Dan Simmons - Black Hills

— Not quite. We came to the Hills when she was pregnant with you and we climbed there….

Paha Sapa pointed to a peak rising to the west and south.

Robert looked surprised, even shocked.

— Harney Peak? I’m surprised you took Mother there—or even set foot on it.

— Its wasichu name means nothing, Robert. At least to me. We could see the Six Grandfathers—and almost everything else—from up there. There was a dirt road that went close to the Harney Peak trailhead and none here to the Six Grandfathers. You saw how rough the ride in here still is.

Robert nodded, looking up at the distant summit and obviously trying to imagine his mother up there, looking in this direction.

— Why did you ask, Robert?

— Ah, well, I was thinking of all the places you’ve taken me around here on our summer camping trips since I was little—Bear Butte , Inyan Kara, Wind Cave, the Badlands, the Six Grandfathers …

Robert had used the Lakota words for these places, including Matho Paha, Washu Niya (“the Breathing Place,” for Wind Cave), Maka Sichu , and so forth. Their private conversations almost always slipped in and out of Lakota and English.

Paha Sapa smiled.

— And?

The smile Robert returned looked like Rain’s when she had been embarrassed.

— And, well, I just wondered if there were religious reasons for these visits as well as just great places to camp—or places important to your people.

Paha Sapa noticed the “your” rather than “our” but said nothing.

— Robert, when the whites summoned various Ikče Wičaśa and Sahiyela and other tribes’ chiefs and holy men and war leaders to Fort Laramie in 1868, to work out the boundaries of the Indian territories, the white soldiers and diplomats speaking for the distant Great White Father said their purpose in mapping our lands was “to know and protect your lands as well as ours,” and our chiefs and holy men and warriors looked at the maps and scratched their heads. The idea of putting a limit to one’s people’s territories had never occurred to the Natural Free Human Beings or to any of the other tribes represented there. How could you know what you might win in war the next spring or lose the next summer? How could you put a line showing your land in areas that really belonged to the buffalo or all the animals that lived in the Black Hills… or all the tribes that sheltered there, for that matter? But then our holy men began to make marks on the wasichus’ maps showing places that must belong to their tribes and people because they were so sacred to them—big loops around Matho Paha and Inyan Kara and Maka Sichu and Paha Sapa and Washu Niya and Šakpe Tunkašila, where we sit right now….

Robert was already grinning as Paha Sapa continued.

— The wasichus were a little shocked because between just the Cheyenne and the Natural Free Human Beings, we considered just about every damned rock and hill and tree and creek and river and mesa and piece of prairie sacred in one way or another.

Robert was laughing now—that free, easy, natural, always unforced laugh that sounded so much like Rain’s sweet laughter to Paha Sapa.

— I get it, Father. There’s no place you could take me in or around the Black Hills that wouldn’t be part of the Ikče Wičas´a’s faith. But, still, don’t you ever… worry… about me in terms of religion?

— You were baptized Christian by your grandfather, Robert.

Robert laughed again and touched his father’s bare forearm.

— Yes, and that certainly took, didn’t it? Actually, I don’t think I’ve written you about it, but I often do go to various churches in Denver… not just the required chapel at school, but with the other students and some of the instructors and their families on Sunday. I especially have enjoyed a Catholic church in downtown Denver, where I’ve attended Mass with Mr. Murcheson and his family—especially at Easter and other Catholic holy days. I like the ritual… the smell of incense… the use of Latin… the whole thing.

Wondering what his wife and Protestant missionary-theologian father-in-law would think of this, Paha Sapa said—

— Are you thinking of becoming a Catholic, Robert?

The boy laughed again, but softly this time. He looked back at the shadowing summit of Harney Peak.

— No. I’m afraid I don’t have the ability to believe the way I know you did… probably do… and perhaps the way Mother and Grandfather de Plachette did.

Paha Sapa was tempted to tell Robert of how his grandfather had seemed to lose his faith in that year and a half after his daughter had died young. The danger, Paha Sapa knows too well, of having only one child… one child who becomes a human being’s only connection to the unseen future and, oddly but truly, to the forgotten past.

Robert is still speaking.

—… at least no religion I’ve encountered yet, but I look forward to seeing and learning more in different places. But I guess for right now, the only religion I can lay claim to is… Father, have you heard of a man named Albert Einstein?

— No.

— Not too many people have yet, but I suspect they will. Mr. Mülich, my mathematics and physics instructor at the school, showed me a paper that Professor Einstein published about three years ago , “Über die Entwicklung unserer Anschauungen über das Wesen und die Konstitution der Strahlung,” and the implications of that paper, according to Mr. Mülich—the idea that light has momentum and can act like point-particles, photons, well… that’s probably as close as I get to religion these days.

Paha Sapa looked at his son at that moment the way one looks at a photograph or drawing of a distant, distant relative.

Robert shook his head and laughed again, as if erasing a blackboard.

— But you know what the Catholic and Methodist and Presbyterian churches I’ve attended most reminded me of, Father?

— I have no idea.

— The Paiute Ghost Dance holy man you told me about a long time ago—Wovoka?

— Yes, that was his name.

— Well, his message of a messiah coming… him, I guess… and nonviolence and of how obeying his teachings would lead to the dead loved ones and ancestors returning to the world and the buffalo returning and how the Ghost Dance would induce a cataclysm that would carry away all the whites and other nonbelievers, sort of like the Tribulations and all that stuff in the Book of Revelation, sounded very Christian to me.

— That’s what a lot of us thought when we heard it, Robert.

— You told me about you and Limps-a-Lot planning to hear the Prophet with Sitting Bull up at Standing Rock Agency, but Sitting Bull getting killed when he resisted arrest…

— Yes.

— But you never told me about Limps-a-Lot. Only that he died shortly after that.

— There wasn’t much more to tell. Limps-a-Lot did die shortly after Sitting Bull was shot.

— But how? I mean… I know you’d thought that your honorary tunkašila had been killed years earlier, right after you’d had your Vision and the cavalry chasing Custer’s killers had burned your old village down, but you left that school the priests were running and went up to Canada to search for Limps-a-Lot when you were… gosh, you were about my age, Father.

Paha Sapa shook his head.

— Nonsense. I was much older… almost sixteen. A visiting priest from Canada had described a man who sounded like my tunkaˇsila. I had to go see.