The Steel God
Fiction - by Mike Adamson
Tiva of the Lakes was upon the calm blue face of the waters when she heard thunder from a clear sky.
She looked up from her catch basket in her hide boat, squinted against sun and clouds, and caught the moving flurry of something she did not recognize. Smoke moved in a billowing pall behind the clouds, then appeared through them, fading to a scatter of burning points like wind-blown embers. Before she could comprehend what she was seeing, wind washed over the lake, filled with heat and odors of burning, streaming her hair and rocking the boat. The embers began to fall. One plunged into the lake far away, others in the hills around about. Then a glittering speck high in the blue which enlarged rapidly in its plummet.
With a hand shading her eyes, she followed the streaking descent, and made out, in the last second or two before its great, spray-pluming impact, the distinct impression of a man.
A shining man. Stooping like a hawk, as he fell from heaven.
The advantage of having a living personality in a Biosynth was that the original body stayed safely at home while the personality braved dangers in a vehicle infinitely more resilient. The drawback was that the personality could still panic.
I panicked badly when the time crucible began to disintegrate. I was on the last leg of the temporal trajectory, approaching touchdown, when failure occurred. There was no time—what an irony for a temporal device—to signal my point of origin before the craft became uncontrollable, tumbling as I punched back into the atmosphere. I could not be certain of my date of arrival as the lands which would one day be known as Persia spread below me from the dark waters of the Gulf to the Zagros Mountains, thence deserts, more mountains and the Caspian Sea in the north. Coastlines were not as I knew them from the thirtieth century, but after the industrial revolution everything changed as a matter of course, and I recognized the coastal-onlap predictions for the earliest Bronze Age. This should be in the “stone-to-cuprous-metal transition period,” the Chalcolithic or somewhere thereabouts—without a precise temporal touchdown I could not be sure.
My ability to cope faded fast when the crucible finally disintegrated. I found myself outside in a roaring, blistering windstream, thirty thousand meters up, and my automatic systems disengaged all sensation as my living biosheath was literally stripped from my body, burned away in the searing wake of my plummet from space. In moments my appearance, carefully prepared to blend with the genetics of the local people, was gone, leaving only my super-alloy and exotic-materials android chassis, naked to the universe. Through cameras where eyes should have been I saw the tipping, rolling horizon, black space above, blinding mountains below. My automatics calculated my impact point, computed extent of damage if striking rock at terminal velocity, and compared it to the chances of trajectoral adjustment to land in water. The odds of survival were acceptable and I had 27, 000 meters in which to navigate.
The AI upon which my personality rode took over fully. It locked me out, took me offline, sent me to sleep, and in one second more had trimmed our body into a blade-like aerodyne, spread-eagled for speed offload while gliding crudely for maximum diversion toward the nearest body of water. I was grateful to pass out, and my last thought was one of regret—for to die here in the past, to be destroyed beyond hope of reclamation, was to leave my physical self devoid of an inhabiting being—a wasting shadow in a coma that would never end.
These were the dangers when curiosity overcame common sense, and we archaeologists probed into the past through the technology of the future, in the hopes of finally piecing together the story of humankind.
Tiva dropped her reed sail and sent the stone anchor over the side on its rope of plaited fiber, felt it pay out a long way and breathed deeply, hyperventilating, her heart racing. The lake had swallowed the shining man and the ripples had subsided as if his miraculous advent had never been, and she feared desperately none would believe her—unless she could produce the apparition. And perhaps the stranger from the sky needed something from her—though a god would be unlikely to drown, she felt.
With the line at rest, the fisher-girl, bronzed by wind and sun, took a last deep breath and heaved over the side into the cool blue waters, fought downward the first dozen strokes, then the descent became easier and she followed the anchor line, the rope whispering through her hand. The waters were clear out here in the deep parts of the lake but she could see only the blur of light and dark, try as she might. She had to be close to things to see them, and hoped she would make out the rough shape of that gleaming body.
In blue gloom she found the bottom, a clinging ooze that made her flinch from its slimy touch, and kicked off to hang in mid-water and look carefully all around. Sunlight struck deep, marching rays painted the bottom in patterns like the ripples above, and she made out, at the limit of sight, a patch of brightness. She kicked hard for it, feeling her lungs beginning to protest, and in twenty sweeping strokes hovered over the humanoid shape, gleaming against the dark mud of the bed. She had to return to the surface and kicked hard for the light to ease her lungs, and when she lay on the undulations, panting hard, she had a better idea of what to do.
She swam back to the boat, hauled the anchor stone clear of the bottom and tied it off, then dug deep with a broad-bladed paddle until her instincts told her she was more or less over the stranger, then let the stone down once more. When she repeated the dive a few moments later she found the gleaming body a couple of boat-lengths from the line, but to her amazement the shining man was sitting up on the lakebed, staring at his hands. His gaze came up to her and she took her life in the gentle grasp of her faith, to lift the anchor stone and stride slowly across the mud and clay to his side. She took the rope in both hands and presented it to him, and when he grasped it she gestured urgently to the light above, then kicked off and soared away with her own bubbles.
Technically, this was a catastrophe.
The principle of total immersion studies, the direct observation of the human past, was to do so unnoticed. With the anonymity of our genetically engineered biosheaths, archaeologist became anthropologist, walking among those we studied, interacting with them as a transient element of the society in question. To be noticed, however, was to become part of the record of human consciousness, and I had contaminated the timeline.
