EMERGENCE (37 page)

And apologies for neglect, Posterity. Have wanted to update journal, honest; but these few minutes before bed this evening literally first opportunity have had since landing here six days ago. Wasn't dodging responsibility; well understand importance: If mission succeeds, future generations of teachers will want to bore students with inspirational Life & Times of Candidia Smith-Foster, Plucky Girl Savior of Our People.

(Of course being sarcastic; but also stating fact. National heroes—nay, racial heroes, more important yet—really should try to leave accurate, intelligible [did my best] record of How I
Really
Did It and Why. Failure to discharge responsibility spawns inevitably inflationary folklore—and can't bear thought of future generations hearing how I crossed Susquehanna on crumbling trestle's single remaining rail, van balanced on two wheels, thereby eluding marauding band of sex-crazed mutants; or that I stupidly chopped down cherry tree in youth and even more stupidly admitted it.)

Will leave journal on table tomorrow morning for Teacher to find. Has promised to make locating family crash-priority project first thing after crisis; invite them into burgeoning hominem community. In due time he or they—someone, surely—will merge this volume with previous three.

(And must say, resulting tome disappointingly slim. Had planned on, hoped for, much more substantial monument.)

Really must be getting to bed now; 3:30 horrendous hour. (And do
not
understand necessity: Geosynchronous orbits, like gibbets, available 24 hours a day—so why must astronauts, condemned prisoners alike, always get up before dawn? Doesn't make whole lot of sense.)

Well, good-bye, Posterity. Take care of future for me.

And good-bye everybody else. Good luck—I'll do my best.

I love you.

VOLUME III—Part II

Portents

It's been four days now, and still no sign of her.

A fire trail enabled us to haul the trailer within about two miles of the point where Adam's RDF line and Candy's compass bearings all intersect, so we're base-camped right in the middle of the search area. We've got a lot of supplies; we'll be able to stay for weeks before having to go back to restock.

The sequoia forest is absolutely magnificent. Just being here in the heart of it should be wonderfully, spiritually fulfilling. It's very quiet: The only sounds are a blend of the breeze sighing through the treetops so far above, and bird calls, insect noises, and small animals rustling in the underbrush. Natural lighting way down here on the ground, almost shut off from the sky and direct sunlight, is diffuse and soothing. The trees are so immense that you tend to forget that they
are
trees; the trunks extend upward out of sight like vast pillars supporting a green ceiling, and lend an almost cathedrallike quality to the scene. It's so very peaceful; and if it were not for the constant awareness of what brings us here, I would love every second of it.

As it is, I see it only through Candy's eyes: envisioning what it must be like for her, probably injured, with only a few pounds of dried rations, a canteen of water, and no shelter—it gets cold up here at night. It's hard not to feel guilty, sleeping in a warm, comfortable bed, eating solid meals, while she's lost out there.

There's ample room to get the van between the sequoias, but often that space is clogged by smaller trees of various descriptions and underbrush. Adam is confident that he can get through to pick her up when we find her, if she's too badly injured to ride out behind one of us on a trail bike. But until then he prefers not to risk the van unnecessarily; if we cripple it, we would have to abandon the trailer when we leave, and come back for it if we can. That would be inconvenient.

For that reason we've been using the bikes to search. They're Hondas, lightweight and easy to ride. They have eight forward speeds, automatic clutches, and big, high-traction, off-road knobby tires. Adam brought along five bikes, providing double redundancy in case one or more should fail under the pounding. So far none have, and they've been given every excuse. We search from sunup to dark, covering probably seventy-five miles a day or better, under conditions which range from smooth going on firm, dry, level, leaf-covered soil, to scrambling and bouncing over logs and boulders.

Adam wrapped a thick towel around the handlebars of Lisa's bike to provide secure footing, and Terry spends the day riding with her. His presence is quite helpful: I always can tell when Lisa starts getting too enthusiastic by Terry's sound level. He loves jumps, wheelies, and going fast; the more fun he's having, the louder he gets. When he becomes audible over my bike's exhaust, I point the bullhorn in that direction and speak sternly.

