Teach spat into his hands, rubbed the palms together and wiped them on the front of his shirt. “Lousy hunters, the lot of them. No respect. Take just parts of the meat and leave the carcass in the open. Worst kind of jackals.”
A whistle from farther in the canyon trilled down the scale. A lark, Eric thought. Haven’t heard one like that before.
“Whoops, speak of the devil, as my dad told me,” said Teach. He scanned the slopes on the sides of the road. Eric looked up too. Here, the road snaked smoothly through rounded hills with few trees or boulders. Immediately the rest of the men started climbing. Teach tugged Eric’s arm. “Best place to not be seen is in plain sight.”
Then he taught Eric how to be a rock.
Eric’s back itched. He pressed his face down even harder. A particularly sharp piece of gravel dug into his cheek. A spot of dampness slid toward his ear. I’m bleeding, he thought. Feet tramped steadily on the road below, measured, military. Metal clicked against metal. Gun swivels? he wondered. They were less than a hundred feet off.
Someone said, “Don’t like this duty. Stupid way to spend a day.”
“Shut your hole, private,” rumbled another voice.
“Just talking. No harm in that.”
They passed. Slowly, Eric raised his head for a peek, marveling that he hadn’t been spotted. Marching toward the slide they had just crossed, a line of eight camouflage-dressed soldiers moved down canyon. They wore dark green boots that reached to mid-shin, and on their backs rode small packs, and each carried the same gun with distinctive open-metal stocks, sharply curved banana clips and cone-wrapped snub barrels.
Eric sucked air between his teeth.
“What?” whispered Teach.
“I know those guns.” The men single-filed it to the other side of the slide and out of sight. “They’re army M-16s.”
Firelight illuminated the blackened stone face of the natural amphitheater and cast flickering light on the pines that surrounded the site. Split-log benches, two deep, formed a half circle around the fire. Eric, Teach, Rabbit and Dodge had one bench to themselves, although it might easily have held a half-dozen more. The people of Highwater drifted out of the trees and started taking their places at the fire. Eric hadn’t thought much of the remains of old Nederland, what used to be a mining town and then became a tourist trap in the Gone Times. Most of the buildings were gone, part of the “Naturalization Project” as Teach called it.
“Where’s the town?” Eric had said. A few foundations poked up, and a bank and small office building still stood. After a long afternoon of nervous hiking, convinced that at any second they would run into more of Federal’s patrols, he’d been looking forward to sleeping with a roof over his head on a comfortable mattress.
Teach chuckled. “We’ve been walking through it for the last half mile.” He pointed to a small hill they’d just passed. “Got several families there.”
Eric saw nothing man-made at first, then he picked out the shape of a wall. Unmortared, rounded stones slumped to one side. Partially hidden by a boulder, the house was practically invisible.
“Looks small,” he’d said.
“Much of it’s excavated. Warmer in the winter. Some of the homes have tunnels running back seventy, eighty feet. If they have another kid, they dig out another room.” Teach pointed to a pile of rock chips. Eric had assumed it was mine tailings. “Takes a long time, too. Soil’s thin. Mostly they’re carving into solid mountain.”
More people sat at the fire. They moved silently, soft on their feet. Even the children were quiet, muted. He saw one poke another and a woman put a hand between them. They looked up and she shook her head gently at them.
Teach said, “What’s different about an M-16? You sounded frightened.”
“Not really,” said Eric. He shifted so he sat closer to the fire. After the sun set, the temperature dropped quickly, not at all like the late-June conditions they were probably enjoying in Littleton. “It’s a powerful gun, though. I saw a few in the year of the plague. Some National Guard units had them, and the people who lived got to be real good at hoarding items like that. I read up on them.” Eric noticed that the people around him were listening. He spoke a little louder for their benefit.
“An M-16 is a small calibre weapon, only a 22, but it has a high muzzle velocity… uh, the bullets come out very fast. And the way it’s designed, the bullets don’t fly smoothly like an arrow. They tumble. When the bullet hits, it tears or smashes. I read that one could be shot in, say, the leg, and it still might kill. The shock of the impact would be so great that it could stop the heart.”
A man behind Eric said, “Tears the flesh you say?”
“Oh, yes, very ugly wounds.”
“Wouldn’t want to hunt with one then.”
“No. They’re designed to kill people. Weapons of destruction.”
Another voice, a woman, said, “They’re part of Gone Time sickness.” Teach leaned toward Eric, “That’s Ripple. She’s a deep one.”
The woman looked at Eric intensely, a full eye lock, as if she were challenging him, and it took a second for him to break the stare and to see that she was young, maybe fifteen, like the Earth Dancer. Her face was skinny, and even by firelight Eric could see dark circles under her eyes.
“Yes, I suppose, but the world was dangerous, and America needed an army to keep itself safe.” She scooted forward on her bench, bent down and put her hands on the dirt. “No,” she said to her feet.
“Gone Time sickness had many symptoms. An army was one of them. M-16s were a symptom.”
“But you never lived there. Much was good then, too. A lot.” Eric felt tense, defensive. “It was a magic time. We could fly, don’t you see. We had great learning. Man knew things.”
“He’d forgotten all that was important.”
Eric thought, she’s so young. She knows nothing of me or my time.
As if she’d read his mind, she said, “I know myself. I know my time, and I’ve heard the stories. I’ve walked through the cities.” She drew a design in the dirt at her feet. Eric found it odd that she spoke to the Earth, and then he thought, she’s like the Earth Dancer, drawing designs, and he wanted to leap up and look at what she was making, to see if it were a noose.
“None of you were native,” she continued. “The sickness came from not belonging. All the symptoms. None of you belonged.”
“Go on,” he said, suddenly eager to hear what she might say.
“None of you were native. You had no place you knew of as your own, and because of that you lived in all places as if you didn’t belong. You made an army because you feared being thrown out. You were always temporary.”
“You mean we weren’t Indians? My family had lived in America for several generations.”
“No,” she said, shaking her head, sitting up and looking at him again. The rest of the people, surely the whole population, listened intently. All the benches were filled. Eric guessed maybe sixty people sat around him. A log popped sharply in the fire sending a shower of sparks up with the smoke. “Birth doesn’t make you native. It’s a matter of life and mind.”
People nodded around her.
“Gone Timers, most of them, lived on land they didn’t know. It’s true, isn’t it, that most Gone Timers didn’t build the houses they lived in?”
“That’s true, but our technology freed us from… from… some tasks. We could devote our lives to learning.”
“You could, but did you? What you did is what counts, not what you could have done. You didn’t build your own houses, but you lived in them. You didn’t make your own clothes, but you wore them. What’s important though, what’s important is that you didn’t know where anything came from. Your house, your clothes, your food, your light, your medicine, your entertainment, even your water. You turned on a tap, and water magically poured out. You flushed a toilet and wastes disappeared. You put your garbage on the street, and others took it away.”