Eclipses (v1.0), page 11
“Yes, but you have Aram to go home to. It’s not as if you’ve lost a loved one.”
“I’m not so sure,” Beth said, feeling uncomfortable. Shelley just shook his head, not understanding, and turned to put the fish in the pan. Beth watched him.
What Serensunarians called fish were really small watergoing reptiles. Apparently Shelley had caught this one in the cold Rift River, which was contrary to what she knew about freshwater varieties that were supposed to live in warm lakes. But she couldn’t pretend that she’d learned all about SERENSUNAR in twelve years. She did notice that the six pieces of fish he’d laid in the pan were soon sizzling in self-made oil. He turned them fairly quickly as the pan was hot and the flesh was thin.
“Maybe I’m just dense … or are you really trying to make me believe that Aram would be angry or something if you don’t come home with the diamonds? That just doesn’t sound like the man I knew.”
“No, of course he won’t be angry. At . most a little disappointed for me. It’s just that I’ve put so much time into it and I’d hoped so much to find them that I hate to admit defeat.”
“Well, the solution’s simple, then,” Shelley said smiling for the first time. “Don’t give up.” He flipped the fish out of the pan, expertly catching them on a tin plate.
“That would be stupid,” Beth muttered. “I should have given up when I didn’t find them in the mountains. Searching the riftlands was pure desperation, and I’ve been doing that for three years. You can fool yourself for just so long, and then …”
Shelley nodded, thoughtful now as he reached for a piece of fish. He found it still too hot and left it on the plate. “It’s too bad, Beth, but I’m glad it’s nothing to do with Aram. You can’t know how bad something like that would hurt.” Suddenly Beth felt angry. “You think you have a monopoly on pain? You think just because it isn’t Aram I’ve lost that I can’t hurt? Shelley, I have nothing left in the world, no more than a few measly credits that have accumulated since I left home last spring. I never have enough even to dress my children in the fashion they’re accustomed to, let alone to provide them with a few amenities. I have to plan months in advance to come up with birthday gifts, and the older the children get it usually means my going without anything new. I’m tired of being a pauper.”
“You’d think Aram would take up the slack,” Shelley said, apparently surprised at the vehemence in her voice.
“Damn it, he does. That’s the problem. I’m living with the wealthiest man on the planet, and I feel inadequate. I can’t change what he is, and I’ll never be anywhere near as wealthy. I don’t think I can stand being a charity case for the rest of my life.”
“You know your voice keeps going up,” Shelley said, his own voice trembling a bit, “and you get louder and louder and louder and complain about what you don’t have. What about what you do have? What about Aram and the children and all the comforts and happiness that go with it? Let me tell you, Beth, when you’ve got love, you don’t throw it away.” He was bitter, Beth could tell, and he was so wrapped up in his own misery that he couldn’t see anyone else’s. Knowing he was angry and hurt didn’t make Beth forgive him, but it did prevent her from answering him and thereby prolonging their differences. She took a piece of meat from the plate and found it was cool enough to eat. She bit savagely, and Shelley started eating, too. He offered her some tinned apples, and she took them because she’d had nothing but dried fruit and a few wild berries in months, but they managed even that in silence. When she said good night, she could feel his blue brooding eyes following her all the way back to the bike.
With the dawn came the clear blue skies of the desert, the monotonously clear sky she had been seeing for months. But there was a pronounced difference between the feel of the desert arroyos and the desert rift valley, noticeable at first in the sounds of the wildlife. Here there were river creatures, large birds and winged reptiles, most of which could swim as well as they could fly, and there probably were shy rock lizards grubbing in the shadows, making their way to a stand of live trees along the riverbanks. There was more activity, a . lot of greenery that didn’t exist in the arroyos, yet Beth was without the vigor she had felt when she had hopes of finding the diamonds.
