An expedition like this might have made sense for a young woman, blessed with stout legs and sound eyes, thought Zuni. But for me it is utter folly, in all likelihood my last folly.
She was resting at a bend of Salt Creek where the current bared a sweep of water-smoothed stones. The rock on which she perched had the melony shape and milky whiteness of a dinosaur’s egg. Having already stumbled across a Roosevelt elk and the pawprint of a bear this morning, she would not have been surprised to feel the stone cracking beneath her or to see reptilian skin gleaming inside. The muscles of earth were quite capable of heaving forth anything you could imagine.
A dinosaur would feel at home in this dripping rainforest. Rain pattered on the hood of her parka, but she paid it no mind. The things of the world had already lost their edges in her blurred sight, so the added blur of rain made little difference. With the present moment crackling before her, why mope about the past? The valley of cinders, that burnt-out place she could no longer think of as home, lay nearly two days of walking behind her. The sanitation port lay three days farther back. Not a bad trek for these old pins, Zuni thought, rubbing her knees. Just beyond this bend, she remembered, the land fell away along a fault, the creek leapt over the brink of an escarpment and tumbled into a pool below. From there it meandered across a meadow, sliced through the coastal ridge, and emptied into Whale’s Mouth Bay.
By closing her eyes Zuni could summon up that landscape, for she had dug clams and danced in and out with the breakers there many times as a child. Now she was reluctant to peek into that meadow for fear she would find it empty, or—worse yet—find the charred remains of a settlement.
All the tangled skein of my life narrows down at last to this one frail thread, she thought. Nothing to do but pull it and see what is tied to the other end.
She rose painfully and peered at the sky. If there were HP gliders snooping around up there, someone with better eyes would have to spot them. In any case, nobody’s eyes were sharp enough to locate the spy satellites, which did the keenest watching. Let them watch. Delicately, as if tasting the breeze, she stuck out her tongue at the sky.
Roots snaggled from the bank like half-buried arms and legs, and these she held onto for balance as she hobbled along the creek. Limbs dipped overhead, each one strung with moss like pale green gauze hung out to dry. Old man’s beard, she recollected, what a lovely name. All the venerable trees with their green whiskers.
The salt tang grew stronger and the roar of the falls beat louder. Behind the next clump of trees the sky took on that vague going-on-forevemess which signified the ocean. No use holding back now, she decided, hastening to the brim of the escarpment. She squinted down into cottony mist, corrugations of fluffy whiteness like clouds seen from above. Fog smothered the meadow and thrust like spears into each tributary valley. No sign of a colony. Maybe they hadn’t settled here after all? Maybe they really had drowned?
Clinging to the lip of land, peering down into fog, Zuni stubbornly fought against despair. There is a way to survive, she told herself; there is always a way to survive. I will live in a hollow tree and eat blackberries and converse with the owls.
She lowered herself over the brink and picked her way downward from ledge to ledge. These falls were higher and wilder than the falls of Wolf Creek, so Zuni was soaked through long before she reached the bottom. Lower down the mist thinned, revealing the ghostly boundaries of the meadow. Still she could see no signs of a settlement. At the base of the falls a pool caught the plummeting waters. She stood there, catching her breath, watching the surface churn and buck. The spectacle transported her back to childhood, and she half-expected her lumberjack father to come tramping up with a clam-shovel in his hand and a blade of grass in his teeth.
The settlement, the settlement, she had to remind herself. This land kept seducing her into memory.
Skirting the pool, one eye on the agitated water and one on the ground, she came to a slab of shining blackness. Oregon mud, she thought. But why such a neat stripe of it? No end in sight. Too broad for jumping over. She thrust one boot forward experimentally onto the blackness, and was astonished to find it held her weight. With a quickening excitement, she squatted down and touched the gleaming surface. It was glass, etched like snakeskin. For a moment she feared it might be the melted ruins of something, more of the HP’s handiwork. But no, with that careful etching, it must be a walk.
Forgetting her weariness and her aching joints, she limped swiftly along the black pathway, shouting, “Hello! Hello!” and expecting any moment to bump into someone—Sol perhaps, or Marie. Maybe Teeg would be the first one! How amazed they would be to discover their old Zuni come a-calling!
Without seeing anyone, she soon came to a ring of domes, each feebly lit from inside, ghostly, diaphanous as a bubble. A larger dome bulged from the center of the ring, like the pale snout of a whale.
“Hello!” she cried, aware of the sappy grin on her face.
They must be here, she thought impatiently, jerking open the airlock on the nearest dome. Inside she found hanging ferns, sunken tanks glimmering with minnows, rolled sleepsacks. No one answered her calls. Where the devil were they? Hiding? Not dead, surely. They wouldn’t dare, with the colony built and me here propped up on sore knees. In the entryway to the large central dome she found ten pure white shimmersuits hanging from pegs, limp and sumptuous, like the pelts of snowbeasts. Nearby was an airshower. She eyed it longingly; she was filthy from her trek, but too tired for the shower just now. She contented herself with stripping off her sodden antique pants and shirt, rummaging around in a nearby sleepcamper until she found a worksuit that looked to be the right size, and putting it on.