I knew this even as I warred with my conscience—should I take the gift I had been offered, or just walk away? I could do so, I could live at the bottom of this lake as surely as in total vacuum. But the object was to interact with the people here, and the chance existed I might patch the damage to the timeline. To do so I needed to reach she who had observed me.
So I climbed the line, a swift flurry of limbs bringing me quickly up into the bright light where her boat was a dark, oblate silhouette, and I saw her beautiful features, framed with their dripping black mane, peering down into the water in search of me. I paused again a few meters below the surface, rechecked my assumption that this was the right thing to do, and knew I needed a foothold here if I was to undo the damage. For one thing, I must collect the physical remnants of the crucible and hide them away from archaeologists—out-of-place artefacts were the bane of temporal studies.
My gleaming cranium broke surface and the girl saw me clearly for the first time. I cannot imagine what she expected but she let out a small shriek and cowered to the far side of the boat. I came over the edge like some demon, to her, surely, all heat-blued metal and a grimace of pseudo-skull, limbs operating silently but seeming far from human despite their proportion. The boat rode lower with my mass and I took a seat to stabilize it, saw her panting with terror and for a moment I considered simply breaking her neck. That would heal the timeline and none would ever be the wiser; people went missing all the time.
But I could not do that.
She had come to my rescue, offered me life, how could I take hers away? Even in the most exceptional circumstances, the notion was abhorrent. A killer was something I had never been.
Instead, I gently raised a hand and made a gesture I hoped would convey calmness. Then I folded my hands and waited, and she seemed to realize she was in no immediate danger from the gleaming monster she had invited up from the waters. At last she found her voice, swallowed and tried again.
“Who...who are you?” she whispered.
My data recall triggered, I matched the patterns and smiled to myself. As expected, the language was an early approximation of Proto-Elamite, so I must be in more or less the intended temporal locus. Language files loaded and translation software came online in a split second.
“You may call me...Ishmael.” I smiled in my own mind, knowing the name may or may not exist at this time. Far to the west the city of Jericho was already ancient, dominating the salt trade on the north side of the Dead Sea, and the earliest Hebrew language with it, as were the Ubaidian farming townships of Mesopotamia. The name means God will listen, and, after all, to absorb all I could of this time and place was the sole reason I was here. I was made to listen; and ‘Levi Capell’ would mean little to her. “Do not fear me.” I put out a hand, very gently. “And who is my rescuer?”
“They call me Tiva,” she murmured, raking her hair back from her eyes. She looked into the sky, then bowed her head low. “You fell from the sky, lord.”
“I did.” I managed to put a sigh into my words. “But I shall be lord to none.” I looked down at my bare endostructure. “I was never meant to come to you this way, but what is done, is done. I have many tasks before me, Tiva. Do you know somewhere I may go to be away from the places of the people?”
“But…you will come back to my village?”
“I cannot.” I shook my head softly. “Already I have done too much.” I raised a finger to her. “In you I place my trust, Tiva. I must stay far from them and you must speak to none of me.”
She was bewildered but, in her still unshakeable impression I must be of divine origin, she did not argue. “There is a place.... A cave in the hills above the sunset end of the lake. Bears sleep there in winter, but it is safe at the moment.” She moved to lift the anchor stone but I took the line in hand and hauled it up in moments for her. She raised the reed sail and trailed the broad paddle through a carved fork at the stern as a rudder, and soon we were skimming into the west across the broad, wind-rippled lake.
Oh, what a mess, I thought. The right time and place, but my vessel was in a thousand fragments, I had no way to return to my own epoch, and was deprived of my disguise of living tissue. I could regenerate it, it would take time and require a lot of organic energy—a months-long cocooning would see me step forth human once more, after nanosomes executed the genetic blueprint I contained—but it was not my first priority. I heaved a mental sigh. Far from walking into this community, posing as a traveler from afar and beginning my anthropological observations, I would hide from the people every way I could.
Except Tiva. As we crossed the lake the girl seemed to be warring with her thoughts. She could not bear to look at me, and I knew the only thing winning her cooperation was her almost instinctual belief that what she did not understand must be supernatural. She thought I was a god, and there was nothing I could do to change her mind about that. Not at once. So I must make it work for me, wrong as that felt. I did not frighten her by trying to engage her in conversation, but let an hour go by in gentle motion as the boat flew before the breeze.
At last Tiva grounded the craft at a gravelly embayment below a forest which rose away on the slope toward hills, and I dragged it ashore for her. This was an era of warmth and high rainfall, many lands subsequently desert were at this time Edenic, and what would become the parched uplands of the Middle East were, here, lush as the Nile Valley might ever have been.
The girl tied on a belt of plant fibers, a flint dagger in a sheath of doeskin at her hip, took a skin canteen of water and rested a fish spear over one shoulder. Without a word, she gestured up into the green country ahead, and I strode at her side into the dappled light of the birdsong woods.
This was somewhere between the fortieth and forty-fifth centuries Before the Common Era. I had stepped backward in time over seven thousand years; not my first expedition, though it may be my last. I knew how to send a message to the 30th century AD, it was a protocol we temporal explorers had implemented but none had ever needed to apply it. To the best of my knowledge no crucible had ever failed in flight before, it was merely my bad luck to be the first.
As we walked the woodlands I ran a series of computations. If I was to shut down to minimum power consumption, just enough to let my living personality idle in dreamless, computer-harmonized sleep, I could survive long into the future; but even so my nuclear core would be depleted for all useful purposes thousands of years short of my own time. There was no nuclear fuel available in the world with which to recharge it for a dozen centuries beyond my most optimistic projection.
