Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two (34 page)

“I was afraid to move! What if I had sneezed, or coughed, or got hiccups? What if the
horse
had looked down?”

Serena had packed beef chunks and chopped vegetables, and within an hour stew was ready. They ate dinner ravenously and took coffee with them to the western end of the butte where they sat on rocks and watched the sunset over the Three Sisters in their chaste white veils.

No one spoke until the display was over and the streaks of gold, scarlet, salmon, baby pink had all turned dark. The snow on the Sisters became invisible and the mountains were simple shapes, almost geometrical, against the violet sky.

“They look like a child’s drawing of volcanoes,” Victoria said softly. Then: “Why do they call this Goat’s Head Butte? It certainly looks like no goat’s head I’ve ever seen.”

“A mistake,” Farley said. “The Indians called it Ghost Head, the source of Ghost River. A U.S. Geologic Survey cartographer got it wrong.”

Victoria drew in her breath sharply. “It really is called Ghost River!”

She sat between Sam and Farley. There was still enough light for them to see each other, but shadows now filled the valley below; the moon was not yet out. For what seemed a long time no one spoke. Farley waited, and finally Sam said, in a grudging tone:

“I didn’t know it then, Victoria, or I wouldn’t have said what I did.”

“Piece by piece it’s coming together, isn’t it?” Before either of them could respond, she said, “We’re too far away.”

“What do you mean?” Sam asked.

Helplessly Victoria shrugged. “I don’t know what I mean. I think you have to be closer to feel anything. I don’t know why—”

Sam stood up, but Farley motioned him back. He put his hand lightly on Victoria’s arm. “Tonight we observe,” he said matter-of-factly. “Tomorrow we’ll crisscross the valley and tomorrow night we’ll camp down there. Relax, Sam. Just take it easy.” Without changing his tone of voice he asked, “Victoria, what did you see in that valley that night?” He felt her stiffen and tightened his clasp on her arm.

“I told you.”

“No. You told both of us your interpretation of what you saw. You translated something into familiar shapes. If you ask a primitive what something is that he never experienced before, he’ll translate it into familiar terms. So will a child.”

“I’m not a primitive or a child!”

“The part of you that interpreted what you saw, that has been reacting with terror, that part is primitive. I’m not talking to that part. I’m talking to the rational you, the thinking, sane you. What did you see? What was the first thing that caught your attention? Not what you thought it was, just how it looked.”

“A black dome,” she said slowly.

“No. Not unless you could see the edges beyond doubt.”

“A black shape, domelike.”

“Let’s leave it at a black shape. Are you certain it had a definite shape?”

“No, of course not. It was night, there were shadows, I was on the hill over it.”

He was silent a few moments, and finally Victoria said, “It was just black. I remember thinking it was a shadow at first, then it took on shape.”

Farley patted her arm. “Then?”

“There was a door, when it opened, a light showed… That’s not what you want, is it?”

“Just how it looked, not what you thought it was.”

“A patch of pale orange light. No. A pale glow. Orange tinted. I thought of a door, the way light comes through an open door.”

They worked on it painstakingly, each detail stripped of interpretation, stripped of meaning. Victoria began to sound tired, and Farley could sense restless small movements from Sam.

“I knew they were vehicles of some kind!” Victoria cried once. “They reflected light, they moved like automobiles—in a straight line, gleaming, and they turned on headlights at the road.”

“But what you described doesn’t have to be vehicles,” Farley said. “What you said was clusters of gleaming lights, like reflections on metal.”

“I suppose,” she said wearily. “They were spaced like cars on a road, and they moved at the same speed, in a straight line, not up and down, or sideways, or anything. Like cars.”

“And when they turned on lights, could you still see the reflections?”

She sighed and said no, she didn’t think so.

“You’re getting tired,” Farley said gently. “We should get back to camp, get some sleep. One more thing, Victoria. Look down there now, the moon’s lighting the valley, probably not as brightly as that night, but much the same as it was then. If you had been up here that night, Victoria, would you have been able to see what you saw?”

Farley still had his hand on her arm. The moon behind them made her face a pale blue; it was impossible to see her features clearly, but he felt a tremor ripple through her, felt her arm grow rigid.

“No!” The trembling increased. “We’re too far away. You can’t see the road from here.”

