The Echo Maker

by Richard Powers

  “Oh my God, Robert. I can’t believe you’re saying that. Look around! We’ve trashed the place.”

  “What are you talking about? The ordinary rez teenager lives better than royalty used to. I’d rather live now than at any other moment. Except the future.”

  “That’s because you’re an animal. I mean: that’s because you’re not an animal.”

  “Since when did you get such convictions?”

  Since she realized how little she could do to change Mark. She had to put her energies elsewhere, or die. This river might need her, more than her brother ever had.

  They’d get onto thin ice within minutes, then stay out there, spinning arm in arm, a whole pairs freedance routine. Each needed to rout the other: pointless yet irresistible. She preferred screaming in horror at Karsh’s outrages to murmuring in agreement at Riegel’s pieties. Robert knew the truth that would forever elude Daniel, all the way to the grave: we love only what we can see ourselves in.

  Invariably, Karsh would pump her. “How are things at the Save-a-Bird store? Tell me about this shiny new fund drive. You folks planning on buying up some wetlands?”

  “First tell me about your consortium’s new shopping center.”

  “Not a shopping center!”

  “What the hell is it, then?”

  “You know I can’t tell you that.”

  “While I’m supposed to shout my little secrets from the rooftops?”

  “So you do have a secret? You people are up to something?”

  Heady, his begging. She had some power over him. The taste of it made up for no end of past humiliations. “There aren’t that many contestable spots of value along the river left, you know.” Something Daniel had said at breakfast, a couple of mornings earlier. She repeated it as if she’d just thought of it herself.

  “We only want to stay out of your way,” Karsh claimed. “We wouldn’t want to develop in any areas that the Refuge sees as essential to preserve.”

  “Then you ought to sit down with the trustees and work this out, acre by acre.”

  He chuckled. “Have I told you that you are really adorable?”

  “Not in this lifetime.”

  “Well, if you and I were in charge, that’s what we’d be doing. Seriously. All this corporate cloak-and-dagger stuff gets on my nerves. Let’s talk once this thing is public. You’ll be a whole lot prouder of me then.”

  The word proud went right through her. Something in her did admire him. He could point to things and claim paternity. Mostly horrible things, granted, but solid and finished. At least Karsh had left a scar on the landscape. She could point to nothing except a series of service jobs, all lost, and a condo, now sold. She hadn’t even procreated, something all her old high school acquaintances did more easily than Karin cleaned house. Even her own brother said she was nothing. At thirty-one, she had stumbled at last into work of consequence. She ached to tell him how worthwhile. “Proud?” she asked, ready to be lost. “How proud?”

  “You’ll see, if we get our Development Council approval. If we don’t, the whole thing is moot. Come to the public hearing and find out.”

  “I have to,” she said, a sultry tease. “For my job.”

  She went to the hearing with Daniel. He drove, and she judged mercilessly the whole way. “If you get to the stop sign first, you’re supposed to go through it first. Don’t sit there and wave other people through.”

  “It’s basic politeness,” he said. “If everyone…”

  “It’s not politeness,” she shouted. “It just screws people up.”

  He shrunk back. “Evidently.” All the cruelty he could muster, and it mortified her. By the time they got to the hearing, she was contrite. She took his arm as they walked through the Municipal Building parking lot.

  She dropped it in the foyer, seeing Karsh and his Platteland colleagues. She kept her eyes down on the peach-colored marble as Daniel led her to the hearing room. They hunted for seats in the filling chamber. Daniel scoped the room. She followed his eyes, over the mostly geriatric crowd. Two kids from the university community cable channel manned a video camera halfway down the right-hand aisle. Other than them, most of the room was drawing Social Security. Why did people wait until they had one foot in the grave before caring about their future?

  “Not a bad house,” she told Daniel.

  “You think? How many, would you say?”

  “I don’t know. You know me and numbers. Fifty? Sixty?”

  “So…roughly one-tenth of one percent of people directly impacted?”