The lack of credits, as she had explained to Shelley, was a problem. But what she hadn’t explained, and hated admitting to herself, was the lack of accomplishment; finding the diamonds would provide wealth, but even more important, they symbolized her expertise in anthropology and the sleuthing that was so much a part of anthropology. Aram could point with pride to his dams, his orchards and the accumulated accomplishments of his ancestors on Serensunar. But what had Beth achieved? Nothing that a normally functioning female body couldn’t do. She felt she had never done anything remarkable or even particularly worthwhile, and it galled her. As far as her feelings for Aram were concerned, she had put herself in a double bind. Although she loved him, she could not fully accept his love unless she felt she were his equal. And if she couldn’t accept what was freely given, neither could she freely give any longer, thinking her love came from a less valuable source and was therefore worth less than Aram’s.
She decided to leave her bike in the canyon and make her camp at the base of the dry falls below. After she’d carried her pack down and found a smooth old sandbar on which to lay her sleeping bag, she walked down to the river to fill her big water bottles.
Shelley didn’t seem to be around this morning, for which she was grateful. She wanted time to think on her own. It really was inconvenient that he happened to be camped nearby, as last night certainly had proved. She didn’t ordinarily require much sympathy, but there were times in her life when she did feel sorry for herself and no amount of “chin up and count your blessings” could convince her that anyone could really understand how she felt about living in the Water Baron’s house without contributing anything to its splendor or even to her own comfort. And the lack of understanding emphasized how alienated and lonesome she felt.
When the water bottles were full, she put them safely on the bank and took off her boots. She’d been right; the river was wider than it had been. The old banks were covered with swift, sediment-laden water that serpentined through the ten-kilometer-wide rift valley, sometimes seeming to touch the thousand-meter-high wall on the far side, which rose to the cracked and multifractured riftland plateau.
Beth sat on a boulder in the shallows, picking pebbles from the water around her feet and tossing them farther into the river. It was habit that made her glance at every one before she threw it away.
This time Shelley didn’t sneak up on her. She saw him walking up the riverbank, barefooted and wearing shorts. The sunlight gleamed red on his auburn hair and made the thatch on his chest look coppery. He was as bronze as she was, and the deep tan accentuated his eyes. She thought he might keep walking; they’d both already nodded without smiling. But instead of stepping on past her, Shelley walked out to her rock.
“I’m sorry about last night. I do believe you’re probably just as miserable as I am, and I know my playing you-don’t-hurt-as-much-as-I games didn’t make it any easier. My only excuse is that I haven’t had anyone to talk to for a long time, except one raft of young people who came in to shoot the rapids, and I think I scared them off, too. So,” he said, still not pausing, “let’s start over. Hello, Beth. It’s nice to see you again.”
He looked so apologetic Beth had to laugh. “I knew you were hurt; I saw it in your eyes before I even knew about Lydia. And I was self-centered enough to want some sympathy that I could tell you weren’t prepared to give. I’m sorry, too. Hello, Shelley. I like you with a beard.”
Again his hand brushed the whiskers as if he didn’t approve of them. He stood awkwardly for a moment, then extended his hand to her. “Want to go for a walk?”
“Sure,” Beth said, unwilling to break the newfound amicability even though she wasn’t much in the mood for walking. She took his hand and felt the shock of the first human touch in months. Shelley must have felt it, too, for he looked at her in a strange way and dropped her hand. They walked quietly along the water’s edge, the current barely noticeable in the shallows. Within half an hour they reached the pile of rubble and slabs where the Lost Expedition’s shuttle might have been buried, unless it had been carried away by the flood that followed the earthquake that had sent hundreds of meters of riftwall tumbling into the valley and the river surging over its banks. The record was not too clear on whether the shuttle had been parked on the top of the cliff or at the base. Whichever, it was gone without a trace.
“Have you been here all summer?” Beth asked, looking idly at the sway of trees beneath the small mountain of rubble. She could hear the rattle of dry leaves above the soft lapping of the river.
