How strange, thought Peter, to find himself thinking of Auntie now. Like Greer’s story of their night in Arizona, his memory of the old woman, and the time they’d spent together, emerged in his mind as if it were yesterday. Her overheated kitchen, and the awful cups of tea; the precise, even reverential arrangement of objects in her cramped house, furniture and books and pictures and mementos; her gnarled old feet, always shoeless, and her puckered, toothless mouth and the vaporous tangle of white hair that seemed to hover in the air around her head, not even really attached to anything. As Auntie herself was unattached; alone in her shack at the edge of the glade, the woman seemed to exist in a wholly different realm, a pocket of accumulated human memory, outside of time. Now that Peter considered it, probably that was what had drawn him to her. In Auntie’s presence, the daily struggles of his life always felt lighter.
“More or less the same. She wasn’t the easiest woman to make sense of.” A specific recollection bubbled to the surface. “There is one thing. It was the same night Amy appeared outside the gate.”
“Oh?”
“She said, ‘The God I know about wouldn’t give us no chance.’ ”
Greer was watching him with studious intensity. “She said that to you.”
He was still a little surprised by the clarity of the memory. “At the time I just thought it was, you know, Auntie.”
Greer broke the mood with a sudden, flashing smile. “Well,” he said, “it sounds to me like the woman knew a thing or two. I’m sorry I never met her. I bet the two of us would have gotten on just fine.”
Peter laughed. “You know, I think you would have.”
“So maybe it’s time for you to trust a little more, Peter. That’s really all I’m saying. Let things come to you.”
“Like Martinez, you mean.”
“Maybe, maybe not. There’s no way to know until you know. I’ve never asked you what you believe, Peter, and I’m not going to. Every man gets to decide that for himself. And don’t get me wrong—I’m a soldier, too, or at least I was. The world needs its warriors, and the day will come when very little else is going to matter. You’ll be there for the fight, my friend, I have no doubt. But there’s more to this world than meets the eye. I don’t have all the answers, but I know that much.”
“I wish I had your confidence.”
The major shrugged this away. “Oh, you’re just trying to work things out, same as the rest of us. When I was growing up in the orphanage, the sisters always taught us that a person of faith is someone who believes something he can’t prove. I don’t disagree, but that’s only half the story. It’s the end, not the means. A hundred years ago, humanity just about destroyed itself. It’d be easy to think that God doesn’t like us very much. Or that there
It was then that Peter understood what he was seeing. Greer was free, a free man. The walls of his cage held no meaning for him at all; his life was entirely elsewhere, unbounded by physical things. How surprising, to envy a man whose whole life was conducted in a prison cell not much larger than a good-sized latrine.
The sound of turning tumblers; their time was at an end. As Sanders entered the cell, the two men rose.
“So,” Greer said, and clapped his hands conclusively. “A little downtime in Freeport, courtesy of Command. Not the best-smelling town, but the view is nice. A good place to get a little thinking done. You’ve certainly earned it.”
“That’s what Colonel Apgar said.”
“Smart fellow, Apgar.” Greer extended his hand. “It was good to see you, my friend.”
They shook. “Take care of yourself, all right?”
Greer grinned through the pocket of his beard. “You know what they say. Three hots and a cot. It’s not such a bad life when you get down to it. And as for the rest, I know you, Peter. You’ll figure things out when the time is right. That’s a lesson you taught me, actually.”
Sanders escorted him into the hall. Only then did it occur to Peter that he’d forgotten to ask Greer about his other visitor. And something else: the major had never asked about Amy.
“Listen,” Sanders said as they were passing through the second door, “I hope you don’t mind my asking, but could you sign this?”
He was holding out a scrap of paper and a stub of pencil.
“It’s for my wife,” he explained. “To prove I met you.”
Peter accepted the paper, scrawled his name, and handed it back. For a moment Sanders just looked at it.
“Wow,” he said.
“Uncle Peter!”
Breaking away from the other children, Caleb flew toward him across the playground. At the last instant he took three bounding steps and catapulted into Peter’s arms, nearly knocking him over.
“Whoa now, easy.”
The boy’s face was lit with joy. “Amy said you were coming! You’re here! You’re here!”
Peter wondered how she had known. But he quickly corrected himself; Amy simply seemed to know things, as if her mind were linked to the world’s hidden rhythms. Holding Caleb in his arms, Peter was washed with his distinctive physical presence: his boyish weight and heat; the warmth of his breath; the milky smell of his hair and skin, moist with exertion, mixed with the lingering scent of the harsh lye soap the sisters used. Across the playground, the other children were watching. Peter caught a glimpse of Sister Peg eyeing him coolly from the monkey bars, his unannounced presence a disruption to her beloved routine.
“Let me have a look at you.”
He lowered Caleb to the ground. As always, Peter was struck by the boy’s uncanny resemblance to Theo. He felt a stab of regret at the time he’d carelessly allowed to pass.
“You’re getting so big. I can hardly believe it.”
The little boy’s chest puffed with pride. “Where have you been, what did you see?”
“Lots of stuff. I was in New Mexico.”
“New Mexico!” The look of wonder on his face was total; Peter might just as well have told him he’d visited the moon. Although the prevailing custom in Kerrville was not to shelter the children from knowledge of the virals, as had been done in the Colony, his child’s mind had yet to absorb the ramifications. To Caleb, the Expeditionary was a grand adventure, like pirates crossing the seas or tales of the knights of old that the sisters read to them from storybooks. “How long can you stay?” the boy pleaded.
“Not long, I’m afraid. But we have the rest of the afternoon. And I’ll be back soon, probably just a week or so. What would you like to do?”
Caleb’s answer was instantaneous: “Go to the dam.”
“Why there?”
“You can see everything!”
Peter smiled. At such moments he felt something of himself in his nephew, the same undeniable force of curiosity that had governed his life. “The dam it is.”
Sister Peg came up behind the boy. Possessing a birdlike slightness, Sister Peg was nonetheless an intimidating figure, her dark eyes capable of shrinking your insides with a single censorious glance. Peter’s comrades who had been raised in the orphanage—men who weathered horrible conditions and constant peril— spoke of her with an awe verging on terror.
“Hello, Sister.”
Her face, a weathered topography of deep crevices and arid planes, possessed the immobility of judgment withheld. She had taken a position just beyond a normal conversational distance, a small but significant alteration
