knowledge from the past, but it’s there, available. I am going to see if I can get Lala to recall for me. Maybe her precocity will include recollection also.” He looked down at his nestling child and smiled. “It won’t be spectacular,” he said, “no eyeballs will light up. I’m afraid it’ll be tedious for you, especially since it will be subvocal. Lala’s spoken vocabulary lags behind her other Gifts. You can drive on, if you like.” And he leaned back with Lala in his arms. The two to all appearances were asleep.
Meris looked at Mark and Mark looked at Meris, and Meris felt an irrepressible bubble of laughter start up her throat. She spoke hastily to circumvent it.
“Your manuscript,” she said.
“I got a box for it,” said Mark easing out onto the road again. “Chip found one for me when you took Lala to the rest room. Couldn’t have done better if I’d had it made to measure. What a weight-” he yawned in sudden release-“What a weight off my mind. I’ll be glad when it’s off my hands, too. Thank God! Thank God it’s finished!”
The car was topping the Rim when Johannan stirred, and a faint twitter of release came from Lala. Meris turned sideways to look at them inquiringly.
“May I get out?” asked Johannan. “Lala has recalled enough that I think my search won’t be too long.”
“I’ll drive you back,” said Mark, pulling up by the road.
“Thanks, but it won’t be necessary.” Johannan opened the door and, after a tight embrace for Lala and an un- English word or two, stepped out. “I have ways of going. If you will care for Lala until I return.”
“Of course!” said Meris, reaching for the child who flowed over the back of the seat into her arms in one complete motion. “God bless, and return soon.”
“Thank you,” said Johannan and walked into the roadside bushes. They saw a ripple in the branches, the turn of a shoulder, the flick of a foot, one sharp startling glimpse of Johannan rising against the blue and white of the afternoon sky and then he was hidden in the top branches of the trees.
“Shoosh!” Meris slumped under Lala’s entire weight.
“Mark, is this a case of folie a deux, or is it really happening?”
“Well,” said Mark, starting the car again. “I doubt if we two could achieve the same hallucinations simultaneously, so let’s assume it’s really happening.”
When they finally reached the cabin and stopped the motor, they sat for a moment in the restful, active silence of the hills. Meris, feeling the soft warmth of Lala against her and the precious return of things outside herself, shivered a little remembering her dead self who had stared so blankly so many hours out of the small windows, tearlessly crying, soundlessly wailing, wrapped in misery. She laughed and hugged Lala. “Maybe we should get a leash for this small person,” she said to Mark. “I don’t think I could follow in Johannan’s footsteps.”
“Supper first,” said Mark as he fumbled with the padlock on the cabin door. He glanced, startled, back over his shoulder at Meris. “It’s broken,” he said. “Wrenched open-” He flung the door open hastily, and froze on the doorstep. Meris pushed forward to look beyond him.
Snow had fallen in the room-snow covered everything-a smudged, crumpled snow of paper, flour, sugar, and detergent. Every inch of the cabin was covered by the tattered, soaked, torn, crumpled snow of Mark’s manuscript! Mark stooped slowly, like an old man, and took up one page. Mingled detergent and maple syrup clung, clotted, and slithered off the edge of one of the diagrams that had taken two days to complete. He let the page fall and shuffled forward, ankle-deep in the obscene, incredible chaos. Meris hardly recognized the face he turned to her.
“I’ve lost our child again,” he said tightly. “This-” he gestured at the mess about them “-this was my weeping and my substitute for despair. My creation to answer death.”
He backhanded a clutter of papers off the bunk and slumped down until he lay, face to the wall, motionless.
Mark said not a word nor turned around in the hours that followed. Meris thought perhaps he slept at times, but she said nothing to him as she cautiously scrabbled through the mess in the cabin. She found, miraculously undamaged, a chapter and a half of pages under the cupboard. With careful hands she salvaged another sheaf of papers from where they had sprayed across the top of the cupboard. All the time she searched and sorted through the mess in the cabin, Lala sat, unnaturally well behaved and solemn, and watched her, getting down only once to salvage Deeko from a mound of sugar and detergent, clucking unhappily as she dusted the doll off.
It was late and cold when Meris put the last ruined sheet in the big cardboard box they had carried groceries home in, and the last salvageable sheet on the desk. She looked silently at the clutter in the box and the slender sheaf on the desk, shivered and turned to build up the dying fire in the stove. Her mouth tightened and the sullen flicker of charring, wadded paper in the stove painted age and pain upon her face. She stirred the embers with the lid-lifter and rebuilt the fire. She prepared supper, fed Lala, and put her to bed. Then she sat on the edge of the lower bunk by Mark’s rigid back and touched him gently.
“Supper’s ready,” she said. “Then I’ll need some help in scrubbing up-the floor, the walls, the furniture.” She choked on a sound that was half laughter and half sob. “There’s plenty of detergent around already. We may bubble ourselves out of house and home.”
For a sick moment she was afraid he wouldn’t respond. Just like l was, she thought achingly. Just like l was! Then he sat up slowly, brushed his arm back across his expressionless face and his rumpled hair, and stood up.
When they finally threw out the last bucket of scrub water and hung out the last scrub rag, Meris rubbed her water-wrinkled hands down her weary sides and said, “Tomorrow we’ll start on the manuscript again.”
“No,” said Mark. “That’s all finished. The boys got carbon-copy and all. It would take weeks for me to do a rewrite if I could ever do it. We don’t have weeks. My leave of absence is over, and the deadline for the manuscript is this next week. We’ll just have to chalk this up as lost. Let the dead past bury the dead.”
He went to bed, his face turned again from the light.
Meris, through the blur of her slow tears, gathered up the crumpled pages that had pulled out with the blankets from the back of the bunk, smoothed them onto the salvage pile, and went to bed, too.
For the next couple of days Mark was like an old man. He sat against the cabin wall in the sun, his arms resting on his thighs, his hands dangling from limp wrists, looking at the nothing that the senile and finished find on the ground. He moved slowly and reluctantly to the table to push his food around, to bed to lie, hardly breathing, but
