The Gold Coast

by Kim Stanley Robinson

She looks away from him uncomfortably. He thinks she’s shy, and almost smiles; would her students believe it possible? “All right.” She pulls the suitcase off the table and barges out the door.

  Jim follows. They exchange names. Hers is Hana Steentoft. She lives up in Mojeska Canyon, not all that far from the college. “And you’re an artist?” Jim asks.

  “Yes.” She’s amused for some reason.

  They enter Trabuco J.C.’s pathetic attempt at a coffee house in the Bohemian style: plastic wood ceiling beams, dimmed lighting, old posters of European castles, a wall of automatic food and drink dispensers. Nothing can hide the fact that Trabuco is a commuter’s junior college. The place is empty. They sit in the corner opposite the janitor washing the imitation wood floor.

  “Do you paint in the style you were teaching tonight?”

  “No. I mean it’s a tool, a stylistic resource. I love the look of some dynasties, and Ming Dynasty painting is perfect for some of what I do, but … you teach writing? It’s like if you taught a class in sonnet writing, and I asked you if you wrote sonnets. You probably don’t, but you might use what you learned from sonnets in other poems.”

  Jim nods. “So you sell your paintings?”

  “Sure. Can’t live on what they pay us here, can you.” She laughs.

  Jim doesn’t reply to that one. “So who are your customers?”

  “Individuals, mostly. A group in the canyons, and in Laguna. And then some banks. Murals for their offices.” She changes the subject. “And what do you write?”

  “Ah—poetry, mostly. But I’m teaching bonehead English.”

  “You don’t like it?”

  “Oh, it’s all right, it’s all right.” He regrets calling it that.

  She chugs down most of her beer. They talk about teaching. Then about painting. Jim knows the Impressionists, and the usual culturevulture selection of others. They share an enthusiasm for Pisarro. Hana talks about Cassatt, then about Bonnard, her special hero. “Even now we haven’t fully understood aspects of his work. That coloration that at first looks so bizarre, and then when you look closer at the real world you see it there, kind of underneath the surface of things.”

  “Even those white shadows in that one painting?”

  She laughs. “Cabinet de Toilette? Well—I don’t know. That was for the composition, I guess. Haven’t seen any white shadows, myself. But maybe Bonnard did, I wouldn’t doubt it. He was a genius.”

  They talk about genius in art, what it consists of and how those without it can best learn from it. Jim, who will concede in an instant that he is no artistic genius, and only hope that he is not pressed further to concede that he is in fact no artist at all, notices that Hana never makes any of these concessions. She makes no claims, either. This is intriguing. They continue to share enthusiasms, they find themselves interrupting each other to elaborate on the other’s remarks. Jim is intrigued, attracted.

  “But you can’t just mean that paying closer attention to what you see is all of it, can you?” Jim asks, referring to her lecture to her class. “I mean, that’s just like getting a good focus on a camera, or a telescope—”

  “No no,” she says. “We don’t see like cameras at all. That’s part of what makes photographs so interesting. But focusing your eyesight and your vision aren’t the same thing, you see. Focusing your vision means a change in the way you pay attention to things. A clarification of your aesthetic sense, and of your moral sense as well.”

  “Vision as moral act?”

  She nods vigorously.

  “Now that’s not postmodernism.”

  “No, it isn’t. But now we’re leaving postmodernism, right? Changing it. It’s a good time for artists. You can take advantage of the open space left by the death of postmodernism, and the absence of any replacement. Help to shape what comes next, maybe. I like being a part of that.”

  Jim laughs. “You’re ambitious!”

  “Sure.” She looks at him briefly; mostly she watches the table when she talks. “Everyone’s ambitious, don’t you think?”

  “No.”

  “But you—aren’t you?”

  “Ah.” Jim laughs again, uncomfortable. “Yeah, I guess so.” Of course he is! But if he says so, doesn’t it underline his lack of accomplishment, his lack of effort? It isn’t something that he likes to talk about.

  She nods, watching the table again. “Everyone is, I think. If they can’t admit it, they’re scared somehow.”

