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Moonshine

By Jane M. Orient, M.D., and Linda J. Wright

CHAPTER 1. KIDNAPPED

As a method of settling disputes, violence has become obsolete.

Alexander Ramcott, Collected Works

Over the roar of the tractor, she couldn't tell what it was. But Cassandra felt sure that the noise had come from the direction of the house.

Her father must have heard it too, because he abruptly cut off the engine, jumped down from the seat, and pushed Cassandra onto the floor.

"Keep your head down," he told her. "And stay here until I come back for you." He began running back toward the house as three more noises rang out, sharper than the first one.

Then, except for an occasional bird call, the buzzing of a fly, a few creaks from the warm engine, and the breeze rustling the trees in the apple orchard, there was silence.

She tried to get a little more comfortable, and wondered why her father didn't come back. Could he have forgotten his promise to let her sit on his lap and drive the tractor? No, he never forgot a promise. And he certainly would not forget this one, since it was her sixth birthday. But why did he want her to hide like this? She didn't understand.

The tractor's engine had cooled. She heard a car turn off the highway and pull into the driveway. It might be someone to see her father on business, or it might be someone coming to wish her a happy birthday. For a moment, she was tempted to raise her head to try to see who it was. But no, he had told her to stay down, and he always had his reasons. The tires screeched — the car must have been moving very fast. Her father would not be pleased about that.

She knew he did many important things, and she reminded herself of this as the minutes passed and her anxiety began to mount. It must be someone with very important business. Otherwise he wouldn't have left her here so long. The metal floor felt very hard and lumpy, and the pedals pressed into her side.

It seemed as if hours had gone by since they had set off so happily early that morning. She fingered the sprig of apple blossoms that he had stuck behind her ear. He had pulled her braids playfully, and she had recited the names of all the different apples that grew at Wyndham Hill. Red Delicious, Jonathan, Macintosh, and Golden Delicious. The best apples in the state, everyone said. But the blossoms had already wilted, and the sun was noticeably higher in the sky, beating down on her in the tractor's narrow cab.

Her anxiety turned to fear, and she began to sob. Why didn't he come? Could something have happened to him? Could he be hurt? Why wasn't her mother calling for her?

A sharp report pierced the air, and then another. Cassandra's fear turned to panic and despair. Something terrible must be wrong. For yet a little longer, her father's admonition kept her huddled against the floor of the tractor. But finally she could stand it no longer, and carefully climbed down. She had never disobeyed her father before.

On the way back to the house, she wanted to cry "Mommy! Daddy!" But the words stuck in her throat, and the tightness spread down around her heart. There was a strange green car in the driveway. As she rounded the corner of the house, she felt a surge of hope and burst into a run — the car was blocking her father's pick-up truck, which was still in the carport. He was here! He hadn't gone away. The second green car hadn't stayed in the driveway, but had pulled up close to the house, right into her mother's precious daffodil patch. At the sight of their crushed yellow heads, all her apprehension returned in a flood. She stopped and crouched beside the first car, unable to move. A voice in her head screamed at her to run and hide in the orchard, where she could see the tractor and the house. But another part of her demanded to know what had happened to her father. The part of her that demanded to know was stronger. She paused a moment to sound out the words painted on the doors of the cars, as her mother had taught her: "Child Protection Agency" and "Agriculture Inspection." Then she crept cautiously toward the house, intending to look in through the window on the porch.

She practically tripped over the body. It was a man in a green uniform. Like the ones who surrounded President Ramcott on the television evening news. Her father used to swear at them. The eyes stared out of a wax-colored face frozen in a grimace of fear. Flies covered the center of the chest, and blood was everywhere — on his clothing, on the porch, on the swing, even on the side of the house. Cassandra stepped back and stared at it in horror and shock. Who could have done such a dreadful thing?

She heard a buzzing in her head, and things began to look gray and fuzzy. Her skin felt cold and clammy, and her body seemed to float.

. . .

CHAPTER 2. CAPTURED

In . . . the will is rooted my ability to free myself from everything. . . . Man alone can sacrifice everything, his life included. . . . An animal cannot; it always remains merely negative, in an alien destiny to which it merely accustoms itself.

Hegel, Philosophy of Right

Meyer almost toppled backward in his chair as the low buzz of his distant early warning system startled him awake.

"Damn!" he said, rousing himself to peer through the peephole of the front door. It was too dark to see anything, but three pairs of feet clumped over the planks of his walkway. It wasn't going to be something simple like a sore throat, he thought anxiously.

He opened the door to admit two young apprentices carrying a litter.

Behind them came Marcus Lang, a sinister, grey-robed figure. To Meyer's dismay, the apprentices departed immediately after depositing their burden in the middle of his front room. A thin young woman, probably about twenty, with short curly brown hair plastered to her head with sweat and dried blood. The patient was obviously very sick. And very important, judging from her escort — Marcus Lang himself, the Counselor to the newly constituted Olympian Islands Cell.

