I put my hand on Lark’s shoulder and he simmers down. It’s real quiet now with just the crackling of the fire and the field crickets. I see a ring of Osage faces blank as stone bluffs.
“Let’s dance on it, John Tenkiller,” I say. “This here is big. Bigger than us. And my heart tells me we got to pick our place in history. So let’s dance on it first.”
The drumkeeper bows his head. We all sit still, waiting on him. Manners dictate we’d wait on him until morning if we had to. But we don’t have to. John raises his wise face and cuts us with those diamond eyes of his.
“We will dance, and wait for a sign.”
The women help the dancers suit up for the ceremony. When they finish adjusting our costumes, John Tenkiller pulls out a bulging leather pouch. With two fingers, the drumkeeper reaches in and pulls out a wet lump of ocher clay. Then he walks down the row of about a dozen of us dancers and wipes the red earth across our foreheads.
I feel the cold stripe of mud across my face—the fire of tsi-zhu. It dries fast and when it does, it looks like a streak of old blood. A vision, maybe, of what’s to come.
In the middle of the clearing, the massive drum is set up. John sits on his haunches and beats a steady thom, thom, thom that fills the night. Shadows flicker. The dark eyes of the audience are upon us. One by one, we—the eldest sons—stand and ease into our dance around the drum circle.
Ten minutes ago we were cops and lawyers and truckers, but now we’re warriors. Dressed in the old style—otter hides, feathers, bead-work and ribbon work—we fall right into a tradition that has no place in history.
The transformation is sudden and it jars me. I think to myself that this war dance is like a scene trapped in amber, indistinguishable from its brothers and sisters in time.
As the dance begins, I imagine the lunatic world of man changing and evolving just past the flickering edge of firelight. This outside world lurches ever onward, drunk and out of control. But the face of the Osage people stays the same, rooted in this place, in the warmth of this fire.
So we dance. The sounds of the drum and the movements of the men are hypnotic. Each of us concentrates on his own self, but we naturally build into a fated harmony. The Osage men are mighty substantial, but we crouch and hop and glide around the fire smooth as snakes. Eyes closed, we move together as one.
Feeling my way around the circle, I register the red flicker of firelight pushing through the veins of my closed eyelids. After a little while, the red-tinged darkness opens up and takes on the feel of a wide vista—as if I’m staring through a knothole into a vast, dark cavern. This is my mind’s eye. I know that soon I will find images of the future painted there—in red.
The rhythms of our bodies push our minds away. My mind’s eye shows me the desperate face of that boy from the ice cream store. The promise I made to him echoes in my ears. I smell the metallic tang of blood pooled on that tile floor. Looking up, I see a figure walking out of the back room of the ice cream shop. I follow. The mysterious figure stops in the darkened doorway and slowly turns to me. I shudder and choke down a scream as I spot the demonic smile painted on the plastic face of my enemy. In its padded gripper, the machine holds something: a little origami crane.
And the drumming stops.
In the space of twenty heartbeats, the dance fades. I crack open my eyes. It’s just me and Hank left. My breath puffs out in white clouds. When I stretch, my joints pop like firecrackers. A sheen of frost lines my tasseled sleeve. My body feels like it just woke up, but my mind never went to sleep.
The eastern sky is now blushing baby pink. The fire still burns something ferocious. My people are collapsed in heaps around the drum circle, asleep. Me and Hank must’ve been dancing for hours, robotically.
Then I notice John Tenkiller. He’s standing stock-still. Real slow, he raises a hand and points toward the dawn.
A white man stands there in the shadows, face bloodied. A crust of broken glass is embedded in his forehead. He sways and the shards glitter in the firelight. His pant legs are wet and stained black with mud and leaves. In the crook of his left arm, he’s got a sleeping toddler, her face buried in his shoulder. A little boy, probably ten, stands in front of his daddy, head down, exhausted. The man has a strong right hand resting on his son’s skinny shoulder.
There’s no sign of a wife or anybody else.
Me, Hank, and the drumkeeper gape at the man, curious. Our faces are smeared with dried ocher and we’re dressed in clothes older than the pioneers. I’m thinking that this guy must feel like he done stepped through the mud and back in time.
But the white fella just stares right through us, shell-shocked, hurting.
Just then, his little boy raises his face to us. His small round eyes are wide and haunted, and his pale forehead is striped with a rusty crimson line of dried blood. As sure as that boy is standing there, he’s been marked with the fire of tsi-zhu. Me and Hank look at each other, every hair of our bodies standing on end.
The boy has been painted but not by our drumkeeper.
People are waking up and murmuring to each other.
A couple seconds later, the drumkeeper speaks in the deep drone of a long-practiced prayer: “Yea, let the reflection of this fire on yonder skies paint the bodies of our warriors. And verily, at that time and place, the bodies of the Wha-zha-zhe people became stricken with the red of the fire. And their flames did leap into the air, making the walls of the very heavens redden with a crimson glow.”
“Amen,” murmur the people.
The white man lifts his hand from his boy’s shoulder and it leaves a perfect glistening palm print of blood. He holds out his arms, beckoning.
“Help us,” he whispers. “Please. They’re coming.”
The Osage Nation never turned away a single human survivor during the New War. As a result, Gray Horse grew into a bastion of human resistance. Legends began to spread around the world of the existence of a surviving human civilization located in the middle of America and of a defiant cowboy who lived there, spitting in the face of robotkind.
5. TWENTY-TWO SECONDS
Everything has a mind. The mind of a lamp. The mind of a desk. The mind of a machine.
It’s hard to believe, but at this point in time Mr. Takeo Nomura was just an elderly bachelor living alone in the Adachi Ward of Tokyo. The events of this day were described by Mr. Nomura in an interview. His memories are corroborated by recordings taken by Takeo’s automated eldercare building and the domestic robots working inside it. This day marks the beginning of an intellectual journey that eventually led to the liberation of Tokyo and regions beyond.
It is a strange sound. Very faint. Very odd. Cyclical; it comes again, and then again. I time the sound with the pocket watch that sits in a yellow pool of light on my workbench. It is very quiet for a while and I can hear the second hand patiently tick-tick-ticking.
What a lovely sound.
The apartment is dark except for my lamp. The building administrative brain deactivates overhead lights each night at ten p.m. It is now three a.m. I touch the wall. Exactly twenty-two seconds later, I hear a faint roar. The thin wall quivers.