Aeon Twelve Read online

  I handed Harry a few pills my doctor had given me a while back. “Just drop ’em in the coffee, boy.” I twined my fingers together and knelt to help Harry up.

  “I dunno, Pop. You’re sure it won’t hurt him?” He put one of his legs into my hands and I pushed him up toward the window. He doesn’t weigh much—he’s mostly plastic.

  “You worry too much. Tommy’s a putz. A cleansing’ll do him good.” I gave him a final heave and his legs scrabbled against the wood siding. Then he was gone.

  A few seconds ticked by and he stuck his head out and whispered, “Yeah, but what about everyone else who drinks the coffee?”

  “Screw ’em if they can’t take a joke.” I took out my pipe and laughed, thinking that the tribe’s bathrooms were gonna be busy for a while. I took a look in the main dining room’s window. Tommy was still there, tapping his fingers on the table and waiting for his coffee.

  “Holy God! What the hell is that thing?” someone cried out from inside. I dropped my tobacco pouch and turned around in time to see Harry leap out the window and over my head.

  “Run for it, Pop! They saw me!”

  We ran around the corner and I struggled to catch my breath. Harry could move darn fast when he wanted to. “Did they see you spike the coffee?”

  “I don’t think so.” Harry craned his neck around the corner to see if anyone was coming. “Doesn’t look like they followed us.”

  “All right. Let’s get up to the trail.”

  About an hour later, Tommy rode past our campsite, steam shooting from his horse’s nostrils. He was grim-faced and shifted uncomfortably in the saddle. We hid in the brush and watched him pass. There was a lodge in Norris that he visited every week—Kicks-the-Coyote had told me.

  He made it about another quarter mile before he stopped, wrapped his reins around a low tree branch, and ran into the woods like a demon was chasing him.

  “Well, you see it, boy, go get it. Don’t screw the pooch.” I said, clapping him on his hindquarters.

  “It’s a horse, Pop, not a dog,” he said, crawling forward through the brush. The mare smelled him and whinnied, pulling against its reins. I heard a branch snap and the mare galloped off into the woods, stopping a few hundred yards away.

  Tommy’s head poked up from the bushes and he shuffled out, his pants around his ankles.

  “I see you, you bastard!” he cried, shaking his fist at Harry, who seemed undecided as to what to do next.

  I stood up and shouted, “Go, Harry! Go!”

  Harry skittered into the clearing and Tommy tried to block his path, tripping over his pants and landing face first in the mud. Harry chuckled and made a series of twenty-foot leaps, landing square in the terrified mare’s saddle. His front two legs reached out and grabbed the reins and his bottom two elongated into the stirrups and pressed against her ribs, steadying her. His middle legs retracted into his torso and he looked almost like a man, ready to ride off into that lonely sunset. The white war paint I had applied to his chassis and to his front sensor array glinted in the failing daylight.

  “Aiiiiiiiiyaaaaaaaaa!” He hauled back on the reins, drawing the horse to a stop. He raised his foreleg to me in salute and shot off into the twilight.

  Kicks-the-Coyote sent a few men to the campsite later that night to introduce themselves and congratulate Harry on his first coup. They gave him a hand-worked bridle for his new horse. They also brought a bottle and stuck around to help me drink it.

  “You should have seen the look on Tommy’s face!” Kicks-the-Coyote’s grandson, Jimmy Redfoot, was an easy man to spot. He was the only fella on the whole reservation with red hair. “All covered in mud and shaking. I’ve never seen that old bastard so pissed!”

  “I have.” I took a pull on the bottle and passed it back to Jimmy, smiling so hard it hurt. “Still feels good to burn his britches, though.”

  “Why’s Tommy hate you so much, Chester?” Jimmy couldn’t keep his eyes off Harry. He had never been off the reservation, so he had never seen a construct before.

  “There’s not much to tell, really,” I said. “We were friends, once. Then there was this girl. She liked me more than him. You get the idea.”

  “Yeah,” Jimmy said, taking another drink. Jimmy’s two friends laughed for some reason I couldn’t fathom. “I know exactly what you mean.”

  “What’s the joke?”

  “There’s this guy looking for me. Big, mean. Wants to kill me.” Jimmy ran his hands through his orange hair.