  They joined the Refuge contingent. Daniel came alive and Karin dragged behind him, a cowbird in the nest. The group fell into plan and counterplan, Karin serving up her prepared research. She watched Daniel at work, energized by the forces deployed against them. Long odds made him more attractive than he’d been in weeks.

  Just behind the student cable crew, on a chair pulled deliberately off-camera, sat Barbara Gillespie. The sight of her rattled Karin: incompatible worlds. “That’s Barbara,” she told Daniel. “Mark’s Barbara. What do you think?”

  “Ah!” Daniel flinched.

  “Doesn’t she have something? Some kind of aura? It’s okay; just the truth.”

  “She looks very…self-possessed.” Afraid to look, confirming her.

  The Platteland contingent chose that moment for their entrance, striding as a group up to the other developers in the front row, just in front of the council tables. She and Daniel both looked away. After a minute, she sneaked another look. If Karsh had acknowledged her, the moment had passed. He was waist deep in presentation materials, the art of consequence. Dizzy, Karin glanced back at Barbara, who lifted one palm in a covert wave. Danger, the flicker of greeting said. Humans everywhere.

  The hearing came to order. The mayor addressed the council and established the procedures. A spokeswoman from the development group took the podium, darkened the room, and fired up an LCD projector. The screen behind the council tables flashed a title slide, the ubiquitous Nature template. The slide, in Mistral font, read: New Migrants on Our Ancient Waterway.

  Karin twisted around to Daniel, incredulous. But he and the Refuge braced for the show, jaws clenched. The slides flipped through their paces, meandering like the river in question. The pitch aimed at the last target Karin had expected: what the Development Council called the “Hospitality Sector.”

  A bar graph showed the number of visitors to the spring migration over the last ten years. Numbers were an eternal mystery to her, but she could gauge lengths. The bars were doubling every three years. By the time she died, much of the country would be traipsing through every March.

  The speaker metamorphosed into Joanne Woodward before Karin’s eyes. “The concentrated staging of almost every migratory sandhill crane on earth has become one of the most breathtaking wildlife spectacles available on earth.”

  “Available?” she whispered. But deep in mental battle, Daniel couldn’t hear. A panoramic photo followed—a stretch of the Platte not far from Mark’s. An overlay faded in, an artist’s rendition of a rustic settlement complete with old homesteads and sod houses. The speaker christened it the Central Platte Scenic Natural Outpost, and was deep into listing its environmental principles of construction—low-impact setting, passive solar, simulated split-rail fences made from millions of recycled milk cartons—when Karin saw: the consortium wanted to build a sprawling tourist village for crane peepers.

  The battle unfolded in glacial pantomime, with developers and conservationists charging and countercharging. Daniel waded into the fray, landing a couple of stinging blows. The birds were spectacular, he pointed out, precisely because the river had drained away beneath them, concentrating them in a few remaining havens. Drawing even one more cup of water out of an already breaking biome was unconscionable. Karin had been over the facts, facts she’d helped research. Every word Daniel spoke was gospel. But he preached with such messianic passion that she felt the room discount him as yet another finger-poi
nting Jeremiah.

  Robert, smiling like an innocent bystander, rose to defend. The Outpost wasn’t in a roosting area, but only nearby. The visitors would come, one way or another. Didn’t it make sense to absorb them as ecologically as possible, in buildings that preserved an historical awareness, integrated into the natural landscape? Visitors would leave more aware of the need to conserve wildness. Wasn’t the whole point of conservation to protect nature for our appreciation? Or did the Refuge believe that only a select few should enjoy the birds?

  This last point was met by room-wide approval. Student council all over again. The Karshes of this world always crush the Riegels, in any open poll. The Karshes had humor, style, unlimited budgets, sophistication, subliminal seduction, neuromarketing…The Riegels had only guilt and facts.

  Robert sat back in his seat. He glanced at Karin, a look that lingered like a stalker. How was that? For a weird, fleeting fugue moment, she felt privately responsible for the whole contest.

