Of course! My huge plastic bottle that I always carried for hiking, to filter water. Filled with air, it had saved Olivier’s life.
“Are you all right, too?” I asked Sam with enormous concern.
He looked awfully ragged—but not as bad as Wolfgang, who must have lost plenty of blood, what with his cat-clawed face and Bambi-wounded hand.
“I’m pretty sure he broke his leg in the fall,” Sam told us, still treading water. “He must have passed out from the pain.”
“So. We will take him ourselves,” said Bambi. “For we must swim back.”
She helped Dark Bear take Wolfgang from Sam as I showed Olivier how to propel his now-floating self back up through the milder current beneath the falls. When we’d crawled up the bank, Dark Bear lifted the lifeless Wolfgang in his arms and we picked our way back to retrieve the Pod and the other vessels. Olivier, carrying Jason while holding Bambi’s gun trained on the Pod, marched our soon-to-be-former boss before us back to the car, as Sam, Bambi, and I carried our ever more costly treasures.
A muddy, bedraggled Sam crawled into the front seat of the Land Rover beside me, and Dark Bear drove, with Olivier, Bambi, the cylinders, and our hostages in the roomy back. I was completely exhausted. Despite all the lifeblood I’d invested in these manuscripts, I almost wished they’d actually vanished beneath the glassy but dangerous surface of the river. My imagination was so demolished by all that had happened that I couldn’t think beyond the end of my nose.
“What next?” I asked the ensemble, who seemed as battered and confused as I.
“I can tell you,” said Olivier, “that my first steps are going to be to throw all my nuclear security badges in the nearest mailbox, pull out a few of my other badges, and use them to haul these two chaps to the authorities for attempted mass murder.” He paused and added, “We’ll discuss all the other charges after that.”
“And for me,” Bambi said proudly, “as we were walking down here from the river, Dark Bear asked that Lafcadio and I use our many contacts to help select the best archaeological and academic institutions in other parts of the world to review and authenticate the original documents. I know we will be pleased to do it. As for my brother, as Lafcadio says, he has planted during all his life what he will shortly harvest.”
I myself really wasn’t yet prepared to think about the unconscious Wolfgang, lying waterlogged beside a dripping Pod on the backseat.
“But these manuscripts aren’t quite out of the woods yet,” said Sam. “Not until we’ve rounded up a few more people—including your father, and Bettina’s mother—who’d surely still leave no stone unturned to put their hands on them.” Despite my feelings toward my unrepentant father, I felt an understandable pang at how things had turned out, and I could tell from her face Bambi must feel the same. “But until we get all the culprits put out of commission,” Sam added, “it will be my continuing job to protect and decipher these documents.”
As for me, I had no idea where I went from here. I couldn’t help wondering what life would be like after these past weeks, when everything had altered so irrevocably. I had no real job, no newfound friends, no mission, and no danger.
“I haven’t a clue what I’m supposed to do,” I admitted to everyone in general.
“Oh, you’re about to have the biggest job of all,” said Sam with a muddy grin, as I sat there waiting for the other moccasin to drop.
“You’re going to learn to dance,” he said.
THE DANCE
Mandala means “circle,” more especially a magic circle.… I have come across cases of women who did not draw mandalas but danced them instead. In India [this has] a special name.… mandala nrithya, the mandala dance.
—Carl G. Jung
In the ecstasy of dance man bridges the chasm between this and the other world.… We may assume that the circle dance was already a permanent possession of the Paleolithic culture, the first perceptible stage of human civilization.
—Curt Sachs,
World History of the Dance
The oldest dance form seems to be the Reigen, or circle dance [which] really symbolizes a most important reality in the life of primitive men—the sacred realm, the magic circle.… In the magic circle, all daemonic powers are loosed.
—Susanne K. Langer,
Feeling and Form
So we’d come full circle—but my dancing days hadn’t quite begun. Olivier arranged, by pay phone from the road, that the Feds send a deputation from Boise to rendezvous with us back in town, pick up the Pod and Wolfgang, and put them on ice. The goods he had on them—including treason, international espionage, fraternizing with known foreign arms dealers and nuclear smugglers, attempted multiple homicides in a river, and the assassination of the high-level government operative Theron Vane—seemed pale, in my perception, compared with what Wolfgang had done: the attempted murder of his own half brother, Sam.
In town, Olivier scribbled on a clipboard resting against the side of Dark Bear’s Land Rover, filling out the required forms for transfer of both his captives. The Pod, due to his lofty position as head of the nuclear site, was moved first by the Feds to their armored vehicle for immediate transfer to a federal prison, for detention awaiting trial.
Meanwhile Wolfgang, bound and harmless but sitting up now on the backseat, requested a word alone with me inside the car. So the others got out and milled around as I turned over my shoulder to look into his face, a mass of cat-tracks, and Wolfgang glared back at me in barely suppressed pain. It seemed to run deeper than something triggered by a wounded hand or fractured leg. Those dark turquoise eyes, that had only recently left me weak in the knees, now left me feeling isolated and frightened by everything that had passed
