Juniper Time

by Kate Wilhelm

  “Okay.” She typed the number again, and added, Olahuene, and then waited for Cluny to bring the message.

  He watched the visual scan process; the message began to appear on the screen. When it was completed Jean took out the original and handed it to him. He put it in the stainless steel sink and touched a match to it. It burned explosively to a fine gray powder, which he lifted out with a Kleenex and tossed into a trash bag.

  “You all set? I’ll be leaving in an hour.”

  She nodded. “I’ll try to have something by the time you get back, but you shouldn’t count on it.”

  “Yeah.” He turned to leave. At the door he looked back at her; she looked diminutive against the complex face of the computer. “Jean, I’m sorry about that day up on the hill.” He left fast, before she could reply; he was furious with himself. He had not intended to say that; it had not crossed his mind that he should, or that there was any real reason to apologize. Still angry, he stamped into the dead, deserted town and chatted morosely with the guardsmen while he waited for the bus.

  Jean worked all morning until she was interrupted by a soft knock on the door. It was Doris.

  “Will you stop for lunch? For a short walk? It’s not good for you to stay cramped up in there all day.”

  “In a minute,” Jean said and returned to the computer. She signaled the end of the work, added the code, Olahuene, and took out the cassette.

  “Look,” Doris said, pointing, when Jean walked into the yard. “Snow on the Sisters!”

  A faint white haze covered the peaks, brilliant in the sunshine. Jean caught her breath; maybe the weather would change now, maybe the drought would end.

  “Robert will be coming back soon,” Doris said. “Before Cluny returns, possibly.” She was gazing at the snow, the first sign of the approaching winter, the reunion of the tribe— Wesley from the Ochoco prairies, Robert from the Cascade slopes, others from the banks of the Columbia. . . . Her wedding would take place soon and there would be a week-long celebration: singing, dancing, a religious ceremony that would be a blend of Christianity and paganism.

  They ate lunch, Ward, Doris, and Jean, and by the time they were finished, the snow had vanished and the peaks were once more stark and barren. The wind shifted and blew in from the south, bringing the smell of alkali and blowing sand; the sun was very hot.

  “I thought I might take Ward to see Lava Butte,” Doris said, turning away from the mountains. “He’s never seen anything like it.”

  Lava Butte was a five-hundred-foot cinder cone with a perfect crater in its summit. “Why don’t you take the horses,” Jean said, leaving the kitchen. “They haven’t had enough exercise these past few weeks.”

  She returned to work. She was still incorporating Dr. Schmidt’s program in her cassette; it was slow, boring work, and she was anxious to be finished with this phase. English, Russian, French, she thought, studying the message as the computer silently, invisibly copied one tape onto another. English, Russian, French. Someone had written out a message in a natural language, and then coded it into those curved lines, eighty-one words or phrases. No hand had engraved those lines on the gold sheet; they were too precise, too perfect. A computer had guided the tool. Curves, arcs, pieces of circles . . .

  The computer signaled that she needed a second cassette. She inserted another one next to the first. Schmidt’s work duplicated what she and Arkins had done; she was familiar with all this material. Words, phrases in the three languages she would try first. Several thousand words; too many, she thought, but how to limit them?

  She studied the message intently on one screen, while the one next to it ran a continuous display indicating copying was being done.

  She blinked; the curves were starting to slither. She closed her eyes and rubbed them gently. Then she tried to get lines of identical sizes in groups, and there were none. All different? She tried for a gradation, starting with the longest line, going down to the shortest, and this came on the screen quickly. It looked like a schematic of a sound wave, a sonar reading. But the lines were too irregular in places, some curved more sharply than others. The transfer was completed then and she stopped playing with the lines and turned her attention to the next step in the program.

  It was no use, Jean thought that night in her room, too tense to go to sleep immediately. Eighty-one different symbols, no repeats at all, and she still didn’t even know if the groups of curves were single words, phrases, or paragraphs. Or nothing.

