by John Farris
He felt his father release his hand. "You bloody well don't," Donal said. "Too much at stake yet. You'll be going back, and no nonsense about it. I do sympathize. As Pease wrote in his fine book on lion, 'You go out to Africa to see savages, and you find them only on your return.'"
"This is the world I want," Sherard said, staring at Gillian.
Gillian answered for all of them. "But this isn't a destination, Tom."
"What is it, then?"
"The country of memory. The 'mind-forest' of the old tribes. I thought you would be more comfortable meeting here than on the Astral plane; much too busy there. Too many distractions, some of them unpleasant if you haven't been much exposed to Astral travel."
"How long can I stay here?"
"Time isn't relevant," his father said, filling his pipe with Turkish tobacco, and his mother nodded.
"Time isn't linear either," Gillian said. "Then, Now, and There all exist simultaneously."
"You can see the future?" Tom asked, his eyes going from one face to another. "When will we all be together—I mean, can it be for as long as we want?"
"We have other lives now, Tom," his mother said gently. She made a motion with her spread hand and he saw the memory-earth vanish beneath her booted feet, saw a universe of nebulae glowing with life. "Out there," she said. Deborah looked at her husband. "As a matter of fact, I think we should be going. Tom and Gillian have a great deal to talk about."
Donal nodded and glanced down at the pipe he'd been about to light.
"Yes, of course, you're right. But I was looking forward to a few puffs on the old corncob. Well." He put the pipe back into a pocket of his bush jacket and held out his hand again to Tom. The old watchdog barked hoarsely, and turned into a nebula himself.
His father disappeared as Tom was clinging to his hand. He turned to his mother, seeing only her smiling elliptical eyes in a dazzle of starlight. He whispered something, longingly. Then he felt Gillian's arm slip inside his.
"Do you have another life?" he asked desperately. "Are you going to disappear on me too? Tell me who you are, and where in the world I can find you. I will find you."
She laughed. "No, Tom. I'm still Gillian. But not for much longer. My stay in the Astral is almost over. Then I'll choose—whatever life is most useful to the growth of my soul. Then, or There."
"Then? The past?"
"I can as easily be born five hundred years ago—earth time—as five hundred years in the future. Then or There, it's all the same, really: the same battles we fight over and over. Only the hellish technology changes, never the lusts and social ambitions. Our earthly tribulations seem to be ordained by genetics, no matter how hard the Enlightened Ones work to straighten out the human race." She shook her head in a moment of despair. "No, you won't find me. You'll be earthbound in Now for a while. But ... I make that sound much harder and gloomier than it deserves to be." Gillian smiled. "There's always love, Tom, and the children I couldn't give to you."
"I don't know what you—"
"Shall I show you some of your future, Tom? Do you seriously want to know?"
"Did you realize that you were going to die that day in New York?"
"Consciously, no. But I'd been preparing myself since the birth of Eden."
"You didn't know about her!"
She turned to face him. "It wasn't needful for me to know Eden during my earth-span. I would have been a danger to her when she didn't have the means to defend herself. Instead I tutored her on the Astral plane. She has great soul-strength, loyal friends, and a purpose, if only she will accept it. That's where you come in, Tom. You have two women in your life now. Beautiful, headstrong, gifted. Both need you. One of them you will marry."
"One—? But—I thought—who are you talking—"
Gillian kissed him. He was sure of that. But when he tried to pull her closer she wasn't there anymore. He heard only the whisper of her voice; or was that too just another memory, fading along with the landscape, a ghostly flight of egrets from the river's edge, the waning sun?
"Tom?" Two anxious faces in Sherard's hospital cubicle, dawn at the window.
"Where've I been?" he asked thickly, remembering so little.
"You were moving your toes," Bertie said, ecstatic tears on her face.
"You'll be out of here in no time," Eden Waring confirmed. She looked as if she hadn't slept for a couple of days. Exhausted, the left eye turning in, she was still a beauty. Made in the image of her mother. The face he had adored for twelve years, and would never tire of seeing.
Bertie held one of his hands, Eden the other.
His life, Sherard knew, could become very complicated if he wasn't careful. Stalwart was the word Katharine Bellaver had used.
