Chronospace

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author's
Imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments,
events or locales is entirely coincidental.

CHRONOSPACE

An
ACE
Book / published by arrangement with the author.

All rights reserved.
Copyright ©
2001
by
Allen M. Steele
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Making or distributing electronic copies of this book constitutes copyright infringement
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The Berkley Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

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ISBN:
0-7865-2323-9

AN
ACE
BOOK®
ACE Books first published by Ace Book Publishing Group,
a member of Penguin Putnam Inc.,
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Electronic edition: February 2002

Books by Allen Steele
ORBITAL DECAY
CLARKE COUNTY, SPACE
LUNAR DESCENT
LABYRINTH OF NIGHT
THE JERICHO ITERATION
THE TRANQUILLITY ALTERNATIVE
A KING OF INFINITE SPACE
OCEANSPACE
CHRONOSPACE

for Gardner Dozois and Sheila Williams

Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.

—ALEXANDER POPE

T
he boy began climbing the mesa shortly after sunrise, stealing away from the village while his mother was making breakfast for his sisters. It wasn’t long before she noticed his absence; he heard her calling his name, her voice echoing off the sandstone bluffs of the canyon he called home, but by then he was almost a third of the way up the narrow trail leading to the top of the mesa.

Darting behind a pile of talus, he cautiously peered down at the adobe village. Pale brown smoke rose from fire pits within its circular walls, and tiny figures moved along the flat rooftops. There was no sign of pursuit, though, so after a few minutes he emerged from hiding and continued his long ascent.

He had hiked to the top of the mesa several times before, but always in the company of his father or one of his uncles, to set traps for tassel-ear squirrels and desert rabbits. The tribal elders had decreed that children were never to leave Tyuonyi alone, for it was only within the settlement’s fortified walls that they were safe from the Enemy. Yet the boy was never very obedient, and he had been plotting this
journey for several weeks now. He knew of a stand of juniper trees that grew on top of the mesa. Although the morning was warm, the first frost had come to the canyon a few days ago, and juniper berries would now be sweet enough to eat. He had bided his time until his father and uncles went away on a hunting expedition, then he made his escape from the village.

The boy was little more than five years old, but he was almost as strong as a child twice his age; the soles of his bare feet were tough as leather, his small body accustomed to the rarefied air of the high desert. He scurried up the steep path winding along the mesa’s rugged cliffs, barely noticing the escarpments that plunged several hundred feet to the canyon floor. When he became thirsty, he paused to dig a small cactus out of the ground; he pulled its quills, peeled its skin, and chewed on its pulp as he continued his lonely trek.

It was shortly after he passed the landmark his father called Woman Rock—a sheer bluff scarred by an oval-shaped crevasse that bore a faint resemblance to a vagina—that he came to the place where deep blue sky met the ground. Suddenly, there was nowhere left to climb; the terrain lay flat, covered with mesquite and sage, with only blue-tinged mountain peaks in the far distance. He had reached the roof of the world.

The boy grinned broadly. He would find his juniper berries and stuff himself to his heart’s content, then he would swagger back down the trail to Tyuonyi, where he would regale his sisters and the other children with his tale of adventure. In his mind’s eye, he saw the tribal elders, impressed by his courage and fortitude, inviting him into their kiva, where he would undergo the sacred ceremonies which would affirm his status as a man. His mother and sisters would be proud of him, and when his father returned . . .

His father would probably tear off a willow branch and whip him to within an inch of his life.

Realizing this, the daydream vanished like so much cookfire smoke. Well, for better or worse, he was here. The least he could do was find a juniper tree.

He walked over to a nearby mesquite and lifted the flap of his loincloth. A thin yellow stream of urine irrigated its roots, and he sighed with satisfaction. The sun hadn’t yet climbed to its zenith, and he had plenty of time to find the object of his desire. Once he had eaten, perhaps he would locate a shady place to take a nap before . . .

A vague motion caught the corner of his eye.

The boy instinctively froze, not twitching a muscle as his dark eyes sought the source of the movement. For a moment he thought it might be a bird or a lizard, yet as he listened, he couldn’t detect any familiar animal sounds. Had it only been . . . ?

There. Just to his left, about twenty paces away. A strange rippling pattern, like the forms hot air makes as it rises from sun-baked ground.

Turning very slowly, the boy studied the apparition. He half expected it to vanish any second, the way mirages always do when the breeze shifts a little, yet the pattern remained constant, spreading out before him like a wavering, transparent wall . . .

No. Not transparent . . . reflective, like the shallows of the creek that wound through the canyon. Indeed, he could see the reversed image of a nearby tree against its surface.

Remaining absolutely still, his heart thudding against his chest, he regarded the manifestation with dread and fascination. Then, ever so carefully, he knelt and, without taking his eyes from the strangeness, picked up a stone. Gathering his courage, he hesitated for another moment, then he leaped up and hurled the rock at the wall-of-air.

