Full Spectrum 3 Part 19

He drew a deep breath and held her gaze steadily. "I am willing."

She turned to the third ghoto. "Take him then as Your own. Let him see my mortality."

They waited in silence. As he listened to her quiet breathing beside him, he felt something else, hovering on the edges of his perception. Holding his breath, he tried to concentrate as waves of dizziness slowly washed into darkness. It felt like a tangible cool twilight, like an impossibly fine veil eddying toward him on unseen currents. He recoiled, but at the last instant it swerved, dropping weightlessly over Teah instead.

With some newly awakened sense, he felt it coil and tighten languorously around her like the arms of a lover, sinking into her flesh. His hand shook in hers as he looked at her and knew. From this day forward, every time he saw her, he would see her death, hovering before him. Even as he felt her fingers pulsing with warm blood, he could antic.i.p.ate the feeling of her spirit slipping away. He could see himself holding her, weeping, struggling to ease the pain and smooth her pa.s.sage into shadows. He knew then how dear she would become to him, and that there would be nothing he could do to stop it. Nothing he could do to turn it away. For the first time, he understood the exquisite pain of the rhyena'v'raien-and with it, all their power.

Teah's gaze met his with an expression of pity, and he saw his own pain mirrored there. "I know. Believe me, Mateo, I know. I saw it, too, the day I bound myself to my own master." She pressed his fingers with hers. "Do you understand how much I need you now? You see, without you as my apprentice, I would be alone when my time comes, with no one to ease me. Will you do that for me?"

"Yes." He took a ragged breath and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand. "Yes, Teah, I will."

She smiled. "It is best to begin at once, then. You will have much to learn."

Lake Aga.s.siz.

JACK McDEVITT T.

HERE WAS A GHOST in Fort Moxie.

Lasker stood beneath a quarter moon, atop the western ridge of the Turtle Mountains, and stared east across the black prairie. Two rings of light, a lesser and a greater, almost touching, floated in the dark, like distant galaxies. The border station and the town.

He seldom went there. A retirement party maybe, for a close friend. Or a funeral. And that was about it.

After all these years, he still feared the place.

The night smelled of oncoming winter. A cold wind chopped across the ridge and bit down on him. Lasker turned back toward the electric lights he'd strung over the work area.

"If that ain't strange," said Will, wiping his nose. Midautumn was a bad time for him.

Lasker had held this land out through the last planting season and intended to put wheat in this spring. "What's that, Will?" he asked, Fort Moxie fading.

"We got some gra.s.s growing here. Look at this." He pointed at a few stalks. Summer green.

"It's always been good right here," Lasker said, remembering the potatoes of the last few seasons. "For some reason-"

The wind shook the light bulbs. Down at the bottom of the slope he could see movement in the kitchen. Ginny. She knew how he felt about Fort Moxie, didn't know why. G.o.d knew what she thought. She'd asked questions for a while, sensed the gulf that lay between them, and let it go.

"Deep enough, Dad?"

Lasker peered into the ditch. "A little more," he said. "Got to get the pipes far enough down where the cold doesn't affect 'em."

They were putting in a system to allow them to pump water uphill from the well. "Be a lot easier next year," said Will, pus.h.i.+ng his spade into the ground. He sneezed, and reached for a handkerchief. Sneezed again.

"Maybe you should go back to the house," said Lasker.

The boy grinned. "I'm fine."

Lasker admired the kid. He refused to give in to the allergies that afflicted him every October. Wouldn't admit there was a problem.

Five minutes later, down about a foot, Will's spade struck something solid.

It wasn't a rock. The thing looked like a shark's fin caught in the act of diving into the rich black North Dakota loam.

"What is it?" Will asked, kneeling, brus.h.i.+ng the soil away with gloved fingers. It was bright red, smooth. Hard.

Lasker grunted. "Looks like plastic," he said, grabbing hold and pulling. It didn't give.

He stood back, and Will hit it with the spade.

They tried digging around it, under it. The thing was a flared triangle, roughly ten inches on a side, paper thin. "It's attached to something," said Will, trying to widen the ditch. "A post, I think."

Lasker saw the house door open. A small shadow skipped out and started up the hill. Jerry. "That'll be dinner," he told Will.

His son was working under the fin now. The post was also red, and angled down at about fifty degrees. It appeared to be made of the same material. He wedged his spade under it, and lifted. Lasker lent his weight. It showed some give, but didn't come loose. They fell over one another, gave it up for the night, and stumbled laughing down the hill.

The Turtle Mountains, behind which Lasker's sun set each evening, were really little more than a line of low hills. They const.i.tuted the only high ground as far as one could see in any direction. Ten thousand years ago, they had formed the western sh.o.r.e of Lake Aga.s.siz, a vast inland sea, larger than the modern Great Lakes combined. Substantial portions of the eastern Dakotas, Minnesota, Manitoba, and Saskatchewan had been beneath blue water then. The lake had lasted only a thousand years, an eyeblink by geological standards, draining off when the glacier blocking its northern side retreated.