Nothing like a serious dilemma of the heart to bring out the iron in a man's character.
He smiled gratefully at the women, and concentrated on moving his toes.
CHAPTER 36
BIG COUNTRY RANCH • JUNE 14 • 7:20 A.M. MDT
Rona was leading her roan filly Sun Dancer out of the barn when she heard the Secret Service agent named Bannister calling her. She put her foot in the stirrup and swung into the saddle, looked down at Bannister as he hurried to catch up. The other agent on the morning detail, Gorman, followed Bannister. They wore new Wranglers and western-style shirts with mother-of-pearl snap buttons. It was obvious from their expressions that running in new pairs of boots hurt their feet.
"Where're we riding to this morning?" Bannister asked her with a friendly smile. Wasn't even as old as her son Joshua.
"I'm doing the riding, and I don't want company. I told you and I told your boss, I'll tolerate having you on the place as long as you don't get in my way. Otherwise I'm not obligated."
"Yes, ma'am. We thought—"
"And I don't believe either of you has ever been on a horse in his life. While you're hanging around Big Country, take a few lessons. Jess will fix you up with mounts you can handle."
"When can we expect you back, Mrs. Harvester?" Gorman asked.
"For the last time. This is my ranch. I come and go as I please, and I can take care of myself."
"Yes, ma'am."
Rona walked Sun Dancer to the pipe gate across the road. Gorman hastened to open it. They and the others hadn't been posted to Big Country to protect her, Rona knew that. They were there to spy on her. But she wasn't fooled.
Sun Dancer knew what Rona wanted on her morning rides, which trails to take. Three or four miles of cantering, then a level gallop for another two miles to Gunflint Spring, which fed one of the creeks flowing across the Big Country range. Easy work for Sun Dancer, who was an Arabian and Russian Orlov cross, bred for endurance racing and difficult terrain.
Thirty-six hours ago it had snowed, a late-spring storm. The snow was half-gone already. The sun was about to rise to join the last-quarter moon in a dawn-pink sky.
Yesterday the bandages had been removed from her rebuilt nose. Beneath the brim of the Stetson her glum eyes were still rimmed in yellow and streaky purple. Rona hadn't wanted to look at herself in any mirror. Her morale was at the vanishing point already although she still had fits of rage, like a badger she'd seen once. Three days with his hind feet locked in a poaching trap, wearing down but still snapping at the steel, snarling at the odor and sight of men and horses. The rage was bad, she knew that, not only an ordeal for the heart but it kept her from thinking of a way out of the trap Buck Hannafin had sprung on her.
Rona was wearing a scarf around her head under her Stetson with the beaded headband, a red and black lumber jacket. Sun Dancer wore a turquoise blanket and breast plate. Temperature was in the mid-thirties, breath of horse and rider steaming as Sun Dancer's hooves crunched through the frozen patches of snow remaining on the ground. But the lupine spikes and buttercups already in profusion had weathered the brief storm. The stock had not been bothered much either. She heard a saw-whet owl, bedding down for the day in a stand of gambel oak. The grama grass was tipped with frost beginning
to dazzle as daylight came to the range.
She was only forty-seven. She could go where Clint had gone before her. Run for office in her home state. Free herself from the trap, one foot at a time. Then try for the presidency. They couldn't just throw her out of the White House like a common indigent, like trailer trash, and get away with it. That was not her destiny. The American people believed in Rona Harvester. They would come to her rescue. Even without Victor she knew . . . But first she had to kill Buck Hannafin. Kill him, kill him! AND STOMP HIS GLOATING FACE UNTIL HIS BLOOD WAS HALFWAY TO HER KNEES NOTHING LEFT NOT AN EYEBALL OR A PIECE OF BRIDGEWORK FROM HIS FAT INSULTING MOUTH—
Rona's heartbeat had accelerated madly. Now wait. Don't go off like that. Maybe it was the stuff they were giving her for pain. She didn't know if she needed Percocet anymore, but she craved it. For the pain of her crippled psyche.
