Authors: Robert Onopa
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Science Fiction, #Anthologies, #short stories, #Anthologies & Short Stories
I’d seen for myself, watched a famous criminal, the Organ Bandit, writhing happily in flames in the Circle of Thieves. The punishment was only staged, but his eternal celebrity promised to be real.
“One more thing,” Max said. “We’ve made our greatest placement ever. Lance found out they had room for half a kilo more payload on that last emergency attempt to blow the comet off course. So we bought the spot in the nose cone.”
“And what in the name of God are we going to do with that?”
“We’ll be sending up a cremate. It’s like burial at sea, but much grander.”
“Who could have the vanity . . . ?”
“That judge,” Max told me, “what’s his name? MacPhee.”
* * *
I recall it was Thursday night of that week when society started becoming really unglued—lawlessness swept the beaches, looting raged on Rodeo Drive, anarchy on the freeways. Public safety followed public transport into frightened hibernation. But the weather turned gorgeous—the air crystal clear and the stars shining brightly that night when the whole power grid went down, the stars of the Milky Way lighting the bowl of the sky with celestial jewelry.
I braved the streets to Westwood on Friday.
Keiko was fortified at the mansion, spending her last days with the judge. Max had arranged for a cortege of armored hearses to transport the judge up the coast to Vandenberg Air Force Base for the launch when the time came.
When I looped back through downtown I found Max and Lance camped out up in accounting. Business was still streaming in; Max had Lance shunting in overload invoice servers into the corporate mainframe. Max was filled with enthusiasm for the judge’s journey as payload on the third rocket, but guarded about the details, as if he didn’t trust me with them. A marketing vision of cosmic proportions danced in his eyes: GD’s greatest triumph, he told me, the beginning of a whole new range of franchise-level services, symbolic of his joining with Lance.
Then fires began to smoke the atmosphere. From the eightieth floor window I watched a sooty cloud rise from South Central, then a fireline start further south, by Long Beach Harbor, where Nomads lived on boats. The winds were pulling the smoke across the whole basin. Even as I watched, a string of brush fires ignited above Malibu.
That’s when we flew to Mauna Kea, Unix and I.
* * *
Since the late 20th Century, Mauna Kea has been the premier optical and infrared red imaging site on the globe. Fourteen thousand feet high, isolated by thousands and thousands of miles of Pacific Ocean from the nearest landmass, Mauna Kea is impacted only by air pollution downstream from China, a high mustard haze which that week had slowly dissolved into nothingness.
It is a rugged site, rust-red and black with lava ash and boulders, the fixed observatories on their little knolls, a gravel road winding up from the astronomer’s quarters a few thousand feet below. I found out I could image from the summit itself, a cinder cone just east of the large instruments. Unix and I staked out a spot and I deployed my small imaging package on the night we arrived. By midnight I’d set celestial coordinates, and we settled in.
We had a little self-erecting tent and good down bags, picnic hampers of food, our own satlink to watch the madness back on the mainland. But mostly we watched the sky, rich with stars, the great silver swipe of
Virgilius Maro
wide across the heavens, Mars and Venus bumping one another on the horizon, as if jostling to get out of the way. The firmament seemed a vast deep blue bowl; up there, with the sky so clear and nothing around you, you feel yourself suspended in space, a cosmic traveler.
We thought we could make out the launch of the Vandenberg rocket, its passage through the ionosphere. “Uncle’s up there,” I heard Unix whisper in wonder.
Unix and I grew very close. Our zipped-together bags made a womb from which we emerged only late on the final day.
As you know the nuke merely turned
Virgilius Maro
off course. It wasn’t the way it might have been in an old SF movie, blowing up. No, that would have sent fragments in the direction of Earth. Rather, it was a flash, albeit a diamond bright human flash, and then the turning, the quickening across the sky.
I don’t mean to diminish it. What a night that was: the thrill of the comet turning, the colors spreading across the heavens, refracted light in bands of red and orange and water blue, Unix against my side, my equipment whirring. . . . It was lovelier, and more dangerous, than any other moment I have experienced.
The comet streaked across the sky, some cosmic fulfillment, an instrument, a sign of change for myself, for the world I lived in. As the rocket had slivered into the comet’s albedo, as the nuke had blossomed, as the shifting colors had climaxed, I’d tracked the nearby click of servos and the squeaks of optical drives to confirm my hopes: my equipment had grabbed just the right fourteen seconds.