Alternately, I possessed a schedule of the temporospatial targets for the next ten planned missions—all travelers knew when other vessels would arrive after one’s own landing date as an emergency safeguard. Expeditions to Ancient Egypt and the early days of the Fertile Crescent had been mounted many times and more were planned: I could sleep away a few thousand years, to be in the right time and place for my processors to handshake with the craft appearing from the future. Strict protocol called for only expeditions post-dating one’s own to be approached, to avoid paradox: no past expeditions had ever reported encountering a Biosynth from their own near future, therefore, unless secretive measures had been taken to sterilize the timeline, it had never happened. I must focus my attention elsewhere.
I could accept I would never return; I was completely alone, immersed in the tactile history I craved, and could spend my entire, vast potential lifespan wandering the world, recording all, filling my inexhaustible holographic memory with an unprecedented record of the story of human existence. I would eventually go offline—die—and become an out-of-place-artefact: I must arrange my burial to survive into a future in which I would be found, recognized and my data downloaded. Anything less would be tragedy, a cycle of pointlessness, and I could not accept such was my fate. Some deeply hidden tomb of my own design might fulfill the purpose, but I had reasonable expectations of returning to the future. All these computations and considerations had taken a few seconds.
I made a throat-clearing sound. “Tiva.”
“Yes, lord?” she whispered.
“Tell me of your people.”
She blinked at me in surprise, a strange admixture of innocence and the preconceptions of faith. “But gods already know every secret in our innermost hearts.”
“Then let this be the first piece of that puzzle, for I do not know such things. I ask you.”
She blinked at me in surprise, faltered in her step, but smiled a little. “They call us the People of the Blue Water.... Our village is on the arm of the lake to right of the sunrise. We have learned to plant the roots in tilled land, and gather the bounty of the trees in season, and to fish the lake for the sweetest flesh.” She smiled again, and I found I followed her words more clearly as the translation matrix analyzed her accent, dialect and syntactical patterns. I heard Proto-Elamite but understood the words as if they were English. “We have lived here as long as anyone knows, though there are stories that we came to the waters long ago from a harsh place of stone and hunger.”
The anthropologist in me, the archaeologist by training, reveled in her words, and I realized, even should I never return to my home in the distant future, I would not lack for company and stimulation; this was the primal world revealed. Neither mammoth nor saber-tooth had yet breathed their last, dire-wolf and giant elk still called Earth home, and early human societies were flourishing the world over. I was in my element.
The cave was high on a slope overlooking forest and waters. The dark gash in the rocks and soil nestled among vegetation that rustled in the fresh, warm breeze, and I stepped inside, crouching a little, to follow it back to the gloomy hollows where bears wintered. Snow would be a brief affair in this climate, and their hibernation much shorter than in later centuries. It would do; I could fortify it with stone if need be, but I was acutely aware of the need to leave no trace of my presence in durable form. I returned to the opening and sat down on a boulder, felt the afternoon warmth on my metal skin and scented the clean air of this pre-industrial world.
“I must go, lord,” Tiva murmured. “Home is far off and I will be missed. What shall I tell my family if they ask why I am late?”
“Tell them you saw the fire in the sky and dare not travel for fear other fires may fall.” I raised a finger again. “But say nothing of me. I am trusting you, Tiva.”
All the way home, Tiva was torn in her heart. The most momentous thing of her life had come to pass but the sky man forbade her to speak of him, and she did not understand. He denied divinity but she dare not disobey him….
The boat scudded upon the wind as she plied the sail expertly, tacking one way or the other to make her way home, her catch adequate and her explanations ready, but when she glided back into the arms of her people toward the end of day she felt strange—the keeper of secrets, when such was alien to her.
The village was a collection of huts, walls of trimmed branches and stout reeds driven into the earth and plastered over with mud, with roofs of reed thatch and hide, while here and there were mud brick structures, and the people wore simple garments of goatskin or woven flax, hip-wraps and kilts, for the season was mild. She was hailed by friends and family and told of the strange fire in the sky, as others gestured to the clouds and spoke of gods and mysteries.
Her parents, Galeb and Harsha, her brothers Hendu and Alam, had feared for her and smothered her with hugs as she assured them she was well, and told the story of the falling embers from out on the waters. The people were in an uproar at this event and by the council fire tonight much would be said. As she thought of the sky man she looked back across the lake and her heart raced—the silence he had demanded was a sacred duty, higher than to family and community, and she could see already she might have to lie on his behalf.
Truly, the gods had sent a test for her young heart....
The sun sank beyond the hills at my back and I watched their shadow lengthen over the lake. The deep colors of sunset came and went and I saw the blazing stars solidify in the night-blue heavens as they never had on Earth since the coming of light pollution. Now I had the chance to calculate my exact date, both by seasonal timing of the stars and by absolute motion between them. My optical pickups had both extreme resolution and the telephoto ability to close in on key areas of the sky where absolute motion was known to be proceeding swiftly — swiftly enough for several thousand years to produce easily measurable change.
I sat by the cave mouth and stared at the sky, matched it to my celestial map and reverse-calculated latitude, then estimated the seasonal progression and scoped in on the most revealing points in space. I was able to make measurements of sufficient accuracy to roughly determine the year — 4280 BCE, with an error factor of a fraction of a percent, or within about twenty years of my target date. I smiled mentally; now I knew where I was in both space and time, and when I had refined the coordinates I could transmit that knowledge to the future.
