of the shallows and knew that I was almost home.
One of the astronauts helped me down the ladder to the ground. The other, waiting below, put the Grub into my arms as if presenting me a trophy for surviving my ordeal. Then they returned to their vehicle, closed the hatch, and ascended again into the sky on delicate streamers of fire. Two gods in a machine.
After their departure, the Grub and I were on our own again. I scrambled over the outcropping of tuff, searching for the spot where Kaprow had parked the omnibus.
There. There it was.
Suspended in the air as if by Hindu legerdemain, the Backstep Scaffold. I knelt beneath it and stared up into the interior of the bus, an equipment-crowded chapel of stinging white light. There were Kaprow’s Egg Beaters, huge coppery rotors, and enclosing them were the padded interior walls and ceiling of the omnibus. Deliverance.
“We’re going home, baby. Going home.”
I pushed the Grub up and over the edge of the Backstep Scaffold, which was about a foot above eye level, then chinned my way onto the platform and settled into its contours with my daughter in my left arm. It took me a moment to locate the toggle for retracting the platform, but when I found and activated it, the rotors inside the omnibus began to spin and the past to drop away beneath us like an ill-remembered dream. My baby and I were going home. Home.
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Russell-Tharaka Air Force Base, Zarakal
September 1987
“WELCOME BACK, JOHNNY. I was beginning to think you were going to sleep the rest of your life away.”
At first he did not recognize the face outlined above him against a window of robin’s-egg blue. The face was a gentle caricature of one he remembered from another time. Most disconcerting, its skin was pale, with hints of applied color in the cheeks and lavender crescents on the eyelids. His tongue would not move.
“Don’t try to talk yet, Johnny. You’ve been sedated for several days. I’ve . . . well, I’ve watched you sleep for the last three. Off and on, that is. They’ve given me a room in the Visiting Officers’ Quarters. First time I’ve ever had officers’ quarters in my life. Hugo would have scoffed at me for even accepting them—but noncoms’ widows don’t rate an on-base hostelry all their own and it’s better than trying to commute out here every morning from Marakoi.
“God, Johnny, they did everything they could to keep me out of this country, everything but charge me with a federal crime and lock me up in Leavenworth. Suddenly, though, just a few days ago, their resistance collapsed, and here I am. . . . I don’t think I’ve ever watched you sleep so many straight hours without your eyeballs disappearing up into your forehead. Maybe you’re over that now. Maybe that justifies what they’ve done to you. Maybe that absolves them of using you for a guinea pig in some sort of temporal I-don’t-know-what. . . . Woody Kaprow tried to explain it. He was the one who insisted on their letting me into the country once you got back from wherever the hell you supposedly were. I owe him for that, I know I do, but the rest of it—the secrecy, the deceptions, the bullyings, the run-arounds—God knows when I’ll be able to forgive them for that. God knows.”
The face was coming into focus, taking on a recognizable human aspect. It was an older face than he remembered, but he had not seen it for—well, for what?—eight years? ten years? more than two million? It belonged to the woman who had raised him, an aging woman against whom he had perpetrated a terrible wrong, believing himself, at her hands, the victim of an unforgivable treachery. He had forestalled any future treachery by cutting all ties with her.
Now—whenever Now was—here she was again. He did not resent this torrent of words from her or even the implicit assumption underlying them, that they could resume their lives without agonizing over or even referring to the cause of their break. That was a false assumption, however. He had a good deal to answer for. He knew it, and he tried unsuccessfully to make his tongue work.
“No, really. You don’t have to say anything, Johnny. They said you might have trouble. Apparently you’ve awakened briefly twice before. Kaprow and a couple of Air Force doctors were with you, but you couldn’t talk. Not a word. They wanted a kind of deposition