Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  Doris shook her head. There was one dress that she tried on, a slim pale-blue cotton shift that Jean had worn only once. “It will be my wedding gown,” Doris said, turning slowly before the mirror. She was very lovely, the blue exactly the right color to show off her glowing skin and lustrous hair. Jean rummaged some more, until she found jewelry, a purse, scarves, everything she could think of that would go with the dress.

  There were gifts for friends, and gifts for the tribe, and then other things that she thought they might find useful.

  Weeks passed quickly, the nights began to have a distinct chill now, although it was still August, and Jean began to consider what she would do when Robert came back. Doris would go with him, and she, Jean, what would she do? The bus back to Portland, to what?

  There was only the question, no answer.

  Then Cluny came. They had been up in the hills overlooking Bend, and when they returned they saw a black camper in the driveway. A very tall man was wandering about the yard. They watched him walk to the bluff and stare down at the dry riverbed; moving again, they lost sight of him as their path took them behind trees and boulders on their way to Lon Speir’s small corral, where Jean’s grandfather had always kept a few horses. They dismounted and left their own horses there.

  “Who is he?”

  “I don’t know,” Jean said, pumping water for their horses. And yet, she thought, uneasily, he was familiar somehow. They started toward the house. For a moment she wanted to turn and follow the river to Robert’s camp high in the Cascades, to hide there, be safe there forever. Her pace slackened as the thought came to her, but she put it aside abruptly and continued onward.

  “My God!” Cluny cried when he saw them approach. “You are exactly the same!”

  He hardly even saw the Indian girl with Jean after a swift glance at her. But Jean! He couldn’t believe anyone could be unchanged after fifteen years! Her hair was shorter, and bleached almost white by the sun, but her body was still very small, deceptively delicate looking; there was the scattering of freckles across her nose, the boyish way of moving with strides longer than women usually took. Her dark blue eyes regarded him now with the same quizzical expression he remembered, the expression that had made him feel awkward as a boy, as if she knew more about him than he did, and felt a mixture of skepticism and amusement about what she knew.

  Jean resisted memory briefly, then yielded, and somewhere she felt as if a door were closing, another one opening with the return of memory. “Cluny?”

  “You remember me!” He rushed toward her and lifted her off the ground, swept her in a circle as if she were a child, laughing in relief and with a curious pleasure that he could not define. It was as if the intervening time had been obliterated, the unhappiness, the pain, the bitterness all erased by a simple return to a past that might have been.

  And although he could not know it, and she did not examine it for a long time, this one spontaneous act of joy propelled her through the newly opened doorway irrevocably.

  When he put her down, they were both laughing hard. “Do you remember . . . ?” they both started, and laughed even harder.

  “My line,” Cluny said. “God, it’s good to see you! What are you doing out here?”

  She hesitated briefly, then said, “Teaching at the reservation. And you’ve been living in space.”

  With the words came unspoken words that she tried to ignore and could not. Why had he come here? What did they want? She had no doubt that he had been sent. Gently she withdrew her hands from his and turned to Doris. “He’s a friend from my childhood,” she said. “And a famous space scientist, astronaut.” She looked at Cluny. “What do you call yourselves?”

  He wanted to take her hands again, to laugh with her, be children once more, but the spell was broken; she had retreated, no longer the child she had been, but suddenly the woman she had become, and he no longer knew her.

  CHAPTER

  14

  CLUNY was not alone. He introduced his traveling companion, Ward Blenko, who owned the van and the equipment in it. Ward was a shy man of fifty or so, frail looking and hesitant in his speech.

  “They’re writing a Wasco-to-English dictionary,” Cluny told him. “Isn’t that the kind of thing you’re set up to do overnight?”

  “Not overnight, please. But fast. What are you actually doing?”

  “I’ll show you,” Jean said and took him to the dining room table to explain.

