A rush of fear contracted her chest. “Good-bye!”
“Now I’ve got to hurry,” he said. “I’ve got to reach them before Grady and those.” Still he hadn’t looked at her. “I’m sorry,” he said, quick, curt, rejecting.
“No,” she said. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m going back to them,” he said. “I’ve got to — get it all down. Record it all. So people can see.” He slung the pack over his shoulder, and filled his pockets with the bread she had set out for him. “And now I’ve got to warn them.”
“Warn them! They’re thieves, they’re killers!” She gasped it out.
“They don’t belong here, they have to go, they have to stop it!” He had turned to go. She grabbed at his sleeve. “What have they done to you?”
He only shook her off, his face set. He went out of their space and into the broad, low corridors that swept across the level. From the long high lines of clerestory windows, bars of moonlight fell across the ways. There was no other light. His footsteps were loud in the silence, but her naked feet pursuing him made no sound. “Meric,” she whisper-called. “When will you come back?”
“I don’t know.”
“Don’t go to them.”
“I have to.”
“Let Grady.”
He rounded on her. “Tell Grady to stay away,” he said. “Tell Emma. Don’t let those men into the Preserve. They don’t belong there. They’ve got no right.”
“No right!” She stopped, still, at a distance from him, as though he were dangerous to approach. He stood too, knowing that everything he had said was wrong, knowing he was doing wrong to her, ashamed but not caring. “Good-bye,” he said again, and turned down a corridor toward the night elevators. She didn’t follow.
He went the night way down through the Mountain, following the spectral luminescent signs, changing from elevator to elevator — the banks of day elevators were shut down, and there were only one or two downward paths he could go; at every discharge level he had to interpret the way to the next, drifting downward side-to-side like a slow and errant leaf. How often he had dreamed he walked through night spaces like these, coming onto unfamiliar levels, finding with surprise but no wonder places he had never seen, vast and pointless divisions of space, impassable halls, half-built great machines, processions of unknown faces, the right way continually eluding him and continually reappearing in a new guise — oh now I remember — until oppressed with confusion and strangeness he woke.
He woke: it seemed to him as he went down now that the Mountain had lost all solidity, had become as illusory as a thought, as a notion. The continual, sensible, long-thought-out divisions of its spaces, the plain, honest faces of its machines, its long black-louvered suntraps, its undressed surfaces, all showing the signs of the handiwork and labor that had brought them into being: it was all tenuous, had the false solidity of a dream. It couldn’t contain him any longer, vast as it was.
He went out across the floor of the great, windy central atrium, past piles of supplies and materials — the place was never empty, always cluttered with things in progress from one condition into another under the hands of craftsmen, wood into walls, metal into machines, dirt into cleanliness, uselessness into use, use into waste, waste into new materials. Before him rose the transparent front, stories high, stone, steel, and pale green slabs of cast glass flawed and honest, through which a green, wrinkled moon shone coldly. He went out.
The moon was white and round. The grass before him bent, silvery, as it was mowed in long swaths by the wind. Behind him the Mountain was silent, a disturbance of the air only; its discreet lights didn’t compete against the moon.
Certainty. That was what Painter offered him, only not offered, only embodied: certainty after ambivalence, doubt, uncertainty. He asked — no, not asked, could not ask; had no interest in asking, yet nevertheless he put the question — asked Meric to overthrow the king within himself, the old Adam whom Jehovah said was to rule over all creation. For even in the Mountain, King Adam was not overthrown, only in exile: still proud, still anxious, still throned in lonely superiority, because there was no new king to take up his abandoned crown.
That king had come. He waited out there in the darkness, his hidden kingship like a hooded sun. Meric had seen it, and had knelt before it, and kissed those heavy hands, ashamed, relieved, amazed by grace.
Give away all that you have, the leo said to men. Give away all that you have; come, follow me.
Meric stepped off the long steps into the whispering grass, not looking back, walking steadily north.
They took Painter at the end of that month, a gray day and very cold, with a few snowflakes blowing in the air like dust. It had been Barron’s plan to encircle the whole pride, if they could, and negotiate a settlement, taking the one called Painter into custody and arranging for the movement of the others, under supervision, southeastward in the general direction of the Capitol and the sites of the new internment centers. But the man Meric Landseer had spoiled that. He, and the young leo appearing from nowhere. It was to have been a simple, clean, just act, location, negotiation, relocation, It became a war.
The leos for a while seemed to be fleeing from them along the foothills of the mountains that formed the northern boundary of the Preserve, Barron decided that if the mountains were keeping them from moving north, he could swing some of his men quickly ahead of them and cut them off in a C-movement with the mountains blocking retreat. When they did that, though, the slow-moving caravan turned north suddenly, toward the steep, fir-clad slopes. Yet Barron had been told they didn’t like mountains. It must be Meric Landseer influencing them.
There was a river, and beyond it a sudden mountain. They abandoned their truck and the wagon beside the river. They were gathering at the river’s edge, about to cross, when Barron and the ranger showed themselves. The Federal officers were staying out of sight, guns ready. Barron called to the leos through a bullhorn, setting out conditions, telling them to put down their guns. There was no answering motion. The ranger, Grady, took the bullhorn from him. He called out Meric’s name, saying he should stay out of this, not be a fool, get away. No answer. The females in their long, dull dusters were hard to see against the dull, brown grass.
Barron, talking peaceably but forcibly through the bullhorn, and Grady, carrying a heavy, blunt weapon like a blunderbuss, started to walk down toward the river. The leos were entering the water. Barron began to hurry. He supposed that the tallest of them, in ordinary clothes, was the one they wanted. He called on him by name to surrender.
He saw then out of the corner of his eye a quick figure moving in the woods to his left. Saw that he had a gun. A leo. Who? Where had he come from? Grady dropped instantly to the ground, pulling Barron down with him. The leo’s gun fired with a dull sound, and then came a sharp chatter of fire from where the officers were hidden.
The young leo dodged from tree to tree, loading his ancient gun and firing. There was a shriek or scream from behind Barron: someone hit. Barron caught a glimpse of the leo now and then when he dared to raise his head. The bullhorn had fallen some feet away from him. He squirmed over to it and picked it up. He shouted that the leo was to throw down his gun, or the officers would shoot to kill. The leos were in the river now, wading chest-deep in its brown current, holding the children up. On the bank Painter still stood, and Meric, and another, the girl they had glimpsed during the chase, apparently the one he had kidnaped.