The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Third out and Jim takes left field in a state of rapture. “I love softball!” “Jim, you never play.” “I know, but I love it.” Trotting out onto that pure green diamond time disappears, all the adult concerns of life disappear, and Jim feels like an eight-year-old.

  Unfortunately for his team he also plays like an eight-year-old. Arthur is up, and he hits a fly ball toward Jim. The moment it’s hit Jim begins to run forward, because after all the ball is in front of him, right? But while running in a little basic trajectory analysis shows him that in fact the ball is destined to fly far over his head. He tries reversing direction instantaneously and falls on his ass. Scrambles up, oh shoot there goes the ball, running desperately backwards trying to look over his shoulder for the ball, left shoulder, right shoulder, how do you decide? Now the ball’s falling, awful acceleration as it does, Jim running full tilt makes a great leap, the ball hits his outstretched glove then bounces off and out, no, an inch more of leather and it would have been an unbelievable catch! He falls, runs to the ball, throws it wildly past Sandy as cut-off man, watches Angela recover it and fire it in sidearm as Arthur cruises across the plate. Damn! Virginia, on deck, is laughing hard. Jim throws his glove down, shrugs ruefully at his grinning teammates. “Hit another one out here!”

  “I’ll be trying,” Virginia calls back.

  More hits, more alarming misjudgments, awkward scrambles after the ball, wild throws back in. It’s fun.

  Next time at bat Tashi hits one even farther than the first time. Home run again. For his subsequent at-bat the outfielders have dropped back until they’re standing in the eucalyptus trees, and Tash laughs so hard he can barely stand. “I couldn’t hit it that far no matter what!” “Sure, sure. Go ahead and swing.”

  Moving the outfielders so far back does create some monster gaps up the alleys, and Tash proceeds to hit a screaming line drive that stays eight feet off the ground for about two hundred feet, then skips off the grass and rolls forever. Another homer. And the time after that he does it again. Four for four, all homers. Tash just stands there, mouth hanging open. “Four homers, right? Three? Four? Beautiful.”

  It’s a different story in the field. Playing center, Tash catches a medium-deep fly and sees Debbie tag from third for home. Really a good chance to nail her at the plate, so Tash rears back and puts everything he’s got into the throw. Unfortunately his release is a little premature. The ball is still rising as it rockets forty feet over the backstop and into the trees. Who knows where it’ll land. Tash stands in center inspecting his right hand. Everyone sits down they’re laughing so hard. Then they can’t find the ball. Sandy declares the game over and they sit down in the hazy sun to eat Whoppers and fries and drink Coke and Buds. “Do you think it achieved orbit?” “Great game.”

  Great day. Jim sits on the grass and flirts with Rose and Gabriela, who have singled him out for the afternoon. They only pick on guys they can trust not to take them seriously, it’s a sign they feel comfortable and friendly with you, and so of course Jim enjoys that part of it; also he can’t help fantasizing that they really are serious this time. That would be a night to remember: what the screens would show!

  Jim doesn’t really notice Virginia, sitting on the other side of him. And unfortunately she appears to be peeved about something; she knocks his hands away from her when he does turn to her, snaps at him. “What’s the problem?” he says, irritated.

  She just snarls. And she won’t confess to any reason for being disgruntled, which annoys Jim no end. He can’t figure it out. He has to suffer the sotto voce lash of her sharp tongue, even while they’re both being very hearty and friendly with everyone else. Great. Jim hates this kind of thing, but Virginia knows that and so she pours it on.

  Finally Jim asks her to come along with him for a short walk, and they go off into the eucalyptus trees.

  “Listen, what the hell are you so upset about?”

  “Who’s upset?”

  “Oh come on, don’t give me that. Why don’t you tell me? It’s stupid to be bitching at me when I don’t even know what for.”

  “You don’t, do you.”

  “No!”

