“Did you?”
She shook her head. “It’s got a lot of parts.”
46
I stood at the base of the alluvial fan, recapturing the vision I’d had staring into the dregs of Pria’s bath. I saw again the giant fan where Walter and I had been stranded. I felt again the heat thrown off by the fan rocks with their dark coating of desert varnish. I felt again the relief of taking shelter in the channel that was unvarnished, washed clean by floodwaters.
That bathtub vision had led me to an idea that beggared belief and I’d abandoned it because logic said Hap could not summon a flood.
I saw, now, that he could.
Studying the dark channel on this fan, I knew three things:
First, the dark channel was deeply incised and so it must have been carved by a significant flow.
Second, the flowpath led directly to the reservoir below. Perhaps the miners had built it there to collect runoff water. That runoff, now, was only a localized trickle.
Third, desert varnish darkened the channel, which meant it had been many years since floods came this way.
These things told me what had happened here. A once-major channel had been abandoned by forces unknown and now it was largely inactive. I did not know the main thing — why. Maybe a fault scarp had broached its head. Maybe an obstruction had diverted the water flow, up in the canyon above. I’d find out, somewhere up above.
Hap, wherever he was, already knew.
I started up the mysterious channel. As I climbed, the incision deepened until only my chest and head were above the rim. Somewhere around here, Hap had spotted me watching him and climbed out. I scanned the curve of the fan — nobody. I scanned the bowl of the sky — nothing. Not a man, not a cloud, in sight. The sun baked the dark rocks and heat boiled up my legs. As fast as my rain-wet clothes dried, I wetted them again with sweat. My spongy socks had never dried. My eyes stung in the bright sun. I wanted my hat. I wanted my shades. I wanted my water bottle. I picked up a pebble to suck on, and tasted bitter manganese. I flung it away.
I returned my attention to what lay up ahead, puzzled. My channel seemed to lead directly into solid rock.
Ahead, at the top of the fan, the framing ridges met to form a face of high-rising walls. I scanned that face, searching for the break in the rock that would lead to the upper canyon — the canyon that must have once fed its waters down to build this fan. I wondered if a rockfall had blocked the watercourse, if the closed rock face was the end of the line. And then my climb topped out and, suddenly, I saw what I had not seen three steps back. There was a joint in the wall, a ragged slot with its edges offset so that if you looked from any viewpoint other than dead-on, you would miss it.
This was not the end of the line. I spent a minute staring at the slot, cataloguing the things I knew:
First, the slot fed the dark channel.
Second, the slot, like the channel, was stained with desert varnish.
Third, flood waters had not come through the slot in a very long time.
Should they come now, I did not want to be here. This slot was like the nozzle on a fire hose, only the hose was obstructed somewhere up ahead. And if that obstruction was removed, this nozzle would shoot a high-pressure jet stream down the dark channel to hose out the tub of beads below. Only one way I knew to remove a geological obstruction and that was to blow it the hell up. With C4 and a remote control. And if you don’t have your remote, then you come do it in person.
I glanced back at the cable ridge, where I’d last seen Hap. He’d been moving slowly, maybe beginning to get sick. He’d been traveling as though intent on escape but I figured he’d changed directions once out of sight, and the good thing — the main thing — was that it was going to take him some serious time to traverse the rugged terrain to reach the canyon above the slot. Actually, I knew a fourth thing. There must be another route to that canyon. Otherwise, Hap would not have abandoned this one.
Either way, I had a head start. I wasted thirty seconds of it wondering if I had the nerve to continue. If I cut and run, if Hap completed his work, then that fire hose was going to sweep the beads down to the oasis at Furnace Creek and crap up all life that drinks there.
My palms grew slick on the stock of the subgun.
You’re armed, lady. He isn’t.
I moved like I’d seen the ninjas do, leading with the subgun, and passed through the slot. Nobody was waiting in the narrow canyon, although my imagination gave itself a short run for its money. I settled my nerves scanning the rock crevices for nesting snakes.
It was a sinuous canyon, sidewinding its way deeper and narrower with every yard I advanced. By the time I’d advanced a few dozen, the walls had risen so high they reduced the sky to a thin blue strip. At first, I welcomed the shade. I cooled, I dried, my mouth found its spit. But within another dozen yards I was straining to pierce the gloom. The rimrock, in places, blistered out to close my sky-strip, darkening the walls beneath the overhangs. The walls were inky dolomite, their folds so entangled I could not read the strata. They began to squeeze in. Ahead, in silhouette, the walls undulated like the bosoms and bustles of Victorian ladies. The ladies were draped in a rough brocade, pocked with erosions and studded with pebbles. As they crowded me, I had to press my arms to my sides so their curves would not slice my elbows.
And then the canyon kinked again and I squeezed around a corner and nearly whacked my head on a tree branch wedged between the walls. It looked to have hung there for ages, stripped bare and bleached white. Hung up to dry by some long-ago flood.
A saying came to me about floods in narrow canyons: more water than you want in less time than you have.
I checked Hap’s watch. Eight minutes gone.
Reflexively, I scanned the walls up to the rims, searching for escape routes. There were none to be had. The sky-strip still showed blue but what did I know of thunderstorms up ahead?
The varnished walls gave me comfort and the will to move on.
I passed beneath the deadwood bridge and continued up the hallway of Victorian ladies, who passed me along in stony silence.
Lady Canyon, as I christened it, began to climb in earnest and within a few dozen yards I met the chute of a dry waterfall. The chute-rock was polished but on either side the roughened rock provided handholds and footholds. It was not much of a dryfall — six feet, at most — but I had to sling the subgun across my back and let it ride, unreachable, as I inched up the rock. Now’s the time, I thought. Nobody ever jumps out at you when you’re ready for them. Of course, Brendan From The Fiery Hill would need wings to get here fast enough to swoop down on me while I’m pinned on this rock. Nevertheless, I was glad to achieve the top. Nobody awaited me there but my ladies. I ninja-cradled the subgun and within another dozen yards came to another little dryfall and had to do it all over again.
It was around another bend, at the foot of the third little fall, that I first heard the hiss of running water. I stood frozen in the dolomite gloom. I stared so hard at the dryfall that it seemed to flow, like dripping candle wax.
Ten more minutes gone, by my watch.
Hurry. I slung the subgun across my back and scrambled up the fall.
When I achieved the top and approached the next kink in the canyon, the hiss fractured. It seemed to come from here, from there, from above, from below. A trick of acoustics.
I went reluctantly around the bend, subgun at the ready — for what that was worth.
Nothing.
47
There was nobody to shoot.
There was nowhere to go.
So I just stared at the obstruction.
My path dead-ended at another dry waterfall, an end-of-the-liner. It was a good forty feet high and its slick chute was edged by vertical strata that I was not equipped to scale. And even if I’d had the ropes and guts for it, achieving the top of this fall would bring me to the bottom of the true obstruction. It rose above the dryfall at least another forty feet and jutted out like a defiant jaw. Its rough gray face filled the canyon from wall to wall, like it had been born here, but there was no crater in the walls from which it might have been torn. There was only one way it could have got here. It had to have come from above, carried downcanyon in some past monstrous flood, and here, unable to shove its jaw through the narrow slot, it had come to rest. It was a keystone, locking the canyon shut. It was the biggest mother chockstone I had ever come across.