In the aching clarity of this new morning, he mused that what he had done was illegal. He had known it when he did it, but he did it because it had been her wish. He understood the reasons for the laws. Harms of aggregation: if billions of people could have their ashes strewn or their bodies buried wherever they wanted, great natural and human monuments would become ash heaps and charnel houses.
“Harms of aggregation.” That had been one of Reyna’s favorites from sociology, the field that had been her profession, but which had also informed her everyday life. Its methods explained why they didn’t bring cell phones or pagers into the back-country with them, for instance.
“The same technologies that make it easier and easier to work,” she said last year, “also make it harder and harder to have a life beyond work. Parkinson’s law says work expands to fill the space allotted to it, but that’s not the whole story. Follow out the fascism inherent in such a notion and you end up in a nasty Utopia—a no place where everyplace is a workplace, a worldwide consumer concentration themecamp where the words over the gate aren’t ‘Arbeit macht frei,’ but ‘God is Work, Work is God.’”
A Reyna rant typical of her wild mind, Ben thought, shaking his head. She was probably right about “harms of aggregation” too. Still, he told himself that remoteness and the relative rarity of human visitors to Bench Lake made any real harm less likely.
The smell of the pines and the sound of calling birds on the wind, the sharpness of the cool bright air on his skin and in his eyes—all these were part of the beauty of the place. The soreness and stiffness of his muscles, however, were a deep reminder that it wasn’t easy to get here.
He and Reyna had been backpacking over a chunk of the John Muir Trail north to south every summer for the last four years. The North Lake to South Lake loop two years back, then last year coming in from South Lake over Bishop Pass, down through Dusy Basin to Le Conte Canyon, up Palisade Creek to the Palisade Lakes. Then over Mather Pass and into Upper Basin before descending to the South Fork Kings River, crossing it, then rising to the junction with the Pacific Crest.
Last year, they took the side trip to Bench Lake mainly to give themselves a day of rest before going over Taboose Pass and down Taboose Canyon to the desert of Owens Valley, beyond. Descending Taboose Canyon proved so knee-knocking and heartpounding, however, that by the time they’d reached their pickup truck at the trailhead they had already vowed they would never climb up Taboose Canyon—ever. Next year, they decided, they would turn their usual north-to-south route upside down and come south to north, so that they could stop at Bench Lake again and then go back down (never up) Taboose once more.
In the intervening year, though, the world had turned upside down. With the sudden onset of headaches and seizures, Reyna declined from perfect health into profound illness. The doctors gave it a name—glioblastoma multiforme, or GBM—and a grade—four, the highest level glioma, the most malignant and aggressive astrocytoma. The medical professionals could do little else, but that didn’t stop them from trying. Surgically, radiologically, chemically, they treated the primary brain tumor that was pushing from Reyna’s temporal to frontal lobe, making a butterfly-shaped swelling inside her skull.
Nothing worked.
“Given the type of tumor you have,” the neurosurgeon had told Reyna and Ben, “and given its aggressiveness and malignancy, your life expectancy isn’t going to be what you might have otherwise expected. Statistically, the odds aren’t in your favor that you’ll live to be an old woman.”
“Which means what, exactly?” Reyna asked.
“Median survival time for GBM is counted in months, rather than years. Still, we don’t know where you’ll fall on that survival curve. You could fall near the median, or at the long end—say as much as three years.”
“Or at the short end?” she pressed. “A few months? Even weeks?”
“Yes,” the neurosurgeon said with a sigh. “That, too, is a possibility. So it’s important to be realistic, but remain hopeful. Prepare yourself for what’s coming, but stay as positive as you can, knowing that we’re trying to keep you as well as we possibly can, for as long as we can.”
“Doctor,” Reyna had said, her voice quavering slightly, “do you think miracles are possible?”
“I’d like to think so,” he replied, “but the chances are pretty slim—statistically speaking.”
“Yes,” Reyna had said with a weary shrug. “Almost by definition.”
