Shannon agreed.
Back in her room, Erin played a karaoke track and Shannon followed the lyrics on her SONY screen. Then they played the original recording. They went back and forth between the copy and the original. Shannon’s voice was hesitant at first, but she learned to sing along with herself.
How many times had she performed this live? It was habit now, no different than Toby Tyler’s automatic ease with a welding torch. Singing along with the karaoke band was like walking into her own house. Erin banged a bottle in time with the music, and Shannon’s voice expanded like the sound of the jet over the city.
Shannon kicked the karaoke machine to stop the music. She was sweating and had to catch her breath. She put a hand on Erin’s shoulder and pulled her close.
“What?” asked Erin.
“You’re not stupid.”
“I hope not.”
“No, you’re smart. You understand. More than I did.”
“That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. I’m your biggest fan. Fans always know more.”
“This is a weapon.”
“Shannon, you’re the weapon.”
Frank Sinatra, Siouxsie, Redwings,
Gunny Sea Ray
Frank let Siouxsie drive the BMW, with Redwings following on his motorcycle, carrying Gunny Sea Ray in the sidecar.
With the Burn Zone behind them they followed the boulevards south of the Fence, past the museum where Siouxsie had worked, down the quiet streets with the dead stores and restaurants and broken glass.
The map led them to a concrete trench twenty feet across, with water moving slowly in a little channel down the middle. A block upstream, the water drained from the side of a hill, behind a locked iron gate.
“The lock is rusted,” said Redwings. “Nobody’s been through here. Let’s keep walking.”
They found a loose manhole cover above a shaft with handholds.
“All of the storm-drain covers were supposed to have been welded shut,” said Frank. “That was one of my jobs during rehab and fence construction. Someone missed this. Could have been a mistake; could have been on purpose.”
“If it was on purpose,” said Gunny Sea Ray, “then don’t you think it would have been used before now?”
“Maybe it has been used and you don’t know it,” said Siouxsie. “Or maybe someone was waiting for the right time to use it, and that time is now.”
Frank agreed with her but didn’t say so. “If this map is right, Gunny Sea Ray and Redwings, then the two of you should be able to walk right under the Fence and come up in any one of twenty places behind the Fence and keep on walking until you get to wherever this leads. You have your radios. Call when you’re at the end and we’ll meet you on the other side. And don’t tell anyone what we’ve seen here today. The news about Vayler’s lies is bad enough. Add the threat of a breach and we’ll get nothing done. I’ll meet you at the other end when you call me. And for now, Siouxsie, you’re going back to the Ritz-Carlton. I’ll take you there before I go back to Center Camp and tell Chief about our day.”
She accepted Frank’s order, knowing that she had no choice and wanting to save the right to quarrel for a better day.
As Gunny Sea Ray and Redwings climbed down into the storm drain, Frank stopped them to give one last instruction. No one else could hear him. “Whatever you find, I want you to come back down here and say you couldn’t get through. If there’s been a breach, I don’t want anyone to know about it. Not anyone. Not Chief. Mark the exit and we’ll get into it from the other side.”
“We’ll come back here and find our way out,” said Redwings. “Then we can meet you inside the Fence and take you to whatever we find—if there really is anything to find.”
Frank drove fast but kept the car in second gear on the ride back to the Ritz-Carlton, to stretch out the engine’s whine, the sound that Siouxsie loved.
He left her at the entrance and drove back, slowly, to Chief’s house.
Frank Sinatra, Chief,
Go Bruins, Royce Hall
Go Bruins stood beside Chief, playing the role of menacing protector as Frank had taught him. Two years after rehab, Frank had released Go Bruins and Royce Hall to Chief’s full-time guard and kept Redwings and Gunny Sea Ray for himself how much time either of the men he trusted could spend with Chief so that Chief would overlook their value, while thinking better of Go Bruins and Royce Hall.
Chief showed the pictures of the dead man to Go Bruins. “Familiar?”
“Not to me. The license picture was taken when?”
“Twelve years ago,” said Frank. “The license was good for ten years from issue. And he was rehabbed. He was too clean to be a Drifter. Are you sure you don’t recognize him? A lot of years have passed.”
Chief said, “Not so many, really. It’s not from young to old; it’s from young to a little older. I would recognize him if he was someone I once knew.”
“So there’s no chance this is the man from Palm Springs?”
“No. Now we have a second killing. I want a meeting of the committee heads as soon as possible. Before it gets dark.”
Alone with Frank, Chief said, “Guns, bicycles, Tesla’s murder, the dead body, the food running out. Are we any different from the way things used to be?”
Pippi
The padlock was heavy, the chain was heavier, the orange trees were tall, and Pippi, who could not move far, was happy. There was nothing she could do to change her situation except to wait for a better moment. She knew Chief didn’t want her dead, and for now, without him but still alive, she felt a better connection to life than she could ever remember having. How many things did she know about that she could think about? She wanted to send messages over the Fence, but she was the prisoner of the people who picked the oranges and would stay their prisoner until Chief released her.
