Rachel encapsulated her grief and set it aside. She focused all her attention on this January night—the bite of rain on her exposed skin, trickle and drip of water in storm drains, creak of tree limb, rush of wind.
She hiked through the maze of tract housing that had overgrown the northern foothills of Mt. Buchanan. Rainwater streamed off the shingles of silent houses, empty houses where abandoned human skins were crumbling to dust. She paused at every high cul-de-sac that allowed a view. The rain obscured much, but there were still a few lights in Buchanan itself, lonely and far and fog-obscured. And she could sense as much as see the ocean, feel its enormous mass troubled by the climatic adjustments the Travellers had begun to perform.
She was wet to the skin. Her clothes were sodden and heavy. But none of that mattered. It was a cold rain, Rachel knew, but the touch of it was soothing, like the rain that carries away the heat of a summer day.
She walked toward Old Quarry Park, where sleepless others had gathered by unspoken mutual consent to share the pleasure of the night.
It was a long walk, nearly two hours by foot from her father’s house, but Rachel finished it without weariness. She was lighter and stronger than she had ever been before. A year ago, a hike this long in this weather would have left her exhausted and ill. Tonight there was no fatigue at all; only a growing excitement, a first tremulous presentiment of joy.
She followed an empty access lane into the deep green darkness of the park.
But it was not a complete darkness even in the rain, even at two o’clock on a January morning. A faint light radiated from the low wrack of clouds. Douglas firs tossed in ponderous slow motion, like the masts of ancient sailing ships. The rain was everywhere, a silvery presence on lips and skin.
Figures moved in the dim light.
Not human, Daddy had insisted, and Rachel supposed that was especially true here. In the human history of Buchanan, there had never been such a gathering on such a raw January night. Before Contact, no one had come to smell the wet winter earth and walk among the mossy winter trees; no one had come for the caress of flesh against flesh—at least not in the cold, not fearlessly, not openly. It wasn’t human.
But it. seemed very human to Rachel, who had recently been studying the Travellers. The Travellers in their organic form had been almost incomprehensibly strange. She had seen them in borrowed and ancient memories: porous antlery creatures like mobile sponges, slow in the thick atmosphere of their chilly moon. Like humans, their bodies had been cellular in structure, but there the resemblance ended. The Travellers were uninucleate and genetically haploid, more like algae than animals. A mature Traveller was a colony of secondary systems—as if human beings were assembled from cultivated crops of livers, hearts, lungs, brains. The parts reproduced independently of the whole. For the Travellers, “sex” was a series of protracted, continuous events… they spoke of karyogamy the way people talked about middle age.
Human sex had seemed to the Travellers equally strange: a grotesquely foreshortened reproductive whirlwind, allied to something like a repeatable religious trance.
But they understood pleasure. Rachel remembered some of their slow, protracted pleasures. She remembered a glade of crystalline fans, warmed by pale sunlight and enriched by volcanic vents of gaseous water, where an ancient Traveller whose name was a shape had come to bask and root. She remembered the pleasure of hyphae uncoiled in a solitary erotic flowering. The pleasure of germinal sterigmata scattered in glittering clouds to the tidal wind.
Rachel left her soaking-wet clothes at the entrance to the park. Bodies moved along the grassy green, or timidly, like fawns, among the trees. The emerald light made these people seem golden and diffuse.
Rachel opened an eye to the Greater World and saw them, not just as surfaces, but as lives; as shapes of lives, complex and many-colored. She longed for their touch.
She found a man whose life-shape was a pleasing, temperate complexity—his name was Simon Ackroyd, and he had once been the Rector of the Episcopal Church, but he was something else now, a creature as fresh on the Earth as herself.
Infinitely light, lightly wedded to her skin, Rachel touched and joined his rain-wet flesh in the shadows of the great trees, in the cold air after January midnight on the surface of the cradle Earth.
* * *
The rain stopped falling sometime after dawn. Matt woke from a fitful sleep on the living room sofa and noted the absence of his daughter and the silence of the rain.
