Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Juniper Time is a panoramic and hauntingly beautiful novel of the survival of humankind and nature. Drought has devastated the western United States and the people migrate eastward to settle in squalid concentration camps called “Newtowns.” One woman, Jean Brighton, flees in the opposite direction. A linguist who can decode secret messages and make sense of alien languages, Jean has found governmental pressure on her university work untenable, and she heads for the only place she knows she will be safe—her grandfather’s now-deserted house in the Pacific Northwest.

  Yet her survival does not come from her own devices alone, for she receives the help of Indians who have stayed to reclaim the land that was once theirs. Through them and the mysteries of their world, Jean masters the art of survival, not only in the desolate Northwest but also in the white man’s world she must return to someday.

  Rich in feeling and insight, Juniper Time ranks among Kate Wilhelm’s most compelling novels.

  JUNIPER

  TIME

  a novel by

  KATE WILHELM

  HARPER & ROW, PUBLISHERS

  New York, Hagerstown, San Francisco, London

  JUNIPER TIME. Copyright © 1979 by Kate Wilhelm

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Wilhelm, Kate.

  Juniper time.

  I. Title.

  PZ4.W678Ju 1979 [PS3573.I434] 813’.5’4 78-22447

  ISBN 0–06–014657–5

  for Jonathan with love

  JUNIPER

  TIME

  CHAPTER

  1

  FOR years Jean did not believe in the moon as a real place where people could go. When she became aware that her father believed in it, she had to accept the reality of the moon as a thing, but never as a place. Perhaps there were people already there, she thought, but no one could go there. It was as mythical and strange and unreachable as the kingdom of Oz.

  Sometimes during the long warm summer evenings the three of them, her father, her mother, and Jean, walked to the Ice Cream Bazaar, where they made elaborate sundaes. Jean found it impossible to resist any of the toppings until in the end her dish was a palette of every color available. Her father watched with awe as she ate every bite.

  “Eat it now,” he said once, “because when I take you to the moon you won’t find any ice cream there. Not for a while anyway.”

  She used to laugh at that, but in later years her laughter was muted and uneasy. She came to believe that he really would take her to the moon one day. Try as hard as she could after that to increase the size of the moon, to give it solidity, to make it a place, it remained the same pale light in the sky, now a sliver, now fatter, now round and shadowed, but never more than that.

  When she was very small she always walked in the middle, holding the hand of her mother on one side, her father on the other. Sometimes, giggling, she raised her feet, and they caught her and swung her back and forth. She liked to look at her mother and father together. She liked the way they looked at each other and at her. She could not explain the feeling, but it was warm and safe. Sometimes at night she would wake up to hear their voices, and that was a good feeling. They played games together, chess, Scrabble, other word games. Later she played with them, and sometimes she even won. She especially loved her mother’s low throaty laugh which was almost too soft to hear even one room away.

  Her father yodeled in the shower. He said he was practicing to become a Swiss mountain climber and applicants had to yodel before they qualified. He said the Swiss mountain men talked by yodeling. She didn’t believe that. She could not yodel even though she practiced. It seemed a particularly fine thing to be able to do.

  One night in the Ice Cream Bazaar three teen-aged boys approached their table. Jean admired their tight jeans and their sunburned arms, but most of all she admired their sneakers. They were full of holes; one even had a piece of tape on it. She wished her sneakers looked like theirs. That was the year she started going to school.

  “Colonel Brighton? Could we have your autograph, sir?”

  Jean listened and watched and for the first time realized that her father really did go to the moon, that was not one of his jokes with her. She pushed her ice cream sundae away because it seemed her stomach was going up and down the way the waves did when they went out fishing in the gulf. She shivered, and when her mother asked what was wrong, she could only shake her head. She did not know what was wrong. There was no way to explain what was wrong.

  On the way home she walked on the outside, putting her father between her and her mother. She never walked in the middle again. It was the end of one phase of her childhood.

  The summer Jean was ten, when they visited her father’s parents in Oregon, the town celebrated the visit with a parade. There were cowboys and Indians, and a marching band, and three floats. The mayor made a speech and a tall Indian made a speech, and then her father made a speech. His speech was very funny, and she thought probably that was improper, he should not have been funny when everyone else was so serious.

  “You know how we’ll move the Congress, make them build roads, even a railroad, up to the moon? We’ll bring back a nugget of gold and every prospector in the West, dead and alive, will hitch up a mule, buy a sack of beans, a hammer and pick, and be on his way. Won’t be any way to stop them.” The crowd loved him.

  In his speech the Indian had called him Olalo, the Man in the Moon. When Jean was introduced to him later, he touched her hair gently and said, “Olahuene, Daughter of the Moon.”

  At first she had been terrified of him. All she knew about Indians was from television, and she knew they used to scalp whites in years past, especially blond people, she felt certain. More recently they seized buildings owned by the whites and shot at people who tried to make them move. And they shot at people who tried to build dams.

