“Lor Lu. How about yes?”
She looked at her husband. At five-feet-eight, she was fairly tall for a woman, but he was considerably taller. And looked Levantine: swarthy and hairy. Not a handsome, exotic-looking Levantine, but virile. Sexy in spite of his calm, his flexible disposition, his mild good nature. It was his sexiness that had first attracted her. Then she found they could actually talk out their disagreements without either of them getting angry the way she and her first husband, Mark, had. She hated it when she got shrill.
Sighing again, she nodded. “Okay, I’ll go.” She made a face at him. “If you promise not to sit around on a pillow with your feet in your lap, saying Ommmm.”
He laughed. “I promise, absolutely.” Then turning, he drew her to him, kissing her.
Her response was distracted. She was worried about her daughters now. She’d check the WebWorld. See what she could learn about the Millennium school that what’s-his-name had mentioned. Lor Lu. Maybe they could register them in a private school, in some town near the Millennium ranch.
2
Physicists recognize four basic forces in the physical universe: the strong force, the electromagnetic force, the weak force, and gravity. Actually those are derivative, not basic. The basic force is love, and the principal secondary force is fear.
From The Collected Public Lectures
of Ngunda Aran
The trip had not begun well. There was an ongoing gun battle at Kennedy Airport between a Port of New York security force and militants of some sort. Thus their commuter flight from Bridgeport had been diverted all the way to Dulles, the air traffic overload at LaGuardia and Newark being extreme. At Dulles they’d lucked out. Their tickets were business class, so they’d gotten on the second flight to Denver, a little more than two hours later than their scheduled flight from Kennedy.
On the Denver flight, and the commuter flight to Pueblo, there’d been no complications. American Airlines had rearranged their reservations, and informed the charter plane that would take them from Pueblo to Henrys Hat.
Henrys Hat. A strange name for a town, Lee told herself.
* * *
She stared. In all her thirty-six years, Lee Shoreff had never been west of the Mississippi. And while she’d seen mountains—the Adirondacks, Greens and Catskills—she’d never seen anything remotely like the chain of snow peaks some twenty miles ahead. They stretched as far north and south as she could see from the small plane, their upper slopes white with late-September snow.
“Ben!” she murmured. “They’re beautiful! I wonder how high they are.”
It was Lor Lu who answered, looking back from his seat beside the pilot. “In that range, the Sangre de Cristo, there are probably ten peaks higher than fourteen thousand feet. See those three over there?” He pointed southwestward. “The tallest is Blanca Peak, the highest in the range.”
“Will we fly over them?”
“No, we’re almost to Henrys Hat.”
Scanning she asked, “Where?”
“See that creek ahead to our right? Where the trees are? That’s Henrys Creek. Henrys Hat is the village, those buildings you can see up ahead, where the road crosses the creek.”
She stared. “That’s—it?” She was surprised that so small a place would have a name. As they approached, she decided it might have a dozen houses, all of frame construction, all weatherbeaten. Plus what she recognized as garages, barns and sheds. And what had to be a store, with a low porch and fuel pumps in front, and a flagpole and flag at one corner. There was nothing resembling a school. A half mile past it was a small airfield, with two parked planes and a large metal machine shed. The only thing she found aesthetic about any of it was the cottonwoods along the creek, their leaves golden, with dark spires of spruce scattered among them.
The eight-place Beechcraft landed smoothly on the grass runway, and they disembarked. She, Ben, and the two girls stood by while Lor Lu settled things with the pilot, whose belt computer first scanned Lor Lu’s plastic, then his thumb print. An ungainly looking vehicle had been waiting for them, its front half an eight-seat carryall, its rear a long pickup bed. Now it rolled to the plane, and a lanky man got out. He began to transfer their luggage, Ben helping him. Each piece, before loading, he put in a large plastic yardbag, which he then tied. When Lor Lu finished with the pilot, he joined them.