The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson

  Jim nods, his face suddenly twisted with nervousness. They’re really going to play his choice? What if he has gone off on some spiral of reasoning that has led him to a completely stupid choice, he can’t be at all sure that he hasn’t! Abe can read all this perfectly in Jim’s comically exaggerated expression of alarm, and he starts laughing hysterically. Jim trails Sandy to the CD player changing his mind, trying to get more time to think it over, but Sandy beats him away with one arm while inserting the CD with the other, and suddenly the speakers are roaring out some big symphonic fanfare. What’s this?

  “‘Pomp and Circumstance’!” Jim shouts at Sandy and Abe, scowling with desperate uncertainty. Sandy grins, nods, turns the volume up so that the people on Catalina can enjoy it too. Then the march begins and Sandy high-steps around the rooms of the ap, leaning over to scream in the face of anyone who has remained sitting. Soon everyone’s up and marching like toy soldiers with scrambled circuits, banging into walls and knocking over plants and each other. Abe marches behind Jim and feels the dust in the blood begin to fly in him, the dumb old march has somehow acquired this immense majesty, now everyone’s out on the balcony, marching: twenty drum majors, a can-can line over by the railing, goose-steppers trying some kick-boxing.… Abe jumps up and down in place, feeling the glory of pure Being surge all through him. Incredible rush of exhilaration, face to the stars, it’s clear tonight and up there on the fuzzy black vault of the night are the big fast satellites, the solar panels in their polar orbits, the microwave transmitters, the ballistic missile mirrors to the north—all the new artificial constellations, swimming around up there and nearly blocking out the little old twinkly stars. And planes falling onto John Wayne Airport like space stations landing, like fireflies in formation: what an amazing sky! Abe leans all the way back and howls. Coyote’s entrance, here, the others take it up, and they howl and yip at the blinking night sky.

  Angela, always first in these things, pulls off her blouse and throws it on the floor of the balcony, in the middle of the marchers. Bra next. Can she get her jeans off while doing the can-can? In a manner of speaking. Howls scale the sky. Clothes begin to fly onto the pile, a flurry of shirts, pants, blouses, silk underwear, boxer shorts. Quickly they’re a ring of naked dancers, as in some pagan rite of spring, they can all feel it and for once it has that quality of primitive sensuousness, no all-American tits-n-ass consciousness in Abe tonight, it’s just the clean joy of having a body, of being able to dance, of Being and Becoming. The way the pink of skin jumps out of the night’s smeary darkness is just part of the joy of it. Freckled Sandy tosses all the couch cushions in the ap onto the big pile of clothing, and then he dives on, swims into the pile, ah-ha, a pile-on here. Naked Humphrey is dancing wallet in hand, can’t just throw that in a pile of other people’s clothes, right? Abe starts howling again, laughing and howling, he can’t get over how good everything feels, how happy every face looks to him, there’s Jim happy, Sandy happy, Angela happy, Tashi and Erica happy, Humphrey happy, all of them dancing in a circle and howling at the sky, Abe dives into the great mass of clothes and people and cushions, clean laundry smell, he’s buried, he’s coming up for air, coming up to be born, like the baby he helped bring into the world just hours before—born out of their clothes, naked, shocked at the pure glossy presence of things, their sensuous reality, their there-ness. For the second time that night Abe Bernard squeezes shut his eyes and wills the moment to stop, to stop while he and all his friends are happy, to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

  32

  … In the 1790s the area still belonged mostly to the Indians, now called Gabrielinos. The Spanish rarely ventured away from San Juan Capistrano and the El Camino Real, and they avoided the swamps and marshes above Newport Bay, because these were difficult to traverse on foot or horseback.

  But during those years the bay had some visitors. A party of French-American colonists, en route to Oregon by way of the long trip around Cape Horn, sailed into the bay and wintered there. The next year a small group returned from Oregon, and they lived on the mesa above Newport Bay for nearly twenty years. These were the first non-Indian residents of the area.

