Brian D'Amato

Brian D'Amato Page 21

by In the Courts of the Sun

  “Thanks,” Marena said.

  “However,” he said, “if you remove the badge, your head will explode.” Sorry, just kidding. He didn’t really say that. All he said was “No problem.”

  They led us east, away from the sports complex. The officials walked back ahead of us in that clompy proud-to-be-a-robot way. On each step my heels sunk a few millimeters into the heat-retaining asphalt. Grgur asked to carry my backpack, but I said it was there to cover my hump, so he took Marena’s two little bags and walked about fifty feet ahead of us. We followed through a cluster of Quonset huts and prefab hangars. Invisible moths brushed our ears on their way to cremation in the tungsten work-lights.

  “Hey, Jed?” Marena asked.

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you know why those donkeys have that pink spooge all over their legs?”

  “Uh, yeah.”

  “So, why?”

  “Well, you see how skinny they are, right?”

  “ Yeah.”

  “The deal is that vampire bats go for the ankles,” I said. “Or hocks or shanks or whatever. And they tend to attack the same victims night after night. So the burro’s owners paint on that pink stuff, and it has an anticoagulant in it. And it’s mainly the male bats who hunt. So the daddy bats drink all this blood with the goo in it, and then they fly back to their wives and children. And the women and baby bats all hang upside down together in this big cluster, like a bunch of grapes. Right?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “And the male bat hangs at the apex of the cluster and regurgitates the blood for them and they all drink it. And then the baby ones are really fragile and they hemorrhage from the anticoagulant and die.”

  “You know, I’m not just sorry I asked,” she said. “I’m sorry I was ever born.”

  “Sorry.”

  The main compound had two eight-foot chain-link fences around it, with a twenty-foot space between them and a little corridor between the gates so we wouldn’t have to deal with the dogs that patrolled the no-man’s zone. A few of them came up to give us the evil eye. They were big Nazi Shepherds, half cyborgized with little head-mounted cameras and chrome teeth. On the other side of the fence we came into a big military-style quadrangle of wide one-story prefab buildings with floodlights mounted at each corner of their low-angled zinc roofs. Someone of vision had cut down a three-hundred-year-old Spanish cedar, trimmed it into a neat cone, stuck it in a hole full of concrete next to the flagpole in the center of the square, and wrapped it in a net of about ten thousand twinkling green and pink LEDs. It was the most tasteful thing in the place. A pair of missionaries sleazed by, walking their bicycles. Christianity, I thought. Eradicating more interesting religions for over two thousand years. Ahead of us, on the far side of the quadrangle, Elder Beaver had reached our building and was having trouble getting its door open. Grgur parked the suitcases and started giving him his opinion on how to sweep or swipe the keycard through the thingie.

  “See, check this out,” I said to Marena. I squeezed the WIDE button on Max’s laser pointer and waved the beam up over the nearest floodlight. It carved a violet cross section of whorls of insect life and a few big flickering masses.

  “Those are bats,” I said. “I mean, insectivorous bats, not—”

  Marena winced. “If I want to wake up screaming tonight I’ll watch C-SPAN.”

  “Sorry.” I narrowed the laser to a dot, brought it down the wall in front of us, and eased it into the center of the still-closed door, right across Grgur’s field of vision. You could barely even see him duck and run; it was more like he just vanished behind the far corner of the building.

  Damn, I thought. Those are some expensive reflexes you’ve got there. Spetsnaz training? I pretended not to notice and kept playing with the pointer, drawing a circle on the ground. He came back, breathing a little heavily and with his right hand behind his back. He hiked his pants as, out of our sight lines, he reholstered his piece.

  “Are you okay?” Marena asked him.

  “Yes,” he gurgled. I tried to play dumb, looking at Marena to avoid Grgur’s eyes, but of course he knew, and I knew he knew, and he knew I knew, et cetera. Good going, Jed. Now he really has it in for you. Brilliant.

  The door opened and we went through into a rush of processed air product with notes of freon and fresh drywall. We passed a lockout/tagout station emblazoned with the legend PRECAUCIÓN/SE PROHIBE LA ENTRADA SIN PERMISO and squeaked down a long hallway with flickering fluorescent lighting and No Trax SuperScraper matting spotted with rusty red mud.

  “… no, thanks,” Marena was saying to A1. “What I really need is to get in to see Lindsay for five minutes.”

  “He may be too devastated to talk right now,” Elder Junior said. “He was glad you got here, though.”

  “And you know Taro Mora is here, right?” A1 said. “And the SSC’s running. And we got you your old room.”