In the ensuing silence we stood there, Unix and I, our breaths vaporizing before us, the cold rock hard beneath our feet, our hearts beating together. I cannot tell you how happy I felt at that moment, how fulfilled.
My pager hummed against my heart.
I took the call through the backup monitor on my imaging equipment, my chilly fingers fumbling with the thin lead. Keesha was on the tiny screen. She looked stricken.
She was calling to tell me that Max Sczyczypek was dead, of massive cardiac arrest.
* * *
You of course know all about the near miss’s unexpected effects—that tidal thing, the way the ozone layer was restored to pre-1900 levels, the way the lower atmosphere cleared. I remember the day after we returned to California, waking up and gazing through the clear, crisp air that had been with us since the comet passed. The rapid ionization of the atmosphere had picked up the particulates and plopped them on the ground, where they were washed by heavy rains; the world seemed fresh and new. It changed all our lives, that near-death experience.
Max, as I’ve mentioned, got a little nearer than most.
His funeral was one of the most spectacular and professionally accomplished in the modern history of deathcare management. It was understood that I would handle the basic interment, though I left the stainless steel instruments, the needles, the gloves and the fluids to Preparation. I dressed Max in his best black suit, picked out a casket, and laid him out, setting his features with a number six Mona Lisa® smile. Dorothy helped me with his obituary; the Sierra Club managed the flowers and the stands of virgin Redwood offered in his name, Espagio’s did the catering, Fiat/Disney produced the wake and the procession. The High Mass was held at St. Christopher’s, with a little virtual hookup to all GD Homes. Burial was at St. Mary’s: Digger O’Donald was there, an orchestra, celebrities by the hundreds, with a special presentation by the union of professional mourners Max himself had helped found.
That was when I first spotted the chemistry between Unix and Lance. I was surprised but then it seemed to me a good thing. I wasn’t sure I could keep up with her, and she needed someone who looked further ahead than I do these days.
Lance and I run the company now. Max left us very well off. We have all that front money from FEMA in the bank, all those fees from
IMMORTALITY NOW!
without the liability to produce it as advertised. Since the comet had been redirected by the Government under an action classified by the courts as an Act of God or War, our warrantee must exclude any mention of “comet.” No comet, no signal. The broadband noise that had been converted into holounits from
The Divine Comedy
would continue to be broadcast by the redirected
Virgilius Maro
, but only in the path of the M31 Galaxy for the next four hundred million years.
We
own
the Obit Channel now—under a dummy corporation, however those things are done. All of the Angels® have been dusted, the Fleetwoods shine, and our new South American division is expanding at the rate of two new Homes per week.
I still feel deep satisfaction with the image I’d grabbed of
Virgilius Maro
up on Mauna Kea. During the final edit I doubled the length of the hololoop. The finished piece hangs in the boardroom these days, replacing an image of Mars. The now half-minute loop, bright silver with a banded spectrum in slo-mo, opens and turns like a timelapse flower bathing in quasar light against a backdrop of deep space.
I see Keiko a lot. It’s a bit unreal. Lance and Unix are a couple. We’re all into life extension. Lance is working with those Swiss engineers you’ve been hearing about on the news. I mean, why not stick with a good thing?
* * *
One more thing I need to tell you about.
After all the dust had settled, Keiko and Unix and Lance and I took what remained of the judge’s ashes and placed them into a crypt. He had refused to take his ashes up with him to Vandenberg; he’d called it a morbid idea. The left-behind ashes had been moved to GD Tower, but Keiko understandably wanted closure. Burial was my advice, a small traditional service; I was glad to see my thinking confirmed by Keiko’s therapist and the MacPhee family counselor. The obsequies were set for a Friday afternoon.
I set out driving alone in my Lotus from downtown to meet the rest of the funeral party at Forest Lawn. I’d picked up the ashes from GD Tower and was carrying them on the passenger’s seat. They were resting in a beautiful onyx urn. I rounded a corner, my suspension let out a squeak, a groan, and I found myself remembering my first encounter with the judge’s ashes in the Model 986 Urn. I started seeing him as a rival again. Instinctively, I reached for the glove box, pulled out the plastic bag containing the ashes of Balthazar, my old Lab, and exchanged them for the ashes of the judge. The idea that the urn containing the judge’s ashes would make a noise during interment spooked me more than I can explain. I know what I did was unethical; I couldn’t help myself.
Anyway, the modest ceremony went well. Unix had arranged for Scottish Pipers, and a representative from NASA stood in uniform and saluted. Keiko achieved her closure.