But, first things first. I left the cave and made my way with mechanical agility to the crest of the hill above, seeing in the luminous night with the wide-open lenses of my optical pickups so I moved in a softly revealed world surmounted by a deep blue sky crossed by a river of stars. This was my normality now, and when out of Biosynth mode I missed it. My human eyes could see but a fraction of the glories revealed in my altered state. From the crest of the hill I turned a slow circuit, visually mapping the terrain, and matched it to my low-accuracy memory of where I had observed fragments falling.
I had senses capable of feeling for the electromagnetic distortions of metals. The pieces had likely hammered into soft ground and would need to be dug free, but this was straightforward. I must decide where to conceal them—or if to conceal them, they could be retrieved by an expedition sent expressly to sterilize the archaeological record.
My android body could cover ground tirelessly at the speed of a horse, and I scouted through the hills south of the lake, sweeping with my spectral sensors for the signatures of refined metals and non-metallic compounds. I was following the general impressions I gathered in the later stages of my fall as to where the surviving pieces of the crucible were coming down; all this data was gathered by the low-level AI, as “I” had been quietly offline at that point, the first I knew of my survival was when I woke smoothly at the bottom of the lake, with a mermaid appearing from the gloom to my rescue.
I found a piece half an hour from my cave and marked the spot in my mental chart. Several kilos of material lay in the ground, fused and cold, the impact crater plain to see, and I decided to eliminate the structure to avoid attracting interest. I scuffed and flattened it, redistributed leaves and soil, then pressed on, scanning in a variety of wavelengths.
On that first night I located a dozen impact sites in a ring around the lake creating a debris footprint some ten kilometers long by half as wide. There would be more, and I found the same again on the nights following. I traveled only by dark, avoiding all contact with the people, and returning to my cave in the hours before dawn…. Except for the evening I raced to a low hillock overlooking the village, where I scaled a tree and let my long lenses scan the cluster of huts on the south-eastern arm of the lake. I adjusted automatically for firelight and was able to record excellent portraits of the individuals who sat by the flames—and found myself smiling as I recognized my rescuer. She relaxed to eat with others, wrapped in white flax, a wooden dish in her lap, and I saw her smile and talk, could interpret the motion of her lips easily enough to infer words, and was quietly pleased she had not mentioned me.
This last was quite obvious—no one who had actually claimed to meet a god would be treated so casually by others.
Tiva could not keep away. For three days she plied her trade on the lake, but when no other sails were in sight she turned west and ran hard for the green woods above the farther shore. She ascended the forest way as swiftly as her leather-tough feet would carry her, and, panting and afraid, burst upon the clear stretch surmounted by the cave.
He was there. The Sky Man stood at the mouth of the cave, hands on hips, looking down at her, and he raised a hand in greeting. She pressed on up the slope and went to one knee before him. “Greetings, lord,” she began breathlessly.
“Tiva. Thank you for returning. Is there something I may do for you?”
She looked up, eyebrows raised. “I.... I had to see you again. It has all seemed like a dream. I wondered if you were real....”
“I am very real,” he said, his tone quite gentle. “Are you well, Tiva? Are your people well?”
She nodded, at a loss to find words, and seemed about to retreat. The shining one stepped close and bent, to gently caress her hair. “You are always welcome, Tiva. But I would ask you to be careful not to draw others here.”
“Always, lord?” she asked, with a strange inflection, as if she wanted to hear these very words, yet feared them.
The inexpressive metal face was unreadable, but the being lowered to kneel with her. “Do not call me lord, Tiva. Think of me as Ishmael, the one who journeys far.”
“Iss-mal…” She tried the word on her tongue, smiled self-consciously. “I will try, l — Iss-mal.”
As the summer of 4280 BCE—or thereabouts—wore on, I found I had her company often. By night I refined my observations of the stars, waiting until the early hours to sight other conjunctions and the phases of the moon, cross-matching them to my database to ever more precisely locate my point in time; and by day I lay low until Tiva came to share an hour, as often as she may. We walked in the green woods, and spoke of her people and their world. This was the anthropology I had come for, and I was performing my mission.
One day I mentioned her fishing would suffer for her absence, and found a way to fill her basket for her. We went down to the lake and I waded in until I disappeared under, then set my vocal amplifiers to broadcast a complex set of resonances, a thrumming vibration that washed out into the lake and drew fish in curious shoals. She waded hip-deep and with lightning jabs of her barbed spear collected in ten minutes what would have taken her a day’s effort otherwise.
Perhaps this merely reinforced my divinity to her, but I liked to think she viewed me as a stranger, one with different abilities to the people she knew. Perhaps I was naïve, but when you care for someone your objectivity can suffer; and I began to understand I did care for her. Quite what to make of it I could not guess; at heart I was human, despite the machine abilities at my disposal, and a human heart is a strange thing, ever immune to analysis.
But I knew my options were limited. I either returned to the future or I kept to myself; I could not become the protecting deity of a tribe, and the scientist in me knew any emotional attachment to the people I studied trebled the danger. Ultimately I was biding my time as I refined my observations: the date was up there in the sky, and I knew what to do when I had completed my calculations.
