Hilltown Part 5
Jul. 18th, 2004 05:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hafoc
In the darkening sky, above the glow of the sunset, the galaxy was becoming visible. She strained her eyes to make out the details of the ghostly shape. "Daddy! I see the Hole!"
Father chuckled. "Make a wish, Margaret. Make a wish."
Maggie smiled, remembering the old days on the farm. Her father looked more like the legendary pirate captain, her great-great-many-greats removed grandsire, than the fuel-tree farmer he was. But for all the apparent ruthlessness in his face, he was a gentle man, and a dreamer. He loved the night sky; yes, the winter sky the poets loved, with its view of the bright stars of the cluster. But even more he loved the dreamy summer sky, dark except for the ghostly glow of the galaxy. And because he loved it, Maggie did too.
The galaxy rode high in the midnight sky. It was exactly edge-on. The Hole was clearly visible. At The University they'd told her this largest black blot, the angular dark spot about two-thirds out along the galaxy's north-pointing limb, was just another of the dust clouds you'd find along its equatorial plane. But she preferred the folk legend: This was the hole in the sky through which Carpathia had been yanked by fate, to crash here.
Was the galaxy the Milky Way, mankind's home? There wasn't any proof of that, as far as she knew. Hyperdrive failure should just make a ship disappear forever. Barring that, they could be anywhere in the Universe. And even if the galaxy in her skies tonight was the Milky Way, there was no proof that The Hole had anything to do with Earth.
But sometimes folk legends are true. Sometimes the yearnings and promptings of the depths of peoples' hearts held more truth than dry science. Perhaps it was so in this case. Maggie liked to think so.
What had humans done in the thousand years since Carpathia arrived here? Would other ships ever arrive here? Everybody had an opinion, it seemed, but nobody knew.
She'd always loved patrolling the deserted nighttime streets. Even in New London, where the streetlights dimmed the galaxy until you couldn't see it, there was magic. The traffic lights would blink red, orange, or green, perhaps reflected in rain-slicked pavement, or gloomy through swirls of snow. There was magic in knowing that a hundred thousand souls, nearly a tenth of the Continent's entire population, slept all around her. Back then she'd felt as if no evil could possibly come to shatter those holy, dreamy nights. And for a long time, nothing had.
But midnight streets in Hilltown were, if anything, more magical. Especially in early summer, with the galaxy in the sky during the short nights.
And then there was the aurora. In New London she had hardly ever seen it, but Hilltown had few streetlights, and had no lights at all in the surrounding wilderness.
Tonight the aurora was out, and it was as bright as she'd ever seen it. It was glorious, it was hypnotic. Bands of blue, green, and red, crawled across the skies like the banners of the Gods as they fought their endless battles between good and evil, even as their followers did here below.
For some reason the aurora seemed brighter to the northeast, beyond the Isle of Olgraffa. It was as if the city of the Old Ones, its ruins buried beneath thousands of years of erosion and a thousand years of forest, had come to life again. She could almost see its crystal spires-- or whatever it had; she had no proof there had been crystal spires. But she could almost see them anyway, glowing with a thousand colors. Nobody knew what the city had looked like; the archaeological evidence made no sense, as if it had been a thousand cities of a thousand eras all somehow catastrophically blended and smashed. So it had crystal spires, she decided. Yes, there had been crystal spires, and beautiful music had always filled those streets as the towers themselves sang in the breezes.
There in the northeast the colored lights danced, bright enough to cast shadows. The music was beautiful. She could see the lights dancing on the bright water of the passage-- how had she gotten down to the water's edge? It didn't really matter, though. Such beauty the Old Ones had created, before their fall!
The sun shone on the waters, and the strange flowers-- the foliage was red, orange, brown, it was beautiful. And there he stood by the waterside, a creature of beauty. He was red and orange too, covered in shiny scales. His eyes were crystal, they glittered with rainbow colors. His expression was strange. It didn't look like a smile, but she knew that's what it was.
She heard a sound behind her and spun, saw the gun, remembered the blast, the pain in her side, her partner crumpling at a second blast as he ran to her aid and she fumbled for her pistol and knew she could never get it lined up in time, but she had it out, and she was by the water in Hilltown, in the dark, and instead of firing at the shadowy form she spun, lashed out with her right boot. The armor hit the shotgun's stock with a loud CRACK. The gun roared. Yellow fire lanced into the night sky as the gun spun away to crash into the bushes.
