“Magnussen-Yaeger sounds strange, here in the woods. Look. A favor?”
“What?”
“Stay a bit longer.”
“Why?” The wicked witch flitted past.
“I’ll take you now if you want. But if you don’t mind, an hour would do.”
“Well—”
“I’ll bribe you. Another beer. Or Scotch? I don’t have soda. You hungry?”
Too hot for appetite. Beer had turned ache to weak sociability. “Scotch would be nice. And water, just a little.”
She examined his face again and said nothing.
“My elbow and I make such good company?”
“Not very.” She smiled but to herself. “I didn’t mean it like that.” Her gaze returned. “You’ll see soon, maybe.”
“A puzzle?”
“Kind of.”
And what could an hour of puzzling hurt? Spent with insects’-rights Sarah. She left. Trying to seduce him? Too late. Parties with new people, bar pick-ups, it’d been years since any of that attracted him, even before Lynn. The presence of others, women and men, had become off-putting, Except for Bobbie. More and more he enjoyed his own company. Carney wasn’t uninteresting, and who knew him better than himself.
•
“You, possibly?”
“Glimpses, Lola.” I try to search out memories of, and then be omnipresent for, important events of the story. All-knowing, all the moments all the time, is impossible. “Glimpses.”
•
Sarah returned with a tray and set it on the table. Scotch, two glasses, a bowl with ice, a jug. “It’s cold. It comes from a hundred seventy-seven feet down.” She poured Scotch.
“Thanks. Enough.” He picked up the jug and poured a little water. “Cheers.” He sipped. And what was its coliform count?
“Now we wait.”
For a few minutes they sat. Silence is hard with somebody else. Way easier when you’re alone. Carney asked, “You live here all the time?”
“Where else?”
A minute later: “Always have?”
For a while it seemed she wouldn’t answer. “I’ve been away. But I grew up around here, at the Grange.”
“Where I’m staying.”
“There.”
He sipped thin Scotch. From the corner of his eye, he watched. She held her Scotch in one hand, the other grasped the arm of the chair. Her face was in profile, a bit of upturned nose, brow half covered with mussed hair. A woman wanting the silence of Carney’s company. Original. “And this cabin, did you build it?”
“Yes.”
“You carted all this in, and a construction crew?”
“Walls are pre-fab. A helicopter landed it on the lake seven winters ago. I put it together.”
“By yourself?”
“You have trouble believing that.”
“It looks like a big job.”
“Took me three summers.” She resumed staring out, and sipped Scotch.
They sat for ten minutes, fifteen. He bet himself he could avoid looking at his watch. He won. Though invited to her parlor he hadn’t left the porch. A bathroom would be nice, too much beer to sweat out. “There a toilet in there?”
“On the right. To pee, anywhere outside.”
“I’ll use the night.”
“Put on some repellent.”
To hell with it, he’d go in. But that felt like defeat. He spread the goo on his arms and face. “What is this vile stuff?”
“Garlic, chili peppers, onions, corn oil.”
“No vinegar?”
She handed him the flashlight. “Don’t take your time.”
Careful to let no creature in he stepped outside, gingerly in bare feet. He peed, paused, turned off the lamp, stared up. Heat haze hid all but a few big stars. He returned. A moth got in.
She chose a net with a four-inch diameter rim, stalked the animal, snapped it up beside the lamp, outside, release, back in quick. “That was an ilia underwing.”
“I can even see not killing moths but, be serious, mosquitoes?”
“You talk a lot, don’t you?”
“Just curious.”
“Is it necessary to kill anything?”
“Mosquitoes bite me.”
“They want a bit of blood. Call it symbiosis.”
“And the whirring that keeps me awake? And the itch after they’ve got me? Come on.”
“What, a nice man like you buying the old eye-for-eye philosophies? Kill or be killed?”
The woman was a nut, yes. And his only way back to the Grange. He glanced at the couch. Comfortable enough for a night’s sleep? Anyway, no mosquitoes.
“You a carnivore?”