  A bit of mind-reading, there! And Jim hears himself say, “Yeah, it scares me, actually.”

  “Sure. But you admitted it anyway, didn’t you.”

  “I guess so.” Jim grins. “I’d like to see some of your work.”

  “Sure. And maybe I can read some of yours.”

  Stab of fear. “It’s terrible.”

  She smiles at the table. “That’s what they all say. Uh-oh, look. They’re closing the place.”

  “Of course, it’s eleven!” They laugh.

  They gather their things and leave. As they walk under the light in the entryway Jim notices how wild looking she is. Hair unbrushed, sweater poorly knitted, she really is strange looking. Couldn’t be more out of fashion if she tried. Jim supposes that’s the point, but still …

  “We should do this again,” he says. She’s looking off at the ground, maybe checking out the way ground bulbs underlight the shrubbery edging the quad. It is a weird effect. Ha—here’s Jim seeing things, all of a sudden.

  “Sure,” she says indifferently. “Our classes end the same time.”

  He walks her to her car. “Thursday, then?”

  “Sure. Or whenever.”

  “Okay. See you.” Jim gets in his car and drives off, thinking of things they have talked about. Is he really ambitious? And if so, for what? You want to make a difference, he thinks. You want to change America! In the writing, in the resistance work, in the teaching, in everything you do! To change America, whoah—you can’t get much more grandiose than that. Remarkable, then, how lazy he is, and what a huge gap there is between his desires and his achievements! Big sigh. But there, look at that string of headlights snaking along the shore of Rattlesnake Reservoir, reflected in the black water as a whole curved sequence of squiggly S-blurs …

  It’s a question of vision.

  37

  Dennis McPherson is not surprised to find that Lemon is furious about all aspects of the Stormbee decision, including the protest. Since the protest was Hereford’s idea, stimulated by McPherson’s outburst and made before the whole traveling crew of the company, it makes Lemon look like he is not crucial to the policy-making process of LSR, and he can’t stand it. So with his most malicious smile he gives McPherson the job of representing LSR in the long and involved matter of the appeal. He guesses that McPherson will hate it, and he is right. Now McPherson has two main tasks: flying to Washington and talking to their law firm, appearing before committees and making depositions and the like; and helping Dan Houston, back in Laguna, with the disaster that Ball Lightning is about to become. Great. McPherson can feel his stomach shrinking, a little more every day.

  So he’s off to Crystal City again. In for consultation with LSR’s law firm, Hunt Stanford and Goldman Incorporated. One of the most prosperous firms in the city, which is saying a lot.

  It’s Goldman who has been put in charge of their case; Louis Goldman, who is fortyish, balding, handsome, and a very snappy dresser. McPherson, who for years has believed lawyers to be one of the principal groups of parasites in the country, along with advertisers and stockbrokers, was at first quite stiff with the East Coast smoothie. But it turns out that Goldman is a nice guy, very sharp, and someone who takes his job seriously, and McPherson has grown to respect and then like him. For a lawyer he isn’t bad.

  Tonight they’re having dinner up in Crystal City’s finest restaurant, a rotating thing on the roof of the forty-story Hilton. Planes landing at National Airport cruise down the Potomac River basin, already below them: a strange sight
.

  McPherson asks about the appeal and Goldman makes a little flow chart on a napkin. “The whole history of the project prior to the Air Force’s RFP is out, of course,” he says. “No one wants these superblack programs acknowledged in public, and there’s nothing written down concerning it anyway, so for our purposes it’s irrelevant.”

  McPherson nods. “I understand that. But the RFP as published matched the specs they gave us for the superblack program, so any deviation from that—”

  “Sure. That could be grounds for a successful challenge. Let’s see if I’ve got the main points as you see them. Air Force asked you for a covert guidance system for a remotely piloted aircraft that could be dropped from low orbit, to underweather but without blind let-down, where it would be navigated at treetop level. Then it was to locate enemy military vehicles and lock on air-to-surface missiles it would be carrying.”

  “That’s what they wanted.”

  “And they wanted it in one pod, preferably, and it was to use less than eleven KVA.”