At noon, Tom Kindle and Chuck Makepeace arrived in Chuck’s Nissan. Committee business: The three of them drove to the municipal reservoir at the northeastern end of town.
Next to the stone slope of the reservoir was a white limestone building, the filtration plant, a WPA project as old as the Roosevelt administration. Set in a wide, rolling lawn, it looked to Matt like the temple of some serene religion.
The three men sat in the car gazing at the building from the gravel parking lot, Kindle taking long pulls on a can of Coke. Together they were the Public Works Subcommittee, and their job was to report on the condition of water and power resources inside the county line. Starting here. But none of them seemed to want to move from the car just yet.
All three had recently been spooked. Kindle had found the human skin snagged on his azalea bush just yesterday. Makepeace had discovered a similar relic in a neighbor’s house. And Matt was still troubled by Rachel’s visit last night… worried that he might not see her again; or that, if he did, she might be changed beyond recognition.
But these were common fears and none of the men spoke about them.
Last night’s rain had left a high, cool overcast. The filtration plant, with its whitewashed steel doors, waited with infinite patience in the green.
Kindle said, “You ever see The Time Machine?”
“No,” Makepeace said.
“In the movie, the time machine gets carried off into this building where the Time Traveller can’t find it. Morlocks are in there. Nasty, ugly people. Big old building.”
“You have a point?” Makepeace asked.
“Looked like this building.” Kindle tipped back his Coke. “Funny how they used to build public works in the old days. Like you ought to wear a toga to go inside.”
“You guys are pretty thoroughly out to lunch,” Makepeace said. “I hope you’re aware of that.”
Chuck Makepeace, former City Councilman, former junior member of the town’s second most prestigious law firm, was still wearing three-piece suits. To Matt this seemed deeply neurotic, like formalwear on a lifeboat, but he kept his opinion to himself.
“I was inside there once,” Matt said. “School trip. About twenty-five years ago.”
“Oh?” Kindle said. “What’s it like?”
“There’s a double row of filtration tanks and a walkway in between. I remember a lot of big-diameter pipes and valves.”
“You know how any of it works?”
“Nope.”
Makepeace laughed. “It points up the stupidity of this whole expedition. We don’t know what to look for and we won’t know what it means when we see it.”
“Not necessarily,” Kindle said. “If we go in there and everything’s humming along, we tell the folks they can use the kitchen faucet a while longer. On the other hand, if the floor’s under water and the pipes are broken, we can all put a bucket on the roof and pray for rain.”
“Let’s get it over with, then… if you’re finished with that soda.”
Kindle drained the can and tossed the empty into the backseat.
“Hey,” Makepeace said, “don’t litter my car!”
“You can get a new car,” Kindle said.
* * *
Kindle had brought a big iron crowbar with him. The filtration plant was liable to be locked and nobody knew where the maintenance people had gone, much less their keys. But when Matt approached the windowless steel door he found it standing ajar.
Inside was darkness.
No one wanted to
reach out and yank the door wide. Certainly Matt didn’t. He heard the muted thump of machinery inside, like a massive heartbeat.
Kindle said, “Did it always sound like that?”
“Maybe,” Matt said. “I was ten years old when I came here last. It could have changed.”
Privately, he thought: No, it wasn’t like that. It had been quiet. This was a high reservoir; the tanks were gravity filters. “Sounds like Morlocks to me,” Kindle said. “Jesus!” Makepeace said. “Open the damn door!” Matt tugged it wide. Moist air gusted out.
There was no light in the great windowless space inside. Once there had been banks of lamps suspended from the ceiling. No more. “Got a flashlight in the car,” Makepeace said. “Get it,” Kindle said.
Makepeace ran for the cherry-red Nissan while Matt and Kindle took a tentative step through the doorway. Neither of them spoke until Makepeace arrived with the flashlight.
The beam probed the farther darkness—once systematically, once wildly.
