Kate Wilhelm in Orbit - Volume Two by Kate Wilhelm Read Free Book Online Page B

He dreamed that the Spaniards dragged themselves up from the shadows where they lived and toiled to complete the fort through­out the night. They were crude shadow figures themselves, silent, carrying impossibly heavy burdens on their backs, climbing the crude steps to lay the blocks, and the fort took shape and rose higher and higher. He woke to find it nearly noon.
    There was a note on his table to see Pitcock as soon as convenient. He showered and made coffee, and after he had eaten he walked over to the main house. Pitcock was in his office.
    “Ed came by to say he was leaving,” Pitcock said. “He wouldn’t tell me what happened. Will you?”
    “Sure.” His account was very brief, and when he got to his adventure in the lake, he summed it up in one sentence. “I went for a swim in the lake and nearly drowned.”
    “Part of the same thing?”
    “I believe so.”
    “Yes. Well, we agreed that it would get dangerous.”
    “Yes.”
    “Have you seen Donna this morning?” Pitcock toyed with a pencil and when it fell, he jerked. He looked at his hands with curiosity. Before Eliot could answer his question, he said, “Maybe we should disband the project now. God knows we have to start over with a new staff.”
    “I haven’t seen Donna. Do you really want to quit?”
    “I feel like a man swimming the channel. I’m three-quarters of the way there, but I want to turn around and go back. I feel like either way I’ll lose something. I don’t think I can make it all the way, Eliot.”
    “That’s because we don’t know exactly what’s in the water for the last quarter of the trip. We keep finding out there are things that we weren’t ready for. Ed’s knife. I put it in my pocket, but it’s not there now. Swimming in a lake that suddenly became bottomless. You can walk across that lake in the dry season. What’s ahead? That’s the question, isn’t it?”
    “Is it? I keep wondering, and if we found out that the earth is an illusion dreamed by a god, what harm have we done? Why are we being stopped? Who’s meddling?”
    Eliot stared at him, then shook his head. “I think you should go away for the weekend. Get away from here for a few days, see how you feel about it Monday. If you want to break it all up then, well, we can talk about it.”
    “You can’t leave now, can you? You’ll see it through, no matter what happens?”
    “I can’t leave now.”
    Pitcock looked shriveled and old, and for several minutes his bright blue eyes seemed clouded. Surprisingly, he laughed then. “You asked once why I picked you. Because I could see myself in you. The self that I could have been forty years ago. But instead I took the other path, extended an empire. Pitcock Enterprises. I thought there was time for it all, and I was wrong. I thought it was a kind of knowledge, that if I bypassed it, I could have it just the same if I forced someone else to seek it and let me see the results. Nontransferable. Not knowledge, then. Not in the accepted sense. I pushed you and prodded you and goaded you into going somewhere and I can’t follow you. Leave me alone, Eliot. I have some work to do now.”
    Eliot stood up and started to leave, but stopped at the door. “Pit, I don’t know anything. If I did, I would make you see it. But there’s nothing.”
    Pitcock didn’t look at him. He had picked up the pencil again and held it poised over a notebook as if impatient to resume an interrupted task. Eliot went out.
    “Eliot, are you all right?” Beatrice was waiting for him. She held out his watch. “I found it by the lake.”
    Eliot took her in his arms and held her quietly for a long time. “I’m all right.”
    “The lake shore is a mess, as if you were fighting there. I went to your house and saw that you’d had breakfast. I knew it was all right, but still…”
    They walked in the shade, toward the far end of the island. The trees, the dunes to the seaward side, all masked the sound of the ocean, and there were