The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3) Page 3

  The night was cold with a stiff wind. There was no need of a light. The moon was bright enough. The silver coating the earth was a blanket of beauty. Only the unaugmented still cared about beauty and looked for it wherever they could. The Augment had a metric. It categorized and quantified so the people didn’t have to think about it or feel it for themselves. Accept the judgement they had been rendered and never worry. Lack of anxiety and doubt was as good as, some said even better than, the old pangs of pleasure. The rubric had been finalized fifteen years ago, drawn up by social scientists and the data they gathered. Ricky had researched it. Moonlight was a 62.3 on the scale. It lacked utility. A rose ranked higher because the imagined or implied fragrance added a potentially useful, corporeal element. But to Ricky's eyes, the soothing moonlight was a clear antidote to the fallacies of reasoned dialectic. Nature held answers that worked if you looked for yourself. If he wrote that it would put him at odds. But he could think it. The beauty and utility of the unaugmented way could not be clearer, yet the majority of people prefered to be told what to think, where to go for food, shelter and even love. It was arranged for maximum utility, to surpass the limitations that had kept humanity from realizing its potential. But when they needed inspiration to keep the Augment humming, they turned to the Creatives for the exact measure, no more, of added juice. So even his lack of clarity was of some use and would be tolerated, up to a point. Determining that point was how he earned his keep. Even his awkward views on beauty, as long as he did not disseminate them widely. Still, some day he wanted to be allowed to expound freely on any topic under the sun, like Dostoyevsky. That was his remaining little ego trip, the fantasy that he cultivated under his pillow at night before sleep. Gretchen liked the fact that Ricky had fantasies that would never come to fruition. It made him appealing.

  There was a movement down by the harborside. It surprised Ricky. On a night like this he could be forgiven for his dreaming. He stayed by the door watching. A knot of people walked up the hillside. Then they fragmented. Three broke away, leaving one solitary figure, hooded, making his way up the road towards Ricky’s cabin. His walk was slower, more willful than Ricky last recalled. He waited to see the stranger’s face.

  Deven was older now. He dropped the hood. His grey hair shone in the moonlight. There were the same flat cheekbones and the knobby lump of a nose that had been broken several times over the course of his uncompromising life. He’d managed to hold on to the insouciance of youth, though.

  “Good to see you, brother.” Deven gripped his shoulder with one hand and took the bottle with the other.

  “What is this? Jubilee Brandy from the Transcaucasus?"

  “That’s right. I can still get my hands on the good stuff,” said Ricky.

  “The Augment takes good care of its domesticated beasts.”

  “Come in and have a sniff for yourself.”

  “Good to see you. It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?”

  Ricky held the door open while Deven shuffled in.

  “At least five years,” said Ricky. “That must have been in the spring of ‘70, after Marjden had been deposed from the INN council and you feared the worst. You stayed for a couple of weeks, remember?”

  “Marjden. I was right, though. He named names,” said Deven.

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Applecruk for example,” added Deven.

  “Our happy Applecruk. Yes. Liquidated.”

  “Never seen again.”

  Applecruk. For the first time in many years, Ricky thought of the Philadelphia poet who had been circulating his work illegally on his own face list and critiquing the Augment’s line on the pedagogical purpose in literary productions.

  “They made an example of him, bragged about the deed on all their public channels,” said Ricky.

  “That’s right,” agreed Deven. “And Marjden got off with five years on solitary in the Mont Dazis reformatory outside of Algiers.”

  With his reminder of their mortality and the tightrope of their tenure, Deven set the prelude for whatever communique he might have brought from his world of intrigue and hostilities. They sat at the table. Ricky took Deven’s wet oil coat and hung it on the wall by the fire. While Deven poured himself a brandy at the kitchen table, Ricky stirred the fire and added a couple of sticks. Gretchen came out from the bedroom, wrapped in a blanket. She studied Deven.

  “Hiya sister. New here on the island, huh?”

  “Yeah.”

  “From?”

  “Rockford.”

  “The penitentiary?”

  “Yah.”

  “Intellectual deviance I bet. Resistant oppositional?”

