Finally, about two-thirds of the way through the book, I came to a couple of underlined sentences—the last passage Doug MacDougall had marked out. The words were below a photograph of a rock covered in some sort of bright yellow growth which, given the title of the book, was presumably a lichen or moss. If I had any doubt these were the words which made such an impact on Doug, it was dispelled by the three exclamation marks penciled at the end of the underscored passage.
Annie must have been a little short-sighted because she asked, “What does it say?”
I read out the passage: “Immaculata solaris, pictured above, has no common name because it is not commonly known, living only in the most extreme of alpine environments. Studies show it to be remarkable due to more than its vivid color and hardiness, for it is not part of any food chain—it does not feed on anything but sunlight, and nothing feeds on it.”
“That’s it?” Annie said, her bafflement matching my own.
I answered with a nod after looking at the next page; there was a photo of something else, and no more underscoring.
I turned back to the photo of immaculata solaris, and re-read the words beneath it. If they had any great significance, I couldn’t see what it was.
“Does that mean any more to you than it does to me?” Annie asked.
I shook my head and said, “I’m sorry.”
“Where do we go from here?”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her I was at a dead end, that this was my only lead and I couldn’t follow it any further. So I said, “I’m not sure, Annie.”
She glanced at her i-band and said, “I better get back—I’ve got a class in five minutes.” She stood up and I did likewise. “Do you want to take Dad’s copy of the book with you?” she asked.
I didn’t see the point, but returning it to her would be an admission I was giving up. Annie MacDougall deserved better than that, as did her father. So I took the book back to the station house with me.
Paula looked at her i-band pointedly. My lunch hour had probably lasted 61 minutes. “You’re late, Travis,” she said.
That was it: all my frustration at the lead having petered out, and my bewilderment at the change in Paula’s behavior between yesterday and today, boiled over. “How come I’m back to being ‘Travis’?” I asked. “What happened to ‘Ben’?”
“It’s not appropriate.”
“So why was it appropriate for a little while yesterday? What’s changed?”
She didn’t answer.
“Are you going to pretend nothing happened in the library, that there wasn’t some sort of chemistry between us?”
Her silence and inability to look me in the eye told me this was exactly what she intended doing.
“Damnit, Paula, how can you be so cold about it?”
“Because I’m a Number,” she said, bitterly, “and my head tells me love is an illusion, a weakness.”
“So how come there was no scorn or mockery in the way you looked at me yesterday when I was talking about Jen, or when you saw the way I’m starting to feel about you?”
“Because my heart tells me something very different from my head, and for a little while I listened to my heart,” she said. “Have you any idea how confusing it is to desperately want something, and yet at the same time believe that what you want isn’t worth having?”
“Paula, have you ever been in love?” I asked.
She shook her head.
“Then how can you believe it isn’t worth having if you’ve never experienced it? I don’t understand that.”
“That’s the whole point. You can’t understand, because you’re not a Number. You don’t think the same way we do. You’re not genetically hard-wired like we are. You have an open mind.”
“But you came close to believing in love yesterday. I know you did.”
“Maybe being away from the community helped me forget who I am, what I am.”
“Maybe it let you be yourself. Maybe for the first time in your life you were starting to find out who you really are.”
“It’s probably just that my surroundings were so unfamiliar they preoccupied my head and left my heart free to do its own thing… And during the storm, when I saw how much you cared about Jen, when I realized you were starting to care about me… I don’t know. All I know is I felt like a different person for a little while yesterday. I felt like I imagine a Name must feel.”
“And now?”
“Now I feel foolish when I remember yesterday.”
And to think that until 24 hours ago I’d looked on Paula as being a Class-A ice maiden, a woman who was so together she wouldn’t come apart in any circumstances. Especially not a set of circumstances like this. “Look,” I said, “don’t you think it’s at least worth giving things a—”
“These things never work out between Names and Numbers. We both know they always end badly.”
“But you’re not like other Numbers.”
“And I’m not like a Name. I’m neither one thing nor the other, but I’m probably more like a Number than a Name, Travis… Ben. I don’t even know what to call you. I just know there’s no chance of things working out.
“You don’t know that. You can’t know that.”
“What I know is that listening to my heart, the way Names seem to, leaves me horribly confused. Listening to my head and trying to forget about my heart, like I’d always done until yesterday, makes life a whole lot simpler.”
“It might make life simpler, but I’m willing to bet it also makes it a lesser thing in some way. In every way. A pleasure’s more than doubled if it’s shared, Paula, and a burden is more than halved. Jen taught me that.
“Then I hope you find another Jen.”
“That’s not how it works.”
“How does it work?”
“I don’t know, I just know it does work; not always, but when it does it makes life come alive. I saw your life come alive yesterday, and it was a truly amazing thing to watch. And I felt my own life come alive, in a way I believed it never would again.”
For a moment I thought she was going to reach out for me, hold me, maybe kiss me. In that moment her eyes truly were windows into her soul, and I saw a longing as intense as my own.
