian war party.

Now, staring with rock-hard pupils through his binoculars into the wave of subalpine early-summer gaseous green snow gra.s.s, he knew with a solar plexuscompressing pressure that he was right. As his old chum Claudius Speerwort back in Turnip would have said, he was "s.h.i.t certain."

But before we consider what it was in his binoculars that had brought his gastrointestinal system so to the fore (and there is nothing quite as paralyzing-except perhaps a stroke, a heart attack, momentary blindness, or a pulmonary seizure, all of which he felt were impending), we need to understand that he was not just some young upstart in a stiff blue uniform a long way from the nearest outpost of encroaching civilization.

He knew a great deal about the biting scent of nitrogen in good soil. He knew how to shoe horses and maintain tack, and how to get an ox to budge and not bolt. He had shot his first pheasant with a turkey gun when he was but six, and he knew the perfect temperature for a root cellar. He had a fine eye for the constellations, and the sight of blood did not faze him. He made an excellent and not overly offensive-smelling liniment from fish guts and mallow, and he could recite no fewer than twenty verses of the King James Bible (one of which was on his tongue just then). He was decent on horseback, acceptable with a saber and a rifle, and superior at navigation, having taught himself back in Illinois. This practice, combined with his innate geometric leanings, had led to some not inconsiderable precision as a surveyor. Plus, despite his still tender age, he had savored and been scared by something of the bigger world beyond his father's farm, including more than a whiff of Lavinia Thorndike's bodice and at least a hint of the ravages of war-the War Between the States, in other words. (Was a truer name ever given a conflict?) While too young in his crick-back father's eyes to avoid his duties on the land at the eruption of the violence, he had finally risked being nailed to their barn door like a squirrel skin and run off ragtag-drummer-boy fashion to join what had become more a river running against him than one forging south and high. It was by then a tide of blood and a tide of terror spilling back northward. What he actually saw to the south was more the flotsam-let's-go-get-some aftermath of the crisis, but it forever dispelled any youthful fantasies about the n.o.bleness of battle. All too much of it would never leave his dreams.

He remembered a starving boy stealing an amputated limb from a surgeon's tent to gnaw. The horrors were as common as the bullet-flecked tree trunks, and no one took any notice. Some of those he watched, skulking and limping through burned-out orchards, seemed more machine than human-beast mechanisms escaped from some delirium. He could remember thinking to his young self, War is an excellent way of hiding deformities and criminal behavior. It is a harvest of madness.

Now, that may seem like an unusual thought for a young turnip-and-potato-growing lad who longed to ride horses and draw maps to have, but there you have it. War as camouflage, and a means of harnessing the energy of widespread psychic disorder. Perhaps young Todd was drawing a bigger map than he realized.

In any case, all these diversions and perversions streamed through his mind on the edge of that overly exuberant rivulet because of what he could not escape in his field gla.s.ses. Because of who or, rather, what he saw, relaxed and waiting for him as if his arrival had been long antic.i.p.ated.

He was looking at a still young man of around thirty, not much older. He was not an Indian-it was hard to say his breeding-and he was mounted on a donkey, but a donkey that was twenty hands high. The man wore some kind of military costume, but unlike any Todd had seen before. It was not a Civil War uniform. Nor was it was some old Mexican uniform from the war of 1845. When he looked more closely, he saw that the emblem on the man's chest depicted a wheelbarrow with flames rising from it. On the man's head was a kind of hat made from the pelt of a skunk. Then, to Todd's astonishment, the hat stirred and the young cavalryman realized that the skunk was still alive! The man was wearing a live skunk-like a hat. And a very ceremonious headdress it appeared, too. The acid in Todd's stomach roared like the creek.

In the Man Beyond's rifle sheath was a firearm that appeared to be made of gla.s.s and in his belt, like a saber, hung a weird-shaped hunting horn, while on the pommel of his saddle perched a powerful pure white gyrfalcon.

The thing Todd found unaccountable was that the man, the skunk, the hunting bird, and the donkey all waited as blithely as could be amid a large herd of smoldering black bison, the biggest Todd had ever seen. Even standing still (and as if at attention), the ma.s.sive horned and hump-shouldered animals looked more like fur-draped locomotives than even gargantuan ungulates.

