Prayers to Broken Stones (21 page)

The image fades to another and in the split second of overlap the face of a 26-year-old Siri appears superimposed on the older woman’s features. “Merin, I am pregnant. I’m so glad. You’ve been gone five weeks now and I
miss
you. Ten
years
you’ll be gone. More than that. Merin, why didn’t you think to invite me to go with you? I could not have gone, but I would have loved it if you had just
invited
me. But I’m pregnant, Merin. The doctors say that it will be a boy. I will tell him about you, my love. Perhaps someday you and he will sail in the Archipelago and listen to the songs of the Sea Folk as you and
I have done these past few weeks. Perhaps you’ll understand them by then. Merin, I
miss
you. Please hurry back.”

The holographic image shimmers and shifts. The 16-year-old girl is red-faced. Her long hair cascades over bare shoulders and a white nightgown. She speaks in a rush, racing tears. “Shipman Merin Aspic, I’m sorry about your friend—I really am—but you left without even saying
good-bye.
I had such plans about how you would help us … how you and I … you didn’t even say good-bye. I don’t care
what
happens to you. I hope you go back to your stinking, crowded Hegemony hives and rot for all I care. In fact, Merin Aspic, I wouldn’t want to see you again even if they paid me.
Good-bye.
”

She turns her back before the projection fades. It is dark in the tomb now but the audio continues for a second. There is a soft chuckle and Siri’s voice—I cannot tell the age—comes one last time. “Adieu, Merin, Adieu.”

“Adieu,” I say and thumb the diskey off.

The crowd parts as I emerge blinking from the tomb. My poor timing has ruined the drama of the event and now the smile on my face incites angry whispers. Loudspeakers carry the rhetoric of the official ceremony even to our hilltop. “… beginning a new era of cooperation,” echoes the rich voice of the Ambassador.

I set the box on the grass and remove the hawking mat. The crowd presses forward to see as I unroll the carpet. The tapestry is faded but the flight threads gleam like new copper. I sit in the center of the mat and slide the heavy box on behind me.

“… and more will follow until space and time will cease to be obstacles.”

The crowd moves back as I tap the flight design and the hawking mat rises four meters into the air. Now I can see beyond the roof of the tomb. The islands are returning to form the Equatorial Archipelago. I can see them, hundreds of them, borne up out of the hungry south by gentle winds.

“So it is with great pleasure that I close this circuit and
welcome you, the colony of Maui-Covenant, into the community of the Hegemony of Man.”

The thin thread of the ceremonial com-laser pulses to the zenith. There is a spattering of applause and the band begins playing. I squint skyward just in time to see a new star being born. Part of me knows to the microsecond what has just occurred.

For a few microseconds the farcaster had been functional. For a few microseconds time and space
had
ceased to be obstacles. Then the massive tidal pull of the artificial singularity triggered the thermite charge I had placed on the outer containment sphere. That tiny explosion had not been visible but a second later the expanding Schwarzschild radius is eating its shell, swallowing thirty-six thousand tons of fragile dodecahedron, and growing quickly to gobble several thousand kilometers of space around it. And
that
is visible—magnificently visible—as a miniature nova flares whitely in the clear blue sky.

The band stops playing. People scream and run for cover. There is no reason to. There is a burst of X-rays tunneling out as the farcaster continues to collapse into itself, but not enough to cause harm through Maui-Covenant’s generous atmosphere. A second streak of plasma becomes visible as the
Los Angeles
puts more distance between itself and the rapidly decaying little black hole. The winds rise and the seas are choppier. There will be strange tides tonight.

I want to say something profound but I can think of nothing. Besides, the crowd is in no mood to listen. I tell myself that I can hear some cheers mixed in with the screams and shouts.

I tap at the flight designs and the hawking mat speeds out over the cliff and above the harbor. A Thomas Hawk lazing on mid-day thermals flaps in panic at my approach.

“Let them come!” I shout at the fleeing hawk. “Let them come! I’ll be thirty-five and not alone and let them come if they dare!” I drop my fist and laugh. The wind is blowing my hair and cooling the sweat on my chest and arms.

Cooler now, I take a sighting and set my course for the most distant of the isles. I look forward to meeting the others.
Even more, I look forward to talking to the Sea Folk and telling them that it is time for the Shark to come at last to the seas of Maui-Covenant.

Later, when the battles are won and the world is theirs, I will tell them about her. I will sing to them of Siri.

It’s odd to think that within the walls of concentration camps such as Auschwitz and even in camps such as Treblinka and Sobibor where extermination of human beings was the
only
official activity, wives of the commandants kept gardens, children of the high-ranking German officers attended classes and competed at sports, musicians played Mozart and Bach and Mahler at dinner parties, wives worried about their figures while their husbands checked for receding hairlines … all the banal preoccupations which constitute the human condition that we share today.

While all around them, humans were being starved and beaten and gassed and fed to the ovens. The ash that had been human flesh an hour before now lightly dusted the roses in the gardens. Barbed wire separated the boys’ soccer fields from the killing fields. The music of Mozart carried to the barracks where former musicians and composers and conductors lay shivering with the other human skeletons there.

In the commandant’s comfortable home, the administrator checked his hairline in the mirror and the administrator’s wife looked in her mirror, pirouetted, pouted, and decided that she would have one less torte for dessert that night.