But the moment passed, and her eyes became cold and so did her voice when she said, “I don’t want to talk about this again, Travis. Not ever.” She swiftly changed the subject, pointing to the book I carried and saying, “Didn’t MacDougall’s daughter want to read it?”
I was so preoccupied by what we’d been talking about moments earlier that I couldn’t work out what she meant now.
“You’ve brought the book back with you; did Annie MacDougall not want to—” she was interrupted by a call.
If the call had come a couple of minutes later—if I’d had a chance to explain to Paula about the book, to read out the last passage Doug MacDougall underlined—it would have changed everything. But the call came in before I could answer her question, and seconds later we were hurrying up in the lift to level seven, where a row had turned violent. It was between a Name and a Number, of course. It made Paula’s point more eloquently than any words, but she didn’t give me an ‘I told you so’ look.
For once she looked like she’d rather have been wrong than right.
When we got back to the station house Paula did what I think of as the ‘paperwork,’ even though paper is way too precious to be used for administrative tasks and everything’s processed electronically. I suppose I’ve just seen one Olden Days cop show too many.
While Paula spoke to her screen, I used mine to check back on Doug MacDougall’s contributions to The Search. I knew I wasn’t likely to turn up any new leads, just add to the validity of the lead that had dried up, but I’d nothing better to do. And besides, I take a pride in never giving up until I have to. I think the fact we can’t match Numbers in terms of logic drives us to outdo them in other areas, like sheer dogged determination. Most of the time all it leads to is weariness and fru
stration for us, and a mocking sneer from them. But occasionally it pays off and we get to sneer at them.
It turned out Doug MacDougall had scanned in over fifty books, all of them about plants—and not one was input in a single continuous session. The most likely explanation for the absence of any digitized chapters from Lichens and Mosses of the World seemed to be that, for some reason, Doug had decided not to scan it in. But that didn’t ring true. The pencil marks indicated he was writing a thesis about it, and he wouldn’t submit a thesis without scanning the book in to give it context. Another explanation was that he’d decided to digitize the book in one long session. But that didn’t ring true, either, because he’d never worked that way before, not once in over fifty contributions to The Search, and people tend to be creatures of habit.
The only other thing I could think of was that for some reason there had been a delay in processing his latest entries. I did another search on Lichens and Mosses of the World to see if the database had been updated since I last checked.
It had, but not in the way I’d expected.
There was no record of the book’s existence at all. Not even in the ISBN catalogue.
Either I’d uncovered some sort of conspiracy, or I was making something out of nothing. Trying to stay calm, I weighed up the evidence. The first time I’d searched for the book, when I was just looking to get a copy of it to read, I’d queried by the author’s name because it was shorter than the title. Perhaps there was some fault in the cross-referencing, so the book only came up if you keyed in the author, not the title. It seemed unlikely, but more likely than the other explanation: that someone had removed all reference to the book’s existence—and ended Doug MacDougall’s life—because of a yellow moss that wasn’t even part of any food chain.
So I queried my screen using the author’s name.
Nothing.
Not only had no book by that title ever been entered into the database, no such book had ever been published.
So how come there was a copy of it sitting on my desk?
I tried a different tack, concentrating on the plant itself. If Lichens and Mosses of the World contained the key to whatever was going on, which seemed increasingly likely, then the book itself was merely a container, and the actual key was the golden yellow substance in the photo. I riffled through the pages and stopped at the one with the picture of immaculata solaris. I read the underlined words again: Immaculata solaris, pictured above, has no common name because it is not commonly known, living only in the most extreme of alpine environments. Studies show it to be remarkable for more than its vivid color and hardiness, for it does not feed on anything but sunlight, and nothing feeds on it.!!!
The important thing had to be the fact that immaculata solaris was unique—and the properties that made it so. Over and over again I read the same fifteen or twenty words: it is not part of any food chain—it doesn’t feed on anything but sunlight, and nothing feeds on it.
When I knew the words by heart and there was no point reading them any more I turned my attention to the accompanying photograph. But all I saw was a splash of pretty color on a dull gray rock.
Wondering if the words and picture would mean any more to Paula than they did to me—and hoping the attempt to work out their significance would draw us together, as the search for the book itself had—I looked over the top of my screen at her and said, “Does this mean anything to you?”
The voice that answered me came from my hear-ring, not my partner: a ‘Rusher’ was running amok in the gym.
We hurried out of the station house.
While we waited for the elevator Paula said, “What were you going to ask, Travis?”
If she’d called me ‘Ben’ I would have told her. But I was so irked by the cold ‘Travis’ that, to annoy her, I just said, “Never mind.” It was pathetic and childish, I know. My only excuse is that I’d no idea how significant those underlined words truly were.
I’d no idea that Doug MacDougall hadn’t been exaggerating when he said they changed everything.
CHAPTER 15
WHEN THE WIND HAD MANY NAMES
I DID SOME MORE STARING AT PAGE 127 OF LICHENS and Mosses of the World when I got home, but before long my thoughts drifted to Paula. I considered calling her to ask for help. Okay, what I really mean is I wanted to call her, and the mystery moss was just an excuse. But she’d see right through me. She’d hear the longing in my voice and, if we met up, she’d see it in my eyes, confirming her belief that love was just another word for desperate, pathetic need.
