“If you mean that we’re travelers, then yes,” Gloria answered.
Doc indicated assent. “My apologies, dear lady, for using terms that are unfamiliar to you. I shall endeavor to speak more plainly in future.”
Gloria laughed. “I like you, old man. You make me laugh. Guess it might be fun to have you around. But yes, we are travelers, and we have our own quest. As leader of the tribe, and hereditary queen, I carry with me the gift of far-seeing. A seer by birth, it’s my duty and privilege to carry with me the legends and purpose of the Gate people. Since the days of skydark, we have known that there is a gateway to the future, to a world beyond the one we know and is yet not of the realms of the chilling. This land will be free from the disease and hurt of the Deathlands, and from this our people will build a new and better life.”
“This gateway,” Doc prompted, “do you know what it is and where?”
Ryan watched the old man and also the warrior queen to try to work out what Doc was getting at: he could see that there was a light shining in the old man’s eyes, and wondered if he was sharing Doc’s thoughts.
What if the gateway to the future of which the woman spoke was a remnant of Operation Chronos? And if this was the case, then what else could possibly be waiting in this mythical place?
Could it, in fact, be the place in the north of which they had learned fragments? Gloria’s next statement left Ryan in little doubt that was a strong possibility. “The legends say that it comes from the predark times and is left over from the evils that were perpetrated by the white men of the secret orders. Some of these white men and those who held dominion over them are still in control, but they are small in number and our righteousness shall overcome them. They are in the great pit to the north, and the gateway to them is in the shape of a pentacle. It was the greatest of all old symbols of power, and it is the symbol that they still carry with them.”
Doc, noting that the sudden change of tone in her voice, from her normal husky tones to a slightly higher, singsong pitch, meant that she was almost trancing herself to recite the legend that had been passed down to her as seer of the tribe.
“Do you know how you must get there?”
Gloria looked at him. Her piercing blue eyes seemed to cut through him like cutters made of ice-blue polished diamonds.
“We must follow the markers. The old ones left a trail of secret sites that we cannot enter until we reach the final gateway, and yet these sites tell us all we need to know. They give us the direction we need to follow.”
Ryan tried to contain his excitement, and took a long and steady look at his friends to see if they had drawn the same conclusions. From the expression on their faces, he could see that they had: the secret sites that Gloria had spoken of had to be the redoubts, and although the Gate tribe never actually used the mat-trans units, they somehow had some way of knowing the manner in which the mat-trans network linked all the redoubts, and they had been following these lines for generations in search of the last refuge of the predark authorities. Ryan had read in some old scraps of books about whitecoat theories on how birds were able to migrate from continent to continent in the days when there were still recognizable continents. These theories suggested that there were lines of energy— the magnetic fields, they called them—that crisscrossed the earth, and the birds followed them, using them as guides.
What if there was some mutie trait in the Gate tribe—or at least in the line of queens to which Gloria belonged—that allowed them to see the lines of energy that linked the mat-trans devices in the redoubts? Knowing from their own bitter experience how screwed-up these lines of communication were, it came as no surprise to Ryan that it had taken them several generations to come this far north.