Black Rain

Hawker smiled, as if he’d been caught at something. “It just makes me wonder,” he said. “I’ve been on a few journeys in my life. Seven days across unpaved desert in a truck, two months on a freighter that seemed to find one storm after another. I wouldn’t have made those without something important to do on the other end. But this, traveling through time. It had to be horrendous. Why even try it? And why go back to such a primitive era when you did? It didn’t seem to work out all that great for them.”

Susan offered an answer. “Maybe the process is not very precise. Maybe they didn’t mean to go that far back.”

Danielle seemed to agree. “An experiment of some kind,” she said. “Like Columbus trying to find a new route to India. Sometimes you get lost and bump into things, places you never meant to go.”

“Maybe,” Hawker said, looking away, “but it feels like there should be something more.”

McCarter found himself silently agreeing, though what that something might have been he couldn’t guess. In some ways, what they’d found was enough for him. It seemed as if they’d discovered one source of what would go on to become the Mayan religion, a religion that eventually took root on another continent, growing into the greatest civilization of the preindustrial Americas, flourishing for a thousand years before collapsing back into a less ostentatious but more personal set of beliefs. All unbeknownst to its earliest members, who still existed: the Chollokwan tribe of the Amazon.

The journey downriver continued slowly, the dark waters of the Negro bringing them back to Manaus. As they grew closer, the lush banks of the river widened, and they began to notice huge plumes of smoke at various points on the horizon.

The smoke came from the plantations lining the river. With the rainy season finally at hand, the plantation keepers were burning off the standing foliage to prepare the ground for crops: the slash and burn that marked the beginning of each planting season. Seeing this, McCarter had one more thought.

“We expected the rains to kill the Zipacna, like the canteen water did to the grub. But the air of today is filled with pollution, including sulfur from coal and other sources. It may not be like acid that can strip paint, but it’s far more acidic than the rain of three thousand years ago.”

“You think that’s why the Zipacna didn’t die from it so quickly,” Hawker guessed.

McCarter nodded, then turned back toward the smoke. “These fires create a little pollution,” he said. “But all across America, Europe and Asia, coal-fired power plants are pumping billions of tons of sulfur into the air. Not to mention carbon and other poisons.” He looked at Danielle; in some ways he now understood her quest. “Seems like we’re making a world more fit for other life than for our own.”

Several hours later, they reached the outskirts of Manaus, a sight most of them never thought they would see again.

During this last leg of the journey, Danielle found herself drawn to the prow of the barge. They were almost home, and she’d begun to wonder what awaited them there. An hour from their arrival, the captain of the vessel came to find her. “You are Americans?”

Danielle nodded.

“Yes, well, someone is looking for you,” the captain told her. “They fear you are lost.”

“Who?” she asked, suspiciously.

“On the docks,” the captain said. “Another American. He radioed us. Looking for a lost group, with a pretty, dark-haired woman named Danielle. That’s you, no?”

“Yes,” she admitted. “I guess that’s me. Do you know who this other American is?”

The captain shook his head. “A friend of yours,” he said, excited, as the bearer of good news should be. “He say they look for you everywhere, checking every boat that comes back from upriver. That’s an amigo, then. For sure.”

Hawker came up as the captain walked away. “What was that all about?”

She looked at him unenthusiastically. “We have an amigo waiting for us on the docks.”

Hawker’s brow wrinkled. “I thought we were all out of amigos.”

She nodded. “We are.”

An hour later they approached a crowded wooden dock, quite near the spot where Hawker and Danielle had been shot at. After some deft maneuvering around smaller boats, the barge had come close enough for Danielle to see three men standing among the locals who crowded the dock. Two wore dark sunglasses and seemed to be armed; the third wore an open-collared linen shirt, with his arm in a sling. She recognized him instantly. “Arnold!”

He smiled at her from the dock. “You’re a sight for sore eyes,” he told her.

The boat touched the dock and Danielle jumped off. She hugged him carefully. “I was told you’d been killed.”

“Yes, well. As I’ve said before: never confuse the official version of reality with the truth.”

“What happened?” she asked, looking at his arm.

“Fractured it when I fell, the only thing twenty-four layers of Kevlar couldn’t prevent.”