“No, just a month,” Shelley replied, stopping to see what had caught her interest. “Why?”
“Has there been any rain?”
“None. The mountains were dry when I left, too.”
Birds suddenly filled the sky, lifting from trees by the thousands in a cacophony of noise. The flying lizards whistled and howled in alarm. The trees were rattling loudly, swaying now, as if from a breeze that was at once undetectable, yet so strong it threatened Beth’s equilibrium. Instinctively she widened her stance in the water. Shelley’s posture seemed awkward, and the water was beginning to lap about as if someone were tilting its bed. “Earthquake?” Beth said uncertainly. She knew she was standing in one of the very places where convection currents deep inside the planet’s mantle were pulling the continent apart. But now the rattling in the trees stopped, and the water was already settling. The birds still flew.
“Just a tremor,” Shelley said, looking uneasy. “Happens all the time.”
Beth nodded. She had felt dozens of tremors over the summer, and she suspected a fault far to the south of her that must be shifting. She was even farther north now, and this tremor was stronger. Could there be another fault nearer to the rift, perhaps in the rift valley itself?
“Let’s go back,” Shelley said. “There’s more open land by camp. I keep remembering that there’s a kilometer of salt beneath this valley, and then I wonder where the water’s going.”
Beth followed his drift, knowing that salt was water soluble. When the salt holding up the land was dissolved away by water, the rock above shifted to fill in, causing yet another fault in the cracked and shattered riftlands. She knew that if she had field glasses she could look across the Rift River to the far wall and see the old railbed the early pioneers had built, using the valley as the straightest line between mountain settlements and the rain forests along the coast. Those rails had been abandoned while they were still new, for wherever they passed a fault—and the riftlands were rife with faults—the shifting land twisted the iron rails like rubber. The struggling pioneers had found it impossible to maintain the rails when the industries that supported and maintained them were already overstrained. Even today all routes through the riftlands had been discarded as impractical, and the transcontinental monorail, finished just before Beth planeted, circumnavigated most of the riftlands by running nearly the entire north-south length of the mountains through costly tunnels blasted out of granite and basalt and over deep ravines before turning upcoast to cross the riftlands along the southeastern coast. There were several active volcanoes along the new monorail track, but those were considered more predictable than riftland movements, especially since the danger of magmatic explosion due to lake water seeping into the magma source had been dramatically reduced by draining several crater lakes.
Beth followed Shelley out of the water to walk on the sunny riverbank. “Shelley, have you seen much air traffic through here?” she asked.
“None, but that’s not surprising. Most of the air corridors are south of us. Why?”
“I’m just remembering how isolated we are.”
“You don’t have a radio with you?” he said, obviously shocked.
Beth shook her head.
“That doesn’t sound like the Water Baron’s kind of preparedness.”
“He carries one on his wrist. I don’t, especially in the summer. This is my time,” Beth said. “If I carried one and happened to get too busy to remember to check in on time, Aram would worry, maybe send searchers.”
“Yes, but what if you needed help?”
“I’m careful, and I heed warnings. Seeing that cliff rubble again has reminded me of just how unstable this area is. I think I’ll move my bike back up the canyon, just to be safe. I don’t want it falling over the edge.”
Chapter 11
At sundown of her third night in the rift valley, Beth took the carcass of a bombardier bird she’d snared to Shelley’s camp, hoping he would be receptive to the idea of cooking their dinners together. Her bird was not large enough to feed them both, but, added to his dried vegetables, it would make a nice stew. She found him napping under a desert tree, the thin but abundant waxy fans providing comfortable shade from the last of the day’s sunshine. He lay stretched out on his sleeping bag, powerful muscles at ease beneath sun-bronzed skin, red hair tousled like a child’s after a day of hard playing. She decided not to ask him about dinner but to present him with a fait accompli when he awoke.