We called it the Perpetuity Protocol, and I was quite certain it would work. I knew an excavation was to be mounted a few months after my departure from the future, at the site of a previously uninvestigated Chalcolithic village, determined by surface artifact scatter and ground-penetrating scans, a day’s walk north of this lake. It was insurance, and quite deliberately planned. I would simply make a clay tablet, such as would come into use in the near future, and inscribe it in the well-known Proto-Elamite script first translated in the mid-21st century. It would survive almost indefinitely in the ground, precisely where I knew archaeologists would be digging. The future would receive the message; in principle it could not be simpler, and in that reassurance I began to feel my mission was not a total failure. Even in my isolated position, I had gained invaluable insights from my conversations with Tiva, and so far her oath to keep my secret was holding.
Perhaps I could expand my role, I felt—being fractionally more daring. The idea came to me as high summer began its turn toward fall, and a band of traders moved through the area, touring the villages of these hills with bartered wares. Currency was thirty-five centuries in the future, all goods were traded, and I wanted a robe of flax, the sort of thing the people wore as the weather turned cooler. I asked Tiva to get it for me in the days the traders camped by the lake, and supplied her with a brace of rabbits I had brought down with pebbles flung with the accuracy of rifle rounds. She managed to make the trade unnoticed by her family and the next day brought the robe. For the first time I donned a garment, drew the hood up and forward, folded my hands in the sleeves, and from a distance I would almost pass for human.
I relaxed into my role, now, continued my scientific observations, and refined my estimate of the date, until I was satisfied this was the year 4282 BCE, and the progression of the seasons and lunar phases, adjusted for the Gregorian calendar, placed the date as August 23rd. I had my temporospatial locale, and knew it was time to set matters in motion.
Clay from a creek flowing into the lake provided the material and I worked it in my metal fingers as I knelt by a small fire, unseen among the trees of late summer. The wind was changing, backing to a new quarter, and birds hurried in their summer gathering, squabbling on the lakeshore as they felt the tug of the year.... So too did I feel the inevitability of time, and my heart was heavy as I took a tiny piece of cooled charcoal from the fire and buried it in the clay. The charcoal provided a carbon dating signature to support my calculations, while on the surface of the tablet I used a stick to impress the Proto-Elamite characters to tell the thirtieth century to send a crucible to the equinox of autumn, 4282 BCE. This was another insurance—the message could not possibly be read, even if accidentally found, at any time before the mid-21st century, by which point the world would dismiss it as a hoax. This was of no immediate assistance to me, however the message would always be remembered and when time travel was developed and total immersion studies proposed, the establishment would realize the protocol had been invoked and the message would reach them all the same. Plain English would invite the tablet being destroyed by a disgruntled Victorian or later-period worker who did not enjoy being made a fool of.
One night when the wind was in the trees and leaves had begun to drift, I took the tablet and made my way north around the lake, set a swift pace and in an hour had covered the distance. I checked my coordinates, matched the topography of the landscape to my memories and paced calmly to the area where, 76 centuries from now, an excavation grid would be established.
I stood in the starlight, listened to the wind and the howl of wolves in these highlands, and looked down at the finished tablet, neatly fired and now archaeologically durable. This was my message to the future, and it seemed all time was circular, or at least, for me, all it contained preordained—both comforting and strangely the opposite. In randomness exists infinite possibility, the coin-toss of existence; knowing the future was, in its way, alien to human reality.
With a sense of being controlled by forces beyond resistance, I buried the tablet with slow, precise actions. When a village was built here, maybe two thousand more years in the future, the tablet would already be at a safe depth to remain undisturbed by post-holes and other excavations, and in the far future the archaeologists knew how deep to scan for a message from the fifth millennium BC. I straightened, dusted my metal hands and heaved a mental sigh; my time with Tiva was prescribed by the date I had asked them to come for me, and now I could concentrate solely on my studies in the weeks I had left.
The leaves were turning, gold had appeared in the treetops and the lakeshore was glorious. Now in cool mornings, Tiva dressed in doeskin and flax, with boots of goatskin, against the wind across the water. When she came to the Sky Man it was the meeting of friends, and they shared an hour as often as they may.
This day, as they walked in the high woods amid the first drift of leaves, she at last found the courage to ask a question long puzzling her. “Iss-mal.... Why will you not tell me of your home?”
The metal face turned to her and she almost sensed a smile. “How I would like to. But I cannot. I have told you I come from far away, and my people wish to learn all they can of yours. It is important to us to understand you. All I can say is that we are a curious people who would know all we can of the world around us. This includes all that lives, from the humblest blade of grass to the farthest star.” He clasped his hands behind his back and looked up at the rustling leaves, his body-language so very human; her instinctive apprehensions to see metal behave so had long been replaced with comfortable familiarity, and trust. “Part of me wishes I could take you with me....” The words were almost a whisper, as if a thought, never meant to be voiced, had escaped from the soul within.
“Are you...leaving, Iss-mal?”
At the note in her voice, the arch of her eyebrows, the Sky Man looked down at her, and she almost sensed a smile. “All things change in time, Tiva. As I came, so must I go once more.” They paused and the breeze, heavy with the scents of the forests, filled the moment.
“But....” She lifted a hand and, so very tentatively, brushed his shoulder. “Please do not go.”
The moment seemed stretched to infinity and she wondered if she had gone too far, when a shining hand covered hers with a gentle squeeze. “I so wish I could remain. But there is danger in every moment. Not to me, but to you, and to the world you live in. I was never meant to be this way.” He sighed, a vocalized emotion. “I wish I could look upon you with living eyes.”
“You are my friend,” she said very softly. “I care not that you were forged by some power I cannot imagine.” She turned away, abruptly hiding an emotion from him, but his hand on her shoulder coaxed her words forth. “I will be of age very soon. I must choose a man of the tribe in the coming year. How can I keep a secret such as this? I fear I will seldom see you. And now you say you must leave....”