The filtration plant didn’t look the way it had looked during Mart’s fifth-grade field trip. What had once been copper pipe was now a tangle of fibrous tubing, columns thick and knotted as mangrove roots sweating condensation into the warm interior air. Much of the floor was occupied by a black dome, a pulsating hemisphere attached by ropy ventricles to the looming black filtration tanks.
From this dome came the building’s heartbeat—periodic kettledrum throbs, like a distant organic thunder.
And the room smelted strange. Maybe that was the worst of it, Matt thought. It was not a bad smell, but it was wholly alien—as penetrating as nutmeg and as rich as garden loam.
Silently, the three men backed out into the cold January noon.
* * *
Chuck Makepeace drove the coast road back into Buchanan, not talking much, his hands clenched on the steering wheel. The road had grown potholes over the winter; the little Nissan bucked and jumped.
“All I want to know,” Kindle said, “is what’s it doing there?”
“My guess?” Matt said. “It’s filtering and pumping water. That’s all. There aren’t enough people to maintain essential services, so the Travellers grew a machine to do it. If we check out the power company we’ll probably find something similar operating the local grid—all the way back to the power plant.”
“Why would they be so interested in keeping Buchanan going?”
“I don’t suppose it’s only us. If they’re running utilities in Buchanan, they must be doing the same for every other city.” Hoover Dam, Grand Coulee Dam, all the nuclear plants, all our little engineering miracles: He imagined tangled black machines operating the massive turbines. No one had put these devices there; they had just grown, like weeds.
“Matthew, do you suppose all our water flows through that thing?”
“It appears to.”
“Well, Jesus—I drank that water!”
“I don’t think they mean to poison us. They could have killed us a long time ago if they’d wanted to.”
Exterminated was the word Rachel had used. They could have exterminated us.
“But it’s control,” Kindle said. “That much is obvious. If they can turn off the lights and shut off the water, they can tell us what to do… We depend on them.”
“Do we? You can dig a well. Nobody’s stopping you.”
“We could dig wells and press lamp oil, but we aren’t going to, ’cause the faucets still work and the lights are still on. So why do you guess they did it? Civic spirit?”
“Maybe,” Matt said. “Maybe because it’s easy for them, so why not? You remember Contact. I don’t like the fact that they’re here, and I don’t like what they’ve done, but I don’t think they did it because they hate us.”
“You believe that?”
He shrugged. “That’s what it felt like.”
“Sure it did. But only a really lousy lie is gonna feel like a lie. The best lies feel like God’s own truth. That’s the point. And anyway…”
Matt looked at the older man. “Anyway what?”
“Even if they’re Jesus and Buddha in one happy package… who says I want ’em working for me? I mean, how does this go? We get water because the Travellers favored us with a big ugly pump? If it’s a dry spell, do we pray for rain? And if we do, do they send some along?” He shook his head. “I don’t happen to believe in God, Matthew, but if I did, I think I’d prefer the one that works in mysterious ways His miracles to perform. Pray for rain, in other words, but keep the tanning butter handy. It’s more human.”
“We’ll get rain enough to suit,” Chuck Makepeace said, running a red light at the vacant intersection of Commercial and Marine. “I understand there’s a mother-bitch of a winter storm on the way.”
Kindle gave him a sharp look. “How would you know that?”
* * *
It turned out Chuck Makepeace had heard the news the same way Matt had: through the agency of the Helper.
Twice since Christmas, Matt had gone to stand before that motionless obsidian giant. He had asked it questions: about the Travellers, Rachel’s transformation, the future of Buchanan.
The Helper had answered concisely in a sedate baritone of neutral accent. Beyond that, it had no discernible personality. It spoke to Matt in colloquial English, but he didn’t doubt that it would answer an Iranian in Farsi or a Brazilian in Portuguese.
It was Rachel who had first hinted to Matt about the weather, but the Helper elaborated that warning, described the new and fiercer storms spinning to life in the altered waters of the tropical seas. Matt had withheld that warning from the last meeting of the Emergency Planning Committee—there had been too much new business and the threat was safely distant—but he had planned to bring it up tonight.