  “I never could see things their way.”

  “That's okay by me.”

  “I’ve heard a lot about you.”

  “Good things, I take it.”

  “Good and bad.” Gretchen laughed and moved over to the window and turned on a lamp.

  Deven explained to them both how he’d got there on the bootleg at low tide from the mainland, hiking up from the highway and waiting for a day at the lobster pound until he spotted his man. The island bot security would notice he was not tagged, she reminded him. Deven laughed and flashed the counterfeit biometric chip in his wallet. Gretchen nodded. She’d seen those before in Nuevo Laredo, she said. He asked her about the border. She was there in the ‘60s. Their banter saddened Ricky, for some reason, as if he could foresee things turning sour between the three of them.

  He poured a glass, drank it off and poured himself some more. How did it get like this? This smuggler’s life, the secretive, hidden way they lived like criminals. His youth misspent in their eyes, a full-blown Democravian professor with all the perks and a postcard of a family. Yes, he had been augmented then, and Democravia had its faults, its illusions of perfection and immortality. His memories of it were dim, however. Once the Augment was removed, there were blank years left. Only Corrag had believed he could recover. Alana had died before he could get better. It was hard to live with the remorse he felt. Writing helped, the concrete task of setting down words in an orderly and pleasing fashion. He could forget who he was for a time, but the minute he stopped, the feelings of despair returned. They called this being human, but Ricky had doubts. Sometimes he secretly wished he could live in the numb peace of the majority.

  “And how is the editorial board treating you, Ricky?” asked Deven, taking soundings.

  “Good. I keep getting my story ideas passed.”

  “I saw your piece on inter-stellar travel.”

  “Oh, yeah. The tribal-level analysis of attitudes. There still are important emotional differences, it turns out.”

  “What does it depend on?”

  “I’m not sure. Some sort of vestigial hard-wiring. It’s not what we supposed. For instance, female North American augments maintain some resistance. But Mormons and Semites are positive in their underlying thoughts.”

  “But why help the Augment figure that stuff?” asked Gretchen.

  “Well, maybe by pushing it to the forefront it opens up avenues for inquiry and just in general creates a ferment. That’s what they tell me. I’m just a whore of the Augment. I don’t ask deep questions, Deven. They pay well for my synthesis of data. That’s the important thing.”

  “Inter-stellar travel. What a farce. We have Churing to blame for that one,” said Deven with a scowl.

  “He recanted his support for the earth bound movement under duress,” Ricky blurted out

  “Still. He didn’t have to accept the Augment. That sent a powerful signal to the youth movements.”

  Anger made Ricky stand and pace. What did Deven want from him? He had turned up with this accusatory tone. What was his angle?

  “Look, you have no idea of the underlying conditions in anyone’s mind, not even your own,” said Ricky.

  “Neither does the Augment,” said Deven.

  “But the Augment doesn’t judge. It just moves ahead. Inexorably. Meanwhile, the puny critics, the ear
thbound, the humanist soul sojourn, the poets, even the libertarians, all they do is squabble among themselves and recriminate. That sickens me.”

  “Don’t be like that,” said Deven. He stared at Ricky with a blank look of indifference. Ricky wanted to fight him then, to wipe away the smug superiority he was surely feeling. But Ricky knew Deven was battle worn and more alive than him. This was what gave him his edge. He had to be patient. Deven would reveal his hand in his own time.

  He fell asleep in the chair by the fire, and Gretchen found him a blanket under the bed to wrap him in. It was Ricky’s Guatemalan weave, given to him years ago by his mother. The blanket incorporated birds flying in geometric waves, now dipping and soaring over the rounded outcrops of Deven’s slumping shoulders. Ricky put more wood on. This was a night to remember. The fire blazed into a roar. Gretchen went to bed. Ricky looked out the door another time. All was clear. But not in his head. Deven’s arrival had stirred up confusing thoughts and feelings. When would clarity come? Perhaps never. Perhaps he needed to get away from the island in order to understand his heart and its desires.

