Free Reunion by Alan Dean Foster Page B

house, they strode down a street sealed with transparent paving material that allowed the sand, rock, and crushed seashells underneath to show through. Most of the buildings they passed were silent and dark. From a few seeped the lights and the sounds of tridee entertainment.
    Leaving the tiny community behind, they followed the course of the small river before effecting a crossing on a string of inconspicuously linked stones. Disturbed, a pair of sleeping egrets eyed them owlishly, irritated at the nocturnal interruption. Overhead, the half moon continued to lavish its light on the nearby beach, giving the incoming waves an ethereal touch of fluorescence.
    Reaching the sandy promontory, they entered a narrow cleft in the stone and began to climb. It was a short, easy ascent, and Flinx soon found himself standing atop the peninsula. Behind them flickered the few lights of the town. Hidden behind a bend in the coast, the extensive resort strip of Tacrica lay far enough away not to be visible, though the glow of its lights lightened a portion of the southern sky.
    The top of the promontory was absolutely barren of life, as were the small hillocks that dotted the otherwise flat surface. When Flinx remarked idly on the apparent regularity of the protrusions, the old shaman chuckled.
    “That’s not surprising, sonny. They be mud pyramids, heavily eroded by many centuries of rain and wind.” He gestured grandly, as if they had just stepped into an ornate parlor. “This site be called Pacyatambu. You be standing on the ruins of a sixth-century Moche city that was once home to some fifty thousand people.”
    A surprised Flinx examined his surroundings anew. Now that he had been enlightened, the outlines of the pyramids became more defined, their sides increasingly vertical. His imagination filled in the silent emptiness with a vision of a busy marketplace, meandering nobles, farmers bringing in food from the fields, fishermen hawking their catch. Brooding priests invoked from a high balcony, and brightly painted frescoes suffused the city with a riot of color.
    Sixth century—a.d., not a.a. With one foot, he stirred the sands beneath him. So very long ago. Had ancestors of his once lived here, content in their ignorance, happy in their subsistence existence? In all likelihood, he would never know—just as he still did not know his true parentage. But these sands and the secrets they contained, they too were a part of him, whether he liked it or not.
    In that wild and windswept place he felt for the first time the hoary history of humankind in a way he never had previously. Not on Moth, not here, not on any of the worlds settled and otherwise that he had trod upon in his short life. For the first time he sensed fully what it meant to be a human being,
all
of whose ancestors had come from the third planet circling the unremarkable star called Sol. Despite the disdain he had shown for it all his life, he understood now what others meant when they spoke of Earth as home, even those several generations removed who had been born on other worlds.
    In front of him, Cayacu had spread an antique homespun cotton blanket out on the ground. Atop this he was arranging the contents of his sack; tiny vials and plasticine containers, an old dagger, ancient bits of broken pottery, bones animal and human, dried plant material, archaic electronic components, a pair of burned-out storage chyps, and more. When he was finished, he sat down cross-legged next to the blanket, facing the sea. Wind snapped the tips of his wavy white hair as he closed his eyes and began to chant.
    Uninstructed, not knowing what else to do, a hushed Flinx sat down nearby and watched. Occasionally the shaman would emerge from his self-induced trance to reach out and touch this or that object on the blanket. Once, he leaned forward to rearrange a pair of ancient computer chyps and a preserved salamander. A lone gull cried, its voice breaking. Beneath Flinx’s shirt, Pip slept