The Saints of David (The Jonah Trilogy Book 3)

by Anthony Caplan

  Chapter Nine - December 18, 2072

  The Harvey Sonora,

  Chilpamingo

  It started out in rain -- a morning squall in our faces as we chugged across the chop in the community outboard running into Deer Harbor. Deven and I carried backpacks. Mine was an old LL Bean inbuilt frame rucksack and Deven’s a Swiss Air Force survival carryall. Gretchen had her Guatemalan sisal sidebag. For identification Gretchen and I had our Repho biometric identity chips in our artifexes and Deven had a Communite Union Atlantique certificate of citizenship, a laminated piece of plastic that the girl at the travel desk in Deer Harbor had to look at from all sides, as she made him look into the scanner. The old confederated nation states were still recognized, but fewer and fewer people had the documentation.

  Gretchen and I had no problems. The rest of the travelers, all of them mainland Augments with studiously neutral facial sets, stared at us.

  We got lucky. We caught a ride on an eighteen-wheeler carrying lobster and seaweed extract to Montreal and hiked the rest of the way to the Norm Laveque Tubidport. Three old people on a quest, imagining that they could push their bodies like that. It was bound to end badly, but until then, there was no denying it was what I needed. I was going to find my father’s book. Deven was going to make contact with the leader of some millenarian cult on behalf of his libertarian friends, and Gretchen? Well, she was just along for the fun of watching the two of us, maybe restrain our worst impulses and delay our self-destruction. She suspected that we already saw giants where there were windmills.

  By late afternoon the sun was out, but there was still a winter bite in the air. The doors slid open. We watched people as we sat against the plate glass with wool caps pulled down low to keep the emosensors guessing. We boarded the early morning tubid to Tampa and then the noon hover full of government types and Augment graduate students on break to Cancun.

  We stalked out of the Cancun hover port in the steamy tropical dusk. Deven took over in the outback. The pockmarked mud road was nauseating, with its unfamiliar, sulphuric smells of cooking food and dead, rotting fish. Groups of slumbering men and women slouched against the storefronts and decrepit hulks of old cars. Deven knew what to say. Gretchen and I stayed on his shoulder as we went down the street. He inquired with vendors and petty officialdom. After about an hour of this we were at the edge of the built-up part of the strip and still had nothing to show for our efforts. I remembered I had something, some old app on the artifex for regional language variations. I offered to help, but Deven snapped his fingers and smiled indulgently. No need, he insisted with this wordless gesture. I indulged his desire to live in a pure, revolutionary, fantasy world of conquest and adventure.

  I backed off and exchanged glances with Gretchen. Travel was wearying for both of us. We were not youngsters and as full of hope as we once had been. We had to bite off any urges to impose, to lead. It was so hard for adults of a certain generation as Gretchen and I. Deven, the son of a Geordie steamfitter, had been up and down, around the Silk Road from Tartarstan to Venice as a derivatives specialist out of Hong Kong, and so he had a much better time sidling by slantwise into the tropical night and trusting in the outcomes. Despite the language barriers, Deven seemed to be making progress with a woman at a stall. She was selling out-of-date artifex parts and cheap 3D printers. I inspected a few of the stock pieces and noted the serial numbers and dates of manufacture. I was a stickler for detail.

  She had a scarf covering her head, silver jewellery and a nondescript cotton shift. She spoke some English. She looked like she might have some counterfeit Augment timeframe inserts. Which is why Deven might have felt some initial connection. Anyway, she knew of the legendary Shavelson, the collector of antiquities, and she promised she could deliver us to him. There was only the problem of government roadblocks. We would wait while she checked with her contacts to see what could be done.

  Deven explained all this to us as we ate fish falafels at a stand about a hundred yards down the road and waited for the last of the day’s light to fade. Storefronts were beginning to blaze in green and blue lights.