  Robert Wind-in-the-Tall-Trees was his name, her father said; she did not believe him, but everyone called the tall Indian Robert, so that much was probably true. Robert and her father had gone to school together, had played together, learned to hunt together. That night for hours the voices of her parents, her grandparents, and Robert mingled, rose, fell.

  Jean loved her grandparents, but especially her grandfather because she knew he was how her father would look when he became very old. His blond hair would turn gray, then white, and still look the same as now. And the many lines around his nose, on the sides of his eyes, would be like Grandpa’s, crinkly, making him look as if he were smiling even when he wasn’t. Her grandfather owned a newspaper and wrote for it and did many of the other jobs. He teased in exactly the same way her father did, saying things like he used to spit lead so hot that it cooked the air. He caught the cooked air and wrapped it up and took it home to roast the meat with it. Sometimes Jean tried not to laugh at his stories, but she always did.

  One night she sat on the porch and listened to her father and grandfather talk inside the living room.

  “How serious is it with Robert?” her father asked.

  “Bad enough. He’ll fight for that spring all the way. Let the damn tourists go to the ocean if they want to get wet.”

  “He won’t win.”

  “Yes, he will. The drought’s deepening, not easing up. One wet winter doesn’t mean it’s over. That spring’s the difference between living and leaving for Robert and all of them. He won’t give it up. He can’t give it up.”

  For years the spring had sustained a large lake that was a favorite tourist attraction in the arid semi-desert country north of Bend. Now that the wells were going dry, and rivers were becoming dry washes, the spring had taken on an importance it had not had for decades. Jean had read about it in her grandfather’s newspaper.

  “If there’s anything I can do . . .” her
father said.

  “Not yet, but it might come to that. We’ll see.” The talk drifted to the space station that was being built. “If you can make it rain from up there, you’ll keep getting your appropriations,” her grandfather said. And the talk was back on the drought and its effects.

  They could not tub bathe in her grandfather’s house, and there was a toilet that did not have to be flushed at all. Jean had eyed in suspiciously at first, but after a day or two it had become just another item, just part of visiting Oregon. The river below the house was still flowing, but barely. The banks were fifty feet apart here, but the trickle in the middle of the banks was less than six feet wide, and the water was sluggish and warm.

  That was the first year that Jean knew how frightened her mother was when her father was in space. Stephanie Brighton was fair and slender. She smoked incessantly, and when Daniel was away she chain-smoked. That year Jean realized that she also drank when Daniel was away. She hardly ever had seen either of them drink anything except an occasional beer in hot weather and wine at dinner, sometimes sipping it when friends visited. But that time when Daniel left, calling back to them both, “Don’t wait up. I’ll write if I find any fancy postcards!” Stephanie had gone back inside to the kitchen and poured herself a drink of bourbon; she diluted it hardly at all with water, and drank it down.

  “I thought he was supposed to be through going up himself,” Jean said.

  “He is, but all that trouble, accidents, things not working right . . . He’ll find the reason, fix it, and that’ll be that.” The words were as usual, light and quick, but underlying them, discernible for the first time, was a current of dread.

  “I used to not believe he really went to the moon,” Jean said slowly. “I used to have nightmares.”

  Stephanie came to her and put her arm about Jean’s shoulders, gave her a kiss on the cheek. “I know, honey. God, I know. I thought you had forgotten all that.”

  “I had forgotten. I just remembered.”

  They went out to dinner that night, and a movie afterward. It was nearly midnight when they got home, but Jean, although so tired she could not hold her legs still, was unable to fall asleep. She got up to go to the bathroom and see what time it was, and the living room lights were on; they were still on when she got up again an hour later.

  Then Daniel returned, bouncy, happy, trouble-free. “The idiots forgot that you need a screwdriver to turn screws with. Took ’em a set of screwdrivers and that settled that. Now let’s go fishing.”

  But that was not the end of the trouble. The papers ran the stories of each accident, each miscalculation, each overrun of expenses. Every year the appropriations had been harder to come by. Each year they had been cut a bit from the previous budget. There was talk of halting the project entirely until the current recession ended, the drought ended, the stockpiles of food were replenished, and so on.

  One night Jean said to her father, “If I tell you something, will you not laugh at it? It’s something I don’t understand, but I don’t think it’s funny, although it might sound silly at first.”

  “Profound things often sound silly when we try to explain them because you have to reduce something grand and sweeping to such ordinary words.” He smiled gently at her. “I don’t always laugh, you know.”

  She nodded. She knew he would not laugh at her now, but she still hesitated because it was hard to know exactly how to say it. “I was almost asleep,” she started finally, “but not all the way, and I was already dreaming. I could feel myself not all the way asleep, and I could see myself dreaming a real dream. And I thought how my mind was like a long stretched-out snake. It was in such a hurry to dream that the front part went ahead and started before the rest of it was even there. It seems to me that sometimes you can stretch yourself out like that, just poking around, and if you decide not to go where the front part is, you don’t have to and it just comes back and tells the rest what it saw and heard where it was so you know things that you don’t know how you know.”