"FREEZE!" she screamed, bringing the pistol into play. Her goggles made the targeting dot visible. She could see it dancing on the man's forehead.
He rubbed his eyes. "Officer.. Officer Blood? Why did you ... wait. Why am I here?"
"Cal? Cal Redfield?" His eyes looked bottomless; her goggles let her see deep into his pupils, full-wide in the darkness. "You frightened me. Are you all right?"
"I think so." He rubbed his eyes again. "I think I must have been sleepwalking. I dreamed I saw something. It was at my back door, it was coming in through the window, it was coming down the chimney. And it was here, somewhere here beside the Passage. I knew it was here, and I had to stop it."
"What was it?"
"One of them." He glanced down, and his eyes, rendered defenseless by the darkness, showed a depth of terror that chilled her. "One of the dragons."
Oh, great. She'd heard of the dragon fever, as they called it. She'd just hoped she wouldn't run into a case of it so soon after starting work. Never would have been good too.
"You're all right, Cal. This is Maggie. You're all right, and no harm done. It was just a nightmare." Maybe that was even true.
"But the lights," Cal whimpered, raising his left hand toward the northeast, where the aurora shone beyond Olgraffa. "The lights of their city. The lights of the crystal spires. The weird music. I can't live, if they keep coming to me in my dreams."
Fear clutched her throat. The lights of the city? The music? How had Cal dreamed the same dream as she? But she was a professional. She knew her face, had Cal been able to see it, wouldn't have shown her fear. Neither did her voice.
"Nightmares, Cal. It's just a nightmare, and you're awake now. Go home. It will all be better in the morning."
His eyes, his terrible eyes, what depths of fear they showed! But he bowed his head slightly, and walked up away from the shore toward the single streetlight visible from this place. He seemed not to remember his shotgun. Good; she damned sure wasn't going to return it to him until she knew he was over this dragon fever thing. If ever!
She watched him go, walking around the big clump of lilacs and toward the street. Then she holstered her pistol, walked aside a few paces and picked up the shotgun. It was a pump gun, based on the ancient Remington design from the archives, about as standard a model as you could get. The sporting model, too, not the riot gun. But sporting models were every bit as deadly, if you got caught at the wrong end of one.
She shucked the shells out; Number 4 iron buckshot, real mankillers. Then she walked toward the streetlight herself, to resume her evening's patrol. Interesting night, this had turned out to be. And overhead the galaxy still floated, and the aurora still flowed its rivers of color. She could almost hear it whispering its mysteries to her.
#
Dean looked up from his eggs and corned-beef hash. Here came Maggie down the sidewalk, looking tired. Must have been a rough night. Well, he'd hear about it soon, if she came into Fisherman's as she usually did.
Sure enough, she opened the door, jingling the bell. She nodded to him, clumped her way across the floor, and sat down across from him. Even though he had seen her in armor since she came here, he was still amazed at how flexible it was.
"Hey, Maggie. Rough night?"
She frowned, shook her left arm, and punched the synchronize button on her wristwatch. "I need a new one. Blasted thing's half an hour fast again. That's the third time this week. Well, the night did feel like it was far too long. I met Cal Redfield. He was out sleepwalking. With a shotgun. I took it away from him."
"That is wise."
"You have a talent for understatement, among other language tricks. I think you're more careful with your language than anyone I ever met. Did I ever tell you that? But forget that for now. What do you know about this dragon delusion, dragon fever, whatever it is? He's got it, and I'm afraid he's going to harm himself. Or me."
"You can talk to the psychiatrist in Disraeli about it if you want. I'm not much for theories."
"I don't want theories. I want practical experience, and I think you have it. You've lived in Hilltown longer than anybody else, haven't you?"
Dean smiled. "It's safe to say that."
"So you've seen people dream of dragons and go sleepwalking, no? Fairly often, I'd guess."
"Yes. But I've never seen the dragon fever cause a victim to hurt anyone else."
"Even if they're sleepwalking on the public street while brandishing a shotgun?"
"Shotgun. Yes. That's bad. But you took it away from him, you said. You got it away from him without trouble?"
"No trouble except it brought back some bad memories. He didn't make trouble. I don't think he knew he'd had it with him, once he woke up. I have it down at the town hall."
"Cal's a bit oversure of himself, that he always knows the best thing for everyone else to do. He never doubts himself. I envy him for that, sometimes. But that conceit might make him more dangerous if the fever attacks him, or it might not. I don't know.