  “Right. And yet they chose a system that uses two pods, and although Parnell claims they only need eleven point five KVA, they appear to be lying, according to our calculations of the needs of their system. The Air Force should have been able to see that too.”

  Goldman jots down these points on a pad he’s put by his dessert plate. No napkin for this stuff. “And they’ve got a radar system, you say?”

  “Right. See, the RFP repeats the original request that the system be covert, that it doesn’t give itself away by its outgoing signals. Parnell has ignored that feature of the RFP and put in a radar system. So they won’t be covert, but it does mean that they’ll be able to do a blind let-down. And now the Air Force is listing that capability as a plus for Parnell, even though it’s not asked for in the RFP.” McPherson shakes his head, disgusted.

  “It’s a good point. And there are other discrepancies?”

  “That’s the main one, but there’s others.” They go over them, and Goldman fills out his list. The Air Force has listed Parnell’s accelerated schedule as an advantage, then given them a contract with a relaxed schedule. And the Air Force’s most probable cost estimates of the LSR and Parnell proposals consistently upped LSR’s figures, while leaving Parnell’s alone, or even lowering them. Then the lower cost of the Parnell system, as determined by the Air Force, was listed as a plus for them.

  “It’s pretty clear from all this that the Air Force wanted Parnell, no matter what the proposals were like,” Goldman remarks. “Do you have any idea why that might be?”

  “None.” McPherson’s anger over the matter is getting its edge back. “None whatsoever.”

  “Hmm.” Goldman taps his pen against a tooth. “I’ve got some of my moles looking into the matter, actually. Don’t tell anyone that. But if we can figure out their motive for doing this, and find any way of proving it, that would be a big help to the appeal.”

  “I believe it.” They order brandies and sit back as the table is cleared. “So where do we go from here?” McPherson asks.

  Back to the flow chart on the napkin. “Two approaches initially, see? First, we’ve petitioned the courts in the District to make an injunction halting the award of the contract until an investigation by the General Accounting Office is made. At the same time we’ve asked the GAO to make the investigation. Results so far have been fifty-fifty. The GAO has agreed to investigate, and that’s very good. They’re an arm of Congress, you know, and one of the most impartial bodies in Washington. One of the only real watchdogs left. They’ll go after it full force, and I think we can count on a good effort from them.”

  Goldman swirls his brandy, takes a sip. “The other front has brought some bad news, I’m afraid. In the long run it could be pretty serious.”

  “How so?” McPherson feels the familiar tightening in the stomach.

  “Well, you make a request for an injunction to the judiciary system, and in the District of Columbia it goes to the federal court system and is given to one of four appellate courts, each with a different presiding judge. It’s not a regional thing, so someone in the system makes a decision and sends your request to one court or another. Mostly it’s a random process, as far as we can tell, but it doesn’t have to be. And in this case, our request for an injunction has been given to court four, Judge Andrew H. Tobiason presiding.”

  Another sip of brandy. Goldman seems to have the habit of courtroom timing: a little dramatic pause, here. “So?” McPherson says.

  “Well, you see,” says Goldman, “Judge Andrew H. Tobiason is also Air Force Colonel Andy Tobiason, retired.”

  Stomach implosion. A peculiar sensation. “Hell,” says McPherson weakly, “how could that be?”

  “The Air Force has its own lawyers, and many of them work in the District of Columbia. When they retire, some are made judges here. Tobiason is one. Giving him this particular case is probably a bit of mischief worked by the Air Force. A few phone calls, you know. Anyway, Tobiason has refused to make the injunction; he’s decided the contract is to be carried out as awarded, until the GAO finishes its investigation and its report is conveyed to him.” Goldman smiles a wry smile. “So, we’ve got a bit of an uphill battle. But we’ve also got a lot of ammunition, so … well, we’ll see how it goes.”