Arched tunnels led her from dome to dome, through workshops and greenhouses, past a solar kitchen and a battery of sunscoops. Through portholes she noticed hydrogen tanks and the fretwork tower of a windmill. Most of this survival equipment she recognized; it had been standard for many years on longer repair missions and construction projects. Some of it she had designed herself, ages ago, before realizing that only a web of cities could safely quarantine humankind.
Why ten shimmersuits, she wondered, and why ten sleepsacks? She had only kept nine bundles of cards in her rocket-covered lunchbox. Who was the tenth conspirator? At the doorway of each sleepchamber she paused to look inside, identifying the occupants by the accumulations of personal things—Marie by her trowel, Coyt by the pillow he used to brace his humpback in sleep, Jurgen by the leather tool belt he had kept oiled and limber through all these decades of plastic, Sol by the ivory comb he used for straightening his beard. Zuni lingered in Sol’s doorway, her eye caught by the air-cushions, rolls of gauze, basin: the equipment of a sickroom. She felt a lurching in her heart, as if Sol were one of her children fallen sick. Weren’t they all her children?
Each tunnel eventually led her back to the central dome. It was apparently their meeting place, with a flare at the center and white pillows around the circumference and a snowy vault overhead. Zuni understood only the haziest outlines of their group mysticism, but she found it easy to imagine spirit-work in this hushed, uncluttered place. She withdrew respectfully, without crossing the threshold.
Outside in the meadow she discovered that the rain had quit. The sun hovered near the horizon. No one visible anywhere. Perhaps they were off gathering something—dandelions or ginseng or seaweed. Who knew what wildergoers might take it into their heads to gather? Or her noisy arrival might have scared them into hiding. Maybe the health patrollers had caught up with them and hauled them away for rehabilitation? No, no, the HP would never have left the colony intact. Sickness then? Poisons waiting here all these unpeopled years? Attack by an army of wolves? But where were the bodies?
Hobbling along and brooding, she soon found herself on the beach. Except for knobs of stone that showed through like vertebrae, the sweep of sand was bare. What might have been bathers floating in the surf turned out, when she limped over for a look, to be driftlogs. A mewing gull flapped down to investigate some bit of sea wrack, then flew away. Greetings, thought Zuni. High up the beach she discovered their empty raft, and in one of the caves she found the scraps of crates. Husks that they had left behind.
She collapsed onto a log and sat numbly watching the surf crash against upthrust rocks in the bay. When her strength returned she would go back to the settlement, wait for them there, live on alone if need be until whatever had spirited them away came in search of her. Whatever it was had better be ready for a fight. For now, she would sit here on the edge of the continent, peeling the damp white hair from her face, licking salt from her lips.
Twice she closed her eyes, to soothe them, and the second time lengthened into a nap. When she woke the sun was squatting on the ocean like a fat rooster. The tide lapped at her log seat. Maybe they’re back, she thought excitedly. She was just twisting round to spy along Salt Creek toward the meadow when she noticed pinpricks of fire on the headland, away up where the lighthouse used to be. She blinked, not trusting her eyes, but the sparks kept burning. Could they be automated signals of some sort? Fires? No, they flickered and jounced, like flares carried through woods. Over the pounding of her heart she strained to hear any sound, but there was only the surf and wind through marshgrass.
Whoever carried the lights was angling down the mountainside toward the beach. Any path inland would have to pass near her. Hide, she thought, until I can see their faces. Yet like a donkey her body refused to budge. No more fleeing, said her bones. Sit here on this log and let whatever might come, come.
The twin lights, drawing close to her, seemed to glow more brightly as the sky dimmed. They were flares, she could see that now, bright solar bulbs carried aloft by a column of walkers. In the circles of light she counted nine figures in shimmersuits, gleaming like mercury. Except for the gritting of boots on sand, they were absolutely silent.
Motionless on her log, merging with the darkness, Zuni watched them caterpillar toward her. To her bleary eyes their faces looked as featureless as balloons. The slender one with dangling braids who carried the foremost flare might be Hinta. The hunch-shouldered one who rolled like a ship when he walked might be Coyt. Hope swelled in her, nearly buoyed her off the log. She was about to cry out. But where was Sol’s unmistakable face, the zebra pattern of white beard on black skin? She squinted, straining to see. No, Sol wasn’t there. Then who were these strangers? A health patrol to come sterilize the settlement? Another band of exiles?
Zuni was shrinking back into the shadows just as the trailing flare drew even with her. The woman who bore the flare halted for a moment to pick up something from the beach—a shell or bit of rock—and drawing the light near her cheek she studied the find in her cupped palm. In that instant Zuni recognized the bald mushroom head, the cratered moonface, the squat body.
