Ancient Shores (31 page)

The radio told him in cold tones he was subject to arrest.

Max dropped to two thousand feet, cut speed, and, five miles out, went to approach flaps. The landing area was smaller than he remembered. He saw the Roundhouse and the fires.

An armored helicopter drew alongside. Max looked out his window. A man dressed in black battle fatigues sat in the open door with a rifle in his lap.

The radio burped. “C—47, turn around. You are in violation.”

The escarpment was coming up fast. He eased back on the yoke.

A blast of automatic-weapons fire and tracers cut across his nose. “We will fire on you if necessary.”

“They’re bluffing,” said Scott.

Max passed over a swatch of trees, throttled down, and felt the main landing gear touch.

The plane lifted, settled again.

Voices were screaming in his earphones. The tail gear, which was also wearing a ski, made contact.

He cut power. The problem with the ski landing was that there were no brakes available. He couldn’t even reverse engines. It was simply a matter of letting the aircraft come to a stop on its own.

The Roundhouse was off on his right. He could hear the stutter of automatic weapons.

“What’s at the end of the field?” asked his copilot.

“Another short flight,” he said.

The Roundhouse slid by. In back his passengers were silent. Snow hissed beneath the skis.

They passed between the parking lot and a couple of rapidly retreating police cruisers. The cars threw up snow.

Ahead, at the limit of his lights, he was looking at a void.

He thought briefly about gunning the engines to
try to get back into the air or yanking the aircraft left to spill it into the trees. But it was really too late to do anything except ride the plane to the end.

The noise in his earphones had ceased.

He hung on.

They bounced over a ripple in the snow.

The void yawned larger. And spread horizon to horizon.

The plane slowed.

And stopped.

A Blackhawk roared past.

Max couldn’t see much ground in front. “Everybody stay put,” he told the passengers.

“Nice landing, Max,” said his copilot.

He glanced through his side window, unbuckled, and looked out the other side. “Plenty of room,” he said, sitting back down. He revved the left engine.

“Hey,” said Scott, “be careful.”

“It’s okay,” said Max. “This baby’ll turn on a dime.”

It was true. Max got some protests from the hold, and the voice in his earphones came back, but he brought the aircraft around and taxied toward the Roundhouse.

While Max turned the plane, Gibson recognized his opportunity.

Moments later, the defenders ducked as a barrage of heavy fire came their way. On the left side of the defenses, Andrea saw a grappling hook loop up over the cliff edge and bite into the earth.

“The plane’s coming this way,” said Gibson’s senior deputy. Its lights illuminated the parking lot as it passed and headed in the general direction of Horace’s position.

“It damn sure is. What the hell are those fools trying to do?”

His radio operator pressed his headphones to his ears. “Bolt Two requests instructions.”

“To do
what
?”

“Shoot, I guess, Horace.”

“Goddamn, no. They must all be crazy out there.”

The operator was listening again. “The Rock Team’s over the top.”

Max angled toward the Roundhouse. The night was filled with gunfire.

Asquith’s voice came from the back: “Can’t we move any faster than this?”

And the linebacker: “This is no time for halfway measures, Max.”

Several of the others, in a surprisingly wide range of tones, supported the sentiment. Max throttled up and made directly for the hole in the security fence, for the middle of the crossfire. Bullets clattered against the fuselage, and he thought how angry Ceil was going to be when she got her plane back. One of the windows blew out.

He wheeled up against a mound of earth, could go no farther. “Okay,” he said, cutting the engines.

In back, they were already throwing open the cargo door. Ben Markey’s cameraman, a tall, blond kid about twenty years old, knelt in the opening, adjusting his equipment. When he was ready, he turned on the lights. “Okay,” he said. “Go.”

Ben Markey, who was already talking into his microphone, nodded to Walter Asquith, who had been standing in the doorway. Asquith leaped out of the aircraft into a spray of bullets. One caught him in the leg and another in the chest. He crashed heavily into the snow.

Gibson, horrified, saw the incident from his forward position, saw two other people jump out of the plane
and throw themselves across the man on the ground to shield him, saw the open cargo door and the inner cabin filled with more people. He had never witnessed such idiocy. Dumb sons of bitches. He turned to his operator. “Cease fire,” he said. And to his senior deputy: “I do not believe this.”

He suddenly realized he was on national television. He saw Ben Markey, sprawled on the ground, trying to avoid being shot, but talking into a microphone. He saw the cameraman panning the injured man, the fires and the mounds and the armed people on both sides.

