Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

“Maybe. You choose; we all choose. If the drought doesn’t get worse, or if the rains start again, they’ll be alive and they’ll be proud of what they accomplished.” She yawned. “Don’t you even wonder what I found out about the message?”

  “Later,” he said harshly. The hope in the back of his mind that had made everything seem possible suddenly had become small and naked, defenseless. One word from her and it would no longer exist at all.

  “It’s real, Cluny. I know what it means, in part anyway.”

  He jumped to his feet, dizzy with a rush of adrenaline. Real! He looked down at her. He thought she smiled, but could not be certain because the fire-cast shadows were dancing on her face. “You said it would take months.” His voice was hoarse.

  “I was using the wrong mind set. When I shifted, it started making sense. It’s what I said at the start: a message no one can translate is more useless than no message at all. It can be translated.”

  Robert returned and they all wrapped themselves in their blankets on mounds of pine needles. Cluny could not still his racing thoughts. Real! They were out there. They had left a message! He stared at the sky, where stars were visible that he never had seen without a telescope, brilliant spots that did not dance or flicker at all in the clear atmosphere over the desert. Which one? How far? When would they be back? Soon; it had to be soon. Earth could hold out, if help was on the way, he thought. And help would be on the way. Had to be on the way. The doctor was coming. . . .

  He heard the wind, and closer rustlings, and then nothing until Robert called his name and the morning light was pale gray, the air very cold. Hoarfrost had turned the world into a white-edged illustration, something unreal except in an artist’s mind.

  That afternoon they left the shelter of the Ochoco Mountains and began to pick their way through arid hills where only sagebrush grew in widely separated clumps. The land had been twisted and faulted more savagely here than anywhere else yet, Cluny thought, feeling a disquiet so deep within him that he could not bring it to the surface where it could be shaken off.

  Late in the afternoon they reached a cliff overlooking the Snake River; the sun was low in the sky, and the air was already very cold, promising another hard freeze during the night.

  “We have to go down now,” Robert said, “or else go back to the cover of those cliffs.” He pointed. “It would be better to do it now when this side’s in such deep shadows.”

  Jean nodded, showing none of the disbelief Cluny knew he revealed. From here it looked straight down to the tiny, almost dry river, two or three thousand feet below.

  Robert looked at him thoughtfully, as if weighing the odds against his panicking. He said, “It’s an old Indian trail, used by generations of fishermen. It’s deteriorated a little, not too much.” Without changing his expression, but with a faint laugh in his voice, he added, “I don’t think any white man will look for us here.” He turned and started down the trail.

  Cluny watched him, looked at Jean, who was waiting for him to start, and he shrugged and followed. He didn’t know how Robert could see the signs of a trail, how he could guide his horse this way, not that, when both appeared equally impossible. It seemed the longest trip he had ever taken, and yet, when suddenly his horse stepped onto level ground, he had the feeling that it could not already be over, finished. They had done it.

  Jean drew even with him and smiled teasingly. “You’re sweating, as cold as it is,” she said.

  He laughed suddenly, and she joined in, as did Robert.

  “Have you ever done it before,” he asked the Indian.

  Robert shook his head. “I wouldn’t come down when my father brought me here. Too steep and dangerous. Some of us went farther upriver, where it isn’t so steep. But I thought they might be watching there; we had to do it at this place. And now, camp and food. We all deserve hot food.”

  Again Cluny slept so deeply he heard nothing, dreamed nothing, remembered no thoughts before falling asleep. In the morning Jean studied him.

  “You looked awful when you first came out here,” she said. “Gaunt, haunted, shifty-eyed. You’re still shifty-eyed, but now you look better, more healthy.”

  He scowled at her.

  She laughed softly. “Today we’ll be in Boise.”

  Climbing the Idaho side of the gorge was not as difficult as going down had been, and on the other side the country stretched out flat and barren before them. Robert let the horses run to the foothills in the distance, and they headed east. They reached Boise late in the afternoon, when the sun was going down in a colorless sunset. Robert took them as close to the airport as they could get on horseback, and then dismounted, helped Jean down.

