Nightmare Country (41 page)

“You got some explaining to do, Perdomo.” Don started after him, but Harry grabbed his arm.

“You see the look on his face? You're liable to get your clock cleaned. It's not like he can go all that far anyway.”

Tamara stepped through an archway of fitted stone about four feet thick. It led to an inner room, where light flickered. The others filed in behind her.

“It's a funny place I don't like,” Agnes said. “Reminds me of us going into the mine when we shouldn't have. And look what's come of that.”

They stood dripping on a floor of the same cut stone as in the archway and gawked at a gleaming silver column surrounded by a diaphanous glass or plastic casing. It stood on a tiered platform. A smooth, hollowed-out place in a column resembled a shapeless and hooded figure, very tall and broad-shouldered, suggested a priest or a cloaked death figure. Candles in ornate candelabra reminded Tamara of those found on church altars. They sat atop a series of rock partitions ringing the circular room that were shoulder-high with three-foot spaces between each. Candle flames rose in narrowed tapers toward some draft from above.

“Never heard of the Mayans having anything like this.” Harry's voice didn't echo, as would have seemed likely in this rock-bound, conceivably holy place. Instead it thinned out as if sucked up into the invisible ceiling like the flames on the candles. Illumination came from somewhere above the column, making the candles unnecessary.

“Your machine, Russ?” Agnes Hanley croaked.

“One just like it.” His swallow sounded dry as paper. “There's one of these in Iron Mountain, Wyoming.”

Don Bodecker spread his feet, crossed his arms, and proclaimed mystically, “An ancient phallic symbol … or statue … or—”

“There's nothing ancient about this thing.” Harry stepped up to put his hand on the clear casing.

“Don't touch it!” Russ pulled him off the tiered platform. “I've seen one of these, I tell you. It'll send you on a trip no pill or airplane could. Everybody haul ass before this thing decides to get in gear.”

Thunder crackled outside, wind and the smell of rain swept through the archway. Candle flames danced. That buzzing noise sounded more like a whir close up. It filled the silent room, while the sides of the archway floated together, shutting in the stunned group. Only Russ Burnham moved, but he was too late. He pounded on the rock, ran his fingers around the outline of a doorway no longer there.

Russ turned to stare at the thing in the middle of the room, its light glistening off the sweat beads on his face.

A doorway appeared noiselessly in the clear casing surrounding the shining column.

“Take cover!” Russ shoved Tamara behind the nearest rock partition, and she could hear the frantic scrambling of the others to obey his panic.

She tripped over something on the floor and sprawled across it, hitting the side of her head on rock. Her eyes teared. The air whined. The light on the wall not shaded by partition blinked.

“Keep your heads down,” Russ ordered them all, and pushed her farther into the slightly yielding but lumpy mass she'd fallen across. “It'll suck you in if you don't.”

The light blinked so rapidly now it gave her vertigo to look at the wall, and she did feel a tugging, as if the air were trying to pull her around the barricade.

“Don't anybody stand up. Don't look,” Russ yelled. “Wait it out.”

Whatever lay beneath Tamara was breathing on her hand. The air generally was in a chaotic swirl, but under her palm it came in slow, tickling, moist, warm exhalations—interrupted with coolness during inhalation.

Her fingers groped the contours of a human face.

She pushed away, and just in time to see the candles and the candelabrum on the next partition tip over and fly away. Russ tried to force her back down.

“Russ, there's someone here.”

Although there was plenty of light in the center of the room, all was shadowed behind their barricade. Tamara could just make out the profile of a woman's face. And a lock of long hair being tugged into the light and around the edge of rock partition. It was copper-colored, like Tamara's.

45

Ramon Carias hung half out of his sidewalk-stand police station, the microphone of his radio set in one hand, the other in violent mid-gesture toward Stefano Paz, who stood outside. Ramon uttered an everlasting “Urrrrrrrr.” People on the sand streets of San Tomas appeared to be in an unusual hurry. Time had stopped them in the process of haste. Canoes and light boats were in the process of being drawn up under houses, wooden shutters in the process of becoming slammed across windows. A local store was doing a brisk still-life trade in kerosene for lamps.