  The warm weather continued the next day, and the next. Doris was restless, bored with inactivity, anxious for Robert’s return.

  “It was all right when it was just you and me,” Doris said unexpectedly. “You are different, but not that different. At least you try to see the same things I do.”

  Jean waited, almost understanding what she was getting at.

  “But Ward,” Doris went on, struggling with the ideas, with the words she needed, lapsing into Wasco, back into English. “He looks and sees something that I don’t think is there. Or he doesn’t see what I know is there. I don’t understand it. He asks questions all the time, but they are the wrong questions. He makes me feel . . . inadequate? Something like that.”

  ‘‘I know what you mean,” Jean said. “They come out here and bring their culture with them and expect you to conform to it. It’s like Ward’s food. He would be horrified if he had to switch to your food. He’d get a bellyache.”

  Doris nodded soberly. “And he asks too many questions. All the time questions. Sometimes the same one with new words, as if I failed to satisfy him the first time. He thinks I don’t notice.”

  Jean felt a rush of anger with the realization that Ward must be treating Doris like a child, or a savage. “Turn the tables on him,” she suggested. “Stop trying to answer his questions. Ask him things instead. Ask why it’s better to freeze-dry instead of sun-dry food when people have been doing it for thousands of years without that elaborate equipment. You’ll think of others once you start.”

  A glint of amusement lighted Doris’s eyes and they dropped the subject. She had been treating him as she would any guest, suffering his nonsense silently and politely, Jean knew, but if she put aside that role, Ward would do some of the squirming.

  At lunch that day she asked Doris if she would start writing what she could remember of tribal life from her earliest childhood, and, more important, the things she had learned to do in the past four or five years, preparing for a return to the old way of life.

  “Hell,” Ward said, disconsolately. “I’ll type up what she writes. Sure isn’t a very lively place around here, is it?” Jean laughed. “This afternoon you two go down and play cards with Steve and Pat. But not for money,” she added. “Doris already owes Steve about a million dollars.”

  They were eating baked apples for dessert, and she sighed. What good food Ward had brought with him. Apples. She thought of the trees blooming up near Hood River, fluffy, so pale that the flush of pink looked like a shadow on the white. And later, the apples like ornaments on the trees, thick enough to hide the foliage; and biting into an apple. Cutting one in half and smelling that delightful spiciness . . .

  Suddenly she dropped her spoon and stood up.

  “Jean?”

  She was hardly aware of Doris and Ward. She saw without thought that Ward put his hand on Doris’s arm, restrained her. She heard his soft, “Leave her be a minute.”

  She saw them then, saw Ward’s look of understanding, and the look of bewilderment on Doris’s face. “I . . . You two go on. I’ll see you later,” she said in a rush and hurried from the kitchen, ran up the stairs to her room and closed the door.

  She opened the second drawer of her chest of drawers and started to rummage through her belongings there. Her mother’s few letters and postcards to her . . . Her grandmother’s string of agate beads . . . A small box that held a necklace her father had given her for her thirteenth birthday, never worn, hated all these years, hidden away, forgotten. When she reached
for it, she saw with detachment that her hand was shaking. She took the small box to the bed and sat down before she opened it. Inside was a pendant he had designed for her, crafted out of gold and silver. She stared at it and heard again his voice, light and amused, and underneath very serious: “I know you don’t like anything about the satellite, honey. Put it away and one day you’ll get it out and decide it’s not so bad after all.”

  The silver was rough, like rocks, two irregular and lumpy crescents, one smaller than the other, like the sides of an apple, and between them was the gold stem, not touching either, held in place by wires so thin it was hard to see them. The three pieces were wired together to form a single object, an artifact no larger than a marble.

  Two sides of an apple with a stem sticking out. One of the words in the message.

