The Bird Shaman

by Judith Moffett

Genres: Science Fiction; Dystopian

Synopsis

Occupation of Earth is now in its 27th year, and relations between humanity and the dictatorial Hefn have never seemed shakier. The aliens mission is to save the planet from its human abusers; and the Baby Ban imposed by mass hypnosis has made Earth a cleaner, wilder, less crowded place. But the Ban has now lasted so long, and provoked such hatred, that when a spark is struck the situation explodes into worldwide riots on one side and retaliatory mindwipings on the other. Years of effort by the eco-spiritual Gaians, who mediate between humans and Hefn, have been destroyed. While the Gaians regroup and brainstorm frantically in an atmosphere of doubt and danger, one obsessed Hefn and one young woman begin a radical experiment. Pam Pruitt has discovered a growing ability to acquire information by non-rational means. Childhood suffering has empowered her, in a way once understood by hunting and gathering peoples - an understanding lost with that lost lifeway - to communicate with mysterious forces through strong dreaming: to function as a shaman on behalf of her community, the human race.

Release date: April 30, 2015

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 320

Sample

THANKS for help with this book must go first to the group named in the dedication. Xenobia began many years ago at Brigham Young University, when students of a charismatic professor named Marion Smith decided to start a writing group focusing on science fiction and fantasy. Orson Scott Card, Dave Wolverton, and William Shunn had all been members; Shayne Bell was still attending regularly, and it was he who brought me in, in 1995. At that time the group was composed of some of those same former BYU students—practicing Mormons many of them, though not all—but by this point it also included outsiders like myself: writers in the field, living in Salt Lake City, with no connection to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The first three chapters of this novel were critiqued by Xenobia. I wish they could all have been. Ginny Smith, a Xenobian who moved back to Kentucky shortly after I did, vetted several later chapters, and Shayne himself did yeoman duty as a critic while I revised and re-revised the chapters that became my story “The Bradshaw.” (He also loaned me his Ape-English Dictionary, my own having disappeared decades before.)

Xenobia did more than critique early drafts of part of this novel. The group was my window into Mormon culture, and without some such window I would not have dared take on the task of describing the LDS Church with the intimacy I do here. My views—based on more than three years of living in Salt Lake, and a lot of discussing, reading, and thinking—are my own; but it was membership in Xenobia that allowed me see the culture from the inside.

The tutelary spirits behind all my novels are the late Anna and Harlan Hubbard and their homestead in Payne Hollow, Kentucky. Anna and Harlan are the real people “represented” by Hannah and Orrin Hubbell in this book and its predecessor. They have, literally, my eternal thanks and praise.

A novel of this kind requires a lot of research, and I owe a huge debt to more books and monographs about rock art and shamanism than I can possibly cite here. Outstanding among these are Polly Schaafsma’s work on the Barrier Canyon Style of Utah, and that of Solveig A. Turpin and the late Jim Zintgraff on the Pecos River culture of West Texas. I’ve quoted extensively from the Zintgraff/Turpin book Pecos River Rock Art on the subjects of dart-headed figures and bird shamans. Wallace Stegner’s The Gathering of Zion and Susan Arrington Madsen’s I Walked to Zion were invaluable sources for the story of the Mormon Trail. I learned about shamanism from texts as different as Mircea Eliade’s essential Shamanism and Robert Moss’s several books, fictional and non-, that vividly describe lucid (he prefers “conscious”) and precognitive dreaming. Stephen Karcher, distinguished translator and interpreter of the I Ching, was my primary source for bird divination. The best aid to imagining the impact of rock art in the landscape is Sacred Images: A Vision of Native American Rock Art, text and photographs by a number of gifted artists, Foreword by N. Scott Momaday; but best of all is to go and see it for yourself.

For help with the fieldwork part of my research I’m grateful to a number of people. In 1995, Shayne Bell led a small group of friends on a tour of the Moab area, during which I first laid eyes on the rock art of several prehistoric cultures and was changed for life by the experience. Ten years later, Dorde Woodruff and Jim Olive drove many hours and miles to show me a number of hard-to-find Barrier Canyon Style (BCS) pictographs, including those described in this story. Among other kindnesses, Dorde compiled for me a loose-leaf binder crammed with information about the rock art we were heading out to see, including many printout pages of discussion and interpretation then available on Jim Blazik’s illuminating website. (It was Jim who made the remark, loosely paraphrased on p. 333, that “some would say [a certain image] indicates shamanic transformations, others that rock art can’t be objectively understood.”) John Remakel guided me to several sites near Moab (and saved me from falling off a cliff while climbing up to one of them). It was John whose directions finally helped me find the site I’m calling Dead Mule Canyon here, with its ethereal pictograph panel. David Sucec shared his expertise on BCS art and the culture that produced it. Before his death in 1998, my husband, Ted Irving, cheerfully agreed to spend vacation time looking at rock art. His company made what was fascinating, fun.