  “But why the government roadblocks?” asked Gretchen. I was wondering the same thing. Deven had said that Shavelson was a type of home grown intellectual who had amassed an amazing collection of rare books that had slipped the Augment’s grasp. As a book collector he also had legions of followers. It was hard to believe. But I trusted Deven. If anyone knew of my father’s works or where to find them, it would be Shavelson. But I hadn’t thought we were expecting trouble with the representatives of the Azueto regime.

  When the woman returned, she was nervous, with a heavier cast to her face. I was the closest to her. She talked past me to Deven. I watched her face. It was clear to me that she did not believe whatever she was saying. Deven nodded, his eyes slitted in the dark. She turned, and Deven took our arms in his large hands.

  “She wants us to follow,” he said.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “I have no idea,” said Deven.

  “Deven. This is a little strange. Stranger than we thought. Are we in some sort of trouble?” I asked.

  “Not that I know of,” said Deven. “We’ll be prepared to walk away if we have to. Come on, then.”

  “If we can,” said Gretchen.

  She took us inside a shuttered storefront by a side door, which she unlocked with a key card. It was essentially an old Mom and Pop variety store with basic processed foods and consumer products. The shop smelled of camphor, mold and the stale byproducts of greens, plantains, and sweet pastries on the dusty shelves. In the basement was an empty storeroom with naked metal beams holding up the concrete floor above us. The fluorescent lights were on full glare. She motioned to us to sit on the floor. We did so, staying close in the middle of the floor in the empty room. Then she went back up the stairs and closed the hatch behind her. We could hear the lock slide in, and then her footsteps grew faint.

  “I’m so tired,” said Gretchen. I looked at her face. It was sunken and lined with worry in the bright, unrelenting glare, and I felt sorry I had dragged her into this. Her eyes searched mine for answers but found none. God only knew what was ahead -- if we were lucky, some awful, sleepless night waiting for a ride to a place we didn’t even know and a man we weren’t sure existed. For the slim chance of finding a trace of my father's book, a volume I’d never read and of which I had only the slightest recollection. My father had said it contained his best work. He was not a proud man. We’d been close, but not cloying with needs and petty grievances. I had always felt he was holding something back from me, some aspect of his past, our past, a clue to the story that made me unknowable to myself -- and my father the holder of all the keys. The search for the book was really a search for a picture of myself to replace the ragged version I used to keep myself together. It was not quixotic; it was necessary. Still, I could not avoid the growing sense of guilt and panic at where we had ended up in the name of my personal mission. But then she smiled, and Deven sat with us.

  “This is what it’s like when you’re on the trail of something big," he whispered. "I recognize it. It starts off like this every time. An empty room and a long wait, a boring expanse of nothing.”

  “And then you realize that’s all there is,” I said.

  “You're a man of little faith, Ricky,” said Deven. “This could be it," he said. "Shavelson is sure to know of it. What’s the title?”

  “Aviation and the Long Night," I said. "Could you get us out of here if we had to make a break?”

  “Of course. There hasn’t been a brig that could hold me. But that’s not the point. The true escape. Isn’t that what you’re after, buddy? Isn’t that what you gave up when you gave up the Augment? Freedom from illusion. The notion that someone called Ricky is sitting there cross-legged feeling tired and anxious and wondering out loud why he ever left the comforts of Maine.”

  “All right, ” I said agreeably. “Although I didn’t give up the Augment willingly. They
sabotaged the implant. But say we are at the crossroads, stuck in some stagnant backwater. Which way is the true salvation? Neurosis or dream? West or East?”

  “Exactly. The choice is emerging, isn’t it?”

  “And always, I suppose, there is a moment like this where the choice is made fresh.”

  “Yes. And I say don’t be trapped in the vain pursuit of comfort.”

  “No,” I agreed.

  “Can I interrupt you two?” said Gretchen. “Can you hear something above us? Or is that just me?”

