It was a pleasant fantasy.
Logan scanned for his daughter, his goggles adapting to the changing glare. Now where has she gotten to?
A giggle made him start. “I’m right above you, dummy!”
Sure enough, there she was. Not five meters uphill, perched on a fifty-degree slope. She must have lain in wait, quiet and unmoving, for at least ten minutes as he approached.
“I never should have let Kala M’Lenko teach you stalking,” he muttered.
She tossed her hair, red tinged from the sun. Her skin was copper colored too, saying to hell with the palefaced fashion of the day. Where a normal sixteen-year-old would have worn the latest style in sun hats, she sported a sweat-band visor and streaks of white onc-ex cream.
“But you said a girl today oughta have survival skills.”
“Thems, you have in plenty. Too plenty, maybe,” Logan answered in pidgin Simglish. But he grinned. “Let’s see what you found.”
Actually, he was pleased with her attitude. As she led him up a path too narrow for footprints, Logan found himself recalling a time some years ago when he had challenged her to “find a rock” in Kansas.
They had been visiting his parents, before the divorce, but long after the Big Drought had forced plains farmers to switch from their beloved corn to sorghum and amaranth. Claire loved the Eng spread, even though the agricooperative it was a part of scarcely resembled the Ma and Pa farms still vivid in story books. At least it was more real than the lavish estate where Daisy had grown up, where Claire hated visiting because her aristo cousins so often cast her in the role of their amusing hick relation, who didn’t even know enough to care that she was poor.
“If you can find a rock, I’ll give you ten dollars,” he had told his daughter on that day, thinking it a simple way to keep her amused during the sluggish stretch until dinnertime. And while the inducement had been mere pocket change, she nevertheless scampered off into the harvested fields, searching through stubble while he lazed in a hammock, catching up on his journals.
It didn’t take Claire long to realize plowed fields weren’t good places to find stones. So she moved to the verges, where windbreak trees swayed in a bone-dry sirocco. During all that lazy afternoon she kept running back to her father with bits of treasure to show him… bottle caps and machine parts, for instance. Or ancient aluminum soft-drink pull-rings, still shiny after seventy years. And all sorts of other detritus from two and a half centuries’ ceaseless cultivation. They had fun puzzling over these trophies, and Logan would have been happy with just that. But, typically, Claire never forgot the original challenge.
She brought him hard clumps that proved, under a magnifying glass, to be only hardened dirt. She retrieved agglomerates of clay and chunks of broken cement. Every sample turned into a revelation, a glimpse into the past. Each time she would hurry off again, only to return a few minutes later, breathless with the next sample to be dissected.
Finally, when Logan’s mother called them in for supper, he broke the news to Claire. “There are no stones in Kansas, ” he had said. “Or at least not in this part of the state. Even after all the terrible erosion, there’s still hardly anywhere you can find bedrock. It’s all a great plain built up over thousands of years, out of dust and tiny bits blown down from the Rockies.
“There’s just no natural way for a stone to get here, honey.”
For an instant he had wondered if he’d taken a father’s license too far, teasing the child that way. But his daughter only looked at him and then pronounced, “Well, it was fun anyway. I guess I learned a lot.”
At the time Logan wondered at how easily she had accepted defeat. It was only three days later, as they prepared to depart for home, that she said to him, “Hold out your hand,” and placed in his palm a heavy, oblong shape, crusty, with a blackened, seared quality to it. Logan remembered blinking in surprise, hefting the stone. He took out his magnifier and then borrowed his father’s hammer to chip a corner.
No doubt about it. Claire had found a meteorite.
“There is a way for a stone to get here, isn’t there?” she had said. Silently, Logan pulled out coins and paid up.
Now, on this Wyoming slope, a much bigger Claire patted the slanting cliff where a sudden change in color could be seen, from mocha to a sort of toffee cream. She pointed to faint outlines, naming fossil creatures whose skeletons were set in stone when this had been the bottom of a great sea, millions of centuries ago. Logan’s own trip into memory was relatively minor in comparison, a mere eight years. But eight years which had changed that precocious little girl.
She won’t have to be picky to choose a man, he thought. She’ll scare off all but the few who can keep up with her.
“… and none of them appear above this line. They all died out right here!” She stroked the line again. “This has to be the Permian-Triassic boundary.”
He nodded. “Fair enough. Shall I take your picture next to it?”
Claire protested. “But we have to take a scraping! I want to take home—”
“Scraping second. Photo first. Humor Papa.”
Claire let out an exasperated sigh. But then, he thought, It’s a dad’s job to make light of things. To be hard to impress.
He touched the controls at the rims of his goggles. “Now smile,” he said.
“Oh all right. But wait a minute!”
She grabbed a flat electrobrush from her back pocket, flicked the switch to charge it, and began swiping at her tangled locks. Finally, she swept off her own goggles and ignored the ferocious sun to smile for the camera.
Logan grinned. In many ways, Claire was still quite sixteen.
It had been a good day. But returning to camp, dusty and with the grit of ages between his teeth, Logan looked forward to a quiet evening meal and collapsing in his sleeping bag. His pack, containing the full five kilos of rock samples allowed by Claire’s collector’s permit, he dropped with relief by the licensed fire ring.
Studiously, Logan pretended not to see the flashing light atop his tiny camp-transceiver. Until he touched the play button, he could still plead ignorance — claim he’d been out of reach somewhere on the mountain. Dammit. The others in his consulting firm had been told, forcefully. He wasn’t to be disturbed except in an emergency!
Washing his face with a cloth dipped in a crevice streamlet, Logan tried to be cynical. They probably want me back “urgently” to clear somebody’s drain spout. Returning to the tent, he tossed the wash cloth over the little red beacon.
But he couldn’t dismiss it that easily. His imagination betrayed him. While Claire rattled the cooking pot Logan kept envisioning scenes of moving water. As they ate quietly in the gathering dusk, he found himself — like some character out of a Joseph Conrad tale — picturing inundations, deluges, liquid calamities breaking through man’s flimsy barriers, setting all works, great and small, in peril.
It was incongruous, here in a parched land where one’s very pores gasped, where moisture was assessed in precious droplets. But he had little control over the train of images thrown up by his forboding unconscious. He pictured levees bursting, rivers shifting… the Mississippi finally spilling over the worn out dikes confining it, tearing through unprotected bayous to the sea.