  Boise was not dead, not like Bend. There were no farms now, but there were ranges where cattle grazed, and there was traffic. There were military installations in the mountains, Cluny knew vaguely, and mines still being worked. He had studied the Boise map, and he knew where the airport was. The rest of the way they had to go on foot.

  He shook hands with Robert, and watched as the tall man and the slight woman withdrew to talk in low voices for several minutes. He could hear nothing of what they said. She removed a necklace and drew it over his head, adjusted it. Then Robert and Jean embraced and she came to Cluny’s side. Her eyes were moist and for the first time she looked subdued.

  They were near a subdivision that appeared lifeless. There were roads and streets, but no traffic in this area. Robert would wait here for one day; if they did not come back, he would leave. If there was no plane waiting, or if they could not get to it, they would rejoin him and return to the reservation.

  “Ready?” Cluny asked her.

  “We might as well start.”

  They looked back at Robert, then began to walk on a street at the outer edges of the subdivision. The street curved and when they looked back again they could no longer see him. For a long time they walked in silence as the sun went down and the evening turned dark.

  “There’s a manufacturing, industrial section,” Cluny muttered. “Should be reaching it now if we’re not lost.”

  She did not reply and they walked steadily, their steps sounding hollow and echoing in one deserted section after another. There were traffic sounds from a distance, and once they had to run into a yard and hide behind a house when a patrol car swung into the street where they were walking.

  “There,” Jean said, several minutes later. She touched his arm, directing his gaze to the left, where the industrial park sprawled. They circled the complex, keeping close to a fence, and halfway around it they saw the airport.

  “It’s a couple of miles,” Jean said then. “Let’s rest a few minutes before we finish.”

  There were runways between them and the buildings and the air traffic control tower. Lights were on in the tower and in the terminal building, as well as some of the lower hangars and shops. A jeep, or truck, something very small and silent from where they watched, darted from one building to another, came to rest again, vanished when its lights were turned off.

  Jean sank to the ground, drew up her knees and hugged her arms around them, facing the complex in the distance. “The message is real,” she said quietly.

  It was too dark to see her features; she was a pale blue against the dark ground. Cluny sat close enough to touch her. “What does it say?”

  “Nothing. At least I don’t think it has content. Remember the story about the natives in New Guinea who lived on an inaccessible mountain by a terrible gorge that separated them from another native village? There was never any contact between them. Sometimes one group would signal the other by building a fire, sending smoke signals into the sky. And there was always great rejoicing in the other village because they had received a message. No content. It wasn’t necessary to have any content. The message was enough. I think we have that kind of message.”

  “Christ!” Cluny said, and Jean could hear the desperation in his voice, sense it in the way he seemed to be so rigid so close to her.

&
nbsp; “I think it’s a signal device to let the senders know that we found it,” she went on. “And there are three more of them in orbit around the Earth.”

  His hand clutched her arm then and she could feel his fingers trembling. “Are you sure?”

  “I think so.”

  “Tell me exactly what you found.”

  “There are patterns. There are four groups of three curves, two of them forming sides, like pieces of an apple, and the third is like the stem, between them, not touching either side. If you have the computer extract the stem, the cylinder, the two sides fall away in the next spaces, and finally regroup with other curves and stop moving. The computer will join all like curves to form ovals, orbits, each one slightly larger than the next, and the stems, the cylinders, are left over. Four cylinders, four messages, or signals.”

  His hand dropped from her arm. “It wasn’t like that,” he said dully. “It wasn’t in a group like that. It was just in a bunch of junk, nothing identifiable as curves. We have pictures of where it was found.”

  “The second time,” she said softly. “I think the first time it was exactly like I described.”

