Pedro Manella’s head and torso extended halfway through the tunnel from middeck. The normally impeccable journalist was grimy and odorous from many days’ labor without bathing. Teresa almost sent him below again, to keep him out of the way. But no. That would be unfair. He’d been working hard, doing all the scutt labor and shit carrying while she and Alex were busy. Probably, they wouldn’t have made it without him.
“All right, Pedro,” she told the journalist. “I don’t figure the cooling system will freeze up in the next five minutes. You can watch the approach if you’re quiet.”
“Like a church mouse, I’ll be.” He carefully float-hopped over to grab the copilot’s chair, but didn’t try sitting down. The seat was filled with another of her make-do consoles. Teresa tried to ignore the aromas wafting from the big man. After all, she probably smelled little better.
As Alex brought them toward a gentle rendezvous with the waiting station, Teresa used her tiny store of precious, hoarded reaction gas to orient Atlantis for docking. Space-suited astronauts made signals in the efficient, lovely language of hands, more useful to her now than the tense words of the station’s traffic controllers, who had no idea what to make of this weird vessel anyway.
At last, with a bump and a clank, they locked into place. Atlantis’s ancient airlock groaned as it was put to use for the first time in decades, hissing like an offended crone.
Teresa flicked off switches and then patted the console one last time.
“Good-bye, old girl,” she said. “And thanks again.”
After transferring the equipment, after meetings and conference calls with everyone from tribunes to investigative com-missions to presidents, after they were finally allowed to shower and change and eat food fit for human consumption… after all of that, Teresa at last found herself unable to settle down within her tiny assigned cubicle. Sleep wouldn’t come. So she got up and made her way to the station’s observation lounge, and wasn’t surprised to find Alex Lustig there already, looking out across the carpet of blue and brown that seemed to stretch forever just beyond the glass.
“Hi,” he told her, turning his head and smiling.
“Hi, yourself.” And no more needed to be said as she joined him gazing at the living world.
Even in weightlessness there are influences, subtle and sometimes even gentle. Eddies of air and tide brushed them, bringing their shoulders together as they floated side by side, their faces bathed in Earthlight. It took little more to fold her hand into his.
From then on, all was kept in place by sound… the silent pulsebeat of their hearts, and a soft low music they could hear alone.
□ “We are born to be killers, of plants if nothing else. And we are killed. It’s a bloody business, living off others so that eventually they will live off you. Still, here and there in the food web one finds spaces where there’s room for something more than just killing and being killed.
“Imagine the island of blue in the middle of a tropical storm, its eye of peace.
“You must admit the hurricane is there. To do otherwise is self-deception, which in nature is fatal, or worse, hypocritical. Even honest, decent, generous folk must fight to survive when the driving winds blow.
“And yet, such folk will also do whatever they can, whenever they can, to expand the blue. To increase that gentle, centered realm where patience prevails and no law is made by tooth or claw.
“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.