He laughed. “I’m not a vegetarian, no.” From somewhere a shred of memory: that roses, when cut, scream. “And you, you kill plants? You don’t hear the tiny cry for help just as you let the sweet little string bean fall into boiling water?”
“I cause as little pain as possible.”
“So? What do you eat?”
She shrugged. “Vegetables. Grains and seeds, they drop in the normal way of things.”
“And the future life of seeds? What about baby plants?”
Her stare through the screen looked weary, with the conversation, with Carney. “Like your own seeds. You don’t make babies each time you expel semen.”
He laughed. “Then beer’s good. And Scotch. All that barley, those hops.”
She drank her glass empty. “It’s good.” A long accusatory silence. “Look, I fly in planes, they spew down contamination. They do if I’m in them or down here. I drive a Jeep and poison pours out. But the idea is, maximize life for the living and minimize pain. Okay?”
Some of Theresa’s lessons, Carney figured, were planted deep. “You atoning for something? What’d you do”—a thin darkness rose in her cheeks as he went on—“pour kerosene into anthills when you were fifteen and set them on fire?” Carney had.
She stared straight ahead. After a while she said, “I’ve taken a vow.”
Vows were private and Carney let it go. “You still want me to wait?”
“You like to talk. You don’t like to argue.”
“Look—”
“A few more minutes. Whatever happens. Or not. Then I’ll drive you back.”
“Okay.” Not another word.
They sat. Her breathing grew audible, a rhythm set in. Carney felt himself go sleepy. Don’t drift away—
He barely felt the beginning but the middle rumbled him to his feet. Except standing was unnatural. Not whisky. The ground itself, a heave, a roll, another, rattling, and vibrations, less, quivers, a tremble, tiny, then still.
Her eyes were misty. A release of breath, a hiss: “Bastards.”
Eight
TERRAMAC
1.
The explosion smithereened away a wall. With it went the small passageway. Necessary, Yak had explained. Johnnie had let it go, couldn’t admit to Yak that Benjie might be in there. He stood behind the screen and felt the echo-waves of the blast die away. No Benjie in that passage now.
Dust settled. They stared through it. “Damn!” From Yak.
“What?”
“You can see. Over there. Why it didn’t work.”
Johnnie saw. Bang Steele rarely erred, but this time two-thirds of the rock face remained. A fissure, visible now between the crumple of dynamited stone and the still-standing granite, had dampened the shock. No, no sonar probing would ever have computed a fissure to be back there.
“Okay,” Yak allowed, “tomorrow we’ll refigure, in the evening we get through.”
The plans for Terramac had been drawn up by the architect Harold Middleston Clark of Pretoria. Winner of the Wright Prize, the International Association of Architects Medal and the Linden Prize. Designer of the two-mile long Anabaptist Mall; of Chikoree Fair, plexiglass englobed, the world’s biggest amusement park, open for business every day and all night whatever the season; of Adirondack Stadium the convertible race track, football
and baseball complex with module seating and retractable roof; and of a two-page list of shopping centers from São Paola to Helsinki.
On first meeting, John Cochan said to the architect, “Do you believe, Mr. Clark, that unspoiled nature, a hundred or a thousand years ago, was kind? I don’t. Plague, famine, drought ran rampant. Yes we’ve overcome some of it, but wherever we’ve created cities we’ve brought in filth and degradation, we’ve introduced new miseries. Now wouldn’t it be fine to breathe city air and drink urban water without worry? A city without stink, grass without bugs crawling up your legs? No bugs, no poverty, no hooligans. Never too hot nor too cold. A cleansed space for human beings to live. Consider it, Harold. We’ll make it happen.”
Harold Clark understood. He himself had once proposed a dome-enclosed golf course and been near to smirked out of the Association. He told this to John Cochan.
Cochan smiled. “Harold, design it. The domes, the playgrounds, parks, and condos. The utilities, the transportation, the lakes and streams, the shops, the viewpoints, the power. The golf course too. All part of a whole.”
A handshake. Followed by legions of lawyers and reams of contracts. Clark brought in three dozen of his people, the brightest of tomorrow’s designers, for the city of marvels. A conscious choice not to go after Pei, Safdie, or Graves. Among many, Clark hired Bang Steele, New Zealand demolitions expert extraordinary.
