Eveleen felt hands seize her roughly, throwing her violently down on the deck, and Ross's body on top of her. Moments later the gunwales burst into flame sleeting violently forward under the impetus of the hell wind chasing them; the sail vanished in a flare of light and the mast burst into flaming splinters. A thunderclap smashed at her ears, clamping her skull in a vise of silence while the devil played his organ music through her bones. Eveleen squeezed her eyes shut and shouted with pain as a whip of fire flayed her and the nausea of the transition was lost in a world of pain—
—and the shaking roar ceased abruptly, the fire cooled. The boat rocked violently for a moment, then calmed.
She squirmed out from under Ross and slapped at her smoldering clothing and then at Ross's. He'd been more exposed than she. She barely noticed the pain of her burns; what she did notice was the pressure in her ears and a total absence of sound.
Around her the others did the same. It appeared that everyone had come through. They were alive.
After a moment she stood up and looked around. The still-smoldering gunwales of the boat were burnt almost to the deck; all around them, she could see sparks falling gently down upon the sea like a benediction.
Eveleen ripped off her half-burned mask, and sucked in the cold air, still tainted with the breath of hell that seemingly had tried to follow them through the gate. She wondered what it had looked like from the Russian ships, now faithfully veering in toward them.
They were alive, and
home.
She turned her face into Ross's shoulder and wept.
CHAPTER 30
IT WAS JUST over a week before Ross heard his wife's voice.
Until then, he could see her lips move, and he could see her changes of expression, and feel her arms around him, but his ears seemed stuffed with cotton batting. That was all right. Cotton batting was far preferable to that head-slamming blast back in the past.
Then sounds started coming in. Their first conversation was about their hearing; Eveleen complained that a bosun's twee had been set off in her brain, and she couldn't find the off switch.
They joked; they rested aboard the unmarked ship the Project had had standing by. They slept a lot. When they were awake, doctors ministered to them, at first patching up their burns, clearing out their lungs and sinuses, prescribing food, rest, and lots of water. Ross had no arguments with that.
Milliard came in by helicopter; Ross woke up one night to the
whup-whup-whup
of the blades, which he could feel more than hear, and next morning at breakfast there was the big boss, looking like the CEO of a
Fortune 500
company, except maybe tougher.
His lips moved, but Ross couldn't hear him. So they began communicating on-line; there were terminals all over the ship.
At first Ross didn't want anything to do with their questions, with debriefing, even with remembering. But the memory will not be denied: if one fought hard enough against it all day, it popped out again at night, taking control of one's dreams with such a vengeance one awoke, sweating, thinking they were all back in Kalliste again, and the pre-Kameni Island was going up maybe a hundred yards away.
So Ross gave in, answered one or two questions, then Eveleen started sending him playful e-mails, and before he knew it he spent those soft, summery days sitting out on the deck with a keyboard in his lap, typing away.
When he could hear again, the interviews started: Milliard, Project heads from various departments, and of course the medical teams, including psychologists.
They were interviewed separately, though no one made any attempt to keep them apart. Their own hearing functioned well enough to do that, had there been any urgent need for individual testimony.
Memory gave way to thought, and thought eventually produced questions—the foremost ones fueled by anger.
It was some time after the main battery of interviews was over that the entire group found themselves sitting out on the deck under an awning. All around them the sky softly wept, clear, clean rain, sky, air, and sea all a silvery gray.
The gentle drumming of raindrops on the roof merely served to make it seem warmer somehow underneath, as they helped themselves to a fresh pot of coffee brought out by the steward.
Gordon Ashe sat forward and gave them what Ross recognized as his scan look. "So, any thoughts?" he asked, sipping coffee.
They obviously weren't going to hear his thoughts first. Ross had no problem with that. He had no problem with leading off, either.
"I'll tell
you
what fries
my
butt," he said.
Linnea Edel's eyes crinkled. Kosta grinned his pirate grin. "What's yours?" he asked.
Ross laughed. "You, too, huh? Well, mine is this: those damned Kayu guys had the gall to judge us! I mean, look at it. They came on the radio like that, without us connecting in or anything. They obviously were listening to every stinking word we said while we sweated out those last few days. Every word. So they only speak up and tip us the clue that the whole damn island was about to blow
after
Gordon got his harebrained idea of rescuing the Baldies."
"That makes you mad?" Eveleen said, her brown eyes going round.
"Of course it makes me mad! That they could set themselves up in judgment like that, without letting us know. And if what the Baldies told Linnea is true, they don't exactly have clean hands."
"Irrelevant," Ashe said—
at his most maddening,
Ross thought with unrepentant grumpiness.
"Game playing," Kosta said. "I hate that." He grinned. "Unless I make the rules."
The others laughed, and Kosta went on, "We never perceived the rules with those ones. They had rules as far outside our ken as automobiles, computers, and TV shows are outside of the Kallistans'."
"In other words," Gordon said, "they made us feel stupid. Granted."
"Not stupid," Linnea Edel murmured, looking around at them earnestly. "Stupid is ignorant and doesn't care. We knew we were ignorant and we did care. We cared passionately."
Murmurs of agreement rippled round the group as the rain kept drumming overhead and far in the distance gulls screeched.
It is good to be home, in our own time, if not our own place,
Ross thought, swallowing down his coffee.
Stavros spoke up, taking the others by surprise. He'd been so quiet during the mission, like many engineers, living mostly inside his head. "I want to know," he stated, his English very accented. "I want to know what is this entity to which they referred."
"So did the brain boys," Ross said. "At least during my turn on the hot seat."
