Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (29 page)

I watched him start the saw and winced at the noise. I didn’t know if
they
had escaped or not; there was no way to tell. Someone pointed upward and Howard stopped the saw and again they all considered the task. It had been pointed out that in movies they always cut off branches and the top first. Otherwise the tree would surely demolish the house when it fell.

Someone got the ladder and Howard climbed it and started the saw again. He brought it down to the tree limb, hesitated, turned off the saw, dropped it to the ground and climbed back down.

He was trembling. “I just wanted to give the old lady a scare. Show her who’s boss. Let’s eat.” He didn’t look at me.

He got drunk and after the others had gone he told me the saw had come alive, turned on him. He had seen his leg being cut off, had seen it falling and had thought it was beautiful that way. The saw was turning in his hands when he switched it off and dropped it.

I should have had more faith in their ability to protect themselves.

I don’t believe it was his leg.

Howard has forgotten about them, pretends he never believed in them in the first place. He never glances at the tree, and he burned all the pictures he took, even the infrared ones.

I have too much to do to work outside the house any more. He accepts that. I am charting all their likes and dislikes. When I left them chopped turnip, there was a grease fire that could have burned down the house. I crossed off turnips. When I find out-of-season fruits, like mangoes, cut up just so with a touch of lemon juice, something nice happens, like the telegram from my mother on my birthday. They like for me to wear soft, flowing, white gowns. My blue jeans brought a thunderstorm, and lightning hit the pole out front and we were without electricity for twenty-four hours.

There is a ritual I go through now when Howard wants to go to bed with me. He doesn’t object. It excites him, actually, to see me undress under the tree.

They liked the mouse I caught for them, and I’m wondering if they would like a chick, or a game hen. The mouse got Howard a Christmas bonus. I know a place that sells live chicks….

• • •

MoonGate

(Orbit 20 — 1978)

It came in the moonlight over the cliff—

Something so alien that it profoundly changed

Everyone who experienced it, each in his

own very different way.

I

When anyone asked Victoria what the GoMarCorp actually did, she answered vaguely, “You know, light bulbs, electronics, stuff like that.” When her father pressed her, she admitted she didn’t know much about the company except for her own office in the claims department of the Mining Division. She always felt that somehow she had disappointed her father, that she had failed him. Because the thought and the attendant guilt angered her she seldom
dwelled on it. She had a good apartment, nice clothes, money enough to save over and above the shares of stock the company handed out regularly. She was doing all right. At work she typed up the claims reports on standard forms, ran a computer check and pulled cards where any similarities appeared—same mine, same claimants, same kinds of claims… She made up a folder for each claim, clipped together all the forms, cards, correspondence, and placed the folder in her superior’s in-basket. What happened to it after that she never knew.

Just a job, she thought, but when it was lunchtime she went to lunch. When it was quitting time, she walked away and gave no more thought to it until eight-thirty the next morning. Mimi, on the other hand, boasted about her great job with the travel agency, and never knew if she would make it to lunch or not. Victoria checked her watch against the wall clock in The Crèpe Shop and when the waiter came she ordered. She ate lunch, had an extra coffee; Mimi still had not arrived when she left the restaurant and walked back to her office. “Rich bitch, couldn’t make up her mind how to get to Rio,” Mimi would say airily. “I’m sending her by dugout.”

Late in the afternoon Diego called to say Mimi had had an accident that morning; she was in the hospital with a broken leg. “You can’t see her until tomorrow. They’ve knocked her out back into last week to set it, so I’ll come by later with the keys and maps and stuff. You’ll have to go get Sam alone.”

“I can’t drive the camper alone in the mountains!”

“Gotta go. See you later, sugar.”

“Diego! Wait…” He had hung up.

Victoria stared at the report in her typewriter and thought about Sam. He had worked here as a claims investigator eight years ago. She had been married then; she and Sam had developed a close nodding relationship. He was in and out for two years, then had grown a beard and either quit or been fired. She hadn’t seen him again until six months ago, when they had met by chance on a corner near the office.