Another horseman caught her attention, probably because he wasn't moving. His chestnut mount snorted smoke-breath along a ridge of black alder perhaps a quarter of a mile away. She didn't recognize the rider's lean silhouette, but there were no fat working cowboys in this country. It was the flat-crowned hat he wore. None of the Big Country's hands owned such a hat. The chestnut had a white face, she could tell that much at the distance. He wasn't from their remuda. So it was someone cutting across their range, which wasn't unusual. Was he watching her? Hard to say, but she felt a deeper chill next to the bone.
She spurred Sun Dancer away from the ridge and the unknown horseman and into their finishing run down to the cottonwoods by the spring, the small pond dotted with wood ducks. A flock of partridge blew out of the tall grass beside the trail as Sun Dancer passed. Wind whipped Rona's sore eyes, drew tears, momentarily blinded her as she leaned over his neck and gave herself to the thrill of the gallop.
When she dismounted the sun was full and flashing through the lacy pale green boughs of the tall cottonwoods. No wind yet. Ice still caked the spring spillway, the sedges that grew in the small pond below. Rona broke a thin layer of ice with the heel of her boot so that Sun Dancer could drink. There was a flare of light across the misted, ghostly surface of the partially iced pond. Some heifers with calves trailing them were on the move a hundred yards to the east. Rona glanced down, saw an exquisitely frosted dragonfly frozen to a blade of grass. Then she caught a glimpse of herself, a bright reflection off rim ice, and turned quickly away, looking back through the cottonwoods.
Her heart jumped. The chestnut with the white blaze she had noticed ten minutes ago was now fifty yards away, standing in the same attitude as if teleported, but riderless now. The chestnut was half-concealed by the trunks of the cottonwoods and buckbrush where the pond drained across a beaver dam and flowed south as Gunflint Creek. Robins flickered in and out of the hazy sunlight.
She heard a crunch of boots in thin crusts of snow. Sun Dancer raised his dripping muzzle from the pond and looked around, whinnied softly. The riderless chestnut answered.
"Hello?" Rona said cautiously.
Someone walked toward her out of the trees, backlighted by the brightening sun. She recognized the flat-crowned hat.
Rona stepped nearer her horse and the .30-.30 rifle sheathed behind the saddle.
"Oh, dear. I've startled you. I'm sorry."
A lightweight voice; he sounded gay.
"Who are you?"
When he spoke again, his voice had changed: it sounded as if he were mimicking her. Rona's blood simmered in annoyance.
"But how could you not know?"
"Why don't you just stay right where you are?" Rona said, a hand on the familiar nicked stock of the carbine.
"Oh! Oh, my God! What happened? The eyes. Oh! No no no! Our beautiful face! Who did this to us?"
Rona trembled from shock, as if an earthquake had rumbled beneath her feet.
"I said, who are you?"
"Oh, don't try to sell me that. You know very well."
A gloved hand came up and swept off the flat-crowned hat. Then the other hand went to work, busy, busy, unpinning the tightly bunned hair. A shake of the head to settle the ash-blond tresses around the face.
"That's better. Now you simply mustn't tease any longer by pretending that you don't know." A stylish sideways move, turn of the head, face finding the light of the sun and taking on a basking glow.
"I'm you," the assassin temporarily known as Rona Harvester said, waving both gloved hands prettily, prancing a little on the snow-crisp ground. "And you're me, except for those awful bruises. And the two of us—" He danced closer to Rona. "We're ... wheeeeee!"
Rona had the rifle out of its fringed leather scabbard and was lever-cocking it as she turned back to the apparition with her face—so faithfully and uncannily reproduced. Something hit her solidly in the chest, a flat rock from the heft of it; she was knocked backward and sat down through the ice at the edge of the pond.
"Mustn't," the assassin chided as he sprang toward her and twisted the carbine from Rona's gloved hands. Rona gasped for breath, turning cold to the roots of her hair. The assassin stepped back and emptied the rifle, twinkling brass falling to the ground. "Now if you'll just change that tune, I'll be happy to tanggg-go."
"Get away . . . from me you . . . fuckin' freak. Help! Help! Somebody! Help me!"
The assassin took off his riding gloves. Displayed his shapely painted nails.
"Like 'em? I went through reams of magazine articles and finally telephoned one of the R Team to find out the exact shade to use."