  Marena said yes, thanks. Someone handed me a keycard and steered me into my cell. Sorry. Room. Marena said she’d call me in a few minutes. They closed the door on me. The room was done up as though it were a real would-be-upscale hotel room, with a single Cypripedium orchid in a glass tube and a folded cardboard wedge thingie that informed me that the hospitality services were administered by Marriott Corporate Retreats International, that the Finn’s Café Restaurant was not yet operational but that breakfast would be served in the Food Court from seven to ten, that the entire area was smoke-free, and that a nurse and a spiritual advisor were on call twenty-four hours a day. Finally, it asked whether, instead of an ordinary wake-up call, I would like to be awakened by an inspirational message. Oh, no, thank you, I thought. I’d rather be awakened by André the Giant pouring a gallon of iced Clorox on my face and kneeing me in the gonads. I prowled around a bit the way one does in hotel rooms. There was a bathroom with lots of sham-luxury amenities but, of course, no condoms. There was the usual Book of Mormon in a drawer. There was a fan of travel brochures on the dresser top. The top one was headlined “Guatemalan Adventures” and featured a picture of a Maya babe in quaint native garb, with a hey-Joe-you-got-nylons expression, standing in front of Stela 16 from Tikal. “You may choose to visit the Mayans in stone … or in person,” the copy said. “Visit Guatemala, Land of Mystery.” Sweet, I thought. You may choose to exterminate the Maya with stones … or in prisons. Visit Guatemala, Land of Sorrow. Dominio de Desesperanza.

  I sat down on the bed, got my phone onto the LAN, and found the You Are Here map. I typed in MARENA PARK and a blue dot appeared not far from my own little red dot. I zoomed in. Just down the hall, it looked like. I left the room and followed the dot. There was televisionish sound coming from a bright but deserted-looking break room, and I went in. It smelled like an office, which is to say it smelled pretty much like Comme des Garçons Odeur 53 but without the glamour. Plus a dash of instant coffee. On my phone the blue dot was practically on top of the amber one. Hmm. There was a henge of upscale vending machines in the center of the room. I went up to one, swiped a debit card through the little vagina—wow, currency still works, I thought—and got two bags of Jelly Bellies.

  “… toll on the reporters covering the story,” some guy on the TV said. I edged around the machines. On the other side, Marena, Taro, and a few other people were sitting or slouching around three sides of a big oval table, watching a big TV on a sort of easel. The white Formica tabletop was scattered with snack food, cups of liquid, and an assortment of the latest personal communications technology.

  Hi, come over, Marena waved.

  I came over. “Brent Warshowsky joins us … with more,” the TV went on. “Brent?”

  “Thanks, Alexander,” Brent said. “Reporters in crisis: Are they getting too close to their subject?”

  I walked past Taro and silently said hi to him. He grasped my arm for a minute, definitely actually glad to see me.

  Setzen dich down here on my left, Marena pointed. I did.

  “I’m talking with Anne-Marie García-McCarthy of Miami’s WSVN TV,” Brent went on. The crawl at the bottom of the screen said SPECIAL ACTION SEGMENT
: HOW REPORTERS COPE WITH DISASTER. “Earlier today, she conducted an emotional interview with a distraught man in Overtown … who lost his wife in the tragedy.”

  “How are you doing, sir?” Anne-Marie asked. The guy said something but he was crying and I couldn’t hear what it was.

  “And where is your home?” she asked.

  “It’s gone, my wife and I were, and we try to get out, and, uh, and, uh, the fire came …”

  “And who’s with you now?”

  “Nobody.”

  “And where is your wife now?”

  “Nobody there.”

  “ Where is your wife now?”

  “She not here. She gone.”

  “You can’t find your wife?”

  “I, I tried, I tried to hold her hand, and she on fire, and it’s too hot, in there, I can’t hold her. She said go on, you take care of the kids. And the grandkids …”

  “Okay, sir, what’s your wife’s name in case we can put this out there?”

  “There no point, she gone.”

  “And what’s your wife’s name?”

  “Lakerisha.”

  “And what’s your name?”

  “JC Calhoun.”

  “Well, just in case rescue workers find a Lakerisha Calhoun—”

  “There no point, she gone. She all burned up. She was my little … she all burned up …”

  “Reporters face a difficult and emotional balancing act,” Brent’s voice said. “Anne-Marie, thanks for joining us tonight. Now, confronting situations like this—here just now we were watching you, Anne-Marie, out on the front lines, and—”

  “Could you kill the sound on that?” Marena said. Someone did. “Thanks.”

  We all looked at each other in the fresh silence.

  “Sorry,” I said. “I’m interrupting. I was just seeing if they had any Peeps yet.”

  “No, stick around,” Marena said. “There’s no news on the news anyway.”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve met Laurence Boyle,” she said, “right?”

  He said hello. He was that elder from the airstrip. Probably she’d tried to introduce me to him and I’d somehow missed it, the way I do.

  “Laurence is the VP of R and D for Warren Research,” Marena said. “And you know Taro and Tony.”

  We all said hi and that it was good we were okay. Taro looked tired. Sic looked absurdly healthy.

  “And this is Michael Weiner.” She indicated a mountain of flesh on her right side.

  “Good to meet you,” he said in his deep New Zealander public-speaking-coached voice. They say TV adds twenty pounds, but in his case it seemed to have taken a hundred pounds off. He was huge. He looked like that new-age health guy, Andrew Weil, with that same sort of humungo beard and big shiny pate, like his head was upside down. Well, at least he has a look, I thought. He stretched his foreleg across Marena’s chest and crushed my thankfully expendable hand.

  “Okay,” Marena said. “What were you saying, Taro?”

