The Cydonian Pyramid (25 page)

W
HEN HE HAD JUMPED INTO THE MAGGOT AFTER
Lahlia, Tucker had braced himself for a fall, but unlike his previous trips through the diskos, he found himself, with no perceptible impact, standing on a flat, level surface in a brightly lit cavern.

Ten feet in front of him, a tall black-bearded man wearing a long black coat and a wide-brimmed black hat was bent over Ronnie Becker. Ronnie was unconscious. The tall man was attaching a plastic appliance to the stump of Ronnie’s left leg — the leg Tucker had blown apart with the
arma
back in Hopewell. The bottom half of Ronnie’s leg was on the floor a few feet away, seeping blood.

A thin, shorter man, dressed the same as the tall man, stood nearby, watching and holding a thin tablet the size of a clipboard. Behind him, on the other side of the room, was a row of large glass-fronted tanks, each of them containing a maggot suspended in clear, pink-tinted liquid. Several other men were seated at a long bench, working intently on complicated-looking devices the purpose of which Tucker could not imagine. All of the men were wearing hats.

These had to be the Boggsians he had heard about — the technologists who had built not only the diskos but also the cybernetic creatures known as maggots.

Tucker saw no sign of Lahlia. But she had to have come here — she had entered the maggot’s disko shortly after Gheen threw Ronnie and his leg through, and only a minute or two before Tucker had followed her.

A buzzing, crackling sound came from beneath Tucker’s feet. He looked down. He was standing on a swirling gray surface — a disko set into the floor. He hopped off quickly. The disko fell silent and went black.

None of the men in the cavern had looked up to acknowledge his presence. Tucker took a breath and walked over to a hawk-nosed, clean-shaven young man who was peering through a lens into the interior of a device that looked like an incredibly intricate and impractical toaster oven.

“Excuse me,” Tucker said.

The man did not so much as blink.

“
Excuse
me,” Tucker said again, a bit louder.

No response.

Tucker had a disturbing thought: what if he had become a ghost, like the Klaatu? Maybe he
was
invisible to these strange men. He reached out and tapped the man on the shoulder. The man shot his hand out and slapped Tucker’s hand away without looking up from his work. Tucker stepped back, shaking out his hand. At least he was not a ghost.

The big Boggsian had dragged Ronnie onto the floor-level disko. He fetched the severed leg and balanced it on Ronnie’s chest, then said something to the man with the tablet. The disko began to hum. The big man stepped quickly off the disko.

The disko flashed orange. Tucker blinked away greenish afterimages. Ronnie Becker was gone. The big Boggsian turned his attention to Tucker.

“Zurück!”
He pointed at the disko.

Tucker took a step back. “I can’t understand you,” he said, although he was afraid he understood perfectly — the Boggsian wanted him to enter the disko.

“Zurück!”
the man repeated.

“Was there a girl here?” Tucker asked. “A blond girl? Just a few minutes ago?”

The smaller man, the one with the tablet, answered him in strongly accented English. “The girl is gone.”

“Gone where?”

The man shrugged and waved a hand at the disko.

“Zurück!”
the large man said, raising his voice.

“What’s he saying?” Tucker asked the smaller man.

“Albers, he says you must go back.” The man consulted his tablet and tapped it with his fingers. The disko sputtered, and its black surface became grainy.

“What is this place? Who are you?”

“I am Yonnie-Dav. This is a Boggs-Lubavitch crèche.”

“Is this the future?”

Yonnie-Dav’s mouth curved up into a smirk. “This is now. Wherever you find yourself, you cannot escape the present.”

“What year is it?”

Yonnie-Dav consulted his tablet. “Six. Seven. Seven. Nine.” He pronounced the numbers carefully.

“That’s like . . . almost five thousand years!”

“You were born before Abram?” Yonnie-Dav shook his head. “I think not.”

“I was born in 1998.”

“Ach. I have given you the Hebrew date. In Gregorian”— he squinted at his tablet —“it is three-zero-one-nine. Thirty nineteen.” He looked up. “Better,
nu
?”

