The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  They smoked tobacco, and carved stone figures of birds and whales and fish.

  The political system was like this: most of the people in a village were family. A headman guided the village with the permission of everyone in it. They changed the headman occasionally.

  Sometimes they fought wars, but mostly they were at peace.

  They made some of the finest baskets in America, weaving intricate symbolic patterns into them.

  They spent part of every day in a sweathouse, pouring water over hot coals and talking in the steam.

  In the centers of the villages, they built circular chambers of willow and cattail and brush. The tribes to the north called this sacred sweathouse a yoba, the southern tribes called it a wankech. Here they held their major religious ceremony, the toloache ritual, where the young men drank a jimsonweed liquid, and saw visions, and were initiated as adults. Each sacred chamber held an image of their most important god, Chinigchinich, the one who had named things. The complete skin of a coyote or wildcat was removed from a body, then filled with arrows, feathers, deer horns, lions’ claws, beaks and talons of hawks, and sewn back up, so that it resembled the live animal, except that arrows came out of its mouth, and it wore a feather skirt. During the toloache ritual Chinigchinich spoke to the participants through this image, telling them the secret names of all things, which revealed their innermost identities, and gave humans power over them. And so the young became adults.

  This is what we know of them; and we know that their village life went on, year after year, generation after generation, existing in an unobtrusive balance with the land, using all of its many resources, considering every rock and tree and animal a sacred being—for seven thousand years. For seven thousand years!

  See them, in your mind’s eye, if you can, living out their lives on that basin crowded with life. Doing the day’s work in the steady sun. Visiting the neighboring village. Courting. Sitting around a fire at dusk. See it.

  And then a band of men came by, looking kind of like crabs, wearing shells that they could take off. They could kill from a distance with a noise. They didn’t know any of the languages, but had one of their own. History began.

  When these soldiers left, the Franciscans stayed. After Junipero Serra founded San Juan Capistrano, in 1776, and went on up “El Camino Real” to found the rest of the missions, a Fray Gerónimo Boscana stayed behind to help run the mission, and convert the locals to Christianity. Those around the mission were called Juaneños, after the mission; those farther north were called Gabrielinos, after the mission at San Gabriel. Fray Boscana wrote, “I consider these Indians in their endowments like the soul of an infant.”

  And so he put them to good Christian work, cultivating the land and building the mission. Within fifty years all of them were dead. And all that went away.

  22

  For Abe as for most people, the weeks fly by in a haze of undifferentiated activity. He can never believe it as he tears the month past off the calendar: whatever happened to that one? His shifts on the job all blur together, especially since he deliberately tries to forget most of them. He couldn’t tell you a thing about his mad drive from Laguna Canyon Road up to UCI hospital: did they lose the victim that time? Was he working with Xavier? He has no idea, and what was it, one, two months ago? No one can tell; no one is operating on that kind of long-term time scale anymore. Lucky if you can remember what happened day before yesterday.

  Somewhere inside him, of course, it is all remembered: every crash, every drive, every expression flitting over X’s face as he sweats it out with the victims in the gutbucket. But the recollection mechanism is firmly turned off. As far as Abe knows in his waking hours, it’s completely gone. Two months ago? Gone! It’s present tense for Abe, the here and now his only reality, the moment and the only moment. This may account for the fact that he very seldom has an ally. He doesn’t think about it. Alliance? With Inez, right? Or was it Debbie. He’ll find out tonight at Sandy’s party.

  Tonight he’s working with Xavier again, as usual. As long as one of them doesn’t trade around off days to extend a vacation (which happens fairly frequently) they’re a team. They like that. It gives the job some continuity, makes it a little more like ordinary jobs.

  The radio crackles, X picks it up. “We hear you, All-Seeing One.”

  They’re tapped out. Code nine, pile-up, five to eight cars, Foothill Freeway just west of the Eastern Freeway, still up on the viaduct. They’re on the Santa Ana Freeway in Tustin, they gun up the Eastern and then up onto the Foothill. The tracks are stacked, Abe drives them on the really narrow viaduct shoulder toward a seemingly airborne forest of flashing reds and blues, three CHPs and another rescue truck already on the scene. Abe and Xavier jump out. The other rescue pair is engaged at the front of the pileup, so they go to work on the rear end. “X, see if you can get another truck or two here fast.”