  Cluny waited, thinking very hard. Nothing was turning out as he had expected. Leo Arkins had said Jean was a rabbity little girl looking for a safe hole to crawl into. Arkins was totally controlled by the Army now, had hardly found time to talk to Cluny at all, and then only in the company of a lieutenant, who had pretended to be busy with the files. And Arkins had sent him to Schmidt. He might know where she had gone to get her degree, to finish her education, he had said, dismissing the entire subject.

  Schmidt had turned out to be a round-faced man who was overworked and tired but with an underlying ebullience that had shown through. At first he had not been willing to talk about Arkins, his work, Jean, anything at all. They had met in his office and he had taken Cluny for a walk on campus. Even here, Cluny had thought, no one talked where there might be listeners, bugs. The thought had filled him with a sense of depression that was not defined enough to identify, but existed as a curious heaviness of spirit, as if the air pressure had increased.

  “Arkins is quite mad now,” Schmidt said. “He’s a prisoner and nothing’s going well, the work is dead and they think it’s his fault, that he’s using faulty methods, or somehow sabotaging the project. It’s not his fault. It never went well until Jean went to work for him. No one else ever replicated his results, no one ever will, not without Jean or someone like her. He started denying her role through jealousy, you know. But then at the end he protected her. Who can understand such a man?”

  They had talked again the next afternoon, and then Cluny had got in touch with Zach. “Only two people besides Arkins know how much she was involved with Arkins’ work,” he said. “And they aren’t talking about it. Schmidt says no one can translate that kind of a message without a key. Period. He also says Jean can probably tell if it’s a hoax, and read it if it is. Do I still follow your itinerary, or go directly for her?”

  “Schmidt can’t even tell if it’s a fake?” Zach asked in disgust.

  “Maybe in enough time, and he’d be willing to try, but it probably can’t be kept secret because his computer is accessed by almost everyone, and he’s sure there’s a running review of his work. The Army is still interested because he tried to replicate Arkins’ work, even though he failed. They seem to think he might try again, with better results next time.”

  “Go after the girl,” Zach had said tersely. “Can you get her to cooperate?”

  Cluny assured him that he could, and he followed her trail to Newtown. No one in the hospital could remember her, and no one objected when he demanded the computer printout of her record. He read it through with his jaw so hard and tight it hurt for hours afterward. When he left the administration building he stood outside the door for a long time looking at the Newtown, blurred with dust clouds that rose and fell over the countless, nearly naked children playing in the streets. Two teen-aged girls eyed him, then started to approach purposefully, and he turned and strode away, filled with a nameless rage.

  He went from there to visit Jean’s mother. Stephanie had grown old. He remembered her as a vivacious, pretty woman, and now she was gray—hair, skin; even her aura, he thought, was gray. She had become an alcoholic, had remarried and divorced twice, had been hospitalized two times for unspecified causes. Nervous breakdowns, nervous fatigue, exhaustion . . .

  She did not know where Jean was. They had not been in touch for the past few years, not enough to keep up, she said. Jean had quit her job at the university, and had gone on a trip to visit her grandparents. When Cluny told her Jean’s grandparents were dead, she looked at him blankly
.

  Stephanie’s sister was a bit more helpful. “She had some kind of drug therapy,” she said, indicating Stephanie. “She doesn’t remember things too well. Jean wrote that her grandfather died and left her the house on the desert. She was going out there to look it over. We haven’t heard since.”

  “Could she have stayed out there?”

  Stephanie laughed. “Exactly the kind of thing she’d do. Go hide there in the desert.”

  Cluny’s orders had been to fly to San Francisco, to contact Ward Blenko and drive up to Bend with him to locate Jean. Blenko had listened attentively to the requirements: a computer that could be relied upon to take the programs Schmidt had given Cluny and spew out the miles of printout with variations of sentences. He had nodded and a few days later said he was ready to move. In the van he had a computer, a generator, cooking facilities, a refrigerator and space to sleep two.

  “Gas could be a problem,” he had said apologetically. “But your papers should get it for us, if it’s available at all.”