As the shadows grew longer, Beth made a fire, quartered the small carcass and started to brown the meat in a pot. It sizzled noisily and she thought Shelley would hear it or maybe smell the occasional wafts of aroma that drifted over him, but he didn’t stir.
Here in the rift valley there were no distractions to thinking things over as there would be at home. Shelley had his own problems to consider, and while they spent some companionable times together, he made no real demands on her time.
He listened when she wanted to talk, but he made no comments or judgments after that first night, and that arrangement suited Beth.
She no longer had any real reason for her independent summer excursions. She could foresee her year-round existence becoming as structured as her winters were. She didn’t much like Maria’s subcontract, which entailed keeping Aram’s household supplied with food, overseeing servants and anticipating and planning for special gatherings. The subcontract augmented her slender credit account but no longer gave her real satisfaction. And it was humiliating to know that Maria always assumed Beth would accept the subcontract without asking her whether or not she wanted it.
The fire was hot and the stew was bubbling when she heard Shelley moan. He rolled over onto his back, still asleep, and the moans had turned into soft sobs. Beth left the stew to go to his side. She knew he must be dreaming and that it wasn’t a very pleasant dream, but she wasn’t certain of whether to wake him or to let the unhappy dream pass of its own accord. When his distress seemed to worsen, she kneeled and touched. his arm. “Shelley?”
He sat up with a gasp, his blue eyes wide with bewilderment. Beth felt him touch her cheek, a gesture she knew was not intended for her even before he blinked in recognition and dropped his hand.
“I’ve made some stew,” she said quietly. “I thought you were going to sleep right through dinner.” The stew was nowhere near ready, but she thought it would be unkind to remind him of his dream. If he were lucky, it faded even as he awakened. But from the slump of his shoulders and the quickness of his breathing, she thought the memory of it was still with him.
“I’ve been sleeping too much,” he said, shaking his head more in disapproval of himself than to ban sleepiness from his system. “I sleep to forget, but even that doesn’t help. She’s in my dreams.”
“Do you suppose the same thing is happening to Lydia?” Beth asked. “Perhaps you and she—”
“No,” he said, cutting her off. “It’s over. But damn! It’s like losing an arm or something, and even knowing that arm was gangrenous and poisoning me doesn’t make me miss it less.” He sighed and got up, walking to the fireplace to stare blankly into the flames. Finally he took the ladle and tasted the bubbling stew. Without commenting he added some spices from a bottle under a nearby rock. Beth had wondered where they were.
The sun was setting rapidly now, and only a part of its ruddy disk was still visible above the far rift wall. The valley was thick with purple shadows and tinged with reds and golds as flocks of river birds glided home on dark wings. Beth glanced automatically at Hunted Moon, still close to the horizon but not close enough to eclipse the sun. The smaller Hunter Moon was high above, already a full silver disk and still pursuing its fat quarry. Even when the two moons converged, the fat Hunted Moon would be there again the next night, as if it had slipped through the smaller moon’s grasp. And tonight the little moon looked as if it had grown arms with which to grasp: A wisp of pink cloud streaked the sky, like outstretched arms, and Beth’s eye followed it northeast in the direction of the mountains, which she could not see because the near rift wall truncated her view.
“Look, Shelley, a double sunset,” Beth said. The thin clouds, high in the eastern sky, were vermilion, giving the illusion that the sun was setting there, too. Such a sight was common in the mountains, where clouds and moisture were frequently present to bend the rays of the setting sun and strike clouds on the opposite horizon, painting them with color. She hadn’t expected to see it over the dry desert, not even in the rift valley.
Shelley looked up to take in the sight, and the two stood watching for quite a while. When the sun disappeared beneath the horizon and the golden tones began to fade, Beth rummaged around until she found some bowls. As they were eating, Shelley kept glancing up at the sky.
“You know, Beth, I don’t think that’s sun reflection at all. I think it’s the reflection from a volcanic eruption.”
