Enigmatic Pilot

“Are… are you a ghost?” he queried, trying to make sense of what was beyond his grasp.

“I would not put it so.”

“Am… am I… a ghost?”

“Say, rather, a hope. A strategy. A necessity. A casualty of war.”

“But you can’t be real!”

“Real enough.”

“But then what am I?”

Who does not seek the answer to that question?

“A desperate measure in a desperate contest. No more can I say that you could fathom.”

“What if I refuse?”

“You will not. The truth has come for you, and as difficult as it is to accept, you recognize it, as you do me.”

“You’re some kind of will-o’-the-wisp!”

I flung one of the stones I had picked up instinctively.

“Ow!” he whined. “Damn thing hit me.”

“I have more,” I said. “Everything is some kind of will-o’-the-wisp.”

“You’re a Vardoger trick! I’ve been trapped!”

“No, it is I who am in the trap. But they will not anticipate me hiding in the trap.”

He rubbed his eyes, trying to make me go away. An illusion of moonlight, a specter of the mind, a lucid dream. If only the technology were so simple. If only I understood fully how to use it.

At last a hint of a tear escaped from the brilliant green eyes, which was more than a little moving and disconcerting for me to witness.

“Am I going to die?” he asked.

“If life and dreaming are not what you have taken them to be, then how can death be, either?” I replied. “Think what Hattie would do.”

“What will become of her?” he asked. And I saw for myself how much he had grown.

“I can say no more about that than you can, now that I am here. I inherit all your uncertainties-save one.”

“Is this because of the slave, and the Ambassadors-a punishment?”

“I take responsibility for Mule Christian,” I said. “You are released. As to those you call the Ambassadors, they are more an enigma to me than to you. I take responsibility for what happened to them, too, although I suspect I have even less to say about them and their fate than you did in the kite. But now you must face another trial. Remember your teachers-the gambler and the runaway girl. Honor them, even as you doubt me.”

Then he did just as I would have done. He rebelled, with all the force of the meaning I had conceived. For that is the wondrous and diabolical nature of the technology. The coming to life. The independence of tactics and vision.

He charged at me, thinking to wrestle me into the oblivion from which he believed I had emerged to supplant him, not seeing that it was more a change of rider. He had no idea that I was the door of which I spoke-and the instant that he touched me he stepped through, fluorescing in a puzzle of hierograms, like fireflies and lost symbols swept into the cyclone.

I crept into the tepee as the last of the luminous hierograms spiraled into vanishing. I was as sorry to see him fade as he was to have seen the twins blown over the river-and not to have said goodbye to Hattie. Folks like us.

And now the trial was upon me.

The scent of the interior was a moment in hitting-and when it did it hit hard. Astounding. The depth and the texture.

I straggled into the bedding where the talismanic objects lay secret in their bag. Hephaestus turned from his rumpled sack of sleep and mumbled, then wiped his face and stared straight at me without the slightest hint of the unfamiliar. It was an eye-opening sensation, to say the least.

“You all right, son? You scared?”

Talk about the child being father to the man.

“Indeed I am, Farruh,” I said. And indeed I was.

Out in the moon-mad dark of this Enigmerica, I heard the cry of things I knew so well-and the call of things more obscure to me than to all others. My own unknown. So many “squeschuns,” as they say in Gullah.

The next day would bring more lightning… and thunder. The primordial answer to the lightning’s question-the original enigma that set the cyclone swirling. I lay down and closed my eyes, trying to master, for at least a few moments of illusory peace, the alien mechanics of this new sleep.

Rapture rolled over in her blanket. “De preechuh put on ’e shroud whin we beeried Boomer,” she said, sighing.

“It’s all right, Murruh,” I said. “It was just a dream.” The last time I would ever say those words.

Boomer.

Poor old Tip. You see the need to be ever mindful? To be mindful of the details? Sometimes it is wise to count the trees before they become a forest. Because if you see a tree clearly enough, others will see it, too. Stampedes start one hoof in the mind at a time. But learn to see the thunder… then you can call the lightning down.

Powerful though they were, they had taken the bait. As wasps are drawn to raw meat they had come, and would come closer still. That is the one true trick there will ever really be in time. Change the boundaries. Everything genuinely dangerous is afraid of itself, and so cannot resist a mirror.

Kris Saknussemm

KRIS SAKNUSSEMM is the author of the critically acclaimed novels Zanesville and Private Midnight, which became a bestseller in Europe, and a collection of short stories entitled Sinister Miniatures. His latest works, Reverend America and Eat Jellied Eels and Think Distant Thoughts will be appearing internationally in 2012. A book of his paintings called The Colors of Compulsion is being published in France and Denmark.

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