For existing to study and preserve prehistoric rock art, and for providing much helpful information, I’m grateful to the Utah Rock Art Research Association (URARA) (www.utahrockart.org) and the Rock Art Foundation (RAF) of Texas (www.rockart.org). Many of the helpful friends and writers mentioned here are members of one or the other, and I have belonged to both for years. Interested readers can learn more about the art referred to in this book by checking out the websites of these organizations, and by Googling “barrier canyon style” and “pecos river style.”

My agent, Amy Stout, formerly an acquisitions editor at Bantam, applied her editorial skills to the manuscript and made me do an extensive rewrite before she started sending it around. This is a better book because of her.

The pictograph on the cover, showing two Pecos River Style bird shamans and their escorts, is after Forrest Kirkland’s watercolor of the original in Kirkland and Newcomb, The Rock Art of Texas Indians.

The four BCS pictographs and one Pecos River pictograph reproduced in these pages appear courtesy of Jim Blazik, who took the photographs, produced the files, and was extraordinarily generous both with them and with his time.

The drawing by Harlan Hubbard from Payne Hollow, on p. 91, is reprinted by permission of Gnomon Press. Passages in quotations that purport to be the writings of Orrin Hubbell are drawn from the same source.

My sources on child sexual abuse within and without the Mormon Church are manifold. Of particular interest is a special report entitled “Latter-day Sinners,” published in the December 22-28, 1994 issue of the Phoenix New Times, which gives a cogent overview of the roots of the problem in the LDS community.

Versions of parts of this novel previously appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction as novellas entitled “The Bradshaw” (1998), “The Bear’s Baby” (2003) and “The Bird Shaman’s Girl” (2007).

Special thanks to Michael Ward, for technical assistance and help with the cover illustration, and to Vicki Mahaffey, for making time to proofread the manuscript on her Roman holiday.

AT the Friends Meeting in College Park, Maryland—the town where Carrie Sharpless had lived the second, or post-meltdown, half of her very long life—a memorial service was in progress. According to Quaker custom, no one was actually running the service. People would stand in place and say something about Carrie. Then they would sit down, and there would be silence for a time while the assembly reflected upon what had been said, and then someone else would get up to speak.

It was all very informal and unrehearsed—very genuine. The only sour note, but it was a good loud one, came from the dozens of spectators crammed into the back benches and along the walls—local people, not friends of Carrie’s or members of the Meeting, who had crashed the service in hopes of getting a look at the Hefn, Humphrey, who’d been Carrie’s good friend. No public announcement had been made that Humphrey would attend, but the connection was known, and the possibility of hearing a Hefn deliver a eulogy for a human being had brought the gawkers out in force.

Whenever a Hefn appeared in public there were bound to be gawkers. Pam knew that and was used to it, but these annoyed her. Like the media, which had been prevented from entering, they were out of place at a private funeral. Scrunched into the second row between Humphrey and her ex-lover, Liam O’Hara, she tried to focus on what white-haired Frank Flintoft, a widower now, come alone all the way from his sheep farm in Yorkshire for this, had to say about his old, old friend.

Yorkshire farmers are men of few words. Pam could feel Liam tense up beside her as the gruff, brief speech came to its end; and almost as soon as Frank had sat down, Liam—a short, athletically built man in his late thirties, face soft and boyish under thinning brown hair—was on his feet.

On Pam’s other side, Humphrey shifted his weight to peer intently up at his brightest pupil. The bench and the Hefn’s oddly jointed body hadn’t been meant for each other, and the cushion Pam had remembered to bring for him didn’t seem to be helping much; he must be fairly miserable. But given Humphrey’s fascination with human bonding, and his closeness to the people most affected by Carrie’s death, Pam knew that wild horses couldn’t have kept him away from this service, let alone mere acute physical discomfort. In fact, when the news of Carrie’s stroke and prognosis had reached him, he’d decided at once to postpone hibernation in order not to miss out on her final rite of passage. This was passion, not ghoulishness; Humphrey had his own things to say about Carrie, and he wanted, with an avidity that was almost comical, to say those things—to truly include himself in the occasion.

