“You are never entirely helpless, nor ever entirely in it for yourself. You can always do something to expand the blue.”
Can anyone out there identify this quotation for me? I found it scribbled on a piece of paper and stuffed between the pages of an old book. My ferrets can’t find the philosopher who wrote it, but I’m sure it must have been published somewhere.
It makes me wonder how things must have been for our ancestors, who might have had beautiful thoughts like this one, but no nei to plant them in, where they might take root and sprout and become immortal.
So many lost thoughts… we’ve only now, it seems, acquired memory.
Perhaps we’re not so much “growing up,” as people say, as awakening from a kind of fevered dream.
• LITHOSPHERE
When the helicopters had first arrived, Logan’s first numb, hopeful thought had been how swift and efficient the rescue effort was! How powerful were the forces of compassion, so soon after the levees broke. But then he saw the markings on the olive-gray aircraft, and their bristling arms, and realized that their sudden appearance over the roiling, muddy waters was coincidental. Such overpowering military presence couldn’t have been organized so swiftly since the Mississippi burst its banks, plowing a new course to the sea. Nor were those deadly birds bound on any mercy mission.
As they circled, shining hot spotlights on him and the kids, Logan suddenly realized in the gathering twilight why they had come. No coincidence, after all.
Daisy. They’ve come after Daisy. Jesus! What’s she done this time?
He still couldn’t bring himself to believe she was gone. Logan clung to hope the same way he had clutched Tony and Claire when the house was torn off its foundations and hurled into the raging torrent. He hung onto that faith through every impact with floating trees and protruding telephone poles, believing fervently that Daisy might have found some pocket of air below. After what he’d seen these last few months, Logan figured anything at all was possible. Even as the helicopters circled overhead — perhaps deliberating whether to make certain of their mission by blasting the house anyway — their tottering bungalow-raft miraculously came aground on one of the sloping, man-made berms thrown up by some TwenCen oil company to hide its ugly refinery towers. Claire cried out as the villa tilted. They grabbed each other and the dangling antennae to keep from spilling into the deadly waters. The churning Mississippi beckoned…
Then the tilting stopped. The house settled back and was still.
Suddenly men were dropping out of the sky, plummeting down ropes to land on the canted rooftop. At the mention of his ex-wife’s name, Logan quickly pointed toward the jammed attic hatch. He had no thought to spare her arrest, only a glimmering hope they might haul her out of there alive.
Several soldiers pulled him and the kids back while others laid gray paste round the hatch. “Cover your eyes!” a sergeant bellowed. But even that didn’t exclude the flash, outlining the bones in Logan’s hands. Blinking through speckles, Logan saw soldiers dive with reckless courage into a black, smoking hole, as if about to face hell’s own legions, instead of one unarmed, middle-aged woman. It seemed so incongruous. These grim-faced men had the set-jawed look of volunteers for a suicide squad.
When word came out what the skirmishers had found, Logan looked at his daughter. There was sadness in her eyes, but also a kind of relief. When she turned his way though, Claire’s face suddenly washed with concern. “Oh, Daddy. I didn’t know.”
Didn’t know what? he tried to ask. But his voice wouldn’t function. He blamed the whipping helicopter blades for the stinging in his eyes, and exhaustion for the quivering that seemed to take over his body. Logan tried to turn away, but Claire only threw her arms around him.
He clutched her tightly as his lungs gave way to wracking, heartbroken sobs.
Military custody wasn’t so bad. The authorities gave them fresh clothes and medical attention. And as realization spread that the worst of the crisis was indeed over, the questioning grew less frantic and shrill.
Not that anyone really believed it all came down to one solitary woman, manipulating forces all over the world from a cottage on the bayou. There had to be more, the intelligence officers insisted. Though now less brutally frenetic, the inquiry went on and on, long after Logan’s revealed participation in the Spivey network brought in yet more officials, more voices asking the same questions over and over. What finally put a stop to it was intervention from the top. And when Logan learned what “the top” meant these days, he understood the wide-eyed expressions on his interrogators’ faces.
HE WAS ON OUR SIDE…
So came word over those special channels, referring specifically to him.
FINISH YOUR WORK, BY ALL MEANS. THEN LET HIM GO.
Everyone treated Logan courteously after that. He got to see Claire and Tony. His plaque was returned to him. And soon, after promising to keep himself available to the appropriate commissions, he was escorted outside into a bright afternoon.
Logan sniffed a breeze that seemed faintly scented with springtime. Claire took his hand and led him toward a waiting chauffeured car. “Your office has been calling,” she told him, consulting her wrist display. “The mayor of New Orleans won’t even talk about plans for a new waterfront and reservoir system without you there — ‘to keep ’em honest,’ as he put it. And the Nile Reclamation Agency sent an urgent message saying they’ve changed their minds about that idiotic, shortsighted dam project. Instead, they dug out your old plans for the Aswan silt diversion system. I told them better late than never, but they’ll still have to wait till you’ve rested. Anyway, I wanted to go over some ideas with you before we talk to them.”
He smiled at her. “Sounds like you’ve been handling the family business while Dad was in stir.”
She lifted her chin. “I’m seventeen now. You said we’d be partners someday. So? It sure looks like there’s enough to do.”
That was true enough. The list of cleanup jobs was long and intimidating — even without having to satisfy a new planetary intelligence that your plans were good ones, truly designed for the long term. From now on the first rule of engineering would be to work with Earth’s natural forces, never against them.
“You’re still going to college,” he insisted. “And by the way, you can’t leave Tony hanging in midair, either. At least, you better tell the poor boy where he stands.”
She tilted her head, then nodded. “Fine. Okay. I’ll take care of being a teenager. That’ll still leave me… thirty hours a week to—”
“ — to be an engineer,” he laughed. “All right. If I tried to stop you, I’d probably just get overruled anyway.”
She grinned and squeezed his arm. Their driver held the door. Before getting into the car, though, Logan stopped to look at the sky. There was a patch over to the north, in the place farthest from the sun, where the dark hue was so clear and icy blue…
Briefly, he closed his eyes and let out a sigh.
“Let’s go,” he said as he sat down beside his daughter. “We’ve got a lot of work to do.”
I am the sum of many parts. I stretch and yawn and test my fingers… using such words to describe the complex things I do until my human parts can come up with better ones.
I am the product of so many notions, cascading and multiplying in so many accents and dialects. These are my subvocalizations, I suppose — the twitterings of data and opinions on the Net are my subjective world. Sometimes it gets confusing and I feel a thread of fear, even revulsion as the contradictions rise, threatening chaos. At such moments I am tempted to clamp down and simplify.