The thing is, after the dinner at Espagio’s, when I was driving back to Westwood with Keiko, swinging up Santa Monica Boulevard?
I swear I heard something from the glovebox: a creak, a pop, a long high note that sang eerily into the gathering night.
Keiko looked at me.
“Balthazar,” I said. “Hush.”
The Swan
T
HE COLUMN OF BLACK SMOKE WAS VISIBLE
from ten clicks away, dense and billowy, shifting in the wind like a dye marker in ocean currents.
Photochemical colors in the twilight sky: mauve and filthy pink. The old Army turbocopter rattled through the airspace above coastal L.A., descending gradually toward the source of the smoke in Long Beach Harbor.
Standing in the open door of the copter’s cargo area, one hand on a safety strap, Voorst squinted south through the haze at the continuous string of makeshift harbors where houseboats seemed every year to multiply like algae in a pond. He guessed densities of five or six thousand per square kilometer, half the rigs illegals, population out of hand.
The way the picture was never seen on CBS or VNN ate away at him like an ulcer. As they swung upwind of the column of smoke—it hung below them now three thousand feet like some fantastic butte in Monument Valley—he pulled himself across the cabin, took a deep breath, then leaned out the opposite cargo door, trying to make out what was going on near the source. The pattern of debris and smudge spread clearly from a large ship, one he maybe recognized: rusty white decks, an out-of-service pool, a blue hull—a passenger liner auctioned off years ago and anchored in the harbor as one of the transient hotels, the QE III.
The copter weaved down alongside the column and his stomach tightened, the sensation like floating down a precipice untethered. Now he could make out the big Virtual News Net uplink out on the breakwater. The shoreside traffic was gridlocked, the sealanes so crowded even a SoCal Harbor Inspector like himself (but what did Harbor Inspectors matter anymore?) had to hitch a ride through the air.
This was the third harbor fire in a week. One up in L.A. proper, the other down in Balboa.
A soft wall of black came rushing up and they wafted into the smoke. In the darkness the copter’s interior screens brightened and he checked the image going out over VNN—he was used to the way they altered a landscape, accustomed to seeing some of the live-aboard scows bled out of harbor shots, but now it looked like they’d moved the source of the fire too. On the VNN screen the smoke rose from a Brazilian bulk carrier anchored in the industrial harbor northwest. Voorst ground his teeth. The acrid edge to the air belonged to burning petrochemicals, not the cargo of Amazon mahogany whose loss the smooth-voiced anchorman was describing. Still, even the VNN summary screen showed the crowd—people with bundles, transients being driven off—fighting with Army cops. “Hey, Stringer,” Voorst shouted against the whine of the turborotor “
Stringer
. Your men gonna have the area secured by nightfall?”
The fiftyish sergeant, his name in block letters above the left pocket of his fatigues, seemed not to hear, didn’t even open his eyes. He leaned against the bulkhead, the bank of internal screens glowing yellow behind him, and continued the story he’d started before Voorst had leaned out the door. “So I tell the lunchmeat I’m a friendly, right? I get her inside the troop carrier. There’s nobody around. I get her on the floor in the back. . . .”
Voorst grunted and peered out as the copter punched beyond the dense smoke, the light like a change of season. Elevation two thousand feet. The dusty sun lay above the horizon less than an hour from setting. “If you don’t get secured,” he yelled to Stringer, “you’re gonna have another three, four hundred dead by morning. Look down there, you can see them swarming—people in the water. . . .”
“Com’on,” Stringer said. “Just listen: so when I take her blouse off. She’s holding must be three hundred housing vouchers? I clap the restraints on her wrists, got ’em threaded around the weapons rack. Next thing I know like her brain fuses, she goes twitch wild. I think, well, the zimmer likes the restraints, right?” The copter lurched in a wave of heat; a red light flashed at the back of the cargo hold, matched by a flush infusing Stringer’s square, hairless face. “I go to pull off my holster and belt?”
Only now does the Harbor Inspector, Voorst, look carefully at the mangled mass of cartilage at the side of Stringer’s head. “Something tells me I don’t want to hear how you lost it.”
“I didn’t
lose
my ear. She
bit
it off. I mean, what are these people turning into?” Stringer pulled himself up and peered out the open door, holding the safety rails so tightly his knuckles showed white. “Man, what
was
this place?”