His beard was full, his hair long, he was dressed in jeans and sandals.

“You’re still there?” he asked incredulously.

“It’s a job,” she said. “What are you up to?”

“You’ll never believe me.”

“Probably not.”

“I’ll show you.” He took her arm and began to propel her across the street.

“Hey! I’m on lunch hour.”

“Call in sick.”

“I can’t,” she protested, but he was laughing at her, and in the end, she called in sick. When she told Sam it was the first time she had done that, he was astonished.

He drove an old VW, so cluttered with boxes, papers, magazines, other miscellaneous junk, there was hardly room for her to sit. He took her to a garage that was a jumble of rocks. Rocks on the floor, in cartons, on benches, on a picnic table, rocks everywhere.

“Aquamarine,” he said, pointing. “Tourmaline, tiger-eye, jadeite from Wyoming, fire opal…”

There was blue agate and banded agate, sunstones, jasper, garnet, carnelian… But, no matter how enthusiastic he was, no matter by what names he called them, they were rocks, Victoria thought in dismay.

When he said he made jewelry, she thought of the clunky pieces teenage girls bought in craft shops.

“I’ll show you,” he said, opening a safe. He pulled out a tray and she caught her breath sharply. Rings, brooches, necklaces—lovely fragile gold chains with single teardrop opals that flared and paled with a motion; blood-red carnelian flecked with gold, set in ornate gold rings; sea-colored aquamarines in silver…

A few weeks later he had a show in a local art store and she realized that Sam Dumarie was more than an excellent craftsman. He was an artist.

“You get off at noon on Good Friday,” Sam had said early that spring. “Don’t deny it. I lived with GoMar rules for years, remember. And you have Monday off. That’s enough time. You and Mimi drive the camper up to get me and I’ll show you some of the most terrific desert you can imagine.”

“Let’s do it!” Mimi cried. “We’ve both asked off until Wednesday. We were going to my parents’ house for the weekend, but this is more exciting! Let’s do it, Vickie.” With hardly a pause she asked if Diego could join them. “He’s a dear friend,” she said to Sam, her eyes glittering. “But he wants to be so much more than that. Who knows what might develop out on the desert?”

Watching her, Victoria knew she was using Diego, that it was Sam she was after, and it didn’t matter a bit. Hadn’t mattered then, didn’t matter now, she thought, driving slowly looking for a restaurant, remembering Diego’s words:

“Get hungry, just pull over and toss a steak on the stove. Enough food for a week for all of us. Get sleepy, pull over, crawl in one of the bunks. That simple.”

But there was no place to pull over on the highway, and no place to park and broil a steak. She spotted a restaurant, had dinner, and wished the motels had not had their no-vacancy lights on all down the main street of this small town. According to the map, she was about fifty miles south of Lake Shasta, and there would be campgrounds there, places to park and sleep. She climbed back inside the camper and started driving again.

Sam had given Diego explicit directions, and the more Victoria thought about them, and about the roads—everything from double green lines down to faint broken lines on the map—the more she wished she had taken Mimi’s suggestion and called the Oregon state police. Sam had gone up to the mountains with friends who had left him there. The police could find him, she thought, or find his friends and locate Sam that way. They could give him a ride to the nearest town, where he could rent a car to drive himself home. Sam would understand why no one had showed up at the appointed hour. And she knew she had refused that way out because Mimi had angered her finally.

“Why?” Mimi had asked petulantly. She was very lovely, her hair black and lustrous, her brown eyes large as marbles. “After all, if you haven’t snagged him in six months, why do you think this weekend will do it?”

It was after twelve when she finally came to a stop, hit the light switch, and rested her head for several minutes on the steering wheel. She had been up since six that morning, had worked half the day, and she felt as if she had been wrestling elephants all evening. She neither knew nor cared where she was, someplace near the lake, someplace where the traffic was distant and no lights showed. She hauled herself up, staggered through the camper to the bunks, and fell onto one of them without bothering to undress. Presently she shifted so that the covers were over her instead of under her, and it seemed she had hardly closed her eyes before she was wakened by shouts.

