“The support network? You tell me. Where do I figure in the Triangle’s larger scheme?”
“Brendan …”
“What?”
“I think that’s a question for you to answer.”
He felt blood drain from his face; his heart beat loudly in his ears. “No, I don’t think it is.”
“Loyalty doesn’t come into being spontaneously,” she said. “It’s a dividend paid out after long years of investment. Of constancy. Of being there for people.”
Brendan leapt to his feet, fists clenched. “So it’s my fault? I fucking—”
“Sit down.”
He sat, trembling with fury.
“Everybody makes choices,” she said. “Nobody is exempt from consequences, including me. Could I have written you more letters? Yes, but I let Chris carry that burden. Mea culpa. Could I have visited you? Not possible.”
He shook his head. “It doesn’t matter now.”
“We all have regrets,” she pressed, her voice taut, nearly breaking. “Every one of us does. The practical question is what to do today, in a world born of a past we can’t change.”
He couldn’t look at her. “Yeah.”
“What if you never learn what was really in the truck? What if you go the rest of your life never knowing whether the comrades you trusted broke their word, or if it was the Federales who set you up?”
She waited for him to speak. The silence between them grew.
“It could happen, Brendan. And if it does—so what? Either way you’ve got a life to put back together. A good, honest, generous life.” Allison sighed heavily. “I don’t know how to fix what hurt you. What I do know is it would be a terrible waste to reject everything you’ve done and been and believed just because a few people did you wrong. Even if it turns out they did you wrong in spades.”
THIRTEEN
Christopher fed his ticket through the fare gate and descended into the BART station. His days had been crammed full. There was work, of course. Suvali. The family dustup. Planning for GeneSynth. When he tallied his waking hours, though, he’d spent a plurality on Chagall’s manifesto. On his own writing project, strictly speaking.
He needed today’s online meet-up to shed some decisive light. Could he trust the saboteur or not? Christopher had approached Balboa Park station after a roundabout walk through City College. Evasive maneuvers were becoming second nature, but running circles to mitigate Chagall’s worries still left him feeling unclean.
Christopher boarded the first southbound train that rolled into the station and didn’t bother to take a seat. The doors opened at Daly City, and he stepped onto the platform. Thirty-eight minutes from the Triangle. It felt a world apart.
“This is a Millbrae train,” the operator’s disembodied voice repeated. “Please stand clear of the doors.”
The suburban expanse disoriented him. Even on a Sunday, acres of cars filled the asphalt moat surrounding the station. He tacked his way through the parked vehicles.
Christopher spotted Café Michelle easily. Its frilly awning looked like nothing else in the neighborhood of low-rent taquerias, appliance emporiums, and check cashing shops. Inside, the walls were hung with angular cityscapes painted by a local artist-of-the-month. A chalkboard menu featured Viennese specialties along with the usual espresso drinks. All in all, the place was trying way too hard to transcend its environment.
Ordering a café au lait, Christopher took a seat with his back to the room’s far corner and ran quickly through the drill. Linux boot, a spoofed MAC address, encrypted IRC client. He was thinking through the points he wanted to hit when Chagall logged in.
CHAGALL: What you sent is a great start.
Christopher set down his coffee and typed.
CHRIS: Including the sample paragraphs? The regretful tone doesn’t put you off?
CHAGALL: It’s on the mark. “Destruction is a failure to mobilize and negotiate.” We would like to see more on strategic selection of target.
CHRIS: That’s difficult. I don’t know what it is.
CHAGALL: And you can’t know, for reasons we’ve covered. Strategy can be explained without reference to specifics.
CHRIS: Maybe this is something you’ll need to tweak.
CHAGALL: Possible. But you could write generally. War against the biosphere is raging, our target is a weapon. Strategy is to reduce target’s capacity for damage, even if our methods have only limited scope and temporary effect.
CHRIS: Okay, I see what you mean. Bearing in mind we’re still not certain I’m writing this for you, can I ask if target is research or manufacturing?
