“Deep in the ground was the thunderbird. It had dug down into the roots of the mountain to escape the sun, but the sun had killed it anyway. The man of the crow people took us into the body of the thunderbird, where another man of the crow people waited.
“The crow people tied me down so I could not move or see. They poked at the stone in my stomach, and they talked in their harsh crow tongue. A long time passed and suddenly a voice whispered ‘Little female, run! Run now, run away.’ I was no longer tied, and there was sunlight seeping in from above. The mountains were shaking and dirt shifts in with the light. I climbed up and up and came out high in the mountains. I saw two boats of the crow people moving away. The crow people were shooting arrows with brilliant, long, red feathering at each other. They went toward the rising sun, so I went the other way hoping to find the village. I traveled for a short time when there was a great noise behind me, and the earth shook, and a fire roared up.
“I ran until I could run no more, and I slept, and ran more. Many days I traveled until I found my way back to the village. Those who were not killed had hunted down the crows and killed all that they could find.
“But I find that Coyote tricked me. The stone in my belly grew and grew, and after nine moons, Magic Boy was born.”
A jump, memories lost.
. . . must be the “white man” that they had been hearing about. The traveling party had a score of men, and a woman that looked like a Shoshone, a baby strapped to her back. By count of limbs, eyes, nose, and mouth, the white man seemed like any other man. He pressed through the crowd of villagers, fingers outstretched, curious to see if the men would “feel” the same as other men, or would they would be totally different, like a frog felt totally different than a fish although both lived in the water. A woman’s hand clasped tight on his. Traced through her genes were many that matched his own. “Uncle,” she murmured, “don’t draw attention from the strangers. It is said that they go downriver next.” Downriver was where the various neighboring tribes sold slaves. He gave her a disgusted look, partially because he wanted to explore, but mostly he could not imagine anyone wanting a stunted freak like him, the boy that didn’t grow up . . .
No record of the woman’s name, or her true relationship to Magic Boy remained. Had her father been one of the little boys that wrestled like wolf cubs with him? Or was she more distantly related, a granddaughter, or great-granddaughter of his brothers? There was no time to wonder, for even as one memory snapped off, another blasted full-bloom into his mind.
. . . They lay on the riverbank, dipping fingers into the water, watching the minnows dart away. Far off, a train whistle went unnoticed, yet recorded into his memory. The boy beside him grunted, rolled onto his back, and watched clouds drift overhead. “What do you think of Hannah?”
Magic Boy winced inside—it was the beginning of the end. They always grew up to leave him behind, going on to things he could never hope to have . . .
A jump, memories lost.
For once the memory caught him in a moment of reflection. He sat in high in the mountains, letting the teenager beside him catch his breath.
At least one benefit of living for a long time, he thought, is seeing the pattern of life, and taking advantage of it.
He thought then, of his mother’s children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, great-great-grandchildren, and even her great-great-great-grandchildren. They numbered in the hundreds, being without fail healthy, wise, fertile, and long-lived. A strong law-abiding streak ran through them, and they became stuffy at an early age. Luckily, each generation had its troublemaker, and thinking of each in turn, from his baby brother to the most recent, Jay, he decided that he loved them most of all.
Take this adventure to find gold in the mountain streams. Jay’s uncles and cousins would all argue that it wasn’t worth the risk; a charge of claim jumping could land them both in jail, if they weren’t hung out of hand. Jay only pointed out that Magic Boy could sense gold in the water just by touch, and thus they could find it quickly. Anyone watching would think they were boys on a lark, finding nothing. It was riskier than breeding horses, where a hundred years of experience allowed Magic Boy to coax superior colts out of only ordinary-seeming parents. In one day, though, they could find more gold than several colts would bring the family.
At my age, Magic Boy thought guiltily, I shouldn’t have allowed my own boredom to let him talk me into this.
By then Jay turned and flashed him a grin that lifted away all sour thoughts. “Do you know, Uncle, I’ve been thinking.”
Magic Boy laughed, knowing full well how this would end.
“What?” Jay asked, caught by surprise.