Then, through the field gla.s.ses, Todd watched as the man raised his arm. The bison did not react, but the falcon flung itself into the air with a strength that Todd could feel all the way across the creek. Beating its wings ferociously, the raptor soared up over the gra.s.sland and came at him. The horse soldier was so surprised that he nearly dropped his binoculars. Faster and harder the fierce white bird came, so that Todd was compelled to reach for his Colt revolver-but then, by G.o.d, the man on the donkey waved at him!

Todd got distracted and had to duck as the falcon plucked his hat clean off his head. Unfortunately, in veering to escape the clutching talons the lieutenant slipped out of his saddle and fell on his a.s.s, which startled his steed further and made him see red for a moment. (In fact, the falcon had nicked him.) By the time he was seated astride his spooked horse again, staunching the faint trickle of blood from his hairline, the man across the creek was holding his hat. The man then offered the cavalry officer's brim back to the beak of the bird.

This time the falcon swooped out over the creek and released the hat into the water. Todd let out a slight cry at this, for reasons he did not understand (and felt ashamed about), and watched as the hat and all that he symbolically a.s.sociated with it surged off into the current.

Needless to say, Lieutenant Todd was discomposed by these events and blew a blast on his bugle to signal Sergeant Scoresby that it was time to come forward with his supporting battalion, which was poised for action about three-quarters of a mile away. Scoresby's men answered the call, but to Todd's dismay, so did the falconer. He raised the eccentric hunting horn and blew a deep, rich tone from it, more primal than symphonic-with amazing effect.

There had been no bison on Todd's side of the rushing creek before then that he had noticed-and it is very hard to overlook a huge herd of potentially deadly mammals. But there were now. More than he had ever seen, and he had by that point seen a lot. He was hurled from his horse. He felt his intestines contract and his breathing stop, and then the cowardice of grat.i.tude-for the flood of brutes had turned in the direction of Scoresby's approach, as if on command, and begun to pound their way toward the advancing line of soldiers, who had yet to make visual contact with this fantastic scene but could no doubt hear the vibrations. Faster and harder the monsters picked up momentum, rumbling toward the hapless hors.e.m.e.n like an avalanche of muscle. My G.o.d! thought Todd in panic. They'll be trampled!

But Scoresby and company had turned tail and begun retreating for all they were worth-for their split-second a.s.sumption was that Todd, being closer to the rampaging herd, had already been more or less obliterated. Later, a search party would be sent out to recover his mangled body. Scoresby had a very cut-and-dried approach to decision-making, with his own survival ranking very high. He rode like the proverbial wind.

Todd, meanwhile, was too unhinged to have a strategy just then (perhaps ever again). He was relieved, of course, not to have been ground into the gra.s.s, but he was also perplexed by the lack of dust in the air in the wake of such a torrent of hooves and horns. He had, as noted, never seen such large bison. And he had never seen so many bison of any size at one time. But he had most a.s.suredly never seen so many bison of any size disappear so fast. That concerned him-for a fleeting moment, almost as much as the dawning awareness of how alone he now was. For a man used to knowing and paid to know where he was and where others should go, he was now acutely conscious that he had no idea that he could trust anymore, save that others should not go where he was just then, and that he would have been very happy to be elsewhere-anywhere else. Even Turnip.

Nevertheless, he tried to compose himself in accordance with his military training-recalling as much the words of his scoffing, colicky father as those of his remote and safe captain. He had to meet the situation, whatever presented itself, with some semblance of dignity and astuteness. He had, after all, been chosen for this post and this particular a.s.signment. He took stock.

No horse. Comrades scattered. And...and...

If the bison that had materialized on his side of the creek were surprisingly no longer in sight, the others across the way were still very much in position. To Todd's utter consternation, they were now sitting as if awaiting instructions. Each and every last one of them was turned to face the man with the falcon, like expectant children waiting for a storyteller to commence.

The young soldier was forced to conclude that he was in the single most awkward, irritating, and sheer s.h.i.t-frightening situation he had ever been in. But he was wrong, for the next moment brought about a change of mind. A loss of mind, he feared. He had thought that the land across the water flow had been steepening, as impossible as that seemed. All too soon, however, he became convinced, because a ridge formed above and behind the man on the donkey...and others appeared. Not ridgelines. Others Others.

He had been prepared to see at any given moment the silhouettes of a Sioux scout party, but he was not at all prepared for the vision he was having now, still sprawled on the ground where he had fallen. The surveying and engineering training he had, his whole Turnip-raised practical hog-and-potato background, forced him to cla.s.sify the arriving visual information as a delusion-some pathetic personal breakdown in perception and courage. But the more he gasped openmouthed at them, the more foreboding his surmise became: he was confronting something-or, rather, things-that really were there. The shock waves of this realization shot him to his feet.