  Third car in has been accordioned to a pancake of metal and glass no more than ten feet thick, and driver and passenger are still in it, both unconscious. Viciously Abe pulls over his primary cutter from the truck, goes to work on the passenger side. The passenger, an older woman, is dots. “A definitive case of the dots,” as X mutters while crawling over her toward the driver. “Real chicken pox.” Driver, an older man, is thrashing around suddenly. Abe leaps over to his side of the car, X is slapping on the drug patches and trying to assess the damage. “Here, Abe, chop a hole for me to get in th’other side.” Screech of metal cut like paper, waldo Superman yanks the roof up and X slithers in, cursing at a sharp edge that catches at his crotch. He flops over the front seat and goes at the driver, Abe continues to widen the door, snip snip snip, Chippie puts a halogen floodlight on them and it’s all overexposed, howl of approaching sirens, it’s loud out here on the freeway but Abe doesn’t hear a thing, it’s only stubborn metal here. He chops away the whole side of the car, looks up to see the hundred cars passing slowly, vampire eyes feasting on the sight.

  “Abe! Abe!” X is hanging down underneath the steering wheel. Abe leans in. “Look man, he’s caught here, the driveshaft wall has snapped over and crushed the right ankle.”

  Abe can see that.

  “Cut that loose, will you?”

  Abe goes to work on it.

  “Not so close!”

  “Well shit, how else can I get that sheet turned back?”

  “Work higher around it, man this guy’s gonna bleed to death from his fucking foot! Can’t get the patch all the way around—”

  Snip. Crrk. Crrk. Crrk. Snip.

  “The driveshaft and the motor are pressing down on that wall, I’ll have to get the crane on it and yank it up—”

  “No time for that! Okay—I got a tourniquet on the calf. That foot is almost torn off anyway, and he gonna die if we don’t get him out of here right fast, so listen here Abe, take those snips and cut his foot clear—”

  “What?”

  “You heard me, amputate right here. I’ll get him to the car. Do what I say, man, I’m the medic here!”

  Abe set the edges of the cutter blades against a bloodied black sock, resists an urge to look away. Just like scissors. “That’s it, right there.” He squeezes the master handles together gently. “Quick now.” There’s no resistance at all to the flesh. Only a little resistance, a slight crunch, as the blades cut through the bone. The footless driver sighs. X slaps a fix on the stump, hands flying, breath whooshing in and out of him as he wiggles around, lifts the driver out, they pull him free of the dash and get him on a street gurney. “Cut that foot free and bring it along,” X says as he runs the gurney to the truck.

  “Fuck.” Abe attacks the motor from the front, puts the snips to it and presses together hard as he can; it takes all of his and the teleoperator’s strength to cut the driveshaft in half, but that done he can sink the cutter into the motor and pull it forward by main strength. Then he can get a grip on the driveshaft wall, a tricky maneuver, but he does it and bends the wall back, runs around to the driver�
��s door, reaches in, yep, there, he can reach in and grab the thing, shoe all full of blood, and here he is running back to the truck with a foot and ankle in his hand. Part of him can’t believe it’s happening. He throws it in back on the bed with its owner, X looks up from his man, “Let’s get this guy to an ER fast.” Abe is in the driver’s seat, seat belt on, off he goes, Mission Viejo’s got a little hospital with a good ER to handle all their swimming casualties, no track now, it’s full speed ahead and X’s sweaty face in the window. “I got him stabilized, I think. He’s looking good.”

  “Will they be able to graft that foot back on?”

  “Yeah, sure. It’s a clean cut. They could graft your head back on these days.” He laughs. “You shoulda seen the look on your face when you tossed it in to me.”

  “Shit.”

  “Ha, ha! That’s nothing. On Java once I was carrying a whole leg out, hip down, and damned if it didn’t keep kicking me.”

  “Shit.”

  “You didn’t feel anything twitching or anything? Ha, ha.…”

  “Please, X.”

