Her father would learn about the storm soon enough, because he had begun to talk to the Helper.
Still, Rachel thought, he was so fragile…
She wondered why he had resisted the offer of immortality—why anybody had. But she didn’t submit the question to the Greater World, where there might have been an answer; she didn’t want to dwell on it more tonight.
There was not much left of her time on the cradle Earth, and Rachel wanted to make the most of these hours.
Not everyone relished the flesh. Many had already abandoned it—whole towns, in some cases, some as large as Buchanan. Buchanan itself was largely empty and would be emptier by the day. But some chose to linger… a leavetaking made strange by personal transformation, in some cases, like the group hidden in the basement of the high school, some forty strong, who had elected to share each other’s memories in every detail. They were there still, cross-legged on the floor and welded at the fingertips; motionless, enraptured, waiting to surrender their joined flesh in a single communal act.
Others—mainly but not exclusively the young—just wanted to play a little longer on the surface of the Earth… stay up past bedtime, do what had been forbidden.
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.”