Appearing on the emerging hillcrest was a spiral chain of figures arranged in a kind of military formation, he presumed-but what kind he could not say. A severely worrying kind. There were Indians-Sioux and other tribes he could identify. There were also Negroes, but not dressed as any he had ever seen. They wore bones...and bright colors...and...there seemed to be some women, too. Various colors and races. He had never seen females arrayed for battle-if that was what this was.

But there were others...people like he had never never seen...hairy and dressed in animal skins. They held implements in their hands that he did not want to know about. He wanted to know less than nothing about those who were beside them. These could not be said to be standing, because they seemed still to be forming, as if out of mist. They had a human form, but it did not hold steady. There was an unG.o.dly transparency to them...and a profound blackness, too, like empty portions of the night sky called coal sacks. While he could make out individual outlines, these seemed to oscillate and blend, so that there was a forbidding aura of compositeness about them-like a crowd made of fog and gla.s.s that became something else. Something whole. seen...hairy and dressed in animal skins. They held implements in their hands that he did not want to know about. He wanted to know less than nothing about those who were beside them. These could not be said to be standing, because they seemed still to be forming, as if out of mist. They had a human form, but it did not hold steady. There was an unG.o.dly transparency to them...and a profound blackness, too, like empty portions of the night sky called coal sacks. While he could make out individual outlines, these seemed to oscillate and blend, so that there was a forbidding aura of compositeness about them-like a crowd made of fog and gla.s.s that became something else. Something whole.

What stood grouped beyond them-this was more than his mind could take. They were not human and never would be or had been human. Some he might have said were creatures from the past-beasts that he at least could imagine having roamed the land long ago. Others he could only think were creatures from a dream. Or a nightmare.

The one fragment of Army-trained thinking that remained was the slack-jawed, goggle-eyed question "What kind of troops could march against this this?"

He felt his being sag with the energy drain of it, and when he was able to blink again and hold his trembling head up, the forces across the water had receded and he was once more faced with the man from out of time, or mind, whoever or whatever he was, and his more familiar and comprehensible menagerie.

This sparked a sudden renewal of will and boldness in young Todd. Perhaps what he had seen come forth had been mere illusion. "Buck up," he said to himself-or tried to say. Yet what he heard in his mind but not in his own usual inner voice were the words Real enough, Lieutenant. Real enough Real enough, Lieutenant. Real enough.

The man on the donkey then produced what looked like an Indian blanket, white with a zigzag lightning pattern. This he tossed into the air, but it did not fall back to the ground. It rose and seemed to dissipate, becoming larger but diffuse. Seeing it against the sky made Todd aware again of how blue the sky was. Not a cloud on the horizon.

Now there was a cloud, for that is what appeared-and appeared to drift toward him. The blanket that had seemed to vaporize had re-formed thick and puffy, like those first little c.u.mulus ma.s.ses that are the harbingers of big thunderstorms. This sculpted single white cloud wafted over the creek until it was overhead. Over his head. Then, like a door opening, it let out a river of its own. Drenching, sopping, unstopping rain.

Todd, in spite of himself, tried to step away. He tried to run away. He did not mean to run, it just happened. He soon realized that he was weaving and darting like an idiot-trying to escape the d.a.m.n targeted rain! It was appalling and reminded him of trying to avoid the missiles of rotten apples that a bully back in Turnip had smacked him with. He had not thought of that incident in years.

This was humiliation of another magnitude altogether. No matter where and how he dodged, the cloud remained immediately overhead, the pillar of single-minded precipitation sluicing down. Against all his ambitions as a soldier and his deepest aspirations as a man, at last a cloud of another kind burst inside him and he began to cry, tears streaming down the length of his face, mingling with the raindrops. He finally stopped stone still and let the crying possess him. There was nothing else to do. He realized that he had surrendered.

This had a calming effect. A translucent ribbon of prismatic light formed before his eyes, and he pondered whether or not he had p.i.s.sed his pants. The pressure of the rain seemed to soften in response. The downfall became gentler and gentler.