  Deven and I cocked our heads trying to hear something. But the only sound was the dim buzzing of traffic out on the mud road. It reminded me of something, but I couldn’t put my finger on the exact memory. I hadn’t had a good night’s sleep for several days. As I had confessed the night of Deven’s fog-shrouded arrival, I had always considered the possibility that this book, my father’s legacy to the world, would speak especially to me and contain some truth, some insight. I had never escaped the feeling that my life was out of synch. Deven was one of the few that knew. It was a long-standing feature of my inner life, which I rarely shared. Most of my life I had felt imprisoned, trapped in the illusion that Deven and I had just now been joking about, the illusion of existing as an entity in a singular moment, independent of the stream of life, waiting for the comfort of death.

  Maybe an hour later, it was hard to tell as we sat there in our separate realms and wasted slowly away, the door bolt slid away and the stall woman shouldered it open. I saw the side of her face and recognized her by the silver bangles she wore around her head. Stepping inside the crawl space behind her was a youngish man with black, thinning hair and a large bulbous nose. He looked hungry. His red-rimmed eyes gathered information without reflecting sympathy of any kind for us.

  “You are where from?” asked the man.

  “New Albion,” replied Deven quickly.

  “And you are journalists?” said the man.

  “Yes, that’s what we are,” I said. “We’re doing a piece, an investigative piece on the book salesman, David Shavelson. For the, the New Albion Writer’s Union.” I looked at Deven quickly with as much conviction as I could. I had a hunch that he was right. We were on the trail of something big, an important discovery.

  “Very well,” said the man. “But getting into the territory of this man, el Santo, is very difficult. The cartels and the government, my friends. They regulate all the roads going into the city of David. It is a valley with one road in and out. I can arrange it for you to go in. It is expensive, but there is one other option. It is less expensive, but very dangerous. From the North. You must return the way you came and come back through the mountains of Ajusco. That way no people is regulating so far. There is a small of traffic between Ajusco and the Rio Grande. There are no other ways than the two, the northern roads and the government.”

  “How much?” asked Deven, seeming to be insulted by the man’s unneeded verbiage.

  ”I can do it for five thousand Republican dollars transferred to a bank account in Merida,” he said, quickly, without hesitation.

  “No way,” said Deven.

  “Hey listen,” I said, cutting in. I wanted to get the party flowing. I had that much in my bank account at home.

  “I’ll do it,” I said.

  “No way, mate. No you won’t. I won’t let that happen. That’s insane. You will not do that,” said Deven.

  “Well. I’ve got two thousand. Will that do it?” I asked the red-eyed man.

  “Five thousand, my friend,” he said.

  I didn’t want to delay at this crossing. The money was meaningless to me. I was getting no younger. With no prospects for genetic remediation, I had one desire -- to find my father’s book and pass it on to Corrag and her children, wherever they were.

  “Two and a half before. And after we come out, you have the rest. I assume the way out is the same way in. You can track us. I’m sure the government friends of yours have the sensory ability,” I said.

  “They can do anything they want. But David right now has the momentum. You see? His city grows every day more presencia. Nobody can touch him. Okay? Let me help you with the transfer.”

  He directed me on my artifex, which I rolled out to the vending tab he gave me, open to some generic fill-in page with blank boxes asking for the account details. I was suspicious.

  “What is this?” I asked. “I’ll log into my account instead. The New Albion Coast and Lighthouse Administration. That’s where my paychecks come from.”

  “We have to wait for the satellite. I will fill in the information and then we can make for the contact by upload. It’s slow but it’s all we can do, eh? Someday we will have the satellite from the Repho for the Augment links,” said the man. He held out his hand for the artifex.

  “No, I don’t think so. I’d rather do it myself.”

  Deven looked at me affirmingly. Not to be trusted, his look said.

  “Okay. We will hope for the satellite. I will be here again very, very soon. In the meantime, you will hope,” said the man, taking back his hand.

  ”For what?” asked Deven.

  “It’s for your own safety.”

  “Well, then,” said Deven. “Could we have water?”

