“Well, yes, you could look at it that way, but what does that mean? What does that have to do with being native? How does that make the Gone Time sick? We were advanced; we could go to the moon. We could cure sicknesses.”
She said, “Not the last one.”
Pushed by a breeze, smoke watered Eric’s eyes. He turned away from the fire. She said again, “Not the last one. But it doesn’t matter. The real sickness was in life and mind. Gone Timers lived in the world like the world didn’t matter. They took upstream and disposed downstream like upstream was forever and no one lived below. The sickness was in metal and coal, in gasoline, in things that could not grow back. The end was inevitable, one way or another.” Eric wondered if Troy and Rabbit were bored. Ripple was preaching, he realized, and a sermon is often a bore, but they were listening too.
Ripple said, “There isn’t a rock here that I don’t know. Every tree, as far as I can walk, I have seen and touched. I place my hands in the stream and I feel the connection to all the water everywhere, to the liquid in my veins. Everything I eat, I know. I am careful with my wastes. I read in a book the saying, ‘Don’t shit where you eat,’ but Gone Timers always shit where someone else ate, and ultimately, because it’s all connected, in their own plates.”
A child giggled. Someone hushed it quietly.
“I share…” she said, “…space with all the living things. If I take a deer, I pray for a deer somewhere to be born to replace it. If I harvest a plant, I see that I leave the ground ready for another. When I die, I will leave a place that another can live. I am native. I belong.”
“That’s a nice idea,” he said. “But people couldn’t live like that, not in Gone Time numbers. Mankind was successful. We learned how to make the work of a few feed and clothe many. We spread out, like grass; we covered the ground, and what we made was beautiful. You said you walked through the cities. Did you look? Did you really look? And what did you see?”
A vision of Denver at night rose in Eric’s head. He said, “Lights everywhere: street lights, lights in homes, advertisements blinking on and on into the darkness. Cars hissing the pavement dry on rainy nights. Laughter. People laughing, coming out of theaters. And concerts, 70,000 people in Mile-High Stadium on their feet feeling music pounding in their chests. Heart-stopping rock-and-roll so loud your skin hurt. That was beauty, human beauty, and there was nothing sick about it. A good time, my father’s time.”
“Knowledge too, pure knowledge. We were close, so close to knowing everything. I’ve seen the books. I know. Scientists could study particles so small that an atom was their universe.” He knew most of the people around the fire would have no idea what he was talking about, but he continued. “We studied the galaxies. We looked out with telescopes and electronic measuring devices and saw the face of god. Mankind reached up and in. Backwards and forwards. Our science traveled everywhere, and that’s what we’re losing now. Our children, my own son, are forgetting the heights we reached. My dad…” he said, “…my dad’s world, my world, was about making people live. We lived longer and healthier. We took care of our teeth. We helped the nearsighted. We reached out, the Americans, we reached out and helped people thousands of miles away in other parts of the world. Technology and science made us more compassionate, more human.”
Ripple looked at him sadly. “The beauty you’re talking about is denial. It was terminal, the false color of fever before death.”
Taken aback, Eric said, “Where do you get words like that? Those are Gone Time terms. How old are you?”
She blushed. “Books. I’ve read and talked. I’ve thought. I’m sixteen.” Teach said, “She has, too. Ferocious memory.” He turned to Ripple. “A little overpowering at times, too.”
Ripple said, “He’s been there, Teach. He knows that it’s true.” A voice from behind Eric said, “What do you think about the Jackals with M-16s?” He pronounced the name of the gun carefully, making it three words. “They seem more Gone Time than now.”
Eric said, “Teach, you said the roads were closed. Your parents dynamited them.”
“They did, but foot traffic has no problem going over the blockade. This is the first they’ve come this far in force, though.”
Eric thought for a minute. “The only reason I can think of that they are coming this way must be the same one why we are going their way. They want to get around the Flats.”
“What about the guns, the uniforms?”
“A military base somewhere north, perhaps. I can’t imagine they’re manufacturing the ammo. There must have been a well protected cache of it. Maybe if it stays cool, it lasts longer.” He considered some more. The fire crackled softly. “If M-16s still work, I wonder if they have other munitions, grenades, napalm.” Teach sighed. “I guess we’ll have to find out. If they’re going to tramp through Highwater.” Silently, Eric stared into the fire. Twists of flame danced along the edge of a log, the heat baking his face and shins. The trip to Boulder seemed almost impossible now. First, the wolves, then Phil and his odd museum, then the Flats, now an army between him and the library. He thought about turning around. Troy would be glad to see Dodge again, of course, and Eric could imagine explaining why he’d left. Maybe the illnesses will pass, thought Eric. There are seasons of bad times. The crops grow rich one year and they grow thin another. People might be that way too. What could make facing men with M-16s worthwhile?
A small voice asked, “Could you tell us about the Gone Time monsters?” Eric looked for the questioner. A girl, maybe ten years old, lifted her hand shyly. She said, “My grandma used to scare me—I remember—about the Sudden Death Playoff and the Twilight Double Header. Were they terrible? Did they really come for little kids?”
Eric laughed. For two hours he answered questions, and the people listened. They hung on his words, and all the time Ripple sat quietly, her head cocked to one side, intent. Eric was convinced she’d not forget a word that he said. And while he was speaking, while the fire burned low until it was just embers and the cool breeze swept gently past his face, he thought over and over again, maybe she is right. These are the natives. I am an alien in my own land.
“What are they doing, Grandpa?” Eric slid over on the stone ridge so that Dodge would have a better view into the canyon at the camp below. Eric looked for Rabbit again, but the boy had taken a different path once they started climbing, and Eric knew that saying anything to him would do no good.
“Keep your heads still,” said Teach. “They might notice us poked up like this, but only if you move. Motion’s the key.” He lay on Eric’s other side. Beside him, Ripple slowly moved into a position where she could see too. Now that it was light, Eric got a better look at her. Her short, cut red hair framed a serious, pale expression. Freckles sprinkled across her cheeks only made her seem more frail. Her eyes were green, and intense. Her movements, deliberate. She might be sixteen, he thought, but I wouldn’t have put her at twelve. He looked back at the camp.
Sixty yards away and fifty feet down, a handful of drab, green tents stood in a small clearing beside the highway. Thin, gray streamers of smoke stretched straight up from a pair of campfires. Beyond the tents, farther down the valley, the rocky sides of the canyon covered the road and choked access. A shallow lake at the rock wall’s base reflected clouds and sky.
Three soldiers were unpacking bulky metal pieces from green chests and assembling them on the other side of the road from the tents.