The girl seemed to have settled down and become as engrossed in this momentary world as Edward P. and Herald, but she never allowed the engineer to get too far from her.

“Did time stop the moment we met on the beach?” Edward asked.

Herald peered closely at Ramon and Stefano, crossed the road to study little Yesenia Campos as she helped her mother gather oranges, spilled from a torn net grocery bag, with arrested urgency. “Time has not stopped, Edward. It is just that we are trapped in one of their moments. A moment they are living through at a normal pace.”

“Well, if we repeat this moment, will there be different people here doing different things, different weather? Everything?”

“You must understand this is a situation I know only from theory, but I believe so—yes. Every time we repeat, we'll catch a different moment but not remember one experience from the last. It may depend on whether we leave the beach.”

“We're repeating now, then, because Yesenia has grown some and her mother wasn't nearly so pregnant yesterday.”

“But what about me? Can you send me back to my mother?” Adrian floated in front of the engineer to capture his attention.

“Is she still at the Northern Terminal?”

“Yes.”

“Well, if this moment lasts for us. If this is your first time in it. If there is time. If we can find the terminal here. If your body still lives and if it is still at the Northern Terminal or your Iron Mountain … I will try, child, that is all I can promise.”

A few tourists were out, their clothes and hair caught in a gust far stronger than the one blowing on Edward P. Again he was startled to see captured and covert glances of disdain and dislike for these visitors on the faces of a local populace he'd always thought to be warm and friendly.

“Looks about to blow up a storm. But the blowing is lighter on us than on them.”

“Yes, and notice the sea.” The engineer pointed to a whitecapped wave of an extreme size to be inside the reef. It broke so slowly Edward could have counted every foam ripple on its surface.

“Was it like this before, or has our movement slowed too?”

“It would be my speculation that we were so surprised to see the movement of wind and water at all, we didn't notice its rate. But I cannot be certain.”

“The wind and tides can be slowed, but not stopped like people and pouring liquid. The world's always been wacky, but this dream takes the cake,” Edward grumbled as he led the way past the generating plant, which made an extended burping noise. “That's the island's power generator.”

“That could be a problem. Is it permanent?”

“Nothing's permanent. Next one'll probably be more powerful.” He hurried on, eager to have Herald explain the machine to him before he awoke. Rain fell now in drops so sluggish they could see each one. They felt abnormally hard on his exposed face and head as Edward walked into them rather than having them falling about him as he was used to. He was almost running when he tripped on a dog in his path and knocked it on its side.

“What sort of creature—?”

“Animal, dog, canine, village stray. Hurry. This'll be no ordinary storm if the dogs are heading inland. You've got to tell me about the machine in the pyramid.” Edward swerved just in time to avoid two more canines in a paralyzed slink, and he managed to warn Herald.

“Pyramid? This is not the sector for what I think of as pyramids.”

“Sector … yes, well, I suppose the Mayan temple pyramids aren't strictly pyramids like in …” Edward stopped short, and again the giant was up against his back, with the see-through girl staring over his shoulder. “You have your machines in the East too? In Egypt and …” He could hear the fact in Herald's thoughts that he didn't know Egypt from Hades, and Edward thought of Africa, tried to visualize the shape of the continent, sensed that it didn't register either, and then formed a mental image of an Egyptian pyramid.

“Early implanters of terminals encouraged the building of natural rock structures to house the necessary equipment. And the more elaborate and mysterious, the more likely the primitives would not destroy them or remove the protective rock.”

“My God, man, whole civilizations built religion and ritual around your ‘nonpolluting' structures. You've polluted your own past!” Edward stomped on down the trail, truly angry and yet unable to reject the idea that due to this dream, his next book would be a sizzler. He stopped again and let the rain pelt him, instead of the reverse. “Did your people build all these protective structures, or did the people who came to worship in them or bury their kings or cut out hearts and sacrifice human beings there?”

“We merely helped. They were so primitive. Someone had to—”

“Did you cause this destruction thing you keep splitting up history with … by your interference? In the name of transportation?”

