Better Angels (50 page)

“One morning,” Seiji said, “in early April I think it was, I had a sort of waking dream. In it a man on horseback at twilight found my brother’s corpse. I had that dream probably the same time he was dying. And now that’s exactly the way he’s been found.”

“Did you tell anyone about that dream?” John asked, curious.

“Did I mention it to you, Paul?”

“I don’t think so,” he said. “Nothing that specific, anyway. When I asked you why you were worried about Jiro, I remember you said you didn’t want to have to attend your younger brother’s funeral any time soon. Remember that?”

“I think so.” Seiji said, exhaling tiredly and staring down into the tabletop. “Then again, I might just have been remembering something I read or saw somewhere—something I thought was appropriate to my situation at the time.”

Paul stood up and put his hand on Seiji’s shoulder.

“How are you feeling?” he asked.

“Insubstantial,” Seiji said, staring. “Everything else is that way too. I look at the table and it’s like I can see right through it to the floor. Through the floor.”

He leaned his head into his hand, as if dizzy. After a moment the dizziness seemed to subside.

“I guess I didn’t tell anyone about the dream,” he said. “I didn’t want to think about it, so I just sort of shoved it out of consciousness.”

“The cause of death was hypothermia?” Cousin John asked, making sure he’d overheard correctly.

“Right. Hypothermia.”

“How’s your father taking it?” Paul asked, concerned.

“He’s mad at Jiro,” Seiji said. “I think both Mom and Dad are. I guess that’s how they’re dealing with it. Aunt Marian and Uncle Ev are with them now.” Seiji leaned back suddenly in his chair, rubbing his face as if trying to bring feeling back into it. “What I’m feeling and what Dad’s feeling are terrible enough, but what Mom is feeling—that has to be worst of all. Jiro came from her, she knew him longest and best.”

For a moment they sat in silence. Paul thought about how Seiji’s mother must feel, having lost a son that for nine months had grown in the house of her body and then for more than twenty years had grown in the house of her life. The kind of grief arising from such a loss must be as close to infinite as any human being could bear. He thought of his own mother, and how she might have felt for all these long years at not knowing what had happened to her daughter Jacinta.

“I need to make shuttle reservations for a flight down to Edwards,” Seiji said, “so I can see to all the legal and funeral arrangements. I’ve got to get out there soon so I can work it all out.”

“Want me to come with you?” Paul asked, patting Seiji’s shoulder lightly. “You might need some help.”

“Thanks,” Seiji said. “I’d appreciate it.”

The vidlink rang out so suddenly they all jumped. Seiji got up to answer it.

“Seij, could you put Johnny on the line?” a man’s voice asked in the other room, sounding rough. “I’ve got some bad news.”

Seiji turned the line over to his cousin and came back into the dining room. The look on Seiji’s face made Paul suspect that Seiji might have already guessed what the bad news might be. Paul gave him a questioning look.

“It’s my Uncle Ev,” Seiji said. “My mother’s sister’s husband. He’s John’s mother’s brother.”

Paul nodded, wondering at how complex even fairly close relations could get. Then the sounds from the other room caught his attention.

“What?” John asked, too loudly. “When?”

They heard John break abruptly into tears. For a moment Seiji looked as if he envied his cousin that release. The news of his own brother’s death had not made him cry, no matter how desperately he might have wanted to. Paul could sympathize with that, having suffered so long from the same dry-eyed affliction. As John talked and cried on, Paul and Seiji moved off into the front room, out of hearing of the vidlink at last.

“My mother,” John said after he got off-line and rejoined them, looking wide-eyed and shocked, his voice still straining to choke back his grief. “She died in the hospital about an hour ago.”

“John, I’m sorry,” Seiji said, slowly. “When I think that looking for my brother kept you from spending more time with your mother, this last time, I’m even more sorry.”

John shook his head.

“Don’t think about it,” John said. He seemed to be thinking his words into place, trying to process everything. “It was my decision to go look for him.”

The silence of sad agreement fell down upon their numbness like a blanket of snow.

“Two deaths announced in this household in less than an hour,” Seiji said at last, shaking his head in disbelief. “It’s like an improbable nightmare, only it’s really happened.”

