Dan Simmons - Black Hills

Looking from the south edge of the tower top, the sheer drop to the river there seeming a lot more than a mere 276 feet, he sees ferries moving to and fro, the river filled with ships, and larger ships moving or anchored in the bay beyond. The Statue of Liberty lifts her torch on an island out there.

He looks back to the west. The fairly recently completed Empire State Building rises above the other high buildings like a redwood amid ponderosa pines. Paha Sapa feels a sudden catch in his throat at the beauty of that building, of these towers—and at the hubris of a race of his species that would construct all this and put it into motion. (Eight weeks later, he’ll see the Empire State Building again when he and thirty other workers follow Mr. Borglum to the Elks Theater in Rapid City to watch King Kong. Borglum will have seen it and have been so enthused about the movie—“the ultimate adventure!” he’ll call it, “a real man’s picture!”—that he’ll lead a caravan of old trucks and coupes and Paha Sapa on Robert’s motorcycle [with Red Anderson in the sidecar] to go see it again. Mr. Borglum will walk into the theater, for the hundredth time, without paying a cent—for some reason the Great Sculptor believes himself exempt from such petty fees as movie tickets—but Paha Sapa and the other men coerced by their boss into seeing the movie will shell out an outrageous twenty-five cents each. It will be worth it to Paha Sapa, who will look at all the images of New York at the end of the movie and think of his moments atop the western tower of the Brooklyn Bridge.)

At this moment on the morning of the first of April 1933, Paha Sapa has no thoughts of giant apes swinging from any of the buildings he’s admiring. The morning has been cloudless until now, but suddenly a few moving clouds obscure the sun, sending their shapeless shadows flitting over bay, steamships, island, ferries, the southern point of Manhattan, and parts of Brooklyn. When two of these newcomer clouds diverge, Paha Sapa watches a shaft of almost vertical sunlight reach down and strike the water to the south of the bridge. The reflection is so bright that he has to raise his hand to shield his eyes.

Without warning there are men standing all around him.

Paha Sapa actually jumps in alarm, thinking that police have somehow managed to sneak up on him and are going to handcuff him and haul him away down the cable—no small feat, that.

But these are no wasichu police.

The last time he saw these six old men, they stood hundreds of feet tall and were each surrounded by a corona of brilliance. Now they are just old men, all but one of them shorter than Paha Sapa. They wear dress-up buckskins and moccasins, the tunics adorned with necklaces and chestplates of bones, everything augmented by the most beautiful beadwork, but the once-white deerskin has grown dark and smoky with age, as have the faces and necks and hands of the six old men.

The oldest and closest of the Six Grandfathers speaks, and his voice is now just the voice of an older Natural Free Human Being, not of the wind or stars.

— Do you understand now, Paha Sapa?

— Understand what , Tunkašila?

— That the All, the Mystery , Wakan Tanka himself, shows his facets and has his avatars share their power with the Fat Takers as well as with the Sisuni and Shahiyela and the Kangi Wicasha as well as with the Ikče Wičaśa. This …

The old man gestures toward the bridge tower beneath, toward the roadway far below with its moving trains and automobiles, toward the skyline of New York and the gleaming Empire State Building.

—… this is all wakan. It is all a demonstration of how the Wasicun has listened to the gods and borrowed their energies.

Paha Sapa feels something like anger filling him. Beneath that there is only sorrow.

— So you are saying, Grandfather, that the Fat Takers—the Great Stone Heads who rose out of our Black Hills—deserve to rule the world and that we must fade away and die and disappear as the buffalo did?

Another Grandfather, this one with his gray hair parted in the middle and a single red feather matching the intricately woven red blanket draped over his left arm, speaks.

— You should know by now, Paha Sapa, the life you have lived should have told you, that we are not saying that. But the tide of men and their peoples and even of their gods ebbs and flows like the Great Seas on each coast of this continent we gave you. A people no longer proud of itself or confident in their gods or in their own energies recedes, like the waning tide, and leaves only reeking emptiness behind. These Fat Takers also shall know that one day. But the Mystery and your Grandfathers—even the Thunder Beings, fickle as they seem—do not abandon those they love.

Paha Sapa looks at the face of each of the six old men. He is tempted to touch them. Each man is as solid and physical as Paha Sapa’s own body. He can smell the scent from them despite the breeze—a mixture of tobacco, clean sweat, tanned leather, and something sweet but not cloying, like sage after the rain.

He shakes his head, still furious with himself and with the Grandfathers’ complicated, unclear statements.

— I don’t understand, Grandfathers. I’m sorry…. I’ve planned to… you know my plans… but I’m one man, almost an old man, by myself, and I can’t… I don’t… I want to understand; I would give my life to understand, but…

The shortest Grandfather, one with all-black hair and equally all-black eyes and features as weathered and eroded as the Badlands, speaks softly.

— Paha Sapa, why did your sculptor choose to carve the wasichu heads on the Six Grandfathers?

Paha Sapa blinks.

— The granite was good for carving there, Grandfather. The south-facing cliff meant that the men could work there most of the year and that the finished heads would receive sunlight. Also the…

— No.

The syllable stops Paha Sapa in mid-sentence.

— Your sculptor knows a sacred place when he finds it. He senses the energy there. That, not gold, is what really brought the Wasicun to your sacred Black Hills. They wish to put their imprint on the place just as the Natural Free Human Beings have sought their destinies there. But the future of our people is like the future of a single man… it is not set. It can be changed, Paha Sapa. You can change it.

Paha Sapa thinks of the dynamite he has begun to store in his shed in Keystone and says nothing.

The fourth Grandfather, the one who looks most like an old woman, speaks, and his voice is the deepest of all.

— Paha Sapa, think of the braids in your hair. Then think of the thousands upon thousands of braids of steel wire in the cables on this bridge and how each large cable in turn is made up totally of joined and intertwined smaller strands of braided steel—the whole stronger than any strand of steel by itself, however thick, however resilient. The twining is the secret. The twining is the wakan.

Paha Sapa looks at the fourth Grandfather but has absolutely no idea what he is talking about. Is it possible, he wonders, for ancient spirits to go senile?

When the first Grandfather speaks again, his voice is soft but as solid and strong as the tower beneath them.

— Wait, Paha Sapa. Believe. Trust.

The other five’s voices are like a whisper only slightly louder than the wind.

— Wait.

Paha Sapa puts his hands over his eyes for a second. For only the second time in his sixty-eight years, he is overcome by emotion.

— Hey… you! Old man! What the hell do you think you’re doing?