“I’m sure he must be here someplace.” He gestured at the lake and trail and the Nevada Fall.
“Thank you,” she said. This time, she did not smile, simply turned and walked back toward the head of Vernal Fall and the descending Mist Trail. He watched her go and took a deep breath, biting into his second sandwich.
He stared at the sandwich ruefully as he chewed. “Must be the white bread,” he told himself. “Can’t catch a beauty like that with anything less than whole wheat.”
At three, the meadow and the perimeter of the lake, the falls and the trail below, were empty. He was the only human for miles, or so it seemed; might even be true, he thought. He crossed the bridge and lingered in the trees on the other side, with only the roar of the falls above and below and snatches of birdsong. He knew rocks of any description but little about birds. Red-winged blackbirds and robins and jays were obvious; he thought about buying a book in the general store to learn the others, but then, what use applying names? If his memories were soon to be scattered fine-ground over space, education was a waste.
What was important was finding his center, or pinning down some locus of being, establishing a moment of purity and concentrated awareness. He did not think that was possible with people all around; now was a chance to try.
Prayer perhaps. God had not been on his mind much recently, a telltale void; he did not wish to be inconsistent when all the world was a foxhole. But consistency was as useless now as nature studies, and not nearly so tempting.
The valley was still in sun, Liberty Cap half shadowed. The smoke had cleared some and the sky was bluer, green at the edges of the haze, more real than it had been.
“I am going to die,” he said out loud, in a normal tone of voice, experimenting. “What I am will come to an end. My thoughts will end. I will experience nothing, not even the final end.” Rising rocks and smoke and lava. No; probably not like that. Will it hurt? Will there be time for pain?
Mass death; God was probably busy also with mass prayer.
God.
Not a protector, unless there be miracles.
He shuffled his booted feet in the dry trail dirt. “What in hell am I looking for? Revelation?” He shook his head and forced a laugh. “Naive sonofabitch. You’re out of training; your prayer muscles, your enlightenment biceps, they’re all out of shape. Can’t lift you any higher than your goddamned head.” The bitterness in his voice shook him. Did he really want revelation, confirmation, assurance of existence or meaning beyond the end?
“God is what you love.” He said this softly; it was embarrassing to realize how much he believed it. Yet he had never been particularly good at love, neither the love of people in all its forms nor the other kinds, except perhaps love of his work. “I love the Earth.”
But that was rather vague and broad. The Earth offered only unthinking obstacles to love: storms, rock slides, volcanoes, quakes. Accidents. Earth could not help being incontinent. Easy to love the great mother.
The wind picked up and carried droplets of mist above the Vernal Fall and over the forest, landing cool and lightly stinging-tickling on his cheek. He thought of down on his cheek and not whiskers, and of wanting his father to stay with them, even then knowing (truly did he realize it then?) that the unknit would soon separate.
That time, in Yosemite, had not been altogether blissful. The memories he now recovered were of a young boy’s ignorant but sharp eye, observing a man and a woman, shakily acting the roles of mother and father, husband and wife, not connecting anymore.
The boy had been unable to foresee what would happen after the separation so obviously but so deniably coming.
He squinted.
Earth = mother. God = father. No God = no father = inability to connect with the after.
“That,” he said, “cuts the fucking cake.” He swatted at a gnat and hefted his pack higher on his back, descending along the wet dark gray rock steps carved out beside Vernal Fall, and then following the path above the foaming, violently full Merced.
Pausing with a slight smile, he left the path and stood on a granite boulder at the very edge of the tumult, contemplating the lost green volumes of water beneath and between the white bubbles. The roar seemed to recede; he felt almost hypnotized. He could just lean forward, shift one foot beyond the edge, and all would end very quickly. No suspense. His choice.
Somehow, the option was not attractive. He shook his head slowly and glanced up at the trees on the opposite side of the spill. Glints of silver shined through the boughs and moved along the trunks. It took him a moment to resolve what he was seeing. The trees were crawling with fist-sized silvery spiders. Two of them scuttled along a branch, carrying what appeared to be a dead jay. Another had stripped away a slice of bark from a pine trunk, revealing a wedge of white wood.
He thought of the Guest, and did not doubt his eyes.
Who controls them? he asked himself. What do they mean? He watched them for several minutes, vaguely bothered by their indifference, and then shrugged — yet another inexplicable marvel — and returned to the path.
Edward was back in the valley, freshly showered and in clean jeans and white shirt, by five o’clock, as he had promised. The amphitheater was more crowded than it had been for yesterday’s meeting. No music was scheduled; instead, they had a minister, a psychologist, and a second ranger arrayed before the podium, waiting their turn after Elizabeth’s introduction. Minelli grumbled at the New Age lineup, but he stayed. There was a bond growing between all of them, even those who had not spoken; they were in this together, and it was better to be together than otherwise, even if it meant sitting through a handful of puerile speakers.
Edward looked for but did not see the jilted blonde in the audience.
61
After three days of interrogation by the FBI and agents from the National Security Agency, as well as six hours of intense grilling by the Secretary of the Navy, Senator Gilmonn had been set free from his office and apartment in Long Beach, California. He had ordered his chauffeur to drive east.
Nobody had been able, or particularly willing, to hang anything on him, though the trail of the arrow or monkey or whatever from the U.S.S. Saratoga to his car was reasonably well defined. Given more than a mere two and a half months of investigation and second-guessing, he might have been in some trouble, and the captain of the Saratoga relieved of his command, but things had changed markedly now in these United States. It was a different nation, a different government — functioning to all intents and purposes without a head. The President, under impeachment, was still in office but with most of his strings of influence and therefore power severed.
Gilmonn’s incarceration, which might have been pro forma half a year ago, was now simply out of the question.
For all that, what had they accomplished? They had killed Lieutenant Colonel Rogers and perhaps thirty Forgers who had refused to vacate the desert around the bogey. They had blown the bogey into scattered pieces. Yet few involved in the conspiracy believed, now, that they had done anything to even postpone, much less remove, the sentence of death placed on the Earth.
He stood on the sand near the gravel road that passed within two miles of the site of the disintegrated bogey, binoculars hanging on a leather strap from his neck, face streaming with sweat under the brim of his hat. The white limousine that he had hired with his own money waited a few yards away, the chauffeur impassive behind his dark glasses and blue-black uniform.