A Wrinkle in Time Quintet (79 page)

“Yes.”

“Oh, I’m so glad!” Yalith cried.

“Father has gone off somewhere,” Japheth said. “In the direction of Grandfather Lamech’s tent.”

Oholibamah looked up at the sky. “He will be happier now. All of us will be happier. Where there is an unreconciled quarrel, everybody suffers.”

Dennys looked troubled. “I’m not sure he really listened to me.”

“But you heard
the stars,” Oholibamah said, “and you were obedient to their command.”

Japheth added, “That is all anybody can do. Now it is in El’s hands.”

Briefly, Dennys closed his eyes.—I hope Sandy doesn’t think I’m crazy. I hope
I
don’t think I’m crazy. Obeying stars, yet.

“I feel like running,” Oholibamah said, and jumped down and ran fleetly across the desert, Japheth following her.

“Come!” Yalith
called, and leapt from the rock. Dennys, with his long legs, caught up with them easily, and suddenly he was holding hands with Yalith and Oholibamah, and the four of them twirled in a joyous dance. Moonlight and starlight bathed them. Dennys, leaping in the night, felt more alive than he had ever felt before.

*   *   *

Sandy and Higgaion sat up, startled, as they heard a roar from the tent.
At first it seemed to be a roar of anger. Then laughter. Then there was absolute silence. Sandy could feel his heart beating faster. Higgaion’s ears were lifted in alarm. He raised his trunk.

“They wouldn’t hurt each other, would they—” Sandy spoke aloud. Higgaion stared at him out of bright, beady eyes.

Then the tent flap was shoved aside, and Lamech and Noah pushed through with difficulty,
because they had their arms about each other, and tears were streaming down their cheeks.

Lamech’s voice was so choked with emotion that the words were muffled. “This my son was dead and is alive again, was lost and is found.”

Noah hugged the old man roughly. “This is my father, my stubborn old father. We are two peas in a pod for stubbornness.” He looked at Sandy. “As you and the Den are two
peas in a pod.”

“Hey,” Sandy said, “I’m glad you two have made up.”

“It was the Den,” Noah said. “He just kept at me and at me.”

Sandy looked surprised. At home, at school, Dennys seldom talked first. He followed Sandy’s lead, but seldom initiated anything. “Well. That’s good.”

“He is nearly healed now, too. Soon he will be able to come to you. My father—” He paused. “I would be happy to have
the Den stay, but my tent is crowded, and noisy. And my father has invited you to stay with him.”

“That’s terrific,” Sandy said. “Thanks, Grandfather, thanks a lot. And Dennys can help me with the garden.”

“So we should celebrate,” Noah said, and handed his father a small wineskin. “There is not much of this, but it is my very best.”

“A little will suffice.” The old man held the wineskin to
his lips, then smacked them in appreciation. “Indeed, your very best.” He handed the skin to Sandy, who took a small sip, barely managed to swallow it without making a face.

“El has talked with you, too?” Lamech asked his son.

“He has. When El spoke, I used to understand what was being said. Now it is all confusion. What does El say to you?”

Grandfather Lamech put his arm about his son’s shoulders.
“El tells me these are end days.”

“End of what?” Noah asked.

“Of all that we know, I think,” the old man said. “It is not just a question of moving our tents to where there is more water and better pasture for your beasts. Sometimes I, too, feel that the words are all confusion. El talks of many waters, but there is no water anywhere around, except in the wells.”

Sandy, sitting next to the
old man, with the mammoth lying nearby, shuddered. Grandfather Lamech, if he did not die first, and Noah and his family, and a good many animals, would be the only ones to escape drowning in the great flood.

—I already know the story, he thought, and was glad that the night hid his deep flush of embarrassment. It did not seem right that he should know something that Grandfather Lamech and Noah
did not know.

But what did he know? Vague memories of Sunday school. God, angry at the wickedness of the world, and sending a flood, but telling Noah to build an ark and bring the animals on. And then there were terrible rains, and finally a dove brought Noah a sprig of green, and the ark landed on Mount Ararat. Not much of a story unless you were part of it.

Was Grandfather Lamech in the story?
He did not remember. Grandfather patted Sandy gently, his usual way of expressing affection, and went on talking. In his concern about the flood, Sandy lost track of the conversation. He heard Grandfather Lamech saying, “My grandfather, Enoch, was three hundred and sixty-five years, and then he was not.”

Sandy’s ears pricked up. “What do you mean, he was not?”