“There are those … environmentalists”—that was the closest thought Edward could comprehend, but it was mixed with the word-thought “moralists” and a sort of distrust—“who suggest this as a possibility, but I noticed expressions among as-yet-unmixed races in that tiny village we just left that would suggest other reasons. Anyone would want to blame a catastrophe of that nature elsewhere, old man.”

Edward was already composing sentences for an introduction to a new book, sifting through ideas in the old that he could adapt (all that work, surely he could use some of it), when Roudan Perdomo loomed up ahead of them.

“What good will it all do if I don't remember this dream when I awake?” he absently asked the proprietor of the Hotel de Sueños, and then noticed the expression-in-progress on the stilled features.

Edward was more used to seeing the big black man grinning, joking, laughing in that high, improbable voice. But Roudan seemed not the least good-natured in this captured moment. He looked stricken, angry, grim, and on the verge of tears all at the same time. Muscles along his upper arms and chest flexed tight against his skin. Rain slid off the bill of his red-and-white cap so thickly and so slowly it appeared slightly clouded, sticky like honey.

“Don't touch him,” Herald warned, and stepped around Roudan, looking him over from all angles. “Fairly respectable specimen.”

“He's still young. I'm thinking he's also one of the monkey wrenches in your machine.” And Edward described awaking in the jungle one night, apparently having sleepwalked. He'd found himself near the Mayan ruin, the existence of which he hadn't suspected until then. A group of villagers was filing into a lighted chamber in the hillside. “And this specimen here was standing in front of a silver column with his arms raised and reciting some kind of jibberish, and all of a sudden the ghost of a woman who used to live on this island appeared in front of him and started dancing. I figured these people'd stumbled across a machine left behind by an ancient extinct race from Atlantis.”

Someone had hit him over the head from behind, and Edward P. had come to, to find Stefano Paz dragging him past the generating plant and chiding him for sleepwalking.

“Hurry, please. You've got to help me,” their phantom wailed.

They left Roudan to his arrested walk and moved on. “If you're so sure your fooling around with your history causes no harm, then why are you so afraid to have us touch anyone or change anything?”

“Now that I'm here, I can see our calculations about your cultures and our effect on them have been inadequate.”

“Inadequate! You plop massive stone structures down in the middle of ignorant villages and you call—”

“We had no notion of the sensitivity, advancement, and great numbers of the species before the destruction. We've always thought of you as a lower form of animal, living in caves, tribal—”

“Who managed somehow to develop such sophisticated weaponry that we could wipe out almost all trace of ourselves.” Edward P. Alexander was less and less impressed with the mental powers of this future race.

“There was so little left to go by except for the legends that came down from the survivors, our ancestors, whom we think of as barbarians and don't take too seriously. And the time funnel is so new. We've only just begun to appreciate the problems and try to correct them.”

They reached the screen of night-blooming cereus and walked along it to the break leading to the clearing and the mound, and an echoing roar that resonated in Edward's ears to make them tickle maddeningly. It took him a moment to realize it was a thunderclap. “If there was nothing left of us after this destruction, how'd you know about the internal-combustion engine?”

It was not until the engineer smiled at him approvingly that Edward P. realized he couldn't have spoken his last sentence aloud and been heard over the ongoing thunder, that he had instead expressed it as a thought, clear and directed perfectly.

“There were a few artifacts carefully preserved by our ancestors.” The engineer looked from the broken stela to the mound. “What has happened here? The structure is overgrown and uncared-for.”

“The culture you duped into maintaining these things died out centuries ago. I think there's been more than one ‘destruction' on this old planet.” He had to repeat that last thought three times before Herald got it. Edward had passed the age where he enjoyed the discomforts of the elements. Old bones ached like rotten teeth, and even the insides of his tickling ears felt rain-soaked. He'd been consistently amazed at the realistic detail of his dreams since arriving on this island. Now he even felt the extreme weariness all this dream walking and excitement would have in reality caused him.… “Could this machine of yours cause people to dream?”