A Light in the Merced River (Short Story) Read online

  “Jeanne,” he whispered in the dark. Not loudly enough to wake her. He didn’t want to wake her. He only wanted to feel her name.

  For days as they worked, Jeanne watched him, and John could see the worry in her eyes. Sometimes she asked him what the matter was.

  “Only thinking,” he’d reply.

  And sometimes she would whirr, softly, like an insect humming, her uplink reaching out to taste the connection between herself and the Cloisters. Then she would freeze her graceful, sure movements, pause like a dancer waiting a cue; then with a look of determination on her face return to what she was doing, or sit on the ground for a moment, resting her head in her hands, making a sound to approximate a sigh. John watched all this in silence, and hated himself just a little more. Yet he could not make himself give her the command. He could not betray his valley.

  One afternoon as they collected plants, Jeanne said, “I know you’re going to stay here.” She said it so suddenly that John straightened, tense, and forgot for a moment how to breathe. “I know you can’t go back.”

  “Jeanne, I have to go back. I’m a missionary. And we’ve collected all the data.”

  “If you were going to give them the data, you’d have done it by now.”

  John could think of nothing to say to this.

  “It’s all right, John. You are a human.” One slender arm rose, described a precise arc to indicate the valley around them. “This is where you belong.”

  “Don’t say that, Jeanne. It’s wrong. Humans left all this behind. We’re better than – than animals running in the forest. We’re more than that now.”

  “Are you?” She bent to examine the leaves of an ivy, plucked one up and tucked it behind her ear. “Are you better than that? Are you as good as my kind? Are you as perfect as Creation?” There was a hint of humor in her voice. She mocked him, but fondly. “Could you make any sacrifice, John, for the thing you love most?”

  He watched her eyes, hoping to read her real meaning there. Her pupils clicked shut and open again. Taking a picture of him for her memory banks. What could she possibly wish to recall about this moment later? The shame that flushed John’s face, or simply the image of him standing in his habitat? The natural history of man.

  Late in the afternoon, the wind turned fast and damp. Low clouds thickened the sky. The air smelled of thunder. They were six miles at least from the cabin.

  “There’s a small cave up the hillside here,” John said, pointing into the woods. “Let’s take shelter there until the storm passes.”

  It was easy enough to find the shallow cave. John had been there several times this summer. The remnants of his most recent fire still lay neatly at the cave’s mouth.

  John shredded a page from one of his notebooks for tinder, and Jeanne struck the nest of paper alight. The blackened branches caught the fire, burning low and steady. On a bed of last year’s sweet-smelling leaves, they lay down together, warm and relaxed. They said nothing for hours, resting against the earth while the rain hissed in the woods outside.

  Jeanne stroked him, and kissed him, and ran her hands through his hair, but said nothing. John was silent, too, filling up his memory banks with the image of her face as she lay beneath him, eyes half-closed, the ivy leaf still parting the hair above her ear. Filling himself with the sound of her, the electronic breath of her body. If he could fill himself with Jeanne until he burst, he would do it – he would. Her glacier-carved features, her grass-sweet skin.

  When they rolled away from each other, John exhausted and Jeanne happy, he saw that the fire was nearly dead. He rose, naked, to tend it. As he prodded the ashes back to life, he saw Jeanne wince, heard the murmur of her link. This time she sat up sharply and cried out.

  “It’s getting worse, John. They know we have something. They want the data.” Her voice was thin with strain. “I don’t know how much longer I can keep it from them.” The admission hurt her, John could see. She cradled her head in her hands, eyes closed tight.

  John crouched beside her, rocking her, comforting her. “I’m sorry, Jeanne. I’m sorry. I’ve done this to you. I should have told you to send it long ago.”

  “No.”

  “Do it, Jeanne. Send the data. I can’t watch them do this to you anymore.”

  “I can’t do it, John. I can’t. You love the valley. You know what they’ll do to it when they come.”

  “I love you, too. You’re my Creation. I can’t bear to see you in pain. Send the data.”