The Counselor outlined the situation. "She was found on the cliff. We don't know who she is or where she came from. Or how she got here, although this harness may be from a parachute. She was carrying some interesting devices with functions we cannot as yet identify. We will find out all these things. . . . as soon as she is well enough to talk."

Meyer's curiosity was piqued — who could this young woman be?

The Counselor looked down on her sardonically, but the patient had closed her eyes and turned her face away. She tried to draw away from Meyer's touch, but was too weak to put up much resistance.

"Hmmm," Meyer said noncommittally. He was not certain how much affectation to use with Counselor Lang. The former chairman of the Psychosocial Research Program at the University of Washington had to have some sophistication about medicine. If he had wanted hands passed over the patient's energy fields, he would have taken the patient to Roscoe Vole at the so-called Institute of Healing. Clearly, he wanted this one to get better. But Meyer followed the forms that had become a habit. One could, after all, obtain a fair amount of information while pretending to be attuned to the meridians. This patient had a fever of about 104 degrees and was seriously dehydrated. Her pulse was rapid and thready. Her face and hair were caked with mud and blood from a small scalp laceration; her coveralls were torn and stained in several places with a mixture of blood, pus, and grime. Meyer rested his hand on her forehead for a moment longer than strictly necessary.

"The prognosis is not good," he said. "She is probably septic. I don’t know how much I can do. "

"We're counting on you, Practitioner Meyer," the Counselor said meaningfully, on his way out the door.

Not too subtle, are you, Meyer thought angrily. But as soon as the Counselor had gone, he rotated the shelf that was cluttered with bottles of herbs, revealing a modest stock of solutions, needles, and assorted drugs and equipment. In half an hour, he completed a cursory examination, ran a blood sample through his autoanalyzer (the sodium was getting dangerously high), planted a couple of blood cultures, and administered half a liter of fluid along with the first dose of an antibiotic. He explained each step, but the patient barely stirred. Until he tried to remove her left boot.

He swore under his breath. He never intended to be a sawbones, but a sawbones without an x-ray machine was really a travesty. Even in his days at Bellevue he could never have imagined that. He wondered whether such a machine still existed. It was surely illegal as it exposed people to more radiation than they would get in a lifetime from living at a nuclear power plant. With a sigh, he went to work with a razor blade; it was a shame to cut such fine leather. But as he suspected, the flesh beneath was purple and swollen. Fortunately, the boot had kept down the swelling, as well as serving as a splint. Probably it was just a bad sprain — no displacement as far as he could tell. In any case, it would need a cast, but that was a lower priority for the moment.

Meyer decided to thread the intravenous bottle through the sleeve and to try to remove the coveralls rather than cutting them, since they couldn't be replaced. He felt the fabric appreciatively. Clearly a synthetic. In places, he had to wet the fabric and cautiously tease it away from the skin Even so, he provoked some bleeding. The patient must have been on the cliff for at least 48 hours, he estimated, since the lacerations were already draining purulent material, and an abscess had formed around a large splinter in her right leg, with ominous red streaks radiating toward the groin. Yes, the nodes were already enlarged. Cleansing the wounds was a tedious job. Occasionally the patient cried out incoherently and thrashed around. She was moving everything except her left leg, he noted.

Finally, he took down a book with a spine labeled "The Healing Properties of Mushrooms," and a title page reading "Practical Orthopedics." After studying the diagrams and rehearsing the motions, he gently slipped a stockinet onto her bruised leg, carefully padded the bony prominences, and soaked several rolls of his precious plaster in water. He positioned the leg as well as he could, holding it until the plaster set. A waste of time and plaster, of course, if the patient didn't regain consciousness. But if he waited, he might have to do it while she was wide awake and complaining.

Having hung another bottle of fluids, Meyer felt satisfied that he had done all that he reasonably could, and lay down to rest his eyes.

. . .

"What's your name?" Meyer asked her, as she seemed to be awake for a moment.

He knew that she had heard the question, but she didn't respond. Stubborn. Well, in her place would he be any more cooperative?

"I'm Meyer," he said. "And you don't need to tell me your name. But do tell me what to call you. Make something up, if you like."

"Gina," she whispered.

"Gina," he said, "You're going to be all right."

"No," she replied, weakly but firmly. "I'm going to die."

"Certainly not," he responded, with more confidence than he felt, "not after all this work."

She looked at him angrily. "I never asked for your help. Now please leave me alone."

. . .

CHAPTER 3. VIGIL

The glow that lights the sky at night Is power plant poisons shining bright.

Children's Learning Rhyme

The moon hung over Safari Island, its pale disk breaking through the clouds. Conserva stood up, hoping the additional elevation (five and a half feet) would help her see what she had been sent to this cliff top to observe. Hugging herself against the spring wind gusting off the ocean, she spoke to the island across the channel.