  “How come?” Harry asked.

  One of Jimmy’s friends, I don’t remember his name, answered. “His wife just had a baby.”

  “Let me guess,” I said. “Red hair?”

  Jimmy nodded and took another drink.

  “You can’t run away from it,” I said. “You have to go to him, try to work it out. If that doesn’t work, you need to settle it, man to man. That kid is yours—you need to be a part of his life.”

  “Hey, Jimmy, he’s gonna be at the Norris dance tonight, with Mabel and the baby,” Jimmy’s friend said, his face mock-serious. “Maybe you can talk to him there.”

  “That’s a great idea,” I said. “Me and Harry will go down there with you, talk to him first.”

  “We will?” The light from the campfire played across Harry’s sensor array. I had attached a single feather beside his eye to signify his first coup.

  “Yep.” I put a hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “Harry will make sure you don’t get hurt.”

  Jimmy looked Harry up and down, apparently unconvinced. He didn’t look all that substantial—just a few bits of metal and plastic cobbled together into a lightweight body. “How’s he going to do that?”

  “Don’t worry. Harry has strong medicine.” I smiled.

  We finished the bottle and rode to Norris together.

  “This lodge was a hotel before Congress ceded Yellowstone to the Crows in 2053,” I told Harry. We looked down at the three-story log building, bathed in the moonlight. Smoke billowed from a number of separate chimneys and the flags of the three tribes ruffled on their poles in the autumn wind.

  Jimmy and his buddies went in first, eager to reach the bar, but Harry and I took our time. There were four front doors, set side by side, and they opened into a massive entry hall. The ceiling stretched up three floors and stairways made of lodgepole pine lined the edges. They led to the old guest rooms that now served as living quarters for the tribe.

  “Wow!” Harry turned to take in the whole space. It was filled with people. Bars had been set up at the four corners and a huge fire burned in the open-sided fireplace in the center of the room.

  “Yeah, it’s something, ain’t it?” I led him to one of the bars and ordered a drink.

  “Now what am I supposed to do, Pop?” A number of people caught sight of Harry and stopped, slack-jawed, to stare at him. A few pointed and gradually the noise of laughing and talking wound down to a low murmur.

  “Hi, everyone.” I waved and whispered to Harry, “The second coup, boy—you must lead a band of braves in victorious combat, without a loss of life.”

  “Combat?”

  “Yep, there’s gonna be a fight. Wait and see.”

  We didn’t wait long. Little John had been looking for Jimmy for days. He was a huge man, almost as wide as he was tall, his hair woven into two long braids. He bellowed an indistinguishable word and Jimmy burst out of the crowd like a frightened jackrabbit.

  “Help!” Jimmy flew behind me and clutched my shoulder.

  The crowd parted as if someone had cracked it in two and Little John, his hands twisted into claws, stepped out. His jaw was clenched tight and his face was beet red.

  “Go talk to him, boy,” I said. Jimmy was behind me still, trying to fold in on himself and disappear.

  “Uh, okay, Pop.” Harry took a step forward. “Excuse me, Mr. Little John, sir?”

  The huge man stopped, taken aback at the sight of the strange little machine that stood in his path.

  �
�My Pop says I should talk to you.” Harry looked back at me. I smiled and waved him on.

  “Jimmy is my friend and—” He stopped. Little John wrapped his massive hand around Harry’s neck and lifted him into the air.

  “Your friend, is he?” He punctuated each rumbling syllable by shaking Harry back and forth. The crowd around the two drew back further.

  “Well, yeah.” Harry raised his forelegs so they rested on Little John’s hand.

  “He’s going to kill Harry!” Jimmy’s nails were digging through my jacket.

  “Nah. Watch.” I reached up and peeled his fingers away from my shoulder. “Harry can take care of himself.”

  Long arcs of electricity burst from Harry’s forelegs. Little John screamed and dropped him to the floor. Harry landed on his back and he had to rock back and forth before he was able to struggle to his feet.

  “See?” I said. “Cattle prods.”

  Little John shook his head and rushed at Harry in a rage. Harry skittered aside and Little John’s hands found nothing but air. “Mr. Little John, can’t we talk about this?”