"But anyway, he'll finish his dream about dragons, or he won't. Or maybe the fever will ease its grip on him before he can work through his dream. If the fever does leave him, it will probably come back again in a year, two years, five. That's the usual pattern; once you've been touched by the fever, once you know those dreams are possible, they tend to come back on you, again, and again, until..."
Maggie scowled, and ordered the Redlands Omelet; tree mushrooms, spinach, and spiced Redlands cheese. "Until what?"
Dean smiled. "Until he dreams his dream to the end, and whatever is fated to happen to him, happens."
"And what will happen?"
"I don't know. It varies. Maybe he'll meet his dragon in his dream. That changes people, somehow; some of them just act a bit different, some are destroyed. Maybe he'll dream that he doesn't have a dragon, and then he'll just be Cal again, collecting contributions for every crack-brained charity that comes along, Gods help us. Or maybe he'll dream, and he will go on with his life as before, but there will be some look in his eyes as if he understands the world. Understands why we're here, understands everything. And he'll be happy."
Maggie snorted. "I don't believe in dragons. And yet, last night, for a moment, I thought I saw... nothing. Never mind."
Dean raised an eyebrow and sipped his coffee. "You too? And so soon? But if you say it's nothing, I'll take your word."
"What are they, Dean? What are the dragons, if they're real?"
He shrugged. "I couldn't tell you."
She glared at him, opened her mouth, and then smiled. The smile seemed forced. "Well, could you at least feel free to speculate?"
"Why this hostility, Maggie?"
"Language tricks annoy me. Never mind. Do you think the dragons might be tied to the Old Ones, somehow?"
He shrugged and put on his best disarming smile. "It does seem likely, doesn't it? Here, out at the far end of the continent, where humans found the only Old One traces."
Maggie smiled grimly. "At the fringe of their civilization, at the point farthest from whatever disaster savaged this world and killed ninety-nine percent of the species on it. Or so they say at the University."
"You sound as if you don't believe that."
"I don't. Do you know that ruined city in the northern part of the Isle of Olgraffa?"
Dean took a deep breath. "I'm aware of it."
"It was huge. Why should it be the edge of anything? I think it was the center. And there's still something there, buried beneath that forest. Last night the aurora was twice as bright in that direction as anywhere else in the sky."
"Professor Lightoller, from the University, studied the aurora. He says it appears bright in our northeast because there's a huge deposit of magnetized iron beneath the Sea beyond the Isle. It goes on for a hundred miles. Just what this world needs, yet another iron deposit, right? And they say this has to be the edge of the Old Ones' civilization. Whatever hit the continent was like an explosion. It erased everything on the continent. You have some traces left here, so the blast had to be weaker here than anywhere else, right?"
"They say. They say. What do you think, Dean?"
"Why should I go against the best minds of the University?"
Maggie smiled. "You never answer questions, do you? Well, consider this. There's another possibility. That big explosion on Earth, in that Russia place. Tonguska, Tuskeegie, whatever the place was called. They found standing trees where? At the exact center of the blast, that's where. What if that great city was the center of the disaster, left standing-- sort of-- exactly because it was the center? Just like that blast in Russia?"
"You seem sure."
"I'm sure this is the weirdest place I've ever lived. That ruined city. The aurora going weird. People dreaming about Old Ones, dragons, or monsters, seeing them in dreams, or along the beaches, or rising from the Sea. And here you are, Mr. Lord Protector, at the very center of it all."
He smiled. "I'm hardly an unusual human being."
Maggie glared at him, and then suddenly chuckled. "Well, there is that. Perhaps being at the exact center of the weirdness leaves you standing unharmed, just like the trees in that Russian explosion, just like the ruined city of the Old Ones. But I think this, right here, was the center of their civilization. And I think it's the center of all weirdness on this world. You mark my words, if we ever find what grabbed Carpathia, whatever brought it here across who knows how many millions of light years and stranded our ancestors here to die, you'll find that it's right here. Right here where we are, right here in Hilltown."
He smiled as Andy, the cook, set an omelet in front of Maggie and refilled his coffee cup. "Well, you may be right. I wouldn't presume to dispute you."
"Right here. Right in this center of a circle of weirdness." She frowned. "Why would the Old Ones, or whatever, drag Carpathia here? Yes, the planet is habitable, barely, but it was such a horrible place in those days. Most of us died."