“Not really,” Tucker said. It was still a thousand years in the future. He looked nervously at Albers, who was shifting from one foot to the other and scowling at him.

“You must go,” said Yonnie-Dav.

“Wait. This disko — can you make it go where you want it?” Tucker asked.

“Meh. The time, ah, you would say, wiggles? Precision is not a property. You, for an example, should not be here. The . . . you say
disko
. . . it is automatic, to redirect anachronisms to their point of origin. You ask about the
maidel.
She comes for the beat of a heart, then”— he snapped his fingers —“back.”

“Back . . . to Hopewell?”

“If that is her point of origin, yes.”

“What about Ronnie, the guy who was just here? And his leg?”

“Damaged persons we send to the Medicants. Are you damaged? No? I do not understand why you are here. You should have backwarded.” He looked at Albers, and the two exchanged several sentences, none of which Tucker could understand. Yonnie-Dav tapped his tablet, looked at Tucker, and said, “You must go.”

“Send me where you sent Lahlia.”

“The
maidel
? Ah, a romance, perhaps?”

“I just want to make sure she’s okay.”

“Is her home not safe?”

“No! It’s —”

Without warning, Albers launched himself. Plate-size hands slammed into Tucker’s chest. Tucker staggered back, arms wheeling, teetering at the edge of the disk. The big man stepped up to give him a final push; Tucker grabbed his thick wrist and pulled. Albers lurched forward, startled by Tucker’s speed and strength. Tucker used the big man’s weight to swing himself away from the disko, then let go abruptly. Albers stumbled into the disko and disappeared in an orange flash.

Tucker whirled to face the other Boggsians. The men seated at the bench were gaping at him, their work forgotten. At least he had their attention. Yonnie-Dav blinked at the disko as if he could not believe what he had just seen. He shook his head slowly and began to laugh.

“What’s so funny?” Tucker wanted to punch him right in his laughing face.

“Albers will be very upset,” Yonnie-Dav said, still chuckling.

“That’s his problem. Why won’t you just let me go after my friend?”

Yonnie-Dav waved a limp hand, dismissing Tucker’s request as irrelevant. “The Gnomon forbid it.”

“Gnomon. That’s a kind of Klaatu, right?”

“Klaatu, yes. We have contracted with them to reknit the timestreams. Our . . .
golems
”— he gestured at the maggots in the tanks —“recover those who are lost or misplaced. They bring them to this place, like you, then we return them to their proper place and time. The Gnomon believe that this will protect them from oblivion.” He smiled and shrugged. “They believe many things.”

“You don’t believe it?”

“We perform according to our contract.”

“Then it doesn’t really matter to you where I go.”

“That may be true. However —”

The disko flashed green. Albers, his coat stained and torn, missing his hat, erupted from the disk. Before Tucker could react, Albers grabbed him around the waist, lifted him into the air, and threw him.

T
UCKER LANDED ON HIS BACK IN THREE FEET OF SOFT
, wet snow. He got up and brushed the snow off himself. He was back on the roof of Hopewell House, but now it was winter, and it was snowing, and it was night. A few feet above his head, the disko crackled and hummed. The layer of snow around him was marked with another set of footprints, partially filled with fresh snow, leading from the disko, wandering back and forth, then ending at the open trapdoor. He was not the only person to have used the disko recently. Maybe the tracks were made by Lahlia — a disko had brought her to Hopewell once before.

The disko flashed and emitted a pair of Klaatu. Tucker ignored them and trudged through a knee-deep drift to look over the edge of the roof. The street below looked different from how he remembered it. Across the street was the Pigeon Drop Inn, but the red neon sign in the window identified it as Red’s Roost. Hopewell Casualty, the small insurance agency next door, looked the same as it always had. The hand‑painted sign above Janky’s Barbershop was brand-new — maybe old Emil Janky had finally decided to spruce up the place. Nearly every business displayed Christmas lights or other holiday decorations.