He stared out through the glistening webs of slowing water into the rainbow obscurity before him, his heart thudding and his throat squeezed shut, wishing fervently that he had taken his father's advice and stayed behind the plow in Turnip, and not ventured forth into the wild Indian lands of the frontier-and definitely not into the more terrifying wilderness of this other frontier that he had stumbled upon, which before his dead-sober eyes shimmered with a dreadful surmise that he knew he would never forget for as long as he was allowed to live.

He glanced up and saw the cloud explode like a smoke ring.

The man-the Master-gave a nod and once more sounded the spiral horn. The bison that had been on Todd's side of the creek, that had charged off in the direction of Scoresby's approaching column, had all melted away. Todd realized that he had not given them or Scoresby and company any more thought for what seemed a very long time. But all those bulky grazers still in view now rose with a communal murmur and approached the creek-and then entered the water in ponderous, measured, military order.

In one enormous, sploshing, swaying, horn-to-tail double row of meat and hide, the lines of bison heaved into the current and formed a bridge-a bridge composed of living wildness. A bridge of composed wildness. A bridge he knew that he was meant to cross.

And yet he could not bring himself to move. He could not. He would not.

Noting this hesitation, the young master of the realm released the falcon once more. Todd watched it gracefully bank and swerve toward him. He planted his face in resignation and his feet in hope-that it would plunge at him at full speed and end this insane ordeal. But it stalled, with perfect coordination, just above his head, like a visual echo of the tormenting rain cloud, and then came to rest upon his shoulder.

Then he saw-he fathomed-to his deepest mortification and yet inestimable delight that the bird of prey was not a bird at all. It was a device. A piece of ingeniously integrated machinery more beautiful than anything he had ever seen. Yet it seemed so very, very real. So alive.

Was it an unthinkably clever but tragic copy, or was it something else? He could not say. It was no clockwork gewgaw, however well made. He had no category handy-no technology of mind to call upon. And the more he examined it, the greater his dis...o...b..bulation, adoration, and anxiety grew.

He grasped that the Master was somehow able to control the device-flying it like a kite without a string. But it did not behave like any kind of kite. It behaved behaved-not just obeyed. It had presence. And then and there an entirely new category of thought and existence opened before young Todd, because he saw that the falcon was neither a fabulous machine nor quite a creature, although it seemed more like a creature than a machine.

It was an expression of the mind of the man on the other side of the creek. A direct expression that intermingled with his own. The cavalryman recognized that how he thought about the falcon changed the falcon. He could make it seem more mechanical-a trick of some arcane industry. He could also appreciate its wild, living aspect. It changed as he thought about it. It was both more a compelling creature and more a sophisticated machine than he had at first conceived-than he could conceive. Thick walls between categories and distinctions began to dissolve. And he heard a voice, very distinct but unthreatening in the air around him: Come join me, Mr. Todd. Learn the secret of what you think of as the truth Come join me, Mr. Todd. Learn the secret of what you think of as the truth.

He let out a jet of wet flatulence in his long johns, which seemed so hot and itchy now that he could barely stand them. Then he stepped forward. By the time he had hoisted himself and begun to crawl across the tail-whisking, flyblown bridge, which snorted and shifted beneath him but still held firm and steady, any thought of Scoresby and company, or the Army that he represented and which was in theory bound to support him, was as far away as his horse. He did not want to look in the direction of the man awaiting him in the stretch of raw meadow beyond. His focus was to hold his sphincter clapped shut and to hope the falcon claws that remained fixed to his shoulder did not strengthen their grip.

Then, in midstream, he had what he felt was the strangest series of imaginings yet. If he had seen phantoms and phantasms before, and been confused by their palpability, he now had an idea that the beasts beneath him were not there at all. They were not simply bigger and more numerous variations on the falcon; they were something else. He was wiggling on his hands and knees across thinner air than he could breathe.

The resistance of the beasts' backs altered as this idea formed. He felt himself squishing and sliding. He had to keep going.

At the slightest hint of doubt, the bridge of skins began to fade beneath him and he felt as if he were falling at first-and then rising-for instead of a bridge of bison across the creek he saw blood-damp acres of their rotting carca.s.ses. Miles of buzzard-picked skeletons. Miles and piles. And, between the heaps of maggot-writhing tissue and sun-brittle bones, white people in alien costumes wandering oblivious, as if in a ritual. As if in a trance. Some ate food that looked like toys. Some talked to themselves or to little boxes. There were people in the little boxes, and the remnants of bison black with flies. Mounds of skulls. Crows and bones and tribes of souls-white people in bright colors and all the ground around black with dried blood. There were endless little pictures for sale, like pieces of a puzzle that no one knew how to put together. So many little pictures and little voices and little faces and little boxes filled with a noise like that of black flies. Wheels turning-wheels upon wheels driven by a hum, like the furious buzz of black flies in a box.