  “That’s just like you, Jim. Off in your own little dreamworld, completely unaware of what’s going on around you. People don’t mean a damn thing to you. I could be dying and you wouldn’t even notice.”

  “Dying! What do you mean, dying?”

  Virginia just grimaces with disgust, turns to walk away. Jim grabs her by the wrist to pull her back around, and furiously she swings her arm free. “Leave me alone! You don’t have the slightest idea what’s going on!”

  “You’re right I don’t! But I do know that I hang out with you by choice—I don’t have to. If it’s going to be like this—”

  “Leave me alone! Just leave me alone!” And she storms off, back to the others out in the sun.

  Well. So much for that alliance. Jim doesn’t understand why it’s ended, or why it began, but … Oh well. Confused, frustrated, angry, he walks back out onto the playing field. Beyond the seated group of friends, Virginia is conferring with Arthur; then, to Jim’s relief, she walks off with Inez and they track away.

  But the feelings generated by the fight don’t go away; the real world has intruded back into Jim’s afternoon, and anger makes the Whopper lie heavy on his stomach. Virginia’s bad mood adds to the other more serious bummers of the last couple of days, forms a fierce brew, a desire to strike back somehow.…

  When Arthur stands to leave Jim approaches him. “Arthur. You talked about real resistance work. Something more serious than the postering.”

  Arthur stops and stares at him. “That’s right. And you called the other day. I was wondering if you’d ever do anything more.”

  Jim nods. “I had to think about it. But I want to do something. I want to help.”

  “There’s something coming up,” Arthur acknowledges. “It’s a lot more serious, this time.”

  “What you mentioned before. Sabotaging weapons plants?”

  Arthur looks at him even longer. “That’s right.”

  “Which one?”

  “I’d rather not say, till the time comes.” And Arthur’s look becomes sharp indeed. They both know what this means: Jim has to commit himself to sabotaging any of the defense corporations in OC, including, presumably, Laguna Space Research. His father’s company.

  “All right,” Jim says. “No one will get hurt?”

  “No one in the plants. We could get hurt—they’ve got some tough security on those places. It’s dangerous, I want you to know that.”

  “Okay, but no one inside.”

  “No. That’s the ethic. If you do it any other way, you just become another part of the war.”

  Jim nods. “When?”

  Arthur looks around to make sure they are still quite alone. “Tonight.”

  The Whopper does a little backstroke in Jim’s stomach.

  But this is his chance. His chance to make some meaning out of his life, to strike back against … everything. Against individuals, of course—his father, Virginia, Humphrey, his students—but he doesn’t think of them, not consciously. He’s thinking of the evil direction his country has taken for so long, in spite of all his protests, all his votes, all his deepest beliefs. Ignoring the world’s need, profiting from its misery, fomenting fear in order to sell more arms, to take over more accounts, to own more, to make more money … it really is the American way. And so there’s no choice but action, now, some real and tangible form of resistance.

  “Okay,” Jim says.

  20

  So that very night Jim finds himself tracking with Arthur through the network of little streets on the east side of the City Mall, in Garden Grove. They turn down Lewis Street, which is a tunnel-like alley through the underlevel, walled on both sides by warehouse loading docks, all of them closed in the late evening. Arthur turns his headlights off and on three times as they turn into a ten-car parking lot between two warehouses. Parked in thi
s cubbyhole is a station wagon. Four men standing by it, a black a white and two Latinos, jump to the back of the station wagon as Arthur and Jim slide into the lot. They lift out some small but apparently heavy plastic boxes, put them in the backseat of Arthur’s car. With a few muttered words and a quick wave he’s out into the alley again, tracking toward the freeway.

  “That’s the usual method,” he says matter-of-factly. “The idea is to keep hold of this stuff for as short a time as possible. No one has it for more than a couple of hours, and it’s constantly on the move.”