"Come on," she urged. "Glow."

Nothing happened. The madrone at her back creaked a little in the wind, the moon edged somewhat higher in the sky, and Safari Island crouched like a huge dumb beast, mysterious and forbidding.

A ragged cloud passed in front of the moon, plunging Safari Island into darkness, as if someone had blown out a candle. Conserva shivered and slid down the tree, to huddle once again on the ground. Against her will, a scrap of the children's rhyme repeated itself in her mind.

At dark of moon the water beasts

On careless children make their feasts.

She shivered again, this time not from cold. Orcas, dolphins, whales, seals: these were the names of the water beasts. Everyone knew that these man-shaped swimmers would seize unwary children, dragging them underwater and bearing the drowned bodies back to their lairs. Although it was only moonless nights that one need fear (the cowardly water beasts needed darkness to commit their abominations), no one walked the seashore after dusk, just to be sure. And, of course, no one swam in the ocean, or went out upon the sea in little boats. Why tempt the water beasts? Only Instructor Paxson's seagoing craft ensured safety: it floated well off the water on a cushion of air and made a ferocious roaring sound that frightened the beasts away.

And yet, one day two summers ago when she had been beachcombing for artifacts in the tide pools at South Point, one of the water beasts — a seal — had appeared in the bay. It had spyhopped several times and vanished. Moments later, it had surfaced again, just at her feet. She could have reached down and touched it. Too startled to run, she had simply stared at it. It had stared back at her steadily, fathomless brown eyes unblinking. After several moments, it had sunk out of sight, leaving as magically as it had appeared. Later, Conserva had realized that for the moments they had looked at one another, she had felt no fear. Had there been reason for fear? She was puzzled, but she did not tell her instructor what had happened, nor asked the questions that had come, unbidden, to her mind. So the riddle of the seal's benign eyes was to be unanswered, but the memory would become for her a secret gift.

She steered her thoughts away. Part of her, she knew very well, delighted in secrets, persisted in asking why, had frivolous and unproductive ideas. "Unsuitable thoughts," her instructor labeled them, and how she struggled for mastery over this unruly part of her mind! Senseless or aberrant ideas might be tolerated in children; they would not be condoned in an adult. Her questions were supposedly a sign of a primitive upbringing. Nowadays, the instructors said, we are aware of the seemly limits of knowledge.

. . .

"Is one hundred the biggest number?" Cassandra asked her mother. "Well, Cassie, let's see. I can think of a bigger one — one hundred one."

"One hundred two!" Cassandra said.

"One hundred three!" her mother replied.

"One hundred four!"

. . .

Conserva clenched her fists angrily, and pushed the vision away. That was a different world, an evil one. She must fight the temptation to return to it: to dwell on memories was a sign of serious illness.

Once they had gotten as far as five hundred before they had finished packing the apples. But, no! She must resist. Her name was Conserva, and her home was the Isle of Amity. Ramcott had saved the world from nuclear destruction, and her instructors had rescued her from a primitive world of violence. And tonight was a night for observation, not fantasies.

Conserva stood up again, willing herself to see the glow. She flinched a little as she repeated the last line of the learning rhyme:

The murdered island's fate is plain

To those whose minds are free from stain.

"murdered island" of the learning rhyme. Once, just one or two generations ago, it had teemed with life: deer, wild goats, wild pigs, and pheasant. Then, spent fuel rods from nuclear power plants had been illegally brought to the island in heavy containers, which were buried deep in the natural caves. Soon, death had come to Safari Island. First, the grasses and flowers had died, so that where once there had been a carpet of green and gold in the spring, only the brown, sere hills and the grey rock skeleton of the island remained. Soon after, the animals had died, and their bones had been left where their starved, sick bodies had fallen, to mark the shame of the men who had dared to meddle with nuclear power.

Now the children took turns standing Vigil so no one would forget. Conserva wasn't sure what the fuel rods looked like, but they were said to be so "hot" that they lit the night sky with a glow that would last for thousands of years.

As each of her classmates had returned from their Vigils, eager to recount what they had seen, Conserva, in a state of frank perplexity, had been unable to suppress questions about the glow. Why did the island glow? Was it on fire? Why did it sometimes shine steadily, and other times flicker like flames? And how could anyone see the glow if the power plant poisons were buried in the caves on the other side of Safari Island? How could anyone see through rock? The class had answered her with laughter, and Conserva reminded herself, again, to keep silent. Now she had another question: why, on this of all nights, did the island not glow at all?

Perhaps the glow was intermittent. She would simply have to stay awake until it began. How she wished that her friend Una were with her, not only to compare what each saw, but for the company. However, each child stood Vigil alone, despite the learning rhyme's specific encouragement of group activities.

Never one, seldom two,

When three or four or more will do.

Join the group in unity

We're equal in fraternity.