“Perhaps it is for the best,” the Sky Man murmured.
“No.” She turned and looked up into his lenses. “I would have things be different.”
The fixed, gleaming face, the skull of silvery hardness, tuned away a little, as if the soul within were suffering. “As would I,” came the whisper. “Truly, we are caught in a web beyond our making. You thought of me as a god once. Were I a god, I would remake things to take away this hurt.”
“But you cannot,” she murmured. “I accept now you are no god. Yet you are more than mortal, this I also know. It tears my heart that I may not share my secret with my people, but it was your first wish, so it shall be.”
They walked on, close together, and at last sat down on a fallen trunk among ferns and the hum of late-season insects.
“I must go,” the Sky Man said softly. “It will be soon… I do not know if I will ever be able to return. But I will try.”
She smiled, held silence, and dared lean close, to rest against his shoulder.
I was first to detect the strangers, my electronic perceptions even sharper than Tiva’s wilderness-born senses. I nodded toward the passes further west and whispered to her, then glanced around.
“Hide,” she hissed, and I made a simple leap, to catch the bough of an overhanging tree, swing up and climb higher. But for an extra scatter of leaves, I disappeared at once, and stood balanced on a great bough to scan down through the foliage to my companion. I looked up, took bearing and distance on faint voices and a moment later caught movement. It was too late for Tiva to go to ground, and I intuited her skills were thin when it came to stalking—or being stalked.
They were hunters, and their blades were still clean. By the cut of their cloth and the patterns of their marking, they were not of the Lakes, but another tribe some way distant. Four men, hard and hungry, searching for deer or pig—their hunting range must be worked out so late in the year, and they had strayed beyond their borders to lay in meat to salt for the hard months.
The language was the same, I had no difficulty translating, though dialect was a little different. They spread out in a stealthy line as they sighted Tiva, and came on warily. Their leader, a man named Danoch, leaned on his spear and spoke in friendly manner, and the others formed a half-circle around the girl. They shared a water skin and spoke of this and that, with many chuckles and gestures.
The anthropologist in me was watching for certain behavioral markers. Human nature, after all, had not changed, and I quickly picked up on a certain excitement among the four. Body language, pitch of the voice—both outside conscious control—betrayed their interest and I knew with a sick feeling in my metal innards they were seriously considering having their way with a lone female of another tribe. First they lulled with smooth words, then sought to elicit a favorable reaction to their manhood, and when Tiva was not interested patience was rapidly exhausted and smiles turned to anger.
What was I to do? Part of me was ready to drop down at her side and head off the situation merely with my presence, but that would be to install a tradition of supernatural intervention. Could I avoid this? I thought quickly, performed a scent analysis of the breeze and knew there were wolves within a kilometer of us. Yes—that would work. I reset my vocal processors and emitted a hypersonic whistle audible only to canines. They would come, nothing was surer. Let the hunters be concerned with their lives and leave Tiva alone.
But things moved with greater speed than I had hoped. With a snarl Tiva thrust a hunter from her, and her obsidian dagger sprang into her hand as she backed against the tree. The hunters laughed and brandished their spears, formed a ring of blades and began to play as if with some unfortunate animal in a pit. I knew the wolves were approaching, I maintained the whistle to draw them, and watched with a knot of anxiety in my soul as my friend held them off—wondering, I was sure, at what point I would come to her aid.
When she lunged right to block a spear, the leader pounced from her left but before his hands could close on her the black blade made a wide stroke and left a red line across his middle. He staggered back, a cry of rage at his bearded lips, and grabbed up his spear as if to cast with lethal intent. I poised to spring, but in the same moment the wolves crashed through the foliage and circled the hunters with a fearsome snarling. Suddenly the men turned back to back and were concerned only with survival, and Tiva held her ground, panting wildly, not wanting to stray from me. The hunters flailed about with their spears, calling with great shouts of bluff and bravado, and edged back the way they had come. I had discontinued the whistle as soon as the pack appeared, and when the hunters were far enough away I crouched, lowered a hand and Tiva jumped to catch it. I swung her up into the tree at my side in the blink of an eye and held her close, an arm around her for support.
But nothing ever goes as well as hoped, and the wolves’ razor-sharp senses picked up my mechanisms. First one, then another froze and stared up into the tree, then slunk closer, tails low, and began an ominous growl. Soon the pack had lost interest in the men and were all pointing like a weathervane—at our hiding place. Tiva whispered something, but I already knew what to do. I remodulated my vocal emitter and produced the infrasound base range of a bear—just inside canine hearing and sure to be well known to them. Their behavior became confused, they milled and circled, searched for scent trails, but at last shied from the clear signature of a more powerful predator than themselves, and melted back into the fall green with whines and snuffles of discontent.
When we were safely alone I eased my grip and sighed vocally. “This is what I meant by danger to you,” I whispered, and gently let her down from the tree.
From acorns grow mighty oaks, as the ancient saying goes, and I had the most terrible foreboding after that event. Tiva had kept my secret at great personal cost and I was more concerned for her than ever. Had she made a dire enemy on my behalf?
