The woman reached out to me, but I did not return the gesture, I stood still, merely an observer. The little girl, who had been dancing around her mother's feet, stopped and tugged at her garment, asking for her attention. "Mama, what are you looking at?"
The woman touched her daughter's head affectionately but did not look down. Instead she held my gaze. "I wasn't fast enough. Almost," she said. "But not quite. But it's all right. Things turned out okay. I don't want you to blame yourself."
She was speaking to me, I could tell. Because I was dreaming, and half-blood dreams come with a kind of clarity. And I knew. Without even looking around I knew where I was. It didn't exactly feel like home. It was more like a grandparent's house. You know it's not where you live, but you still feel comfortable, at ease.
The little girl tugged at her mother's skirt once more. "Mama, watch me!" She let go and somersaulted, throwing her own skirt completely over her head. She stood and righted herself but seemed otherwise unperturbed.
The woman smiled softly. "I wasn't fast enough. But it wasn't…" She faded away.
Wasn't what? I tried to call after her, but I could not speak.
All of a sudden I was jostled awake. Darkness engulfed me and I panicked, completely disoriented. When I tried to reach out for some clue as to where I was, the handcuffs that restricted my movement did the job for me. I was in a futuristic paddy wagon being hauled off who-knows-where for I crime I hadn't even gotten to commit. The right side of my head throbbed. I must have hit it and been knocked unconscious. And I couldn't even reach up to feel whether I had a goose egg. I exhaled roughly. So everything pretty much sucked. Awesome.
The vehicle stopped roughly. How bad a driver did you have to be to get a bumpy ride out of a hovercraft? In fairness, I thought, it was probably difficult to drive with a giant horn in the middle of your field of vision. The doors opened and I squinted against the light, but my muttered protests were ignored. I was led off of the craft though some kind of docking bay. The windows slanted outward, and I made the mistake of looking over the edge. We were hundreds of feet in the air. Again.
I almost rolled my eyes, but realized there wasn't any point. What was I going to do? Complain that I'd already done the perilous heights bit? I might as well have added that I'd already eaten pizza this week, so if that was what they were serving captives then I'd pass. The truth was there was a good thick layer of technologically advanced glass between me and the hundred meter downward dash, so I figured I was pretty safe. And I would never refuse pizza.
When I looked out at the scene sprawled before me, my breath caught. The marketplace, huge as it was, was only a small part of Einezdej. Several thin towers that I presumed looked similar to this one stood at regular intervals, with docks positioned at every other story. But more incredible were the thousands of ships that sailed between them. The large, flat apparatuses were clearly sails but the ships they were attached to did not look like they were ever meant to touch the water.
While behind me, my captors carried on some bizarre conversation that sounded like a failed attempt at a Dr. Seuss book, I watched in awe as one of the ships folded down its sails and docked smoothly at one of the platforms. A crew of humans (or what I assumed were humans), aliens, and robots appeared and busied themselves checking over the ship while the dockworkers began to unload the craft.
Of course! I thought. They were cargo ships. This whole place was a giant port. For a moment I envied the sailors. Who new what sights they had seen, all the places they traded with? Cities more incredible and bizarre than this one, I was sure. Did they have history textbooks—or, text-holograms or whatever—that talked about twenty-first-century New York City? All at once I felt just how far from home I truly was. But it didn't make me homesick. It never did. It only made my heart beat faster and my skin tingle with excitement.
My captor jiggled my arm to get my attention. We had stopped before a large set of doors. "You will identify the specimen." My escort informed me.
But before I could say, "Look buddy, you've got the wrong gal," the doors opened to reveal the room beyond and I knew with a dreadful certainty that, somehow, they'd gotten exactly the right gal. The celestial bronze glowed softly, suspended in midair by one means or another. The wings were so perfectly shaped they looked like they might fly away at any moment, the snakes perfectly identical and detailed. It was the caduceus. The staff of my father.
The last time I'd seen it, more than a hundred thousand years ago, it had looked like a cell phone, but here it was in all its glory. I guess that answered my question about where the gods were. I knew my father at the very least had been near here. But how had he let his precious staff fall into the hands of these thugs?
I'm sure my face revealed that I recognized the object. I wasn't sure the rhinos were good enough at deciphering human expressions to pick up on that. So I lied. "I've never seen it before."