  History doesn’t tell us much more about these French-Americans than that. But we can deduce a fair amount about the lives they must have led. They were from Quebec, they were used to the wilderness, and they knew the crafts necessary for survival in it. They must have been fishermen, and perhaps they did some farming as well. We don’t know if they were literate, but they easily could have been; they may have had some books along with them, a Bible perhaps.

  They must have had contact with the Indians who lived on the bay; perhaps they learned where to dig for clams, where to set snares, from Indian friends. There was an Indian village on Newport Mesa, called Genga; they must have spent some time there, learned a bit of the Gabrielino language. The Spanish called the bay Bolsa de Gengara, after this village; what did these French call it? If we knew what the Indians called it, perhaps we could guess.

  At that time, in the same years that the French Revolution and Napoleon were causing such upheavals in Europe, Newport Bay did not look like it does now. The Santa Ana River, which ran all year around, drained into the vast marshes at the upper end of the bay; these marshes extended all the way in to Santa Ana and Tustin. And the upper section of Newport Bay was open to the sea. Balboa Peninsula did not then exist; it was created by flooding of the Santa Ana River in 1861. The river itself did not swing into its new delta at 56th Street until the 1920s, in another great flood.

  Ocean, estuary, marsh, grasslands, hillsides; it was a land of great variety, teeming with life. And this little group of French-Americans—how many were there?—lived in the midst of this wilderness, with their Indian neighbors, in peace, for over twenty years.

  What must their lives have been like? They must have made their own clothes, shoes, boats, homes. Children must have been born to them, raised until they were perhaps twenty years old. Perhaps some of them died there. Their days must have been spent hunting, farming, fishing, exploring, making, talking—speaking French, and Gabrielino.

  Why did they leave? Where did they go, when they left? Did they return to Oregon, to Quebec, to France? Were they in Paris when the Napoleonic wars ended, when the train tracks were laid? Did they ever think back to the twenty years they had spent on the California coast, isolated from all the world?

  Perhaps they never left. Perhaps they stayed on the shores of the primeval bay, in a little bubble of history between the dream time of the Indians and the modern world, until they were exterminated with the rest of the Gabrielinos when the Europeans came up from Mexico—killed by people who couldn’t tell them from Indians anymore.

  33

  Next time Arthur comes by, Jim decides to take the direct approach.

  “We have another strike planned,” says Arthur.

  And Jim replies, “Listen, Arthur, I want to know more about who you are, who we are. Who exactly we’re working for and what the long-range goals are! I mean, the way it is now, I don’t really know.”

  Arthur stares at him, and Jim swallows nervously, thinking that he may have gone too far somehow. But then Arthur laughs. “Does it really matter? I mean, do you want a name? An organization to pledge allegiance to?”

  Jim shrugs, and Arthur laughs again. “Kind of old-fashioned, right? The truth is that it’s more complicated than you probably think, in that there is more than one so-called group doing all this. In fact, we’re stimulating a lot of the action indirectly. It’s getting so that half of the attacks you hear about are not actually our doing. And it seems to be snowballing.”

  “But what about us, Arthur. You. Who supplies you, who are you working for?”

  Arthur regards him seriously. “I don’t want to give you anybody’s name, Jim. If you can’t work with me on that basis, you can’t. I’m a socialist and a pacifist. Admittedly my pacificism has changed in nature since I’ve decided to join the resistance against the weapons i
ndustry. But like I told you, the methods I tried before—talking to people, writing, lobbying, joining protests and sit-ins—none of them had any tangible impact. So, while I was doing that I met all sorts of socialists. You wouldn’t think any existed anymore in America.”

  “I would,” Jim says.

  Arthur shrugs. “Maybe. It’s almost a lost concept, that individuals shouldn’t be able to profit from common property such as land or water. But some of us still believe in it and work for it. There could be a combination of the best of both systems—a democratic socialism, that gave individuals the necessary freedoms and only prohibited the grossest sorts of profiteering. Everyone has a right to adequate food, water, shelter and clothing!” Frustration twists Arthur’s face into the intense mask Jim remembers from their poster raid on SCP. “It’s not that radical a vision—it could be achieved by votes, by an evolutionary shift in the law of the land. It doesn’t have to be accomplished by violent revolution! But…”

  “But it doesn’t happen,” Jim prompts him.