The boy had always possessed a keen eye. He had learned how to kill lizards when he was only three, and more recently had refined his talent to the point where he could knock a squirrel off a tree branch from twenty paces. The stone he threw now hurtled on a straight trajectory
toward his selected point of reference, the center of the air-wall where the juniper tree was reflected . . .

The rock hit something that wasn’t there. It made an odd hollow sound, and in the briefest of instants, the boy glimpsed concentric whorls spreading outward from its point of impact. Then the rock bounced off the invisible surface and fell to the ground.

He was still staring at the place where stone had fallen when a ghostly hand touched his left shoulder.

“Go away, kid,” a voice said, in a language he couldn’t understand. “You’re bothering me.”

The boy leaped straight into the air. When his feet touched ground again, he was already running. His terrified scream echoed off the canyon walls as he sprinted back down the trail, the coveted juniper berries utterly forgotten.

A few moments passed, then the air shimmered around the place where the boy had stood. Thousands of tiny mirrors gradually assumed a man-shaped form until it solidified into a figure wearing a loose-fitting environment suit. He raised his gloved hands and pulled off his hood, then grinned at the invisible wall.

“Did you ever see someone run so fast?” he asked. “I bet he’s already halfway home.”

“That wasn’t a very nice thing to do,”
a woman’s voice said within his headset.
“You could have hurt him.”

“Oh, don’t worry so much. Just gave him a scare, that’s all.” Tucking the hood beneath his arm, Donal Bartel wiped sweat off his shaved head as he walked to the edge of the mesa and peered over the side. Although he could see the top of the trail, the boy was nowhere in sight. “All right, he’s gone. Let’s finish up here.”

He turned to watch as the spectral wall began to materialize, taking the form and substance of a saucer-shaped craft. Perched above the rocky ground on five petal-like flanges, its electrochromatic outer skin resumed its natural appearance until the vessel’s silver hull dully reflected the hot sun overhead. Hemispherical pods beneath its lower
fuselage emitted an amber glow which pulsated within the craft’s shadow.

“You’ve got everything you need?”
From within the single porthole on the
Miranda’
s low turret, the timeship’s pilot peered out at him.
“We could stay a little longer, if you think we’re not going to be bothered anymore.”

Donal pondered Hans’s question as he unzipped the stealth suit and shrugged out of it. The suit was useful for hiding from contemporaries, but in the desert heat it threatened to suffocate him. “He’s not coming back, but once he tells his folks what he’s seen up here, someone might come up to investigate.”

“I agree.” The woman who had spoken earlier was climbing down a ladder set within one of the landing flanges. “The Anasazi are a very wary people. Someone down there might think the boy saw a scout from an enemy tribe.”

Donal nodded. For the last two days, he and Joelle had studied this isolated settlement of pre-Pueblo native Americans. Seven hundred years from now, this place would be identified on maps as Burnt Mesa, overlooking Frijoles Canyon within the Bandelier National Monument, not far from the town of Los Alamos, New Mexico. By then, the village of Tyuonyi would be a collection of ancient ruins carefully preserved by the United States government. The site would have a gift shop and a museum, and thousands of tourists would visit this place every year to saunter among the crumbling remains of what had once been a thriving settlement.

Yet their mission hadn’t been merely to record what Tyuonyi had looked like when it was inhabited. Twentieth-century archaeologists had already done that task, three hundred years before the
Miranda
had traveled back through chronospace. There was also the enduring controversy over the forces that had brought an end to the Anasazi civilization. Some CRC researchers, holding to theories first advanced during the late twentieth century, believed that
some tribes had begun raiding others, committing atrocities that went beyond rape and slaughter to include ritualistic cannibalism. This was what had eventually forced many tribes to abandon their adobe homes and seek refuge in cliff dwellings; the Tyuonyi villagers had already built their own Long House within the talus walls of Burnt Mesa. Indeed, the very word
Anasazi,
given to the pre-Pueblo tribes by the nearby Navajos, meant “Ancient Enemy.”

“We might learn more if we stayed longer, but . . .” Joelle Deotado pushed back her long blond hair as she gazed at the distant village. “I don’t want to risk exposing ourselves, and we may have done that already.” She glanced over her shoulder at Donal. “You might have done the wrong thing, but it probably doesn’t matter. They would have found us sooner or later.”

“I’m sorry it worked out that way, but . . .” He shrugged. “You’re right. We’ve been compromised. Better pack up.”

“Very well,”
Hans Brech said from within the timeship.
“I’ll begin laying in a return trajectory, if that’s what you want.”

“That’s what we want.” Joelle walked toward the miniature cameras and listening devices they had concealed within foliage upon ledges overlooking the village. As expedition leader, it was her decision whether to call off a survey. “Let’s get ready to go.”

Donal sighed as he neatly folded the stealth suit. He had donned it when the motion sensors they had placed around the top of the trail detected the approach of the native boy. When Brech put the
Miranda
in chameleon mode, the timeship should have been adequately disguised, the energized fractal coating of its outer hull enabling it to blend in with its environment, yet the boy had the eyes of a cat and the curiosity to go with them. Joelle might not have liked the way he chased him away, but . . .