The Dancer from Atlantis (4 page)

Somehow that rallied Reid. ‘Take it easy, friend,’ he said, uselessly except for the tone, the smile, the palms lifted in
peace. ‘We’re not conspiring against you.’ He tapped his chest, gave his name, did likewise for Oleg. Before he could ask
of the woman, whom he finally noticed was more than handsome, she said, ‘Erissa,’ like a challenge.

The mounted man considered them.

Neither he nor his steed was prepossessing. The pony was a mustang type – no, not with that blocky head; rather, it resembled
the tarpan of central Asia – duncolored, shaggy, mane and tail braided, blue tassels woven in: an entire male, doubtless fast
and tough but no show animal. It was unshod, its bridle of primitive design, saddle high-peaked fore and aft and short in
the stirrups. From that saddle hung a full quiver, a lariat, a greasy felt bag, and a leather bottle.

The rider wore clumsy felt-soled shoes; full trousers of rough gray cloth, tied at the ankles, unbelievably dirty; a felt
shirt which could be smelled ten feet off; a long leather coat, belted at the waist; and a round fur cap. For cutlery he had
a knife and a kind of saber.

He was powerfully built but dwarfish, five feet three or so, bandy-legged, hairy except for the head. That was shaven, Reid
learned afterward, leaving a single black tuft on top and behind either golden-ringed ear. The face was so hideously scarred
that scant beard grew. Those cicatrices must have been made deliberately, since they formed looping patterns. Beneath them,
the features were heavy, big hook nose and flaring nostrils, thick lips, high cheekbones, sloping forehead, slitted eyes.
The skin was a weatherbeaten olive, the whole effect more Armenian or Turkish than Mongol.

Oleg had been rumbling in his whiskers.
‘Nye Pecheneg’
he decided, and snapped:
‘Polovtsi? Bolgarni?’

The rider took aim. Reid saw his bow was compound, of laminated horn, and remembered reading that a fifty-pound draw would
send an arrow through most armor. ‘Hey!’ he exclaimed. ‘Easy!’ When the horseman glowered at him, he repeated the introductions;
then, pointing to the shimmering cylinder, he acted out his bewilderment and motioned to include Oleg and Erissa.

The rider made up his mind to cooperate. ‘Uldin,
chki ata
Günchên,’ he said. ‘Uldin. Uldin.’ Stabbing a begrimed fingernail from one to the next, he Worked on their names till he
had those straight. Finally he indicated himself again – all the while keeping his bow handy – and uttered a row of gutturals.

Oleg caught the idea first. He made the same gesture. ‘Oleg Vladimirovitch,’ he said. ‘Novgorodski.’ He pointed and questioned:
‘Duncan?’

Who are you? Not you personally; what people do you belong to? That must be it. ‘Duncan Reid. American.’ They were as bemused
as everyone else was by Erissa’s ‘Keftiu.’

For her part, she seemed astonished and hurt that Reid was not more responsive to her. She slipped off to recover her knife.
He recognized the metal as bronze. And the iron of yonder arrowhead was precisely that, wrought iron; and Oleg’s equipment
was either plain iron too or low-carbon steel, and when you looked closely you saw that each ring, each rivet had been individually
forged.

And at the end of a sentence, Uldin was saying of himself, ‘– Hun.’

He did not pronounce the word in Anglo-Saxon wise, but it rammed into Reid. ‘Hun?’ he gulped. Uldin nodded, with a wintry
grin. ‘At – Attila?’ That drew blank; and, while Oleg tugged his beard and appeared to be searching his memory, the name clearly
had no deep significance for him, and none for Erissa.

A Russian who felt his nationality was less important than the fact he hailed from Novgorod; a Hun to whom Attila meant nothing;
a Keftiu, whatever that was, whose gaze lay with troubled adoration on … on an American, snatched from the North Pacific Ocean
to a desert shore where nobody else had ever heard of America The answer began to break on Reid.

It couldn’t be true. It mustn’t be.

Because Erissa was nearest, he reached toward her. She took both his hands. He felt how she shivered.