  She stopped in confusion. It did sound silly after all. But he was not laughing. He was quiet for so long that she began to squirm in embarrassment. “It’s a joke,” she said finally.

  He seemed to pull himself back from somewhere else, far away, the place he went to when he was concentrating. He had said once that everyone had a thinking place, far away, and sometimes people fooled you by pretending to be nearby when actually they were in the thinking place. Now he said, “It isn’t a joke, honey. It isn’t silly or funny. You’ve said something very profound, something that needs a whole lot of thinking about.”

  A few months later, a day before her birthday, he said, “I am a genie. I will grant you any wish. Speak, birthday girl!” ‘

  “I just want one thing,” she said quickly. “I already know what I want more than anything else in the world. Magic. I want to be able to do magic!”

  He laughed, then sobered and closed his eyes. After a moment he made a pass with both hands before her face. “It is done. You have the greatest magic in the universe.”

  “Hah!” She looked around the room; finally her gaze came to rest on a scab the size of a quarter on her knee. “Be well! ” she commanded. Then she looked at her father sorrowfully. “You’re just not a very terrific genie, I’m afraid.”

  “You have the magic,” he said, still serious. “But you have to learn how to use it. It is language. Words. I promise you, you can do magic with words if you learn to make the words do what you choose. You can have whatever you want, make people do what you want, make them love you, serve you. You can change the world with words.”

  “It’s like a riddle, isn’t it? It’s a trick like you think you’ve got something but nothing changes and you find out you don’t have anything you didn’t have before.”

  He shook his head. “It’s real magic, but hardly anyone learns to control it and use it. And those who do want such petty things.”

  She realized her father was talking to her from his thinking place. Sometimes when his voice was low and serious like this, when his eyes stopped laughing and flashing with light and became very steady and almost dull looking, he was in that far away place, and anything he said from there she should pay attention to carefully. Suddenly she thought that she was also in her own thinking place because her thoughts were flowing so fast she could hardly keep track of them and would not have been able to tell anyone about them all, but they were very clear to her, not at all confused. You could give someone a present that no one else could see or touch or know was there, she realized, and that might be the best present of all.

  “Thank you,” she said gravely, still in her thinking place. “I accept. You are a true and good genie.”

  “And you are wise beyond your years,” he said, and came back with twinkling eyes and a smile on his lips.

  But from her own thinking place she suddenly saw that the smile was not all the way through him, that he was concerned and preoccupied with something he did not speak of at all. Abruptly she stood up, not willing to stay in that place any longer, and when she looked at her father he was exactly as he always had been, happy, unworried, laughing at small jokes that he sometimes shared, often did not. She would never go there again, she decided.

  That year Daniel was on tour for weeks at a time. Often there were demonstrations protesting his speeches, and Stephanie and Jean would sit side by side watching television, saying nothing, Stephanie with a drink in one hand, a cigarette in the other, Jean feeling the waves of fear churn her stomach endlessly. When her father appeared next to Colonel Cluny on stage, she always felt he was a stranger, not the man who lived with her and her mother. This man was sober and direct; he never made jokes, rarely smiled, and somehow he seemed much older than her father. Playacting, she decided, and hated it.

  Once the demonstrators started a fire in the auditorium when her father was on stage, and although it was not on television, she could see every detail; she could see people getting crushed underfoot, ot
hers jamming against doors that refused to open, others huddling under chairs, under the stage trying to escape the flames. Sixty-four people were killed that night.

  There was a congressional hearing, and her father was called. He answered the questions gravely, unhesitatingly. When he stated his reasons for believing the space station should be finished, that it was a necessity, not a luxury, no one doubted that he was speaking the truth he lived with and for.

  After that he spent a month in Europe, trying to persuade the French, the British, and the Russians to contribute more to the station, a more balanced proportion of the costs. They were all suffering from the drought also, not as much as the United States, but enough to make them wary of committing larger sums of money for the future.

  Jean now read every word printed about the space station: the predicted benefits, the accidents that had plagued it from the start, the bickering among the four nations involved in the construction, the difficulties of four nationalities working closely together on such a technical job where every misunderstanding led to even more delays and more accidents.

  Rumors of sabotage, whispered before, became louder and more persistent and ugly, and there were speeches at the UN that were scarcely veiled threats of withdrawal if the rumors did not stop. The French were insulted; the British were furious; the Russians were belligerent and issued a statement saying the Americans were trying to freeze them out of participation at this stage when at last some parts of the station were nearing readiness for use.

  Many times Jean went to the backyard of their Houston suburban house late at night when there were few lights on in the neighborhood. She waited until her eyes adjusted, then looked at the sky and found the star that was the station. “Die!” she whispered at it fiercely. “Explode! Vanish!” She wished a space crab would come and eat it up, or that aliens would blast it from the sky, or that the Russians would bomb it out of existence. All the hatred she could feel was directed at that one white light in the sky.