  He had known, she thought, staring at the pendant. He had seen it. Abruptly she slipped the chain around her neck, the silver and gold pendant tucked away under her shirt. She replaced the box, picked up her wide-brimmed hat, left the house and started to walk, following the meandering riverbed. Was he the one who put it there? Was her father the one who had hidden the message among the rocks in orbit?

  She walked until the shadows filled the canyon, and the air was chill on her skin. Absently she noticed that clumps of blackberries were bearing now; the berries were small and tart. They should be gathered and dried. The shadows were like rising water in the canyon, cooling the stones, creeping up silently. It was not a message, not in the usual sense, she decided. It would be pointless to hunt for words. She tried to visualize the curved lines, but they moved and changed and slithered away like snakes. She hastened her pace, eager now to return to the van, to catch those shifting lines and make them hold still long enough to reveal their secrets.

  When she got back to the house Doris and Ward were there already; dinner was ready and waiting. Jean had been gone for hours although she had the feeling that she had walked out the door and then back in with hardly a pause outside.

  “Ward is teaching me to play chess,” Doris said. “I like it. The board is like the desert. . . .”

  “She’s a natural for chess,” Ward said. “It’s a matter of focal point. You can see a piece and not the whole, or see the whole and let the pieces go and somehow they get where they have to be. Most new players just see the individual pieces but she sees the whole pattern.” His eyes were very knowing, sympathetic when he looked at Jean.

  That evening, into the night, she studied the individual symbols, searching for another one as definitive as the two apple halves had been. When her eyes blurred too much to see, she went to bed. Early the next morning she started again, filling every screen with curved lines, comparing them, searching for patterns. Late in the day she extracted all the curves that were similar to those in the one meaningful symbol. She joined them in a continuous line, and an irregular oval appeared. Apples to eggs, she thought; it was a grocery list. She turned to one of the other screens to see where the pieces had come from, where there were holes now, and a new pattern seemed to be forming as she narrowed her eyes and concentrated. There were other clusters of three. She extracted the center curved line from one of them. The outside lines fell apart, regrouped with other curves. She returned to the first one, the apple, as she thought of it, and studied it again. The outside lines seemed to be falling away in the next two spaces diagonally downward; by the third space they had re-formed with other lines. The stem, the piece extracted, was not represented in any of the following spaces. She had the computer extract the next set of like curves, then join them: another oval, smaller than the first. She repeated this two more times and had four ovals and four lines left over. She stared at them stupidly; they were bobbing up and down. Finally she signed off. It made sense, she knew, but she was too tired to understand it.

  Ward was a huddled mass of blankets on the couch. She felt a flicker of sympathy for him as she tiptoed through the living room and went up the stairs. She entered her own room and closed the door softly, then stiffened when she heard a whisper from her bed.

  “Jean? Is that you?”

  Doris was lying across her bed, rousing now, pushing herself up. She was a faint shadow among shadows. Jean went to her and sat down.

  “Are you sick? What’s the matter?” She found that she was whispering also.

  “I wanted to say good-bye. I fell asleep.”

  “Good-bye? Why?”

  “Ward said you had to leave in the morning. A plane is coming for you. He said you’re made too sad by telling people good-bye. And I’m made sad also, but not as sad as I’d be if you left without saying it.”

  Jean groped for the candle on the nightstand; nothing was making any sense, she thought, too blank to try to cope with anything but sleep right now.

  The flame seemed very bright, causing Doris to shield her eyes from it. She had not undressed.

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Jean said. “I’m not going anywhere in the morning. You must have heard him wrong, or something.”

  Doris looked frightened. She shook her head. “We walked to the station after dinner. We left after a few minutes, but Ward said he had forgotten something and went back. Instead of waiting, I followed him and I overheard him telling Steve and Pat that Cluny is sending a plane for you at dawn. He said there’s a job only you can do and it’s very important. He said you don’t like to tell people good-bye and you asked him to do it for you. I left then and pretended I didn’t hear. Then I decided to wait for you because sometimes it’s better to say what you feel and taste the sadness than to try to avoid it. I didn’t mistake what he said.”