Frank Sinatra, Gunny Sea Ray,
Redwings, The Man
Gunny and Redwings came to the end of Hopper and Seth’s storm drain and saw The Man above them. “Redwings,” said Gunny Sea Ray. “Shouldn’t Frank know about this now?”
“Did he make an allowance for us to call him if by chance the exit to this tunnel was point zero: the Playa?”
“No he did not.”
“Then back we go, content we should be with the knowledge that until we share this result with Frank, we are in sole possession of some special information that lesser men wouldn’t handle with the caution to which we’ve agreed to abide by.”
“No,” said Gunny. “As much as I respect my Redwings, I’m getting on the walkie-talkie and telling him where we are. Right now.” Gunny called Frank. “Take the tunnel, stay to the middle where the storm drains meet, and you will be surprised.”
Frank went into the drain with his flashlight the way he’d gone into the container at the rail yard, chasing the same man. Again he wanted to be alone with his thoughts. He had so few of them and they didn’t often link to new ideas. Tracking down Drifters was easy. They were out there living their obvious Drifter lives, but now he was after someone cleverer than himself. Not far from the end, where he could see the light coming through the exit at The Man’s foot, he found an empty bag of Corn Nuts.
When he reached the Playa, he asked the men if they’d seen it when they came through.
“We didn’t, sir,” said Redwings. “But that doesn’t mean it wasn’t there. We weren’t looking at the ground, so to speak. We were looking for a way out.”
Gunny Sea Ray added a useful observation. “But we know from the rail yard that someone liked these Corn Nuts. So speaking for myself, if Redwings or I had seen the wrapper, we’re trained well enough by you, Frank, sir, to make note of it and we would have saved it and marked its position here in the drain.”
Frank told them to continue to keep this a secret, and unlike anyone working for Toby Tyler or Vayler, he knew they would.
He also knew that Redwings was wrong about something. They didn’t see the Corn Nuts bag because the Corn Nuts bag hadn’t been there when they came through.
“We are always being followed by someone smarter.”
Hopper
When Piperno complained that Chief had called a meeting of the committee heads and once again refused to have the head of the UCLA hospital there to advise on medical matters, Hopper went to Center Camp with his inventory requisitions list.
Chief, Frank Sinatra, ElderGoth, Toby Tyler,
June Moulton, Vayler, Hopper
Chief was alone on the terrace with his eyes closed, walking slowly in a circle as he knew he must have done when he was a child. He trusted that these small treasures of feeling went back to something that must have been ordinary. There weren’t enough people in the world now to know what was typical. But in the past—throughout the known cities—so many backyards and parks had structures for children to play on, swings and slides and wooden castles and forts. Chief liked riding on seesaws with Pippi. No one ever had them in their homes, so he went to them in playgrounds. The empty playgrounds were empty of children but also of their parents. He knew of seesaws outside the Fence and went on them with Go Bruins and Royce Hall. Almost everyone now was an orphan. His thoughts went to the ingenious scientists, who mastered the complexity of the human material to design a weapon so strategically ornate in its subtle and total viciousness. Burning the world with thermonuclear weapons had no art, just a love of death. NK3 was made of spite.
When he wasn’t sure of what to do, he liked to explore the texture of darkness, self-imposed or natural. Blind circle walking helped him clear many general doubts. In bed at night when the curtains were closed so that no light came through, he held his hands in the air and asked Pippi, “How many fingers am I holding up?” She would answer with a number, but he wouldn’t say if she was right or wrong. He missed her now but felt certain that she was safer away from the expanding chaocracy that was so close and would be even closer once the meeting started.
With Vayler locked in the house across the street, all the committee heads were on the way. He told Toby to arrive early. Toby had sent word back that she wanted to bring the crew that always orbited around her, but Chief wanted only the heads today, no staff. He heard her coming up the steps and opened his eyes but continued walking in a circle. There were six chairs around a table set with twelve bottles of red wine with the labels soaked off.
“What’s all this for?” she asked, starting to pour a glass.
Chief told her to put the wine down.
“The labels are missing. Is there something special about these bottles I should already know?”
“No.”
“Am I early?”
“No, I wanted you first. You can wait until the others arrive.”
“Why?”
“I want to honor Systems, Toby Tyler. I give you the right to choose your seat at the table.”
“They’re going to ask me what you said to me.”
“You can tell them that I wanted to just share a quiet moment together, because it’s the truth. I like you, Toby, and we don’t often say that to each other.”
He turned his back on Toby and looked at LAX through Pippi’s favorite telescope, wondering what she had seen at the airport that she hadn’t told him about.
June Moulton was the second to arrive. Toby tried to start a conversation with her, but June took her usual position at the edge of the terrace and waited for Chief to come to her.
“Is everyone inside the Fence now scared of the Inventory problem?” asked Chief, drawing her into the dry remains of the garden, and even there, whispering.
“Everyone,” said the mythologist. “Unless you have a surprise.”
“I have an impulse but I’m not sure what to do with it yet. It might surprise you.”