He had to keep going. He knew that if he did not keep his head he would fall either into the creek or into some deeper fit of madness than he was in already. He had to keep his head, and so he thought of his lost hat, imagining where it was-how far it would travel, what would become of it, what people would think. What did people think? He had to keep moving, just like his hat, which by then was very far downstream, bobbing along in the water the way it seemed to have drifted away from him in time. For time is a kind of river, it is said.

Which, to some, might well raise the question of where one goes when that river is crossed. Maybe time, if we could apprehend it, is nothing even like a river.

And perhaps Mind is not something we think with our brains that we possess and somehow are, and yet can lose in moments of calamity like a hat, but rather something both within us and beyond us, ever open to discovery...like a dark and shining territory...fertile, haunted, and filled with possibilities. Of all kinds. Of all kinds. The young dumbstruck officer kept crawling-hearing again those silent words: Real enough, Lieutenant. Real enough Real enough, Lieutenant. Real enough.

CHAPTER 1.

Time of the End WHERE DOES THE TIME GO? T THE YEAR IS 1844. K 1844. KARL M MARX IS IN Paris playing indoor tennis with Friedrich Engels, who has just auth.o.r.ed Paris playing indoor tennis with Friedrich Engels, who has just auth.o.r.ed The Condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England The Condition of the Working Cla.s.s in England. In Iceland the last pair of great auks have been killed, while in the booming and embattled United States the first minstrel shows are packing in crowds in the East, as former slaves Sojourner Truth and Frederick Dougla.s.s lecture on abolitionism, and hosts of eastern white folk are packing up and heading west via the Oregon and Santa Fe Trails. War looms with Mexico, the lunatic bankrupt Charles Goodyear will receive a meaningless patent for the vulcanization of rubber, the shrewd bigot Samuel Finley Breese Morse takes credit for inventing the telegraph, and a deluded mob murders the deluded visionary Joseph Smith, Jr., and his brother Hyrum in a jail in Carthage, Illinois. Many people are asking themselves, "What hath G.o.d wrought?"

One such individual in Zanesville, Ohio, was just straggling out of a peculiar iron sphere, about the size of three B & O hopper cars, which sat balanced in a cradle of railroad ties ringed at a distance of ten feet by an a.s.semblage of timepieces that ranged from hand-rolled, graduated beeswax candles to sundials of various descriptions, a tribe of hourgla.s.ses, and an a.s.sortment of borer-eaten cuckoo clocks-along with a once dignified but now gaunt and weather-faded grandfather clock that leaned into its own shadow like an old coot trying not to nod off in the middle of a story.

The bantamish man of apparently mixed breed wedged himself out of a fire gratesize hatch in the sphere and fished a pocket watch from his overalls. The watch casing was silver, but it had the dirty, worn fog of lead now. Still, the gears and springs gave out a satisfying report, as loud as the gra.s.shoppers in the grain bin and as strong and regular as a healthy heartbeat.

"Hephaestus," he heard a woman's voice insinuate. he heard a woman's voice insinuate.

The name mingled with the call of the clocks, which began to chime and ping and cluck, not quite at once but close, followed a silent moment later by an answering echo from inside the sphere, which caused the man's paprika-colored face to brighten for an instant. He heaved himself down to the ground, mopping his slick scalp with a handkerchief, and glanced up at the slanting August sun.

"Hephaestus..." he heard his wife, Rapture, call gently again. he heard his wife, Rapture, call gently again.

The man, who was now standing in the circle of timepieces, looked scrawnier than the bulk of his cranium would have suggested. A scarecrow that had turned into a blacksmith, you might have said, and this would not have been far wrong. His name was Hephaestus Sitt.u.r.d, and he was indeed skilled as a blacksmith, as well as a wood turner, cooper, tinker, and carpenter of great ingenuity (but no discipline); he was also a middling gunsmith, a dedicated fisherman, a maker of moonshine, a spinner of yarns, and a rhabdomancer (water diviner) of some repute. His white father had been the master mechanic responsible for the operation of a large cotton gin in Virginia until a religious vision prompted a change of career to Baptist preacher, a vagabond calling he set out to pursue with his son Micah Jefferson Sitt.u.r.d, following the loss of the boy's mother to peritonitis. This led to various digressions as a keelboat pilot, dance-hall tenor, tent boxer, and garrulous rainmaker. Along the way he met a half-breed Shawnee woman who was related to the great Chief Tec.u.mseh and fathered another son, to whom he gave the name Hephaestus because of one slightly clubbed foot.