She stood a bare three inches under him, which made her towering if she belonged to the Mediterranean race that her looks
otherwise bespoke. She was lean, though full enough in hips and firm breasts to please any man, and long-limbed, swan-necked,
head proudly held. That head was dolichocephalic but wide across brow and cheeks, tapering toward the chin, with a classically
straight nose and a full and mobile mouth which was a touch too big for conventional beauty. Arching brows and sooty lashes
framed large bright eyes whose hazel shifted momentarily from leaf-green to storm-gray. Her black hair, thick and wavy, fell
past her shoulders; a white streak ran back from the forehead. Except for suntan, a dusting of freckles, a few fine wrinkles
and crow’s-feet, a beginning dryness, her skin was clear and fair. He guessed her age as about equal to his.

But she walked like a girl, no, like a danseuse, like a Danilova, a Fonteyn, a Tallchief, a leopard.

His smile wavered forth anew. She put aside both her trouble and her worship and smiled shyly in return.

‘Ah-hmph!’ Oleg said. Reid released Erissa, clasped hands with the Russian, and offered a shake to the Hun, who, after a second,
accepted. He urged them by gestures to do the same among each other.

‘Fellowship,’ he declaimed, because any human sound was good in this wasteland. ‘We’re caught in some unbelievable
accident, we want home again, okay, we stick together. Right?’

He looked at the cylinder. A minute passed while he mustered courage. The wind blew, his heart knocked. ‘That thing brought
us,’ he said, and started toward it.

They hesitated. He waved them to come along. Erissa soared in his direction. He made her follow behind. Oleg muttered what
was probably a curse and joined her. He seemed about ready to collapse in a pool of sweat. Uldin advanced too, but further
back. Reid guessed the Hun was a pro, more interested in being able to cover a wide field with his archery than in heroics.
Not that Oleg was equipped for anything but close-in fighting.

Beneath Reid’s shoes, dirt and gravel scrunched. His topcoat was smothering him. He took it off and, thinking about possible
sunstroke, draped it on his head for a crude burnoose. The hollow-voiced wind tried to blow it away. Behind the cylindroid,
barrenness reached on, and on, and on, till horizon met sky in a vague blur of mirages and dust devils. The cylindroid was
almost as hard to make out, within the shifting mother-of-pearl light-mist that enveloped it.

That’s a machine, though, he compelled himself to understand. And I, the only child here of a machine age, I am the only one
who has a chance to deal with it.

How big a chance?

Bitsy. Pam. Mark. Tom. Dad. Mother. Sisters, brothers. Phil Meyer and our partnership. Seattle, the Sound, the Straits, the
wooded islands, the mountains behind; Vancouver; funny old Victoria; the Golden Gate Bridge, upward leap of walls from the
Rotterdam waterfront, Salisbury Cathedral, half-timbered steep-gabled delight of Riquewihr, a thatch-roofed hut in a Hokusai
print and those homes you were going to build; why does a man never know how much there was in his world before he stands
at the doors of death?

Pam, Pamela, Pamlet as I called you for a while, will you remember that underneath everything I loved you?

Is that true, or am I just posturing for myself?

No matter. I’m almost at the machine.

The time machine?

Nonsense. A bilgeful of crap. Physical, mathematical, logical impossibility. I proved it once, for a term paper in the philosophy
of science.

I, who recall well how it felt to be that confidently analytical
twenty-year-old, now know how it feels to be marooned without warning in a grisly desert, nearing a machine like none I had
imagined, at my back a medieval Russian and a Hun from before Attila and a woman from no place or age bespoken in any of the
books I read when I might have been being kind to Pamela.

Abruptly the iridescence whirled, became a maelstrom, focused its shiningness upon a single point of the metal thing. That
point grew outward, opened as a circle, gave onto a dusk-purple space within where twinkled starry sparks of light. A man
came forth.

Reid had an instant to see him. He was small, compactly built, mahogany in hue, hair a cap of black velvet, features broad
but finely molded. He wore a prismatic white robe and transparent boots. In his hands he bore twin two-foot hemispheres of
bright metal upon which were several tiny studs, plates, and switches.

He walked uncertainly, he looked very ill, and his garb was discolored by vomit stains.

Reid halted. ‘Sir—’ he began, making the sign of peace.

The man reeled and fell. Blood ran from his mouth and nostrils. The dust quickly drank it. Behind him, the portal closed.

‘My God! If the pilot’s dead!’ Down on his knees, Reid felt across the still body. The rib cage moved, though with unhealthy
rapidity and shallowness. The skin was hotter than the desert beneath.

Erissa joined him. Her face had gone utterly intent. Murmuring to herself what sounded like an invocation, she examined the
dark man with unmistakable skill: peeling back a lid to study the pupil, timing his pulse against her rhythmic chant, pulling
the robe around his shoulders and cutting off the form-fitting undergarment to check for broken bones or flesh injuries. The
hale men waited anxiously. She rose, glanced about, pointed toward a ravine.