CHAGALL: No. No description beyond early communications.
CHRIS: So all I know is crops/agribusiness.
CHAGALL: Better not to repeat across dialog borders. How hard would it be to write two versions, for science and for industry? We could choose A or B.
CHRIS: I’ll think about it.
CHAGALL: We’ll want to say the scope of action is limited because we’re targeting only one facility, this time. A regretful tone should not imply flagging resolution.
CHRIS: So you want a broad critique, one that will apply if extended to different facility types.
Christopher looked up from his screen. A hit of coffee, a glance around the room. No one seemed to be paying any attention to the guy in the corner with fast fingers. Chagall’s reply popped into view.
CHAGALL: Exactly. Which fits your—what to call it? Your flexible model for composition. Imply this might be first of many actions, but don’t say outright. At the same time, avoid argument that opposes scientific knowledge and development. Destruction of target should be acknowledged as a waste of resources that could have been used constructively. Science not the enemy, it’s a tool, etc. Enemies are hubris, greed, shortsightedness.
CHRIS: Our positions are consistent. Does something in what I sent raise a flag on this?
CHAGALL: Section on what we don’t know about biology. Humility is good. Attack on reason would not be helpful.
CHRIS: Understood. From my point of view, defrocking priests doesn’t compel pulling down temples.
CHAGALL: Not sure about the metaphor.
CHRIS: Biologists understand micromechanics, at expense of the big picture. Genetic engineers attempt to break apart and reassemble a foundation without knowing what it supports. Scientists are moving too quickly because they’re funded by profit-driven corporations. The funders have a free hand to impose risk on the rest of us because they also employ lobbyists, to thwart regulation.
CHAGALL: We’d want to keep it readable.
CHRIS: Sure. You mentioned Christian Right at one point. It’s important to appeal to a religious audience. Can invoke humility again, preserving God’s creation, without pandering to biblical literalism or to the ostrich mentality in vogue among reactionaries.
CHAGALL: If you can pull that off, appeal to religious might fit. But must not appeal only to one sector. Secular audience is key. Our natural “base.”
CHRIS: I think it’s important enough to try to make it work. You can judge when the draft is complete. Your take re: including critique of corporate-owned gov’t, and consumer greed? As fundamental issues to civil society retaking reins?
CHAGALL: Fundamental, yes. But people glaze over at theory. Use accessible examples. Pension funds going broke, top salaries at 500x ordinary workers’—those are easy to understand. Not Marx, no references to commodity fetishism.
CHRIS: That’s fair. But the argument must address wealth directly. Planet can’t sustain excessive consumer demand. This is a major part of logic behind agribusiness and other environmentally destructive industry: “if the world won’t support manufactured cravings, change the world.” While profit-controlled government aids and abets.
CHAGALL: Again, can’t read like a dissertation. On a different note, you include a prominent argument re: no harm to humans. Of course we remain fully committed to this intention. But circumstances are never under complete
control.
Christopher stared at his screen. Then he typed, a flurry of keystrokes.
CHRIS: No. A thousand times no. I am writing a defense of no-harm activity, period. Require ironclad guarantee before giving you permission to use. Anything is theoretically possible. But I’m out unless there’s strong assertion re: zero harm.
CHAGALL: Slow down.
CHRIS: There’s nothing to negotiate here.
A tall, strikingly handsome guy in skinny jeans and a narrow-shouldered trench coat smiled at him from across the café. It was a piss-poor moment to be distracted. Male attention didn’t bother him, but the guy was barely half his age. What was it about IRC in public venues that incited flirtation? Christopher pretended not to notice.
CHAGALL: Point conceded. Understand that we have 100% commitment to harming no one, only property. You’re right, and we won’t compromise written material. Care and planning are thorough and safe as possible.
CHRIS: Line in the sand: even if I do eventually permit use of something I’m writing, I revoke permission if catastrophe happens. What I have to say will make political sense only in the event of success & no harm. Otherwise your group must write its own apology and self-criticism. I do not and will never agree to justify an action in which people are injured, regardless of intent. These are not negotiable requirements. I need unconditional agreement.