Beyond the shock and suddenness, Reyna’s death had left an unfillable emptiness in Ben’s life. At night even now he dreamed himself back to the days at her bedside, watching the synthetic opiate draining slowly away through the drip into the needle planted in her arm. He wished and hoped again in his dreams, as he had in those dark days, that there might be something, some biomedical fix he could put in the fluid-filled plastic bag hanging above her, to grant his dying wife not just an easing of pain, but a miraculous return to health.
No miracle, technological or theological, had been forthcoming.
Although the poor, small lake of his soul was only so deep, in darkness it seemed capable of reflecting a loss and grief deeper and vaster than the stars. Everyone assured him that “life goes on,” that Reyna would have wanted him to go on, but no one could have predicted or even described to him how differently his life would go on without her.
This summer Ben came from the south, following the route they had planned together before she grew ill. From Onion Valley he came over the high saddle of Kearsarge Pass. Down toward Charlotte Lake and up to the razor ridge of Glen Pass. Past Painted Lady Peak reflected in the Rae Lakes, and Fin Dome reflected in Arrowhead Lake. Down to Woods Creek then up its long drainage to the high scraped notch of Pinchot Pass. Then down past Lake Marjorie, and down again to this side trip.
To here, to this morning, to memory—and to the realization that, despite all the sublime beauty around him, his life was sad, a broken thing. He wondered that it could still go on, but it did.
Next year, I won’t take the side trip to this lake. Hurts too much. I’ll come in over Kearsarge again and go out at Mount Whitney. Finishing the last section of the Muir Trail, without Reyna. Alone.
His reverie was broken by a beeping sound. At first he thought it was the call of a bird or marmot, until he realized how thoroughly out of place it was in this wilderness. He carried no cell phone or pager into the backcountry, per his departed wife’s rationale. So it could only be his geolocator—his one concession to work and the whole ensnaring webworld of the twenty-first century. A concession which Reyna would not have approved of at all.
Ben frowned. His work with NSA had, since shortly after Reyna’s death, contractually obligated him to “full locatability,” anytime, anywhere. Even here, even now.
Thinking about a world all boundaries and interfaces, he silenced the geolocator’s beeping. In so doing he confirmed his location. What would that mean for those on the other end? From the itinerary he’d filed, they must have known he wasn’t scheduled to hike over Taboose Pass until later today. He wouldn’t reach the trailhead and what passed for civilization until tomorrow noon at the earliest.
Breaking down his tent and gathering together his gear, Ben wondered if anything truly urgent had come up. He had taken on the NSA work at Reyna’s suggestion, when she had first become ill. She thought it would keep his mind occupied, but the only ongoing project he was involved in was monitoring and “understudying” the work of Jaron Kwok, and that had required little enough from him.
Last Ben knew, he was in Hong Kong, a bustling city that would suit Kwok well. During the brief time the two of them had roomed together in college, Ben had once suggested that Kwok join him on a hike. “If God had intended us to trek about in the wilderness,” Jaron had said, “He would have provided comfortable benches every fifty feet.” That seemed to sum up Kwok the Urban Man quite well. It wasn’t until later that Ben had found the original quote from Oscar Wilde, who apparently shared a simil
ar distaste for physical activity in the great outdoors.
Stuffing his gear into his backpack for the hike out, Ben thought how odd it was that he should recall that old conversation—benches and all—here on the shore of Bench Lake. He took a last look around his campsite to make sure he had left nothing behind, then gazed at the rugged peaks, trying to etch the scene into his brain, somehow certain he would never pass this way again.
He looked down at his heavy pack, mentally preparing himself for shouldering it, for hip-belting and sternum-strapping himself into it. Then, out of the corner of his eye, in the direction of Taboose Pass, he caught sight of a dark dot moving above the landscape.
As he watched, the flying object resolved itself into a helicopter. A rare occurence, but not unprecedented. He had seen rescue choppers in the backcountry before—noisy machines obliterating the mountain quiet, for all their noble intent.