First came satellite, aerial, and on-site ground inspection. From exhaustive research into and simulations of the past century’s climatic conditions, they calculated weather projections up to 2050, including forty-seven el niño/la niña anomalies. With sketches, print-outs, designs, models, and multidimensional imaging, Clark rendered tactile the details of Cochan’s surface vision, and his own. Simultaneously, following clandestine rock bores to reveal extensions and levels of the hollow space, he planned the entrenchment of Terramac’s great secret: a third of a mile below, a man-made yet natural realm, resplendent caverns of light where wise and healthy human beings, Jane and Jim, could laugh, love, hope, plan, conceive, and build: Underland. A neo-ecological urban workplace and pleasure ground, insect-free, element-safe, fully connected to yet withdrawn from the upper world, its beauty greater even than that of Summerclime.
Clark and Cochan had consulted daily. Variant projects grew on inspiration, inspiration multiplied on discovery. John and Harry felt themselves, if not gods, certainly titans. Only occasionally did they disagree.
For Clark, a single nuclear generator, small, perfectly clean, could power all Terramac.
But John mistrusted the nuclear factor.
“If it’s built right,” the architect claimed, “not cutting corners so public service councillors grow wealthy on tax-payer money, nuclear power’s safe.”
About nuclear power Cochan had read a great deal and feared yet more. Still, Clark was the expert here. A team of thirty conducted the study, six weeks of undivided research digitally assimilated. All information received, assumed, even speculated, was given its value, fed in, chewed up, analyzed. How to ensure forever that the core wouldn’t Three-Mile-Island Terramac into glowing radioactivity? They explored new systems, the about to be tried, the hypothetical. Vitrify the waste. Mix the garbage with molten glass, let it cool, bury it solid. Chill it with helium rather than water. Send it to Nunavut.
No, there’d always be waste, radioactive garbage already produced would take three ice ages to deactivate. Clark retreated: nuclear power and human safety, antagonists unto eternity.
They approached the premier of Quebec. Yes, sir, up north in the province a dam three times the height of Niagara Falls, producing five thousand megawatts of power, that’s five billion watts produced, monsieur, every second. A hundred times the power your Terramac needs, a thousand times. And if you expand, then for your Terramac our Quebec will build another dam, we’re projecting one this very minute, gargantuan, to power all New England, New York, it’ll dwarf that Hercules the James Bay project, soon we’ll have dams all over the place.
A shaking of hands. More lawyers, more contracts.
The world of potential buyers knew only this: that Terramac is Summerclime. Harry’s domes rising high above the whole of Summerclime were projected onto the public imagination, a natural yet pristine environment for homes of perfection. A countryside community built from the foundation up. Vegetable gardens and flowering trees, fruit trees pollinated by hand. A lake for swimming and fishing, wave machines to produce perfect surf, and water slides. A stream with trout breeding in balanced pH. The golf course beneath twenty-three interconnected bubbles. Woods for strolling amidst a multitude of genera each a consummate specimen to delight the mind, the eye and the nose in a temperate climate free of acid rain and snow. All beneath giant domes, and human-scale domes.
An econovum, 99.9999 percent insect-free. Cochan knew bugs were his phobia. He lived with and accepted this. So for Terramac, no mosquitoes, blackflies, ants at picnics, no slugs or beetles. No gnats, dragonflies, caddis-flies, blackflies. Bug-free fruit and vegetables. No drones, hornets, bumblebees, yellow-jackets. No springtails, no cockroaches. The occasional blue or yellow butterfly, imported, rendered sterile, no way to reproduce crawling things. No night moths. No locusts, grasshoppers, crickets, cicadas, termites, earwigs, spiders, maggots, mites, fleas, lice, or nits. No wasps.
But condominiums, shops, schools, a hospital. Airy work places, wired and Wi-Fied, cabled, digitally sustained. A small, well-paid, friendly police force. And soon, soon, within four years, the world would learn more: Terramac’s most closely guarded secret would be, literally, unearthed: Underland. For Jim and Jane of Summerclime, ease of transport to Underland, the urban miracle beneath the shelf, both a pleasure ground and a self-sufficient dwelling place, there to meet up with Homer and Helen, together delighting in their lives and controlling their destinies amidst the finest of eateries, the best in entertainment, the fascination of one another’s company.
