I swallowed hard, fighting back the dark, half-remembered fears of childhood. Spall was not—could not be—the seat of God's kingdom. Period. There was a reasonable explanation for what had happened here—a reasonable, scientific, non-miraculous explanation for what had happened here.
All I had to do was find it.
My probing fingertips caught something else. "Hairline cracks," I grunted to Calandra.
She nodded. "There's a whole network of them," she said absently. "More visible from my angle, I guess. They seem to radiate from the glazed part outward into the surrounding rock."
I leaned forward to see. "Cracks from the heating?" I hazarded.
She shrugged, oddly hunch-shouldered. For all her current rejection of her faith, she'd had the same upbringing I had... upbringing that would have included the same scriptures about God's fire and lightning that were currently bouncing around my own mind. "Maybe," she said. "They look a lot like the cracks around the thunderhead up there, though."
I looked back down again, chagrined that I hadn't made that connection myself. "Maybe that's the answer, then," I suggested slowly. "Maybe these are spots where there were once thunderheads."
She snorted. "Oh, certainly. What, no one ever taught them not to play with fire when they were seedlings?"
Under other circumstances I might have tossed out a pointed reference to God's lightning. But with a sense of creepiness growing steadily around me, I couldn't even resent her sarcasm. "It's not that crazy an idea," I told her. "I've heard of plants whose seeds germinate best after a forest fire has passed through the area. Why not one which spontaneously burns down at the end of its life to give that kind of seed a good head start?"
"Have you ever heard of a plant like that?" she countered.
"No. But neither of us is exactly steeped in botanical knowledge."
Her eyes seemed to defocus for a moment... as if trying to see something that still wasn't quite there. "True," she said at last. "I just hope it's really that simple."
—
There were housekeeping chores to be done when we reached bottom; chores that enabled me to temporarily ignore the odd feeling hovering at the edge of my mind. By the time we'd set up our firepatch flatlantern and gotten it started, the sun was down; by the time we'd sorted out and eaten our pac-heated meals, it was full night.
And as we sat quietly on opposite sides of the firepatch, lost in our own private worlds, the mystery inevitably returned to my thoughts.
"Any progress?" Calandra asked, her face eerie looking in the glow of the firepatch.
I shrugged. Irritating though Calandra could be, a portion of my mind noted dimly, it was sometimes nice to be with someone who didn't have to communicate entirely through words. "Maybe," I told her. "I presume we can eliminate right away the possibility of volcanic activity on those slopes?"
"I know even less about geology than I do about botany," she said dryly. "But I find it hard to believe this is volcanic rock."
I nodded. "Okay, then. Suppose, for sake of argument, that the thunderheads have a high metallic content."
"All right," she said after a slight pause. "I guess I can suppose that. So...?"
"So high metal content would imply good electrical conductivity," I said. "Which would make them likely targets during thunderstorms."
"So all the ones that happened to grow on the slope got blasted off, while the ones right on top didn't?"
"The ones on top might be younger," I reminded her. "We don't have any idea how old the heat-treated parts are, or how long a thunderhead's lifespan is."
She waved upward, the motion casting a ragged shadow on the ridge behind her. "It still doesn't make sense," she sighed. "None of it does. Why would one group of thunderheads prefer—no; insist on—living among a tangle of other plants out in full sunlight, while another group works very hard to drill its members into solid rock on cliff faces? While a third packs together in shadow like lonely walruses," she added, gesturing at the sea of thunderheads faintly visible in the reflected light.
I shrugged helplessly. "Maybe they're three different species," I said. "Maybe they behave differently at different parts of their life cycle. Maybe they're just highly adaptable and can live and grow no matter what happens around them. Some things are like that; others aren't."
I hadn't intended the comment to sound accusing... but it did anyway, and both of us heard it. "Sometimes that kind of struggle isn't worth it," she said quietly, her eyes steady on me.
For a moment we gazed at each other, and I felt the rush of suppressed emotion flowing like white-water through her. "What happened?" I asked softly.
Her eyes were still on me, but her attention had turned inward. To thoughts, and memories, and feelings... and, perhaps, to the need to talk about it all. "Aaron Balaam darMaupine happened," she said at last. "Do you remember what it was like to be sixteen?"
I thought back. Awkwardness, both physical and social. Confusion, and the questioning of things long taken for granted. A profound need to be accepted, to be like all the others. An equally profound terror that I wasn't, and would never be. "I remember enough of it," I said.
"I was sixteen when darMaupine's Kingdom of God was toppled," she said, her voice echoing old pain. "When the Patri and colonies began to truly hate the Watchers." She took a deep breath, let it out slowly. "You were, what, ten when that happened?"
"Eleven."
"Eleven. Which meant you were still pretty much locked safely away in the Watcher womb." She shook her head. "I wasn't. I'd already spent a lot of time out in the non-Watcher world—darMaupine practically ordered us to do that. 'Do you not realize that the holy people of God are to be the judges of the world?'—that was one of his favorite quotes. I'd spent time out of the settlement. Made a lot of... friends."
She dropped her gaze to the firepatch, a hand coming up to daub briefly at her eyes. "I was sixteen, Gilead. I... couldn't take the hatred and... rejection I felt everywhere. And I couldn't believe a loving God would have permitted someone as gifted as darMaupine to be so badly corrupted."
I licked my lips. "We're creatures of free will," I said quietly. "By definition, that means God allows us to choose whether to use our talents for or against Him."
"I know all the arguments," Calandra said, shaking her head. "But arguments didn't help. I was hurting... and all the Watchers who were left were too busy fighting off their own destruction to care about something as unimportant as a teenager's crisis of faith. I left just as soon as I could."
"And have been running ever since?"
A bitter smile touched her lips. "But the running's going to stop now, isn't it? Can't run any more after you've been at the Deadman Switch."
"Calandra—"
"You suppose it's my punishment for quitting?" she asked, her voice trembling slightly. "You suppose God considers it heresy that I ran out when my questions outnumbered my answers?"
"If God were that impatient He would have rolled up the universe by now and put it away in a closet," I sighed. "We just have to trust that He's got things under some kind of control. Whether we understand what He's doing or not."
She raised her eyes back to mine again. "So why did you run away?"
I hesitated. I had promised myself never to tell this to anyone else... "I left because there wasn't any way to make money in Cana," I told her. "And I wanted to make money."
She stared at me for a long minute. "I don't believe you."
"Everyone in Cana believes it," I said, feeling a flicker of pain. Pain I thought I'd laid to rest long ago.