Oblivion Stone. James Axler

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      Bryant’s companion, Mariah Falk, looked at him dubiously. “You want me to—” she air quoted “—‘bathe’ in that?” A slender woman in her midforties, Mariah had short brown hair streaked with gray. While not conventionally pretty, she had an infectious smile and an inherent inquisitiveness that made her a delight to be with.

      Both Bryant and Falk were Cerberus personnel. He was an oceanographer turned chef, while she was an expert geologist. Like many of the Cerberus personnel, the pair shared an unusual bond—as government employees, they had been cryogenically frozen at the end of the twentieth century and placed in the Manitius Moon Base, where they were protected from the subsequent nuclear holocaust that ravaged the Earth. They had been awoken two hundred years later, and found themselves in a world blighted by the horrors that had superseded civilization in the United States of America in the wake of the nukecaust.

      “I’ve done it,” Clem told her as they stood at the head of eight wide stone steps leading down to the flowing, muddy waters of the mighty Ganges River in India. The steps were a pale sandy color and there were numerous other people there, locals going about their business, washing their clothes, filling buckets that they rested on yokes across their shoulders, Brahmans washing the soles of their feet. No one seemed to take much notice of the two Westerners who were dressed in the immaculate clothes of the Cerberus redoubt, and whose skin was so much paler, as if they had never seen the sunlight.

      Wrinkling her nose, Mariah looked out over the silty wash that swirled past the foot of the steps. “I don’t know, Clem,” she said. “How long ago did you do this?”

      “I took a gap year after college,” Clem told her. “Traveled a little. Many Hindus believe that the Ganges is the source of all life. They hold it in the highest respect. They say that Brahma washed the feet of Vishnu here and they believe that it has the power to wash away an individual’s sins.”

      “I don’t have any sins,” Mariah said, shaking her head and turning away from the murky water as sunlight twinkled across its surface in dazzling white highlights.

      Clem took Mariah’s hand and squeezed it, looking into her bright eyes. “I’m sorry, Mariah,” he said. “Bad choice of destination. Next time you can choose where we go.”

      Mariah looked from Clem to the wide river, then back to Clem once more. “You really bathed in it?”

      Clem shrugged. “I…paddled,” he admitted evasively.

      Mariah let go of the oceanographer’s hand and crouched down, unlacing the dusty white pumps she wore on her feet. “Okay,” she said, “I can do that.”

      The sun beat down as, hand in hand, the two Cerberus personnel made their way down eight sand-colored steps to the water’s edge.

      Mariah looked down at the murky water, watching the silt swirl within it as the many activities there churned sand up in little cloudlike bursts. “Am I going to catch anything?” she asked Clem, wincing and gritting her teeth.

      “Only enlightenment,” Clem assured her as Mariah pulled her hand away from his grasp.

      In a final rush, Mariah took the last few paces on her bare feet and waded into the flowing Ganges, letting it lap around her bare ankles and calves as she held her shoes aloft. “Eeeee,” she cheered, “it’s warm.”

      Sedately, Clem followed her in, feeling the water flowing over his sandals, splashing around his feet and soaking the bottoms of his pant legs. He turned to Mariah as she held her pumps over the sun-dappled surface of the water and tentatively waded a little deeper, making her way from a group of local women who were busy washing their clothes. To Clem’s eyes, she looked happy and, for all the activity going on around her, she looked at peace.

      Clem called to her as he made his way over to where his companion was now standing hip-deep in the flowing river. “Can’t you feel your sins washing away?” he inquired.

      Mariah dipped down and, to Clem’s surprise, ducked her head under the water for a moment before resurfacing and shaking the water from her dark hair. “Oh, Clem, how did you ever talk me into this?”

      “I don’t recall,” Clem replied with a laugh. “Did I promise infinite being, infinite consciousness and infinite bliss?”

      “No,” Mariah said, “you said you’d teach me to scuba dive. And take me dancing.”

      Clem shook his head. “I can’t imagine that I would have agreed to the dancing.”

      “Are you saying you won’t dance with me, Bryant?” Mariah asked coquettishly, reaching her arms around his shoulders.

      Placing his own arms around her waist, Clem pulled Mariah closer and together they danced in the flowing waters of the River Ganges, Mariah’s shoes still dangling from her crooked fingers, while all around them people carried on with their daily chores, oblivious to the couple’s joy.

      Mariah was still laughing five minutes later as Clem led her back to shore and they ascended the wide stone steps. “I can’t believe you made me do that,” she said. “I’m soaked through.”

      Clem stretched his arms wide and turned his head toward the sky. “The sun will dry you off,” he told her. His own clothes—a light ensemble of shirt and cargo pants—had stuck to him from the soaking that he had received in the river. “I can’t believe I’m back here. I feel like I’m twenty-one all over again.”

      Mariah walked barefoot up the steps, her sopping pumps dripping in her left hand. “Me, too,” she said. “With everything we go through at Cerberus, it’s funny to think that places like this still exist. It feels like they haven’t changed in a thousand years.”

      “India suffered in the global conflict as much as any country,” Clem told her. “It’s just that New York and Washington, London and Moscow—those locales have been relegated to the history books. While places like this—” he swept his hand about him to indicate the magnificent vista of the wide river “—they’re eternal.”

      “Do you really believe in this stuff?” Mariah asked as she and Clem made their way back onto the dusty road that led down toward the steps. “Enlightenment and the washing away of one’s sins?”

      Clem smiled. “The belief in a higher purpose, the desire to be a better person—these are universal,” he said. “These are precisely the tenets that Cerberus subscribes to.”

      “I didn’t really think of it like that,” Mariah admitted, running her hand through her hair. To her surprise she found that it was almost dry already, thanks to the warmth of the pounding sun.

      “Speaking of which,” Clem said, reaching into a sealed pocket of his pants and pulling free an earpiece with a built-in microphone pickup, “it’s about time we were heading back to work. I’ll radio in and let them know we’ll be entering the mat-trans in about twenty-five minutes.”

      Mariah nodded reluctantly as she watched Clem place the portable communications device over his ear. Unlike the field teams, she and Clem had decided to forgo the minor operation that inserted the Commtact equipment beneath the surface of the skin. As such, they were both limited to carrying robust, portable units around with them and firing them up when they needed to. Also Cerberus was less easily able to contact them while they were away from home base. On occasions such as this, Mariah reflected, that lack of contact and the privacy it brought wasn’t such a bad thing.

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