In those few seconds the gunfire trailed off and stopped.

The black government car pulled up. Elizabeth got out on the run. “What the hell’s going on here?” she demanded. She saw Asquith and caught her breath. “What happened?”

The passengers were still coming out of the plane, climbing down one by one, some managing it easily, others needing help. Police cars pulled up, lights blinking. The wheelchair came out. “Who are you people?” Elizabeth demanded.

A couple gave names, but Gibson was too far away to hear. She looked in his direction. Horace was thinking how best to handle it: Round these people up, but take advantage of the cease-fire to undercut the position of the Native Americans. He could do it. He knew he could.

“You can see what’s happening here,” Markey told his microphone. “Walter Asquith, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for literature last year, has been shot.”

Asquith
? thought Gibson. My God. There’ll be hell to pay.

The linebacker knelt beside Asquith, trying to stop the bleeding, while a man with a gray beard tried to make him comfortable. “You guys got a medic here anywhere?” the woman demanded as an ambulance pulled up.

Asquith’s eyes were glazed, and he died clutching the linebacker’s sleeve.

The body was placed in the back of the ambulance. After the vehicle drove away, Gibson came forward and identified himself. “I’ll have to ask you people to come with me.”

“Why?” asked the man with the beard. He was of about average height, and the cast of his features suggested a mild temper, but he confronted the marshal with barely suppressed rage. “So you can go on with your war?”

Gibson stared back. Nothing was easy anymore.

“Just arrest the whole bunch,” said Elizabeth, keeping her voice down.

“Who are you?” Gibson asked the man who had spoken. He had recognized two of the visitors but not this one.

“Stephen Jay Gould,” he said, raising his voice to be heard over the wind. The camera moved in, and the spotlight illuminated him for the national audience. “I don’t think we’re going to cooperate. If the government wants to kill anyone else, it’ll have to start with us.”

They were beginning to line up now, forming a human buffer between the sides.

“Gould,” Ben told the microphone, “is a paleontologist.”

The camera panned to a tall, aristocratic figure.

“Charles Curran,” Ben said, holding the mike for him. “Theologian.”

Curran might have been preparing to discipline a disorderly child. “This is more than a dispute about property rights,” he said. “Johnson’s Ridge doesn’t belong to one government, or even to all governments. It belongs to everybody.” He looked directly into the camera. “Tonight, its protectors are under siege. To that degree, we are
all
under siege.”

“Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. Historian.”

Schlesinger’s brown eyes flashed behind hornrimmed glasses. Gibson had a sudden sense of the uselessness of his fire power.

“Scott Carpenter. Astronaut.”

Max’s copilot. Still looking capable of riding into orbit, he nodded to the invisible audience.

“Gregory Benford. Astrophysicist and novelist.”

Benford was of medium height, bearded, wearing an oversized hunting jacket that he’d probably borrowed. He scarcely looked at Gibson. Then he waved the chairman forward. Walker tentatively took his place in the line.

“James Walker. Leader of the Mini Wakan Oyaté. The People of the Spirit Lake.”

“Thank you,” Walker said, looking left and right.

“Harry Markowitz. Economist.”

Markowitz folded his arms in silent defiance.

“Richard Wilbur. Poet.”

Wilbur nodded, but his eyes were elsewhere, tracking the geometry between the artifact and the surrounding hills, as if the pattern were familiar, something he recognized.

“David Schramm. Astrophysicist.”

The linebacker. He was covered with Asquith’s blood.

“Stephen Hawking. Physicist.”

Like some of the others, Hawking did not look properly dressed for the weather, as if he had been snatched from doing something else, in a warmer climate, and thrust on a plane. His eyes measured Gibson coldly.

“Walter Schirra. Astronaut.”

Brown eyes, square jaw, medium size. Gibson knew Schirra, had read somewhere that he was one of the most gregarious and good-humored of the astronauts. But there was no sign of easy congeniality today.

“Ursula K. Le Guin. Novelist.”

She stood staring at the place where Asquith had fallen. She too was stained with his blood.

“And Carl Sagan. Astronomer.”

Like the others, Sagan seemed angry, frustrated, his signature optimism jolted by events. “Walter Asquith,” he said, “was also with us on this journey. Walter was a poet.”

“You know,” said Gibson, in a low, dangerous voice, “you people are not above the law.”