  Little John took another step toward Harry, but stopped, his eye catching sight of Jimmy standing behind me. He smiled, an evil thing, his smile, and stalked toward him, oblivious to the fact that I stood in his way.

  The floor of the lodge shook with each of his footsteps and Jimmy pulled at my shoulder. “Chester! Chester, come on! Let’s get out of here.” Little John’s shadow fell over us. It seemed that a grizzly bear stood there, its features blotted out by the great lights behind it—a shadow bear about to maim us both.

  “Pop!” Harry jumped on Little John’s head. He grasped his huge chin and pulled it to the side, dragging him to a halt as if he were a horse. “Run for it!”

  I smiled and looked over my shoulder at Jimmy. “See? Don’t worry—”

  Then I saw him.

  Behind Little John, his silly war bonnet still on his head, stood Tommy Longbarrel. He had an old, stag-handled beer mug in his hand and he drew it back to his ear to throw it. “No, Tommy, don’t!”

  The heavy mug struck Harry square in the head and he toppled from his perch atop Little John’s shoulders. Jimmy momentarily forgotten, Little John grasped a heavy oaken chair and raised it over his head, intending to smash it down on Harry.

  Jimmy brushed past me faster than I could blink. He threw himself at Little John, driving a shoulder into his stomach.

  “Ooooof!” The chair fell to the side and splintered. Little John toppled to the floor and Jimmy crawled up his prone body and poked him in the eye. “Ooow!”

  Tommy Longbarrel moved closer. He picked up a leg of the broken chair and made his way over to clobber Harry with it.

  “Tribal PD!”

  Jimmy, Harry, Tommy, and Little John were buried under a pile of police bodies. The party broke up just as it was starting to get good.

  The tribal cops had a hell of a time getting Little John into the drunk wagon. He was heavy.

  I went to the little jailhouse after them.

  “That your construct in there, Chester?” the cop chief asked.

  “He’s my son.” I dropped my credit card on the front desk.

  “Good looking kid.”

  “Thanks.”

  “You gonna bail them all out?” the cop asked.

  I looked over to the drunk tank. Little John, Harry, and Jimmy had their arms around each other, laughing and hollering. Tommy sat by himself in the corner. The cops had taken his war bonnet.

  “Yeah, why not?”

  The third coup: A brave must strike an opponent with a coup stick. It took me a while to find him, but I finally located a Sioux close by that Harry could wallop. I mean, yes, he was eighty years old, and yeah, he was in San Francisco, but counting coup on a real live Sioux would give Harry powerful medicine.

  So we took Harry’s new horse, which he renamed Nellie, and my old horse, Paint, on the three hundred mile journey from our lodge to the nearest starport in Idaho Falls, Idaho. And from there it was just a quick flight to San Francisco, or Paris, or anywhere in the galaxy, really.

  It took us four weeks to get there. I arranged for a couple of friends in town to watch the horses for us while we were gone. Someone might steal them there, but that was to be expected in Crow country; there was always somebody counting coups.

  The starport terminal was as anonymous and plain as any I had ever seen. The same white walls, the same courteous constructs, and the same press of people. The only clue to a traveler that he was near the land of the Crow was a couple of guys decked out in feathers hamming it up for the tourists and charging them ten credits a pop for a picture.

  I bought two tickets on the shuttle to San Francisco. In just a few minutes, we were there. I gave the address to a uniformed construct at the gate and he hailed an autotaxi for us. “Have a pleasant journey, gentleman.” He held the door of the taxi open and waved as we drove away.

  I set the autotaxi to wait for us in front of the seniors’ home. The lobby was painted in soothing pastels and tinny music blasted from hidden speakers. To our left, the sound of muttering oldtimers spilled out of a large common room. A multitude of houseplants of all shapes and sizes filled the place, giving it the appearance of some forgotten jungle, inhabited by wrinkled and sleeping pygmies.

  Harry crouched on all sixes. The two feathers he had earned so far hung from his sensor array, and a fresh coat of paint made him look quite fierce. He reached up with his forelegs and I handed him the coup stick, resplendent in the feathers that each of the men of my line had added to it, one at a time. “Take this, my son, and make me proud,” I said. He took it from me with deep reverence.

