CONTRAILS VANISHED FROM THE SKY

TRIVIAL FRAGMENTS OF TALES

Betula was to see many of the Ancients' alien face, those accursed peoples whose likeness was still reviled, even in the innermost recesses of the Science Institute's archives. There were times in her exploring of the Northland wastes when she would freeze in the blank stare of a toppled statue. Often she observed the details of their daily life, even the rituals of their mating recorded on the videodiscs she found and fed to her deciphering device. Genetics was a discipline to Betula and she did not doubt the prediction in the Chichen-Itza curse. What the neo-shamans regarded as the eternal rise of evil, she took to be an aberration, rare without a doubt after centuries of genocide, but possible nonetheless. Wasn't she herself one? Still, Betula couldn't have conceived that this vanished people would so often be reborn in her sleep.

More and more each summer, while her flyglider ran its nocturnal routine of hundred-mile circles above a continent lost to a darkness unbroken by lights or campfires, Betula's dreams would take her back centuries, though only a few thousand feet below. There, not yet silenced by the howling of a wolf, a soul would be crying for a witness to its passing, someone to notice the waning of a candle at a windowpane, the drifting of snow against a closed door.

Such wanderings into the past shattered Betula's equanimity, even when the experience took her to places of lesser tragedy. In a dream she once drove a train through tunnels lined with luminous messages, past crowded stations of riotous iridescences. Another time she sat in an office as a long-fingered lass sentenced to a keyboard. Awaking, Betula shuddered at the set of her shoulders, the thrust of her breast, her lust for the young man whose smile had just done its magic on a screen long gone to dust.

And dawn would break over an ocean of greenery, the rising sun revealing a tangle of converging lines. Ahead, where a forest fire had left blackened stumps, the squared corners of fireweed growths would reveal a grid of crumbled city blocks bisected by the trace of a vanished highway. Enthralled still in the hold of her dream, Betula could imagine the place reverting to its ancient busy ways, and there she would be, an average Jane commuting to her tasks.

She tried to explain such symbiotic treks into the Ancients' very life by her deepening knowledge of their world. But she also dreamed of places she had not visited, objects she had yet to encounter in her searches of the ruins of their dwellings. Sometimes she suddenly knew details of which she had not had any inkling when her eyes had closed. Logical assumptions, educated deductions, she thought. Were her dreams the intuitive vignettes of a past smothered under the spreads of endless fields of ferns, an era's memories fragmented by the sprouting of a billion aspens? Or was her nocturnal insight simply fantasy, spontaneous fiction bred of her day's intimacy with the Ancients' relics?

Troubled, Betula often wished for the clarity of thoughts she had enjoyed when she was a junior Scientist graduating into a world where reason at last was to triumph over the myth of the Shaman, the so-called sacred words now invoked to sanctify the neo-shamans' pronouncements. Her task was plain enough then. Betula's brilliance had made her eligible for a flyer's assignment. The northward march of the species and the retreat of the ice from the Ancients' lands would be her life work. Heady days when wisdom had taken full account of Science's equations, when the Council had finally squelched the lurking of the Dark by denying Science's authority to the neo-shamans' wizardry.

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"How dareth thee to ask of my dream?"

In their archaic cast the words had rung from the top of the amphitheater like a thunderclap. Like hundreds of others, Betula turned back to the speaker. It was Spiranthes-the-nth, her mother, heavy with child. Risen, she was glaring at the neo-shaman stunned into silence at the lectern below. Betula noticed a crow's foot at the corner of her eyes, as if she was suppressing a smile. She would give them more of that old charlatan medicine, she thought.