This clubfooted boy was the man who now stood in the Ohio sun beside the hollow iron sphere he had forged and hammered together himself. The rainmaker minister and his half-Indian bride were long dead, and Hephaestus had been left with their crumbling ruin of rabbit-weed farm on the outskirts of Zanesville, overlooking the Licking River. Half brother Micah was believed to be a Texas Ranger who had taken a Comanche wife, but Hephaestus had not heard from him in years. His family now consisted of his wife, Rapture, and their son, Lloyd, and they were such a blessing to him that he thought of little else-save his inventions.

Unfortunately, he was afflicted with that American misconception that the world was in constant, dire need of a better mousetrap, and that he was just the man for the job. He had, in fact, invented several different kinds of rodent traps (over fifty at the time), as well as a series of wind-driven bird frighteners, an automatic fishhook, a foolproof tree straightener, a hand-operated drum-cylinder motion-picture machine (which had been dismantled by the local church matrons because he had made the tactical error of demonstrating the capability with some rather bold Parisian postcards that a man in a marmot hat had sold him in Cleveland), a flyswatter that could also be used for toasting bread, as well as a wide range of outside-the-box ideas for things like disposable dentures and the creation of a pigeon-winged federal postal system.

The mania had started innocently enough, as such things often do, when he was still a wet-behind-the-ears young boy and his father had come home wounded from fighting in Benoni Pierce's Light Horse Company at the Lakes in the War of 1812. Laid up as he was, the old man could not go fox hunting in the Moxahala Hills, which had been his great pa.s.sion, and so was forced to sell his beloved hunting dogs-or would have been forced to had not the young Hephaestus. .h.i.t upon the idea of using the dogs to run a drum treadmill to power the drill for gun boring. Gunsmithing became the family's primary source of income until the father died of pneumonia.

Now, years later, the sphere was by far Hephaestus's most ambitious undertaking. It had exhausted all his resources as well as his family's finances and patience. Yet he was intensely proud of it, although he knew there was still much work to be done-and so little time. Time was the problem, for the sphere was not simply a hollow iron ball. Oh, no. It was meant to be a refuge, a shelter, an ark-the Time Ark, he called it, or, in sour mash-fueled moments, the Counterchronosphere.

Although not a full practicing Christian, he had become influenced by William Miller, the numerically minded New York State farmer who had worked out that the world was soon going to end or that Christ would return, depending on your point of view. Miller, who based his theory on the biblical books of Daniel and Revelation, supported by calculations from Ezekiel and Numbers, had taken to sermonizing and lecturing at camp meetings back in 1831, and had since become a national and indeed international celebrity, with several newspapers devoted to spreading the word of imminent advent and hopeful paradise for the worthy.

Believing firmly in mathematics and partially in the Good Book-and being superst.i.tious about his wife's name and undecided about the question of "worthiness," Hephaestus had become a default Millerite-and a very worried one at that. After all, a comet had been spotted in recent times, and just the year before a dairy farmer in Gnadenhutten had found a cow pie in the shape of the Virgin Mary. Clearly, the world was working up to something decisive. So Hephaestus had turned the bulk of his attention to the problem of how to escape time and so shield his loved ones from doomsday.

Many exceptional minds and more than a few competent engineers would have been daunted by such a challenge. But not the Sitt.u.r.d patriarch. When not hobbling between the forge and the distillery shed, he pored over both engineering pamphlets and Scripture, devotional tomes and Mechanics Hall literature-anything and everything he could get his hands and mind on to help answer the eschatological call.

However, with the revised countdown on to the Lord's Return (the original Miller prediction had put it in 1843) Hephaestus was forced to admit that the technical issues were still troubling. In the evenings when he sat watching the fireflies blinking in the pea patch-his wife, Rapture, brewing some extract of wolf mint, dressing buckskins, or working at her spinning wheel; his son, Lloyd, cataloguing his trilobites or dreaming of his twin sister, Lodema, who had died at birth-doubts would overcome Hephaestus. It was when these doubts took their darkest form that the sphere grew hopelessly heavy. Gleaming in the sunshine now, it appeared to him to be c.u.mbersome beyond all description-ridiculous-so that all his reckonings, all his research, shone back in mockery from the surface of the hot metal.