Christopher had no reason to believe his demand would be honored if Chagall fucked up, no matter how fiercely he declared it. His ultimatum amounted to rhetorical bluster. But why had Chagall raised the question in the first place?
CHAGALL: Agreed and accepted. I did not mean to complicate your contribution. Your work is top quality, we’d like to see this through. Can you estimate a finish date for a complete draft?
Christopher typed a reluctant reply.
CHRIS: Maybe a week. Not polished, but fleshed out.
CHAGALL: Awaiting next e-mail. Appreciate your careful thinking. Anything else needed from our end?
CHRIS: Will need to consider today’s exchange.
CHAGALL: Didn’t mean to rile you up. Would rewind if I could. Our commitment to no-harm is absolute. Until next time.
CHRIS: Until next time.
Christopher disconnected from the café’s wireless. He took a few moments to collect himself, then dove into housekeeping. First, a set of shorthand notes. A sip of his cooling coffee. Then he encoded the chat transcript. Chagall would blow a gasket if he knew, though Christopher did wipe the original with software that conformed to a formal specification the saboteur insisted he use. A MilSpec. Even NSA types wouldn’t be able to excavate those bits from the disk. It took a few minutes to replace the cleartext file with randomized zeros and ones, overwriting the data multiple times to scrub the drive irreversibly. A green progress bar flashed completion. Christopher confirmed his notes looked like gibberish in the absence of a password, then shut down the laptop.
The guy who’d been glancing Christopher’s way was chatting up a glum neo-punk, showing her pages in a bulky paperback. She nodded her spikey-haired head indifferently. Christopher recognized an edition of Neruda poems that Brendan had been reading a few nights before. He blushed at his own presumption. The guy had been looking to strike up a conversation. About poetry. He hadn’t been cruising at all.
Christopher exchanged the laptop for a sheaf of articles out of his bag, but couldn’t make himself concentrate on yet another analysis of genetically modified corn. Not with Chagall’s hedge looping in his head: “circumstances are never under complete control.”
Neither was his own certainty. With the exception of this morning’s lapse, Chagall didn’t come off as reckless. But what was he planning? If things went wrong, it would endanger life and limb, his recruiter had now given that much away.
Brendan’s return made it hard to avoid the obvious comparison. His friend’s handlers had signed him up to do one thing. Then, in the reading Christopher found most plausible, they tricked him into doing something different. Chagall could be planning to fly a plane into a building. An empty building, after parachuting out if his professed intentions were genuine—but how the hell could Christopher know?
If he was in, he had to assume a huge target. That’s what Chagall claimed, that’s what would generate an audience, that’s why taking on his manifesto made sense. It wouldn’t be worth the effort if the saboteur was blowing smoke.
Seeing Chagall waver on the question of zero harm forced Christopher to acknowledge how close he’d already crept to the cliff. What if people got hurt, or even killed? That eco-saboteurs had a lucky history didn’t guarantee anything about future exploits.
He couldn’t know.
That was the bottom line, and it came out the same every time he weighed the risks. Whatever promises Chagall offered, Christopher wouldn’t know what he had up his sleeve until after the fact. All he had to protect himself were ignorance of the plan, the barely provable fact that he hadn’t agreed Chagall could use his work, and whatever cover the First Amendment offered. It amounted to thin ice.
He could take more rigorous precautions. He could weave commitment not to harm any living thing deeper into the text. Or—it occurred to him suddenly—he could submit the manifesto to some obscure public discussion forum where it would languish until Chagall “found” and “cribbed” it. Maybe that was the answer. Prior publication would insulate him from any connection with whatever Chagall and his cadre had planned. He wondered whether the saboteur could live with something along those lines.
But Christopher had to acknowledge the larger picture too. Not just what he could do to protect himself, but why he wanted to write Chagall’s manifesto in the first place.