Paul thought there was another house where the same improbable pairing of death announcements had also happened: At Seiji’s parents’ place. Seiji’s parents had learned they had lost a son, and those who had come to comfort them, Seiji’s aunt and uncle, had in turn needed comforting, when Seiji’s uncle learned that he had lost a sister. Paul said nothing about that, however. Too much death and sorrow already.

Seiji was looking directly at his cousin.

“It’s a good thing we only have to meet for the first time once,” he said.

“Yeah,” John said, with just a hint of a sad smile, the same expression found on Seiji’s and Paul’s faces. “The energies have been working overtime tonight.”

And they actually laughed then, sadly, in the house where Death has been announced twice, Strange, Paul thought. Amid all the pain and death of the evening the three of them sat there smiling and laughing quietly. At what? At their own bewilderment? In guilty relief at still being alive?

Suddenly John shushed them.

“Listen!” he said intently. “Hear it? Energies—all around us.”

In the silence Paul actually did hear something, though what it might have been he couldn’t say.

“What time is it?” John asked.

“22:05,” Seiji said.

“I’ve got to be on my way,” his cousin said, standing up. “Got to report to work. Got to explain all this, then head back down the well again.”

John sidled away and bent down to pick up his spacer’s sleepsak, then shrugged on the last of his clothes. The three of them walked through the house and out in silence, following John to the docking bay where Helios and Oz waited.

When they came to his ship they stood there awkwardly, the three of them casting distorted shadows in the halflight spilling from the rest of the docking facilities.

“Now that we’ve met, cousin,” Seiji told him, “don’t be a stranger.”

“I won’t.”

“You’re always welcome here in the habitat,” Paul added.

“Thanks.”

The awkwardness continues for a moment more, until the three of them embraced as one, becoming human geometry, a figure whose three sides leaned on each other for support.

“What do we do now?” John asked Seiji when the hug had ended.

“We go on.”

“I suppose you’re right,” John said, nodding, glancing thoughtfully down at the blasted mooncrete floor of the docking bay. He looked up and clasp their hands in farewell handshake.

Grabbing up his sleepsak from the docking bay’s floor, John disappeared into his ship. Paul and Seiji retreated to the clear plasteel walls of the observation deck, to watch John’s departure from there.

After a minute or two they could hear the Helios roaring into disgruntled life. As it hovered out of the bay and slipped toward the space locks, they waved. Paul saw his own reflection waving in the transparent walls of the observation deck. For a moment it seemed as if the stars and the ship with the man and the mastiff on board were all passing through him, as if he were a starry country of dreams still very much awake and watching bright red ship’s running lights disappear in the distance.

He and Seiji turned away then, leaving visions and optical illusions and apparitions behind, wondering if they would ever see John Drinan again. The hard business of death and personal effects still lay ahead.

Remembering it now, Paul found that, in contrast to the sharpness of his memories of John’s visit, the trip to and experiences on Earth, although far more recent, were also far more a blur, as if he, the “friend of the family,” had been observing them from a distance more of mind than of space.

After traveling down the gravity well to Earth, Paul and Seiji had landed at Edwards. In a rented hover they flew through Cajon Pass and over Balaam’s Inland Empire sprawl to Yucaipa and Beaumont, where they met with local law enforcement, utility officials, and eventually the coroner.

From the sheriff’s deputies and the utility people Seiji and Paul learned more of the specifics surrounding the discovery of Jiro’s body. The man on horseback at twilight was a utility company worker. His supervisors had been investigating a spike in “transit loss” recorded in microwave reception records from many months back. Investigation of the spike had in turn led to the discovery of a small but persistent power deflection from the grid’s local beamdown node. Tracing the deflection to its origin, power company analysts discovered that the drain was most likely coming out of the NoTech zone in the Trashlands, which made them more than a bit curious.

The power company worker who found Jiro’s body had been sent in to eyeball the actual source of the drain. The utility had sent him in on horseback because, in rare previous runs into the Trashlands, the power company had found that such a mode of transportation was not only quite efficient in the steep and shifting rubbishscape, but was also less offensive to the TechNot true believers who lived thereabouts.