“That can’t happen. Nothing surprises me completely. A mythologist such as myself watches the reactions of others, not her own. Where you, Chief, might be surprised at someone’s reaction to an event, and by ‘event’ I mean a sudden change in the flow of energy that divides time into sections, I have no personal need for a specific resolution of the inequity in disturbances. At most I have an opinion. Call it the difference between inducing knowledge from a set of responses and determining from them a principle, or starting with a series of principles and from them, deducing and anticipating a particular outcome. I’m sure you understand.”
“You didn’t say what anger begins with.”
“Justified anger expands from justified causes, from the violation of a principle, which begins with the betrayal of trust. And we’re here because Vayler broke trust. But right now stop talking to me. It will make you look like you’re getting my advice, and everyone who heads a committee wants to think their advice is better than anyone else’s. And here comes ElderGoth with Frank Sinatra. See? Sinatra is excusing himself from ElderGoth and she’s conceding that he has the right to talk to you now, so I’ll withdraw.”
ElderGoth stopped to let Sinatra come to Chief.
“Why didn’t you tell me that Pippi stole a truck and left you?”
“My personal problems don’t matter now, not with the crisis of Inventory.”
“And Go Bruins couldn’t catch her?”
“I’m upset about this, Frank. But like I say, I have so much to do and it’s just not important now. Let’s join everyone.”
“There are twelve bottles of wine on the table,” said Chief. “And the labels have been taken off. Instead of looking up the value of the wines in the wine books and magazines, we have to guess what is good. June, will that work?”
“That’s not a question for Mythology.”
“Of course it is. The myth is that the more it costs, the better it tastes. Any bottle of wine will get you drunk if you have enough to drink, but you wouldn’t know what its rating was in the past. You won’t know if, five or six years ago, this bottle was three dollars and ninety-nine cents on the shelf at Trader Joe’s or if this bottle is from Erin’s father’s wine cellar and it cost him three thousand dollars at auction. You’ll have to trust your own sense of quality. ElderGoth, do we trust our own sense of quality?”
“That’s not my department, Chief.”
“But of course it is. You have to trust your sense of the quality of the people you verify.”
“The machine does that.”
“But what if the machine broke? We’d have to trust our senses. Why would we need the DMV and all of Verification to tell us who among the living survivors of the catastrophe deserves membership in our community and who, for general incompetence or specific disorder, belongs out there beyond the ash fields?” He pointed toward the south and then slapped ElderGoth across the top of her head. “That was a question, ElderGoth. Answer me.”
“What’s the question?” Her eyes were wet.
“Who else heard my question? Toby Tyler?”
“You can’t compare wine tasting to the valuation of those who can help us and deserve to be included in the life of Center Camp.”
“Why not?” asked Chief, threatening to slap Toby Tyler as he had just slapped ElderGoth. “We’ve been going by labels.”
Sinatra knew it was time to make his first gesture. “You’re right, Chief. The DMV is a failure. We need to find other ways to rank the Drifters, but I don’t think that’s what we’re here to talk about. You’re trying to make a comparison between the quality of unknown wine bottles and what Vayler did. You’re not asking about Vayler because we all know he lied about Inventory and Chief does not yet want to discuss this except by methods that only June Moulton understands. June, what does Chief want us to understand about bottles of wine that don’t have labels?”
But June, still looking to where Chief had pointed south before hitting ElderGoth, wouldn’t answer Sinatra, which cost him the
little advantage he thought was his. And this impressed upon him the need to avoid any approach to the problem that might be called clever. Clever didn’t work around Chief.
No one else wanted to speak, which was Chief’s intention from the start.
“We have all heard what Vayler Monokeefe has done or not done. I’m scared and so should you be. When we have a new head of Inventory, we’ll have only a little time to calm the fears of the community before everyone reacts separately instead of as the group that we have so successfully been.”
Toby Tyler raised a hand but spoke before she was invited. “How much do we think is there now, Chief. Or are the numbers all fucked up?”
“Assume the numbers are all fucked up.”
Sinatra raised his hand too. “But does that mean we’re out of food in a week or a month or two years?”
“We don’t know. We need June to tell us what we should say without knowing the answer. June?”
“Each of you drink from the unlabeled wines and tell us what you think of them, and then I’ll answer.”
Toby Tyler reached for the nearest bottle and Sinatra knocked her hand away. “No, we won’t do this,” he said. “We don’t have the skill to know the difference. You’ll prove nothing, June, and it won’t help us help Chief. We have bigger problems than our lost selectivity. Speaking for Security, I see a war over food between Center Camp and the Drifters, and if we win that war, and I have no doubt we can beat them, then after that I see a war inside Center Camp. And each of us, Security, Mythology, Inventory, and Verification, has a network of allegiances that we’ll try to use against everyone else.”
Chief said, “You left out Systems.”
“Yes,” said Sinatra. “Because Toby Tyler will rule. She has the rest of us at her command, and she’s never used her power against us. But now, I think she will, which is why she reached for the wine so eagerly.”
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