"Perhaps it brought Carpathia here because otherwise everyone, all the passengers and crew of that ship, would have died."
"Ah, but can you be sure of that?"
Dean looked down into his coffee, reading whatever he could scry in its dark surface. "No. That's the hell of it. We can't ever be sure. There were probabilities, possibilities, but never any certainty. We don't know. We can never know."
"Dean? What's wrong?"
He shrugged and smiled. "I'm always sorry for the crashlanders. It's such an old, sad story. I wish I could see this Earth they loved."
"Well, it turned out all right in the end, even if we do live in the center of a circle of weirdness."
Dean laughed. "Indeed we do, and it's my estate. I think when we met this spring you wondered why the Lansen ducal estate should be a perfect circle of twenty-seven point three miles diameter. If you have nothing to do, would you like to see?"
"I should sleep soon, but all right."
"Your old wounds, they don't leave you too short of breath to climb the Hill, do they?"
She glanced at him, a piercing glare. "How did you..."
"Oh, a youngish woman wearing Continental Police-issue road armor and riding a Valkyrie, you had to be a former cop, retired early. Retired on disability seemed like a pretty good probability. With that, and a search through the New London Times database, and I knew all about you."
Maggie smiled. "Perhaps you should have been a detective."
"And you can't complain about my investigating you, when you've been investigating me, no?"
"How did you know that?"
Dean smiled. "I didn't, for sure. Until now."
She stared at him, and then roared in laughter. The other diners looked up from their breakfasts, amazed.
"Score one for you. So we're going to go climb the Hill?"
Dean smiled. "Yup. After you, Officer."
Father chuckled. "Make a wish, Margaret. Make a wish."
Maggie smiled, remembering the old days on the farm. Her father looked more like the legendary pirate captain, her great-great-many-greats removed grandsire, than the fuel-tree farmer he was. But for all the apparent ruthlessness in his face, he was a gentle man, and a dreamer. He loved the night sky; yes, the winter sky the poets loved, with its view of the bright stars of the cluster. But even more he loved the dreamy summer sky, dark except for the ghostly glow of the galaxy. And because he loved it, Maggie did too.
The galaxy rode high in the midnight sky. It was exactly edge-on. The Hole was clearly visible. At The University they'd told her this largest black blot, the angular dark spot about two-thirds out along the galaxy's north-pointing limb, was just another of the dust clouds you'd find along its equatorial plane. But she preferred the folk legend: This was the hole in the sky through which Carpathia had been yanked by fate, to crash here.
Was the galaxy the Milky Way, mankind's home? There wasn't any proof of that, as far as she knew. Hyperdrive failure should just make a ship disappear forever. Barring that, they could be anywhere in the Universe. And even if the galaxy in her skies tonight was the Milky Way, there was no proof that The Hole had anything to do with Earth.
But sometimes folk legends are true. Sometimes the yearnings and promptings of the depths of peoples' hearts held more truth than dry science. Perhaps it was so in this case. Maggie liked to think so.
What had humans done in the thousand years since Carpathia arrived here? Would other ships ever arrive here? Everybody had an opinion, it seemed, but nobody knew.
She'd always loved patrolling the deserted nighttime streets. Even in New London, where the streetlights dimmed the galaxy until you couldn't see it, there was magic. The traffic lights would blink red, orange, or green, perhaps reflected in rain-slicked pavement, or gloomy through swirls of snow. There was magic in knowing that a hundred thousand souls, nearly a tenth of the Continent's entire population, slept all around her. Back then she'd felt as if no evil could possibly come to shatter those holy, dreamy nights. And for a long time, nothing had.
But midnight streets in Hilltown were, if anything, more magical. Especially in early summer, with the galaxy in the sky during the short nights.
And then there was the aurora. In New London she had hardly ever seen it, but Hilltown had few streetlights, and had no lights at all in the surrounding wilderness.
Tonight the aurora was out, and it was as bright as she'd ever seen it. It was glorious, it was hypnotic. Bands of blue, green, and red, crawled across the skies like the banners of the Gods as they fought their endless battles between good and evil, even as their followers did here below.
For some reason the aurora seemed brighter to the northeast, beyond the Isle of Olgraffa. It was as if the city of the Old Ones, its ruins buried beneath thousands of years of erosion and a thousand years of forest, had come to life again. She could almost see its crystal spires-- or whatever it had; she had no proof there had been crystal spires. But she could almost see them anyway, glowing with a thousand colors. Nobody knew what the city had looked like; the archaeological evidence made no sense, as if it had been a thousand cities of a thousand eras all somehow catastrophically blended and smashed. So it had crystal spires, she decided. Yes, there had been crystal spires, and beautiful music had always filled those streets as the towers themselves sang in the breezes.
