He looked up at the sky: Davimo, god of the day sky. Smoke climbed up to the god’s face from dozens of smoke holes. He heard a voice. As Pela worked at the fire, preparing to cook, she was singing to something up in the sky, but not Davimo. She would be singing to Tana, the winged wolf-woman goddess of maidens and widows. In this age, no woman considered herself complete without a man. Conversely, no man considered himself complete without at least one woman. In his entire life, Gordon had never felt complete. Perhaps, he mused, it was the lack of a woman. Allowing the thoughts to fall from his mind, he turned and looked at the graves, momentarily seeing again those heat ripples rising from a cold and lonely place.
As near as he could understand from Pela’s description, Mehmet had been missing part of his head. He’d probably caught a piece of the imploding hull as the metal weakened, Gordon speculated. Pela said Taleghani hadn’t had a mark on him. Old guy, though. Probably had a chest full of modern medical miracles—replacement valves, pacemaker, wire leads. Suddenly everything metal powders and stops working, stops conducting electricity. The former Egyptian major who couldn’t be trusted with a loaded sidearm and who wanted to bring Squanto from the past to speak to the future was now alongside his devoted student, groceries for prehistoric worms.
“My religious sensitivities,” muttered Gordon to himself in Towa, recalling Taleghani’s question from another age. He pulled the remains of his belt from its loops, held it out, and looked at the leather image of Coyote. Gordon draped the belt around his neck, looked up, held out his arms, faced his palms toward the sky, and searched below the tree branches for shadows. After a moment, one of the shadows seemed to move.
“I see you, Coyote. You reach back even to here,” he said. “No such thing as a joke too old for the Trickster, eh?”
The shadow didn’t move.
“So, here I am, Gordon Redcliff, your tool and plaything. I’m still on this side of the dirt and once again have no explanation for that. Since I am still alive, however, I have two small requests to make of you, Yellow Eyes: one new, one old. The new request is this: Give up just a little bit of your joke. Let the ghosts of the two Bilagana, Ibrahim Taleghani and Mehmet Abdel Hashim, let them walk among Pela’s people so they can see and learn what they can before the meteor hits, the mountain shatters, and Pela’s people vanish. Ibrahim and Mehmet paid a big price to touch this part of the past. Is it so much to ask to let them steal a look at what they paid so much to see?”
He lowered his hands and looked up from the shadows to the few clouds hanging motionless before the rising sun. “The old request, Trickster? It is what it has always been: Before you close my eyes for good, Coyote, let me understand the joke.”
Gordon pulled the fur wrap more tightly around his shoulders and stood for a moment in silence. The shadow in the deep woods moved again and then was gone. After a pause, Gordon walked beyond the graves to where the timespanner vehicle had been. All evidence remaining of the vehicle consisted of three crazily tilted cedars, their facing trunks stripped of bark and branches, and a lumpy pile of greenish powder at their bases lightly covered with snow, strips of gray plastic molding and gasket material sticking up from the mound here and there. Some of the lumps were chunks of hull that hadn’t powdered completely. A touch was all it took. He dug into the powder with a stick and his hands. It was like playing in hellishly cold, coarse, dry wheat flour. He felt something hard and pulled up something large and plastic. The couches were still whole. They’d make great patio furniture for some leisure-burdened ancient, once leisure and patios were invented. He pulled the other two couches from the dust and placed them aside.
He found the plastic containers of food bars and water as well as his pack and the doctor’s. The thin plastic was cracked and shattered. The food supplies that were not encased in metal appeared all right as well as a few of the medical supplies. His personal knapsack was made entirely of leather and was in excellent shape. Taleghani’s knapsack relied upon metal rivets, buckles, and rings and had fallen apart. Something red and sticky had burst inside, as well, and had eaten the fabric. Inside the pack were the remains of Taleghani’s changes of clothes, camera, and recording devices—all useless.
The rifle’s plastic stock, the lenses from the scope, the smokeless powder from the ammunition now contaminated, and the shockcomb were all that remained of the weapons. He regretted the loss of the fighting knives. He had noted Pela doing her cutting with a flint knife. Gordon saved the lenses from the scope and placed them in his bag.
From the bottom of his pack he picked up the small olive-colored locater and adjusted down the readout screen’s light intensity level. It still worked. It was based on the same technology as the timespanner and shockcomb. The assortment of readouts, it had been explained to him by Dr. Taleghani, would let them know when the window is about to open, where it is exactly, and would let Mehmet know where they were when he came back to find them and good old Squanto. All automatic.
“Except that the fellow who can read the instrument is dead, the pilot who is to come looking for us is dead, the ship that is to pick us up is so much powder, and Squanto apparently has other plans.” There was one part he could read, however: 191 days until impact. He glanced at the shadows. Yellow Eyes was back, looking at him, whispers of paws in snow, the Coyote People maintaining their watch. Gordon poked through Taleghani’s pack until he found the doctor’s locater. Its case had been eaten through by the red goo, and the screen was dead.
If a rescue ever were attempted, Gordon could still be found. Once found and returned to Site Safar, however, the authorities would be looking for someone to blame for the deaths, for the unauthorized intrusion into the past, and for the destroyed vehicle. “I wonder who that will be,” Gordon muttered facetiously to Coyote. He replaced the working locator in his bag and opened one of the energy bars. As soon as he tore the wrapper a foul odor assaulted his nostrils. He opened another. All of the food was either spoiled or contaminated. Something in the food or in the wrappers had reacted badly when the vehicle’s metals altered properties. He’d have to rely upon local fare.
One leather bag, one shockcomb, a set of lenses for a low-power telescope, a time locater, a change of clothes, the Widow Pela, and one hell of a disaster coming in a matter of just a few months. There was a moment of dizziness, the images of his two fellow travelers flashed before him, then all pain left him as he watched the snow-covered ground rush up to smack his face.
“God’n? God’n all good?” came Pela’s voice through the fog. As the pain filled his head he opened his eyes. It was dark again and he was in the lean-to, Pela’s seated form silhouetted by the fire behind her. She must have dragged him there. He guessed he must outweigh her by twenty or twenty-five kilos.
“A little good,” he said. He thought on it, the pain beginning to diminish, becoming a dull presence rather than a stabbing insistent maniac. “Better good,” he said gingerly sitting up. “Food?” he asked her.
Pela grinned widely. “Food good.” She turned toward the fire, reached, and brought back some kind of toasted bits of meat stuck on a cedar stick. The pieces of meat were bigger than if they’d been from a mouse. Rabbit, maybe. He pulled a piece from the end of the sharpened stick, and it was rabbit spiced with something resembling chili and honey. With it came a wooden cup filled with a hot tea brewed in a fired ceramic pot. Before he knew it Gordon had cleaned the stick, which was all the compliment Pela needed. She presented him with another. While he ate, she gave him his numbers and showed him how to write them. The system resembled Roman numerals without the subtraction. A four was four vertical slashes. A five was a big dot resembling a fist. A ten was two fists crossed at the wrists—an X. Fifty was a hollow box and a hundred, a solid box. “Old man, like God’n father,” she said, and marked ninety-six in the snow: