The Klaatu Terminus by Pete Hautman

said. “Just a scratch.”
    “Show me.”
    Tucker slowly opened the front of his coveralls and looked down. The wound below his rib cage had closed. She examined it in the firelight, then snorted.
    “That is an old wound. Both my sons are
idiotas
.”
    Yaca stared at Tucker as if he were a ghost.
    “You speak English well,” Tucker said.
    “
Inglés
is our trading language. The boggseys speak it. You are not a boggsey. Come, sit with me.” She walked over to the fire and sat down on the log. Tucker hesitated, then followed her and sat down a few feet away.
    Marta motioned with her hand. “Who are you? Where do you come from? Tell me a story.”
    Tucker considered the many stories he might tell. He finally said, “My name is Tucker. I came from a faraway place called Hopewell. This morning I came from the city of Romelas.”
    “No one lives in Romas.”
    “Yeah, I kind of got that.”
    Her brow furrowed.
    “I mean,” Tucker said, “I didn’t see anybody there.”
    “Tell me how you came to Romas.”
    “Through a disko. A Gate.”
    “A Gate!” Her eyes narrowed. “There are no Gates.”
    “You seem to have heard of them.”
    “They come in dreams.” She stared into the fire for a moment. “I do not speak of them.”
    “Why is the city abandoned?” Tucker asked.
    “The gods left. The people were eaten.”
    “Eaten by what? Jaguars?”
    Marta laughed. “
El tigre
’s appetite is not so great as that. I will tell you a story.”
    Tucker noticed that the men had moved closer, and were all squatting around the fire, listening intently. Marta cleared her throat and began.
    “In a time long before my grandmother’s grandmother’s grandmother, Romas was a rich city ruled by the priests of the god Sept. People lived pressed together in stone buildings, while the priests performed miracles and dined on lamb liver and sweet persimmon. They lived this way for countless generations, and more. It is said the priests lived inside the great pyramid.
    “Though they were powerful, the priests were small in their hearts, and they fought among themselves. There was a great battle, and the priests tore at each other like animals. When they saw that the people of Romas knew their pettiness, the priests were ashamed, and they climbed to a hole in the sky. Then a great beast appeared and devoured the hole, and the priests were no more.”
    She fell silent and stared into the flames. Tucker thought she was finished, but after a moment, she continued.
    “For a time, the people of Romas were content without their priests, but then came the boggseys with their spirit-makers, offering solace to those whose joy in life had abandoned them. The boggseys claimed their machines would take people to a new life, a life without hunger or pain. They said their machines would make people into gods. They called it transcendence.”
    “Klaatu,” Tucker said, understanding.
    “
Klaatu
is the word for gods in our language. At first, few people were willing to give up their life in this world for promises of paradise. But some of the old, the sick, and the desperate gave themselves to the boggsey machines, and they returned as spirits and spoke of their new life. The people saw their friends and relatives living as gods, and they saw that they were happy — even those who had given themselves to the boggsey machines in despair. Soon, others began to enter the machines, hoping to join their departed ancestors, hoping to live without the discomforts of life. Lovers entered the machines together. Parents gave their children to the machines, then followed them. In time, there were so few remaining in Romas that the boggseys shut down their machines and returned to their farms, and the city died.
    “My ancestors chose the bellies of the forest over the bellies of the machines. Now the forests have devoured us. We are few. We wait to die.”
    Her head slumped forward; she stared at the ground between her knees. One of the men added some