Occasionally, when he was a boy, Lasker's father had flown with him over the Red River Valley, pointing out the ancient coastline. The idea of a lost sea fascinated them both. Long gone, his father was fond of saying, but it influences everything we are. Lasker wondered about the remark at the time, but he came to understand that Dakota wealth grew out of former lake bottom, that the texture of the Red River Valley itself had been dictated by Aga.s.siz.

In a way, Lasker had told his own sons, it's still out there. Only thing is, you can't swim in it Lasker was a big man: awkward, with thinning brown hair and huge shoulders. His features were sharp, raw edged, blasted hard by the Dakota winters. The eyes were difficult to read. Of all the farmers in the area, people would tell you that no one was more clearly designed by nature to play poker than Tom Lasker.

At dawn on the day after they found the object, Lasker and his older boy were back atop the slope. The plain was bleak and cold in the gray light. They had an hour or so before Will had to get ready for school. Ordinarily Will wouldn't have been here at all on the morning of a school day. But he was curious about the shark's fin. And, without any more talk, he confronted the object, which now looked like a triangular hand fan mounted on a pole. The pole burrowed down into one side of the ditch. "Let's do it," the boy said enthusiastically, sinking his spade into the earth. He turned it over, and the soil, even this late in the season, was heavy and sweet.

Will seemed all right this morning, the air was still, and Lasker felt good about the world.

He measured off a few feet in a straight line from the point where the pole entered the side of the ditch, and began throwing up soil in his own methodical way.

They worked until Will had to leave. Lasker had planned to quit when the boy did (he was only pursuing this to satisfy Will's curiosity), but by then he'd discovered that the pole was at least eight feet long, and showing no sign of ending. His own steam was up.

Whatever it was, the angle of descent was steep. He was down almost six feet when he quit for lunch.

Ginny came back with him afterward to see what the fuss was about. She was tall, clever, a product of Chicago who had come to North Dakota as a customs inspector, with the primary objective of getting away from urban life. Lasker's friends and family had warned him that she would quickly tire of solitude and harsh winters. But she'd thrived and seemed to enjoy nothing more than settling down on a snow-driven night with a book in front of a roaring fire.

"It's blocking the pipe?" she asked, puzzled, standing over the thing.

"Not really."

"Then why all the fuss? You don't really have to tear it out of the ground, do you?"

"No." Most of it was down pretty deep. "But I'd like to know what it is. Wouldn't you?"

She shrugged. "It's a pole."

"How'd it get here?"

Ginny had spotted something. Lasker had dug three ditches down to the descending pole, each deeper than the preceding one by a couple of feet. They now knew it was at least twelve feet long. Ginny was looking into the deepest of the pits. "There's a wad of some sort buried down there. At the bottom."

Lasker had set a ladder in the pit. He climbed down, and used his spade to fish at the wad. "It's cloth," he said.

She frowned. "I think it used to be attached to the pole."

He dug around the fabric. Tried to free it. After a few minutes, he gave up. "I'd like to find the other end of the pole," he said.

"I suggest you forget it. If you can't drag it out of the ground, it's going to turn into a big job." She blinked in the sunlight. "Maybe you should go down to Colmar's and hire a couple of men."

"I will," he said, "if this goes on much longer." He grinned at her and, constricted by the narrow confines of the pit, worked his spade in around the pole and pulled more dirt loose.

Ginny was reluctant to leave. She was still standing over him, watching, when the spade chunked against something solid.

"What is it?" she asked.

A boat.

A sailboat.

A dozen people, Lasker, Will and Jerry, Ginny, the hired men from Colmar's, several neighbors, stood in the twilight near the top of the slope. They'd hauled it out of its hole and laid it on its side, propping the mainmast with a stack of cinder blocks. Jerry was playing a hose on it. The water washed the clay away, and revealed a bright scarlet hull and creamy white inboard paneling and lush pine-colored decks. A set of canvas sails that had once been white were spread on the ground nearby.

n.o.body was saying much.

Betty Kausner touched the keel once or twice, tentatively, as though it might be hot.

"It's fibergla.s.s, I think," said her husband Phil.

Jack Wendell stood off to one side, his hands on his hips, just staring. "I don't think so," Jack said. He used to work at Morrison's Marine in Grand Forks and he figured to know about things like that. "Even for fibergla.s.s, it's pretty light."

"Tom." Betty Kausner was staying close to her husband. "You sure you got no idea about this?"

"No." He glared at the boat as if it were an unwelcome intruder. "None."