  Taro usually paused for a moment before he spoke, and he did this time. But instead of waiting, Michael Weiner broke in ahead of him.

  “Doom Soon,” Michael Weiner said. “Crossbow effect.”

  [14]

  “Right,”Marena said.

  “Sorry, I still don’t get what those are,” Laurence Boyle said.

  “Taro was saying that—”

  “Hang on,” Boyle said. He was stylusing at his phone. “Listen, I’m going to start recording again for a transcript for Elder Lindsay. Just in case anybody thinks of something. Is that all right with everyone?”

  Everybody nodded. “Okay, everybody please speak clearly. And I’ll make sure he plays it into his good ear.” As is the custom in the U.S., he laughed heartily at his own nonjoke. “And watch the profanity, okay?” He touched his phone. “All right, we’re on. Okay. What was that about again?”

  “The idea is that the crossbow effect enables the Doom Sooners—what do you guys call them?” Michael asked.

  “Doomsters,” Taro said.

  “Right, and that whoever did it, he may have thought he was going to destroy the whole human species,” Weiner said. “And the theory is that whoever engineered the polonium dispersal may not have been just one person, but they probably aren’t a lot of people or they’d have already have been identified.”

  “Yeah,” Marena said, “the doomster thing—the point is that there are more and more people like that.”

  “More and more people like what?” Boyle asked.

  “That is, more and more people who have both a desire to cause a lot of damage and the means to cause a lot of damage,” she said. “It’s Taro’s idea.”

  “No, thank you, but no,” Taro said. “It is not my idea. The doomster issue is an increasingly common problem in the field of catastrophe modeling.”

  “Well, okay, then,” Boyle said, watching the computer transcript read out on his phone. “Professor Mora, can you briefly tell us what it’s about?”

  Taro paused.

  “Here, have this one,” Marena whispered to me. “I haven’t touched it.” She slid a cardboard mug of stuff into my zone of the table.

  “Well, a potential doomster,” Taro said, “that is someone who would like to kill everyone on earth, including himself. An actual doomster would be one of these people who finds the means to do this.”

  “Okay,” Boyle said, “but there can’t be many people who are that crazy.”

  “Well, there have been similar attempts,” Taro said. His voice was getting stronger as he went into lecture-hall mode. “In Pakistan, twice, and then in Oaxaca. And there were other incidents during the Cold War, and probably several we do not know about.”

  “Maybe,” Boyle said.

  “But the issue is not exactly whether there are, say, ten people who are that crazy, or ten thousand. The problem is that at some point, one of those people will acquire the means to carry out his desire. And according to the crossbow effect, this will happen sooner rather than later.”

  “You’d better explain that term again too,” Marena said.

  “Excuse me?” Taro asked.

  “The crossbow effect.”

  “Oh,” he said. “ Yes. In, in I think 1139, the Lateran Council tried to outlaw crossbows because they said they’d lead to, say, the end of civilization. Because now an ordinary soldier could kill an armored knight on horseback.”

  “But then crossbows actually didn’t cause much of anything,” Marena said.

  “No,” Taro said. “And then later, in the 1960s, munitions manufacturers used to cite that example to say how people should not worry so much about nuclear weapons.”

  “Okay,” Boyle said.

  “However, crossbows only killed one person at a time,” Taro said. “And per shot, they were quite expensive for the period. Nuclear weapons killed many people, with much less cost per death. Say a few dollars per person. But they were still quite expensive. Now, today, however, we have many types of weapons that are devastating and cheap. And easy to manufacture. This is what happened in Iraq. The war games the U.S. used to plan the occupation did not reckon with that technology, that is, plastic explosives, even dynamite was coming into the hands of so many people. The Pentagon was using older models, from the days when plastic explosives were expensive. And they were hard to get. But by the 2000s, C4 was very cheap and easily available. So a single attacker could kill many people and do millions of dollars of damage for a moderate cost. Another way you could put it is that the massive democratization of the technology intersected with a growing population of potential users. That is, suicide bombers.”

  “Okay, maybe,” Boyle said. “But they never manage to destroy everything. And besides, there can’t be many people who want to do something like that.”

  Taro paused. I sipped at the stuff in the mug. It was freeze-dried and flash-reanimated green tea with tapioca balls. Kiddie drinks. Whatevs.

  “Almost anyone has experienced a moment in their life when they are angry enough to want to end everything,” Taro said. “According to most current models, at some point in the near future, someone who is, say, a little less tightly wrapped, and a litt
le more technically savvy, will feel that way, and he will bring it off.”

  “And when’ll that be?” Boyle asked.

  “Well, you can graph it,” Taro said. He started sketching on his phone. “In fact, you can even simplify it to just three main vectors. Okay. The thick line, a, that is the spread of access to technology. This is derived from a basket of subvariables. Like the rate of growth of the Internet and the rate at which things like explosives or viral vaccine lab setups were declining in price. And then the thin line, p, is the number of people that you could consider under stress. That is, at risk of extreme personal radicalization. Doomsters. And the third is e. That is the dotted line. It represents growing prevention efforts by the DHS and other police and antiterrorism agencies worldwide.”

 

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