Лоуренс Блок - Random Walk - A Novel for a New Age

He fell into step beside her, took her free hand in his. “Guthrie,” she said, and squeezed his hand.

“Beautiful morning.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“I figure we’ll make it an easy day’s walking today. Pipestone’s too far to do in a day, so we’ll just walk to the Interstate or a little bit beyond it today, and go the rest of the way tomorrow.”

“That sounds good.”

“That’ll give us all two more nights together, and then the next morning in Pipestone we can set out on separate paths.”

“It’s all one path, Guthrie.”

“I guess. I had a talk with Jody.”

“He told me.”

“I’m not against it. When I think about it I even have the sense that it was there all the time waiting for me to hit on it myself. But it tears me up all the same.”

“Of course it does.”

“It’s the right thing. I remember way back at the beginning when you said you didn’t come all this way to play four-handed group therapy. Well, I didn’t walk this far just to play Follow the Leader. But with six or eight groups of us, all of them branching out whenever they start to get too large, why, we’ll fill the country.”

“We’ll be the country.”

“But I hate losing everybody in the meantime. Jody especially. I’m going to miss him.”

“So will I.”

“And everybody else, of course. Dingo and Gary and Doug and Bev and Les and Georgia and Martha and — oh, everybody. Even the ones I haven’t had a chance to get to know yet, even the ones who’ll be joining up today and tomorrow. I feel as though everyone who leaves will be taking something away from me.”

“They will, Guthrie. They’ll be taking what you’ve given them.”

“That’s not what I mean.”

“I know it’s not. You mean you’ll be diminished by their departure, that there’ll be less of you for their leaving. But that’s not true. Nobody’s really leaving, Guthrie. We’re just extending the line of march, spreading ourselves out a little farther.”

“Maybe.”

“If the others always have you for a leader, they’ll miss finding leadership within themselves. And we need plenty of leaders.”

“I suppose so.” After a moment he said, “It’s going to be hard for anyone to be a leader without you along to tell him what he’s doing.”

“I’m not sure about that. I think we may retain some kind of access to each other’s minds, no matter how far apart we may be physically. I don’t know that distance exists on the plane where our minds are linked up. We’ve come a long way, you know.”

“All the way from Oregon.”

“Don’t be intentionally obtuse. You know that’s not what I mean. The other night, when Mark went back to his birth and went through it again, everybody was linked to him telepathically. We weren’t just picking up vibes. We were hooked up with him. That’s the kind of connection the whole human race has to make in order for things to work out. When we’re all linked up and functioning together as the cognitive brain of the planet, it will be perfectly natural for everyone to act for the good of all. And we forged a link in the chain, Guthrie. There are only two hundred of us and there are five billion people on the planet, but we’re growing, and it may not take many to start a reaction. You only need a couple of pebbles to start an avalanche, if they fall right.”

He thought about it. “So you’ll still be available? People can pick up a phone and call you on the astral plane?”

“I’m not sure how it will work. I think that if they need to know something and I know it, they’ll just get it. They’ll reach back onto that shelf in their mind, and what they need will be there.”

“Could be.”

“And they’ll know how to make certain leadership decisions because they’ll be connected to your mind.”

“Lucky for them,” he said. “But it won’t be the same as having you to talk to.”

“You’ll still have me to talk to.”

“I mean face to face.”

“So do I. I wouldn’t want to miss the Kentucky hills. They’re supposed to be beautiful in the fall.” She smiled. “Just wait until I describe them to you.”

They reached Pipestone on the second day, as planned. The famous quarries were on federally-protected land, almost three hundred acres a few miles north of town on Route 75. They walked there, picked a campsite for the night, and then split up into small groups to explore the quarries and look at the rock formations.

The place felt holy to Guthrie. The tribes had held the land sacred, and hostilities had always been suspended here; whoever came to quarry the precious stone did so in peace. He wondered whether this practice had endowed the land with its power, or whether the Indians had merely been responding appropriately to a power the quartzite outcroppings and deposits of catlinite pipestone already possessed.

Whatever the case, it struck him as a good place for their last night together.

There was a cookfire, and a meal. Afterward Guthrie stood up in front of them and told them that this was their last night as a single group. “We’ll still be together in spirit,” he said, “but we’ll be spreading out to cover the country. Some of us will be going north into Canada, others will wind up in Mexico, maybe even farther south.” He called on each of the new leaders, and they gave a quick rundown of the route they intended to follow.

“But it’s all tentative,” Jody said when it was his turn. “You can make your plans, but they’re always subject to change. It looks as though the leader picks the route. That’s not really how it works. What happens is the route picks the leader.”

“The route may not even matter,” Guthrie said. “It’s the walking that matters. If you do that, you’ll get where you’re supposed to.”

When they’d finished, Sara announced they would end the evening by breathing in unison. In the past she’d had them arrange themselves in neat rows, all of them lying with their heads toward the north. This time she had them form a different arrangement. They placed themselves like the spokes of a wheel or the rays of a sun, with their heads toward the campfire at the wheel’s hub and their feet extended outward toward its rim.

“Go where the breath takes you,” she urged them. “Some of you already know which group you’ll be a part of tomorrow. Some of you haven’t decided yet. You’ll either find the answer tonight or wake up with it in the morning. Remember, whichever choice you make will be the right one.

“That’s one purpose for our breathing together tonight. There are other purposes, more of them than I know. Whenever we breathe like this our spirits touch, and they form bonds that can never be severed. I won’t be with all of you after tonight, and yet I will be, however far apart our bodies may be. I love you and I’ll never leave you.

“Let’s breathe.”

They breathed in unison for over an hour. Usually the connected breathing led to spells of unconsciousness, where the breathing was suspended intermittently and the breather sometimes left his body altogether, not responding to the words of the person monitoring him, sometimes insensitive to touch as well. But this time there was no unconsciousness, no interruptions of the breathing rhythm. Everybody managed to stay with the breath.

And, when it was over, Guthrie realized how unnecessary it had been to worry about losing any of them. They were all one being, one flesh, one spirit. They couldn’t lose each other even if they tried.

In the morning people got up, packed up their gear, and joined up with the leader they had decided to follow. The mood was low-key, and there was almost a sense of emotional anticlimax to it all. People about to part exchanged long hugs, but there was not a great deal of sorrow in the air.