  And no more than an hour after that, Jim finds himself crawling on his belly up the dry bed of the Santa Ana River, scraping over sand, gravel, rocks, plastic shards, styrofoam frag ments, bits of metal, and pools of mud. He’s dressed in a head-to-foot commando suit Arthur has provided out of one of the four boxes. This suit, as Arthur explained, is completely covert. It holds Jim’s body heat in, so that he gives out no IR signal; one layer is made of filaboy-37, Dow Chemical and Plessey’s latest stealth material, a honeycomb-structured synthetic resin whose irregular molecules not only distort but “eat” radar waves; and it’s a flat bland color called chameleon, very difficult to see.

  Jim peers out through eyepieces that have some kind of head’s-up display, green and violet visuals from covert low-frequency sensors giving him a fairly good view of the night world, though the colors are out of a bad drug hallucination. And he can’t see Arthur at all. The suit’s sauna effect is intense, he’s soaked with sweat.

  They get up to climb the east side of the riverbed. Jim is cooking. The world looks as if it’s under very turbid green and violet water. “Thus they crossed the Lake of Fire…” Oh, it is weird, weird.

  Here on the Newport Beach side, occupying the site of an old oil field now gone dry, is the physical plant of Parnell Airspace Corporation: fully lit (each light a white-green magnesium flare in Jim’s bizarre field of vision), surrounded by a high fence that is electrically defended so conspicuously that the barbed wire on top can only be for decoration, or nostalgia—a symbol, like the mark of a brand over a modern cattle factory.

  Jim bumps into Arthur, crouches beside him, puts down the box that he’s been carrying or pushing along with him. It’s heavy. The buildings of the Parnell complex are still some three or four hundred yards away, dark masses on a green plain of concrete, which is dotted here and there by lavender cars.

  Arthur crawls up to the fence and gently hangs on it what looks like a tennis racket without a handle. The frame adheres to the fence, and the wire mesh of the fence caught inside the frame falls away. The frame is now giving out the proper response to the fence’s sensors, convincing them that no hole exists—so Arthur has explained to Jim as they prepared for their raid.

  “Where do you get all this stuff?” Jim asked at the time.

  “We have our suppliers,” Arthur said. “This is the crucial item here, the solvent missile.…”

  Now he shuffles back to Jim and they quickly set up a missile launcher, with the missile already in it. They nail the base of it into the ground. It’s got a covert laser targeter, and all in all it’s the latest in microarmament: it looks like a Fourth of July skyrocket, or a kid’s toy. When they fire it, it will shoot through the new hole in the fence and behave like a little cruise missile, following its laser clothesline into the door of Parnell’s physical plant; impact will penetrate the door and release a gas containing degrading enzymes and chemical solvents, mostly a potent mix called Styx-90, another Dow product; and all the plastic, filaboy, reinforced carbon, graphite, epoxy resin, and kevlar reached by the gas will be reduced to dust, or screwed up in some less dramatic way. And Parnell, primary contractor for the third layer of the ballistic missile defense architecture, currently trying to make satellite mirror stations covert or semicovert, will have the bulk of its ground stock handed to it on a plate. Turned into dust and odd lumps on the floor.

  Aiming the device is simple though a bit risky, as it makes them semicovert for that instant that the laser targeting is happening. Arthur does it, and they crawl down the fence fifty yards and repeat the whole operation, aiming at another building’s door.

  Now comes the hard part. The missiles have secondary manual starters, in case radio signals happen to be jammed or responded to with some kind of return fire. Arthur has judged either possibility to be all too likely, so they are using the manual starters, which are buttons at the end of cords connected to the minimissiles. The cords are about a hundred yards long. So Jim crawls backwards through the sage and the trash as far away as the cord lets him, and Arthur does the same from the first missile. They angle toward each other, but Jim can’t see Arthur when he comes to the end of his cord. In the suits they’re completely invisible to each other.

  Arthur has anticipated this difficulty, however. He’s given Jim one end of an ordinary length of string, and now Jim feels three tugs on it. They’re ready to go. When he gets three more hard tugs he pushes the button on the firing cord, drops both cord and string, and starts running.