“Promise me, Jay, when it is your son that’s dragged me off to some misadventure, you will not say ‘Uncle, you’re supposed to keep him out of trouble!’ Ones like you cannot be kept out of trouble. In fact, I think it might be a mistake even to try. It would be like keeping fish out of water.”
Jay laughed, showing the sound white teeth that marked him as a child of Kicking Deer. “I promise. Now, look over there.” Jay pointed out the depression that later would be known as Big Sink. “Does that not sound like the rocks that your mother talked about when she climbed out of the thunderbird’s body, fleeing the crow people? Let’s see if we can find the way down to the thunderbird.”
And off Jay went. Magic Boy followed, ambivalent about the whole adventure. It sounded dangerous. On the other hand, Magic Boy could feel the strangeness in him. He was partly his mother, and in her many children he could find whispers of himself. He could find no match, though, for the other parts of him. Not coyote. Not crow. Not of anything that crawled in the dirt, swam in the water, ran the earth, or flew in the sky.
In the thunderbird’s body, deep in the earth, perhaps there would be a clue of what he was.
It took all of Magic Boy’s abilities to locate the narrow, chimneylike cave. Leaning down in, he found ancient traces of his mother’s passage . . .
The memory ended. Only from what Jared told him did he have any hint that he and Jay actually ventured down the hole. Other memories were unfolding, competing for attention. Ukiah tried to hold onto the memory a little longer, treasuring the affection he felt for Jay.
Jared was Jay’s great-grandson, he realized with dismay. Tiny flickers of memory gave him Jared’s bloodline of Jay, Jesse, and then Jared’s father, Jacob.
Then the next memory shared avalanched into his mind. This one thankfully degraded from the razor-sharp details of his normal memory—for Ukiah could only watch in dismay as Magic Boy pursued the lone Ontongard through the streets of Pendleton. His earlier version thought only of finally finding someone that felt just like himself, and forgot all the dangers of his conception. Lost was that moment when the Ontongard turned to attack, or how they ended up in the underground passages of Pendleton. The memories stuttered like a badly edited horror film as Magic Boy fled through the endless, twisting dark in an attempt to escape. The creature that only looked human chased him. Cornered him in the butcher shop. Reared over him. Ax. Ax. Ax. Ax . . .
Ukiah jerked away in horror from the memory and fell into another, saner one.
. . . he was stuck on the blasted doorstep again. The wood was deeply scored from the countless times he been there before, unable to climb up the height of his shell without repeated attempts. He felt vibrations of someone coming. He blinked nearsightedly behind him, sniffing. Jared. He waited patiently, and sure enough a hand slipped under his shell and lifted him up to sit him on the kitchen floor.
“There you go, slowpoke,” Jared rumbled far overhead, and then leaned down to tap gently on his nose . . .
Ukiah blinked at the memory.
Jared! And there—from the rhythmic creaking of bedsprings, to the break of Claire’s water, to an infant’s cry, to a toddler’s curious fingers, to a boy’s confidences, to a man’s protective stance—unfolded Jared’s life. This was a Jared he had only seen glimpses of, a man physically stron
g yet gentle, determined to do what was right and good, with a capacity to love deep and strong.
Oh, God, Jared! Ukiah threw his head back and howled the sudden and complete knowing of the nephew he had betrayed and lost.
Ukiah heard Max’s hurried footsteps approaching, but couldn’t take his hands from his eyes. His tears felt like fire burning under his eyelids.
Max touched him lightly on the shoulder. “You okay?”
Ukiah nodded.
“You know,” Max said softly, “if the machine works on Ontongard, it will work on Pack too.”
Ukiah looked up at Max, blinking, through the shimmering pain of unspent tears. “You mean change Jared back?”
“Yes.” Max glanced about. “So it worked? You took in the turtle?”
Ukiah stood up, scrubbing at his eyes. “Yeah. I remember where the ship is.”
Big Sink, Blue Mountains, Eastern Oregon
Saturday, September 4, 2004
Magic Boy and Jay must have moved rocks to block the hole, afterward, because a stack of stones blocked the entrance. Max, Sam, and Ukiah shifted the stack aside to reveal the opening.
