Canticle Blue

14. Entanglement

Music - Walk With Me by Will Ackerman and Heather Rankin

Havilan started to follow the team leaders but, to his pleasant surprise, Elyse caught up with him and took his arm playfully, saying, "Hey, we're supposed to stay in pairs, you know."

He laughed and stumbled sideways as she bumped into him intentionally. Her presence suddenly seemed as natural to him as breathing, and he briefly thought in verse:

Into this part
of heaven
who follows whom?

They intentionally fell behind the group on their way back and talked about the city. Elyse asked, "So, are we overwhelmed yet? This is all coming up fast, isn't it?"

He answered, "Really! Maybe in the log book, we could just start each entry with 'Today's mind-boggling Thing.' But I think what overwhelms me the most is the feeling of not wanting to go home. I mean, Ever. What kind of thinking is that? We just got here."

"I know. Annibet fell in love with the city the moment she saw it. Did you hear what she said to me? Even before she spoke to the group, she wanted me to sneak back and get our tent."

Why wouldn't she want to go with you?"

"Because she couldn't take her eyes off of the city. And, you know what she wanted to do first?" She was laughing. "Clean. Not housework; she wanted to wash all the globes to make them as bright as she could. She said she wanted the city to 'sing again.' And if she could finish doing thousands of those, she already had plans to start on something else."

"Wow, she's such a sweetheart, isn't she?"

"No," Elyse teased, "I'm a sweetheart; she's a saint. But I do want to stay here too. I can actually feel rebellious when I think about the Bryn now, like their people would have to drag me out of here. I've been thinking about how to get the planter boxes going again, finding compost and plants from the island. Even seaweed," she laughed. "I want to show them that we can grow food here. We could try using the globes for plant lights. I know the winters would be super cold, but the Per'sa evidently managed to stay warm here. Maybe we could put up some kind of weather barrier in the sea tunnel, the one they used for overflow. Maybe, Tor and Cian can get the water tunnel fixed. See, my mind is just full of this stuff. But don't you get the feeling that this could never be an insignificant thing in our lives? Maybe it will be what our whole lives are about, because we've already seen things that probably no one at the Bryn would want to believe."

"I agree," he replied. "I think we have a great group for dealing with the evidence and keeping an open mind about the place too. Geddes says he thinks it will have to be kept secret from all but colony people. So, maybe that would be another good reason to let us stay here, because we're already in place. He's going to contact the Bryn but says he'll have to be careful, even about that. He doesn't want to keep secrets from them, but he's worried about being misunderstood.

"There could certainly be a lifetime of work here. There might be manuscripts that are hundreds of years more recent than anything we have at the Bryn. So much could be learned about how they survived—apparently even thrived for a time—on the island. And maybe some clues about where they went and why. I don't get the impression that they failed. We haven't found any physical remains. But it looks like they packed up and left in a hurry. I've been trying to imagine how they could even have evacuated everyone because there's no trace of them in history after that period. And it's hard to imagine the Per'sa, as protective and secretive as they were, leaving all this exotic matter behind for someone else to find.

"And another good reason for my staying here," he teased, "is to woo these 'city gals.'"

That brought another nudge from Elyse, but this time not as hard.