Liam’s hands gripped the back of the bench in front of him. “I knew Carrie all my life,” he began. “She was my dad’s cousin. Carrie and Matt didn’t have kids of their own, and we all lived pretty close to each other in Philadelphia, so Carrie used to take my friend Jeff and me hiking in the park when we were little, with a bag of doughnuts and a thermos of hot tea …”

He spoke steadily enough, but Pam, who could read every slightest nuance in Liam’s voice and face and general demeanor, knew how upset he was—how drawn and exhausted. His shapely hands, tight on the bench, were bone-white; and the parallel scars, which ran across the backs of his white hands and vanished up his jacket sleeves, stood up in ropy welts.

Abruptly, without willing or wishing it, Pam found herself remembering the time, just after their apprenticeship at the Bureau of Temporal Physics had ended, when the two of them had encountered the bear.

JUNE in the Poconos. Shiny new leaves everywhere, from oak canopy to blueberry undergrowth; mountain laurel in delicate, fading white bloom; blue sky, bright sunshine spangling the river, green violently overwhelming the winter brown all across the long low mountains. Pam and Liam, a matched set of newly-minted temporal technicians, going-on-eighteen and going-on-nineteen, on holiday together as Terry Carpenter’s guests at his cabin on Lake Winnepaupack.

Day after day the warm, sunny weather holds. At Port Jervis they launch the canoe that had belonged to Jeff Carpenter, Liam’s friend, and paddle it down the Delaware to the Water Gap—45 miles of mostly whitewater rapids—camping two nights on islands in the river. The shad have spawned and are dying; their floating multitudes of smellily unraveling corpses are all that qualify the delight of being on the river. The journey is highlighted by happier sightings: five bald eagles, dozens of great blue herons, mergansers and goldeneyes and geese, does and spring fawns coming down to drink, a porcupine or two, a trillion songbirds. Even before the alien Broadcast accelerated the process a decade ago, by putting human fertility on hold, wildlife of every sort had been increasing all through the protected upper Delaware valley. Pam identifies the birds by song, and calls out their names happily to tolerant Liam: summer tanager! song sparrow! Baltimore oriole! yellow warbler! towhee! chat! cardinal! She knows these eastern songbirds like the back of her hand, and will miss them out in California.

They reminisce a lot about their other canoe trip three years before, in the spring of ‘14—The Canoe Trip That Changed History, says Liam, with a bow of acknowledgment to Pam. In the spirit of that earlier trip they harmonize on many, many stanzas of “Peace! Be Still!” (and compose several wicked new ones of their own). As before, their paddling together is another sort of expert harmony; and their relationship, which can be fractious, glides along day after day in perfect harmony as well. A magical journey, one to treasure for a lifetime.

On the last day Liam borrows the car—a perk of Terry’s position as Chair of the Senate Committee on Alien Affairs—and they cross the river at the Delaware Water Gap and drive up the derelict Old Mine Road to a trailhead Liam knows about. The Appalachian Trail runs along the ridgetop above them, parallel to the river; this shorter trail ascends more or less straight up from the road to the ridge to connect with the AT. The climb up is stiff, and they get sweaty and winded (and a little bit fractious, nothing serious), but the high long view of tiny, shiny Walpack Bend, the S-curve in the Delaware through whose boiling rapids they’d gone whooping and paddling like blazes just a couple of days before, takes Pam’s breath away, what’s left of it. Terry’s chicken sandwiches are fabulous.

For variety they descend by a different route, the Kaiser Trail, a rough jeep track that will deliver them onto the Old Mine Road about a mile below the car. Unlike the gorges and stony cliffs through which their upward track led them, the mountainside here is parklike, a mixture of large trees and spindly saplings doomed to be shaded out before they can mature. This trail is wide enough for two to walk side by side, and Pam and Liam tromp along in their boots, making no attempt to be quiet, tired now and less inclined to sing than to argue. They are in fact quarreling fairly loudly about some damn thing or other—afterwards neither of them remembers what—when Pam happens to glance to her right, through the open area below the high canopy, and sees the large, dark, motionless object shaped like a barrel on end, some fifty meters away.

Her mind tries several times to reject the obvious in favor of something less problematic, but finally “Omigosh,” she blurts, interrupting Liam’s tirade, “it’s a bear.”