Lisa had an uneasy relationship with her bike in the beginning. She couldn't reach the ground from the seat; and because it outweighed her by at least four to one, she had great difficulty bracing it upright with one leg. So she has learned not to need to: She stands or sits, depending on how rough the terrain is, feet always on the pegs, never quite stopping, and
never
touching foot to ground. Her effortless progress through or over virtually anything Nature puts in her path is simply amazing to behold.

It's even more amazing from my perspective: I often drag one or both feet for stability and usually have to maintain my balance, when going very slowly over rough ground, by pushing with one foot or the other. Not uncommonly, I simply get off and walk it over the very worst conditions. Adam is better at it than I am but is in awe of Lisa.

We conduct the search by riding through the forest on a compass course, three abreast, Lisa and Terry in the middle, Adam and I keeping her barely in sight, all three of us studying the ground in front and on both sides, and trying to remember to keep an eye above us as well, in case Candy might be trapped in a tree. Periodically we stop altogether, shut off the engines, call through the bullhorns, and listen for a reply. We've been keeping track of the areas we've searched by chopping blazes on tree trunks as we proceed and marking our progress on the sectional map.

Because the bikes provide such speed and mobility, Adam reasoned that one of us might find him- or herself out of even bullhorn range in only a few minutes. So when shopping for the bullhorns, he picked up several sets of police personal radios, with belt-mounted battery packs and speakerphones designed to be clipped to the wearer's collar. We carry two each; one worn, one in reserve on the bike. They're a great comfort when I look in Lisa's direction and can't see her for minutes at a time.

An odd thing happened the day before yesterday, by the way, unrelated to the search: We had an earthquake. It wasn't much of one; we probably wouldn't have noticed if we hadn't been stopped for lunch, sitting on a log, watching Terry chin himself upside down from a creeper. For the briefest instant the log and ground both trembled, and we heard, or perhaps felt, a faint, distant, rumbling sort of boom.

Adam says trucks passing his parents' home in Baltimore were more noticeable. I guess that means he wasn't impressed.

But I was: This isn't really "earthquake country" up here. For us to have felt it this far from The Fault, it must have been a fairly respectable tremor.

Which means we could be cut off up here. We came up the only open road in a hundred-mile radius; if it's blocked now, we'll never get the trailer out, and probably the van as well. Both are replaceable, of course, but we'd have to replace so much equipment, as well. I haven't mentioned this to Adam; he has quite enough on his mind.

Incidentally, I wonder if I might have discovered an unsuspected partial explanation for the amount of time and effort Candy spends on these journals: Sitting down, reviewing a day's or week's events, and composing a clear, concise summary provides an unequaled opportunity to see things in perspective. Details which seemed trivial at the time often acquire significance upon reflection, or vice versa.

For instance: Years ago I had an Aunt Becky who had a charming Panama parrot named Ellery Green. They were very close. And when she died, they almost lost Ellery, too. He refused to eat or drink or take an interest in anything; he just sat in his cage and pined. They force-fed him for weeks. He probably would have died anyway had not one of my cousins overcome his grief through sheer intensity of love.

Now, Terry and Candy are
much
closer than Aunt Becky and Ellery were, and at first I worried that Terry might react similarly. But he hasn't. The only hint of change in his behavior is that he's reverted to his original vocabulary; he's stopped using those long, convoluted, totally inexplicable sentences. In fact, apart from that, if it
is
significant, I can't see that he's even noticed that she's gone! He's entirely content, and I don't understand why.

True, Terry likes both Adam and me. He lets us feed and water him and clean his stand, and he's obviously grateful when one of us offers him a head-rub. But his attitude toward us remains more a matter of courtesy and friendliness than love.

Lisa falls into a different category, of course. Before we lost Candy, Lisa was his second-favorite playmate: If she was around and Candy wasn't, he wasn't happy unless he was either on her shoulder or close enough for frequent, mutually reassuring physical contact. That's still the case; they play riotous games, laugh uproariously, and "converse" for hours.

