Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Probably she was up there lying awake wondering what he wanted, he thought, and even as he thought it, he decided he was wrong. She was asleep. Doris was sleeping, maybe Ward was, and only he, Cluny, was awake in this entire forsaken dead land where the wind and the coyotes made more noise than anything in downtown New York.

  He tried to separate the various coyote voices one from another and was listening for the one he had decided was the closest when he lost track and drifted off, and was surprised to hear noises in the kitchen, more surprised to see the pale gray morning light in the room. It had been a long time since he had slept through an entire night.

  Jean and Doris worked on some of the words that had stumped Doris the day before, and then Ward appeared and asked Doris if she was ready to start. She left with him.

  “Can we go for a walk?” Cluny asked.

  Jean nodded, slipped on a light jacket, and went out before him. “Hills or desert?”

  “Hills. I can’t stand that dead land out there.”

  She looked surprised but made no comment and they started to walk toward the hills west of Bend. Now, she thought, it would come. The reason they were willing to give computer time to an Indian girl and her tribe, the reason for Cluny’s pursuit of her across the countryside. She walked steadily, leading the way that she knew would not be too fatiguing and still be an interesting walk.

  “I’m amazed that there’s still water,” Cluny said, his legs starting to throb already although they had walked less than fifteen minutes so far.

  “Oh, there’s enough if you just use it for drinking and keeping clean. There isn’t any for irrigation or any kind of industry. It’s cistern water.”

  She had led him down to the riverbed, up the other side, and past the deserted mansions to a rising hill that already overlooked the entire town. Up higher was a smooth basalt flow, where she planned to stop and let him rest. She noticed with amusement that he was grimly determined not to ask.

  “How have you lived out here for a year?” He kept up by ignoring the aches in his legs and the pain in his chest. Pick up a foot, put it down. Now the other one. Again . . .

  “I lived on the reservation. I taught the children English and learned Wasco, their language, one of them anyway. They took good care of me.”

  They reached the basalt and she took off her jacket and sat on it. “Look, out there—that road is the dividing line. It’s real desert south of it and to the north it’s high plateau prairie, but there’s not a whole lot of difference right now. Just more alkali in the south.”

  “It’s as bleak as the moon,” Cluny said, hating the naked land that showed every scar, every change.

  “Have you been to the moon?”

  “No. Just looked at it from the satellite, and through the telescopes.”

  “You showed me your new telescope the last time I saw you,” Jean said, remembering.

  “I wish I could show you the ones we use now. They’re not inside the satellite at all, but out in their separate little orbits, transmitting pictures back in to the astronomers inside. It’s . . . it’s something that can’t be described,” he said helplessly.

  “Try,” she said.

  And somehow he found himself able to talk to her again, just as he had been able to talk to her years ago. He told her about the satellite, the people there, the many views of space, his own work with cosmic rays and the theories about the weather change as a result of the decrease in them. . . .

  “We don’t know enough,” he said. “That’s always our problem. We think the cosmic rays affect the Van Allen belt, and it in turn affects the jet streams. But it’s all just hypothesizing still.”

  Suddenly he realized the sun was almost overhead. It had become very hot; they had been out for hours. “I’m sorry,” he said, meaning it. “You should have stopped me.”

  She shook her head. “I’m glad you got what you wanted. I’m glad you told me about it.”

  “And you? Did you get what you wanted?”

  “No, but it isn’t surprising. I wanted a negative—not to be bothered, not to have to do things I didn’t want to do, not to be involved with anything at all. You can’t achieve a negative, I think.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Write a book about Robert and his tribe, how they worked to relearn things they had forgotten. I’ll try to publish it, and I think I may turn it in to Dr. Schmidt and see if he’ll allow it for a doctoral thesis. He might.”

  “Jean, I seriously have a job for you. Schmidt thinks you’re the one for it.”

  She started to get up and he caught her wrist, held her.

  “At least listen.”

  She seemed to relax although he thought she had not really gone tense, and she thought how vulnerable he had left himself during that moment. She looked out over the rooftops of Bend. Many of them could have stayed, she thought, but they had been afraid. No electricity, no telephones, no doctors, no gas . . . They had been unwilling, or unable, to return to the Bend of a century ago, when all that those people had had was sand and juniper and sagebrush and the will to make it become more. Strange how most people thought it would be shameful to live as their ancestors had. And it needn’t be that drastic, she thought, remembering what Robert had said about boots, fishing hooks, guns. They could take essentials from today. . . .

  Cluny found himself hesitating, not knowing exactly where to start. “Do you follow world politics at all?” he asked finally.

  She shook her head.