  Abe flies down La Paz and up the tortured curving streets that are supposed to make old Mission Viejo somehow different. To the hospital, onto the ER dock, wheel the guy and his foot inside. Whew. They sit on the dock.

  X gets up and gets towels and water bottle from the ambulance compartment. They towel off their faces, drink deeply. Abe feels the shakes begin to hit. The kinetic memory of the amputation returns, that crunch when the waldo suddenly overcame the bone’s resistance. “Man,” he says. X laughs softly.

  Brrk! Crrk! “Truck five twenty-two, code six, a two car head-on where the Coast Highway meets Five in Capistrano Beach—”

  Tapped out again. Reflexively they’re up. Xavier yells in to the ER nurses, Abe gets the truck started. X jumps in. Seat belts on. “Man they’re densepacked tonight.”

  “Drive, road pilot, drive this baby.”

  23

  Dennis McPherson reads of the sabotage at Parnell on the morning wall news, shoots air between his teeth. A bad business. There have been several attacks by saboteurs on defense contractors recently, and it’s hard to tell who’s behind them. It’s beginning to look like more than intercompany rivalries. Every company’s security division, including LSR’s, is involved in some questionable activities, usually concerned with getting their hands on classified military documents or the plans of other companies; this McPherson is aware of, as is everybody. And in isolated cases a zealous or desperate security team may have gotten out of hand and done some mischief to a rival. It’s happened, sure, and in recent years, with the Pentagon’s budget leveling off a little, the competition has become more and more unscrupulous. But mostly it’s been confined to intelligence and minor-league tampering. This widespread sabotage appears to be something new. The work of the Soviets, perhaps, or of some Third World power; or of homegrown refusniks.

  Dennis laughs without humor to read that the composite-compound solvents used in the attack were mostly Styx-90, made by Dow. Parnell is owned by Dow. And he laughs again when it occurs to him that these companies, whose main business it is to defend America from ICBM attack, cannot even effectively protect themselves from little field cruisers. Who anymore can possibly believe in Fortress America?

  Certainly not the security men at the gate of the LSR complex. They look distinctly unhappy as they check to see if McPherson is the correct occupant of his car. They’re there to defend against industrial espionage, not guerrilla attack. They’ve got an impossible job.

  And the people inside?

  For the last several weeks McPherson has been whipping the informal Stormbee proposal into formal shape. Going from superblack to white. There are advantages to a white program that McPherson appreciates. Everything’s on the table, the specs are there in the RFP and can’t be changed by some clown in the Air Force who happens to come up with a new idea. And they’re forced by the intense competition to do a thorough job, including tests that are run until every part of the system has been proved to work, under all kinds of circumstances. And that’s good in the long run, as far as McPherson is concerned. He’s been out to White Sands seven times in the last month, working on further tests of the system, and in the tests they discovered, for instance, that if the target tanks were grouped in a mass the laser target designator tended to fix only on the tanks on the perimeter, leaving those in the middle alone. Some work by the programmers and the problem was solved, but if they hadn’t even known about it? Yes, this is the way McPherson likes to work. “Let’s get it right,” he tells his crew almost every day. In fact his programmers call him LGIR behind his back, pronounced “Elgir,” which has led certain music-minded programmers to speak of cello concertos, or to whistle “Pomp and Circumstance” to indicate the boss’s arrival on the scene.…

  So, McPherson sits down at his desk and looks at the list of Things To Do that he left the night before. He adds several items that have occurred to him over the night, and on the drive in.

  9:00 meet Don F. re Strmbee prop printing

  see Lonnie on CO2 laser problems

  work Strmb prop introduction

  1:30 meeting software group re guidance

  call Dahlvin on Strmb power

  work Strmb prop

  4:00 meet Dan Houston on Ball Lightning

  He lifts the phone, punches the button for Don Freiburg. The day begins.

  * * *

  Becoming a white program means that the Stormbee proposal is now part of the mainstream of public military procurement in America. This is a vastly complicated process that contains hundreds of variables, and very few people, if any, understand all the facets of it. Certainly McPherson does not; he concentrates on the part of the process that is important to his work, just as everyone else does. Thus he is an expert in the Air Force’s aerospace technology procurement, and knows little or nothing about other areas. Just learning his own little area is difficult enough.