  Cluny had expected to find Jean in bad shape, a recluse hiding from the world, burying herself in the past, possibly as crazy as her mother. Instead she was healthy and vital in a way he could not fathom. She looked like the girl he had gone swimming with hundreds of times when they had both lived in Florida, lean and muscular, suntanned with high color in her cheeks, her eyes very clear and penetrating.

  He watched her now, sitting at the dining room table with Doris and Ward, head bent over the papers they were examining, the high curve of her cheek, her rather long neck. She looked up at Ward and laughed at something he had said. Doris laughed also, and they all returned to the papers.

  “Is it something you can handle for them?” Cluny asked then, impatient for them to finish, impatient to get Jean alone and start the real business.

  “No sweat,” Ward said. “Doris and I can run it through in a couple of days, get it ready for the printers in a week.” Doris shook her head at him. “It’s much harder than you think. Sometimes Jean and I talk about a word all morning because I want to define it by walking all around it, and in a dictionary that can’t be done. There’s no way to alphabetize holes. Jean finally points at the word we need. I can’t do it alone.”

  “You prepared for company for a couple of weeks?” Cluny asked. In his frustration he sounded sullen. To hell with it, he thought.

  “Of course. There’s a spare room upstairs, and we have enough to eat, enough water.”

  “Oh, we have everything we need in the van,” Ward said hastily, his shyness returning. “I’ll stay out there.”

  “And I’ll take the couch, if that’s part of the offer,” Cluny said. “Ward, why don’t you show Doris where you’ll be working. I’ll help Jean get some dinner under way.”

  Ward looked at Doris, then away. “Do you want to see it?”

  “Oh, yes,” she said, laughing. To Jean she added in Wasco, “He’s a little boy in an old body, isn’t he?”

  They started out, but Ward stopped at the door. “Uh, Jean, don’t use any of your food stocks. We have enough stuff in the van to feed an army. Let me make dinner. We’ll bring it in when we come back.” They left before Jean could respond.

  “He just wants to show,off his electronic marvels,” Cluny said. “You know, you look exactly like you used to when we went swimming off the Cape?”

  “Surely not. I remember myself as a scrawny kid, always sunburned, with a peeling nose.”

  “Just the same,” he said firmly.

  “Thanks,” she said, dryly. “I needed that.” She regarded him steadily for a moment, then moved past him to the living room and sat down. “Why are you here, Cluny? This isn’t exactly the sort of place where people just happen to be passing.”

  She was surprised at his awkwardness. She had not wanted to know about the reopening of Alpha, but it had imposed itself upon her consciousness and she had known about it, had known that he was responsible. Yet he was as awkward as a boy now.

  “You’re right,” he said then. “I was looking for you. I tracked you down to Bend. Simple?”

  She shook her head. “Too simple. The question is why, not what you did.”

  “An overwhelming urge to see you? A need to rekindle the past? Loneliness?” She was shaking her head gently, not willing to play his game. “I have a job for you,” he said then.

  “I don’t want it. I already have a job of my own.”

  “Wait until you learn what it is.”

  “It doesn’t really matter. It has something to do with Alpha, doesn’t it? Isn’t that your life now? I’m not interested.”

  That part still held, he thought. She still hated anything to do with the satellite. It must also be true that she was still crazy about her father, his memory, still blamed the government, and his father, for that fatal accident. He felt a bit relieved now; he had been thrust into a situation that had turned out to be altogether different from what he had expected. He had anticipated finding her withdrawn and frightened, as neurotic as her mother, or even worse, consumed by hate and fear, and instead she was self-confident and too assured, too cool.

  He had been prepared to offer her protection, he realized; he had felt pleased that he could rescue her, give her security, care for her as he would care for a little sister. He admired the defenses she had erected and at the same time knew he had to smash them down again. He knew she was hiding her fear behind this mask of self-assurance; she could not have forgotten so soon the terrible things that had happened to her in Newtown. Some people crumpled the way Stephanie Brighton had done, into neuroses or even madness, alcoholism, addictions; others built walls. He would help her in spite of herself, but first, he thought with a touch of wryness, he had to make her realize she needed his help.

