PART THREE:
CLIMAX AND
COMPLETION
PROLOG
Her crepe-soled nurse's shoes stepped quietly on the closely fitted flagstones. It was past time for her employer's breakfast, but sometimes he'd lose himself in contemplation or a book, neglecting to come in at nine o'clock to eat. And if he was meditating, it would be worth her job to disturb him. She didn't expect to find anything wrong, despite his generally poor health. He'd simply been preoccupied lately.
When she saw him on the ground, half out of the arbor, she hurried to him, knelt in brief examination, then as fast as her overweight, middle-aged body would take her, ran back to the house to get help.
* * *
The physician left the room thoughtfully. He'd done what he could, and considered the prognosis favorable. Next time—who knew? He'd once wanted a brain scan done on his patient, but the man had refused, absolutely, and it seemed now there'd been no tumor, for that had been years earlier. Beyond that, he had no explanation for the seizures. Possibly someone else might, but his patient had expressly forbidden him to bring in consultants.
He had no illusions that he was medically up to date. As up to date as many, no doubt, but . . . Not much of his reading was professional these days. Hadn't been for years.
His patient's reclusiveness went beyond a simple preference for privacy. It seemed to reflect some pathological condition, although he was brilliant beyond a doubt.
Being a house physician for a sometimes crochety recluse was not what he'd visualized as a student, many years earlier. He hadn't known himself well then, hadn't foreseen his susceptibility to alcohol, and eventually cocaine. Or how he would ruin his marriages—one, two, and three—and allow, even cultivate the decay of his practice.
Then his patient-to-be had found him. No doubt through agents. He was aware, vaguely, that the man had people elsewhere who served him, though as far as he knew, they never came in person. The man, whose health had already been poor, had sat down with him as a friend, not a patient. Had charmed him, impressed him with his knowledge—its breadth, its depth—and his insights into many things. And in a short series of ever-stranger visits and gentle questionings, had given him to see things he'd never imagined. Until he became aware that he no longer wanted to snort white powder or drink amber whiskey.
Only then had his friend asked him to be his private physician. At a salary ridiculously low for a doctor, but impossible to refuse. He wasn't young himself, though less old than he looked, and his "future" was past. And after all, the man had saved him, from himself and his addictions. With a signed contract in hand, he'd saved him from his creditors as well, by a remarkable display of bargaining. He'd paid them off in cash, thirty to sixty cents on the dollar!
Besides, the man had a remarkable library, and the doctor had one addiction left—books. Between the two of them, they read enough for fifty ordinary people.
But they rarely talked anymore as friends. They seldom had, once their agreement was signed.
* * *
Looking back a few days later, the old man considered himself lucky to have come through alive. He'd been unconscious for more than twenty hours. The mind he'd been in was one he'd felt secure with, one he'd come to control more completely than any he'd associated with before. But to be in it at the moment of violent death . . .
Never had anyone interfered so utterly with him before. Never. Not Christman, not anyone. Christman had cost him more, far more. But in terms of personal interference . . .
And to develop one's powers, one must uphold one's integrity.
Christman he'd killed personally, so to speak. He'd been there, willed the trigger pulled, seen the dismay on Christman's face. He'd be more circumspect in handling this man—use a throwaway resource, some potent underworld group, set it in motion and allow it to operate. And if it failed, use another. There was no hurry. And he needed to husband his physical strength, the health that remained to him. While he developed his powers further, sufficiently to renovate the difficult husk he occupied, rejuvenate it.
He chuckled. He would rejuvenate it; he was confident of that now. He'd made major progress recently in his ability to psychically tinker bodies. He could even kill now without an intermediary, if the person's consciousness was sufficiently weakened. He'd tested that, first with comatose, then semi-comatose bodies. It involved manipulating certain gross physiological functions. To rejuvenate a body, of course, would require more subtle, intricate, and knowledgeable manipulations. He'd hypnotize his physician and question him, have him help design a program. Presumably it would take time, and no doubt numerous steps. But he'd always been patient, he told himself. Almost always.
36
GRAND CANYON;
THE BARNEY TRAIL
October 2012
It was Indian summer in Flagstaff, Arizona. With Tuuli beside him, Martti Seppanen turned their rented Ford travel van north on US 180, here called Humphrey Street. In less than a minute they were out of the downtown business district, driving through a pleasant residential area.
This was the Coconino Plateau, which at 2,100 meters and higher was a land of coniferous forests. To their left, intermittently visible between shade trees, was the low, pine-clad mesa called Mars Hill, with its observatory domes and comblike arrays of antennae. Northward, the street led the eye to a pyramidal mountain peak that loomed bare-topped above forested slopes. To Martti, Tuuli seemed energized with an expectation he didn't really understand. "Those peaks," she said, "are the eroded rim of an ancient volcano. Did you know that?"
"Nope. No I didn't."
"It's supposed to have been twenty thousand feet tall before the top blew off, a very long time ago. Can you imagine? And this is what's left. Humphrey Peak is the highest part of the rim, 12,680 feet. An Indian spirit lives in it. I've met him."
Martti said nothing. Nothing came to him.
"You can't see Humphrey from here," she went on. "Agassiz and Fremont are in the way, with the ancient crater in between. Twenty thousand years ago it held a glacier. Now it holds patches of aspen, and great heaps of rock."
He'd seldom seen her so talkative. She paused, then began to recite:
Primal mountain bursting long ago,
rupturing the darkness with your might,
shrouded with clouds of ash and fumes
that glowed and flashed and shuddered
in the night,
high shoulders flowing red with molten rock,
with heat and sullen light.
Is that you?
Is that you
so calm and clean beneath the sky,
slopes serene in snow
and forest frosted white?
Ah, I know you in many moods,
green, with branches dripping rain,
yellow with aspen
or blind with blizzard.
I know you now.
She looked at her husband expectantly. "Nice," he said. It seemed to him he should say more, but didn't know what. After a moment he asked, "Who wrote it?"
"I don't know. Frank recited it when he and Mikki hiked me up the mountain to meet the Indian spirit. He wrote it down for me when we got back to Long Valley."