If he was an activist, he had to assume responsibility first and foremost. Years before he’d resolved never to be cowed by theoretical threat, whether from the government or anyone else. It wasn’t even a matter of resolve anymore. It was personality.
Activists act.
If he ran scared, who would hold the line?
Christopher knew the world was running off its rails. He knew that if he knew anything. If people like him—people willing to take risks—failed to force change, then change wasn’t going to happen.
The options didn’t leave much wiggle room.
FOURTEEN
Passing a shop next door to the Bombay Bijou, Zac bent like a kurta-clad reed, ducking away from a breeze-blown flutter of orange, saffron, and sky-blue saris.
Jonah laughed at his narrow escape and inhaled deeply. “This street smells awesome!”
“Doesn’t it?”
Scents of cinnamon and cardamom wafted from markets packed so full their wares spilled onto the sidewalks. Restaurants breathed warm curry into the sunny afternoon. Zac and Jonah had crossed the bay to see a Raj Kapoor classic at a storefront cinema in Berkeley’s Little India.
“So what did you think of Awāra?” Zac asked.
“Pretty good. I liked how everybody’s lives got mixed up. But Karan Arjun was better. Not so drippy.”
“Drippy?”
“All that love stuff.”
Zac rolled his eyes. “You’d rather muck around in all that blood and swords stuff.”
“Heck yeah!” They came to a shop window brimming with wicker baskets of snacks. The air was rich with asafetida and cumin. “Let’s go in,” Jonah said.
He picked out spiral crackers studded with sesame seeds, and plantain chips. Zac chose spice-dusted nuts. A stout, dark-skinned man weighed out chakli, masala badam kaju, and vazhakkai varuval into waxed paper bags, and figured the bill on an adding machine that could have predated India’s independence. They found a place to sit on the stairs of a church around the corner.
“You know what’s weird?” Jonah asked.
“I’ve got a few ideas,” Zac said. “What are you thinking?”
“I don’t know anybody else who’s into Indian movies.”
“Nobody at school?”
“I tried to tell this g
uy Deepak about that one by Satyajit Ray, but he acted all embarrassed.”
“Why is that, do you think?”
“Deepak wants everybody to forget he’s from Delhi.” Jonah said. He continued to pop plantain chips into his mouth, one at a time.
“How about you?”
“I’m from here.”
“Duh! I mean, do you want to fit in like that?”
“Well … not exactly. It’s kind of like, if you refuse to fit in that can be just as cool.”
“I like that angle. Is that Buzz’s strategy too?” Zac leaned back into the weathered wooden steps, as if the dull pressure against his spine might ground him as their conversation edged into volatile territory.
“Yeah. I guess.” Jonah squirmed, just enough to notice.
“So is watching 1950s Bollywood musicals cool or not cool?”
“It depends on your attitude.”
“How so?” Zac asked.
“It’s like … if I talk about Awāra, and some kid says, ‘Oh, Jonah’s obsessing about stupid India again’—then it’s up to how I react. If I’m all embarrassed, the other kid wins. If I act like he’s totally ignorant, then I turn uncool into cool.”
“By force of personality.”
“Yup.” Jonah reached for a handful of the spicy nuts. “Buzz has more force than me, though. If he talked about Awāra it’d for sure be cool.”
“But it’s not just self-confidence, is it?” Zac asked, helping himself to a sesame cracker. “I mean, someone can be cocky and still not be cool.”
“You know who Buzz reminds me of?”
“Who?”
“Brendan. Not exactly, but they both do what they want.”
“Touché,” Zac said, nodding thoughtfully. “Maybe that’s why they both got their backs up yesterday. Two tomcats scrapping over territory.”
“Um … yeah, maybe.”
A few moments passed. “So are you cool with having Brendan around?”
“It’s a little weird.”
“He’s not the easiest person,” Zac said. He idly fingered the sharp spines of a live oak leaf, fallen from a tree in the next lot over.
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