When the power company horseman reported his unexpected discovery to the local authorities, the sheriff sent people and machines to survey and cordon off the scene, write reports, and take the remains to the crime lab in Beaumont. Jiro’s datawire—containing his aircar license, an old student ID, and three hundred and fifty-six New Dollars—has been found on the body. The deputies lifted a single print and, with the coroner’s help, did a DNA match on the remains. The body had been positively identified as Jiro’s.

Talking to the deputies, Seiji and Paul learned much more history than they might have wanted to know. A couple weeks before his estimated time of death, Jiro had been arrested for being drunk and disorderly—his first, last, and only arrest. At the time he had a blood alcohol content so high he should have already been dead or in deep coma.

Earlier still—soon after Seiji and his parents first tried to report Jiro missing, in fact—the police had interviewed Jiro’s landlord. The property owner said that Jiro was having some major problems at that time. One day, as he walked past Jiro’s apartment, the landlord claimed he heard what sounded like two people having a brutal argument. He listened more closely and realized that Jiro was both voices, both sides of the argument—that he was screaming at himself. The landlord also reported that, just before Jiro quit the premises, Jiro accidentally set fire to part of his apartment. Jiro put out the blaze, reported it to the landlord, paid for the damage, paid off the remainder of his rent, and just walked away from his rooms and everything with which he had furnished them.

“If I’d known any of this before,” Seiji said to Paul on hearing the deputies’ reports, “I’d have caught a shuttle down in a heartbeat and gotten him out of here.”

Seeing Seiji’s expression—sad, dismayed, and guilty at once—Paul had suggested that they go out to the Trashlands, to the view the location where Jiro’s body had been found. The sheriff’s deputies, short-staffed and too busy, didn’t have time to guide them to the spot where Jiro’s body was found, though they did promise Seiji that he’d be able to pick up Jiro’s personal effects at the county jail property rooms in Banning, once the sheriff okayed it. The deputies also referred Paul and Seiji back to the coroner—a gray-haired, gravel-voiced man with extremely dry hands—who kindly agreed to take them out to the site.

Leaving Beaumont with the coroner, they proceeded by obscure landmarks into the great Southern California wasteland. Seiji and Paul and the coroner got lost again and again, until finally they approached the small complex of the coldbox and its ramshackle support buildings. The coldbox itself, the LogiBoxes, and the liquid nitrogen works were all still in place, too big to be carted off with the rest of Jiro’s personal effects and still waiting on Seiji’s decision as to their fate.

“The squatters hereabouts are mostly TechNots and Neo-Luddites,” the coroner said as he lifted up the crime-scene tape and began showing Paul and Seiji around the site, “so they tend to demonize the tech out here. Blame it for your brother’s death, I suppose. Leastways Bill Lanier, the power company rep, says they told him Jiro’s soul was ‘stolen’ by one of these machines. One of the Jebson kids claimed your brother’s ghost talked to him, too—before the power was cut off. Bill didn’t see or hear anything. He says the TechNots were probably just misinterpreting a perimeter security program, responding automatically to their presence.”

Having shown them the LogiBoxes and nitrogen tanks, the coroner approached the coldbox.

“We found your brother in here,” he said pulling open the long, door-like lid of the horizontal coldbox. A funky, moldy smell wafted out. Inside, Paul saw, was the reversed shadow of a man, light surrounded by dark, like the flash-image shadows of people vaporized at Hiroshima when the first atomic bomb devastated that city. The thick bluish dust that gave the light shadow its dark aura had been slightly smeared in a number of places, distorting the image, but not so much as to erase the fact that the light shadow was clearly the outline of a human form.

“We had to disturb the site a little bit to remove the remains and the personal effects,” the coroner said. “The body held together surprisingly well in the removal. Usually you leave a body exposed to the elements for six months, even in cold places like mountains or tundra, and the fat in the flesh saponifies, runs like soap into the ground. Out in a mountain meadow, once you haul away the remains after a summer in the sun, all you have left is soap and shadows—saponified flesh and the impression the body left on the grass and ground.”