There was a place like that once and long ago — a stream set well off the road most took up from a remembered highway, a dirt road he'd hiked up from the ranger station, stones over which water lapped in summertime —
But if one went far, far from that pool, farther up, they'd said in a youngster's hearing, a waterfall poured from high up the side of the mountain. One couldn't hear anything but thundering water from the foot of that waterfall, one just stood there, feeling the mist, enveloped by blowing curtains of it —
Wind-borne, the gray sky above him, and the wind racing off the height: the gale-force winds bent down the trees and swept down deluges on the young and very foolish hiker. He'd been soaked to the skin. He'd had to walk down toward that ranger station to keep from freezing.
There were so, so many half-thought experiences that had brought him to what he was, where he was. He remembered walking long after he thought his knees couldn't stop shaking. He'd known he'd been stupid. He'd known he could freeze to death — at least he'd known that people did, in the mountains; but twelve-year-old boys didn't — he wouldn't, he couldn't, it didn't happen to him.
In fact it hadn't. A ranger had come out looking for him on that trail and brought an insulated poncho. The ranger had said he was a stupid kid and he ought to know better.
Yes, sir, he'd said meekly enough, and he'd known then that even if he might have made it, he'd come close to not making it, and he was aware hiking up there with no glance at the sky hadn't been the smartest act of his life.
But he'd never forgotten, either, the storm sweeping sheets of water off the top of the falls. He'd never forgotten being part of the water, the storm, the sound and the elements up there. He'd felt something he knew he'd never forget. He'd wondered on that shaky-kneed, aching way down if the ranger ever had.
And by the time they'd gotten to the ranger station he'd begun to think, by reason of things the man said, that maybe the ranger had gone up there more than once, but stupid kids up from the tourist camp weren't supposed to have that experience: stupid kids from the tourist camp were what the rangers were up there to protect the wildlife and the falls from. So he'd been embarrassed, then, and understood why the rangers were upset with him, and he'd said he was sorry.
The rangers at the station had phoned his mother, fed him, got him warm, and he'd told the man who drove him down the mountain that he'd like maybe to be a ranger himself someday.
And he'd said that he was sorry they'd had to go out looking for him.
The ranger had confided in him he didn't mind the hike up. That he'd hike up the trail in blizzards and icestorms himself to take photographs.
Then for the rest of the trip the man had told him about what gear you really needed to survive up there, and how if he happened by when he was older, he should come up and see about the summer program the rangers had.
In the way of such things, his mother hadn't let him repeat his escapade. She'd chosen the north slopes of Mt. Allen Thomas the next season, probably to keep him from such hikes, and he and Toby both had taken up siding, to the further detriment of his knees, Toby's elbow, and the integrity of their adolescent skulls.
Saidin said — he should see this place. Atevi appreciated such sights. Atevi found themselves moved by such things. There was something, something, at least, that touched a spot in two species' hearts, or minds, or whatever stimulus it took to take a deep breath and feel — whatever two species felt in such places that transcended — whatever two species found to fight about.
He felt less abraded and confused, at least, in the memory-bath. He regretted lost chances — messages unsent: he wondered what Mospheira would think if he asked the international operators to patch him through to the ranger station above Mt. Allen Thomas Resort.
He imagined what contortions the spies on both sides of the strait would go through trying to figure out that code. It all but tempted him.
But he lived his life nowadays just hoping that things he remembered were intact, unchanged, still viable in a rapidly evolving world. He tried to reckon what the man's age had been. He couldn't remember the man's name. The paidhi — with all his trained memory — couldn't recall the man's name.
More, he was afraid to learn the man might have left, or died. He lived all his life somewhere else — afraid to know something he'd left, if he tried to access it, might have changed — or died.
And that particular cowardice was his defense against all that could get to him.
God, what a morass of reasoning. Sometimes —
Sometimes he was such a construction of his own carefully constructed censorships and restraints he didn't know whether there any longer was a creature named Bren Cameron, or whether what he chose to let bubble to the reflective surface of his past defined the modern man, and the rest of him was safely drowned under that shiny surface that swallowed childhood ambitions, childhood dreams, childhood so-called friends — about whom he didn't like to think —
Was thatthe origin of his capacity to turn off that human function and look for something else?
Strip those pieces away and he guessed there wouldn't be a whole man left. Break down the constructions he'd made of his memories and something essential went — that old business with the ranger station, that was a stone that held up other stones, and it would mean something calamitous to him if the man was dead, he supposed — thatwas why he instinctually tucked it close and wouldn't change it, the way he wouldn't change other things, not the hurts, not the flip down the snowy slope that had provided his first experience with mortality, and crutches, not slipping off a mossy stone on a summer hike on the mountain, either, and squishing back to camp in an experience that gave a portrait of the fabled Terraces textures and temperatures and value in his adult and harried mind.
He didn't know what damn good it did to accumulate more and more experiences like that as you lived, so that you could forget them all when you died — unless somehow what mattered was doing something with them: the older you got, the wiser you grew, the more power you got within your hands.
Maybe that was what it meant. Doing something.
Young, you ran the risks the way he'd gone up on that mountain; fresh from college you ran the risks you knew about because you had life to spare and nothing touched the truly fortunate; experienced in infighting and with more power to screw things up than you ever wanted — you sweated blood, and questioned every damn step of the way, foresaw/remembered the disasters, and kept on the track and kept sweating and trying to do your job only because you knew the young and the educated didn't remotely know where they were going.
The ranger might have his own reasons for climbing up there. But he'd gone up that night after a kid who might have made it on his own, and, who knew? Being a kid all the same: maybe if he'd made it on his own, he might have been the same cocksure disaster as Hanks was.
Or he might have tried hiking up there again in a storm, with less luck, in which case, no Bren, Hanks would have succeeded Wilson, Tabini would have been dealing with her and all history might be different. The ranger who'd trekked up the hill in the driving rain hadn't been interested in returning starships and international crises, and probably wouldn't have stopped to listen to a protestation Bren was going to be somebody vital — he'd have just said, as he had said, "Here, kid, get warm."
That man hadn't counted on knowing the outcome of what he did. He'd done what he did for the reasons that brought him to the mountain. He might have hauled a hundred kids down off the trails. He might not know that he'd saved a life. Or damned the planet to lose what he valued.