The autumn equinox was fast approaching, my time here almost up. The instant a craft appeared, I would feel the cool electronic touch of its computers; ordinarily I would have been counting the hours, but now I felt I left something vitally important undone, less a responsibility to my work than to those my work had affected. Thus, when Tiva left me to sail the lake for home, I took my robe and made my way cautiously through the woods south of the water, staying well out of sight as afternoon became evening, and at last scaling my favorite vantage tree to scope in on the village with long lenses and ferry mikes. I had to know she was safe. Clearly she was shaken, her family knew something had happened, but even now she kept my secret; and I resolved to monitor, for though I had no idea what I could do to help if she was compromised, knowledge alone provided options.
Each day I scanned the village, salving my conscience by calling it anthropological observation, while knowing I was looking after my friend, and as time went by I became more certain she was fine. The equinox was hard upon us now, and I wanted only to be able to step away into the future with reasonable certainty I left her and her people as well as I had encountered them. Thus my foreboding when, on the morning of the day before the equinox of autumn, a small party crossed the hills from the south-west, making for the village, and among them I spotted one of the hunters we had encountered in the woods.
Their expressions were stern, they walked with spears at their shoulders, and every analytical faculty I possessed told me the consequences of my actions were about to become very real. If I had possessed a stomach, I am sure it would have turned in that moment. I mentally squeezed my eyes closed and willed calm, weighing my options.
In the hour they took to reach the village I stayed hidden, thinking. Today Tiva was not upon the waters, but working with the flax weavers in the village common area, I watched her nimbly threading the processed fiber on a loom of carved wood, chatting with her workmates as if without a care, and I focused hard on her. Her body language betrayed no anxiety, she suspected nothing....
A shout brought attention to the edge of the village and people gathered as the strangers appeared. Hands rose in greeting and it seemed words were amicable, but the party were stern, adamant, and though I could not quite make out their words they were obviously aggrieved.
Now things happened with terrible swiftness—the village hetman was called, a carved chair was carried from his lodge and placed on a packed earth dais in the common area, and the strangers presented themselves before him. He took his seat, flanked by his strongest men, each with spear in hand, though as yet merely in a ceremonial guise. The old man’s silver head inclined in cautious greeting, and the hunters from afar had their say.
I fine-tuned my audio pickups, struggling against wind distortion, and pieced together statements from about 75% reception, plus lip-reading where possible. The hunters’ backs were to me, but I quickly enough knew my worst fears were confirmed. The man Danoch, whom Tiva had slashed in her own defense, had suffered an infection of his wound and a fever set in, taking his life the previous day, and now the people of the western woods sought restitution. A life for a life was their intent, with the threat of open hostilities between the tribes if justice was not served.
I scowled mentally. Had my presence truly generated this situation? Had I not been here, the odds of Tiva ever encountering those hunters were remote; we only walked to the west because it took us away from her people. So—my responsibility. I knew then I could not—would not—allow her life to be taken for an act of self-defense, and when she was brought before the chief, with much imprecation from her family, she protested her innocence, her regret the man had died, but that he had brought it upon himself.
She stabbed a finger at her accuser. “You were one of them! You tried to take me against my will! If there is guilt here, it is yours!”
The villagers cried out, many hands were raised in angry gesture and the hetman quieted them with effort. “Is this true?” he asked, hard brows drawn upon the strangers. “By your own admission, you hunted in our woods. Tiva is a member of the People of the Lakes, she may go wherever she pleases upon our own land, protected by our laws. Did you make unwelcome advances?”
Much shouting accompanied the question and the strangers stood closer together, spears now clutched in white-knuckled hands. “I warn you,” the hunter returned, voice gravelly. “My people have lost a son and a great hunter, and we will have his worth, whatever his intention.”
“You are as guilty as he!” Tiva shouted, eyes flashing.
The stranger brought forth a polished stone amulet on a thong around his neck. “This is the seal of our chieftain, it stands for his voice and his law. The death of Danoch far outweighs whatever misdeed he stands accused of. Do you truly invite an exchange of spears between our peoples?”
Tiva’s father, a great bear of a man, stepped forward, his spear carried casually across his shoulders. “It sounds like it was an honest fight. If your mighty hunters couldn’t carry the day against a girl of the lakes, what have we to fear?”
Amid the general outburst of laughter, the men of faraway bristled, eyes flashing darkly. “We would have had her if not for the coming of the wolves!”
The hetman rose at that and stabbed a hard finger at the accusers. “You admit from your own lips you sought to take this woman!”
“What of it?” The reply was so blunt, so arrogant, it quieted the throng. “Before our law it does not overset the loss of our son and brother!” A hand was raised in angry gesture. “Mark me well, Chief of the Lakes. If we do not have satisfaction, there shall be no peace between us!”
The silence was terrible and I saw glances flicker between hetman and father, and among all those who resented this arrogance. But I knew the chief must weigh the value of peace against injustice. Could he really invite the squabbles and reprisals of a petty skirmish? Livestock slaughtered, crops destroyed in the fields, the coming of fire in deepest winter, children stolen away, murder and pillage.... I saw these thoughts as they chased across his face and knew as a responsible leader he would seek alternatives.
At last, with an expression as if the words were foul upon his tongue, he spoke, gritty and slow. “You may not have her life.” What else? was the implicit subtext.
The leader of the strangers weighed the moment, all eyes upon him, then brought forth a bag of deerskin and drew from it plaited lengths of rawhide, bound to a wooden grip, and threw it down before the chief. “One hundred strokes.”
The villagers broke into an uproar, and Tiva seemed to shrink within herself, looking around with eyes like a wolf in a cage. Her father dropped a huge arm around her and his eyes implored the hetman; but he was bound by the law as much as anyone else. He may brave war, but could he ask others to?