  Jean felt a hollow dread growing in her chest. Cluny! She thought of Arkins, a prisoner in his own office, forced to work at a project that would never be released, but used only for the Army.

  “You heard right,” she said grimly. “Only I’m not going. Get some warm clothes on. We’re leaving.”

  Doris nodded, and there was a gleam in her eyes. She slipped from the room without a sound. Jean dressed quickly, changing the moccasins for boots, her lightweight shirt for a woolen one. In a few minutes they were both ready. Jean put her finger to her lips and led the way downstairs. The fire still lighted the living room faintly; in the shadowy light she could see the blanket-covered form on the couch. At the foot of the stairs she paused momentarily, thinking of her boots on the wooden floors, visualizing where the rug started.

  “Shit!” Ward said suddenly, his voice regretful, not at all sleepy. “Christ! I hoped she had fallen asleep.” He turned on a flashlight and caught them in the glare.

  Jean closed her eyes. “What are you doing?”

  “Come on in and sit down,” he said. “Doris, put another log on the fire.”

  Jean turned her face from the light and entered the room, with Doris close behind her. “What are you doing, Ward? What does all this mean?”

  “Put the log on so we can have some light,” Ward said. “And then you both sit down in the big chairs.”

  “We’re leaving,” Jean said. “Give the tapes to Cluny, do whatever you want with them. But I’m leaving now with Doris.”

  Ward moved the light away from her face briefly and the glare caught a flash of metal in his other hand. He was holding a gun, not pointing at them, but toward the floor. He lifted the light again, keeping her pinned by it, and said, “I won’t shoot you, Jean. You’re valuable. But I’ll shoot her, and I don’t want to. I like her. She’s an innocent kid. Don’t make me do it.”

  Jean moved toward the chair he had indicated. “Put the log on,” she said to Doris, and she sat down.

  The log blazed, and Ward turned off the flashlight. He remained on the couch across the room from the two women. Jean studied him thoughtfully. A slightly built, middle-aged man, tired-looking. “You lied about Cluny, didn’t you? He wouldn’t have anything to do with threats like this.”

  “He killed his own wife,” Ward said.

  Jean shook her head. �
��Another lie. You think I’ve found something. You have a radio in the van? You must have. You called someone and received orders to sneak us away from here before Cluny gets back. Who do you work for, Ward?”

  “How much of what you’ve discovered have you told Cluny?”

  “I had barely started when he left, as you know.”

  “Why is he in Washington?”

  Jean stared at him, then shook her head.

  “Our people lost him in Portland, and then he turned up in Washington. We’ll find out why, but it could take time, and meanwhile it changes everything. What if he doesn’t come back alone, but brings reinforcements? What if he comes back by plane to take you? Too many unknowns. It was decided that I should make certain you were safe, somewhere away from here, and then see what he’s up to.”

  Jean leaned back with her eyes closed, trying to fit the pieces together. She began to suspect there was no way she could do that. It was like being caught in the center of a Kafka novel, she thought; or at a masquerade where everyone wore layers of masks and each unveiling revealed only more mysteries.

  “I thought of you as a gentle man,” she said then. “A peaceful man who wanted only to work with the computers he loved. A man who wanted to show off a little, with cause, because he had things to be proud of. I would have put treachery so far down on your list of attributes that it would have been off the page.” She kept her eyes closed, thinking furiously. She and Doris could take him, she knew, if he gave them the chance. Had Doris told him about the defense classes? She didn’t know. But as long as he kept the room between them, as long as he sat with the gun on his knee, there was nothing to do but talk.

  “I am exactly what you thought,” he said eagerly. “You’re a wise woman, wiser than you realize. You’re brilliant with the computer, your ability to write a program so quickly with so little effort. Some people have that intuitive understanding of what to do, how to make it perform. I have it. So do you. I respect you for that.”