“It’s all right, Mom,” he said.

“It’s all right to be afraid,” Arthur said to nobody in particular, staring at the flowered wallpaper illuminated by a small night-light pointing the way to the bathroom.

They were in a bed-and-breakfast inn a few miles south of Portland.

The network was not active.

He had been set on his course, given his instructions.

I could use a little sympathy, too.

But none was offered.

Excerpt from New Scientist, March 25, 1997: The emergence of a new and radically altered Venus from behind the sun has given planetary geologists many things to ponder. It was supposed that the impact of a block of ice two hundred kilometers in diameter would cause enormous seismic disruption, but there is no sign of that. Some, in fact — connecting the impact with events on Earth — have theorized that the block was artificially “calved” into many smaller chunks, distributing the impact more evenly around the solar system’ s second planet.

What we now see is a naked Venus, her atmosphere transformed into a cloak of transparent, superheated steam. Surface features thus revealed are little different from what we had expected from the evidence of past planetary probe radar scans.

Planetologist Ure Heisinck of Gottingen University believes that the atmosphere may now have a built-in heat-transfer mechanism that will allow it to cool; that eventually the steam will condense and the resulting opaque white clouds will reflect more of the sun’s heat into space than they will absorb. More cooling will occur, and eventually rain will fall, which will turn again into steam on the planet’s surface. The steam will condense in the upper atmosphere, conveying heat back into space. In a few centuries, Earthlike conditions may prevail…

LACRIMOSA DIES ILLA!

60

Smoky haze hung high over the valley from fires in the east: Idaho, Arizona, Utah. The morning sun glowered bright orange through the pall, casting all Yosemite in a dreamy shadow-light the color of Apocalypse.

Edward walked past the general store and saw Minelli sitting in the open doorway of his car in the parking lot, listening to the radio with one leg drawn up on the other knee, picking mud out of his boot tread with a twig.

“What’s the word?” Edward asked, leaning his walking stick on the car’s bumper.

“Nothing close to us yet,” Minelli answered. “Fires to the south, spreading south but not north, and fires to the east about three, four hundred miles.”

“Anything else?”

“The bullets have dropped below microseismic background. Nobody can hear them now.” He smirked and flipped the mud-tipped twig onto the asphalt. “Makes you wish- we were out there at work, doesn’t it? Feeling the patient’s pulse.”

“Not really,” Edward said. “Walking today?”

“Been,” Minelli said, gesturing to the west. “Since about five. It’s nice getting up in the dark. The sunrise was spectacular. Lots of my habits are changing. I’m feeling very calm now. Does that make any sense?”

“Denial, anger, withdrawal…acceptance,” Edward said. “The four stages.”

“I don’t accept at all,” Minelli said. “I’m just calm about what’s going to happen. Where are you going?”

“I’m taking the Mist Trail up to Vernal and Nevada falls. Never been there.”

Minelli nodded. “You know, I’ve specked out where I want to be when the crunch comes.” He raised a finger to Glacier Point. “You can see everything up there, and it’s going to be spectacular. I’ll hike up and camp out for a week or however long it takes, just to be ready.”

“What if you meet some kind female?”

“I expect she’ll go with me,” Minelli said. “But I’m not holding out much hope.” He rubbed his beard and grinned fiendishly. “I’m not grade-A Choice.”

Edward glanced at a sticker in the side window: BORN TO RAISE HECK. “Mazel,” he called back over his shoulder, walking east.

“I’m a Catholic boy. I don’t know that stuff.”

“I’m Episcopalian,” Edward said.

“When are you coming back?”

“In time for the meeting at five.”

Edward followed the switchbacks of the first leg of the Muir Trail, pausing on rock-masonry vantage points to gaze out over gorges filled with roaring white water. He was halfway up the steep Mist Trail by eleven. The smell of moss and spray and damp humus filled his nose. Vernal Fall bellowed constantly on his left, ghostly clouds of moisture soaking his clothes and beading on his face and hands. He grimaced against the chill but refused to wear a parka or anything else that would isolate him.

The wet dark gray trail rocks reflected the sky and became a somber orange-brown. When the breeze blew thick fingers of mist in his direction, he seemed suspended in a warm amber fog, the fall and weathered, moss-covered granite walls lost in a general vaporous void.

I saw Eternity the other night, he quoted, and not remembering the rest, concluded aloud with, “And it gave me quite a fright…”

At the top of Vernal Fall, he walked across a broad, almost level expanse of dry white granite, one hand on an iron railing, and stood near the wide, sleek green lip of plummeting water. Here was the noise and the power, but little of the wetness; observation and immediacy and yet isolation. The true experience, Edward thought, would be sweeping down the falls in the middle of the water, suspended in cold green and white, curtains of bubbles and long translucent vertical surfaces distorting all sky and earth. What would it be like to live as a water sprite, able to magically suspend oneself in the middle of certain death?

He looked across at Liberty Cap and thought again of the vast granite spaces within the domes, unseen. Why an obsession with places out of view?

He frowned in concentration, trying to bring up the monstrous big thought he had so loosely hooked. Living things see only the surface, can’t exist in the depths. Life is painted on the surface of the real. Death is the great unexplored volume. Death rises from the inaccessible, depth and death sounding so much alike…

There had been only three other people on the trail that morning, one descending, two climbing behind Edward. Another he had not seen, a blond-haired woman in a tan parka arid dark blue shorts lugging a big expensive blue backpack. She stood on the opposite side of the granite block, looking over Emerald Lake, the pool where water from 600-foot Nevada Fall rested before slipping over the shorter Vernal Fall. She must have camped overnight, or was perhaps on the morning leg of a long trek around the rim of the valley.

The woman turned and Edward saw she was strikingly beautiful, tall and Nordic, a long face with perfectly cut nose, clear blue eyes, and lips both sensual and faintly disapproving. He looked away quickly, all too intensely aware she was outside his range. He had long since learned that women this beautiful paid little attention to men of his mild appearance and social standing.

Still, she seemed to be alone.

Came that high, painful interior singing he had always known when in the presence of the desirable and inaccessible woman, not lust, but an almost religious longing. It was not a sensation he wanted now; he did not wish to be seduced away from worshiping the land, the Earth, to focus on a single woman, let alone one he could not possibly have. The woman or women he had imagined the night before would not evoke this kind of response; they would be safe, undemanding, undistressing. Quickly, with nothing more than a polite smile and nod, he passed the woman where she stood by the bridge and continued along the trail.

In the rocky tree-spotted upland meadow beyond Emerald Lake, he found a natural granite bench and laid out his lunch of two processed-American-cheese sandwiches and dried fruit, very much like what he had eaten on hikes in the valley as a boy. Facing the white plume of Nevada Fall, still a few hundred yards distant, he chewed crescents from a leathery apricot and brewed hot tea on a tiny portable stove.