  Across the expanse of empty runways and barren, gullied earth and tumbleweeds at rest now in the quiet night, the lights of the tower went out. The airport was closing down for the day. There were no night flights any longer, except troop movements or emergency flights.

  Jean stood up. “We should go before the moon rises,” she said.

  “What do you mean, the second time?”

  “My father found it years ago,” she said softly. “I don’t know who else knew about it, probably your father did, maybe others. Like now, they didn’t know what to do with it, about it. And then my father was killed, and no one did anything at all. Maybe he never told anyone else. Or no one knew where it was any more. I don’t know. But he knew about it.” ‘

  She did too, Cluny thought. There was no uncertainty in her voice. They started to walk along one of the ruined runways. His mind was curiously blank although there were questions he wanted to ask, had even thought of during the long ride across the Idaho wastelands; now the questions were forgotten. She knew. That was enough. The aliens had come, had left a message. That was enough.

  He watched his feet, and thought distantly, they could fix this, make the grass grow, the rain come. . . . Only the major landing strips were being maintained. The others were breaking up in the ground, thrust up by freezes, buckled under the summer sun. It was easier walking on the ruined concrete than in the corduroy earth along it. The wind erosion was powerful here, patiently working at the soil, loosening rocks, moving them aside to release inches more of the vulnerable dirt and blow it away.

  As they drew closer to the dump of buildings, they could see a 707 parked a distance away from the other, smaller planes lined up near a hangar.

  “That’s it,” Cluny said. “It’s a USDA plane. Department of Agriculture. Come on.” He turned away from the main buildings and headed for the plane. There was nothing to hide behind here, no trees, signs, shrubs, nothing but the tumbleweeds, which stirred now and then, as if testing muscles to see if they could start rolling yet. Several hundred feet from the plane, he stopped. “Can you see anyone?”

  “I think so. There’s a jeep or something parked near it. I thought I saw a figure a second or two ago. I don’t see him now.”

  “Okay. We’d better not go any farther together. If anything funny happens, hightail it back to Robert. If it’s our plane, I’ll whistle.”

  Cluny approached the jeep cautiously and when he was close, he called softly, “Hey! Anyone there?”

  “Keep back, mister. Didn’t they tell you this plane’s contaminated? You don’t want to get dose to it.” He got out of the jeep and stretched. Then in a low voice he asked, “You Dr. Cluny?”

  “Yes.”

  “Got something I can look at? ID?”

  He took Cluny’s wallet inside the jeep again and examined it by a light so carefully held that not even a glow was visible. “Okay, Dr. Cluny. You can go aboard. You alone?”

  “Who sent you?”

  “Zach Greene. He said you would have a companion.” Cluny turned to whistle to Jean, but she was nearly at his elbow. “I told you to wait.”

  “I was afraid it was a trap. You might have needed help.”

  “What did you mean, the plane’s contaminated?” Cluny asked before moving.

  “Our cover story. We had to land because a shipment of chemicals sprang a leak. We’re waiting for orders from Washington. No one knows what the stuff is yet; they’re checking. It’s so plausible I’m almost afraid of it.”

  “Okay. See you later.”

  “The seating’s been rearranged. There are a couple of couches; you can stretch out, blankets in the bins, all that.”

  “Right.”

  They hurried up the stairs, to be greeted by an odor of chemicals: they could see vague shapes of crates and boxes in the rear. Another emergency being taken care of, Cluny thought, a shipment of sprays for the California growers. No one would question the flight, no one would interfere.

  “Here are the lounges,” Jean whispered, and took his hand, leading him. The two couches were separated by a table. Cluny groped for the blankets in the storage bins, handed one to Jean, and wrapped himself in the other. He could hear rustling sounds as she got comfortable on the other couch. “If only we had something to eat,” she whispered.

  His couch was note quite long enough. Finally he propped his head on the armrest. “Are you sleepy?”

  “No. Not yet. I’m hungry.”

  “Me too.”

  “Cluny?”

  “Hm?”