Grandfather Lamech said, “He walked
with El. He was a man of warm heart. And El took him.”

It was a weird story. “El took him? How?”

“I was only a boy,” Grandfather Lamech said. “He—my Grandfather Enoch was walking through the lemon grove—the same lemon grove I will show you tomorrow—he was walking through the lemon grove with El, and then they were not there.”

If this was part of the story of Noah and the flood, Sandy did not
remember it. “Is it customary,” he asked, “for someone just to be not?”

Grandfather Lamech laughed. “Oh, dear, not at all customary. But my Grandfather Enoch was not an ordinary man. He went away from us to be with El at a very young age. He was only three hundred and sixty-five years old.”

“That’s exactly a solar year,” Sandy said.

“A what?”

“A solar year. For starters, it takes our planet
three hundred and sixty-five days to go around the sun.”

“Nonsense,” Noah said. “We don’t go around the sun. It goes around us.”

“Oh,” Sandy said. “Well. Never mind.”

Grandfather Lamech patted his knee. “It is all right. Things may be different where you come from. Do you know El?”

“Well, yes, sort of, though we say God.”

Grandfather Lamech appeared not to have heard. “My Grandfather Enoch—how
I do miss him. El talks with me, and sometimes I am able to understand, but I have never been able to walk with El in the cool of the evening, like two friends.”

“What do you think happened to him, then, to Grandfather Enoch?”

Lamech nodded and nodded, as though answering. Finally he said, “El took him, and that is all I need to know.”

“Father,” Noah said, “you talk with El more than anyone
I know.”

“Because my years are long, my son. It was not always so. I am glad indeed that you have come to me before I die.”

“You’re not going to die for a long time yet!” Noah cried. “You will live as long as our forefather Methuselah.”

“No, my son.” Grandfather Lamech’s arm about Noah’s shoulders tightened again. “My time is near.”

“Perhaps El will take you, as he took Grandfather Enoch.”

Grandfather Lamech laughed again. “Oh, my son, I am full of years, and now that you have come to me, I am ready to die. El does not need to take me in the same way he took Grandfather Enoch.”

Sandy looked at the two small men, hugging and laughing and crying all at the same time. It seemed likely that Grandfather Lamech would die before the flood. How soon? And how soon was the flood? He had come
to love Grandfather Lamech, who, with Higgaion, had nursed him so tenderly.

—And what about Yalith? he wondered suddenly. He did not remember her name in the story.

—And what about us, Sandy and Dennys? What would happen to us if there was a flood?

SEVEN

The seraphim

Sandy slept that night as usual on Adnarel’s cloak. He wondered if Adnarel knew about the coming flood and the destruction of almost all life on earth. His arms tightened about Higgaion, with whom he slept much as, when he was a small boy, he had slept with his arms around a small brown plush triceratops. His fingers moved through Higgaion’s shaggy hair, stroked a great fan
of an ear. Felt something hard. The scarab beetle.

It gave him a feeling of comfort, although he found it difficult to associate the bronze beetle with the great seraph. Well. Thinking about this could wait till morning. Dennys was the thinker, Sandy the doer. The gentle tip of Higgaion’s trunk stroked the back of Sandy’s neck, and he relaxed into sleep.

*   *   *

Adnarel came in the morning,
in his seraphic form.

Sandy said, “I’ve been thinking.” After all, not only Dennys could think.

Adnarel smiled. “Sometimes that is a good idea. Sometimes not.”

“Dennys and I are in the middle of the story of Noah and the flood, aren’t we?”

Adnarel’s azure eyes regarded him. “So it would seem.”

“How are we going to get home?”

Adnarel shrugged his golden wings. “The way you arrived, perhaps?”

“Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to be possible. In the meanwhile, Dennys is in one of Noah’s tents, halfway across the oasis.”

“That is true. But he is nearly ready to come to you.”

“It’s a long way. Is he strong enough to walk it?”

“Possibly.”

“I was thinking maybe you could call a unicorn for him.”

“Certainly. That is a possibility.”

“But then I thought”—Sandy’s forehead wrinkled
anxiously—“when we were riding the unicorns to the oasis, he went out with the unicorn.”

“That is no problem,” Adnarel reassured him. “If we should call a unicorn to bring him from Noah’s tents to Lamech’s, and if, for some reason, they were both to go out, then we would recall the unicorn to Grandfather Lamech’s tent, and Dennys would be here, too.”