"It looks in good shape," said Rope Hammond, who owned the land to the east, along Route 11. "You could take her for a spin tomorrow." He touched the cloth with the tip of his boot. "Even the sails. Tom, these can't have been in the ground very long."

Another car pulled into the driveway, and disgorged Ed Patterson and his family. Five kids. Ed owned the Handy Hardware in Cavalier. The kids charged up the hill and began chasing one another around the boat.

Kausner had gone back to his station wagon. He returned with a tape measure. He made marks in the soil at stem and stern, and measured it off. "Nineteen feet, five inches," he announced.

The hull looked subtly different from anything Lasker had seen before. It was rounded, flared. Something. It had a mainsail and a jib and a staysail. Running lights were set toward the front of the hull. He wondered if they would work.

"Look at this," said Hammond, poring over the bow. He was pointing at a cl.u.s.ter of black Arabic-looking characters. "What language is that?"

"Looks Iranian to me," said Jack Wendell, remembering the signs carried by demonstrators back in the days of the Ayatollah.

Three more cars were coming in from Cavalier, and two from Fort Moxie. Lasker sighed. Ginny had set up the coffee maker they used during planting and harvesting. She was pa.s.sing out cups, and telling people there was Danish inside.

Gradually the sense of vague disquiet that had ruled the early evening lifted, and by ten o'clock the house was filled with noisy, well-oiled guests.

Two hours later they were gone. Lasker helped Ginny clean up. He was setting dishes in the washer. Through the window over the sink he could see the boat. It lay on its side at the top of the slope, its hull curved and inviting in the moonlight.

"Going to bed," said Ginny, tossing a dishtowel across the back of a chair.

"I'll be up in a while." Lasker reached for his jacket.

"It's cold now," she said. "Don't stay out too long."

The ghost's name was Corey Ames.

He never knew why he took it into his head to drive into Fort Moxie that night. When he went outside, he'd intended simply to go up and take another look at the boat. But as he got near it, the old rush of fever he'd felt whenever he thought of Corey took him, drove him back down the hill, and carried him toward the garage.

His heart was hammering by the time he got into the front seat of his pickup, because by then he knew he was going into town, and he knew why.

Dumb.

But still, he would indulge himself. Give himself over to the old pa.s.sion for an hour. Let it hurt- Fort Moxie lends itself to timelessness. There are no major renovation projects, no vast cultural s.h.i.+fts imposed by changing technology, no influxes of families with strange names. The town and surrounding prairie possesses a kind of stasis. It is a place where Eisenhower is still President. Where people still like one another, and crime is virtually unknown. The last felony in Fort Moxie occurred in 1934, when Bugsy Moran shot it out with the customs people.

In all, it is a stable place to live, a good place to rear kids. But it holds memories. Much as the land held the big lake.

Long gone now.

He bounced out onto Route 11 and turned left.

Corey was in Seattle. Or at least she had been last he'd heard. She'd married an insurance salesman and moved out of the Fort Moxie area. Guy by the name of Maury. Corey Maury. Goofy name. She'd come back for her father's funeral in '77, and Lasker had cowered at home. Hoped she'd notice he was not there. The husband had not come along, and Lasker had wondered dismally whether they'd broken up. He was himself married by then, and would not have left Ginny no matter what. Still, he wished Corey ill, and it shamed him to realize it.

There'd been a daughter. Six or seven years old. It felt good to realize that Corey might be a grandmother.

He sucked cold air into his lungs, felt the old emptiness close around him.

Route 11 is a two-lane, unlighted highway except when it curves through the windscreen at the Hammond property. It runs parallel to the Canadian border, about a mile south of the line. Lasker could see the soft illumination of Fort Moxie in the night sky. The moon had set now behind the Turtle Mountains. But the stars were hard and bright. The wind pushed at the pickup and rattled the load of hoes and rakes in the flatbed. It blows all the time across the northern prairie. There's a kind of channel connecting Hudson's Bay with Fort Moxie, and the wind builds up over the pole and just charges down the channel. Doesn't much matter what time of year it is; it's always cold. The joke in Fort Moxie is that if you leave town over the Fourth, you miss the summer.

The old lake bottom was lush and black in the glow of the headlights. It rushed by, and the pickup's tires sang against the paving.

Lasker pa.s.sed the old Milliken spread. The barn and outbuildings were shadows beneath the trees; cheerful light spilled out of the farmhouse. Milliken had added a deck since the last time he'd been by.

The road looped north, banked slightly, turned east again, past the cemetery. His headlights swept across the markers, and then he climbed up over the interstate, and dropped down among the sleepy frame houses and wide tree-lined streets.

His breathing slowed.

Charlie's Southern Barbecue now marked the edge of town. It was new, had been there four years or so.

The Tastee-Freez still stood at Nineteenth and Bannister.