Dark Time: Mortal Path (23 page)

The deep blue sky seen at high altitudes had become covered with heavy, gray clouds, and as Maliha searched the wreckage, she felt the first snowflakes on her shoulders. Approaching a shape already lightly dusted with snow, she found the body of the bald man. She stripped off his clothing and layered it on top of hers, then stuffed pieces of his underwear into his boots, slipped them on her feet, and tied them on for extra insulation. As heavier snow fell, she went back to the fuselage and worked her way into an area out of the wind. It was the best she could do.

When a plane exceeds its flight plan’s arrival time, a search should be initiated. Given the propensity for violation of rules, however, she doubted that a flight plan for this trip existed. Maliha peeled the skin from an onion with her knife and bit into it like an apple. Darkness fell quickly under the cover of the snowstorm, and with it came bitterly cold temperatures. Maliha wouldn’t let herself fall asleep during the coldest time. She hadn’t lived more than three hundred years to succumb to hypothermia in the Andes.

She meditated, helping her leg to heal, and when she wasn’t doing that, she huddled in the wreckage and pulled the bald man’s shirt over her face for warmth. It didn’t smell very good.

She let her mind roam, found a warmer place and time in her memory, and dwelled there for the night.

I
love you,” Yanmeng said.

Maliha nearly fell off her camel.

“I have never had a friendship so profound.”

Whew!

What he’d just said meant a great deal to her. Over her lifetime, she’d heard many professions of love from men, including some that were sincere. That’s when she fled the relationship.

With Yanmeng, his love was of a different type, and when she tested her own feelings, she found that she returned the emotion. Having a deep, close friendship was a new experience for her. The closer she got to someone, the more lying and skirting the truth she had to do. Plus, hanging around with her could be hazardous to one’s health. It didn’t feel like it was going to be that way with Yanmeng. For one thing, he did a good job of taking care of himself.

He wanted to experiment with remote viewing her. He hadn’t done so in the years since his escape from a Chinese prison, feeling that it was too much of an intrusion without a person’s consent. Maliha had resisted, because she had many secrets. Having someone peer over her shoulder while she ran with inhuman speed was bound to raise questions.

“Let’s talk about it tonight,” she said.

They were six days’ camel ride into the Taklimakan Desert. The desert was a six-hundred-mile-wide wilderness of shifting sands and dunes five hundred feet high in Central Asia. The Silk Road divided when it came to the desert—called a sea of death—taking a northern and southern route and leaving the vast, desolate area to the wild camels who roamed it. The Uygur people lived on the rim of the hostile land.

They had started out as nomads, but then had settled into villages, some of them large and prosperous, and some consisting of a few adobe huts. Their lives centered on oases and rivers that flowed from the Tibetan plateau, sank into the sand, and vanished into the desert.

It was past the heat of midday. The temperature was about 115 degrees, and the sun was low on the expansive horizon. When darkness fell, the temperature would plummet 80 degrees or more. Several times, she’d seen dust tornados in the distance. The Uygurs hadn’t seemed alarmed, so she took her cue from them.

The dunes looked like giant ocean waves frozen in time, although they did move, slowly, driven by 77 z 138

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wind. That same wind created dust storms that spread Taklimakan sand outside the basin of the desert, although the “desert creep” phenomenon wasn’t as marked as with the Sahara Desert. In more than 5

million years, the only change was the pattern of the dunes. Some said it was the most hostile environment on Earth, and Maliha wouldn’t argue against it.

Maliha wore a light-colored cotton gown that fell to her knees, and loose trousers underneath so she could straddle the camel, wrapping one leg around the saddle horn and letting the other leg hang down along the camel’s side. She had a head wrap that left an opening to see through. Although the wrap kept moisture that escaped in her breath close to her face, her lips and eyes were painfully dry, and the lining of her nose crackled in the heat.