  It begins within the Air Force itself, like so: One of the operating commands, say the Strategic Defense Phase One Group (SDPOG), makes a Statement of Operational Need (SON) with a Mission Element Need Analysis (MENA) to the United States Air Force Headquarters (HQ USAF). If HQ USAF decides that the SON represents a major program, they make a Justification for Major Systems New Start (JMSNS), which is reviewed by the Requirements Assessment Group (RAG), and this review is then submitted to the Secretary of the Air Force (SAF). If SAF decides that the JMSNS represents an Air Force Designated Acquisition Program (AFDAP), he approves the JMSNS, and it becomes an AFJMSNS. The SAF then submits the AFJMSNS as part of the next Air Force Program Objectives Memorandum (POM) to the Secretary of Defense (SECDEF). If the SECDEF approves the POM, and thus the AFJMSNS, the HQ USAF prepares and issues a Program Management Directive (PMD), and Planning, Programming and Budgeting System (PPBS) action is taken. The Concept Exploration Phase (CEP) has begun. In this phase the various Preliminary System Operational Concepts (PSOCs) are explored, and altogether they constitute the Phase Review Package (PRP). From the PRP a System Concept Paper (SCP) is prepared by HQ USAF, and it is again reviewed by the RAG, and by the Air Force Systems Acquisition Review Council (AFSARC), after which it is submitted to the SAF. If the SAF approves the SCP, it is reviewed by the Defense Systems Acquisition Review Council (DSARC), which recommends it to the SECDEF. If the SECDEF approves the SCP—a Milestone I decision—then HQ USAF issues another PMD and the program enters the Validation and Demonstration Phase (VDP).

  All clear? Well, it’s at that point that the program first connects with private industry. If the SAF and the SECDEF have agreed that the program must remain top secret, then the program becomes a superblack program and a single contractor or two is contacted by Air Force personnel directly in the Pentagon. At least usually. There are also the ordinary black programs, which are given directly to contractors like the superblacks; a few people in Congress are told about these as well, so they can think that they are in on all the
Pentagon’s secrets.

  But by far the majority of the programs are so-called white programs, and these require more complicated procedures. During the VDP, HQ USAF begins floating draft Requests For Proposals (RFPs) and Requests For Information (RFIs) to relevant defense contractors, asking for comments. The interested companies respond with technical suggestions based on their evaluations of the RFP, and these become part of the Decision Coordination Process (DCP). Eventually HQ USAF issues a final RFP, which is usually published in Commerce Business Daily. At this point there has already been an important tactical struggle between the interested contractors, as each attempted to get things written into the RFP that only they were competent to do. But now the RFP is out there for anyone to respond to, and the race is on.

  Typically companies have ninety days to submit proposals to the Program Manager (PM), who is an Air Force colonel or brigadier general. After submission, the proposal evaluation process begins. Part of it is conducted by the Air Force Test and Evaluation Center (AFTEC), which is part of the Air Force Systems Command (AFSC) based at Andrews AFB; part of it is conducted out of HQ USAF in the Pentagon, or under the PM. From these units and others a Source Selection Evaluation Board (SSEB) is convened, under the command of a Source Selection Authority (SSA), who is usually but not always the PM. The various proposers are brought in and grilled over every detail of their proposals, and when that six-week process is over, the SSEB makes its evaluation, which is then summarized by the SSA, who uses his summary to justify his decision to the people above him. The decision to award the program to a bidder (or to award it to two bidders in a competitive development, or in a so-called leader-follower arrangement) is thus ultimately the SSA’s decision, but he usually follows the recommendations of the SSEB, and he also has to secure the approval of his superiors, up to the SAF or even the SECDEF.

  All clear?

  * * *

  But meanwhile, at this point, all Dennis McPherson has to worry about is putting together a proposal that will stand up under the technical testing and budgetary demands that the SSEB will soon be making. Not too many days left; and so it is nearer five-thirty than four when he finally gets free for the first conference with Dan Houston about the Ball Lightning program, which Lemon has vengefully commanded him to work on, in his “spare time” from the Stormbee proposal.