  “Okay. You must know about the cold war that followed World War Two. I know they still teach that in school. Then came the rise of the multinational corporations and the cold war slipped into the past without a murmur. No one wanted war any longer. War was bad for trade, bad for business. Then came the drought, and everything changed again. The corporations were losing money, with markets drying up, production drying up, governments no longer willing or able to subsidize them. And somehow out of this the militarists began making a comeback. No one has proven yet that they are financed by the corporations, but no one can prove they aren’t, either. And they’re getting money somewhere. Suddenly these past six or eight years it’s been the cold war all over again, only hotter than it was before. It never was completely dead. Our boys wanted the Russians out of the satellite from the start, but now there’s a lot of talk about who can make the bombs and where, and how they can be transported to where they have to go, and so on. Half the government wants the satellite, all satellites, to be war machines; the other half is holding out for science and the good of mankind, ta da, but they’re sounding weaker every day.” Jean thought of the national guardsman, Steve Miller, and his eagerness to get on with it, obliterate Russia, and Robert’s belief in the major war. . . .

  “Now the satellite,” Cluny said. “It’s international, but we developed and built the shuttles. We own them. Neither we nor the Russians could put in the kind of money it would take to do that over. Russia has dozens of smaller satellites in orbit and we do too, but this is the big one. This is the one that could be turned into a super war machine overnight. There’s enough material in orbit to finish the rest of the satellite, practically. It’s also enough to make a fleet of killer satellites, killer drones, that could sweep the sky clean of everything that isn’t ours. Or if they get it, they could do the same. Then they, whoever controls it, would control the world. Literally control the world,” he said again slowly. “Make the world safe for democracy,” she said.

  “Or communism, or big business, or whatever.”

  She nodded. “Presumably you don’t want me to stand up and tell them all to stop immediately.”

  He glanced at her bitterly, then turned to look at the dead world spread out below them. It could all be like this, he thought. Dead, unable to sustain any life at all.

  “We found something,” he said coldly. “It could be a hoax, or it could be a message from another civilization, aliens. We don’t know. It could be the Maine, or an assassination in
Yugoslavia, or Pearl Harbor. It could be a straw, or a life preserver. Schmidt says you can find out which it is. He says probably no one else can do it fast enough. We’re afraid time’s running out awfully fast.”

  “You mean you might have a real message from outer space? There must be hundreds of people in government who can tackle something like that. And there are people like Schmidt, a dozen others. Even Arkins. He’s crazy, but not in a way that interferes with real work. This is silly. There’s never just one person who can do something. That’s too melodramatic. I don’t believe you.”

  “Schmidt can’t do it because we don’t know who has access to his work. He doesn’t know. Arkins is under Army wraps. We can’t turn it over to any of our own agencies. It would be headline stuff before morning. If it’s real, it has to be an international project, but if it’s a hoax, there’s too much money and technology involved to dismiss it as a boyish prank. We don’t dare let it break until we know. Schmidt and Arkins think you’re the one to tell us.

  She stared at him incredulously, ready to laugh. But he was serious, deadly, coldly, furiously serious. She curbed her first reaction and said reasonably, “You’re wrong. I can’t do it either. Schmidt is wrong about that. No one can do it without months, years, computers, help of all sorts. If it isn’t readily apparent whether or not it’s real, it will take a long time.”

  “You can at least tell us if it’s a hoax. That’s all we’re asking for now, and then we’ll give it the time it’ll need for translation or to find the hoaxers, whichever.”

  “You don’t realize what you’re asking. The experiments I worked on with Arkins were all setups, every one of them. We controlled the content of the messages. I never had any faith in what we were doing. It was all phony.”

  “Not the last one. The one that brought in the Army, put Arkins in solitary confinement.”

  “It was phony too, and a fluke. I tried to tell Arkins a dozen times that the line of investigation was without value, that no one could replicate it, it was meaningless. It was guesswork. You don’t make scientific advances by guesswork. Eeny, meeny, miney, mo’. That’s all it was.”

  “Then guess again.”

  “No. You need chemical analyses of the materials it’s on, a computer analysis of the age, carbon dating, all that. You have people who can do that.”

  “Nothing positive one way or the other has come out of it,” he said. He stood up and looked down on her. “You have to do it, Jean. There’s really no alternative.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I know what you felt about your father, how much he meant to you. I have proof that he was in on the sabotage of the satellite during those last years. He committed suicide by heading out into space rather than being exposed. I’ll expose him, smear his name through the news, the history books. It’ll kill your mother the rest of the way.”

  CHAPTER

  15

  JEAN watched Cluny stumble back down the trail toward the house. “If you care anything at all about that Indian girl, keep her out of this,” he had said just before leaving. “This has the highest possible security rating. We’ll talk about it again tonight.”

  See what they do to you! she wanted to cry after him, force him to acknowledge. She sat unmoving until he was out of sight, and then she got up and climbed a little higher, sat down again with a boulder at her back, a straggly jack pine casting shade on her head.

  It was not true about her father, of course, but did he believe it was? That was the question she could not get out of her mind. And if he believed, why? Gradually Cluny faded from her thoughts and she was in the past, reliving her childhood with her parents, seeing one incident after another, a faint smile now and then playing on her lips, her eyes unfocused as she looked inward. Something had happened during her father’s last few months; not what Cluny believed, but something. Her father had developed a new urgency, a new intensity; he had been worried and it had shown when he thought no one was watching him.

