Please god, any god, all gods, whatever. Let this work.
When she looks up at the screen again, there is a match. Her hands shaking, she watches the symbols stream across the screen, matching her search criterion letter for letter, digit for digit. Then they begin to change: a related command, but different.
Yes. Yes! A small, cautious voice in the back of her mind warns her that this may not be what she is searching for, but she refuses to believe it. The information flows steadily, varying from the prototype command here, identical there. Abruptly it stops.
Kirsten runs the match again, and again the code plays out before reaching the end of the command. Incomplete. Kirsten runs it a third time. Still incomplete. A fourth time. Nothing is different. She has part of the code, no more. She lowers her forehead to her clenched hands again, and silent, bitter tears slip down her cheeks.
After a time, she raises her eyes and turns off the computer. If she does not have the complete code, she has at least a part of it and can perhaps build on that when her mind is rested. She is realist enough to know that she can accomplish nothing of worth in her present state of exhaustion. Rising, she takes her jacket from the row of hooks by the back door and whistles Asi to her side. He all but knocks her down, jostling her against the door frame, as he bounds out onto the carport and down the snow-powdered street, turning to wait for her half a block away, tongue lolling, breath clouding in the frosty air.
Angry at her failure and at herself, refusing to think, Kirsten allows Asimov to choose their itinerary. He leads her through the half-derelict housing section, where vehicles that have not moved since the day of the uprising remain shrouded in snow and abandoned homes stand open to the elements. There has been no time to set them to rights or to reclaim what might be salvaged. No time, and no people. Those that are left have more immediate concerns.
At the end of a cul-de-sac, Asi veers away from the residential area into a strip of woodland growing on the banks of a long, narrow pond. The water, frozen now, gleams in the low sun with swirls of gold and crimson . Fire, Kirsten thinks. Fire in the lake.
Sudden overthrow. Revolution.
As omens go, it is a bit belated.
And no damned use in any case.
Asimov dances ahead of her, running a short distance, turning, barking, running again. Glad to be free of the confines of the house, clearly wanting to play. Too well trained to ignore him, Kirsten picks up a fallen limb a yard long and breaks it over her knee into shorter segments. “Asi!” she calls, “Fetch!”
She pitches the stick ahead of them some fifteen feet, and Asi bounds through the snow after it, for all the world as if it mattered to him. He returns, grinning around the piece of branch, and drops it at her feet, looking up at her expectantly. She picks it up again and feints a throw. He wheels to run but stops in his tracks when she fails to release the stick, looking back at her reproachfully. Twice more she pulls her throw, then sends the improvised toy sailing ahead through the bare trees. Asi follows like a shot, sailing over the small rise that may be only a drift or a may be a massive tree root under the snow and racing down the long line of naked sycamores that mark the edge of the water in warmer seasons. Kirsten slogs after him, clambering over the hump that does indeed feel like ancient, twisted wood beneath her feet. It is knobbed and knotted with age, and it takes all her attention to keep her balance as she climbs cautiously up and over to the other side, stumbling slightly when her foot catches on a protrusion near the ground. She flings out her arms to balance herself, fails, and sprawls in the snow. It is only when she is on her feet again and brushing herself off again that she realizes that Asi is nowhere to be seen.
“Asi! Asimov! Come!”
No answer.
“Asi! Come! Now!” Her voice rises and breaks with something near panic.
Still no Asimov, but from some yards ahead and to her left, she hears a high-pitched, plaintive whine. Following his prints, she trails him to the trunk of a huge tree whose bare branches extend almost halfway across the narrow inlet of the pond, where a feeder stream flows into it. He sits beneath the sycamore , staring upward, his tail brushing a half-circle in the loose powder that covers the frozen water. He whines again, this time almost pleadingly.
Twenty feet up, a raccoon sits in the fork of a branch. It is an older male, perhaps a third of Asimov’s size and weight, his fur fluffed about him for warmth. He nibbles delicately at an acorn, holding it with both long-fingered paws as he turns it around and around before his narrow muzzle. He pauses as Kirsten arrives, regarding her with eyes like molten gold from behind his black mask.
Unbidden, images tumble through her mind. A naked woman painted in blue spirals and sunbursts, brandishing a spear and a shield of polished bronze. Another woman, her face printed with the years and with wisdom, enveloped in a billow of vermilion silk like flame. A raised hand of not quite human form, and a voice on the churning wind. Turn back. The time is not yet.
Then they are gone, and she is standing under a tree with a disappointed dog and a raccoon who stares disdainfully down at them both , calmly eating his dinner.
Kirsten whistles, and this time Asimov obeys. They trudge back to the house through the gathering dark, as the eastern sky deepens to ultramarine and a flush of scarlet and purple still colors the west. The cold deepens as the sun slips finally beneath the horizon and the first stars appear. As Kirsten makes the final turn into Maggie’s street, Asimov breaks from her side and goes pelting down the block, baying like the hound of the Baskervilles.
A long-bedded, heavy blue truck is pulled up in the driveway, a blue truck with the insignia of the veterinarian’s V and caduceus just visible in the failing light.
Koda is back.
Without volition, Kirsten’s feet carry her forward at a pace just short of a jog. Her heart picks up its rhythm to match, her mouth suddenly dry. She watches as Koda slides out of the driver’s side of the pickup and is joined by a second figure, taller and broader shouldered, but with much the same erect carriage and proud tilt of the head. With a deliberate effort, Kirsten slows her pace and joins the two new arrivals just as Koda unlocks the kitchen door. Under the carport light, Kirsten can see the striking likeness of their features, and a small unacknowledged fear shrinks in upon itself and dies.
“Hi,” she says, as Koda turns to her with a smile. “Welcome back.”
“Well, look who the dog dragged in,” Koda teases gently, returning the smile as she reaches down to give Asi’s ears a good scratch. Asimov all but turns into jelly, and for the first time, Kirsten finds herself not minding so much that her dog has obviously fallen head over heels in love with this woman.
Much to Asi’s dismay, Koda all too soon retires her hand from scratching duty and lifts it to the doorknob instead. “Let’s get in out of the cold, shall we?”
A blast of warmth and light hits them all as the door swings open and the group steps inside. Asi immediately claims his place in front of the fireplace and begins to attack the large soupbone Maggie had left for him earlier. With a sigh of satisfaction, Koda places her heavy pack on the kitchen table and gestures for her brother to do the same. Then she turns her smile back to the young scientist. “Doctor King, this is my brother, Tacoma. Tacoma, this is Doctor Kirsten King.”
With a grin so identical to his sister’s that they could be—and should be—twins, Tacoma holds out a massive hand that gently engulfs Kirsten’s much smaller one. “A pleasure to meet you, Ma’am.”