The final hurdle was the annoyingly slow-moving line at the tube fare machine, where an attempted cut-in precipitated a shoving match violent enough to attract the rentacops. But once inside the station, matters proceeded more smoothly. An escalator carried him down to a half-filled lounge; five minutes later, his train was called, and he continued down to the chutes.
One moment the track was empty, the red and green lights above each boarding chute marking the number of seats available on the approaching train. Then the great interlock separating the station from the evacuated stone tunnel opened, and the massive red and white cylinder slid through the aperture, its entry almost silent save for the rushing air. Boarding was swift and efficient. Christopher took the last seat in compartment 11, tucking his night bag in the underseat basket. In less than two minutes, the train continued on its way.
The cities flew by like subway stops: El Paso-Juarez, Phoenix-Tucson, the San Diego-Los Angeles sprawl. Christopher’s compartment emptied, filled, and emptied again. From outside San Diego north to the California border the trains ran on the surface, at half their underground speed—no one wanted to have to rebore a five-meter tunnel after an earthquake. But the scattering of lights glimpsed at high speed through tiny windows was little distraction from his thoughts.
Christopher tried to concentrate on the unfinished lyric of a new song, tried to interest himself in an odd little book on neoteny, halfheartedly tried to engage the jet-eyed Filipino woman who boarded at Sacramento in conversation. He was successful at none of those efforts, which left him sitting half curled in the half-darkness, thinking about Oregon. Thinking about William McCutcheon.
It had always been a mystery to Christopher how he could feel so uncomfortable in the presence of someone he loved so much. He had found it difficult living in the Vernonia house with his father, the more so as he left childhood behind. William McCutcheon was a magnet toward which everything turned. When he was home, it was clearly his home, and he filled it with his unequivocal expectations—expectations of excellence and, less nakedly stated, of obedience. Lines of force, radiating outward to bind everything in their reach to he who stood at the center.
When his father was absent—as he often was for business, for a month or more at a time—the house was calmer. Christopher felt a better balance with Deryn, who threatened none of his ambitions. In the glare of his father’s light, Christopher had trouble seeing his own. Against the weight of his father’s opinions, Christopher had trouble holding his own.
In one of their few conversations on the subject of William McCutcheon, Deryn had told him, “Your father doesn’t know how to be anything other than what he is. Try to appreciate what’s best in him, and try not to take the rest personally.”
It had seemed an odd thing to say. His father’s flaws were not the problem—it was his own flaws that Christopher felt so acutely. Measured against his father’s accomplishments, Christopher found his own achievements shabby and wanting. It was the same at fifteen, at twenty-five, as it had been in the open-eyed infant years. Mere age and physical stature had changed nothing. He could still only see his father by looking up.
Even more, Christopher knew that he did not yet truly understand his father, that he did not yet see him clearly. There were unresolved paradoxes in William McCutcheon. Quick-witted, but he used his humor as a weapon. An incisive thinker, but close-minded and stubborn. A genteel, well-spoken man who could turn curt and coldly dismissive in an eye-blink. Who drew people to him, and yet had opted to live alone for the last dozen years.
Somehow, he was all of those things. And the pieces would not fit together, frustrating Christopher’s quest to close with this man who still, at more than a decade’s remove, from half a continent away, piped the tune to which Christopher danced.
William McCutcheon.
Father.
The moment it cleared the Portland flight-restriction zone, the Avanti Eagle carrying William and Christopher McCutcheon home soared skyward five hundred meters and surged forward at full thrust through the night. The diffuse glow of Hillsboro and Beaverton, the scattered lights of the wheelies and skimmers bound to Highway 26, fell away below and then behind them.
Still Christopher pressed his face to the window, more hiding than watching.
His father had not met him at the gate, but paged him instead from the pickup curb. That was both annoying and merciful— merciful because it avoided any waiting-lounge hugs or other embarrassing efforts at intimacy. All Christopher had to do was clamber in, flash a quick smile and say “Hello, Father” to the man driving, and settle back in his seat.
The Eagle, a six-figure six-seater appointed with expensive natural fibers and a whisper-quiet extended-range flight package, was new since Christopher had last seen his father. Letting him relate its pleasures and mysteries had avoided the inevitable awkwardness for the first few minutes; sight-seeing and reminiscing had postponed it still further. But his father did not do his part in fueling the idle chatter, and Christopher had run out of landmarks.
“Not much to see out there,” his father said.
Innocent enough words from anyone else’s mouth, the observation struck Christopher as a reproach. “More than I saw the whole way up,” he said truthfully.
“But what’s to see from the tube?” William McCutcheon asked. “Houses stacked one upon the other like cancer cells, and serving as little purpose. Consider yourself lucky, Christopher. The railway designers were kind.”
“I think the engineers had the last word, not the designers.”
“If the engineers had had the last word, there’d be no windows in the cars at all,” McCutcheon said, downshifting into a lecture. “If you want to look out, look up. You’ll never see a night as clear as this one in Salem or Sacramento or San Bernardino, not with the haze hanging and the sick-sodium halo.”
“Maybe so,” Christopher said, heading it off. “But I wish it was daytime. The stars are the same here as in Texas. What I’d like is a look at Mount Hood.”
“I expect it looks more or less like it did the last time you saw it,” McCutcheon said.
“Wyeast,” Christopher said. “That’s what the Indians called it. Did you know that?”
“Wyesr,” his father said, correcting his pronunciation. “Yes, I knew that.” He shook his head. “Why I know it, I couldn’t tell you.”
The correction irritated Christopher. “Maybe Deryn told you,” he said, the mention of her name a bold bit of defiance.
“She used to tell me Nisqually and Okanagon stories—how the Coyote made the Columbia, the story of the Changer.”
“Did she.” His father’s voice was cold.
“I’d forgotten until a few weeks ago, when I indexed a book of Indian legends.” He laughed. “It’s odd. The Indians were here for hundreds of years, but we name the mountain after a British admiral who never even saw it. Doesn’t seem right, somehow.”
“ ‘Das Weltgeschichte ist das Weltgericht,’ ” his father quoted. “The world’s history is the world’s judgment, now as in Schiller’s time. We’re here—where are the Nisqually? Mount Hood will do for us. Or are you rewriting history down there in Houston as you compile it?”
“No,” Christopher said. “But there’s more than one history of the world, I’m discovering. And the Nisqually’s version has a place in the library along with ours.”