Maybe she had a point. After all, I missed Jen desperately, and I had to admit there was something pathetic about how much I longed for Paula to open up to me again the way she had while we sheltered from the storm.
Just as I was at a dead end with Doug MacDougall’s murder, so I felt caught in a hopeless Catch 22 with Paula: it would take a lot of love to short-circuit the ‘hard-wiring’ that made her inherently predisposed to interpret passion as need—and yet the more she saw I loved her, the needier I’d appear.
One intractable problem would have been bad enough; two at once was too much. My head was starting to hurt, so I put Doug’s book away and reached for one that would help me forget about his death, and about Paula.
The book I grabbed was More Than Seven Wonders by Calum Tait. I let the words and pictures of the long dead travel writer take me away from my own world—with its soul-destroying blacks and whites and shades of gray, its confines and sterility—to a time when the world was a bigger, brighter place and all of it was worth seeing. Although I’ve read the introduction a hundred times, as often as not when I pick up the book I read those first two pages again, because the words which fill them strike a symphony of chords with me:
If the only traveling you do is along the path of least resistance it can seem like there are only seven wonders in the world. When each day is spent going through the motions, going to the same places and seeing the same faces, life is a lesser thing in some way, in every way; security becomes stagnation and a house becomes a prison.
So what other paths are there to follow? Well, how about these: the Silk Road, the Salt Route, the Frankincense Trail; the Way of a Thousand Kasbahs, the Royal Road of the Incas, the Pacific Crest Trail.
What about traveling back in time, following infamous footsteps and seeing fabled sights in far-off lands…
Or going wherever people are making the most of the present: filling a diary with the dates when people in different parts of the world gather to celebrate the good things in life, then turning the pages and going to the places to find out what form the festivals take; not just being a spectator but adding your life to the celebrations—dancing each night away until the music stops or until you drop, not caring where the dance takes you or whether all that it makes you is tired in the end…
Or just picking the name of a wind that sounds enchanting and exotic: the khamsin or sirocco, the chinook, the mistral, the bora—finding out where it blows and going where it goes; if it’s a warm wind walking into it, if it’s a cool breeze keeping it behind you, never knowing where the next day will find you or worrying about that any more than the wind does.
I felt a choke in my throat at the thought that even those old, romantic sounding winds were gone now, their names all but forgotten, replaced by an oppressive, toxic breeze and periodic superstorms that would flatten you rather than carry you to the four corners of the world. How could the people who went before me destroy something as ephemeral as the wind, something that was everywhere and nowhere and epitomized freedom and restlessness? What chance was there for anything else if even the breath of Mother Nature and her wordless, timeless whispering had failed to survive? How could people whose ancestors had the capacity to come up with such musical sounding names as khamsin and sirocco have lost so much of their soul? How had they gained so much knowledge and yet lost so much wisdom?
Those were as baffling as the other questions I’d faced that day, so I turned ba
ck to the book.
Learning a little more with each of these days about different lifestyles, what people have in common and what makes them unique… Listening to the rhythm of the language they speak, the music they sing to, the music they dance to, the background sounds that accompany their lives—and when you leave each place taking with you some things worth more than any material possessions that money can buy: an understanding of the people you’ve met and the world they live in, and a deeper understanding of yourself.
I wondered how Calum Tait had felt—a man who obviously hadn’t sold his heart and soul, who hadn’t bought into the bargain that material things were worth destroying the world for. I wondered if he’d had any idea how quickly the world he was describing would be destroyed; if he’d had any notion that he’d be among the last generations who would be able to see it. And I wondered if he’d experienced any guilt at the fact that, in seeing the world, he’d helped deny to others the very things he so profoundly appreciated himself; the planes he’d criss-crossed the skies in did their bit to add to the lethal pollution.
After a wistful sigh I turned to the first chapter. The photo accompanying it was of a white monument in the shape of a stylized ship’s prow with a line of seafarers on it, each looking to the far horizon. The monument was in Lisbon, and the chapter, called Voyages of Discovery, was about the spirit that had moved those men as powerfully as the wind that filled the sails of their ships.
Imagine waking up one morning and hearing that a new continent had been discovered. Think of all the wonders such vastness might contain: plateaus and plains; rivers, waterfalls and great mountain chains; mighty civilizations, fallen empires, myths and legends that endured. In their wildest dreams could Columbus and those who followed in his wake have foreseen mountains the shape of Sugar Loaf or a river the length of the Amazon; the stepped pyramid of Kukulcan, the tale of feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, the legend of El Dorado?
Imagine what it would be like to come across such things for the first time. Imagine what it would be like to discover a continent. You just about can imagine it with a monument like Lisbon’s one to The Discoverers beside you, with so much history behind you, and an open horizon ahead of you. There’s something about distant horizons—they do to the imagination what love does to the heart.
Tomorrow’s World Page 17