Jack McDevitt - Ancient Shores

And she was, by the way, wrong about Bill. He believed every word.

Andrea Hawk gave Max a hand with the travel kit and then stood aside.

The video record of the rings icon had revealed a wall with a long window. The window was dark. The wall was plain. They knew nothing else about the last of the possible destinations tied into the Roundhouse.

Somehow the place had looked chilly, so they were all warmly dressed. “You know,” said Arky, “it’s just a matter of time before we get stuck out there somewhere.”

“That’s right,” said Andrea. “We should devise a test. A way to make sure we can get home.”

“If you can think of a way to do it,” said April, “set something up.” Max knew she had no intention of waiting around. She wanted to look at the last of the places that could be reached from the Roundhouse; and he knew she would go on from there to Eden and begin exploring its connections. Eventually, he believed, they would lose her.

Andrea stood by the icons while April, Max, and Arky took their places on the grid. “Ready to move out,” said April.

She pressed the rings. “Usual routine,” said Max, waving a spade. “We’ll check the return capability before we do anything.” And to Andrea: “We’ll send the spade back. If it doesn’t work, we’ll post a message.”

Andrea nodded.

Max tried to relax. He closed his eyes against the coming light and took a deep breath. That was probably what saved his life.

He’d discovered there was less vertigo if he closed his eyes. He watched the familiar glow against the inside of his lids, felt the unsettling lack of physical reality, as if he himself no longer quite existed. Then the light died, weight came back, his body came back.

And he couldn’t breathe.

A wall of cold hit him and he went down onto a grid. His ears roared and his heart pounded.

Vacuum. They’d materialized in a vacuum.

April’s fingers clawed at him. She staggered away, off the grid. He went after her.

They were in a long, cylindrical chamber filled with machines. The black panel they’d seen in the video was a window, the night beyond it unbroken by any star.

Several windows along the opposite wall admitted the only illumination: light from an enormous elliptical galaxy. Even in his terror, Max was awestruck by the majesty of the scene.

Arky stumbled through the silver glow to the rear of the transportation device, which was supported by a post like the one in Eden. From his angle, Max could see two columns of icons.

Arky looked at the icons and caught Max’s eye. Max saw reproach in the distorted features. And something else.

Now .

Max read the tortured stare.

Go .

The dark eyes flicked to the grid. Max seized April while Arky pressed the icon display. One of the symbols lit up, but his fingers stuck and would not come loose.

The terrible cold pushed what air Max had left out of his lungs. The world was slipping away, fading, and he just wanted it to be over.

But April’s hand held onto him. Drew him back. He staggered onto the grid, and she collapsed behind him.

Arky was on his knees, watching them.

The chamber began to fade, and Max would have screamed against the coming light if he could.

The tape, played on NBC’s Counterpoint , had caught everything. A nationwide audience watched the eerie column of snow move with purpose across its screens. If any program in the history of television had been designed to terrify its audience, this was it.

“And the child,” asked the moderator gently, “was found in the field when you drove this thing away?”

“I don’t think that’s exactly what happened,” said Stuyvesant.

“What exactly did happen, Jim?”

“It was more like it was trying to show me where the child was.”

The moderator nodded. “Can we run that last portion again, Phil?”

They watched the whirling snow systematically retreat and pause and advance and retreat again. Unfortunately, the audience could not see the connection with the movements of the man holding the camera, but they saw enough.

“Is it true,” asked the moderator, “that Jeri never before did anything like this?”

“That’s what her folks say. If they say it, I’m sure it’s so.”

“Why do you think she wandered off this time?”

“Don’t know. I guess it just happened.”

“Jim, is there any truth to the rumor that she was lured ? That this thing was trying to get her away from the town?”

“I don’t think so,” Stuyvesant said.

The cameras moved in for a closeup of the moderator, who turned a quizzical expression to the audience.

If, during that period, a true injustice was committed against any of the persons living in and around Fort Moxie, the victim was Jeri Tully. Jeri also received a gift of inestimable value, and the gift and the injustice were one and the same.

For reasons unknown to the corps of specialists who had examined her, Jeri had never grown properly, and her skull had never become large enough to house her brain. Consequently, the child had suffered not only a diminution in height but retardation as well. Her world was a confused jumble, a place that was arbitrary and unpredictable, in which the principle of causality seemed scarcely to operate at all.

Jeri’s pleasures were limited largely to tactile experiences: her mother’s smile, an astronaut doll to which she had become particularly attached, her younger brothers, and (on Friday nights) pizza. She had little interest in television, nor was she able to participate in the games normal children might play. She was delighted when a visitor paid attention to her. And she enjoyed Star Wars films, although only in theaters.

June Tully sensed a change in her child after Jim Stuyvesant brought her home on that cold April day. But she could not pin it down. The feeling was so ephemeral that she never mentioned it to her husband.

Jeri, by the nature of her misfortune, would never really grasp her deficiencies, and therefore they could give her no pain. This simple view provided unlimited consolation to her family. But something unique had happened to her when she sank half frozen into the snow off Route 11. She was frightened, but not for her life, because she did not understand danger. She was frightened because she did not know where she was, where her home was. And she could not stop the cold.

Suddenly something had invaded her world. Her mind opened, not unlike a blossom directed toward the sun. She had risen into the sky and ridden the wind, had known a flood of joy unlike anything she’d experienced before. She had reached far beyond her own pale limitations.

During those few moments, Jeri understood the interplay between wind and heat and the tension between open sky and swollen clouds. She soared and dipped above the land, as if she were herself a storm, a thing made equally of sunlight and snow and high winds.

For the rest of her life, her crippled brain would cling to the memory of the sky, of the time when the darkness and the chaos and the weakness had receded. When Jeri had known what it was to be godlike.

Adam and Max went back in pressure suits to retrieve Arky’s body. They said good-bye to him two days later in a quiet Catholic ceremony at the reservation chapel. The priest, who was from Devil’s Lake, said the ancient words of farewell in the Sioux tongue.

The mourners were equally divided between Native Americans and their friends. There were a substantial number of attractive young women, and nine members of a teenage basketball team for which Arky had been an assistant coach.