  “Let’s leave it until tomorrow,” he said. “There’s time. Tell me about yourself, what you’ve been doing, your work with Arkins. I talked to him. He’s a maniac, a prisoner, going nowhere.”

  “He was always a maniac. He could hide it most of the time, but there it was, always waiting for a chance to leap out and assert itself.”

  The room was growing dark and an evening chill was in the air. The wind had started to whine through the windows. Jean went over and closed both windows and the door, then started to arrange dry sticks in the fireplace. “How short the days are getting,” she said. “It can get awfully cold at night here.” She put a match to the sticks and they caught and flared; flames leaped, danced over the large logs already in place. “The only thing there’s no shortage of is wood. We do keep warm.”

  Cluny felt his frustration build as she continued to dominate the conversation, keep it turned toward safe topics. “I talked to Dr. Schmidt also,” he said deliberately. “He thinks you were the sole reason for any success Arkins ever had.”

  “Is he still at Northwestern? It seems so long ago, another lifetime since I thought of all that.”

  “I went to the Chicago Newtown along the way,” Cluny went on, but she seemed not to be listening now.

  She looked at him, smiling. “Do you remember that time on the Cape that we got past the guards and went down to the beach? Past all the stages of rocket launchings? Right back to the stone age of space flight, where they had the holes in the ground and bunkers with slits to watch through. Remember that gunboat that spotted us, how someone stood on deck watching us through binoculars all the time we were there until they came for us in the jeep? I was so afraid they’d put us in jail. I wrote my will that night, thinking they’d come for us the next day. I remember changing the part where I had left you my stamp collection. I decided if you were in jail you’d have no more use for it than I did, so I left it to Peter Middleton instead. I thought we’d die in jail. I thought everyone did.”

  “I thought my father would kill me,” Cluny said, laughing with her. “He said we had been swimming on Shark Bar, where every shark in the Atlantic congregates in the summer. You were only a kid, eight, nine. I tried to get you to stay behind,
remember?”

  “I thought that was unfair. But I was a little mad at you for making us jail bait.”

  “Remember that reception where you wore your bathing suit under your long white dress? And I got mustard on my lapel and all day I had to hold my hand over it?”

  “You looked like someone ready to pledge allegiance at the drop of a hat.”

  “And you itched. You kept scratching.”

  “My bathing suit was wet; sand was under it.”

  They became silent for a few moments, lost again in the shared past.

  “My father used to talk to me about you, about spending too much time with a little girl, and I tried to make him understand that you weren’t a little girl. I don’t know what I thought you were.”

  “We had a lot in common. We could talk. My father understood that, I think.”

  “Yeah, he probably did. He was looser than my father was.”

  This time the silence lengthened, and was broken by the sound of the back door opening, closing, and Doris’s voice.

  “Jean, you wouldn’t believe the machine he has! It’s like a magic box. And he has food like nothing I’ve ever seen. It comes in tiny pouches and it looks like . . . like . . .” She stopped, then finished in Wasco: “Like dry cow dung.”

  Jean laughed.

  Ward looked pleased with himself. “Freeze dried,” he said. “We have here a gourmet meal for four, to be served instantly.”

  There were asparagus spears in butter, veal cutlets with mushrooms, creamy potatoes, hot rolls, a raspberry tart and coffee. They scraped every dish clean.

  Cluny lay on the couch watching the fire across the room. The flames were very low, hissing, now and then showering the fire screen with sparks. The room was warm, but it would be cold before morning, Jean had said, tossing two blankets onto the couch for him. She had said also that probably they would awaken him in the morning, and if he was not yet ready to get up he should roll over and sleep some more. There had been no hint of apology in the words; it had been a statement of fact.