  The stars held still. There was one orbiting satellite making its way from east to west, blinking its red and green wing lights, an alternating code language only the drones and the Augment algorithms understood. Ricky stared at the pattern and thought maybe, just maybe, there was a chance for a crack in the wall of his faulty senses to get through and be free. It was a poetic fancy, a second-rung dream of victory, he thought. The spark of the intuition was always fragmentary and largely dependent on currents of thought and energy undetectable to all but the most sensitive instruments. The best trusted in sleep and the secrets whispered in dreams. The worst took the Augment, selling their souls for a mess of gaming. But the fact that a human would even try to do in a second what the Augment had failed to accomplish in thirty years was still a marvel of design.

  In the morning Deven was the first to wake. He rose and made coffee on the stove by the door after using the bathroom. The smell of the coffee boiling woke Ricky. It was dark, but the light from the bulb over the table was still on. He’d forgotten to turn it off. Not that Deven needed its orientation during the night. On the contrary, the dim bulb in the demi-dawn looked garish and frightening, swinging in minute, barely perceptible arcs. The coffee was a Central American hybrid genetically crossed with rain forest kava, used as an antidote to psychosis. That was relevant with Deven, who brought in his wake all manner of potential illusion.

  Gretchen was a sound sleeper. It didn’t matter to her what was going on. She was on her own schedule. The sun had just appeared out in the harbor, visible light behind the curtains above the sink. Ricky joined Deven at the table.

  “You made it through the night,” said Deven.

  “Yes. No dreams, though,” said Ricky, cutting off Deven’s next question. But Deven jumped ahead of him.

  “I did. Three people camping. You, me and Gretchen. A man shows up outside the tent. We’re camped in Rubio Park in front of the Ryan Tubidport. The man asks about the book.”

  “What book?”

  “A tall guy. I couldn’t look him in the face. We were kneeling in the grass in front of our tent. He shows up out of nowhere. Just drifts over. Asks about a book.”

  “Is it a book we have?”

  “No. More like we have to find it.”

  “For him?”

  “No, for us.”

  “I like to camp,” said Gretchen. She was wearing her Uffizi pullover, the one she liked to wear to curl up and read by the fire. She pulled up a chair and sat down, smiling with a newfound sense of lightheartedness. For Ricky, it was a mystery what drove her mood changes.

  “Yeah, but is Rubio Park even anywhere near the Tubidport? I thought it was next to the Sears Tower,” said Ricky, realizing he was being foolish wanting to put a dent in it, question the basis in fact of this dream, stop the Deven freight train before it could pull out of the station. The sun wasn't even up and he was already feeling grumpy and put out. What would they do with Deven? It was a nice day, maybe a stroll on the beach?

  “Of course it is,” said Gretchen.

  "No,’” said Deven. “But there’s a stone ruin, an old castle in Connemara that reminds me. It was the castle of Maeve’s. The one with the cattle that Cullin stole. Do you want to hear the title of the book the man was looking for?”

  “Yeah, let’s hear it,” said Gretchen.

  “The Grammar of Love,” said Deven.

  “That’s pretty,” said Gretchen.

  “Didn’t your Dad write a book?” asked Deven, after a pause.

  “He wrote several," said Ricky.

  "What were they about?" asked Gretchen.

  "Flight, space travel, physics. There was one he co-wrote with his brother. I never read it. Aviation and the Long Night.”

  “What was that about?” asked Gretchen. Her eyes held Ricky’s for just a second, but he felt a momentary sense of déjà vu. She had a way of doing that to him. He drank some coffee before answering. A sense of foreboding overtook him. Why was his heart going haywire?

  “What was it about? Do you have it?” asked Deven.

  “No,” said Ricky. “I’ve always wanted to find it.”

  Chapter Four -- December 5, 2072

  Dallas Hilton,

  Texas,

  Republican Homeland

  The citrus salad was always in season. That was an example of the sort of lesson the child was picking up from the artificial world of the Hilton. The variety in the salad bar was arbitrary and based on the perfect judgement of the Augment. Not that they would ever be told how it worked. All they could be was curious.