  It really is a very simple business.

  Hitting the button is like turning on all the alarm systems in the world at once; there’s a wail of sirens and glare of supplementary floodlights back on the Parnell lot. There’s no way of knowing exactly what the missiles did—not a chance of hearing any small crunches that they might have made on impact—but judging by the response, something sure happened.

  Jim finds himself flying down the riverbed, crouched over so far that he’s in danger of smacking his nose with his knees, and leading Arthur by a good distance. They reach Arthur’s car, which he parked in the rivermouth beach parking lot; they jump in and track out of there, toward Newport Beach. The commando suits are stripped off in a panic hurry. They track into traffic, Arthur gets in the slow lane and tosses the suits out the window when they pass over Balboa Marina. Off the bridge and into the water. At that point they become two citizens out on the road, nothing to connect them to the buildings full of weapons-become-slag back on the old oil field.

  They both smell strongly of sweat, it’s like the spa’s weight room in Arthur’s car. The towels Arthur brought along are damp before they’re through drying off, and they struggle back into street clothes still sticky and hot. Jim’s hands shake, he can hardly button the buttons on his shirt. He feels a little sick.

  Arthur laughs. “Well, that’s that. Intelligence estimates we got about ninety million dollars of space weaponry. They’ll find the missile stands, but that won’t tell them anything.” Suffused with energy that is still welling up in him, he sticks his head out the window, shouts “Keep—the sky—clean!”

  Jim laughs wildly, and the fight-or-flight adrenaline of their run downriver courses through him—one of the most powerful drugs he’s ever felt. The best stimulant in the world. “That was great. Great. I actually—did something.”

  He stops, thinks about that. “I’ve actually done something. You know”—he hesitates, it sounds silly—“I feel like this is the first time in my life that I’ve actually done something.”

  Arthur nods, stares at him with raptor intensity. “I know just what you mean when you say that. And that’s what resistance can do for you. You feel you’re in a system so big and so well entrenched that nothing at all could bring it down. Certainly nothing you can do individually will make the slightest bit of difference. But if you hold to that conviction and do nothing, then it’s self-fulfilling—you create the very condition you perceive.

  “But take that very first step!” He laughs wildly. “Take that first step, perform an act of resistance of even the smallest kind, and suddenly your perception changes. Reality changes. You see it can be done. It might take time, but—” He laughs again. “Yeah! You bet it can be done! Let’s go celebrate your first act.” He hits the dashboard, hard. “Here’s to resistance!”

  “To resistance.”

  21

  They lived here for over seven thousand years, and the only sign they lef
t behind were some piles of shells around the shores of Newport Bay.

  This is all we know of them, or think we know:

  They came down from the plains east of the Sierra Nevada, wandering members of the Shoshonean tribes, setting up camps and then wandering farther to trade and gather food. When they reached the sea, they stopped and set up camp for good.

  They had many languages.

  They were what we call hunter-gatherers, and did no cultivating, kept no animals. The men made weapons and hunted with bows and arrows. The women gathered berries and edible roots, and made thistle sage into a porridge; but acorns and pine nuts were their staples. They had to leech the tannin out of their acorn flour, and used a fairly complex set of drains and pits to do it. I wonder who invented the method, and what exactly they thought they were doing, changing this white powder from inedible poison to the daily bread. No doubt it was a sacred act. Everything they did was a sacred act.

  They lived in small villages, their dwellings set in circles. In the gentle climate they had little need for protection from the weather, and they slept out except when it rained. Then they slept in simple homes made of willow frames and cattail thatch. The women wore rabbit-pelt skirts, the men animal pelts thrown over the shoulder, the children nothing. Fur cloaks were worn in the winter for warmth.

  They traded with tribes from every direction. Obsidian and salt were obtained from the people in the desert. Branch coral came up from Baja. The pelts of sea mammals came from the Channel Island people, who paddled over from the islands ten to a canoe.