  The Refuge countered: the developers were requesting ten times more water shares than their Natural Outpost would consume. The developers explained their own cautious projections and promised that the Outpost would sell all unused water shares back into the public kitty at cost.

  Democracy flailed on, the most cumbersome form of deciding known to man. Breath-powered sailboat. Every village eccentric and homeless aluminum-can collector had his say. How could so blind a process ever reach a right decision? A developer in a pale-green suit and a Refugee in stringy denim, what little hair remaining to him pulled in a ponytail, sparred, their arms ceremonial swords, their voices rising and falling in spectral Kabuki wails. A gauzy filter settled over the gathering, as if Karin had stood up too quickly. The whole room shimmered, like a bean field in an August wind. These people had been gathering here since before development was even an issue. For as long as there were prairies open enough to blind and madden, men had met here to argue, just to prove to themselves that they weren’t alone.

  The public was as conflicted as her brother. Worse: as her. The debaters circled, doubling each other, doubling themselves, squaring off against phantom combatants…She sat in the middle of the fray, a double agent, selling herself to both sides. She took the combat inside herself, all possible positions banging around the loose democracy in her skull. How many brain parts had Weber’s books described? A riot of free agents; five dozen specialties in the prefrontal bit itself. All those Latin-named life-forms: the olive, the lentil, the almond. Seahorse and shell, spiderweb, snail, and worm. Enough spare body parts to make another creature: breasts, buttocks, knees, teeth, tails. Too many parts for her brain to remember. Even a part named the unnamed substance. And they all had a mind of their own, each haggling to be heard above the others. Of course she was a frenzied mess; everyone was.

  A wave moved through her, a thought on a scale she’d never felt. No one had a clue what our brains were after, or how they meant to get it. If we could detach for a moment, break free of all doubling, look upon water itself and not some brain-made mirror…For an instant, as the hearing turned into instinctive ritual, it hit her: the whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors. At most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind. Long after everyone in this room was dead, this camp meeting would rage on, debating the decline in life’s quality, hammering out the urgent details of a vast new development. The river would dry up, go elsewhere. Three or four surviving decimated species would drag here annually, not knowing why they returned to this arid wasteland. And still we’d be trapped in delusion. But before Karin could fix the thought taking shape in her, it turned unrecognizable.

  The hearing ended without a resolution. She clutched Daniel, confused. “Don’t they have to come to some decision?”

  He gauged her with pity. “No. They’ll sit on the proposal for a few months, then slip out a ruling when no one is looking. Well, at least we know what we’re up against now.”

  “I thought it was going to be a lot worse. Some kind of factory outlet megaplex. Thank God it’s just this. You know. Something that doesn’t spew poison. Something that’s at least pro-bird.”

  She might as well have stabbed him. He’d been drifting to the exits at the back of the room. He stopped in the middle of the milling pack and grasped her upper arm. “Pro-bird? This? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

  Heads turned. Robert Karsh, deep in numbers with two Development Council members, looked up from across the room. Daniel reddened. He leaned in to Karin and apologized in a hot whisper. “I’m sorry. Unforgivable. It’s been a sick few hours.”

  She stepped forward to hush him. A hand petted her shoulder. She wheeled to see Barbara Gillespie. “You! What are you doing here?”

  That single, arch Gillespie eyebrow. “Being a good citizen. I do live here!”

  Caught, Karin made introductions. “I want you to meet my friend Daniel. Daniel, this is Barbara, the…woman I told you about.”

  Riegel turned toward her, a stiff, grinning Pinocchio. He couldn’t even stammer. Karin caught sight of Karsh as he left the room, leering at Barbara.

  “I liked what you said,” Barbara told Daniel. “But tell me something. What do you suppose these people plan to do with this facility during the five-sixths of the year when there isn’t a crane to be seen?”

  Daniel stood gaping at the environmentalists’ combined failure to raise the question during the hearing. “Maybe a conference facility?”