“Yeah, right,” says Liam irritably; he hates being interrupted. But then he looks where she’s pointing. “Yikes, it is a bear! Jesus Christ Almighty! How come it’s just standing there? When I see bears up here they always take off.” He slows almost to a stop and grins nervously at Pam. “Okay, you’re the Girl Scout, what do we do?”

Pam, casting about frantically to call up anything she’s ever read or heard about bears, says, “Just keep on going, don’t make any sudden moves. Black bears are supposed to be more scared of us than we are of them, unless it’s a sow with cubs.”

They resume walking. “I didn’t see any cubs, did you?” Liam glances over his shoulder. “It’s all right, he’s leaving,” he reports with relief.

Pam looks too. What she sees she will remember for the rest of her life: the instant when the bear appears to change its mind, swings back around and charges toward them, swift and straight as a bullet. “No he’s not,” she says, scarcely able to take this in, “he’s coming!”

You’re not supposed to run, and Pam’s brain is still debating whether to stand tight, call the bear’s bluff, but her feet have taken off. She and Liam tear up the shallow slope to the left of the trail, leap over a little creek in a gully, dart between the skinny trees. Away from the trail the footing is bad, the ground littered with branches invisible under thickly matted clumps of last year’s leaves. Pam glances back just in time to see the bear bound across the gully, closing fast.

“I don’t believe this! What the hell are we supposed to do?” Liam asks again, half laughing. No more than Pam does he seem able to accept the moment as a real one, continuous with the reality of graduating from the BTP and shooting the Walpack rapids.

“Climb a tree?” Pam pants, remembering as she suggests this that tree climbing is grizzly-attack strategy; black bears are skillful climbers. All the same she starts looking around for a climbable tree, because what else can they do? It’s that or be caught on the ground.

But no luck: every tree in sight is either a smooth-boled giant, its lowest branches twenty feet out of reach, or a sapling too slender and weak to be of any use. “Maybe we should split up,” she gasps, and strikes off down the slope, running as if in a nightmare, just as Liam swings one leg over a middle-sized log fallen at an angle against a living tree. The log’s trunk is mossy and slippery but … frantically Pam scans the slope as she sprints, looking for a thicket of young trees growing in a tangle that she can maybe keep between herself and the bear.

The whole time she’s aware, in a detached way, of her mind—superbly trained problem-solving mechanism that it is—continuing to search swiftly, methodically, for an answer to the present problem. But school problems set by Humphrey, however difficult, always had solutions. What if this particular pop quiz doesn’t have one? She thinks again and again that the bear’s bound to break off the chase, but what if it doesn’t?

And then Liam shrieks, and Pam, skidding and twisting in mid-stride, sees the bear bowl him under the angled log with a swipe of its right paw, and plunge after him. Liam huddles on his stomach, arms wrapped around his head and neck. The bear swipes again, powerfully, too fast to follow; Pam sees a bursting bloom of red and then she’s there, whacking at the bear’s snout with her backpack, which she doesn’t remember taking off, yelling, whaling the tar out of the bear to beat him off of Liam’s huddled, bleeding form. For a timeless interval everything’s a loud whirling blur with Pam at the center. And then, miraculously, the bear is lumbering away.

Pam, unhurt, drops her pack and helps Liam sit up. The backs of his hands and arms are scored with deep claw-marks and bleeding profusely; there’s blood all over his shirt. But none of his wounds are spurting, the bear didn’t hit an artery, and his own daypack, ripped to pieces now, has protected his back. Pam pulls the shreds of the pack off him. He’s dazed. If he goes into shock they’re in big trouble, and he doesn’t have the luxury of being wrapped up in the emergency blanket with his feet elevated. They have to get off the mountain.

But he probably won’t go into shock if the bleeding can be stopped. There’s nothing absorbent bigger than a gauze pad in Pam’s first-aid kit, but there is an Ace bandage. This she unrolls, cuts in two with the little scissors on her Swiss Army knife, and wraps one piece, not too tight, around each of Liam’s forearms, to apply pressure. She does this coolly and efficiently; then she hauls him to his feet. They have to get going. The bear might come back.

Their panicked flight has carried them into deeper woods. No sign of the Kaiser Trail. Stumbling over the uneven slope in their haste, angling downhill, they cast about for it, or rather Pam does—Liam’s gone from being dazed to being hyper. They aren’t really lost—if they keep heading down they’ll eventually hit the river and the road—but if they have to bushwhack it’ll mean a tough, slow, scratchy descent through the bear-fraught wilderness.