But Lisa isn't Candy, and his relationship with her is very different from that which he shares with his "twin." For instance, only with Candy has Terry ever participated in hours-long Rapt Silences, snuggling quietly in her arms, both content just to be together.

There are other distinctions as well, of course; but the point is that, no matter how satisfactory we three are as baby-sitters, the center of Terry's universe is Candy, just as Aunt Becky was for Ellery, and I find it strange that he's taking her absence with such aplomb.

But what bothers me most of all is the fact that Lisa isn't worried either. I attempted to explain that Candy has had an accident and may be hurt, or may even have Gone To Heaven, like Daddy. I know she feels the same way about Candy that I do, but she was completely unconcerned. She told me not to worry; that Candy is fine. I've probed this as deeply as I dare, considering her age and the potential for trauma, and I don't think that what she's doing is refusing to face facts. Lisa is serenely, utterly confident that Candy is all right—no, correct that: Lisa
knows
that Candy is all right. But she doesn't know how she knows.

And then there is the curious thing that happened the morning that we lost Candy and early the very next day.

We were sitting around the living room, listening to Candy report road conditions. Adam was at the radio; I was on the couch. Lisa was in a chair in the corner, Terry on his stand. Things happened very quickly after Candy's distress call, and neither Adam nor I had time to pay attention to Lisa and Terry, consciously anyway. Since then, however, I've had time to assemble a composite of what they were doing by retrieving memories of peripheral glimpses of things I saw but which didn't register.

Lisa sat, staring glassy-eyed into space, holding both arms of her chair with white-knuckled hands, smiling enigmatically. Terry was crouched, his body level, tail extended. His expression was even more gleefully vacant than usual. His head bobbed, his wings were half-open, and both he and Lisa swayed unevenly in unison. A short while after we lost the signal, Terry suddenly flapped violently. Both he and Lisa weaved and bobbed back and forth, squealing, "Wheee-e-e-e . . . !" until either Adam or I snarled at them to shut up. They did; but I heard Lisa whisper to Terry, "That was
neat!
"

Then early the next morning, as Adam guided the rig swiftly but smoothly along the fire trails toward the search area, they did it again! The silence echoing from the rear of the van attracted my suspicions—that's something mothers learn early.

Terry again wore that silly, delighted, not-here expression; crouched on his stand, tail slightly elevated, wings half-spread. Lisa, too, was staring vacantly into space again, holding the arms of her chair tightly with both hands, and smiling. Both leaned and shifted their weight in unison; Terry's movements especially were reminiscent of an aircraft banking for turns.

I watched surreptitiously in the sun-visor mirror until it was over. As before, both returned to an awareness of their surroundings simultaneously but apparently independently. Lisa blinked a couple times and then sighed happily. Terry resumed his normal upright posture and shook himself briefly to settle his feathers. Lisa glanced at him and grinned. The bird bobbed his head in reply.

Now, I'm an engineer. My training deals with concepts capable of mathematical proof, and their relationships to tangible objects or provable intangibles. I have an imagination, but it's under control. Thus far I've never had trouble differentiating between fantasy and reality. Nor have I had difficulty keeping
what I want to be
separate from
what is.

But now I'm not sure. Events of the past few days hint at things beyond my training and experience. Sometimes I wonder if I'm letting my imagination run, fed by Adam's previous speculations, and seeing more than is there. At other times I wonder if even his suspicions fall short of the truth; if perhaps we're seeing surface indications of a phenomenon operating on a level we're not equipped to perceive.

However, I've always prided myself on an open mind. I've never ruled out something without hard evidence and/or math to justify my opinion. I've always believed in, and tried to practice, the scientific method: When faced with an enigma, I've always deferred judgment until completing a proper study of the available data. Mere absence of positive data does not prove the negative. In fact, several times I have refused to venture a professional opinion when I judged that the data, while unanimously pointing to a certain conclusion, was insufficient to support it.