I expected the transport’s motorized spotlights to burst with light and swivel toward us, but that did not happen.
Bridget corrected course to parallel to the interstate, and tramped on the accelerator.
Out of the side window I could see hardly more than the faint suggestion of the transport executing a fishtail turn, like a shark in murky water that had passed its prey and was coming around to take a mortal bite.
As we shot across the chalky terrain, scattered clumps of sagebrush whisked the flanks of the Explorer, its bristling twigs screeching like fingernails punishing the paint.
“He’s coming after us,” Bridget said, her observation based on intuition rather than on anything she could see.
“Why doesn’t he pin us with those spotlights?” I wondered as I braced myself for a collision with a thrusting formation of stone or a plunge into an arroyo.
From the back seat, Sparky and Panthea responded to my question with the same three words, one answer based on military experience, the other on what the seer saw—“Night-vision goggles”—and Winston agreed with a thin whimper of anxiety.
By now you must realize that it isn’t my nature to have moments of satori, when in an instant I achieve understanding of something puzzling. I need to study ants and birds and fish, with the patient guidance of a teacher, to understand what ants alone should have taught me. And even after the fish, I need time to ponder. However, in that frantic desert-night pursuit, I leaped to enlightenment: The ISA knew about our psychic magnetism; they must have successfully captured, imprisoned, and interrogated others like us. In this instance, they preferred to pursue and corner us in the darkness rather than draw the attention of potential witnesses in the backup of cars on the interstate. They were confident that their night-vision gear would serve them far better than the gift we possessed by virtue of our Rishon DNA from the first universe.
The Explorer shuddered across what might have been an exposed stratum of washboard stone, and then through a field of loose gravel that clattered against the undercarriage. The speedometer needle pricked thirty, and I thought of an old news story about people in a helicopter, flying blind through fog—straight into a mountainside.
“Hang on,” Bridget advised, as if we had any other option.
BACK IN THE DAY
THE BOY, THE FATHER, THE FISH
Litton Ormond was dead at twelve years of age. His father was dead at last, after murdering so many others.
Eleven years old, I slept the sleep of the near dead, which is the sleep of depression, and did not get out of bed of my volition.
The ants regimented themselves into classes and performed tasks according to their station, each day like every other day.
Each species of bird built a nest identical to the nests of all the others of its kind, ate what all the others of its kind ate, raised its young predictably.
And now Sister Theresa insisted that we study fish.
Some were bottom-feeders, thriving on what grew on the floor of a lake or pond. They were content with their bland diet, and in fact lacked the capacity to think of any food but that.
Others snared insects that alighted on the surface, rising to take them by surprise. They sought no other sustenance, nor did they need to. In nature, there never was a shortage of insects, which were hatched in battalions to work and die.
Particularly in the ocean, fish schooled in awesome numbers, executing sudden turns in unison, in the manner that hundreds of sparrows suddenly turn as one in flight.
“I’m done with fish,” I told Sister Theresa on the third day of our studies. “If I was a fish, I’d die of boredom.”
“No, you wouldn’t. Fish are not ever bored,” she said. “Do you know why?”
“Fish are stupid.”
“Perhaps they are, by comparison. But that’s not why they’re never bored. To be bored, Quinn, you have to imagine yourself doing something else. But a fish can’t imagine being anything but a fish, so it goes about being the best fish it can be.”
I sighed laboriously. “I wish I could swim like a fish. I wish I could stay underwater for hours. If I could, then I’d swim deep down where you couldn’t find me to teach me any more about fish.”
“But of course you could swim underwater for hours. It’s called scuba diving. Or you could learn to pilot a plane and join the birds and fly up where I couldn’t take you by the ear and bring you here to my office.”
“Yeah, well, they don’t let kids fly planes.”
“You won’t be a kid forever,” she said, “but a fish will always be a fish, and a bird a bird, and an ant an ant.”