of his past clicked away inside his mind with every jolt of The Machine’s balloonlike tires. This was his mission. He had finally got it, or it had got him, and his entire life had been pointing toward this place and this time. A time that encompassed an infinity of moments. An infinity of possibilities.
“You all right?” Kaprow asked, wrestling with the steering wheel. “You’ve been mighty quiet.”
“He’s anticipating the morrow,” Blair put in.
“More than that,” Joshua confessed. “Lots more than that.”
Chapter Twenty-Eight
A Gift from the Ashes
THE STORM BROKE OVER SHANGRI-LA and soon enveloped the entire mountain in its shroud. I squatted beside my wife and daughter in Guinevere’s hovel, in the sting of the astringent rain, and tried to sort out my fragmented emotions. News of the birth had spread through our encampment, even to those who had been sleeping, and while I watched my Helen struggle futilely against the stealthy machinations of death, every Minid in our band passed by her resting place—her makeshift bier—to see the baby. I could not pinpoint the moment of her dying, for she went without a wince or a murmur, the victim of lacerations and internal hemorrhaging, having exerted the last reserves of her strength to force our daughter into the impersonal slaughterhouse of the world; and the rain, the cleansing and astringent rain, had distanced me from the full intensity of her suffering.
“She’s dead!” I shouted at Alfie, Guinevere, and the others. “Goddamn it, I think she’s dead!”
I did not look to see what their reaction was. I turned my attention to the issue of Helen’s womb. Despite our daughter’s pale skin and greedy suckling at her mother’s breast, I began to feel a powerful affection for her, a desire to comfort and protect. I took her into my arms and sheltered her from the pounding rain.
The storm passed over us, moving seaward. Dawn broke bright and cool. Several of the Minids greeted it with song.
But I could not understand the persistence of thunder on so fine a morning. The habilines were quicker than I to deduce the answer, to identify the source of this noise, and their gathering panic finally opened my eyes to what was happening.
The thunder was not overhead but underfoot.
Like a boiler full of clabbered tapioca, Mount Tharaka was churning inside, its sticky contents threatening to burst, brim, and overflow. The thunderstorm, along with the confusion attending the birth of the Grub, had disguised from us the mountain’s premonitory rumblings—but now, all too plainly, we could hear and feel them. The higher the sun mounted the more pronounced and emphatic these warnings.
We began to make preparations to leave Shangri-la, and our preparations included the manufacture of a travois on which to place my wife’s body. I was hurriedly trying to tie together the frame for this sledge when Mount Tharaka’s highest peak flew apart like a gigantic tooth dealt a shattering hammer blow.
I pitched to the ground. Foliage blocked my view of the summit, but above this line of foliage a billow of smoke and ash climbed into the sky, twisted in the air, and drifted downwind like the fallout from Death’s powder puff.
Another explosion wracked the mountain.
Below our encampment Alfie and Malcolm were hooting frantically. Quite clearly from where I lay, only a few feet from Helen and the Grub, I could hear other habilines calling back and forth across the ridge. I turned on my side and saw Guinevere hurrying out of her windbreak and down a worn footpath toward the men.
Emily, Fred, and Nicole next came scurrying past me, and Nicole was carrying A.P.B., whose eyes were fixed over his mother’s shoulder on the prodigious bonnet of ash cowling Mount Tharaka’s truncated peak. The ground was tilting and heaving even as they fled, and it occurred to me that I had only two possible courses of action: I could die with Helen or I could bid her farewell and perhaps save my life. And the Grub’s.
Kicking aside the struts of the unfinished travois, I threw myself into Guinevere’s shelter. There lay Helen. The Grub squirmed against her breasts, where I had placed the infant to free my hands for work. About her neck my dead wife still wore the red bandanna that my sister Anna had given me in Cheyenne. I unknotted it, wiped Helen’s forehead, and, after closing her lackluster eyes, tied the bandanna around my own neck. Another powerful explosion shook the mountain. Time was tightening like a noose.
“Come here, baby. Come