  “That’s right. It doesn’t happen. But do you know what to do about it? No. None of us do. But now, after everything else, I’m convinced that unless the plan includes active, physical resistance, it isn’t going to work. It’s like the defense industry is the British before the revolution—they control us in the same way—and we’re the small landowners in Virginia and Massachusetts, determined to take our lives into our own hands again. We being a group of Americans who are determined to fight the military-industrial complex on every front. There are lobbying groups in Washington, there are newsheets and videos and posters, and now there’s an active arm, dedicated to physical resistance that hurts nothing but weaponry. Since there’s so much public about this group, it’s absolutely necessary to keep the active arm of it secret. So. I know a couple of people—just a couple—who supply me with the equipment, and the intelligence necessary to carry out the operations. That’s all I really know. We don’t have a name. But you can tell by the public statements, really, who we’re a part of.”

  Jim nods.

  Arthur watches him closely. “So. Is it okay?”

  “Yeah,” Jim says, convinced. “Yeah, it is. I was worried by how little I really knew. But I understand, now.”

  “Just think of it as you and me,” Arthur suggests. “A personal campaign. That’s what it all comes down to in the end, anyway. Not the name of the organization that you belong to. Just people doing what they believe in.”

  “True.”

  And so that night they track into the warren of streets behind the City Mall, to the little parking lot between the warehouses at Lewis and Greentree. There they flash their headlights three times and meet the same four men and their station wagon full of boxes, and the four men help them load the boxes into Arthur’s car. Their leader pulls Arthur aside for a brief muttered conversation.

  And then they track into the Anaheim Hills, putting on another pair of stealth suits as they take the Newport and Riverside freeways north. Once off the freeway they track up to the edge of a tiny park in an applex, one dotted with long-neglected slides and swings and benches. They crawl to the edge of the park, where a small slope of grass overlooks the Santa Ana Canyon. Below them and across the freeway-filled gorge, on a knoll, sprawls the big manufacturing plant of Northrop. And in the northeast corner of the expanse of buildings, all lit by blazing xenon lights, with a perimeter fence that is swept by roving searchlights, are the three long warehouselike buildings that hold the production facilities for the third tier, midcourse layer of the ballistic missile defense—that is to say, space-based chemical lasers, which will be transported to Vandenberg and hauled up into orbit. The “High Fire” system.

  Quickly they hammer four little missile stands into the grass, and Arthur aims them at four doors in these buildings. This is the dangerous moment, the semicovert moment, and if the defenses are sensitive enough …

  Arthur, Jim has time to think, is connected up with some excellent intelligence sources: he knows the right buildings, the correct doors, he knows the buildings will be empty, the night security forces elsewhere in the complex … Such information must be top secret in the companies involved, so that the espionage involved in getting hold of it must be sophisticated indeed.

  Missiles set and targeted, they trail the ignition cords across the tiny park, back toward Arthur’s car. Buttons pushed, run to the car, track away, tear the suits off, dump them down a storm drain. No sign at all of pursuit; in fact, they can’t even tell what the missiles might have done, because they’re on the other side of the hill now, getting onto the Riverside Freeway with all the rest of the cars. They never even heard a siren this time, because the little condo park was over a mile from the Northrop complex. It really is very simple. But one can assume that the little missiles have followed the laser light directly to their targets, and have dissolved the materials in the plant susceptible to the solvents in the payloads.…

  Despite the ease of the attack, Jim’s heart is racing, and he and Arthur shake hands and pound the dash with the same sharp exhilaration that they felt in the first raid against Parnell. Jim becomes more certain than ever that he is only really alive, really living a meaningful life, when he is doing this work. “Here’s to resistance!” he cries again. He has a slogan now.