Max measured the gas content of the fissure.
“You always bring all this to find lost hikers?” Sam asked, eyeing duffel bags of equipment.
“Hikers stick their noses into some of the most unlikely holes.” Max clicked the detector to the natural-gas setting. “The dangerous thing about holes in the ground is that there’s no good reason for oxygen to be present if another, heavier, gas has filled the hole up.”
“And even the kid can’t survive without oxygen?” Sam asked.
“I’d rather not test that theory.” Max folded away the gauge. He took out his lighter, snapped it on and held it in the sheltered opening of the fissure. The flame flickered and danced. “The air is good down as far as I can drop the probe. There seems to be a strong updraft, so there must be another opening and this one is acting like a chimney.”
“Great!” Ukiah cinched tight his climbing harness. “It’s a going to be a tight enough fit without oxygen tanks—which we don’t have.”
“Oh, you don’t?” Sam seemed amused by the lack.
“Not with us,” Max explained. “You can’t transport them on planes, and I didn’t pick up a spare tank once we got here. I figured we would be working with the search-and-rescue team, which would have its own supplies.”
“It can’t be too bad of a climb if my mother got out, provided there wasn’t a major landslide or fall afterward,” Ukiah said. “Being that Jay and I got down into it and back suggests not.”
Max looked at him hard. “You and Jay?”
Ukiah blinked. The memory was there, without having him dig for it—as if it was his own memory. “Jay and Magic Boy.”
Max let it go, probably because there was nothing to be done for it now. Instead he flipped on the radio base. “Headset.”
Ukiah slipped on his headset. “Testing. Testing.”
“You’re green across the board. Go ahead.”
With Max anchoring off to control the climbing ropes tied to Ukiah’s waist, Ukiah crawled into the hole and slowly rappelled down the steep rock chimney.
Only three people had made the climb prior to him: his mother, Jay, and Magic Boy. He found bits and traces of them, faint ghosts of their passing. Ukiah treasured those of his mother. For a woman seemingly chosen at complete random, his splintered memories of her revealed a person of great intelligence, compassion and wisdom. Unique as he was, he had been overshadowed by her in their family until her death.
“Mother, I’m like no other.” He hid his face in her lap, her hands gentle on his hair.
“Ah, Magic Boy, let me tell you a story. Two coyotes met on a ridge looking down into a village. The first coyote grinned his sly grin and said, ‘I am Coyote.’ ‘Well,’ said the second coyote, ‘so am I.’ ‘No, no, I’m the Coyote.’ ‘How can this be? We’re both coyotes. I could be Coyote just as well as you.’ ‘Here,’ said the first coyote, ‘I’ll prove it to you.’
Down the first coyote trotted into the village, and the people working there looked up and cried. ‘Ah, it’s Coyote!’ And he trotted back to his brother and said, ‘See. Did you hear what they called me?’ ‘That proves nothing,’ said the second coyote. ‘Here, watch.’ And he trotted down into the village, and the people looked up, and said ‘Ah, there’s another!’
Magic Boy giggled.
“It is better, my little one, to be yourself, and not just another.”
Outside the memory, Ukiah felt a powerful love for her. More than before, he could not leave Zoey and Jared to their hard fates. His mother wouldn’t have approved.
They say God works in mysterious ways.
The alien scout ship made a controlled but hard emergency landing in the Blue Mountains, tucked up against a granite cliff. Either one of Prime’s sabotage efforts—prior to or after the landing—or the landing itself had sliced open the hull exactly opposite of the crack in the granite. Superheated by the reentry, the hull had fused rock to glass where it touched, heat venting up through the chimney, keeping the vent open while reinforcing it with its forge-hot heat.
A bubble of space remained between rock and hull. Ukiah dropped down to the ceramic-covered hull and peered through the slash in the metal below. The hole continued down through a twisted mass of wires and circuitry boards.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Ukiah muttered over the headset.