“Not because we’re too far to see it,” Farley said. “The road’s lower over there than the valley is.”

“You mean I couldn’t have seen it from the hill either?”

“No.”

Victoria rose unsteadily and stared at the valley, turned her entire body to look at the cliffs surrounding it.

“What is it?” Farley demanded. “You’ve remembered something, haven’t you? What?”

“This isn’t the right place.”

“It’s the place. You were over there. You can see the boulders, the pale shapes near the end of the ridge. Below that is the ranch road where you parked. It’s the right place.”

“It’s wrong! It isn’t the right place! I was on a hill. It wasn’t like that!” She closed her eyes and swayed. “I was on a hill, and I could hear… I heard…”

“You heard what? You heard something and saw something and smelled something, didn’t you? What was it?”

She shook her head hard. “I don’t know.”

Farley made her face the valley again. “Look at it, Victoria look! You’re hiding among the boulders on that ridge over there. You know they might see you. You keep in the shadows, hiding. Don’t move! Don’t make a sound! What do you smell? What do you hear?”

She moaned and he said, more insistently, “You smell something. What is it, Victoria? You know what it is, tell me!”

“Water!” she cried. “Water, a river, a forest!”

“You’re running,” Farley said, holding her hard. “You’re on the hill and you’re running. Your eyes are open. What do you see?”

She tried to push him away. “Nothing! I can’t remember that part. Nothing!”

“Look at the ridge. Look at it! You couldn’t run up there! There’s no place to run!”

“It’s not the same place! I told you, I was on a hill, there was grass. I ran until that man, Reuben, stopped me.”

“You’re terrified they might hear you. You smell the river and forest. You hear the rushing water. You run. Where are you running to? Why?”

“The trees,” she gasped. “Bushes under the trees. I’ll hide in the bushes, in the mist.” She pulled harder, her voice rising in hysteria. “There isn’t any forest or river! Let me go! Let me go!” She began to sag. “I can’t breathe!”

Farley and Sam half-carried, half-led her back to the campfire, which had burned to a bed of glowing ashes. Sam built up the fire and Farley held a drink to Victoria’s lips, keeping one arm around her shoulder. She sipped the bourbon, then took the cup and drank it down.

“Better?” Farley asked. She nodded. “Sit down. I’ll get a blanket to put around you.” Wordlessly she sat down by the fire. Sam was making coffee.

No one spoke until they all had coffee. Then Farley took Victoria’s hand. “We have to finish it,” he said.

She nodded without looking at him. “I’m crazy,” she said. “I would have killed myself that night if that cowboy hadn’t been there to save my life.”

“You saved yourself,” Farley said. “You panicked and you ran. You knew there was no forest, no river, no mist, but they were there. You invented Reuben, you projected him, because you couldn’t resist the evidence of your senses. You had to have help and no one was there to help you, so you helped yourself, through Reuben.”

“I’m going to bed,” Victoria said dully. She made no motion to get up.

Farley was not certain if she could accept anything he was saying. He could not tell if she heard him. “You acted out of self-preservation,” he said.

“It was all just a dream or a series of hallucinations,” Sam said. His voice was hard, grating. His angular face looked aged; his full beard made him look Biblical, like an old bitter prophet.

“You can’t regard it all as one thing,” Farley said. “That’s the mistake you made before, the same mistake the psychiatrist made, that if part of it was false, it all was. Obviously the cowboy figure is right out of romantic fiction, but that doesn’t make the rest of it false. I wondered if Victoria rejected the truth because she was convinced the truth was impossible, and accepted instead the illusions that could have been possible.” He paused, then added, “Both in what she saw in the valley, and again in the cowboy.”

Victoria stirred and shook her head. “I don’t understand anything,” she said, but with more animation now, as if she were awakening.

“I don’t either,” Farley said. “But you did see something, and you smelled and heard Ghost River. I bet not more than a dozen people today know it was ever called that, but you renamed it. That’s what I keep coming back to.”

“That’s crap!” Sam shouted. “She saw something and ran. Probably she stumbled and knocked herself out. You know you can’t run over that country, not even in daylight. She dreamed all the rest of it.” He had risen to stand over Victoria. “The only important thing is, what did you see in the valley?”