Did the mirrors reflect human beings? Of course they did. People can adapt to almost anything.

During the days of the Black Death in the 13th Century,
when entire villages were wiped out, when the death carts rumbled through the streets at night with the cry “Bring out your dead!” until there was no one left to bury them, there was much preoccupation with the macabre, many flirtations with death—skull-masked revelers danced nightly in the burial catacombs of Paris—but overall, the small wheel of daily life creaked along as usual.

Are we doing the same today?

I always flinch when I hear someone use the word
decimate
to mean “wipe out,” as in, “The Sioux decimated Custer’s men.”

The word actually comes from the Latin and the action it implies from the Romans. When someone in an occupied province defied the Roman governor or killed a Roman soldier, the Romans would hold a lottery and kill every tenth person.
(Decimate
as in
Decimat(us)
past participle of
decimare.)

The Jews weren’t decimated in Poland and Europe; they were almost wiped out.

The people of 13th Century Europe weren’t decimated; a fourth to half of the entire population was wiped out. And the plague returned—again and again. The people could not see the plague bacillus so in a sense it did not exist for them. They saw only the results piled high in the death carts each night, staring eyes and exposed teeth illuminated by the light of torches.

We’re not being decimated by cancer in the latter part of the 20th Century—the odds are worse than that. The lottery calls one in six. Or perhaps it’s already one in five. (It’s been getting worse for a long time.)

Meanwhile, we grow our gardens, play our games, listen to our music, and look in our mirrors.

We just try not to see too much.

On the day Louis Steig received a call from his sister saying that their mother had collapsed and been admitted to a Denver hospital with a diagnosis of cancer, he promptly jumped into his Camaro, headed for Denver at high speed, hit a patch of black ice on the Boulder Turnpike, flipped his car seven times, and ended up in a coma from a fractured skull and a severe concussion. He was unconscious for nine days. When he awoke he was told that a minute sliver of bone had actually penetrated the left frontal lobe of his brain. He remained hospitalized for eighteen more days—not even in the same hospital as his mother—and when he left it was with a headache worse than anything he had ever imagined, blurred vision, word from the doctors that there was a serious chance that some brain damage had been suffered, and news from his sister that their mother’s cancer was terminal and in its final stages.

The worst had not yet begun.

It was three more days before Louis was able to visit his mother. His headaches remained and his vision retained a slightly blurred quality—as with a television channel poorly tuned—but the bouts of blinding pain and uncontrolled vomiting had passed. His sister Lee drove
and his fiancée Debbie accompanied him on the twenty mile ride from Boulder to Denver General Hospital.

“She sleeps most of the time but it’s mostly the drugs,” said Lee. “They keep her heavily sedated. She probably won’t recognize you even if she is awake.”

“I understand,” said Louis.

“The doctors say that she must have felt the lump … understood what the pain meant … for at least a year. If she had only … It would have meant losing her breast even then, probably both of them, but they might have been able to …” Lee took a deep breath. “I was with her all morning. I just can’t … can’t go back up there again today, Louis. I hope you understand.”

“Yes,” said Louis.

“Do you want me to go in with you?” asked Debbie.

“No,” said Louis.

Louis sat holding his mother’s hand for almost an hour. It seemed to him that the sleeping woman on the bed was a stranger. Even through the slight blurring of his sight, he knew that she looked twenty years older than the person he had known; her skin was gray and sallow, her hands were heavily veined and bruised from IVs, her arms lacked any muscle tone, and her body under the hospital gown looked shrunken and concave. A bad smell surrounded her. Louis stayed thirty minutes beyond the end of visiting hours and left only when his headaches threatened to return in full force. His mother remained asleep. Louis squeezed the rough hand, kissed her on the forehead, and rose to go.

He was almost out of the room when he glanced at the mirror and saw movement. His mother continued to sleep but someone was sitting in the chair Louis had just vacated. He wheeled around.

The chair was empty.

Louis’s headache flared like the thrust of a heated wire behind his left eye. He turned back to the mirror, moving his head slowly so as not to exacerbate the pain and vertigo. The image in the mirror was more clear than his vision had been for days.

Something was sitting in the chair he had just vacated.

Louis blinked and moved closer to the wall mirror, squinting slightly to resolve the image. The figure on the chair was somewhat misty, slightly diffuse against a more focused background, but there was no denying the reality and solidity of it. At first Louis thought it was a child—the form was small and frail, the size of an emaciated ten-year-old—but then he leaned closer to the mirror, squinted through the haze of his headache, and all thoughts of children fled.

The small figure leaning over his mother had a large, shaven head perched on a thin neck and even thinner body. Its skin was white—not flesh white but paper white, fish-belly white—and the arms were skin and tendon wrapped tightly around long bone. The hands were pale and enormous, fingers at least six inches long, and as Louis watched they unfolded and hovered over his mother’s bedclothes. As Louis squinted he realized that the figure’s head was not shaven but simply hairless—he could see veins through the translucent flesh—and the skull was disturbingly broad, brachycephalic, and so out of proportion with the body that the sight of it made him think of photographs of embryos and fetuses. As if in response to this thought, the thing’s head began to oscillate slowly as if the long, thin neck could no longer support its weight. Louis thought of a snake closing on its prey.