Yanmeng’s camel was behind hers, yet she could hear him talk in the quiet of a desert sunset. The camels walked one behind the other, so face-to-face conversation among their human passengers occurred only during meals and at night. With the exception of the caravan master, who was riding out front connected to Maliha’s camel by a long rope, the Uygurs who tended the supply camels lagged behind in their own group. The camels sometimes got on a grunting binge, drowning out conversation, but this wasn’t one of those times.

Maliha’s camel came to a stop. The animal’s instinct told it that the time to hunker down for the night had arrived. She tapped its neck with her camel stick, and held on as the camel lurched down to its knees. One of the Uygurs took her camel to be hobbled with the others, and Maliha went over to help prepare dinner. Wrapped in heavy robes against the increasing cold, she and Yanmeng shared bowls of rice with a few chunks of lamb. The wind was still, and sand that had risen during the day gently drifted down from wind-borne heights, giving their faces and clothing a light dusting. Once the sand had settled, the air was incredibly clear, lacking the pollutants of modern societies. They looked up in wonder at the beauty and intensity of the stars in the desert night.

A strange path had brought Maliha to this desert. She was looking for the Tablet of the Overlord, carved by the hand of the Sumerian god Anu, father of all gods. After that, she intended to search for the shards of the diamond lens, unite them, and use the lens to read the tablet, destroying all of the demons.

In Sumerian stories, the lives of their gods and demons stretched back about 450,000 years, when the oldest forms of
Homo sapiens
first walked the earth. Who was she to dream of stamping those demons out? It was a lofty goal for a humble village healer once tied to a stake and set afire, but she was determined to do it, as she was determined to beat the ticking clock of her aging body.

Amid all the world-changing, super-sized plans Maliha was contemplating, there was one small and very personal thought. With Rabishu and his kind wiped away like an ugly smear from humanity’s future, would there be a time when she could feel an ordinary woman’s simple joys once again?

First—and it was a giant step—destroy the demons.

If
she could find all the diamond pieces.

If
she could find them before she balanced the scale and joined Anu among the stars, leaving behind the concerns of Earth.

If
she didn’t die first and ruin everything.

The Uygurs drifted away from the communal fire. Maliha stayed a while longer, poking the dying embers. She had mixed feelings about fire. She knew what it felt like to be devoured by flames, but in the course of her years and global travels, she’d found herself in this situation—crouched in front of a fire built for cooking and warmth—many times. A final jab at the glowing remnants, and she headed for the tent she and Yanmeng had put up before eating dinner.

They’d zipped their sleeping bags together for warmth inside the tent. Disappointed to find him awake, she slid in on her side. She’d promised that they would talk that night about his declaration of deep friendship, and if he’d been asleep, she could have postponed the talk. He was onto her scheme of waiting around after everyone else left the fire.

Yanmeng reached across her and clicked off the flashlight that lay on the tent floor.

“There are some things I need to tell you about myself.” At least the darkness made it easier to talk to him. She told him about her past, everything except her quest to collect the shards of the diamond lens.

The time didn’t seem right for that. He had enough to absorb as it was.

He didn’t interrupt, and she wondered what he was thinking about the revelations she was exposing, which must sound like the product of an active, or demented, imagination.

“For someone born in 1672,” Yanmeng said when she was finished, “you look pretty good.”

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She could sense him smiling in the dark. That’s when she knew it was going to be all right. She felt a tremendous relief. She let her fear slip away, the fear that he was going to freak out, not believe her, sell her story to a gossip newspaper like she was a two-headed alien baby, or some combination of those. He could put them both at risk.

I did it.

She fell asleep with tears welling in her eyes, tears that shouldn’t be shed in the desert.

In the morning, she woke with a lighter heart. She had a true partner. Yanmeng had been lying there waiting for her to wake up.

“You will let me use remote viewing, right?”

She nodded. She’d never asked him about how it works, and this seemed like the time to know.

“How do you do that, anyway?”