  She did not try to force meaning now, but rather saw again those days, weeks. The past is more mysterious than the future, she thought, and remembered the words as Serena’s. “We think we understand the past,” Serena had said, “and that makes it dangerous because we are changing it to conform to what we believe now. Not accepting that we have little understanding of what it was.”

  Everything that is, Robert had said, must be. Every cycle must be completed, must lead to the next cycle. He had talked about times when the desert had been drier than it now was, times when it had been lush and wet, and there had been no question in his mind that this too must be.

  All her dodging, her withdrawals, denials, intentions to remove herself from the satellite, and everything it meant, had come to nothing after all. Now she was in the center. Thinking she was choosing the least likely subject to involve her in anything more pressing than the development of language, her training had been uniquely designed to thrust her into this particular pattern, this cycle that had started a long time ago and must be completed.

  Cluny thought she had to protect her father, she realized, and shrugged the thought away. It did not matter what Cluny thought. He no longer existed as a person, but had become a part of a large machine that had no need for souls or consciences or feelings. The machine worked because parts moved and caused other parts to move without awareness, without regard for consequences. As soon as he used a weapon that could have injured her beyond repair, he had stepped out of the world of persons and into the world of machines. A year ago his words might have cut her so deeply she could have gone into a paralysis of shock; they would have threatened her past and through destruction of the past they would have challenged her right to exist in this present.

  She understood his threat thoroughly. It was not aimed at her mother; her mother was beyond hurting any more. The threat was aimed directly at her, Jean. She was surprised that he had enough understanding to strike so unerringly at this vulnerable spot. He had expected to find Stephanie’s rejected daughter, Arkins’s cowering slavey, the brutalized victim of Newtown, but instead had found her, living totally in the present, not denying, but also not wallowing in, the past.

  “You can accept it and examine it, use what is valuable from it; or you can return to suffer again and again in whatever misery you’ve already had,” Serena had said. “Or you can forget it and be ruled by it in ways that you’ll never understand.”

  She had not finished, she knew; there was the whole last year or two that she had lived with her mother that she had not been able to accept yet, but it would come also.

  There were snatches of memory, nothing whole and completed from start to finish. Glimpses of her mother sprawled out on the couch, too drunk to get up . . . Her mother scrambling eggs, letting them burn to foul-smelling unrecognizable lumps while she stared at nothing, tears streaming down her face. Her mother with a strange man, a second strange man, another . . . And the moves, from apartment to apartment, city to city, searching for something that could never be found again. The cramped hotel rooms, the furnished apartments with their wobbly chairs and stained dishes, an expensive suite in an Atlanta hotel, and always the men.

  Carefully Jean turned away from those months. It was like a jigsaw puzzle to her, bits and pieces strewn about, few of them joined yet. She would put those pieces together, but not yet. She felt too near the terrible fights they had had then, the terrible things they had screamed at each other, the torrents of guilt and shame that had dissolved her into a sobbing incoherent child.

  She felt she was gathering all the pieces together again, storing them away, gently closing the door on them once more. Not yet.

  She would try to unscramble Cluny’s message, she thought, not because he used empty threats, but because she now recognized the pattern of her own life from the time of her thirteenth birthday, when her father had given her the magic of words. She had been preparing for something like this all that time. Once she had tried to heal a scrape with her magic;
now she would try something else with it. Strangely, she felt that her magic was real, just as Serena’s healing magic was real.

  She stood up and stretched, ravenously hungry. She retraced her steps to the house, where Doris met her and examined her face.

  “I have found out what they want,” Jean said in Wasco. “I have to do a job for them, but we’ll finish the dictionary first.”

  Cluny jumped to his feet as they spoke; she ignored him, went into the kitchen to find something to eat.

  Doris followed, speaking in Wasco. “Is it something dangerous? Cluny is upset, nervous. Ward knows nothing about why they are here. He questioned me about it. He’s like a small boy being taken here and there by a parent who won’t answer questions.”

  “He’s probably ignorant of the reason. I can’t tell you, and that grieves me deeply, but it could be dangerous. I’m sorry.”

  Doris nodded, then said in English, “We kept soup hot for you. Out of the magic pouches.”

  Cluny was glaring at them helplessly as they began to chat now about the work on the dictionary.

  He had expected Jean to return defiantly, to demand proof, to argue. Or, alternatively, he had expected to see evidence of fear. He saw neither. When the women sat down at the dining room table to go over the words Doris had not been able to define succinctly, he stamped out of the house and headed toward town.

  Dinner that night was a silent, glum affair. Ward did not have enough social grace to try to fill in the silence, and Cluny was too baffled, too uncertain of himself and Jean’s reaction to his words on the hill. He found himself studying her again and again as she ate with good appetite, as much at ease as Doris was. Who are you? he wanted to ask her, demand an answer. As soon as the meal was finished, Doris said good night and went upstairs. Ward mumbled something and disappeared out the back door.

  “I’ll clean up in here and you fix a fire,” Jean said, starting to clear the table. “Then we’ll talk.”