  “There’s probably a time message along with the rest of it. You know what I mean?

  “Did you figure that out too?”

  “Not really. Not enough time. But there’s a pattern when you start extracting the ovals, the orbits. Whoever works on it should know that.”

  “Yeah.” He jerked upright. “What do you mean, whoever?”

  “It has to be international now. It isn’t ours alone.”

  “Jean, you know you can’t go making any announcements about this, don’t you? It’s classified until Zach, or someone else, says it isn’t. You’ll go along with that, won’t you?”

  There was laughter in her voice when she answered, “Who’d believe anything I said? I wandered out there on the desert and got a touch of sunstroke, or had a vision. Isn’t that what they’d say? But if you said it, Cluny, with your background and your ability to make people believe in you and do what you want, if you said it . . .”

  “I’m under orders. I don’t make the decisions.”

  “I know.” She chuckled softly.

  He tensed, then forced himself to relax. Neither spoke again. Inside the plane it was so quiet that if either of them moved, the sound threatened to betray their presence. He could stand guard at the door, he thought, and did not move. He couldn’t make decisions, he thought angrily. With any agency, any group effort, no one could preempt authority, do things alone, or the entire project would fall apart. There had to be chains of command. The alternative was anarchy. He could hear her, close enough to touch, so far away that he could not fathom her at all. She wanted him to get a soapbox and carry it from corner to corner. Childish, silly woman, no awareness of the reality of the world, the agency, the government, how they all operated, how he operated within the large complex. He could hear her steady breathing and knew she was asleep, and he felt only resentment that she could drift off like that, so easily, like a child who never has to think about the future, about anything at all.

  CHAPTER

  19

  THEY landed at Philadelphia, were rushed to a limousine and sped to Washington, where they were hurried inside a tall building through a back entrance, onto an elevator to the tenth floor. Their escort tapped on the door and Zach Greene opened it.

  “Good job, Cluny,” he said. “Come in, both of you. Ms. Brigh
ton, I’m delighted.”

  Cluny introduced him and before he was completely finished, Zach said, “Two bedrooms down that hall, Ms. Brighton’s on the left, yours on the right. I had some of your clothes brought over, and we’ll round up some for you, Ms. Brighton. Five minutes there will be food, but you’ll want to wash up first, I’m sure.”

  Jean looked like a street tough; her clothes were the same jeans and shirt she had been wearing the day she left Ward tied up in her kitchen; her hair was dirty, as was her neck, the backs of her hands, her arms. Her skin was too taut over her bones; she had lost weight during the past week; but her eyes were clear and unwavering as she studied first Zach, then the apartment, which was pleasant and totally impersonal—no book collection, no art, no plants. She nodded and led the way down the hall he had indicated.

  When she returned she was barefoot. “Do you mind?” she asked. “I’ve had those boots on for a week, and my feet threatened to leave if they weren’t given some relief.”

  Zach laughed. “It’s Jean, isn’t it? May I?” He took her hand and put it on his arm, led her across the room. “Dinner is served.”

  There was a small table set in the corners of the living room. Zach had coffee While Jean and Cluny ate steaks, potatoes browned in butter with onions, green beans, corn on the cob, hot biscuits, wine, coffee, and then ice cream. Jean ate as much as Cluny did.

  When the ice cream dishes were empty, Zach said, “Now. Tell me.”

  Jean told him everything she had learned, what she had guessed.

  “Why do you think your father found it years ago?”

  “When I was twelve, just before my birthday, we had a talk about language, the magic of words. He said a few words could change the entire world, make it take a new direction. I forget exactly what all he said, and at the time I didn’t understand, but now I’m positive he had seen the message and realized its importance.”

  There was a knock on the door, and the man who had escorted them from Philadelphia came from the kitchen to open it. A woman was admitted.

  “This is Tillie Cook,” Zach said, rising. “She’ll get some information, measurements from you, Jean, and bring some clothes in a little while. What’s that?”