But Chuck Makepeace knew as much about the weather as Matt… because Makepeace had talked to the Helper, too.
Matt arrived at the hospital boardroom unshaven and somewhat lightheaded, five minutes late. He had skipped dinner. Maybe lunch, too; he couldn’t recall. He missed a lot of meals these days. Time seemed to slip past; his attention often wandered.
He had hoped to chair a fairly sedate meeting and introduce the storm-warning during New Business. At this point, the best and simplest strategy was to secure a shelter—maybe the basement of the hospital—and stock it with water, food, Coleman lanterns. It was an important job, but not a difficult or costly one.
But the news had arrived before him. Chuck Makepeace had heard it, and so had Bob Ganish and Abby Cushman. All three had been urged by Contactee friends or family to talk to the Helper. All three had done so. And all three had received the same warning: strange and powerful weather moving eastward from the far Pacific.
The news had spread by telephone the day before the meeting, had spread even farther in the crowd around the coffee machine before the Emergency Planning Committee was gaveled to order. Matt arrived in time to hear Tom Kindle wonder whether he was the only human being in Buchanan who wasn’t having long conversations with that damn robot up at the City Hall Turnaround.
“By no means,” Paul Jacopetti said. “I haven’t talked to it either. Wouldn’t. Not on a bet. I’m with you there, Mr. Kindle.”
“That’s a consolation,” Kindle said.
Matt called the meeting to order. Nine people took seats and gazed at him. There was no use postponing this; he upturned the agenda and asked for debate or resolutions on the subject of the weather emergency.
Abby Cushman expressed her astonishment: “The Travellers are going to a lot of trouble to help us—as Mr. Makepeace mentioned, they’re keeping our water and electricity on line—so why would they create a storm that might kill us? I don’t understand!”
“I don’t think it’ll kill us,” Kindle said. “Not if we’re careful. As for the logic of it—Abby, by any calculation, they’re a superior species. More powerful than us, at least. I knew a guy in Florida one time, ran a hospital for injured birds. He had a wild heron with a broken beak, and
he worked real hard on it, taped the injury, fed the bird by hand until it was strong enough to go free. Finally he released it with a metal tab on its leg for some kind of wildlife census. Three months later, he gets back the banged-up tab with a nasty letter from the FAA: Apparently the bird got sucked into the intake of an Alitalia 747.”
Abby looked dismal. “I still don’t understand.”
“Well—the heron got some nice treatment. But that bird shouldn’t have jumped to any conclusions about how safe it is to deal with another species. The fact that we’re getting free electricity doesn’t mean the jets aren’t rolling out onto the tarmac all the same.”
“That’s macabre and terrible,” Miriam Flett announced.
Kindle regarded her mildly. “Do you disagree, ma’am?”
She thought about it. “No.”
Matt proposed a shelter to be provided in the hospital basement and asked for volunteers for a Storm Precautions Subcommittee, then suggested the whole subject be tabled until there was more substantial information: “We have other business pending, after all.”
Agreed, with random grumbling. Matt consulted the minutes. “Okay… is there a weekly report from the Radio Subcommittee?”
Joey Commoner stood up.
* * *
“Radio report,” Joey said.
He cleared his throat. If Mart’s memory served, this was the first time Joey had spoken at a Committee meeting. Joey had dressed up for the occasion: there was nothing on his T-shirt more offensive than a tennis-shoe ad.
“This week we logged thirteen calls. Most of those were Mr. Avery Price from the Boston group or Mr. Gardner Deutsch of Toronto. Plus a few from Colonel John Tyler and some one-time contacts like a woman in Ohio and someone in Costa Rica who I didn’t understand.
“Mr. Price says Boston is leaving town in a convoy, and Toronto is also going to leave tomorrow morning according to plan so the two groups can meet in Pennsylvania and travel together. He says—”