"Fuck you fuckyoufuck—"
"Oh, darling, if only I could, I would be in bliss forever. Unfortunately, and this is just between we, it's so small it hangs out the back. Now what do we think? Honest opinion, please. Have we ever seen us done up so beautifully? No, no! Now you must stop that screaming." The assassin gave Rona a long thoughtful look. "It is time to embrace the facts. Because, realistically, there can only be one of us. So I'll leave it up to . . . you . . . to choose . .. who."
He seized Rona by the shoulders and dragged her a few feet along the pond to where the ice still formed an unbroken reflective surface. He turned her, a hand gripping the back of her neck, pushed her down close to her sad discolored image on the ice.
Then the face she'd had before her nose was shattered appeared over one shoulder like the moon rising past a dusky bluff. A double image of Rona Harvester registered in her shocked mind. Before. After.
"I know it hurts you to look," he said soothingly, his breath in her cold ear. "But don't you worry. I shall do everything I can to perpetuate our legend. Too bad you can't be there to see it—" The position of his hands changed. One hand gripped her chin. The other was pressed flat against the side of her head away from him. "When we make our debut in Vegas."
Rona Harvester heard a hawk cry out. She felt the tension building at the top of her spine. But this couldn't happen! He/she didn't look strong enough to—
She heard her neck snap. It was the last sound she heard as a red the color of blood lit up her eyes. Followed, almost instantaneously, by eternal darkness.
CHAPTER 37
SHUNGWAYA •LAKE NAIVASHA, KENYA • OCTOBER 6 • 1410 HOURS ZULU
E-mail message
Betts Waring to Eden Waring
Good morning! Or, I guess, while it's still sleepytime here must be afternoon over there. The videotapes were, as always, wonderful. I look at the new ones every night, not without a few tears I have to admit. I know, I have my tickets already and I can't stop flappin' my wings. I've handed over my patients to Zan Fortner, the legal stuff is almost concluded. I've already packed your diploma. About all the animals. Giraffes and zebras and even those cheetahs that come around at night I can take in stride. But isn't it just a little dangerous, hippos grazing so close to the house? Does the colobus monkey you seem to be wearing on your shoulder in most of your close-ups have a name? He looks unsettlingly like my late uncle Norbert. Maybe there is something to transmigration.
You know that Africa was always Riley's dream destina
tion. Wouldn't be surprised if he wangles a weekend pass from the Gatekeeper and drops by while I'm there. If he does, I'll know somehow.
Eden looked up from the E-mail printout she was reading on the veranda of the lakeside house that, apparently, was forever going to be under construction and wiped an eye, gazed for a few moments at the blue folds of the low mountains across a mile of lake. The screech of a fish eagle sounded above the racket of hammering and sawing on the guest wing of the house. The construction crew was sheathing the framework in Kenyan cypress. The copper for the roof had just arrived on a lorry and was being unloaded. Up to her to do the supervising, while Tom Sherard was in Nairobi visiting his physical therapist and Bertie was in Mombasa on a shoot for the Spanish Vogue.
There were servants at Shungwaya to look after her, and an assortment of large dogs for protection, but she had been lonely the night before, missing Betts and everyone else, staying up late to read Dinesen's Shadow on the Grass and something by Joy Adamson, an epitaph for a beloved lion that spoke poignantly of Africa's true magic:
The wind, the wind,
the heavenly child,
Softly going over the stone,
It strokes and kisses the lonesome night
In which a deep secret lies bewitched.
Eden sniffed back tears, felt a tiny buzz inside her navel. She frowned and chopped a hand sharply through the air.
I'm busy. Not now.
She resumed rereading Betts's E-mail.
No, not a sign of or a word from Geoff McTyer, but then he wouldn't dare, would he? Don't know why you still give him so much as a passing thought. As time goes by memories of last May grow fainter here in Innisfall. Not to say you've been forgotten. The legend, or myth, or whatever you want to call it, continues to grow. The pitiful ones still come around, stand in the road and stare at the house. Some leave notes asking for miracles. A few have tried to come over the fence, but the Blackwelder people put a quick stop to that activity.