The walls of the crater were a ring of sharp hills; they surrounded us like a hug, tall and sheltering.
The sky was brilliant.
I was frozen in the act of looking. I couldn't tear my eyes away.
I could feel the enchantment here, taste it, smell it. The air smelled of flowers, but there weren't any flowers near us.
"I've never seen anything like this-" I repeated.
Foreman said, "That's why I brought you here. Ready? Come along."
We pedaled down to the center of the crater. There was the inevitable comfort station there. "Do you have to go?" Foreman asked.
"No. Why?"
"Better go now. It'll be a while before you get another chance." I looked at Lizard. She shrugged back. We did as he said. When I came out, he was locking the bicycles into a rack, I said, "I thought that locks were a thing of the past. Wasn't it you who said there's enough for everybody now?"
He nodded. "But not all of it is in Hawaii. And part of the job of being enlightened is to not tempt others to be less than they are."
I said, "We could have driven."
He shook his head. "No, we couldn't. Ah, here's Lizard. Follow me."
He led us off on a trail into the brush. I couldn't stop marveling at the lushness of the growth here. My only previous experience with craters had been the meteor crater at Winslow, Arizona, and that had been mostly barren on the inside. I hadn't known what I had expected to find here inside Diamond Head, certainly not this little piece of paradise.
The trail suddenly turned sideways and upward. It jogged back auud forth across a rocky, tree-covered wall. Everything was dark and shady here. I realized we were hiking up to the top of the crater. I hadn't known that was possible. I followed Lizard and Foreman without much comment. I didn't wonder why they had Inwaght me here, I already knew. This was all supposed to be part of my therapy.
Occasionally we passed people heading downward. They grinned and waved knowingly. They knew what was ahead. They'd been there. We hadn't. At least, I hadn't.
I felt that way with Lizard and Foreman. They always knew what was ahead for me. I never seemed to.
We broke from the brush high on a cliff wall. We could see over thc top of the crater now. The suburbs of Honolulu were scattered high on the green slopes of Oahu. The houses glimmered bright in the crystal air.
The trail wound around, zigged and zagged, and stopped before a hole.
"Well, come on," said Foreman. "First, the tunnel. Then the stairs." He plunged in.
"Where does he get his energy?" I asked Lizard.
"He creates it." She grabbed my hand and pulled me into the darkness. There was a handrail for part of the way.
For a moment, I was absolutely blind.
Lizard stopped me in the tunnel. She came into my arms and found my mouth with hers. The kiss was quick and passionate. "What was that for?" I gasped.
"So you don't forget."
"Forget what'?"
"How much I love you."
"How much do you love me?"
"You'll find out."
Foreman was waiting for us when we came out of the tunnel. "Look," he pointed.
We were at the bottom of a concrete staircase. There were at least a thousand steps to the top. At least, it looked like that many. "Want to catch your breath before we go?"
"Uh . . . "
"How's your heart?"
"I'm young."
"You won't be when we reach the top. Let's go." He started cheerfully up.
He was right. I was a thousand years older at the top.
"This used to be a naval lookout station," he said. "It's over a hundred years old. They used to watch for Japanese planes from here. Now, it's mostly a weather station. And a place for tourists to picnic."
He led us up through four levels of concrete bunker, up a set of stairs, and out onto a catwalk
"Urk-" I said.
"You are now two hundred and thirty-three meters above sea level," said Foreman. "Don't look if it bothers you."
The catwalk led around a bulge of rock on the outermost edge of the highest point of the crater, to a set of stairs and a handrail. At the very top was a tiny concrete gazebo. It looked too high, too precarious, and much too easy to fall off of.
"I, uh . . . think, I'll go back inside . . . and look from there."
"Okay," said Foreman. He started up the last flight of stairs. Lizard followed him.
Neither looked back at me. Goddammit.
I hadn't even known I was this afraid of heights.
I closed my eyes and climbed the stairs, not opening them until I reached the top.
They were waiting for me there.
They had spread out a blanket. Lizard was laying out a small buffet. Foreman was opening a bottle of champagne. The cork popped and shot straight out toward Waikiki. It arced high, then tumbled down into the greenery, two hundred and forty meters below.
"Nice shot," I commented.
Foreman handed me a glass. "Thank you." He poured for himself and Lizard. "Have you ever been here before?"
"Uh, no."
"That's why we brought you. When I was your age, there weren't as many stairs or handrails. That last bit of stairs, for example-that used to be a rocky slope. A bit more challenging then."
I looked back and shuddered.
"Spend a moment taking in the view," he said.
"I feel like I can see almost all of Oahu from here."
"Well, this side of it anyway. Look," he pointed. "There goes the state bird of Hawaii."
I looked. "All I see is a lumbering old 747."
"That's it. We've got everything that flies going back and forth between here and the mainland. They're on the ground only long enough to take on fuel and supplies. We've got planes landing every thirty seconds. We're connecting to Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, LAX, and San Diego. We're moving as much of the vital organs of the United States as possible out of the cancerous part of the body. We're duplicating the memory tanks in New York, Denver, and Washington, D.C. as well.
"If you look out there," he pointed, "you can see where we've started three new artificial islands. By next year, we'll have a chain of them ten miles long. As long as the current flows, we have electricity. As long as we have electricity, we can grow all the sea domes and islands we can use. We're also putting in a floating runway exclusively for shuttle operations, but that'll be at Maui."
"How are the locals taking it?" I asked.
"Some of them hate it. Some of them love it." He shrugged. "Nobody likes living in a refugee camp, and there's a very good chance that's what this state will become. We're trying to get more people to move on to Australia and New Zealand, but most Americans don't want to go that far. Would you?"
"I wouldn't want to abandon the United States to the Chtorrans, no. Here, we're still fighting back."
"Uh-huh." Foreman smeared some chopped liver on a cracker and popped it into his mouth. "What about you?"
"What do you mean, what about me?"
"What do you want to do?"
"Haven't we had this conversation once before?"
"Uh-huh, and we'll probably have it again. The answer may have changed. What do you want to do, Jim?"
"You know where my commitment is. I hate the worms. I want to kill them."
"So? What?"
"What do you mean by that?"
"I didn't say 'So what?' I said, 'So? What?' Two different sentences. So? What next?"
"I don't understand."
"Wanting to kill Chtorrans isn't all, Jim. There's something else there. If all you really wanted was to kill Chtorrans, we wouldn't be having this conversation. You'd just be a killing machine. We'd point you at Chtorrans and you'd kill them. But the truth is, you don't want to kill any more, do you? You've got some very real questions about what's going on, don't you? And you want to find the answers more than you want to keep on killing. Right?"