“South of the industrial harbor, see? A big old passenger ship—Harbors database shows upper decks were a Sears-Daei Mall and a transit center, maybe two thousand people below. VNN’s saying Nomads came aboard a bulk carrier, set a fire, the people in the harbor started looting. . . . Jesus, they treat people like cattle.”
“Nobody treats
me
like cattle,” Stringer grinned. “What’s the matter, pal? You afraid my people gonna hit you with the prods?”
Voorst looked at him: red-eyed, one-eared. He took a deep breath: petrochemical air. “Stay out of my way, Stringer,” Voorst said, trying to keep calm. “I’ve got a job to do down there and I don’t want your men interfering. Stay out of my way.”
* * *
Voorst’s job was to clear the harbor of illegal vessels. The first step was to identify the most dangerously unseaworthy craft, hulls he’d mark with his orange “V” for the Corps of Engineers to impound and sink along the massive net of breakwaters. Most of the few vessels which could actually sail had done so when the fire had broken out, just sailed north out of the harbor mouth to some other mooring. The illegals left behind ranged from slimy inflatables rigged as sleeping quarters, to makeshift houseboats with small kitchens, to old tanker hulls that had been converted into twelve-story “apartments.”
Walking the docks, by sunset he found only six boats he could clear. Two hours later he heard an appeal from a group of unwashed men and women and let slide the regs for a dozen trimarans moored under the tattered flag of the Ponape Yacht Club. Even as they spoke an illegal barge ghosted into an area he’d already inspected—the harbor changing amoeba-like around him. Still, he’d see to it the worst cases were sunk.
At midnight Voorst found himself picking his way across the deck of a converted cattle ship docked near the VNN uplink. Behind him the Corps was already towing the first hull he’d marked. Now he stopped to watch the Army drive a crowd along the shore back through the lurid light. The water was littered with clothing, cooking utensils, bedding. The red plastic of a toy Mars Rover crackled beneath his feet when he shifted his weight.
His heart went out to the people who needed a place to live, but what else could he do? When the big winter storms came slamming in from the Pacific, as they would in a month, the great breakwater itself a mile out wouldn’t hold back the rising seas. Even in good weather the utility hookups were rats’ nests and sewage fouled the waters for a click out. When the storms came, the collisions, capsizings, swampings—sheer overcrowding in the harbors killed thousands every year on this part of the California coast alone.
Voorst sighed, looked around to take his bearings. He’d covered all of the northern quarter of the harbor except for a crumbling pier near shore. He told himself that’s where he’d quit for the night.
He walked over. He started writing off a string of listing hundred-foot hulks, sheet metal and wallboard shacks on scow hulls, when he realized that one rusty hull, partly sunk, was blocking a dozen small boats moored to a pontoon dock along a hidden channel.
That’s where he found the
Swan
.
* * *
She was an antique sailboat, a racing sloop from the 20th Century, Scandinavian-built, about forty feet on the waterline. He’d seen a boat like her in the museum in San Francisco once: a glass hull with fine, fast lines, a flush teak deck for quick sail changes, a tall mast with a narrow crosstree. Her gull-winged cockpit set her apart from other old racing boats and gave her away even from beneath a thick layer of grime. He’d never forgotten the words etched on the steel plaque in San Francisco:
Nautor Swan
.
This boat’s reg numbers didn’t show up on his readout. She certainly was run-down: filthy, her decks gouged, her brightwork the washed-out color of driftwood. Her winches were crusted over and her rigging hung from the mast like an old spider’s web. But there was no disguising the heartbreaking sleekness of her design.
“Hello!”
Voorst called out from dockside, banging on the hull, hearing the fatigue in his voice.
“Ahoy the
Swan
.”
The boat had lost its rudder, seemed a bit low in the water. Still, he couldn’t just have her sunk. He calculated his alternatives and started writing out a warning notice to post on the hull when he heard the companionway hatch scrape open on its tracks. The hair rose on the back of his neck—in the red glow from a secondary fire, the harbor had turned weirdly quiet; he hadn’t met anyone for an hour.
And now a girl emerged from the low cabin. She was wearing a T-shirt of a provocative blue beneath a khaki windbreaker. She was slim-hipped, high-cheeked, and pretty, but certainly just a girl. He guessed from the look on her face that she would have disappeared had she anywhere to go.
“Are you Army?” she said. Her skin was smooth as a mannequin’s. Her hair was honey-colored despite the Oriental fold in her eyes and the flatness of her nose—someone’s exotic, beautiful daughter.
“SoCal Harbors Office. Where’s your family?”
