“Oh, it could. Not to mention what could happen when people start up with the Ghost Dance again and all those dead Injuns born into white skin wake up and realize who they really are. That could get waaaayyy out of hand. You just can’t let it get out of your hand.”
Not for the first time, Kirsten wonders if her mind has shattered under stress. “I don’t see what that has to do with me. Dakota’s a medicine woman, I know that, I respect that—”
A hoot of laughter, strangely not human, comes from the tree above her, and Tega leans back, holding his sides. “Medicine woman! You silly girl, you’re marrying the fuckin’ Pope! Get used to it!”
“That’s crazy! You’re crazy!” Kirsten hisses. “I’m crazy for thinking I’m having a conversation with a—a—talking raccoon with perverted dietary habits!”
Tega turns suddenly serious. “Oh, you’re crazy all right. No sane woman would get herself into—and out of—the tightest droid facilities on the continent. No sane woman would try to put this wreck of a society back together. Now would she?”
“I had to! I’m the only one who could do that! The droid part, I mean.”
“True,” says Tega. “And you, and Dakota with you, are the ones who will lay down the pattern for the New World Order.” Kirsten can hear the capitals as his eyes dance behind their ridiculous lenses. “A mixed culture, where even white boys do the Sun Dance. And a blonde Lakota woman opens the ceremony beside the Medicine Chief of the whole nation.”
Kirsten head spins. Almost she can see it, herself in braids, carrying a hawk’s wing fan, stamping out the rhythm of the drums at the head of a line of women, all in Native dress, their skins and hair all the colors of the human spectrum. Behind them, making the circuit of the dancing ground, come the men with wreaths of spruce crowing their long hair, eagle-bone whistles between their lips. Among them are Andrews and Darius. And the implication hits her like the meteor that extinguished the dinosaurs.
“That means—we’re going to survive! Gods—!”
Before her, Tega begins to fade, the rough texture of the bark becoming visible through his rough fur. Only his voice remains, becoming fainter and fainter. “Remember: the past is the future, the future is the past. Round and round she goes. . . little wheel, spin and spin . . .round and round . . . and where she stops. . . nobody. . .knows. . . .”
And Kirsten is alone, standing on the empty sidewalk, staring up at the empty fork of the tree. She swallows hard; her throat is painfully dry. I need a drink, she thinks. I need a drink bad. Swiftly, almost running, she sets off for the relative security of home and Asi.
CHAPTER FORTY FOUR
THE CONVOY WEAVES in and out among the wrecks on Highway 90 like a line of dancers, stately and nimble. The lead Humvee bristles with weapons, a roof-mounted M-60 and an AK in the hands of its gunner, the tail vehicle identically armed. In between, Tacoma drives an open Jeep, Koda in the seat beside him, Maggie Allen in the back with a topo map and a laptop open on the passenger bench beside her. They are moving just fast enough that the odor from the shattered and torn-open derelicts cannot settle about them. Even so, Koda can hear the occasional strangled breath from Maggie. An airborne warrior skims above the stench of death; a foot soldier and a medic spend their lives in its penumbra. In any case, Koda’s mind is on another matter.
A shadow has followed them since they set out from Ellsworth, a shape that glides along just beyond the screen of the treeline, disappearing at intervals where the ground rises or a streambed cuts below the road. The sun, standing down from noon, glints off the new green of leaves, laying long shadows the length tree trunks. The shadow never quite separates itself from them, never comes clear into the light. The wreckage slows the convoy to a pace that a swift four-footed creature might match, and it has paced them tirelessly. Though it is beyond the range of sight recognition, Koda knows it for a manitu, a power. Tacoma does not seem to have noticed, nor has Maggie. The creature’s message is not for them. Dakota simply makes note of the presence and waits for what will come.
“We need to get a dozer out here,” the Colonel observes as they veer around yet another overturned eighteen-wheeler, its open door bent back like the lid of a tin can. Its upholstery is streaked white with lime where the carrion birds have perched. Just visible through the spiderweb of cracks in the windshield, an arm picked down to bone angles over the steering wheel. “We can’t get an armored column up this road unless we get some of this mess cleared off.”
Tacoma nods as they pass a minivan whose windshield crawls with maggots. He waves a hand at it. “There’s a real morale booster for you. We need a burial detail out here before we bring troops through.”
Maggie pauses a moment, her face thoughtful in the rearview mirror, and Dakota knows that she is weighing resources. “All right,” she says finally. “Nothing fancy. Just a backhoe and a ditch. Get half a dozen volunteers and promise them . . .whatever bonus you can realistically promise them. We’re as short of perks as we are of time.”
Just ahead of them, a fox climbs out the broken window of a car that remains crumpled into the back bumper of a pickup. A scrap of blue cloth still clings to its muzzle as it hops down and disappears into the grass grown tall by the side of the road. Spring thaw has brought the scavengers out to feed. From the corner of her eye, she catches movement of something larger in the rippling stalks, and watches as the fox’s smaller wake veers wide to pass it by.
Something born on Ina Maka, then, physical. Not something purely of the spirit world.
Briefly the shape of Wa Uspewikakiyape floats across her mind, and with it a stab of grief that remains sharp, even though she has managed to hold it distant from her in the crisis of the coming battle. It is too soon for his return, even should he choose to be reborn again. And, she acknowledges to herself, one of his wisdom has no need to walk the earth another lifetime.
“Tanski? You with us?”
Tacoma’s brow knits in concern for her, and she reaches over to pat his arm. “Present and accounted for, thiblo. Just thinking.”
He grins, and she watches the snappy comeback fade before it reaches his tongue. More and more of the Base personnel have begun to exchange knowing glances when she and Kirsten enter a room together; it is, she supposes, something that goes with being a newlywed.
More or less. Formalizing their relationship is something she and Kirsten have not talked about yet, cannot talk about at least until they are past the coming battle. When she had married Tali, fresh out of graduate school, they had gone away to Greece for their honeymoon and had been spared the grins and the elbow jabs of friends and kin. Odd, that her life should have taken a turn for normal in this one small thing amid the wreckage of a world.
She says, “How far out you think we should meet them?”
“Far enough out to give us some maneuvering room between there and the Base.” He glances back at Maggie. “Colonel?”
“Fifteen miles. Twenty would be better. There’s a place up past the bridge where the land falls away. They’ll have to come along that stretch strung out on a narrow front. We can control their approach there easier than just about anywhere else.”
A shiver passes over Koda’s skin, despite the warmth of the sun. “I know the place you mean. Anything on wheels will have to keep to the highway there.”
“Their armor won’t, though.”
Koda frowns, an idea forming slowly as the convoy negotiates yet another narrow passage between lines of wrecked vehicles. “We can block them, if we have time,” she says. “Or at least slow them down. How many heavy dozers can we get working?”