"It needs to move," a boy's voice announced. "Time is a vibration. So the Ark must vibrate in time with Time-to become transparent."

As remarkable as it may seem, the speaker was none other than his five-year-old son, Lloyd, and as the boy spoke a wishbone and paper airship wafted around the door of the barn. Powered by miniature spindlewood propellers and guided by rudder wings of dried bluegill fins, the delicate machine floated above the goat pasture, then around the barn, and finally over the peppergra.s.s that surrounded their corncrib house, landing intact just beside the man's mangled foot. Hephaestus looked at the airship in dismay and then over at Lloyd, the craft's designer and fabricator, knowing that the ingenious trinket had been constructed in but a matter of minutes.

The child's inventive life had begun in the cradle (or so it seemed to Hephaestus). In addition to a hyper-accelerated acquisition of language skills, although small physically, the boy's manual dexterity was unnaturally adept while he was still theoretically confined to the old kindling scuttle that had been converted into his ba.s.sinet. His curiosity was inexhaustible, and by the time most children are just beginning to make sense of a rattle and how to move from all fours to wobbly legs, young Lloyd had already demonstrated an almost disturbing grasp of the principles of basic machines: the lever, the wheel, the pulley, the inclined plane, and the screw-even the mysterious utility of gears.

Inclined to wander, as well as to disa.s.semble and rea.s.semble anything his little hands touched, not long after his second birthday it had become necessary to remove him from the house and install him in his own dedicated section of the family barn, where Hephaestus kept his tools and maintained his blacksmith's forge.

Here the father had designed a kind of labyrinth to keep the boy's insatiable sense of experimentation occupied (and also to keep him somewhat protected from the prying eyes of visiting neighbors, whose dry, thick Zanesville tongues took to wagging whenever anything, let alone anyone anyone, out of the ordinary crossed their paths). This combination of protective and distractive measures proved to have remarkable consequences.

What to other parents might have seemed a rather dangerous obstacle course of materials of various kinds (the debris of Hephaestus's own inventions, miscellaneous bits of sc.r.a.p metal and lumber, spare tools, and the like) provided yet more spark to the boy's intellect and hunger for creation. To the blacksmith's astonishment, the miniature minotaur embraced the labyrinth and began turning it into a working machine of its own unique kind, so that he was soon in no sense constrained by it but using it in the prosecution of new discovery and manufacture.

"If I didn't know better," Hephaestus said to himself, "I'd say that he had somehow a very good idea of what a first-rate metal shop, carpenter's barn, and apothecary's formulary looked like."

It was not long before the supposed labyrinth become laboratory and workshop began to produce its own strange offspring-articulated puppets, for instance, brutish in appearance, perhaps, but subtle in their capabilities.

By the time Lloyd was four, he had produced a functioning aeolipile, a steam-driven monorail that ran from their house to the barn, a crude family telephone exchange, and an accurate clock that needed no winding. A rocking horse had turned into a simple bicycle, and a giant slingshot had propelled a meat safe over the river. The boy had even experimented with the use of primitive anesthetics while performing surgery on various farm animals. No wonder Hephaestus felt threatened-and the need to keep his son's innovations under wraps wherever possible. Zanesville was like that.

Lloyd Meadhorn Sitt.u.r.d had hair the color of rye gra.s.s, skin the color of river sand, and green animal irises that gave the impression that they saw more than ordinary human eyes saw. There was nothing childlike about him other than his size. His vocabulary was already immense, and his mathematical ability was that of a savant. (When Judith Temby, the wife of the dry-goods-store owner once remarked, "The tree is best measured when it's down," the boy replied bluntly, "You don't know much about trigonometry, do you?") After spending a single Sat.u.r.day with Mr. Fleischer, the knife sharpener, he could speak pa.s.sable German. The same was true for Norwegian and Spanish-and, even more remarkably, Chinese, as Hephaestus discovered following the boy's visit to the laundry shack down by the carriage bridge. From Hayden Zogbaum, the prodigy absorbed four full years of Latin and Greek in just four afternoons, in return for supplying the former parson with a serving of pork cheese (an Ohio delicacy made from the head, tongue, and jowls of a young pig, boiled with marjoram and caraway, poured into pudding molds, and eaten cold).