Walkman away, as she’d been told. 'I want another glass of milk,' she said in a petulant tone.
'We’re out of milk,' Jeff reminded her. 'I’m going into town tomorrow morning; I’ll bring some back then. You can ride in with me, if you’d like; it may have stopped raining, and we could walk down by the falls.'
'I’ve already seen the falls,' Kimberly whined. 'I want to watch MTV.'
Jeff smiled tolerantly. 'Out of luck there, kiddo,' he said. 'We could listen to the shortwave, though; see what they’re saying in China, or Africa.'
'I don’t care about China or Africa! I’m bored!'
'Why don’t we just talk, then,' Pamela suggested. 'That’s what people used to do, you know.'
'Yeah, sure,' Christopher muttered. 'What’d they ever find to talk about so much?'
'Sometimes they told each other stories,' Jeff put in.
'That’s an idea,' Pamela said, brightening. 'Would you like me to tell you a story?'
'Oh, jeez, Mom, come on!' Christopher protested. 'What do you think we are, in kindergarten or something?'
'I don’t know,' Kimberly said, turning thoughtful. 'Maybe it would be fun to hear a story. We haven’t done that in a long time.'
'You willing to at least give it a try?' Pamela asked her son. He shrugged, didn’t answer.
'Well,' she began, 'thousands and thousands of years ago, there was a dolphin named Cetacea. One day a strange new awareness suddenly came into her head, as if it had come from the sky above her ocean and beyond. Now, this was in the days when dolphins and people sometimes spoke to one another, but…'
And with the gentle summer rain in the background, she told them the story of Starsea, of the common bond of loving hope that linked the intelligent creatures of the earth, the sea, the stars … and of the catastrophic loss that ultimately brought humanity to the sorrowfully exalted moment of first full contact with its ocean kin.
The children fidgeted a bit at first, but as the tale wore on they listened with increasing fascination while their mother verbally recreated the film that had once won her worldwide acclaim and had brought her together with Jeff. When she had finished, Kimberly was weeping openly, but with a glow of otherworldly rapture in her young eyes; Christopher had turned his face away to the window and didn’t speak for a long time.
Just before dusk, a single shaft of sunlight broke through the overcast sky, and Jeff and Pamela stood outside on the porch to watch it slowly fade. The children chose to stay inside; Kimberly had borrowed some of Pamela’s watercolors, and was painting images of stars and dolphins, while Christopher was absorbed in one of John Lilly’s books.
The shifting light played vividly across the rain-soaked meadow, the billion droplets beaded on the fresh-cut grass shimmering like unearthly jewels in a field of green fire. Jeff stood quietly behind Pamela, his arms around her waist, her hair against his cheek. Just before the light failed, he whispered something in her ear, a line from Blake: '
She pressed her hands to his, softly completed the quote: '
The towplane taxied into position, and when it had come to a stop, engine still turning, the line boy ran out to attach the two-hundred-foot nylon rope from the sailplane to the hook at the tail of the idling Cessna up ahead.
'Christopher, you want to check out the controls for me?' Jeff said to the boy who sat in the student’s seat in front of him.
'Sure thing,' Pamela’s son answered, his tone serious with pride at being part of the preparations, not just someone who was along for the ride. The boy wiggled the glider’s stick left and right, and the ailerons at each wing tip responded; then he pushed back and forth on the stick, and Jeff turned back to see the elevator at the tail of the craft flap up and down, as it should, followed by the shimmy of the rudder as Christopher moved his feet on the pedals. All the controls seemed to be in good working order, and Jeff smiled his approval.
The towplane ahead of them began to inch forward, slowly taking up the slack in the rope. Its rudder waggled the pilot’s 'Ready?' query, and Jeff answered with a matching right-and-left movement of his own rudder. The Cessna moved down the runway, pulling the sailplane behind it. The wing boy ran alongside, holding the craft level and keeping it headed into the wind. Jeff kept his eyes on the tow plane, judging the level of his wings by the horizon line ahead. They picked up speed, the ground crew boy dropped back, and Jeff eased back slightly on the stick; they were airborne.
Out of the corner of his eye Jeff noted low swirls of puffy white clouds near the base of the mountain ahead. Good sign; that meant unstable moist air and thermals already developing. No time to look for them now, though; he stared intently at the towplane and the line, kept the nylon rope rigidly straight, and turned smoothly as the Cessna turned.
They reached altitude, three thousand feet above the lower slopes of the mountain. Jeff pulled the release knob, waited a moment to see the undone tow line snap forward like a rubber band, then went into a climbing turn to the right as the tow plane veered off and downward to the left. The Cessna’s engine faded away as it returned to the little airport they had left, and soon there was no sound at all but the smooth rushing of the air against the Plexiglas canopy. They were in steady, powerless flight.
'God, Jeff! This is great!'
Jeff smiled, nodded as Christopher turned in his seat to look back at him, the boy’s eyes wide and gleaming. He held the sailplane in a long, looping turn, using the leftover energy of their tow speed to gain as much working altitude as possible. The unearthly white cone of Mount Shasta slid by on their left, then reappeared in front of them, a sun-bright beacon urging them ever upward.
Jeff looked back toward the southwest, where the town named after the mountain lay nestled in the great surrounding forest of ponderosa pines. A second single-engine Cessna, towing another white-and-blue sailplane, was approaching. Jeff circled lazily, his speed beginning to drop to the normal cruising range of forty to fifty miles per hour, as he waited for the other craft to join him.
When it was a mile or so away, the second glider broke free of its umbilical and swept up and away from the powered tug in a maneuver exactly like the one Jeff had just performed. Christopher pressed his face to the side of the clear canopy, watching the new arrival as it swooped toward them and drew alongside in smooth formation.
Pamela smiled and gave a thumbs up from the rear control seat of the other sailplane, and in the front seat Kimberly beamed ecstatically, waving at Jeff and her brother.
Jeff gently touched his left rudder pedal as he banked the wings leftward with the stick, breaking the loop they were in and turning toward the great symmetrical bulk of the mountain. Pamela followed suit, staying just behind and to the right of him.
The snowy treetops on the mountainside seemed to reach for them as they drew nearer and the angle of the slopes beneath them steepened. A lone deer chanced to look up and gave a startled shiver, then stood transfixed, staring at the great soundless birds not far above. Farther on, a quarter of the way around the mountain, Christopher pointed excitedly at a lumbering black bear, oblivious to the strange metal creatures sweeping low through his sky.
They found a bit of ridge lift, a swirling updraft of reflected wind, in front of and above the crest of a jutting cliff on the more rugged backside of the mountain. Jeff and Pamela glided along the ridge for several minutes, back and forth, looking at the silent, untouched snow that seemed so close they might have reached out to scoop up a powdery handful. Then Jeff spotted a thin wisp of cloud just forming against the blue sky slightly east of the mountain. He broke formation, headed for the newborn puff of condensation.