  34

  In the month after LSR submits its bid for the Stormbee program, Dennis McPherson flies to Dayton four times to meet various members or subcommittees of the Source Selection Evaluation Board. The questions are tough and exacting, and each session drains McPherson completely. But so far as he can tell, they are faring well. Except for a whole day’s worth of questions concerning the laser system’s abilities in bad weather, the so-called blind letdown issue, he has satisfactory answers for all of their technical questions, and these in turn justify the estimated costs of the system. As for blind let-down, well, there’s nothing much they can do about that. The RFP asked for a covert system, so they’re stuck with the CO2 laser’s inability to see well through clouds. McPherson tries not to worry about it; he figures that the SSEB is merely trying to find out which of the bidders’ proposed systems will deal with this handicap the best.

  So. Four intense grillings, each with its ritual humiliations, the various reminders that the Air Force is in control here, it’s the biggest buyer’s market of all history and so everyone gathering around to sell has to do a little submission routine, rolling on their backs and exposing throat and belly like dogs … at least in certain ritual moments, as when beginning or ending presentations, or answering irrelevant, insolent questions, or greeting members of the board at the occasional lunch or cocktail party on the base. McPherson goes through all that grimly and concentrates on the actual sessions, on clear concise answers to the questions asked. It really is wearing.

  But eventually the time runs out, and the SSEB has to stop and make its report, and the Source Selection Authority—General Jack James, a serious aloof man—has to stop and make his decision, and this decision has to be reviewed by HQ USAF, and then it finally comes time for the Air Force to award the contract for Stormbee. Somewhere in there the decision has been made. One company will have its bid chosen and will be in charge of a $750 million system, the other four competitors will be sent home to try again, each some several million dollars out of pocket as a result of their attempt.

  Because of McPherson’s reports on the grillings, and the original choice of LSR by the Air Force back when the program was superblack, Lemon is confident that their bid is going to be the one chosen. All the Dayton questions indicate a strong interest in the problems of development and deployment, and Lemon thinks the proposal is so strong that no weaknesses have been found. Donald Hereford, in New York, appears convinced by Lemon, and on his orders a big contingent of LSR people travel to Crystal City for the Air Force’s announcement of the award. Hereford himself comes down, with a small crew of underlings. The night before the announcement they have a party in the restaurant abo
ve the LSR offices in the Aerojet Tower, and the mood is celebratory. The rumor, spreading industrywide, is that LSR has indeed nailed the contract.

  McPherson is politely cheerful at the party, but as for the rumor, he’s trying to wait and see. He’s too nervous to make any assumptions. This is his program, after all. And rumors are worthless. Still, it’s impossible not to be infected by the mood a little bit, to allow hope to break out of its hard tight bud.…

  The next day, in one of the Pentagon’s giant white meeting rooms, McPherson feels talons of nervousness digging into him. A whole lot of people fill the room, including big groups from all five bidders: Aeritalia, Fairchild, McDonnell/Douglas, Parnell, and LSR, each team gathered in knots around the room. McPherson eyes the other companies’ teams curiously. Jocularity with the rest of his own group is a tough bit of acting, and it’s doubtful that he really pulls it off. Really all he wants is to sit.

  It’s actually a relief to see the Air Force colonel come into the room and stride to the flag-bedecked podium at the front. Video lights snap on and a microphone in the cluster of them at the podium begins to hum. It’s another big media conference, the Pentagon’s idea of high entertainment. And everyone else seems to agree. Several cameras are trained on the speaker, and McPherson recognizes many of the trade reporters, from Aviation Week and Space Technology, National Defense, SDI Today, Military Space, L-5 Newsletter, The Highest Frontier, Electronic Defense, and so on; ID badges also announce reporters from The Wall Street Journal, AP, UPI, Science News, Science, Time, and many newspapers. This is big news, and the Pentagon has been canny about turning the award ceremonies into PR events for itself. The colonel who will be their master of ceremonies is obviously an experienced PR man: a handsome flyboy, McPherson thinks sourly, about to award the contract that will make pilots obsolete.