‘Yeah, get him out of the sun,’ Reid interpreted. ‘Us too.’ He remembered he was not among English speakers. But they caught
the idea. Oleg gave Erissa his ax, took the pilot, and bore him easily off. She pulled an amulet from below her tunic, a gold
miniature suspended on a thong around her neck, and touched it to the weapon before carrying that with some reverence after
the Russian.

Reid tried to study the cylindroid. At a distance of a few feet, where the nacreous flickering began, he was stopped. It was
like walking into an invisible rubber sheet, that yielded at first but increased resistance inch by inch. Protective force
field, he thought. Not an overwhelming surprise in the present context. Better stay clear – possible radiation hazard – m-m,
probably not, since the pilot – but how do we get in?

We don’t, without him.

Reid collected the hemispheres. Their hollow interiors were more elaborate than the exterior shells. The only comprehensible
features were triads of crisscrossing bands, suggestive of helmet liner suspensions. Were these, then, communication devices
to be worn on the head? He carried them along to the gulch. On the way, he noticed the pipe that had fallen from his mouth
and retrieved it. Even on doomsday, you find trivia to take care of.

Steep-sided, the ravine gave shelter from the wind and a few patches of shade. Oleg had stretched the pilot – as Reid
thought of the unconscious man – in the largest of these. It was inadequate. Reid and Erissa worked together, cutting sticks
and propping them erect to support an awning made of his topcoat. Oleg shed armor and pads, heaving a gigantic sigh of relief.
Uldin took the harness off his horse, tethered it to a grass tuft above the gulch, and covered the beast as well as he could
with the unfolded saddle blanket. He brought bag and bottle down and shared the contents. Nobody had appetite for the dried
meat in the first; but sour and alcoholic though it was, the milky liquid in the second proved a lifesaver.

Then they could do nothing but squat in their separate bits of shadow and endure. Erissa went often to check on the pilot.
Oleg and Uldin climbed the crumbly bank by turns, peered through a full circle, and returned shaking their heads. Reid sat
amidst thoughts that he never quite recalled later except for his awareness of Erissa’s eyes dwelling on him.

Whatever was happening, he could no longer pretend he’d soon awaken from it.

The sun trudged westward. Shadows in the ravine stretched and flowed together. The four who waited lifted faces streaked with
dust and sweat-salt, reddened eyes and cracked gummy lips, toward the first faint balm of coolness.

The pilot stirred and called out. They ran to him.

He threshed his limbs and struggled to sit. Erissa tried to make him lie down. He would not. ‘Mentatór,’ he kept gasping,
and more words in a language that sounded faintly Hispanic but was softer. He retched. His nosebleed broke out afresh. Erissa
stanched it with a piece torn off a handkerchief Reid had given her. She signed Oleg to uphold him in a reclining posture
and herself helped him drink a little of the stuff Uldin called kumiss.

‘Wait a minute.’ Reid trotted back to where he had huddled and fetched the hemispheres. The pilot nodded with a weak vehemence
that made Erissa frown, and reached shakily for them. When Reid hunkered to assist him, she stepped aside, clearly setting
the American’s judgment above her own.

Damn if I know whether I’m doing right, he thought. This guy looks barely alive, on fire with fever, shouldn’t be put to any
strain. But if he can’t get back into his machine, we may all be finished.

The pilot made fumbling adjustments to the devices. He put one on his head. The shining metal curve turned his sunken-eyed,
blood-crusted, dirt-smudged countenance doubly ghastly. He leaned back on Oleg’s breast and signed Reid to don the second
helmet. The American obeyed. The pilot had barely strength to reach and press a stud on his. It was the most prominent, directly
over his brow. The hand fell into his lap; but fingers fluttered at Reid.

The architect rallied what guts he had left. Be ready for anything, he told himself, and tough it out, son, tough it out.
He pushed the control.

A humming grew. The noise must be inside his skull, for none of the others heard; and somehow it didn’t feel physical, not
like anything carried along the nerves. He grew dizzy and sat down. But that might be only from tension, on top of these past
dreadful hours.

The pilot was in worse case. He twitched, whimpered, closed his eyes and sagged bonelessly. It was as if his machine were
a vampire draining his last life. Erissa ventured to kneel by him, though not to interrupt.