  “Hold on to the curiosity. That’s all we have left,” she said to nobody in particular. The botserver held its head at a peculiar angle as it recorded her maxillofacial alignments and body movement. All the audio was picked up from God knew where. The hotel was packed with sensors. Someone had calculated once how many per square inch. It was a trivia game they’d played as a public performance, and the audience had loved it, laughing along and moving in gentle waves through the courtyard, along with the flock of peacocks under the dwarf pear trees, while the tame Siberian deer mimicked their movements in the steppes in another, simpler age.

  She was hyper-aware this morning of herself and the way Hera coughed into her napkin. Ben had been rising early and walking to the stadium along the pedestrian tunnels. He had an old friend from the army who slept in the rough, and they would drink for a couple of hours before he would show up shit-faced in the afternoon in time for rehearsals. It gave him an edge, he said, which was true, but it was a jagged edge and tearing at the fabric of their relationship. Also, it was ruining Hera’s chance at having any kind of normal childhood in this circus.

  They ate at a table with Paul Fisher, the director, and his partner Jib Uko, the set designer. Fisher and Uko talked about their expedition for props out to Eagle Rock. The western part of the state was full of antiques. They’d only had to flash their identity chips once. It had been an officer with the Repho Border Patrol who very politely had stopped them in the driverless, blacked-out, vintage portervan Fisher had rented. There was no problem. Everything was on the up and up, said Fisher. He used quaint phrases like that in an unironic way. Otherwise, Corrag thought Fisher had a good handle on the production, unlike many of the directors they'd worked under. It was amazing how bad some of them were. What they did was such a throwback, the whole live entertainment thing, when you came right down to it. There was no way of knowing what worked or didn't with the Augment audience. Some of them seemed to have a genuine rapport with live performance, but so many were uncomfortable with raw, unprocessed emotional expression. There was a whole generation or two of forced augments that had essentially grown up autistic, gaping at their artifex scapes and burrowing themselves away from contact with fellow humans in public spaces like the hotel grounds.

  Corrag said nothing, keeping her face turned to the table and then to H
era, admonishing her a little too harshly for not covering her mouth when she coughed.

  “Why the bourgeois propriety?” asked Jib.

  “Better than letting them go to hell and then hoping the Augment picks up the pieces,” said Fisher.

  “She’ll never be. Not while I’m alive,” said Corrag.

  “Where's your husband, the last American man?” asked Fisher.

  He asked this using his genuine voice again. The Last American Man was the play they were rehearsing. Ben was being typecast once again, to her disappointment, as the laconic alpha male questing for relevance in an unaugmented, and therefore increasingly surreal and entropic universe. Nevertheless she covered for him, making something up about his need for quiet time, fasting in order to prepare psychologically for the role. Not her and Hera. They ate lustily and in her case guiltily, stocking up on the hotel’s bacon and pastry rolls. She’d put on some pounds since the beginning of the month, and that was one of the things she wanted to talk to Dr. Ewing about.

  After breakfast she dressed Hera in the party outfit she’d found in one of her bags in the closet. It was a dress that was Corrag's, given to her by Alana, who had collected vintage clothes. Hera was seven, with preternaturally large eyes she’d inherited from her grandmother and a wise, old laugh that either alienated strangers or guaranteed their life-long allegiance. There was already a Hera Calder Fan Club page on the Foragers tab of the Unitube. She had caught up with it after Ben found it one day. There weren’t too many entries, but there were plenty of video clips of Hera toddling after balloons or performing solo turns in front of the bandstand. The comments section was filled with cute emoticons and one strange hater had written -- Go back to Hedville! -- a reference to the Hedville Nineteen, a Living Water center in the Ozarks that had gone over to the wild and been liquidated. As if they had ever been to Hedville. They hadn't. Or as if Hera represented some hateful trend. It had made her angry, and Ben and she had agreed on Dr. Ewing as a smart move to avoid politicizing their daughter’s innocent, unaugmented appeal. Wasn’t the Augment supposed to neutralize the hate? Somehow jealous rage still popped up now and then when some old-timer forgot to get their annual nano-clean.