They stood together looking across the little square around which were grouped the rough timber buildings of the community center, the surgery and dispensary, and the three cooperative stores that served the needs of the three-hundred-strong settlement. Outwardly primitive, the sturdy pine-clad buildings were fitted out with all modern amenities, including electricity and nonfreeze plumbing. It was a tenet of Earth Foundation philosophy that technology was the friend and not the enemy. There was no reason not to take full advantage of man's inventiveness and enterprise if used sensibly and with due consideration for the environment. No one here subscribed to the back-to-nature fallacy: That was simply a stupid and short-sighted return to the Stone Age. They were far from the masochists and martyrs who felt conscience-stricken at the thought of killing a rabbit or burning a log. The important thing was to live in harmony with their surroundings and not to plunder or despoil out of sheer greed, indifference, or asinine thoughtlessness.
Above all, to inculcate those same beliefs in the rising generation. Theirs was the earth to inherit, providing their forebears hadn't already squandered the inheritance.
"Are you serious about Jo?" Cheryl asked, surprising herself with the question. She didn't want to pry.
"Do I have to be?"
"I just wondered."
"What's up, afraid she'll get pregnant?"
"Dan!" Cheryl said, disapproving more of his directness than scandalized by the sentiment itself. "I didn't think that for a moment. She's only seventeen and I wondered how you felt about her."
"She's okay. We have fun together." Dan folded his arms, his brown work-hardened biceps bunching and stretching the short sleeves of his T-shirt. He was full of the confidence of the healthy good-looking twenty-one-year-old male, delighting in his own masculine appeal. And why not? Cheryl thought. If you didn't feel good at twenty-one there wasn't much hope for you.
She said, "I guess you're old enough to know what you're doing."
"I guess so," he agreed, the same grin lurking at the corners of his mouth.
Was he making fun of her? Maybe she was losing her sense of humor, which was hardly surprising under the circumstances. Resolutely she pushed the shadow away, kept it at arm's length. It occurred to her that perhaps the rest of the community was perfectly normal and it was she who was behaving strangely. After all, that's what paranoia was: to suspect others of having weird thoughts when they resided in your own skull.
The trail was steep and rocky leading up to Drews Gap, elevation 5,306 feet, and the horses were sweating and jittery. They sensed the danger of a slip or a stumble, their eyes white and rolling as they shied away from the drop. Thick vegetation and the spiky tops of pine trees dropped away steeply below.
Jo led the way, neat and trim in a check shirt and jodhpurs, the set and balance of her slim body just right on the broad flecked back of the gray. Dan derived a lot of pleasure from just watching her. Her long blond hair, pulled back and tied at the nape of her neck, gleamed like a silver scarf in the clear sunlight. When she arrived at Goose Lake with her parents two years ago she'd been an awkward gangling kid with long skinny legs, pretty much as he remembered her from their last meeting. He'd teased her and unkindly nicknamed her "Stilts." The teasing had lasted about a year, until shortly after her sixteenth birthday when (almost overnight it seemed to Dan) the proverbial swan had appeared. From then on he'd started to take notice in an entirely different way.
The trail leveled out and Jo coaxed the gray toward a small clearing guarded by a circle of slender pines, standing to attention like sentinels, the breeze whispering in their branches. Somewhere in the undergrowth a stream chuckled to itself as it leaped and gurgled over rocks. Jo slid down and the horse immediately began cropping the luxuriant tufts of grass. Steam rose from its flanks and hung in the sunlight, which lanced like pencil beams through the overhead cover.
"What was all that with Cheryl?" Jo asked, unfastening the straps on her saddlebag and pulling out a small bundle swathed in white cloth.
"She was worried that we might be sneaking away for a spot of afternoon delight. You know how they are."
Jo looked at him sideways from under long fair lashes, her expression mildly scathing rather than coquettish.
"Naturally I told her the thought had never entered our heads," Dan said with a perfectly sincere face that still managed to seem devilish.
"I'm glad about that," Jo said. "Because it never entered mine. From what I hear there's no shortage of that on Saturday nights with Baz Brannigan and his cronies, among whom you number yourself, so I believe."