Several pickup trucks and cars were parked on the street. There was something odd about them. For a moment, he couldn’t figure out what, then he realized that the cars were all fifteen or twenty years old, at least. He leaned out over the parapet and looked south down Main Street. In the distance, he could see the blocky shape of the old Save Rite store, which had been closed and vacant since Tucker was a little kid. It wasn’t closed anymore. A bright neon sign out front read, friedman’s save rite.

This was Hopewell, but not the Hopewell Tucker knew. This was a Hopewell that had not existed since before he was born.

Tucker realized he was freezing. He was still wearing the thin gray coveralls he had gotten from the Medicants. The only parts of him that weren’t cold were his feet, protected by his Medicant boots. He trudged through the snow to the trapdoor and climbed down into the abandoned hotel. Inside, it was dusty, with spiderwebs and the acrid smell of bat droppings. Everything looked really old, as if time had stopped back in the mid-twentieth century. This was what Hopewell House had looked like before it was refurbished during the short-lived passenger pigeon craze back in the 1990s.

It was no warmer inside than it had been on the roof. He descended the four flights of stairs to the main floor. The front door was nailed shut from the outside, but one of the windows had been pried open. Tucker climbed through and jumped down into the snow. The tracks led out to the street, then disappeared in a mass of tire tracks. Where would Lahlia go? It was cold out. The bar, Red’s Roost, was the closest source of heat. As he crossed the street, Tucker noticed something odd: a motorcycle parked at the curb. A
motorcycle
? On a snowy street, in the middle of winter? Tucker performed a mental shrug and pushed through the doorway into the bar.

He almost backed straight out — the building was on fire — then he realized that it was just cigarette smoke. This was definitely the past, when people still smoked in bars and restaurants.

It took him a moment to see through the haze. A younger and much thinner version of Henry Hall, Hopewell’s most notorious drunk, sat hunched over the bar, nursing a mug of beer and a cigar. Tucker didn’t recognize the other two men sitting at the bar or the couple at the small table against the opposite wall. A lanky young man with long black hair wearing a black motorcycle jacket was leaning against the bar, smoking a cigarette and talking to Red Grauber, the owner. Red looked younger, too.

“Aw, c’mon, Red. It’s cold as witch spit out there. Just gimme a beer,” the young man said.

“You ain’t twenty-one.” Red laughed. “You ain’t even old enough to smoke, last I checked.”

Henry raised his head. “Give the kid a beer, Red. We won’t tell nobody.”

“Shut up, Henry,” Red said. “How about a
root
beer, Curtis?”

The young man grinned — and Tucker recognized him.

His uncle Kosh! Kosh at, maybe, seventeen. That had to be his bike out front. Tucker stood frozen in place. He watched Red pop open a bottle of root beer and set it on the bar in front of the young Kosh, who scowled at the bottle, shrugged, and took a swig.

Red noticed Tucker standing inside the doorway.

“Something I can do for you, son?”

“I just . . . I just came in to warm up,” Tucker said. Everybody in the bar was looking at him.

Henry Hall said, “I think I’m seeing double again.”

Tucker took a few tentative steps toward the bar.

“You lose your coat, son?” Red asked.

“Uh, yeah. I guess. Was there a girl just here?”

“Nope.” Red laughed. “Unless you’re talking about Mavis.” He pointed at the elderly woman sitting alone in a booth, drinking something from a wineglass.

The young Kosh was staring at Tucker intently. “Do I know you?” he asked.

“Not yet,” Tucker said.

The front door banged open; a gust of cold air swept through the room. Kosh looked toward the entrance and blanched. “Adrian,” he said.

A young version of Tucker’s father stood inside the entryway, his face hard and brittle. Tucker stared at him openmouthed.

Adrian Feye walked past Tucker without seeming to notice him, completely focused on Kosh.

Kosh slid off his stool and held out his arms.

“Welcome back, bro,” he said.

Adrian Feye punched Kosh in the jaw. Kosh staggered back, grabbed at the bar for support, and knocked Henry’s mug of beer into Henry’s lap.

“Hey!” Henry yelled.