“Not what you want me to say!” Victoria cried. “It wasn’t a god figure. Not a burning bush or a pillar of flame. Not good or evil. Nothing we can know.”

Farley reached out to touch her and she jerked away. “You said we have to finish it. We do! I do! Sam, you wanted to know my nightmare. Let me tell you. I’m wearing tights, covered with sequins, circus makeup, my hair in along glittering braid. Spotlights are on me. I’m climbing the ladder to the tightrope and there’s a drum roll, the whole thing. I know I can do this, the way you know you can ride a bike, or swim, or just walk. I smile at the crowd and start out on the rope and suddenly there is absolute silence. I look down and realize the crowd is all on one side of the rope, to my left; no one is on the right side. The audience is waiting for me to fall. Nothing else. They know I’ll fall and they are waiting. They aren’t impatient, or eager; they have no feelings at all. They don’t care. That’s when I panic, when I realize they don’t care. And I know I must not fall on their side. I try to scream for someone to open the safety net, for someone to take my hand, for anything. Then I am falling and I don’t know which side I’m on. I won’t know until I hit. That is what terrifies me, that I don’t know which side I’ll die on.” Her voice had become almost a monotone as she told the dream. Abruptly she rose to her feet. “I’d like some more bourbon, please.”

Farley poured it and she sat down once more and drank before she spoke again.

“I came back here to see which side of the rope I’ll land on. The next time I’ll finish the dream and find out.”

Sam reached for the bottle and poured bourbon into his cup. “A lousy dream,” he muttered.

“Indifference, that’s what made it a nightmare. Their indifference,” Victoria said quietly. She sipped at her drink and went on. “It’s the same way we might break up an anthill and watch the ants scurry. Or how we tear a spiderweb and maybe see the spider dart away, or not. We don’t care. We watch or not, it doesn’t matter. Like the bank camera that photographs me when I go to the window. Me, a bank robber, someone asking for information, it doesn’t matter, the camera clicks its picture.” She was starting to slur her words slightly. Her voice was low, almost inaudible part of the time. “It… they watched me like that. They didn’t care if I went over the cliff or not.”

Farley felt the hair rise on the back of his neck and wondered if she realized what she was saying. She wasn’t talking about the dream any longer.

“They didn’t care if I went over the cliff. They didn’t care if stopped, or ran, what I did.” She drained her cup, then set it down on the ground with elaborate care. “That’s inhuman,” she said. “Not like a god, the opposite of what it would be like for a god. Beyond all idea of good and evil. No awareness of good and evil.

Sam sighed and said, “She’s drunk. She never could drink.”

Victoria pushed herself up from the ground. She nodded. “I am,” she said carefully. “I’ll go to bed now.” Both men rose. She looked at Farley. “I know why I’m here. I have to see where I land. And I know why Sam’s here. He’s looking for God. Why are you here? What is your noble cause?” She was taking care to pronounce each word, as if speaking a foreign language.

“You’re too stinko to talk any more tonight.”

“I can’t talk, but my ears are not drunk. My ears are not blurring anything.”

“Will you remember?”

She nodded an exaggerated yes.

“It’s my land. Over the years twenty-five or thirty head of cattle have gone over that cliff. Two people have vanished in that area. My land. I have to know what’s there. I put it off and pretended it was just a superstition, wiped it from my mind, but I can’t do that now. You won’t let me do it ever again.” He paused, examining her face. “Do you understand that?”

“No, but I don’t have to.” She began to walk unsteadily toward the tent. “Because it’s not true,” she said, then ducked under the flap of the low tent.

It was true, though. He wanted to exorcise a devil, Farley thought, sitting down again. And Sam wanted to find God. All Victoria wanted was to learn the truth. They’d both use her, and through her they might find what they looked for. Across the fire from him, Sam sat brooding, staring into the flames.

“I want to stay up tonight,” Sam said abruptly. “Just in case there is something down there.”

Farley nodded. “We’ll take turns. You want to sleep first?”

Sam shrugged, then wordlessly got up and went to his sleeping bag spread on the ground a short distance from the fire.

Farley sat with his back against a pine tree and watched the shifting patterns of light and shadow as the moon moved across the sky. From time to time he added a small stick to the fire, not enough to blaze much, just to maintain a glow to keep the coffee hot. A fire during a night watch was friendly, he thought, nudging a spark into flame.