Dazed, she pulled the shade aside. It was not yet light.

“This is a parking lot!” a man yelled at her. “Move it out of here.”

It was bitter cold that morning and the sky was uniformly gray. She turned the radio on to the weather channel and nodded glumly at the report. Freezing miles to go; it was four-thirty. She should be level three thousand feet, snow in the higher passes.

All morning she crept along, sometimes in the clouds, sometimes in swirling snow, sometimes below the weather. At one o’clock she realized she had left the cold front behind her; she was east of the mountains, heading north in Oregon. The sun was brilliant, but the wind speed had increased enough to rock the camper, and she fought to hold it to forty miles an hour.

The rain forest had given way to pines on her left, and off to her right there was the desert. Later in the afternoon she turned east an U.S. 26, and after a few miles stopped at a rest area for lunch. This was the Juniper Wayside Park, a small plaque said, and went on to extol the virtues of the juniper tree. The trees were misshapen, no two alike. Some grew out sideways like shrubs, some were almost as upright as pines; none was over twenty feet tall. Beyond the small grove of junipers the ground was flat brown, dotted with sagebrush and occasional clumps of wirelike grass. The wind screamed over the empty land. Shivering, Victoria got back inside the camper. She made a sandwich and studied the instructions Sam had written.

She had less than sixty miles to go; it was four thirty. She should be there well before dark. A truck thundered past the park, and she jumped, startled. It was the first vehicle that had passed her since she had turned east. But, she thought, it proved other traffic did use this highway; she would not be totally alone on the desert.

When she started again, no one else was in sight. The road was straight as far as she could see in both directions, and it was a good road, but she had to slow down again and again until she was driving no faster than thirty-five miles an hour. Even at that speed the wind out of the northwest was a steady pressure against the side of the camper, pushing, pushing. When it let up, she rebounded. When it gusted, she was almost swept off the road.

To her left—she could not judge distance in this treeless country—there were hills, or mountains, and sharply sawed-off mesas. Now and than a pale dirt road appeared, vanished in the sagebrush. Her highway was sending out feelers, tendrils that crept toward the hills and never reached them.

Milepost 49. She shook her head. Those little roads were being swallowed by the desert. It was a joke. Sam had not meant for them to drive on one of those go-nowhere roads. Milepost 50, 51… She slowed down even more, gripped the wheel hard enough to make her hands ache. There was no place she could stop on the highway, no place she could pull over to consider. U.S. 26 was two lanes; there was no shoulder, only the desert. When Milepost 57 came, she turned north onto a dirt road. She felt only resignation now. She had to keep driving; the road was too narrow for two cars to pass. On either side there was only rock-strewn, barren ground, sagebrush, and boulders, increasing in size now. She could see nothing behind her except a cloud of dust. The sun had dipped behind the mountains and the wind now hurled sand against the windshield. The road curved and she hit the brakes, gasping. Before her was a chasm, a gorge cut into the land so deeply she could not see the bottom, only the far side where sharply tilted strata made her feel dizzy for a moment.

Some ancient river, she thought, had thundered out of the hills, an irresistible force that no rock could withstand. Where was it now? Gone forever, but its passageway remained. A mighty god, it had marked the land for centuries to come, its print cruelly raked into the earth. The forests it had nourished were gone; the bears and otters and beavers, all gone; the land was deserted, wailing its loneliness. She roused with a jerk. It was the wind screaming through the window vent. Soon it would be dark; she had to find a place where it would be safe to stop for the night.

She read the directions again before she started. Sixteen miles on the road, turn right, through a gate, a short distance to a second gate, twelve more miles. She glanced at the odometer frequently as she drove, willing the numbers to change. The cliffs on her left were already dark in shadows, and the gorge she cautiously skirted appeared to be bottomless. This narrow road had been blasted out of the mountains; it threaded upward in a series of blind curves.

Every step for six months, she thought, had led her to this: driving alone on the desert, miles from another person, miles from help if she should have an accident. Driving on a track that seemed designed to make any stranger end up at the bottom of a ravine.