  Still, he can’t deny it’s bad news. McPherson sits back, drains the brandy snifter. A terrible singer is moaning ballads over bad piano work, in the center of the revolving restaurant. Their table’s window is now facing out over the lit sprawl of Washington, D.C. The dark Mall is a strip across the lights, the Washington Monument white with its blinking red light on top, the Capitol like an architect’s model, same for the Lincoln Monument there in the trees … all far, far below them. Washington has kept its maximum height law for buildings, and everything over there is under ten stories, and far below them. And of course height means the same thing it always has; the isobars for altitude and prosperity, that is to say altitude and power, are an almost perfect match in every city on earth. Height = power. So that here in Crystal City they look down on the capital of the nation like gods looking down on the mortals. And it isn’t just a coincidence, McPherson thinks; it’s a symbol, it says something very real about the power relationship of the two areas, the massive Pentagon and its lofty crowd of luxury-hotel sycophants densepacked around it—looking across the river and down, on the lowly government of the people.…

  “The Air Force has a lot of power in this town,” Goldman says, as if reading his mind. “But there’s a lot of power in other places as well. So much power here! And it’s scattered pretty well. Could be better, but there are some checks and balances still. All kinds of checks and balances. We’ll get our chance to manipulate them.”

  To be sociable McPherson agrees. And they talk in an amiable way for another hour. He enjoys it, really. Still, on his way back to his hotel room, his mood is black. A retired Air Force colonel for a judge! For Christ’s sake!

  A well-dressed woman gets into the elevator with him. Perfume, bright lipstick, glossy hair, backless yellow dress. And alone, at this hour. McPherson’s eyes widen as it occurs to him that she is probably one of the Crystal City prostitutes, off to fulfill a contract of her own. Stiffly McPherson returns her smile as she gets off. Just another military town.

  38

  Now Jim looks forward to seeing Hana Steentoft, but he certainly can’t count on it happening; she doesn’t seem quite as interested in getting together. Some nights she’s gone before Jim dismisses his class. Other nights she has work to do; “Sorry,” she says diffidently, looking at the ground. “Got to be done.” Then again there are the nights when she nods and looks up briefly to smile, and they’re off to the pathetic Coffee Hut, to talk and talk and talk.

  One night she says, “They’ve given me a studio on campus. I’ve got to work in a while, but do you want to come see it first?”

  “Sure do.”

  They walk over dark paths, between concrete buildings lit fro
m below. Sometimes they get wedge views of the great lightshow of southern OC. Nobody else is on campus; it’s like a big video set, the filming completed. One of the concrete blocks holds Hana’s studio, and she lets them in. Lights on, powerful glare, xenon/neon mix.

  Piled against the walls are rows of canvases. Jim looks through one stack while Hana goes to work mixing some paints, in a harsh glare of light. The canvases are landscapes, faintly Chinese in style, but done in glossy blues and greens, with an overlay of dull gold for pagoda roofs, streams, pinecones, snowy mountaintops in the distance.

  The results are … odd. No, Jim is not immediately bowled over, he does not suffer a mystical experience looking at them. That isn’t the way it works. First he has to get used to their strangeness, try to understand what’s going on in them.… One looks totally abstract, great stuff, then Jim realizes he’s got it upside down. Oops. Real art lover here. Reversed, it’s still interesting, and now he understands to look at them as abstract patterns as well as mountains, forests, streams, fields. “Whoah. They’re wonderful, Hana. But what about—well, what about Orange County?”

  She laughs. “I knew you’d ask that. Try the stack in the corner. The short one.” Laughter. “It’s harder, of course.”

  Well. Jim finds it extremely interesting. Because she’s used the same technique, but reversed the ratios of the colors. Here the paintings are mostly gold: gold darkened, whitened, bronzed, left itself, but all arranged in overlapping blocks, squares tumbled one on the next in true condomundo style. And then here and there are moldlike blotches of blue or green or blue-green, trees, empty hillside (with gold construction machinery), parks, the dry streambeds, a strip of sea in the distance, holding the gold bar of Catalina. “Whoah.” One has an elevated freeway, a fat gold band across a green sky, bronzed mallsprawl off to the side. Like his place, under the freeway! “Wow, Hana.” Another abstract pattern, Newport harbor, with the complex bay blue-green, boats and peninsula gold blocks. “So how much do you charge for these?”