As it moved closer he wondered what strange acoustic effect of basin and range was preventing him from hearing this one. Then all at once it dawned on him: this wasn’t a rescue helicopter. It was a black military job, built for stealth, an oversized Sikorsky Comanche. Quieter than it had any right to be, it wasn’t just coming toward him, it was coming for him.
The mirror lake shattered into innumerable pieces as the helicopter, dropping to hover not far off the south end of the island, roiled the still air into a whirlwind. Two Navy SEALS dropped an inflating raft and plopped into the water beside it. Dumbfounded, his backpack leaning against his legs, Ben could only watch as the two men paddled the raft ashore.
He was being extracted.
He wondered if the chopper had flown in from China Lake or Lemoore, but before he had time to formulate the question a square-jawed, clean-cut young man in modified frogman gear was standing in front of him, saluting crisply.
“Doctor Cho?”
“Yes?”
“Your immediate removal and relocation has been ordered, on highest priority, sir.” The young officer handed him a biometrically secured message tube. “This should explain. Please follow me.”
The officer picked up Cho’s heavy backpack and headed back toward the shore in one fluid motion. Checking over his shoulder to see that he had Ben Cho himself in tow, the officer soon had both backpack and backpacker stowed aboard the raft where his fellow SEAL waited. The short paddling trip in the raft and lift into the hovering helicopter passed in a blur. Glancing out the gear hatch before it closed, Ben glimpsed the white noise on the surface of Bench Lake, calming and disappearing as the helicopter lifted away.
Staring at the message tube clutched in his hand, Ben remembered what it was for. He pressed his thumbs into the scanners on both ends of the slender cylinder. They quickly read the personal labyrinths of his thumbprints. He felt as much as heard the message cylinder give a low buzz, then he lifted it to his eyes. Light flashing from the translucent bar read his retinas. Finally, amid the whirring of the cylinder breaking its own superencryption, the flash resolved itself into a single short message:
PROFESSOR CHO—
GREETINGS. SORRY TO INTERRUPT YOUR VACATION, BUT CIRCUMSTANCES FORCE US TO PUT THE UNDERSTUDY AT CENTER STAGE.
—BALDWIN BEECH
As he pulled the cylinder away from his eyes, the cryptic message quickly faded. Although it didn’t provide enough information for Ben Cho to clearly read his future, he thought he could see something of the shape of things to come, nonetheless.
TWO
CHIMERICULTURE
KOWLOON
By the time Police Detective Lu got the word to investigate the incident in Sha Tin, the dragons were descending from the hills above Kowloon, to bathe in Victoria Harbor. They passed through the broad notch of missing floors, an entire wing never built into the New World Renaissance Hotel. This absence existed expressly to avoid putting any obstruction in the dragons’ path.
To anger dragons was to court the worst kind of ill luck. In feng shui–conscious Kowloon, prudent architects took such issues seriously into account when drawing up their designs.
Before leaving her office, Mei-lin Lu—“Marilyn Lu” to her monolingual English-speaking friends—made several phone calls to find out who was already on site and to glean some specifics on what happened. She ascertained that the deceased was an American citizen of Chinese descent, but that was about all anyone was willing to say.
The last of the dragons were returning to the hills by the time Detective Lu got a car from the motorpool and headed for the Royal Park Hotel. Maneuvering along the busy highways leading out of a densely skyscrapered downtown, she was reminded of a not particularly good day in Blade Runner’s Los Angeles, 2019.
Sha Tin wasn’t in Lu’s official jurisdiction, but there were mutual-assistance agreements among law enforcement agencies in the Special Administrative Region governing Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories. She was the closest available detective with her level of forensic expertise, which someone in Sha Tin felt was needed for this investigation.