“Sometimes the law is stupid,” said Markowitz.

April Cannon appeared and took her place between Schirra and Hawking.

Gibson was already formulating what he was going to say to his superiors.

They spent the evening camped on the other side of the port
, along the shore of the unnamed sea. Sagan and Schramm lay with their heads propped on backpacks looking up at strange constellations; Carpenter, Wilbur, Hawking, Benford, and Schirra sat by a dying fire, talking little, listening to the murmur of the tide, feeling, perhaps, what people have always felt when they’ve been washed up on an unknown coast. LeGuin, Curran, and Walker had tossed off their shoes and walked out into the water, where they wondered what lay on the other side. Schlesinger, Gould, and Markowitz were comparing notes with April on the transportation system that had brought them here, and what its adaptation to local use might mean. “The end of the city,” said Markowitz.

Gould was not so sure. “Cities have a social utility, if only as places to get away from,” he suggested.

Max stood off to one side, intimidated, until April noticed and handed him a Coke, bringing him within the circle of friends. “I don’t know whether we
thanked you,” she said. “None of this would have happened without you.”

Markowitz laughed and put an arm around him. “Yes, Max,” he said. “Like it or not, you got us here. Whatever happens from this point on,
you
are responsible.”

“The real question,” Sagan said later, when it had grown cool and they’d all moved close to the fire, “is, where do we go from here?”

“How do you mean?” asked April.

“I think he means,” said Wilbur, “that the government has a point. And I believe he’s right.”

“I agree,” said Schirra. “If we exploit the Roundhouse, we move completely outside human experience. For one thing, we’re going to have to have a whole new type of economy. Wouldn’t you say, Harry?”

Markowitz nodded. “Oh, yes,” he said. “But we can prepare for it. Adapt to it.” He smiled and pointed out to sea. “The future lies that way.”

“We,” said Hawking, speaking through his electronics, “have incurred a responsibility. After all, we took it upon ourselves to make a decision today. I don’t see how we can back away now.”

The air moved. The long shoreline curved beneath the stars.

“But there are risks,” said Walker.

Curran nodded. “The risks are proportionately high, as are the fears.” He grinned. “We may have a lot to answer for.”

“We have nothing to fear,” said Schramm.

“Stephen is right,” Schlesinger said. “We’re looking at a new world. New worlds are always hard on old ideas.”

Benford opened a box of marshmallows, stuck one on the end of a stick, and put it over the flame. “Are we saying that
we
should lead the charge?”

“I think you have to,” said Max.

Several faces turned in his direction. They looked, he thought, not uncomfortable with the prospect. LeGuin poked at the fire. It crackled, and a cloud of sparks rose into the night. “It seems arrogant,” she said.

Schramm opened two beers and passed one to Benford. “Of course it is. But I think we might need a little arrogance here.”

“We might not be around to help,” said Curran. “I’m not sure yet, but I think we committed a federal offense out there last night.”

Sagan smiled. “I don’t think we need worry. Matt Taylor’s going to need all the help he can get.”

“Yeah,” said April. “I’d really like to help the President. He almost got us killed.”

“He was in a box,” said Schlesinger. “Right now everyone in the world may be in a box, and we’ve helped put them there.”

“I agree,” said Hawking. “And I think we should begin to consider how to get them out.”

Benford nodded. “For a start, we need some positive PR.”

“Precisely,” said the chairman, who had seen a demonstration that day of the power of public relations.

“Maybe a TV show,” said April. “Let people know what this place really is. What it can mean.”

“And what the risks are,” suggested Carpenter. “We need to be honest. Speaking of which—” He looked at Walker. “What about the Sioux? Are you willing to help?”

All eyes turned toward the tribal chairman. “I think we will insist that this world not be turned into a second North America. And we will control the use of the port to that end. Beyond that, yes, we will be proud to help.”

The Horsehead Nebula was in the northern sky, out over the sea. The illusion that it was an approaching storm was very strong.

“We’ll have our hands full,” said Schirra.

They looked at the stars, listened to the wind coming off the sea, felt the warmth of the fire on their faces. “I wish we could all have made it,” said LeGuin.

Wilbur nodded. His eyes were lost in shadow. “I have Asquith’s notes on this project.”

“Enough to publish?” asked Hawking.

“Oh, yes.” Wilbur reached behind him for a jacket and pulled it around his shoulders. “And it’s pretty good stuff. Maybe, in the end, he’ll outlive us all.”