There in the northeast the colored lights danced, bright enough to cast shadows. The music was beautiful. She could see the lights dancing on the bright water of the passage-- how had she gotten down to the water's edge? It didn't really matter, though. Such beauty the Old Ones had created, before their fall!
The sun shone on the waters, and the strange flowers-- the foliage was red, orange, brown, it was beautiful. And there he stood by the waterside, a creature of beauty. He was red and orange too, covered in shiny scales. His eyes were crystal, they glittered with rainbow colors. His expression was strange. It didn't look like a smile, but she knew that's what it was.
She heard a sound behind her and spun, saw the gun, remembered the blast, the pain in her side, her partner crumpling at a second blast as he ran to her aid and she fumbled for her pistol and knew she could never get it lined up in time, but she had it out, and she was by the water in Hilltown, in the dark, and instead of firing at the shadowy form she spun, lashed out with her right boot. The armor hit the shotgun's stock with a loud CRACK. The gun roared. Yellow fire lanced into the night sky as the gun spun away to crash into the bushes.
"FREEZE!" she screamed, bringing the pistol into play. Her goggles made the targeting dot visible. She could see it dancing on the man's forehead.
He rubbed his eyes. "Officer.. Officer Blood? Why did you ... wait. Why am I here?"
"Cal? Cal Redfield?" His eyes looked bottomless; her goggles let her see deep into his pupils, full-wide in the darkness. "You frightened me. Are you all right?"
"I think so." He rubbed his eyes again. "I think I must have been sleepwalking. I dreamed I saw something. It was at my back door, it was coming in through the window, it was coming down the chimney. And it was here, somewhere here beside the Passage. I knew it was here, and I had to stop it."
"What was it?"
"One of them." He glanced down, and his eyes, rendered defenseless by the darkness, showed a depth of terror that chilled her. "One of the dragons."
Oh, great. She'd heard of the dragon fever, as they called it. She'd just hoped she wouldn't run into a case of it so soon after starting work. Never would have been good too.
"You're all right, Cal. This is Maggie. You're all right, and no harm done. It was just a nightmare." Maybe that was even true.
"But the lights," Cal whimpered, raising his left hand toward the northeast, where the aurora shone beyond Olgraffa. "The lights of their city. The lights of the crystal spires. The weird music. I can't live, if they keep coming to me in my dreams."
Fear clutched her throat. The lights of the city? The music? How had Cal dreamed the same dream as she? But she was a professional. She knew her face, had Cal been able to see it, wouldn't have shown her fear. Neither did her voice.
"Nightmares, Cal. It's just a nightmare, and you're awake now. Go home. It will all be better in the morning."
His eyes, his terrible eyes, what depths of fear they showed! But he bowed his head slightly, and walked up away from the shore toward the single streetlight visible from this place. He seemed not to remember his shotgun. Good; she damned sure wasn't going to return it to him until she knew he was over this dragon fever thing. If ever!
She watched him go, walking around the big clump of lilacs and toward the street. Then she holstered her pistol, walked aside a few paces and picked up the shotgun. It was a pump gun, based on the ancient Remington design from the archives, about as standard a model as you could get. The sporting model, too, not the riot gun. But sporting models were every bit as deadly, if you got caught at the wrong end of one.
She shucked the shells out; Number 4 iron buckshot, real mankillers. Then she walked toward the streetlight herself, to resume her evening's patrol. Interesting night, this had turned out to be. And overhead the galaxy still floated, and the aurora still flowed its rivers of color. She could almost hear it whispering its mysteries to her.
#
Dean looked up from his eggs and corned-beef hash. Here came Maggie down the sidewalk, looking tired. Must have been a rough night. Well, he'd hear about it soon, if she came into Fisherman's as she usually did.
Sure enough, she opened the door, jingling the bell. She nodded to him, clumped her way across the floor, and sat down across from him. Even though he had seen her in armor since she came here, he was still amazed at how flexible it was.
"Hey, Maggie. Rough night?"