Cochan knew too that Harry, Yak, and the others sometimes found his bug mania a bit extreme. But that’s how Terramac would be.
2.
Carney slept badly. Before sunrise he set out to catch a couple of breakfast trout. His elbow ached mightily. Humidity gummed his brain. And last night’s explosion? No warning, not from Sarah Magnussen-Yeager, not from his friend Mot. Road construction, blasting through granite, produced a fraction of yesterday’s force; demolition was a series of simultaneous much smaller bursts. Carney had razed enough buildings damaged by fire or quake to know how those detonations felt. “Well, what was it?” he’d asked Sarah.
“I don’t know,” she’d said. “An explosion.”
“How’d you know it was coming?”
“Most nights this last week. About this time.” Her head shook. “Way the biggest so far.” She got up. “I’ll drive you to your car.”
That was all she could tell him. When he arrived back the house was asleep, no one to talk to about the blast. Surely they’d felt it? Now, early morning, once more only he was awake.
The water of Gambade Brook had gone a range of ruddy yellows, from bile to brick. The level had risen four or five inches. Not even the hungriest rainbow could see beyond its snout. He’d met with roiling water often, this kind of surge usually following a flash mountain rainfall. But there’d been no rain nearby for over a week. And the flow smelled murkily chemical.
Last night’s mosquitoes were back. Ten more minutes and he gave up. He’d have kept casting if his elbow hurt less. A damn slingshot pebble.
He returned to the Grange and showered. From the window he saw, in the yard below, a tall skinny man in jeans and red T-shirt, splitting wood. Carney dressed, went down and out. The curving upswing of the tall man’s axe was smooth as a breeze, the slash a clean flow of steel from shoulder to blade. When the axe pulled him straight he stood an easy six-six.
He stopped his work, noted Carney, nodded. “You’re Carney.”
“Right. You’re Feodora’s husband?”
The tall man nodded. “Ti-Jean.” He went back to splitting. After a couple of minutes he stopped to wipe his forehead.
Carney said, “I tried for some trout this morning but the water’s gone muddy.”
Ti-Jean nodded again.
“It stank, too.”
Ti-Jean went back to splitting. After two logs he glanced Carney’s way. “Sulphur.”
“Where’s it come from?”
“Hell.”
Carney laughed.
“Terramac.” Ti-Jean’s lips tightened. “The blast.”
“Last night? That brought on the sulphur?”
“Maybe.” Ti-Jean’s measured way of speaking should have left Carney time to think, but it didn’t. He met Carney’s eye without blinking. “Or our demons.”
“Demons?”
His glance had gone elsewhere. With the axe-head he rolled a log close to.
Carney said, “I met your sister-in-law. While fishing.”
“Yep. She’s out there.”
“She made me wait for the blast.”
“She would.” Stooped, early forties, gangling till he swung the axe, Ti-Jean seemed to guard thoughts Carney might never fathom.
Or maybe Ti-Jean just wasn’t very bright. Except Theresa had praised him. “Why?”
Ti-Jean glanced toward the house. “Feodora’s about. She’ll get you breakfast.”
Dismissed. “Thanks.” He found Feodora in the kitchen.
“Morning, Carney. Ham and eggs to give you strength to take on Cochan.”
“Great.”
“Since you’re not seeing Cochan till this afternoon you better stay till tomorrow, have supper with us. My father enjoyed talking to you, hopes you’ll stay another day.”
Yes, Carney could do that. “I liked talking with him too.”
“It’s Milton mainly that holds us all together. He’s there, he’s quiet. Our glue.”
“I guess families need a little glue.” Very little from Carney. Just enough for Bobbie.
Feodora nodded. “It’s not simple for him.” She smiled. “Theresa’s not an easy woman.” She cracked an egg into a frying pan. “She wants you to kill this Terramac thing.”
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