kicking around Bonneville Lake with the spring running down. They won’t feed in fresh water, you know, no matter how weak they get. Odd thing is they’ll take a fisherman’s fly, even though they’re fasting, but that’s as far as it goes—say, are you all right?”
Christopher barely heard the question and could say nothing in answer. While the ranger rattled on and the salmon tumbled past, the tightness in Christopher’s throat had returned, quickly growing into a strangling ache beneath his ribs. His throat was raw, and each breath hurt more than the last. He took his air in little gasps that were chopped off with sounds like sobs.
Clutching the railing and struggling for air, Christopher blinked away tears in a feeble effort to staunch them, until his cheeks were shining wet and the anguished sobs unmistakable. He sleeved the moisture away, infuriated that he did not know what had triggered his crying, and even more that he could not stop it.
But fury, like embarrassment, was a feeble weapon against the flood of pain, and his defenses crumbled. Racking, body-wrenching sobs seized him, and aching primal sounds tore free from prisons deep inside him. He slipped down to a seat on the stepped floor, clinging to the railing like an anchor with one arm, tear-blurred eyes hooded behind the wall of his hand—one final, feeble grasp for dignity in the midst of the kind of naked moment that shatters dignity and pretense and self-deception.
And when Christopher sensed the ranger beside him, felt the uncertain touch on his shoulder, and heard the kind-voiced question “You want to tell me about it?” all he could think to say was
It was hard to escape the ranger’s unwelcome solicitude, and harder still to persuade him that he did not want to be left alone. The arrival of other visitors, a family with two children in tow and an infant in arms, was the first wedge, destroying the illusion of privacy and reminding the ranger of his other duties.
“Look, you want to come upstairs, I can let you sit in the staff workroom awhile,” said the ranger. “Seems like you need to take a little time to pull together.”
“I’m okay,” Christopher lied, his voice unpersuasively hoarse and thready. “I just got clobbered by an old memory, that’s all. My father used to take me fishing up by The Dalles.”
The ranger frowned, teetering between resistance and acceptance. “We’ve got a counselor over at the administration center,” he said. “Maybe I should give him a call.”
“No,” Christopher said, pulling himself to his feet. “I’m all right. Just go back to the desk and be your smiling self.” He turned and looked up, feigning interest in the fish tracker.
Rudeness did what diplomacy could not. The ranger hesitated, then finally walked off. When he disappeared into the elevator, Christopher hurried to the stairs.
From the plazalike observation deck atop the center, Christopher could look down four stories into the fish ladder, as well as downstream toward the Beacon Rock monolith and across the island to the dry, quiet spillways of the dam. By the time he had made a slow walking circuit of the deck, he also had a clearer view of what had spilled from him downstairs.
His father’s death had been remote and somehow sanitary, easily denied, curiously unaffecting. Moreover, there had been no one but Lila to talk to, no one to help him catalyze his emotions. Consequently, he had managed to pretend that he was whole, ignoring the growing sac of emotional pus. The sight of the blooded, failing chinook had slashed it open, the two-edged blade of futility and finality doing the damage.
But other questions, more important questions, remained unanswered. His father’s ruminations on the blind, all-sacrificing drive of the pioneers were unsettling. It was clear to Christopher that his father had meant it as more than metaphor—Jeremiah’s actions were proof of that. He had seen something out there to fight against, something tangible and threatening.
Which made no sense to Christopher. There were some poetic parallels, to be sure, but there were also fatal—even foolish—incongruities. There were no dissenting chinooks barricading the mouth of Columbia, no coho plotting to destroy the fish ladders. The salmon’s migration was an expression of their being, an uncontested conation pointed toward survival, the sole moral barometer of evolution.
The human Diaspora, by contrast, was the rough-and-tumble marriage of romance and hubris, blessed by the twin gods of technology and opportunity. Choice was the key variable—a minority’s choice, it was beginning to appear, but choice all the same. In evolutionary terms,
Conation on the one hand. Choice on the other. It was ludicrous to think that they could be part of the same thing. And yet his father had believed it, and his father was not a fool. His father had believed it, and that belief had killed him.
Christopher’s questions pointed back toward the Project, and he could only think of one person there who might be both able and willing to answer them.
As soon as he cleared the Bonneville flight control zone, Christopher gunned the Avanti and pointed it skyward.
“Lila?”
“Yes, Christopher?”
“Would you see if you can get through to Daniel Keith at AT-Houston?”
“Secure or direct?”
Christopher considered. “You still know some of your routing tricks?”
“Yes, Christopher.”
“Secure.”
“Calls into Allied Transcon should be assumed to be monitored. A voice-only connection should be untraceable for three minutes.”
“Do your best. Put it through.”
It took but a second for the green bar on the dash to glow. “Keith,” said a voice.
“Daniel, this is Chris.”
An ominously long silence followed. “I don’t think I can talk to you, Chris.”
“I’ll call you later, then. At home.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I think you know.”
Christopher had been half prepared for this. “Daniel, you have to know that whatever they’re saying about me is a lie.”
“Then why did you resign?”
“Who says I did?”
“Chris, Loi called me last night, worried about you. She asked me if I knew where you were.”
“Why didn’t she call me?”
“She did. You’re off-net. The call just came back to the house,” Keith said.
Christopher looked at his bare wrist dumbly. “I lost my band.” Lange or the sentries must have taken it from him, but he had no memory of that.
“Doesn’t matter. The point is, I asked a few people a few questions, as a favor. My curiosity wasn’t exactly rewarded.”
“Damn it, Daniel, corpsec murdered my father.”
Another long silence. “I can’t discuss that,” Keith said finally.
It was such a surprising answer that Christopher’s mental wheels stalled as he tried to embrace it. “I need to see you.”
“I’m sorry,” Keith said curtly. “I can’t help. Call Loi, will you? She deserves better.”
Calling Loi was a duty which had tugged at him more than once since Dryke and his people had left the ridge. Something had always intervened—most often the sobering finality of being severed from his life in Houston, paired with the stark futility of trying to reclaim any part of it. Thinking about Kenning House only evoked feelings of