She frowned, shook her left arm, and punched the synchronize button on her wristwatch. "I need a new one. Blasted thing's half an hour fast again. That's the third time this week. Well, the night did feel like it was far too long. I met Cal Redfield. He was out sleepwalking. With a shotgun. I took it away from him."
"That is wise."
"You have a talent for understatement, among other language tricks. I think you're more careful with your language than anyone I ever met. Did I ever tell you that? But forget that for now. What do you know about this dragon delusion, dragon fever, whatever it is? He's got it, and I'm afraid he's going to harm himself. Or me."
"You can talk to the psychiatrist in Disraeli about it if you want. I'm not much for theories."
"I don't want theories. I want practical experience, and I think you have it. You've lived in Hilltown longer than anybody else, haven't you?"
Dean smiled. "It's safe to say that."
"So you've seen people dream of dragons and go sleepwalking, no? Fairly often, I'd guess."
"Yes. But I've never seen the dragon fever cause a victim to hurt anyone else."
"Even if they're sleepwalking on the public street while brandishing a shotgun?"
"Shotgun. Yes. That's bad. But you took it away from him, you said. You got it away from him without trouble?"
"No trouble except it brought back some bad memories. He didn't make trouble. I don't think he knew he'd had it with him, once he woke up. I have it down at the town hall."
"Cal's a bit oversure of himself, that he always knows the best thing for everyone else to do. He never doubts himself. I envy him for that, sometimes. But that conceit might make him more dangerous if the fever attacks him, or it might not. I don't know.
"But anyway, he'll finish his dream about dragons, or he won't. Or maybe the fever will ease its grip on him before he can work through his dream. If the fever does leave him, it will probably come back again in a year, two years, five. That's the usual pattern; once you've been touched by the fever, once you know those dreams are possible, they tend to come back on you, again, and again, until..."
Maggie scowled, and ordered the Redlands Omelet; tree mushrooms, spinach, and spiced Redlands cheese. "Until what?"
Dean smiled. "Until he dreams his dream to the end, and whatever is fated to happen to him, happens."
"And what will happen?"
"I don't know. It varies. Maybe he'll meet his dragon in his dream. That changes people, somehow; some of them just act a bit different, some are destroyed. Maybe he'll dream that he doesn't have a dragon, and then he'll just be Cal again, collecting contributions for every crack-brained charity that comes along, Gods help us. Or maybe he'll dream, and he will go on with his life as before, but there will be some look in his eyes as if he understands the world. Understands why we're here, understands everything. And he'll be happy."
Maggie snorted. "I don't believe in dragons. And yet, last night, for a moment, I thought I saw... nothing. Never mind."
Dean raised an eyebrow and sipped his coffee. "You too? And so soon? But if you say it's nothing, I'll take your word."
"What are they, Dean? What are the dragons, if they're real?"
He shrugged. "I couldn't tell you."
She glared at him, opened her mouth, and then smiled. The smile seemed forced. "Well, could you at least feel free to speculate?"
"Why this hostility, Maggie?"
"Language tricks annoy me. Never mind. Do you think the dragons might be tied to the Old Ones, somehow?"
He shrugged and put on his best disarming smile. "It does seem likely, doesn't it? Here, out at the far end of the continent, where humans found the only Old One traces."
Maggie smiled grimly. "At the fringe of their civilization, at the point farthest from whatever disaster savaged this world and killed ninety-nine percent of the species on it. Or so they say at the University."
"You sound as if you don't believe that."
"I don't. Do you know that ruined city in the northern part of the Isle of Olgraffa?"
Dean took a deep breath. "I'm aware of it."
"It was huge. Why should it be the edge of anything? I think it was the center. And there's still something there, buried beneath that forest. Last night the aurora was twice as bright in that direction as anywhere else in the sky."
"Professor Lightoller, from the University, studied the aurora. He says it appears bright in our northeast because there's a huge deposit of magnetized iron beneath the Sea beyond the Isle. It goes on for a hundred miles. Just what this world needs, yet another iron deposit, right? And they say this has to be the edge of the Old Ones' civilization. Whatever hit the continent was like an explosion. It erased everything on the continent. You have some traces left here, so the blast had to be weaker here than anywhere else, right?"
"They say. They say. What do you think, Dean?"
"Why should I go against the best minds of the University?"
Maggie smiled. "You never answer questions, do you? Well, consider this. There's another possibility. That big explosion on Earth, in that Russia place. Tonguska, Tuskeegie, whatever the place was called. They found standing trees where? At the exact center of the blast, that's where. What if that great city was the center of the disaster, left standing-- sort of-- exactly because it was the center? Just like that blast in Russia?"