The hetman stepped down from the earthen dais and looked down at the lash, breathing softly. His eyes went from it to the strangers, to Tiva, and I saw the faintest traces of a message in his eyes — was he asking her to avert war? Did she assent in some subtle way? He turned on the accusers. “Forty.”
“I will not haggle with you like a trader on market day,” was the curt response.
“Forty. Dealt by our scourger.” The tone of the words made it clear there would be no further offers, and the moment I saw agreement in the hunter’s face, I dropped from the tree. Tiva was still the keeper of my secret, and I could no longer allow her to suffer for my failure.
To Tiva, all was a blur of shouting and gesturing as her family, her people, roared their outrage, but she knew what she was being asked to do. Save them. She knew to speak of the Sky Man would be pointless, none would believe her, and she would at least have the satisfaction of never breaking faith with him. Before the fevered eyes of the men from faraway, two of the village hunters took her—gently—from her father to the frames where nets were strung to air, and her mouth was dry with fear. All she knew was the injustice of it, and clung to the thought, as she was bound, that by her sacrifice she saved those she loved. She knew her chieftain was compromising for the greater good and their scourger would ease the lash if he could…
And then the village fell silent, a strange silence as of a pent breath, of waiting for a sunray to break through clouds—and she half turned to look back at her people.
He was here.
The Sky Man strode evenly through the villagers, swaddled in his fine flaxen robe but face gleaming silverly in the shadows of the hood. All eyes followed him and a thread of unease quieted all voices. The scourger stood with lash upraised, awaiting his chieftain’s word, and the first he knew was the soft touch of the stranger’s extended right index finger upon his arm, then he convulsed, the arm became useless, shuddering, rigid, and he dropped where he stood. All gasped and fell back a few steps, but one of the men from the forests girded his courage, hefted a stone axe by its stout wooden haft in both hands and brought it down with all his considerable strength over the stranger’s skull.
The ground-stone blade shivered apart in a shower of chips and a sound like a bell rang over the village. The hood was swept away, the gleaming cranium revealed, and twin lenses scanned the people as the man staggered back, massaging sprung wrists with a grimace. One might have heard a fly’s footfall as the apparition commanded every eye, and in a last gesture of defiance the belligerent hunter seized a burning brand from a cookfire and flung it to the stranger’s feet. The robe caught and blazed up around him, a wreath of flame in which he stood, unperturbed.
When the flames died down he dusted away the fragments and shook his head. “I liked that robe,” he said softly, and at his words people fell to their knees in a strange admixture of fear and disbelief, the hunters first among them, many not daring to look upon the shining humanoid figure revealed to the light of day. In moments he was surrounded by a kneeling throng, and turned to look sidelong at Tiva. She smiled for him, a thanks, though no words would come, and he reached to break the rawhide thongs at her wrists as easily as wafting aside cobwebs. He put out a hand to steady her and raised his voice that all may hear. “This girl is under my protection,” he said very slowly and precisely. “She always has been, and always will be.” He bent to the hunters and spoke with a sound like a drawing blade. “Who do you think called the wolves?” He rose and was about to speak when a glittering light broke in his mind, a flood of cool presence, and he glanced involuntarily at the sky, as if expecting to see the craft from the future… “Listen well, People of the Lakes, men of the forests. There will be no war between you. You will go your separate ways and treat in amity. The man Donach got what he deserved and the matter is closed.”
Tiva was shaking like a leaf as he lead her through the people, and she could only stand silently when he turned to address them one last time. “Ask Tiva to tell you of the Sky Man. Respect her, now and always.” Then he took her hand and they walked on into the green beyond the village.
In the years to come, Tiva would retell the tale a thousand times, of how they had walked into the country and she had bid farewell to the stranger from the sky, who had promised nonetheless to watch over her. He had told her of his grief, and she had felt the unfairness of those forces even sky-beings must obey. In the end he simply walked into the morning light and passed from existence like a fleeting sunray.
All the tribe had clamored to know and she had become the keeper of the memories, the Chosen One of the Sky Man. Other tribes had sent emissaries to learn of his advent, and it seemed a new god had come among them, though Tiva always repeated his assertion he was no such thing. Less than a god, then, yet more than a man, and she had grown to maturity as priestess to his memory. She spoke of his dedication to peace, his thirsting for knowledge, and exhorted others to have a similar attitude.
One day, some years later, a man walked out of the west. Tall and well-built, with a kindly face and the calm assurance of one who has seen and done much, and his name was Ishmael. Perhaps it was simply coincidence, Tiva felt, but at once took an interest in him, and found him an eager listener to her tales of the Sky Man. In Ishmael she found the most devoted disciple, and in time they were conjoined, for none other had dared propose to the chosen one of neo-divinity. Tiva and Ishmael were more happy than a word existed to describe, and spent the long years of their lives in the Eden of the lakelands, striving for the peace and prosperity of their tribe; and though the priestess had long suspected her Sky Man had returned in the guise he was always meant to wear, she never asked him to confirm or deny it. The possibility was more than enough, and she went to her final repose as content as a human being can be, save for the regret she left behind all she loved, and the man she had always known, instinctively, would outlive her.
High Priestess Tiva was laid to rest with all ceremony and the grief of her people, and when all formalities were attended do, old Ishmael took his walking staff, turned his back on the lakes and set forth for the forests from which he had come. In time, he too passed into legend, along with the shining being that had touched the heart of the wild fisher-girl of the lakes of Elam.