  Barbara considered. “That’s possible. Why not?” Then, so briskly it spun Karin, she added, “Well, great to see you, my dear! And good to meet you, Daniel.” Daniel nodded, limp. “Fingers crossed on this one!” Barbara backed away with a crooked smile and a paralyzed prom-queen wave, then stumbled out of the room through the thinning crowd. A part of Karin cursed her exit.

  Daniel was suffering. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have lost my temper if things hadn’t gone so…I don’t know where that came from. You know I’m not…”

  “Drop it. It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered but getting free, reaching the real water. “So I’ve lost my fucking mind. We both knew that already.”

  But Daniel couldn’t drop it. On the car ride home, he came up with three more theories explaining his verbal assault. And he wanted her to ratify all of them. She did, in the interests of peace. This wasn’t good enough for him. “Don’t say you believe me if you don’t.”

  “I agree with you, Daniel. Really.”

  It got them home, at least, and into bed. But the postmortem went on, in the dark. He spoke to the plaster cracks in the ceiling. “The whole hearing was a total disaster, wasn’t it?” She couldn’t tell if she was supposed to agree or object. “We didn’t know what hit us. We went into the hedgehog defense right away. Fighting it like it was the usual commercial-strip land grab. We failed to discredit this thing. The Council probably left that room thinking what you did: that this Nature-rama is somehow beneficial.”

  She still thought so. Done right, it could even be a populist equivalent of the Refuge, managing the impact of tourists, whose numbers would just keep swelling, anyway.

  “They’re obviously up to something. This is just stage one. Look at the water they’re asking for. And your friend is right. They can’t possibly make money if the place is only filled two months out of the year.”

  She rubbed his back, big gentle circles. Weber’s book said that made endorphins. It worked for a minute or two, before he flipped over.

  “We blew it. We should have exposed them, and instead…”

  “Shh. You did the best you could. I’m sorry; I don’t mean that. I mean, you did the best that anyone could have, under the circumstances.”

  Daniel was up all night. Sometime after one, he started tossing so badly she came out of her own fitful sleep enough to rest a
hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry about it,” she mumbled, still half dreaming. “It was only a word.”

  Around three, she woke to an empty bed. She heard him out in the kitchen, pacing like a zoo creature. When he at last crawled back into bed, she pretended to be asleep. He lay still, an all-hearing ear, out in a field, tracking something big. Bring your sphere of sound inside your sphere of sight. Fully motionless, even his lungs. By five-thirty, neither could pretend any longer. “You okay?” she asked.

  “Thoughtful,” he whispered.

  “I gathered.”

  They should have just risen and had breakfast, pioneer style, in the dark. But neither moved. At last, he said, “Your friend seems very sharp. She’s right. These birder houses are just the tip of something.”

  She crushed the pillow. “I knew you were thinking about her. Is that why you—?”

  He ignored her. “Did you already introduce me to her somewhere?”

  “Look at me. Do I look like I’ve lost my fucking mind?”

  He blinked at her, his head dipping. “I told you I was sorry. It was unforgivable. I don’t know what else to say.”

  She had: she had lost it. Ground down by failed caretaking. “Forget it. It’s nothing. I’m insane. What are you saying about Barbara?”

  “I have the weirdest sense that I know her voice.” He stood and crossed naked to the window. He pulled back the curtain and stared into the dark yard. “She sounds like someone I know.”

  Winter on Long Island: Why did they persist in staying? Surely not for the few breathtaking postcard moments: rime on the water mill, the duck pond frozen over, Conscience Bay whited out, with nothing but the invader mute swans and a single confused heron holding tight before the snow turned sooty and the real season of lifelessness settled in. Not for their health, certainly: pelted for days at a shot by tiny, sleet hypodermics. Not out of any economic necessity. Only some fathomless expiation, clinging to the former fresh, green breast of the new world.

  “Dug in, in that vast obscurity beyond the city,” he told Sylvie, over a ruthlessly administered breakfast regimen of muesli and soy milk. “Where the dark fields of the republic roll on under the night.”