  “I can do that,” said the man. He turned to the woman with black hair and earrings and said something to that effect. The two of them walked back up the stairs. They slid the bolt closed on the door. We looked at each other in dismay. We had been so close, but now we had to be patient once again. We had no choice.

  “I can’t believe you agreed to pay that amount. Five thousand dollars,” said Deven.

  “Look, you’re the one who’s always saying it’s only money, right? We can get in to Shavelson,” I said. “Sounds like he’s got more than a bookstore," I added.

  "My people were right,” said Deven.

  “Yes, it does seem that way, doesn’t it?”

  “I guess we weren’t going anywhere. It sounds like we have some chance of making it in. Whatever that means,” said Gretchen.

  “Could be a scam. Could be he’s hacking us,” said Deven.

  “Look, we’ll see,” I said. I couldn’t explain to him just then how I was feeling, how this all seemed like my last shot at creating an arc of connection in the one life I’d been granted. Gretchen sensed what I was going through. I wanted this to work. It was clear that Deven considered me a liability in accomplishing the project, originally mine but now all of ours.

  “Easy, you two,” said Gretchen. “We can’t start bickering at the first roadblock. How’s that going to work? You’re making me sad. We’re just thirsty and hungry. As soon as we can, once we’re out of here, why don’t we get a bite to eat? Any sort of place and then check into a nice, comfy hotel for the night, use some of the money for that. How about that, Ricky? We can splurge, have some access time and then tomorrow continue on to the book guy, Shavelson.”

  “The Saint. Yes. Absolutely,” said Deven, trying out a lighter tone. “After all, it’s Ricky’s money. He can do what he wants with it. Just that in my experience once these crooks feel like they have you, they tend to want to keep you on the edge, off balance for more.”

  “I don’t have any more,” I said.

  “Then how are you planning on paying for your Aviation and the Long Night?” asked Deven.

  “I didn’t want to tell you before, but I’ve decided that no matter what, whether we find my father’s book, I’m going to stay there. Freelance. He'll need some help. I’m a writer. He sells books. He’s developing an alternative market for ideas.”

  “You have absolutely no idea what you’re getting into,” said Deven.

  “Damn, Ricky,” said Gretchen.

  It seemed like I had dropped a bomb. But it made perfect sense to me. I was going to help the Saint out. Assuming he was legitimate and not some double agent, an illusion set up by the Repho as a trap for well-meaning Creatives such as me, suckered once again into believing there was a chan
ce, a middle way between the Augment and the wild.

  Deven and Gretchen made no further attempt to dissuade me. The conversation died. Again we drifted on our separate stars. Even my breathing pained me, as if the air was reproaching my ribs for being in the way. But talking, spilling my secret plans, was shutting the door in their faces. There was no return. Going home to the island was out of the question. In my mind there could be nothing worse than reversing course.

  Several hours passed. I don’t know how many -- I had stopped consulting my artifex with its constant mapping of time as we apportion it across the grid of our quantum world; and the buzzing of the LCD bulbs in the overhead fixtures was blotting out my curiosity about anything. The woman reopened the door. This time there was a young boy with her, a teenager. They both smiled. They had good news. She had bottles of water. The young boy opened them for us, doing us a service. We took them greedily and drank. The sweat on my hands mixed with the condensation on the bottle. I thought it might slip, so I used two hands to hold it. Like a nursing lamb, I tugged at the water. Then the woman’s face turned cold. Once we had been given water it was time to get what she needed. She handed me the same rollout screen as before, but this time there was an open window with a login icon.

  “The satellite?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  I logged into my account. There were more than seven thousand dollars in available funds. I was more pecunious than I realized. This was getting real now. Did I know what I was doing? With some foreboding, I looked at her. She watched me carefully. Deven and Gretchen stared at me from the opposite wall, united in their disavowal of my recklessness.

  “Where does he want me to transfer?”

  She handed me an old, blank, rumpled sheet of paper with some typing on it and took the screen while I read. Ercules Camaroncillo, it said, and listed an account number with Banco Santander, Plaza de la Revolución, Merida.