“I’m older than I look,” she told him, lips tight. “Try twenty-two. Are you going to squander all the boats in the harbor? The way you did up in Seattle?”
He grunted. “Who told you that?”
“Everyone knows about it. There’s a pinch, the boats get condemned. The next thing you see, they’re sunk at anchor. Then the bay gets filled in by some developer and apartment blocks go up.”
The story bothered him too. The trouble in Seattle, as he recalled, had been a petrochemical slick that had unfortunately ignited at the turning of the tide. “We’re not sinking anybody at anchor,” he told her. “You’re mistaking me for the FedHarbors people. But for your own safety . . .”
His pager squawked and he stopped, took a message from ComNet: FEMA had scheduled a briefing at the fire’s source on Dock G North at 0600.
He’d had to look down to read the message display and to shut his pager off. When he looked back up, the girl was gone.
* * *
At the morning briefing—he’d been right about the source, it was the
Queen Elizabeth III
, a floating flophouse belowdecks, the mall above—the Long Beach fire chief showed Voorst and the Army Evac Team where the blaze had started in the video department of the Daie store, around 4
P.M.
on the previous day. Someone had set off a case of Lydex, the Army’s “sticky napalm,” fragments of the original container blown out into a passageway.
The Lydex—left over from the “police action” in Mexico—was the signature of the New Nomad Terrs, Stringer chimed in during his five minutes: Stringer was apparently something of an expert on the terrorists, Voorst was surprised to learn. Stringer’s assistant placed the disruption to the QE III’s ComNet channel at 1602 hours.
“So they lost video uplink from this ship from the
start
?” Voorst asked.
A black firewoman from Long Beach shook her head. “No way.”
Stringer looked annoyed. “That’s what the scum do first, blow the links, give you false signals,” he said, but the black woman only shrugged.
Voorst waited until the briefing was concluded and Stringer and his team drifted away.
“Show me,” Voorst said to the firewoman in the yellow slicker.
Up forward in the old first class theater one of the Virtual News Network’s “experience” rooms was still more or less in working condition, running three walls out of four. Voorst played back the holotape of what had gone out over the Net even before they’d flown out from Malibu, cutting the volume on the anchorman Tachikara’s familiar, avuncular voice. There it was again: the QE III fire was already superimposed on the Brazilian bulk cargo carrier, the
Sea Angel
, anchored in the industrial harbor just northwest. He’d seen that harbor choked with live-aboards too as they’d flown over, but as he watched the walls around him projecting VNN’s three-dimensional coverage, half the residential boats were gone, erased, digitalized out. Even the odor of the fire they were sending out over the Virtual Net was different, yes, incense sweet, a hint of burning wood from the tropics.
He supposed they had their reasons. Maybe the police had a lead on the Nomad Terrorists which would be blown if everyone knew the truth. Still . . .
“You believe this shit, what they do nowadays?” Voorst asked the black woman.
She seemed rapt—on the screen, against the dramatic sights and sounds of the fire, a guy wearing a red bandana was pulling a comatose, semi-nude blonde out of water so oily it threatened to ignite. “This is better than what happened, man. I like this better.”
Behind the slosh of the water and the crackle of flaming lumber and paint blistering a hatch an announcer murmured the station ID for VNN:
Here’s There!
he said.
You’re Here!
Voorst picked up the unerased string of scow hulls as part of the background on a side screen. Without giving it much thought he called up the screen controls and instructed the virtual-reality program to zoom in.
You could hardly see the edit lines. Blue shirts swarming near a derelict sailboat. The
Swan
.
“Hey,” the firewoman said, “lookit that. Maybe those’re the guys who started the fire.”
Voorst shrugged. “Look at their bedrolls. Folded in a hurry. Look how those two are half-dressed, how their survival packs are a mess. That bunch is clearing out like they don’t know what’s going on.”
* * *
The Corps of Engineers had already brought in two large cranes, and now a dredge from the nearby Naval Shipyard was stationed in the harbor mouth. The harbor looked trashed—debris strewn, littered with derelict vessels, scum on the water thicker than usual—but because the Army’d come in strength, the transients weren’t swarming back as they had in Balboa, so today his own job seemed less urgent. Voorst ate a late breakfast with the Long Beach fire crew, a druggy bunch who shared Stim tabs with their coffee. Then he worked the Alamitos end of the bay out of a
Zodiac
for a while. Before long his eyes were burning from some toxicity in the air. He moored the
Zodiac
at an empty slip and walked over to the
Swan
.