The Cydonian Pyramid (11 page)

A crackling sound came from behind her. Lia whirled. A Gate was forming just off the edge of the frustum. Lia’s heart lurched with hope and fear. She started toward the Gate, then hesitated. The Gate might well take her to a place even worse than this — a place like the city Spawl, where Yar Song’s eyeball was scooped out with a spoon. She looked back at Artur, standing beside his cart, looking up at her. The man who had run off earlier was returning with several other men.

Her choice was clear.

T
HE FEELING OF BEING COMPRESSED AND SPIT OUT WAS
becoming familiar. Lia hit feet-first and rolled. She jumped up and looked around. She was alone, standing on a flat rectangular surface covered with tiny pebbles. She understood at once that this was the roof of a building. A knee-high parapet surrounded the edge of the roof.

The Gate hovered an arm’s length above her. Lia backed away from it, fearing that the Lambs would follow her through. She looked around, searching for a way off. The roof was studded with an assortment of pipes and vents. She looked over the parapet down onto a street. Several autos of ancient design were parked along the curb. The street was lined with buildings of various sizes and shapes. Her history tutor, Brother Von, had shown her images of such cities from the distant past.

There were several people on the street: a man in a white coat sweeping the sidewalk, a pair of women wearing blue trousers and colorful tops, a boy on a bicycle, and others. The city was not large. In the distance, she could see fields of corn and other crops. An auto rolled along the street, making a grumbling, roaring noise and ejecting smoke from its rear. She had traveled to a time before the Boggsians, before the Medicants, before the Lambs.

The Gate hummed and crackled. A small gray shape flew from the disk and landed on the roof.

The kitten! It crouched, ears flat, tail puffed out, then ran for the edge of the roof.

“No!” Lia cried out.

The kitten stopped in the shadow of the low wall, looked back at her, and hissed. Lia approached slowly, talking in a low voice. “Do not be frightened. I will not hurt you.”

“Mreep?”
The kitten seemed to recognize her. It took a few tentative steps, then stopped. Lia sat down on the roof and kept talking in a quiet voice, telling the kitten that it was safe, that everything would be fine — even though she had no reason to believe it herself. The kitten moved closer.
“Merp?”

Lia reached out. The kitten made a decision, trotted over to her, and let her pick it up. She embraced the cat gently, feeling the warmth of its small body against her chest. She closed her eyes and felt tears trickle down both cheeks.

“How did you get here?” she asked. “How did you find me?”

The kitten began to purr.

The Gate crackled again, and several Klaatu emerged. A moment later, a man fell from the Gate and landed hard on his back. Lia clutched the cat to her chest and backed away. The man groaned, rolled onto his belly and pushed himself up.

He was dressed in a dirty faded-blue garment. He looked around, bewildered. His blue eyes landed on her.

She recognized him. This was the same strange man who had appeared on the frustum during her blood moon. But he looked different. His face was sunburned, his clothing tattered, and he was wearing bright-blue Medicant boots.

The man stared at her intently for a few seconds, then walked quickly to the edge of the roof and looked down. She could see some of the tension leave his shoulders. He stared down at the street for a long time, then turned back to her, touched his chest, and said something that sounded like “Revaron Fai.”

Lia pointed to herself. “Lah Lia,” she said.

The man nodded and formed a tired, strained smile, as if he was out of practice.

“Ahm pleesto meetyoo Lahlia,” he said. His language sounded like
inglés,
but with an accent that made it nearly incomprehensible. The man —“Revaron Fai”— opened a trapdoor set into the roof. Above him, Klaatu swam back and forth excitedly. The man did not seem to notice. Making another attempt at a smile, he beckoned to her with his hands. He wanted her to go with him.

Lia hesitated. Was he another madman, intent on turning her into a ghost? She did not think so. He did not look like a Boggsian or a Medicant, and he was certainly not a Lah Sept priest. The cat was squirming in her arms, its yellow eyes fixed on the Klaatu.

The Gate buzzed and went from gray to orange. The Klaatu gathered in a ghostly clump and streamed back inside. The cat relaxed.

When the man beckoned to her again, Lia followed.

“T
HIS GIRL
, L
AHLIA
. . .
WHAT MADE YOU THINK SHE
was from the future?” Dr. Arnay asked.

