The Puppet Master

Besides, the man had a remarkable library, and the doctor had one addiction left—books. Between the two of them, they read enough for fifty ordinary people. 

But they rarely talked anymore as friends. They seldom had, once their agreement was signed. 

* * *

Looking back a few days later, the old man considered himself lucky to have come through alive. He'd been unconscious for more than twenty hours. The mind he'd been in was one he'd felt secure with, one he'd come to control more completely than any he'd associated with before. But to be in it at the moment of violent death . . .  

Never had anyone interfered so utterly with him before. Never. Not Christman, not anyone. Christman had cost him more, far more. But in terms of personal interference . . .  

And to develop one's powers, one must uphold one's integrity. 

Christman he'd killed personally, so to speak. He'd been there, willed the trigger pulled, seen the dismay on Christman's face. He'd be more circumspect in handling this man—use a throwaway resource, some potent underworld group, set it in motion and allow it to operate. And if it failed, use another. There was no hurry. And he needed to husband his physical strength, the health that remained to him. While he developed his powers further, sufficiently to renovate the difficult husk he occupied, rejuvenate it.  

He chuckled. He would rejuvenate it; he was confident of that now. He'd made major progress recently in his ability to psychically tinker bodies. He could even kill now without an intermediary, if the person's consciousness was sufficiently weakened. He'd tested that, first with comatose, then semi-comatose bodies. It involved manipulating certain gross physiological functions. To rejuvenate a body, of course, would require more subtle, intricate, and knowledgeable manipulations. He'd hypnotize his physician and question him, have him help design a program. Presumably it would take time, and no doubt numerous steps. But he'd always been patient, he told himself. Almost always.

36

GRAND CANYON;

THE BARNEY TRAIL

October 2012

It was Indian summer in Flagstaff, Arizona. With Tuuli beside him, Martti Seppanen turned their rented Ford travel van north on US 180, here called Humphrey Street. In less than a minute they were out of the downtown business district, driving through a pleasant residential area.

This was the Coconino Plateau, which at 2,100 meters and higher was a land of coniferous forests. To their left, intermittently visible between shade trees, was the low, pine-clad mesa called Mars Hill, with its observatory domes and comblike arrays of antennae. Northward, the street led the eye to a pyramidal mountain peak that loomed bare-topped above forested slopes. To Martti, Tuuli seemed energized with an expectation he didn't really understand. 'Those peaks,' she said, 'are the eroded rim of an ancient volcano. Did you know that?'

'Nope. No I didn't.'

'It's supposed to have been twenty thousand feet tall before the top blew off, a very long time ago. Can you imagine? And this is what's left. Humphrey Peak is the highest part of the rim, 12,680 feet. An Indian spirit lives in it. I've met him.'

Martti said nothing. Nothing came to him.

'You can't see Humphrey from here,' she went on. 'Agassiz and Fremont are in the way, with the ancient crater in between. Twenty thousand years ago it held a glacier. Now it holds patches of aspen, and great heaps of rock.'

He'd seldom seen her so talkative. She paused, then began to recite:

Primal mountain bursting long ago,

rupturing the darkness with your might,

shrouded with clouds of ash and fumes

that glowed and flashed and shuddered

in the night,

high shoulders flowing red with molten rock,

with heat and sullen light.

Is that you?

Is that you

so calm and clean beneath the sky,

slopes serene in snow

and forest frosted white?

Ah, I know you in many moods,

green, with branches dripping rain,

yellow with aspen

or blind with blizzard.

I know you now.

She looked at her husband expectantly. 'Nice,' he said. It seemed to him he should say more, but didn't know what. After a moment he asked, 'Who wrote it?'

'I don't know. Frank recited it when he and Mikki hiked me up the mountain to meet the Indian spirit. He wrote it down for me when we got back to Long Valley.'

Indian spirit. Was there really such a thing up there? He supposed there was, if Tuuli said so. And if there was, she'd probably have felt it; maybe communed with it. The old-time Lapps, it seemed to him, had missed a bet in having had only male shamans. He wondered if he could ever sense a spirit, then remembered the visitor he'd felt in front of Molly Cadigan's that day, and wondered if it qualified.

While they'd talked, they'd left the town behind, for what a sign told them was the Coconino National Forest. For some miles its pines alternately crowded the highway and stood back behind meadows of tall grass that formed vistas, provided scope. Here and there was private land, subdivided and built upon, but mostly it was forest. There was no hint of cloud, but autumn haze softened every view. Then the highway climbed a long tapering skirt of the mountain, to top out on a higher level of the plateau. Here for a few miles the land was an old lava flow, its forest thin and scrubby, its black and rugged bedrock showing often through short bunchgrass.

From this, the highway emerged into a long meadow that gave them another vista. Martti pulled off at a tiny roadside chapel, a rustic, cross-topped A-frame. Here there was soil again, and the grass stood tall, cured pale yellow by late summer's freezing nights.

Tuuli was out of the van ahead of him, beaming at what she saw. They'd driven half around the mountain, and looked southward now at its north side. A band of yellow aspen clothed its lower slopes, and nearer, bordering the meadow, tall stands of it glowed red-gold in the late sun. Above the aspen zone was a forest of dark spruce, and above timberline a thin covering of snow bequeathed by an early October storm. Tuuli's hand found Martti's, and