And to think I owe it all to a bunch of clay soldiers, she mused sourly. Like many other Chinese youth of her generation, Lu had been inspired toward a career in archaeology as a result of First Emperor Qin Shi Huangdi’s ancient terra cotta army of soldiers and horses discovered in the burial complexes around Xian. That, however, had been long before she met and married Xun-il, “Sonny,” then dropped out of graduate school—not long after the birth of their only child, Clara.
The twisting course of her life and the burden of adult responsibilities had carried her, not to Shaanxi Province or a career of exotic digs on the empty Mongolian steppe, but—as a police officer with a background in forensic anthropology—to contemporary urban corpses, which she examined for signs of recent foul play. Despite this, she still thought of herself as a cultural investigator, an anthropologist of a very contemporary sort. Her single concession to the grim realities of her work was that, while on duty, she carried an Israeli-made,.50 caliber Desert Eagle handgun. Her friends in the department, particularly Derek Ma and Bili Chen, referred to the gun as “Lu’s Cannon.”
Beyond the urban density of Kowloon, through the green tropical preserve between Golden Hill Country Park to the west and Lion Rock Country Park to the east, Detective Lu at last drove into Sha Tin proper. Her alma mater, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, stood on a hilltop not so very far away. Remembering her college days, she thought of her mentor, Professor Carlton Jiang.
Jiang had been a thoughtful anthropologist, quick to question how much had really changed in the nearly twenty-three centuries since Emperor Qin’s time. The old man had stressed again and again the relationship between the “content of lives and the context of culture.” With a wry smile, he seemed to enjoy telling a classroom full of eager young students—believers in Reason and Science—that “Truth has a bright face, but human perceptions are so limited that our minds can provide only fragments of a shattered mirror for her to see herself in.” And as Lu’s graduate work began to fall apart, the professor had become more than a little frustrated with her. She felt her old mentor would have made a great police investigator. He had the right attitude: part sage, part cynic.
As she pulled her car into the turnaround for the Royal Park Hotel, Lu Mei-lin realized that the same could be said of her own father. Another man of “parts,” even if some of those parts seemed to have gone missing. A policeman-turned-writer of the Wambaugh school, he published four detective novels under the pseudonym Quinton C. S. Chang, then spent the rest of his life working on a fifth—usually of Scotch, but bourbon would do in a pinch. His final novel, Widows and Bad Breaks, about a murder in the publishing industry, continued to arouse occasional interest from publishers—probably more out of concern for potential libel, than potential profit.
Lu noted that there were no emergency medical personnel or vehicles anywhere in the entry area of the hotel. Not a good sign, that. Either the local police were keeping it extremely low-profile, or the deceased was already far c
older than she liked. Crossing the marble and jade lobby, Lu found a bank of elevators and punched the UP button, still thinking about her father.
The brass and glass elevator arrived. She stepped in and pushed the button for the tenth floor. Waiting for the doors to close, she looked out the elevator’s transparent exterior wall. Lu figured she couldn’t really blame her old man all that much. Yeah, he was an alcoholic, and a failed writer of police procedurals, but he had done his best, given his upbringing.
The doors finally closed and, passing through the ceiling, the elevator climbed the side of the tower. Against a backdrop of green mountains, Lu saw rising and falling around her the glitzy company skyscrapers, the graying high-rise apartment blocks, the road and commerce signs in English. All of which, she knew, seemed so terribly alien to the rural folks from the inland People’s Republic of China when they visited the former Crown Colony on holiday. Folks much like her father must have been when, as a twelve-year-old refugee, he had fled the Communists.
The Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, Kowloon, and the New Territories was a place part traditional and part postcolonial, part Chinese communist and part corporate transnational. Detective Lu thought of those clever phrases the South China Morning Post used. “Living in the interzone.” The “interface.” The “membrane.” “Surface tension.” “Synapse society.” “Chimericulture.”
Home. For her, in ways it had never been for her father. And no longer was, for her mother. Which was why Lu could almost never hear the acronym for the Special Administrative Regions, SARs, and not think of another acronym, one for Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, the original name of the disease that had taken her mother’s life.
The Labyrinth Key Page 5