Nods of agreement from everyone.
"Well, I want to know, too," Ashe said.
Ross shrugged. "I think they went nuts. I mean, don't try to tell me those guys suddenly started believing in fire gods." He snorted, reaching for the coffee pot to pour out some more. "Or do they mean there's some kind of mysterious alien force living in the volcano? Give me a break—that's almost as bad."
"One thing I learned while I was so briefly a prisoner," Linnea said in a slow voice, "is that, even if I were to have told the other women about my time, what vocabulary would I have used? These women were not stupid. They were thinking beings, aware of their world, involved, several of them wise—much wiser, I think, than I will ever be—about certain kinds of things. Yet I'd be forced to use the language of childhood to describe a pair of nylon stockings."
Eveleen nodded. "That's what I thought.
Entity
could mean almost anything, and our mistake would be to assign our old rules to it, especially old rules we automatically distrust."
"I figured it had to be another sort of alien, at first," Kosta said. "From what I understood on that last radio transmission, the 'entity' couldn't 'talk' to the oracle woman while the device was in place."
Stavros nodded. "That argues for physical limitations of a sort that we can understand."
"Unless the noncommunication was not related to physical limitations but to some other set of rules, some we can't possibly imagine," Ashe said.
"Like what? Gods playing chess with us and the Baldies?" Ross scoffed. "If you're going to start gassing about gods then Fin going back to sleep."
"I'm playing devil's advocate," Ashe said, with a faint grin. "Probably a more comfortable post, at least in today's deterministic paradigm."
Ross knew that Ashe was joking—and he was the butt. He sighed. "Look. I just don't know, and none of you do, either, about that kind of question. So why get into it, since we can't really know?"
"Because it's interesting, trying to apprehend the infinite," Linnea said. "I, too, scoffed and thought myself so superior to those poor benighted women with their snake dances and their oracle, there in the dirty cave with stuffy air. But by the end, I began to see that in certain ways, I was the ignorant savage, and not they. Their perception of the universe was clear, it had moral rightness, and for all my superiority in realizing that they couldn't see the Baldies as aliens, only as priests, how many things were around me that I could not see, that they could? There is always the chance that at least Maestra, their seer, had in some way glimpsed past the shadows on the cave wall."
"Then you think there's a fire," Ashe said, looking across at her.
"I think that there are times when we feel the heat of it and see things reflected from the light of it," she said, even more slowly than before. "Don't you?"
Ashe sat there, staring out at the open sea. "I didn't, when I was young, but now, after years of seeing strange things, unexplainable things, I can only safely admit to my own ignorance."
Eveleen said, "Well, those Kayu knew there was something there. And so did that priestess. We found out too late to make our own investigations."
"And who knows if we would have found anything? We might still be too ignorant: all our tools are the wrong tools, our questions the wrong questions, because we so often have, if unconsciously, preformed conclusions," Linnea said. "It seems to be the curse of our modern times: we think we know enough to strip the meaning from all the past paradigms, without replacing it with anything."
"And without really comprehending the underlying meaning that made those paradigms work in the first place," Ashe put in. "Well, it ought to be interesting, the future. The Kayu and Baldies both know not only where we are but
when
we are."
"Do you think they will show up here, then?" Linnea asked.
Ashe shrugged. "It wouldn't surprise me."
"But we don't really know that they are from our own future. It could be that they cannot go forward, only backward," Kosta stated.
Stavros pursed his lips. If he had thoughts about time travel and aliens, he wasn't speaking.
Ross sighed. "Back to the speculation."
"Ah, but we're so good at it," Ashe said, smiling. "Why not indulge ourselves?"
"Because to me it's running in circles. Give me a clear goal and the tools to take action, and let me at it. I hate palaver that can't go anywhere," Ross said. "If that puts me in the ignorant camp, I think I can live with it."
Linnea smiled over her coffee cup at him. "It puts you in the camp of those who act. I am in the camp of those who react. There is, I believe, a place for both."
Ashe turned to her. "Does that mean you want to stick with the Project, then? Despite a fairly harrowing first trip?"
"Oh, yes," Linnea said. "Oh, at first I thought that I would never even be able to look back, and then I started looking back, and then I thought I would only stay on to consult on others' experience—Milliard specifically invited me to do that—but these past few days, I find myself thinking of things I would do differently next time. And that means I want there to be a next time."
Eveleen grinned. "So you got bitten, too, eh?"
Linnea turned to her. "Yes. So I told the bosses that I'll go home, revisit my children, as I promised myself, but I'm going to design my life differently, I think. Even the briefest glimpses of our past are treasures, and I want to be the treasure hunter."
"She's bitten," Ashe said.
They all laughed, and presently they got up and separated, all to various tasks.
——————————
THE SHIP WOULD dock in two days, the bosses having decided that they had enough preliminary material and that the agents were rested, had no mystery viruses or diseases, and were due some extended leave time.
Stavros headed straight back down to the labs, where all the instruments on the boat that hadn't been broken in those last few desperate hours were being evaluated. Kosta was up on the bridge. Gordon and Linnea went off to talk to some of the archaeologists that the Project had on staff.
Ross lingered longest, standing at the rail, trying not to think, but thinking anyway. When he finished his coffee, he went down below, and sure enough, there was Eveleen, in the midst of a workout.
He waited until she was done, then said, "We did talk about what to do when we got out, but we didn't decide. Or don't you want to think about the future yet?"
Eveleen gave him a too-innocent grin. "Oh, I think we should visit Hawaii—and go tour the big volcano!"