  “Aiyeeeeeeee!” he cried, and sprung down the hall like some fantastically large flea. His eye darted around the room and fell upon a single old man, stoically playing Parcheesi with an even older woman in the false jungle of ferns and spider plants. Silver rings covered both their hands and they had feathers poking here and there out of tired bathrobes. The old Sioux looked up at Harry rushing at him with no more emotion than a bull buffalo regarding a charging rabbit.

  Harry touched him on the shoulder with the coup stick. “AIYYYYAH!!!” He shook the stick in the air.

  We ran for it, whooping as we went to the front door and toward the taxi.

  Behind me, I heard the old man grunt. I caught his eye when I opened the door for Harry and winked at him. He turned back to the old woman.

  “Third time this year,” he said. “Damn Crows.”

  For the final coup, Harry needed to wrest a weapon from an enemy.

  Nobody had stolen our horses while we were in San Francisco, a small miracle in Crow country. It was a long trip back to the lodge so we spent some time grooming and feeding them before we set off.

  The weather was cold and our progress was slow. Snow pelted us from time to time and the wind smelled of the coming winter. Thousands of buffalo and a few elk ranged about, looking for the last of the green shoots buried under the snow.

  One day we camped by a lake where a few wood ducks splashed about in a small section of unfrozen water. Harry lit a fire with a piece of flint and his knife. I had matches for my pipe, but it was good practice for him. Besides, I’d be damned if my son couldn’t light a fire without a match. When he was finished he came and wrapped a heavy fur about my shoulders.

  “Thank you, my son,” I said, putting my hand on his head and leaving it there for a long moment. I gave him a little push away, pointing at the spot opposite me, across the fire.

  I lit my pipe and puffed. Harry lit his own, carefully watching me and copying my movements. He had no lungs, but smoking is a good way to clear your head, so Harry did it anyway.

  “In the beginning,” I said, pointing the stem of my pipe at the ducks, “the Creator, Old Man Coyote, came upon a group of ducks and asked them, ‘Who amongst you is the bravest?’ One of the ducks came forward and Old Man Coyote said to him, ‘Go to the bottom of that lake and bring up som
e mud. From it, I’ll see what I can make.’

  “So the duck dove in and disappeared. When he had not come up for a long time, the Creator sent the other ducks, one at a time, until the last finally emerged with a bit of mud on its bill.

  “Old Man Coyote dried it in his hands, and blew on it. And when he opened his hand, the Crow came forth.

  “He taught us how to hunt and kill the buffalo, and how to use each of its parts to make all manner of good things. From the stomach could be made vessels for water, from the hide could be made clothing, from the bones, many tools.

  “He told them that he made us few in number, but brave. He said if he made us too numerous, we would destroy the other peoples he created.”

  We were silent for a while, smoking. “What happened to the ducks, Pop?” he asked after a time.

  “The old stories don’t say. But I can’t imagine that Old Man Coyote didn’t take care and reward them for their bravery,” I said, pointing once more to the frolicking ducks, shaking the water from their feathers. “For who has a better life than ducks? They are at home in the lake, woods, and sky. They live long and travel far, bound to neither rock, stream, nor cloud.”

  I closed my eyes and heard the sounds of winter—a songbird in the lodgepole pines, the rushing water of a nearby stream, the wind in my ears, the beating of my own heart. I smelled the good earth and the snow and the droppings of the buffalo.

  Harry passed the night in silence and I let him be. He needed a rest from the ramblings of an old man. He needed to let his true self come to the surface, his Crow self. Crow country had a knack for showing a man who he truly was.

  It did not matter that Harry was a construct rather than a human being. He was made by me and there is more to fatherhood, to family, to tribe, than mere blood.

  The next day the snow fell harder. We stopped to admire a valley painted orange by the sunrise. We looked at the snowcapped mountains, at the buffalo and elk, and at the brilliance of the sun.

  “I dreamed of Old Man Coyote last night,” Harry said. I had written dreaming into his programming, fashioned from random bits of his daily experiences and the traditional tales of our people. A few of the people at the university had laughed when I told them of it, but they were blind to many things. Dreams are powerful medicine.