When they do finally strike the trail—much farther away than expected; the amount of ground they’ve covered astonishes them both—they light out, Pam more or less steering Liam, toward the road, the river, the car, and safety. High as two kites on adrenaline, they jabber and babble and talk on top of each other all through the downhill scramble. “They aren’t supposed to charge you! They’re supposed to back off if you don’t threaten them—” “Except if they’ve got cubs! Maybe she had some cubs up a tree, and the trail went between her and the tree—” “No, I think it was the chocolate and trash in your pack, I think that’s why she went for you instead of me, I didn’t have anything but the first-aid kit—”

Down and down the wooded mountainside they rush, casting anxious looks behind them, peering between the tree trunks; but finally they sight the trailhead barrier, and the road beyond, without another glimpse of the bear.

In her frantic haste to get away, Pam’s pack has been left behind. At the road they stop while she cuts Liam’s tee shirt off him, tears it into strips, unwinds the blood-soaked elastic bandages, and wraps the strips of shirt around his arms and hands. The tube of antiseptic is still on the mountain. So is the bottle of Numbutol, and this process is making Liam’s wounds hurt in earnest. “All the miles and miles I’ve carried that first-aid kit, and the only time I ever really needed it, I haven’t got it!” Pam gripes, mostly to distract her patient, who is gasping and grimacing. She wants him to sit down and wait while she goes for the car, but he refuses so absolutely that she doesn’t waste energy arguing. He’s not bleeding too badly now anyway; the emergency measures seem to be doing the trick.

The adrenaline starts to wear off while they toil up the Old Mine Road together. Pam feels sick; Liam’s in pain and his teeth are chattering. The road hasn’t been repaired in twenty years, Pam has to watch where she’s walking for both of them. “All the t-t-times I’ve been up here hiking and c-c-camping in these m-m-mountains,” Liam complains, “all the bears I’ve b-b-bumped into, and n-not one of ‘em was ever the least bit ag-g-gressive, not w-w-one!”

“Maybe your number just came up.”

“Yeah, m-maybe s-s-so.” Now that the acute peril is past, Liam’s shuddering all over in reaction to the trauma.

A poem has been running through Pam’s head all the way down the trail, and now for lack of a better distraction she starts to recite it, panting, in time with their double-quick pace:

“Up from his stony playground—down from his well-digged lair—

Out on the naked ridges ran Adam-zad the Bear;

Groaning, grunting, and roaring, heavy with stolen meals,

Two long marches to northward, and I was at his heels!”

Liam’s face smooths out; he loves Kipling, they both do. “‘I was at his heels!’ A guy with a d-d-death wish! Is that the one about R-Russia?”

She nods, puffing. “The Truce of the Bear.”

“‘Eyeless, noseless, and l-l-lipless, something, something of b-b-blank …’”

Pam picks up the thread where she dropped it:

“Two long marches to northward, at the fall of the second night,

I came on mine enemy Adam-zad all panting from his flight.

There was a charge in the musket—pricked and primed was the pan—

My finger crooked on the trigger—when he reared up like a man.”

Then, realizing where the poem’s leading, Pam breaks off. “Oops, sorry, bad idea, I’m creeping myself out!”

“D-d-don’t s-s-stop! Keep g-g-going!”

“No, it’s gruesome! It’s the worst thing I can think of to be quoting right now, I shouldn’t’ve started.”

“Come on, I w-w-want to hear it!”

Pam argues some more, but finally she does continue, the rhythm is irresistible:

“Horrible, hairy, human, with paws like hands in prayer,

Making his supplication rose Adam-zad the Bear!

I looked at the swaying shoulders, at the paunch’s sag and swing,

And my heart was touched with pity for the monstrous, pleading thing.

 

Touched with pity and wonder, I did not fire then …

I have looked no more on women—I have walked no more with men.

Nearer he tottered and nearer, with paws like hands that pray—

From brow to jaw that steel-shod paw, it ripped my face away!”

Pam stops. “Listen—” she starts to demur; but Liam shakes his head. He’s not shivering quite so badly. “Keep going, I’m fine. Go on. Finish it.”

So she goes on:

“Sudden, silent, and savage, searing as flame the blow—

Faceless I fell before his feet, fifty summers ago.

I heard him grunt and chuckle—I heard him pass to his den.

He left me blind to the darkened years and the little mercy of men.”

Then she breaks off again in relief. “I see the car!”