"You seem sure."
"I'm sure this is the weirdest place I've ever lived. That ruined city. The aurora going weird. People dreaming about Old Ones, dragons, or monsters, seeing them in dreams, or along the beaches, or rising from the Sea. And here you are, Mr. Lord Protector, at the very center of it all."
He smiled. "I'm hardly an unusual human being."
Maggie glared at him, and then suddenly chuckled. "Well, there is that. Perhaps being at the exact center of the weirdness leaves you standing unharmed, just like the trees in that Russian explosion, just like the ruined city of the Old Ones. But I think this, right here, was the center of their civilization. And I think it's the center of all weirdness on this world. You mark my words, if we ever find what grabbed Carpathia, whatever brought it here across who knows how many millions of light years and stranded our ancestors here to die, you'll find that it's right here. Right here where we are, right here in Hilltown."
He smiled as Andy, the cook, set an omelet in front of Maggie and refilled his coffee cup. "Well, you may be right. I wouldn't presume to dispute you."
"Right here. Right in this center of a circle of weirdness." She frowned. "Why would the Old Ones, or whatever, drag Carpathia here? Yes, the planet is habitable, barely, but it was such a horrible place in those days. Most of us died."
"Perhaps it brought Carpathia here because otherwise everyone, all the passengers and crew of that ship, would have died."
"Ah, but can you be sure of that?"
Dean looked down into his coffee, reading whatever he could scry in its dark surface. "No. That's the hell of it. We can't ever be sure. There were probabilities, possibilities, but never any certainty. We don't know. We can never know."
"Dean? What's wrong?"
He shrugged and smiled. "I'm always sorry for the crashlanders. It's such an old, sad story. I wish I could see this Earth they loved."
"Well, it turned out all right in the end, even if we do live in the center of a circle of weirdness."
Dean laughed. "Indeed we do, and it's my estate. I think when we met this spring you wondered why the Lansen ducal estate should be a perfect circle of twenty-seven point three miles diameter. If you have nothing to do, would you like to see?"
"I should sleep soon, but all right."
"Your old wounds, they don't leave you too short of breath to climb the Hill, do they?"
She glanced at him, a piercing glare. "How did you..."
"Oh, a youngish woman wearing Continental Police-issue road armor and riding a Valkyrie, you had to be a former cop, retired early. Retired on disability seemed like a pretty good probability. With that, and a search through the New London Times database, and I knew all about you."
Maggie smiled. "Perhaps you should have been a detective."
"And you can't complain about my investigating you, when you've been investigating me, no?"
"How did you know that?"
Dean smiled. "I didn't, for sure. Until now."
She stared at him, and then roared in laughter. The other diners looked up from their breakfasts, amazed.
"Score one for you. So we're going to go climb the Hill?"
Dean smiled. "Yup. After you, Officer."
no subject
Date: 2004-07-20 01:53 am (UTC)So how many more of these stories do you think there are? Do we ever find out just what the dragons are or anything about the Old Ones?
no subject
Date: 2004-07-21 10:40 pm (UTC)Foo. Truth is I don't know everything yet myself. Simple things first. I think there have to be at LEAST three or four more stories before we get to the end, probably more. The total might end up being novella-length. But the style this one seems to have settled into is little bits and pieces widely separated by time. That's fine, but it doesn't make for a long narrative.
Just what the dragons are? I don't think that will ever be explicitly told in the story. But I'll spoil things by telling you everything I know.
After a space or two.
Or three.
OK. The dragons are what's left of the Old Ones. But you can't really find what happened to the Old Ones because the disaster that happened to them was more complete than that.
What I THINK happened was: They achieved what they thought was perfection in society, and they wanted to maintain it forever. To do so they created a machine, being, cyborg, SOMETHING.. call it Dean.. to protect the status quo. He would do so by rewinding time, changing things, and letting it go forward again in its preferred path. However, what they didn't know was that too much of this can rupture reality.
So reality tore apart, and the Old Ones' history got scrambled among thousands of different possible alternatives. They're impossible, they can't ever have happened. They're also trapped between layers of shredded reality and time, not quite gone. When you mess with time strange things have happened.
Just how they interact with humans, and why, is yet to be revealed. :) Or at least I think it is to be revealed.
no subject
Date: 2004-07-21 10:42 pm (UTC)