Analog SFF, September 2009 by Dell Magazine Authors

Author:Dell Magazine Authors
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Science Fiction
Publisher: Dell Magazines
Published: 2010-12-15T07:07:42.838000+00:00

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Serial: TURNING THE GRAIN: CONCLUSION

by Barry B. Longyear

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Illustrated by Mark Evans

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Do promises always deserve to be kept?

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The story so far:

In the still winds before sunrise every morning, those who lived in Jemez Pueblo could hear Nascha Redcliff do her angry sing. The woman would climb to the top of Bear Rock in the desert far west of the village and its cultivated fields. Then she would beat on the rock with her medicine stick and scold the sun she called Glittering Man up from the darkness. Once the reluctant orb peeked over the mesas to face its taskmaster, Nascha would charge the sun with ending all evil in the universe, complete with an extensive list of objects, institutions, and individuals qualifying as evil. She would recite their crimes and issue her horrific prescription: Death. In all cases, death.

Some of the Christians in the village believed she was evil. Some of those who followed the more traditional Navajo religion believed she was a witch. One of the local bloggers referred to her as “the idiot.” The rest of the villagers believed she was insane. Nascha believed what she believed, nevertheless, and there was nothing anyone could do.

When Nascha's child was delivered by a midwife in the hogan she shared with her husband, Niyol, she declared Glittering Man as wholly inadequate to end evil in the universe. She now passed the task to her newborn infant. Her husband abandoned both her and the infant that night, pausing only long enough to name his son Gordon after Flash Gordon as a bitter joke: Flash Gordon, you see, defeated evil and saved the universe. Before sunrise the next morning, Nascha and her baby son were atop Bear Rock scolding Glittering Man into the sky and reciting the list of evildoers, their crimes, and calling for their deaths.

Growing up for Gordon was the loneliness of the outcast, interrupted by fights with other students, fights with police and school officials, and unremittingly more bizarre sessions with his mother. The lone bright moment came with the news of the first successful experiments at spanning time. Time travel: someone had actually done it. The excitement and promise, though, had been immediately swallowed by the overwhelming tide of international scientific, political, environmental, and especially religious hysteria against this form of transportation and investigation. Timespanning was regulated almost into nothingness, becoming something that had no relevance to Gordon's life.

When he was eleven, after yet another fight in school, he vowed to run away and start over again anywhere as anything. He chanced upon a respected elder, Hosteen Ahiga, who the more disrespectful of the pueblo children nicknamed “Iron Eyes.” This old man told the boy of his mother's madness and that there was nothing anyone could do for her except be there—a task too demanding for Niyol. Iron Eyes suggested to Gordon that he might be stronger than his father.

Over the next seven years Gordon continued following his mother to Bear Rock every morning, listening to her hate, powerless to ease her pain.

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