“What is it, kid?” Max’s voice whispered in his ear, barely reaching through the rock between them.
“This opens right into the ovipositor, nearly over the table Hex and Prime had my mother strapped to.”
“So she got loose and climbed right out, just like she said.”
“The room was intact when Prime last remembered it.” Ukiah eyed the twisted equipment. “Prime must have done a lot of damage that I don’t remember.”
Max swore softly. “Are we going to be able to salvage anything useful?”
“Have faith,” Ukiah murmured, easing himself through the ragged metal. Ukiah snaked through the tangled wires and swung down onto the dirt-coated floor of the scout ship. “Okay. I’m in.”
He glanced at the table where his mother had been held captive. The restraining straps operated on magnetic locks. When the power failed in the room, they opened, freeing his mother. Since the ovipositor had its own independent, backup power system, only extensive damage like his father wreaked on the equipment itself would have caused it to fail.
He had thought during the trip from the Kicking Deers’ to the Big Sink on what equipment they would need in order for this to work. He went first to the resequencer. The durable instrument front had been unscrewed and set aside. Stuffed into the heart of the circuitry was an unexploded detonator, looking as innocent as a can of soda.
“What is it, kid?” Max asked when Ukiah yelped in surprise.
“It’s a bomb.”
“Shit, get out of there, then.”
“Wait. I think I can just disarm it.” Ukiah peered cautiously at the detonator. Prime had apparently set the delay counter and tripped the arming switch. The power cell, though, was long dead, leaving no clue to why the detonator failed. Without an electronic pulse to trigger the explosion, the detonator should be inert.
Wincing, Ukiah picked it up. Nothing happened. Holding it at arm’s length, he squinted and thumbed the arming switch to off. It clicked down. Gingerly he carried it to the waste disposal unit, unsealed the steel door and carefully placed the detonator inside. He sealed the disposal’s door.
“Okay. I’ve gotten rid of it. I’m going to check to see if there’s any others.”
Ukiah had memories from Prime of shutting down the scout ship’s damage-control systems. Judging from the damage he saw, Hex must have gotten them back on line as the string of detonators tried to rip the ship apart from the inside. Inertia fields had contained the explosions as they were detected, localizing the damage to spheres roug
hly twice the size of the soda-can shaped detonators.
Prime, with his layered backup plans, had placed all the detonators inside the equipment. So while the damage was minimal, the bombs still utterly gutted the equipment.
“Ukiah?”
“Most of the systems are toast,” Ukiah reported. “One bomb failed to explode, and it was in the piece we need.”
“Oh, thank God.”
Ukiah knew that Max was just saying it out of habit. Still, he pressed his hands together like his moms taught him and said, “Thank you, Almighty God, for this blessing we have received. Amen.”
“Ukiah!” Max half-laughed, half-scolded far above. And then explained to Sam, “He’s praying down there. No, I’m not an atheist. Kid, are you going to be able to get it up by yourself?”
Ukiah considered the resequencer. “I could use help.”
In some ways, Ukiah desperately wanted to know what had happened between Hex and Prime hundreds of years ago.
After leaving the mother ship, Prime had been wounded many times, reducing his last memories down to random snippets. Time and time again, the Pack had discovered the dangers hidden by Prime’s lost memories. They had not known that the mother ship crashed on Mars. They had not realized that Hex could free the crew trapped in cryogenic sleep. They had not guessed that Kicking Deer lived to give birth to the feared breeder.
What else did they not know?
As Ukiah searched the ruined scout ship, looking for tools and equipment, he found evidence of Prime’s systematic sabotage. Many of the doors had been fused shut and then cut open. The armory, when Ukiah cranked the door open using the backup manual system, was stripped completely. He found a stack of damaged weapon power cells by the trash compactor. The compactor was filled with crushed stunners. Laser burns riddled the bridge control panels. The lift to the bridge had been blown with a disrupter cannon jury-rigged into the ship’s power system, apparently set to go off when the lift signaled that it reached a certain level. A landslide filled the open sled-docking bay with dirt, boulders, and tree roots.