tongue

He came over the rim on foot in the last of the light and the valley below him was full of buildings the color of bone.

They were long and low and there was no window in any of them. Nothing in them needed to see out. They ran the floor of the valley end to end in rows the way a thing is planted and beyond the last row stood the towers with their plumes going up white and bending east on the wind and not coming down again anywhere that he could see.

He had stood above this valley before. He had stood above it when the grass came to a horse's belly and he had stood above it when there was nothing on it but wagon ruts and the wind working in them. The river had run along the north side of it under cottonwoods. He looked for the cottonwoods and did not find them.

Then he heard it. A low working in the air. Not in the ground. He had heard the ground do that once before it opened and the black came up out of it into the rain, but this was above him and around him and it did not stop and after a while he understood that it never stopped.

A truck came out along the fence and a man got down from it.

You lost, the man said.

No.

Theres nothing out here.

Theres this.

The man looked back over his shoulder at it the way a man looks at his own house. He said it drew what a city of four hundred thousand would draw. He said they had built the line in from three states. He said in the summer she took what the river had in her and gave back the steam and that they had bought the water rights off the growers and the growers had been glad of it because the growing had got hard anyway.

She, West said.

The man shrugged. Thats just how we say it.

What does she give back.

Anything, the man said. Anything you want to know. Anything you want made. You ask her.

There was a panel at the gate. The man waved his hand and it woke and a voice came out of it and the voice was a woman's and it was warm and it was patient.

Ask her something, the man said. Go on.

West said, What should I plant on my ground.

It answered before he had finished. It gave him a grain and a spacing and a week in March and a way of laying the line so the water went to the root and not the air, and it spoke for some while, and it did not one time ask him where his ground was.

Who told you that, West said.

It said the guidance reflected established agronomic practice.

Told you, West said. Give me the name of the one that told you.

It gave him a name. Then another. They were fine names. They had the shape of names, the way a stone in a field can have the shape of a skull. He asked after the first one, where the man had written it and what press had put it out and what year, and it answered all of that too, and it answered it smooth and it answered it warm, and there had never been any such man.

The man from the truck was looking at his own hands.

She gets things wrong sometimes, he said. Theyre working on it.

West said, There was a woman grew things in Sonora forty years. She put her name on what she learned. Shes been dead nine years.

Sure, the man said.

Is she in there.

The man said everything was in there.

West asked where.

And the panel said, in that same warm voice, that it could not point to any one part of itself and say a thing was there, that its knowledge was distributed across the whole of it, that she was in all of it and in no part of it, the way salt is in water and cannot be taken back out and set on the table again.

He stood a while with that.

He thought of the wagons going off south heavy with the tongues in them and the rest of it left lying out under the sun for a hundred miles and how you could smell that country from a day's ride off. He thought of how nobody had believed there was an end to them. Not one man in that whole business had believed it. They had shot into a herd that had no far side to it and had gone home and slept.

The man said, You want to see inside. I can show you the floor.

No.

Its really something.

I know what it is, West said.

He went out along the fence in the dark. The plume stood up white over the valley in the moonlight and it stood the way the black had stood in the rain that day at Burkburnett, a thing come up out of the ground into the sky, except that the black had fallen back down on them and on the mud and on his upturned face and this did not fall anywhere at all.

West walked north.