  “I won’t. I can’t. I can’t go all my lifetime knowing I brought them here, John, knowing it’s because of me that your valley is destroyed.”

  “You’ll have acted on my orders. It’s my decision. I am the missionary, and you the companion. It’s my choice.”

  But all the while he soothed her, his heart ached. All the while he held her, he remembered running up the hillside, through sun and shade, alive and human.

  Jeanne seemed to have control of herself now. She lay back on the leaves, pale skin on russet. “We won’t give them the data, John. I know it’s what you really want.”

  John shook his head.

  “It’s all right. Do it, John.”

  “No.” But he reached for his pack. He took out the little tool kit rolled in leather.

  “It’s all right,” Jeanne said. “We won’t give it to them. They won’t take it from me.”

  “They’ll think something has happened to us. They’ll just send more missionaries, and one of them will send the data. They’ll have the ore, soon or late.”

  “But they won’t have it from you.” Jeanne closed her eyes. “You won’t be a part of it. And neither will I.”

  John sat still for a long time, watching the rain move in purple veils down the hill. Night was setting in. He unrolled the tool kit. He kissed Jeanne, a long kiss, filling his memory with the taste of her mouth. Then he lifted off her face plate. The filaments of the network of her self steamed softly in the cool air of the cave. The steam rose up to brush his cheeks, his eyelids. When his tears fell into her, they cracked like pebbles in a fire.

  By morning Jeanne was dismantled, packed into his straining rucksack. John bent under the burden.

  He left pieces of her along the ridge, tucked among the ivies, scattered among stones. In the thicket where he’d hidden to watch her, he placed her hillside legs. In the meadow where she’d collected flowers, he dropped her careful, gentle hands. He set her hair drifting on the breeze, a golden cloud swaying over the valley, to be picked up and woven into the nests of birds. He buried the left eye in a meadow, her right beneath an oak. He pounded her memory board between two rocks until all of her memories shattered, fragments of reflected color, and scattered themselves among the river rocks. He hung her wires and pneumatics from the branches of trees, where they drooped like Spanish moss, speaking in the wind with a faint voice like violins.

  As evening fell, John took the glowing core of her heart from his pack, splashed into the Merced, and dropped it into the water. It wavered down, tilted away from him in the current, tottered out toward the center of the river. But he could still see it glowing, a bright, inhuman blue like the acetylene torches in the Cloisters. Its light broke and rebroke through the water’s rush.

  His legs were numb with the cold. A crow called in the woods behind him, and another answered from across the river. He backed toward the shore, groping with his feet. Trout began to rise to the evening’s flies, shattering the light of Jeanne’s heart into concentric rings. John’s feet found the river bank. He stood for a long time, staring at his companion where she lay, shining, in the heart of the river.

  His skin shivered to warm him. All the hairs of his body stood upright. When a deer appeared on the river’s far shore, pausing in alarm at the sight of the blue glow, John turned back for the woods. His pack was empty now, and light. He tightened the straps around his shoulders.

  By the time he reached the hillside, he was running.

  Other Works by Th
is Author

  Novels:

  Baptism for the Dead

  Tin Moan (forthcoming)

  Short Fiction:

  Finnegan's Pig

  Schrodinger's Kitty

  Writing as Lavender Ironside:

  The She-King Trilogy

  The Sekhmet Bed: Book One

  The Crook and Flail: Book Two (forthcoming)

  Visit Libbie Hawker at her blog: https://libbiehawker.blogspot.com and at https://lavenderironside.blogspot.com

  About the Author

  Libbie Hawker was born in Rexburg, Idaho and grew up dividing her time between the Puget Sound area and the rural vicinities surrounding Rexburg. She is passionate about the American West and strives to make her love for its unique landscapes, atmospheres, and people evident in her writing. She can be found online at https://libbiehawker.blogspot.com. She also writes historical fiction under the pen name Lavender Ironside.

  Libbie welcomes comments of all kinds from readers at [email protected].

  Thank you for reading books on Archive.BookFrom.Net
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