“Marie!” she called out of the darkness.
The woman’s hand fell limp, dropping whatever prize it had discovered, and her face swung blindly in Zuni’s direction. “Who’s there?”
Zuni tried to stand, but her knees would not unbend. Stupid legs!
“What is it? What? What?” The others crowded around Marie, a knot of astonishment. The twin flares bobbed and jerked over their heads.
“Somebody called my name,” said Marie.
“I’m here. Here!” Zuni cried. “Come get me. I’m rusted solid.”
Their voices babbled in consternation. Marie waded forward, searching for this impossible voice. But a smaller body darted past, arms outstretched and red hair flying, and in the next instant Zuni was flat on her back in the sand, surf licking her ears, with Teeg pawing her like a puppy.
“Zuni! You can’t be here! Did you drop out of the sky? Come, sit up, let me help you, there.” She tugged and shoved at Zuni, pummeling her with affection. “Ach, my rib! Never mind. Everybody come see what the tide washed in!”
Their bent heads formed an inquisitive circle above her as Zuni sat, giggling and weeping like a schoolchild, with Teeg’s arms about her.
“My lord, my lord, it’s really you,” Marie said wonderingly. She touched Zuni’s cheek, as if to test whether she was an apparition.
“What’s left of me. I’m about worn down to a frazzle.”
“However did you get here?”
“I hiked.”
“From where?”
“Cascade repair station.”
Again the babble of consternation. Over one hundred kilometers!
“How did you know we were here?” It was Jurgen’s voice, rumbling, suspicious.
Zuni allowed herself a sly smile. “You’ve all been my hobby for a very long time.”
“But why did you ever leave the city?” asked Teeg.
“For the same reasons you left. To see the mountains again, the forests, the ocean. To see how things are growing now that people are locked indoors.”
“Did you come by yourself?” Jurgen reared over her. Dear cantankerous Jurgen. A bulldog at heart.
Zuni laughed. “Who would be crazy enough to come along with me?”
Jurgen hunched down and shoved his great bewhiskered mug close to her. After a moment’s glare, a grin split his face. “You are an old fox,” he said, pressing his forehead to hers. “I can’t believe you’re really here. But I’m glad.”
When they had all finished greeting her, Marie scolded, “Now Teeg, quit smothering the woman. Let’s take her home. Where’s the stretcher?”
“Oh fiddle! I can walk!” Zuni waved them aside. They stood back respectfully. But when, after a half minute of straining, she could not persuade her legs to unbend, Jurgen swept her up, light as a doll, and laid her gently on the stretcher. She was too bone weary to protest, or to ask why they carried a stretcher with them or where they had been all day. A slender man with the raggedy beginnings of a beard, a man she did not know, bore the front of the stretcher. Was he the mysterious tenth conspirator? And why were there only nine in this procession? Who was missing?
Teeg pranced alongside, chattering the whole way to the settlement. Once there, she tucked Zuni into a sleepsack, murmuring, “Rest now, love.”
Zuni teetered on the brink of sleep, held back only by a sense of loss to which she could give no name. Then she recalled who was missing. “Sol came with you from Oregon City?”
“Yes.” There was an unwillingness in the girl’s voice.
“Where is he?”
Teeg brushed the salty strands of hair from Zuni’s face. “He died this morning.”
Zuni felt the sudden loss as if someone had carved a hole through her belly. But she was not surprised. She had known about his cancer. “He was a lovely man,” she whispered. “So gentle. Remember how he would embrace you with his eyes when he spoke?”
“You were mates?” Teeg asked softly.
“For a little while. Long ago.”
Both women kept still a moment, feeling Sol’s presence. Finally Teeg said, “That’s where we’ve been since yesterday, up on the headland singing him through.”
“He’s buried up there?”
“Cremated. It’s what he asked for.” Teeg sat on her heels and stroked Zuni’s face. “I guess it’s what I want after I die, to go right back to earth.”
Sol … ash? All life was a burning, Zuni thought, a fire in the cells defying for an instant the ultimate cold of the universe. In the Enclosure, he would have been frozen after death, against the hope of some future cure. But out here there were no resurrection vaults, and death, when it came, might as well be celebrated with a final fire.
“We’ve put you in his sleepchamber,” said Teeg. “You don’t mind?”
“I’m glad.”
The fingers took up Sol’s ivory comb and untangled Zuni’s hair. “Do you need anything, old one?”
“No, child.”
“Would you like me to stay with you through the night?”
Zuni was unable to keep the amusement from curling on her drowsy lips. “No, no. Nothing frightens me here. This is where I’ve wanted to be.”
Teeg’s fingers at last withdrew from her face, and Zuni slipped away into sleep, her body a constellation of stars.