TIGHTLY packed as they were in the row, Liam jostled Pam out of her reverie by sitting down. She’d heard nothing of his speech beyond the first sentences. Startled at the sheer vividness of what she’d been remembering, Pam made an effort to fix herself in the present—did a breathing exercise, rubbed her face, discreetly tightened several muscle groups in sequence. Being able to get such deep trances was an excellent meditation tool, but you wanted to pick your time and place. It was spooky when it happened by itself—not to mention (in the present instance) painful.

The silence lasted a good while. Pam had time to get herself in hand, and then to wonder, as she had on the plane, whether she wanted to say anything herself about Carrie. Now would be the time, but her mind was a blank. Carrie had been kind to Pam when Pam was a fourteen-year-old first-year Apprentice at the BTP, when the Bureau was based in Washington and Liam would sometimes bring Pam out to College Park for dinner with his extended family. They had liked each other. She could say, “When Liam and I were just starting to be friends, poetry was almost the first way we connected, and Carrie taught Liam everything he knows about poetry”—but this, though true, put the emphasis in the wrong place. This service wasn’t about Liam or herself.

Would Carrie have spoken at a memorial service for Pam? Pam didn’t think so. What could she have said? “I hoped for both their sakes that the kids could make a go of it, but I knew Liam awfully well, and there was something about the fit that didn’t feel quite right.” (Not even Carrie would’ve said that in a public setting!)

By the time Terry Carpenter rose to take his turn, Pam had decided to hold her peace.

Terry made a lot of speeches; you wouldn’t need to recognize him as a famous face to figure that much out. “On the day when the time window opened,” he began, in a damped-down version of what Carrie used to call his “stentorian” voice, “I was a student at the University of Pennsylvania—a junior. I’d been working on a take-home exam, an exam for Professor Sharpless’s class in American poetry. The year was 1990. Now, when the window opened, and I saw Liam O’Hara and the Hefn Humphrey standing on the other side of it”—he gestured across the room—“Liam over there hadn’t even been born yet in real time—but in the time window, he was a good deal older than I was.”

At the reference to himself, Liam smiled faintly and nodded in acknowledgment. Humphrey did whatever it was the Hefn did to convey the impression of a smile. Having lived so much among humans, he did it better than most of them; today, delighted at being included, he did it especially well.

Terry bent toward the Hefn in a half-bow. “Now, of course, those two could only look through and talk through, they couldn’t step through and neither could I. Naturally Humphrey wiped every trace of our meeting from my mind, and he made a good job of it. Had Carrie given the class a different exam, my memory of the event wouldn’t have been triggered by her questions; had she not been concerned for my state of mind, and come back to the park with me, there would have been no witness to vouch for any part of my experience on that fateful day …”

It was what Pam had expected Terry to talk about, the story his political career had been founded on, the one that had linked his life to Carrie’s for keeps. There could hardly have been a soul present not familiar with it; but Senator Carpenter was chief mourner here and they all gave him their attention, even the crowd in back.

As he talked on, embellishing the tale, Pam smiled to herself to think how Carrie, an English professor all her working life, and a canny, tough old bird of 85 the last time Pam had been to see her, had despised cheap rhetorical flourishes like “that fateful day.” She’d have been cross as two sticks with Terry for making her the occasion of a phrase like that. She’d be spinning in her grave.

Not that Carrie actually had a grave, or ever would. At the moment, in fact, she was attending her own memorial service, on the bench next to Terry, in a cardboard box from the crematorium. The arrangement would have made her grin like a wolf and fire off some piece of tomsawyeresque self-parody—“She warn’t bad,” Pam could imagine Carrie’s rough old voice saying, “only mischeevous like”—while snorting and tossing her head like an elderly horse at her old student’s politico-babble.

It was true, as he’d so often said, that in the park that day—all of 47 years ago; Pam, the ex math prodigy, did the calculation in a flash—Terry had been a twenty-year-old undergraduate with lots of dark, curly hair, and Liam had been years older than that. Observing the trim, bald Senator from Pennsylvania as he picked up steam, Pam thought that despite the erect posture and confident manner he looked older today than anyone, impossibly old, a ruin of grief. “For many terrible years,” he was saying now, “Carrie was the only person—the only person!—who believed I had seen what I’d seen and heard what I’d heard. Her faith in me, in my experience, helped me hang on to my sanity. It supported my decision to enter the law, and politics—to prepare to respond when the calamity, the nuclear disaster foretold by Liam out of the future