Sandy asked curiously, “If Dennys fell off
the unicorn right away, and if the unicorn went out of being with him, could you call them to Grandfather Lamech’s tent faster than it would take them in, sort of, the ordinary way.”

“Oh, certainly. Fear not.”

“Wow. Wait till I tell our father. That’s what he’s working on, traveling without the restrictions of time. Tessering.”

Adnarel nodded. “That is indeed one way of thinking about it. Your
father is on the right track.”

Sandy wrinkled his brow in concentration. “Okay, then. If Dennys and the unicorn went out, and then you called them back into being, and they appeared here, that would be a quantum leap, wouldn’t it?”

“Tell me what you mean.” Adnarel’s azure eyes probed Sandy.

“Well, it’s like, oh, in particle physics—well, you can measure a quantum where it is, but not on its
journey from there to here. At least—you can’t measure a quantum in both its speed and its place in space, not at the same time. A quantum can be measured where it is, and then it can be measured where it’s got to. So—” He paused for breath.

“So?” Adnarel asked, smiling.

“Oh, I wish Dennys was here. He could explain it better than I can. But … when you call a unicorn into being, you can see
it, maybe measure it. But you can’t measure it when it’s gone out. Not until you call it back into being. So maybe that’s what space and time travel is going to have to be like. A quantum leap. Or what my father would call a tesseract.”

“You are an intelligent young man,” Adnarel said. “This is not easy to understand.”

Sandy realized that he had closed his eyes, almost stopped breathing, in
order better to concentrate. He opened his eyes, took in a deep gulp of air. “Can
you
do it?”

“Do what?”

“Tesser. Take a quantum leap.”

Adnarel smiled again. “When I am in the scarab beetle, as I have told you, I am limited by what limits the beetle. When I am in my seraphic form, I have fewer limits.”

“Can you get off this planet if you want to?” Sandy asked. “I mean, can you travel to other
solar systems or other galaxies?”

“Oh, certainly. We are here because there is need. Our brothers, the nephilim, cannot leave this planet. They have lost some of their freedoms.”

“Why?” Sandy asked.

But Adnarel was examining Sandy’s healed skin. “You are beginning to get a nice protective tan. When your twin comes, each of you must spend a little time, and then a little more, in the sun, until
your skin can bear the rays without burning. You must always remember to stay in the tent during the noon hours. Even in the shade, you can burn from the sun’s reflection.”

“I’ve been sunburned before,” Sandy said. “Once when our Scout troop went to the beach for the day, and we all got burned. But it was nothing like this.”

“I think you come from a more northerly part of the planet,” Adnarel
said, “and this sun is younger than it is in your time.”

“And not so much pollution now between earth and sun. Does anybody here ever have allergies?”

Adnarel smiled. “Allergies do not come until later.”

“Hey,” Sandy said. “Grandfather Lamech’s granddaughter Yalith, the one with hair the color of you when you’re in the scarab beetle—why has she never come back with the night-light? Why is it
always somebody else?”

“Yalith has been busy, taking care of your brother.”

For a moment Sandy was washed over with a sick wave of jealousy. He shook himself. If he and Dennys were not interested in mythical beasts, neither were they interested in girls. They went to the regional school dances, but usually stuck with the other members of the hockey and basketball teams. There was going to be
plenty of time for girls later. Sometime after they had their driver’s licenses and weren’t dependent on parents to drive them. Sometime when they met girls who were not silly and giggly and showing off.

But Yalith was not silly or giggly and she did not show off and she was not at all like any of the girls at school. Even though he had been dizzy with fever that first night in Grandfather Lamech’s
tent, his memory of Yalith was as vivid as though she had come with the stone lamp the night before. Her bronze hair had held sunlight even in the dark shadows of the tent. Her body was tiny and perfect. Her eyes, like her hair, held sunlight. Trying to keep his voice level and not succeeding, for it cracked immediately, he said, “Well, I wish Yalith would bring the night-light tonight.”

Adnarel
looked at him, and Sandy blushed. He understood why he was feeling the way he was feeling, and at the same time he did not at all understand the way he was feeling, and this conflicting mixture of emotion confused him. His cheeks were as hot as they had been from fever and sunburn. He wondered how much Adnarel saw. But the seraph looked at him calmly. “Now I have business elsewhere. You worked
very hard in the garden this morning during the dawn hours. Good work. You may stay out for fifteen more minutes. I will send my griffin friend to tell you when it is time to go inside.”