“She told me,” Tucker said. “Of course, I didn’t believe her. At first. I mean, at first she didn’t even talk. But later, after she went to live with the Beckers, I kind of got to know her. Me and Tom and Will, we sort of hung out with her.”

“Hung out? You talk like a beatnik.”

“What’s a beatnik?”

“Never mind. Was she your girlfriend?”

“No . . . not really. But I liked her. You know how sometimes you feel like you’re all alone and the world is a really strange place? Do you ever feel like that?”

“I’m in a submarine at the North Pole with a kid who claims to be from the future. It doesn’t get much stranger than that.”

Tucker thought maybe the doctor was smiling, but it was hard to tell with the mask covering half his face.

“I think Lahlia felt like that all the time. I mean, I spent my whole life in Hopewell, but to her it must have been like landing on another planet. Also . . . this sounds weird, but I think she might have come to Hopewell because of me, like I was responsible for her being there in the first place.”

“You must have a pretty high opinion of yourself,” Dr. Arnay said.

“It’s not that. It’s because she knew things about me. And I felt connected to her, like we had some kind of history together, only it was a history that hadn’t happened yet, you know what I mean?”

“Nope,” said the doctor, crossing his arms.

The arm crossing irritated Tucker. The guy was determined to not listen to him. And it bugged him that the doctor was wearing a mask.

“I’m not sick, you know,” he said. “You don’t need that thing on your face.”

“You’re probably right.” Dr. Arnay removed the mask. It left red stripes where the ties had crossed on his cheeks. “That better?”

“Yeah.”

“But you’re still quarantined, until we can figure out what’s going on with you. Now, you were telling me about the girl?”

“Lahlia. I don’t know for sure that she came to Hopewell because of me, but it’s definitely on account of her that I ended up here.”

“She sent you to the North Pole?”

“Not exactly. But she was the reason I went through the disko on our house, and if I hadn’t done that . . . well, everything would be different.”

Dr. Arnay sighed, sat back in his chair, and made a circular motion with his hand, telling Tucker to continue. Tucker took a moment to reorganize his thoughts. If he told the doctor the literal truth, he would not be believed. Best to start out slow.

“I didn’t see much of her at first,” he said. “We were both living in Hopewell, but she pretty much stayed with the Beckers on their farm. I hardly saw her at all that whole first year. . . .”

“L
AHLIA, COULD YOU FETCH THE WASH FROM THE LINE?
”

Lia looked up at Maria Becker’s broad face and took a moment to process the words she had just heard.

Fetch the wash from the line?

Even after a year of living in this strange place, she had to translate from Maria’s English into
inglés,
then back into English.
Fetch
meant to gather or retrieve.
Wash
meant to cleanse. A
line
was a sequence of interconnected events, a row of objects, a string, a rope, a cord. The proper meanings of the words fell into place. It took only a fraction of a second but felt like longer.

“You wish me to remove the fabrics from the drying cord?”

Maria Becker smiled patiently. “Yes, dear.”

Dear
as in affectionately regarded one, not
deer,
the animal of the woodlands, or
Deere,
the name of Arnold’s tractor.

“I will do that.” Lia took the empty laundry basket from Maria.

“Thank you, dear.”

“You are welcome,” Lia replied. She crossed the lawn to the clothesline, followed closely by the gray cat, whom she had named Bounce. As she unclipped and folded the dry sheets, towels, and other linens, Lia thought back over the past year.

When Lia had first arrived in Hopewell, last summer, the Reverend Feye had taken her to his home, where she met his wife and his son. The Reverend’s wife, Emily Feye, had red hair like the temple girl she had met in the garden, but she was older and thinner. Lia later learned that red hair was not uncommon here. The Reverend’s son looked like a younger version of the boy who had appeared on the pyramid, the one who distracted the priests, allowing her to escape.

The boy’s name was Tucker Feye.
Tuckerfeye?
Lia had been astonished to hear a name straight out of
The Book of September.
Was it possible that this ordinary-looking boy could be the
prophet
Tuckerfeye? The Tuckerfeye who would one day be sacrificed by his own father? Lia watched him carefully during the few days she lived with the Feyes, but the boy showed no signs of being exceptional.