“It isn’t anything I can explain clearly. I develop a ‘tag’ for a person, and once I have the tag, I can go to where that person is. The stronger the tag, the more likely I can find him. When I view, I see the location from a vantage point above, so I have a wider field of view than the tagged person. It’s worked for me before to tag a place rather than a person, but that’s much harder. When it’s successful, then I can visit that place anytime I want.”

“Can you interfere with what’s happening?”

“You mean like mess with time or kill somebody from above? No. It’s taken me many years just to develop a way to tell someone I’m viewing them. My wife describes it as a feathery touch on the head or shoulder. There’s no telling what I could do given enough years, but my progress is slow.”

It occurred to Maliha that having someone view her from above could be awkward. There were times when she definitely wanted privacy.

“Can I tell you to break the connection?”

“Sure. You can use a hand signal, anything we work out that’s not used in conversation. Hold your hand out parallel to the ground and make the signal. I can see it from above, and I’ll go away.”

“No questions asked?”

“No questions asked.”

“How about this?” She lifted her left arm, formed a fist, and then extended her index finger and thumb at right angles to each other, forming an L shape. “It’s an L in sign language, except I’ll be doing it horizontally instead of vertically. L as in, ‘Leave me alone.’”

Yanmeng lifted up his hand in the same gesture. “Got it.”

“Do I have to be close to you, within some range?”

“No. I haven’t had the chance to try viewing someone in space, but as far as I know I can see worldwide. It isn’t like I have to fly there. I cross the space between us instantaneously. Where can I get one of those teeth implanted with cyanide in it?”

“What?”

“A fake tooth. In case I’m captured and tortured.” He said it matter-of-factly.

“You can’t be serious.”

“I’ve never been more serious in my life. There’s too much at stake here. Consider what I have been through in my life, taken to prison, interrogated, and condemned. I would rather die than give away anything you’ve told me. And from what you say, you’ve got some nasty enemies.”

A surge of emotion, several emotions, struck her. Yanmeng was saying he’d die for her, and he’d said it with the utmost sincerity. He was propped up on one elbow, watching her.

“I…I’m touched,” she said about his proclamation that he wanted a suicide tooth to protect her.

Touched
was an understatement. “It can be done, but we’ll have to talk about it again, after you get a chance to think about it. A lot.”

She hadn’t mentioned something the night before.

“There’s one thing you may not have thought about. You’ll get older and die, and I’ll still look young. I think. I’m not in control of aging any more than you are, but I can have jumps forward that could be years long. I can’t say for sure about how long I’ll live, just that it will almost certainly be longer than you.”

“I know. But my life, however short compared to yours, will be full of purpose.”

He gently reached inside her clothing and ran his hand over the scale carving. She jerked away, then relaxed. It wasn’t at all sexual. It was his way of telling her that he accepted their situation. An affirmation 79 z 138

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of everything she was trying to do.

She sighed. “There’s one last thing you need to know.” As his hand rested on her skin, she told him about the diamond lens, and the Tablet of the Overlord, which she was going to snatch from the heart of the desert.

The next morning, over the protests of the camel drivers, Maliha filled a backpack with dried food and water and a few special supplies she’d brought along, and walked out of camp alone. An American going off to die, they thought. As she was getting ready, she’d heard Yanmeng reassuring them, through the one man who spoke broken English, that she’d be back.

They must think we’re both crazy.

The Uygurs agreed to wait for Maliha until the supplies ran low enough that they had just enough to make it out of the desert themselves.

Out of sight of the camp, Maliha took off running. She could make better time alone on foot than on the back of a camel in the company of others. She knew she had to pace herself in the extreme environment, but she’d determine that as she went along. The night before, she’d sighted the moon and navigational stars using a sextant. During the day, she’d use the sun. She was adept with celestial navigation. She’d crossed oceans alone, and since this desert was an ocean stilled in time, she knew she wasn’t going to get lost.