Perhaps he had run everywhere, too, in this instant, through the network of light and power.
But then, he had always been everywhere at once. He felt himself a unit of a whole and therefore he was stable; to her, unity was new and shaking. She felt his arms suddenly around her and she pressed her face into his shoulder for a long while, hard, while the humming and the humming climbed higher, and she cried freely, achingly, against him…
In the morning the desert sky was very clear. They walked from the powerhouse quietly, saddled their horses, cinched on all of the equipment, and mounted.
She settled herself and sat there under the blue sky. And slowly she was aware of her back, and her back was straight, and she looked at her alien hands on the reins, and they had ceased trembling.
And she could see the far mountains; there was no blur nor a running-of-color to things.
All was solid stone touching stone, and stone touching sand, and sand touching wild flower, and wild flower touching the sky in one continuous clear flow, everything definite and of a piece.
‘Wope!’ cried Berty, and the horses walked slowly off, away from the brick building, through the cool sweet morning air.
She rode handsomely and she rode well, and in her, like a stone in a peach, was a peacefulness. She called to her husband as they slowed on a rise, ‘Berty!’
‘Yes?’
‘Can we…’ she asked.
‘Can we what?’ he said, not hearing the first time.
‘Can we come here again sometime?’ she asked, nodding back toward the powerhouse. ‘Once in a while? Some Sunday?’
He looked at her and nodded slowly. ‘I reckon. Yes. Sure. I reckon so.’
And as they rode on into town she was humming, humming a strange soft tune, and he glanced over and listened to it, and it was the sound you would expect to hear from sun-warmed railroad ties on a hot summer day when the air rises in a shimmer, flurried and whorling; a sound in one key, one pitch, rising a little, falling a little, humming, humming, but constant, peaceful, and wondrous to hear.
The end
