Moon Flower (6 page)
“Take your time.”
As Shearer followed Rob out, his phone emitted its squeaky rendition of
Toccata and Fugue
in his jacket pocket. “Go on ahead. I’ll catch up,” he said, taking the unit out. Rob nodded and moved away along the corridor. Shearer thumbed the accept key and dropped his pace to a slow walk. The tone selection that it had sounded indicated an audio-only call. “Marc Shearer here.”
“Mr. Shearer.” The voice was that of Ellis, the department head. “I have some news for you that I am informed is most urgent. I confess that I also find it highly surprising.”
“Oh?”
“It concerns your application for an off-planet posting.”
“Yes?” Something jumped in Shearer’s chest. Although he had complied with Wade’s request, there had seemed little reason for it to be considered worth allocating a valuable slot on a mission. Hence, he had not thought too much about it, devoting his time instead to the contemplation of what other future prospects might present themselves.
“It appears that you, or conceivably Professor Wade, must have more influence in the right places than I would have thought credible. Your application has been accepted, and I am instructed to expedite matters by no less a person than the faculty dean himself. It appears that a further expedition to Cyrene is being organized, and is due to depart six days from now.”
Six days! God Almighty!
...
“You are required to be at Interworld Restructuring’s offices across the Bay for preliminary briefing and familiarization, commencing tomorrow morning. You’ll need to spend the rest of today tidying things up here. Can you come up to my office first thing after lunch to go over the details?”
Shearer’s mind was still racing to catch up. “Er, well, yes.... Of course” was all he could manage.
“Shall we say two o’ clock, then?”
“That would be fine.”
“I’ll see you then, Mr. Shearer.” The line went dead.
Still in a daze, Shearer fumbled the phone back into his pocket and quickened his pace automatically. Slowly, like light growing and brightening the landscape as the sun comes out from behind cloud, the meaning became clear in his mind. “
Yeaaahh
!” he yelled jubilantly, turned a full circle, and punched a fist toward the ceiling....
Just as two girls in lab smocks came out of the doorway beside him.
“Did you just win something?” one of them asked warily.
“Even better than that. I’m going to the stars!”
“Oh, really? That’s great. When?”
“Six days from now.”
The girls glanced at each other. “Oh boy,” the second one murmured.
CHAPTER FIVE
Orange County and other parts of the Los Angeles area that had once provided homes and playgrounds for the rich and famous and the rich and notorious alike had for the most part been taken over by more common representatives of the species. When the influx from the south that had swelled to huge proportions in the early part of the century eventually led to civil violence and then armed conflict, the affluent and mobile transplanted themselves to new enclaves of exclusivity farther north. The area now bordered the Greater Mexican Union, and as the immigrant population consolidated in numbers, wealth, and confidence, strong signs were emerging that it might secede and change over to the other side.
The other factor that played a large part in the secession of the Western Federacy, later reduced to Occidena, was the seismic shift in financial holdings and political power that followed the sudden breakthrough into Heim physics and its rapid development in things like starship drives. Enormous fortunes were made through timely stock transfers and takeovers, lofting names overnight into the
Forbes 400
that longtime subscribers to the
Robb Report
had never heard of. The most consequential of these activities revolved around the corporate empires and research institutions associated with the space and military industries on the West Coast, which was where the bulk of the scientific expertise and infrastructure best suited to exploiting the new physics was concentrated. This also happened at a time when new heights of intrusiveness and excess on the part of the former federal government were increasing general unrest and adding to the internal forces already straining the nation toward fission. When the West-centered interests preempted impending confiscatory legislation from Washington by declaring themselves independent and made clear their readiness to defend their new sovereignty by force — of which it commanded an overwhelming superiority — the Eastern establishment found itself holding a pair of twos against four aces and had no choice but to back down. The resulting shock waves opened up fault lines that had been creaking and deepening for decades. In a rapid series of convulsions the Midwest, Plains, and Great Lakes regions followed suit to end years of growing resentments by breaking ties with Capitol Hill and pledging a return to original constitutional principles, which they symbolized by adopting the name New America; the Southern states yielded to a decisive black majority swollen by migrants escaping the turmoils of other parts, to become Martina; while the eastern rump, in a way that was not without its touch of irony, emerged as a parody of what was almost a reversion to the original thirteen colonies, proclaiming its adherence to the grander vision nevertheless with the amended title of Federated American States. Completing the picture, Texas preserved a balancing act between east, west, north-center, and south by reinvoking its status as a onetime republic; Hawaii went along with the Western Federacy and Alaska elevated its governor to president and declared nationhood, but maintained a close affiliation.
So the children of the new privileged West Coast dynasties were no longer graced by attending such hallowed academies as Harvard, Princeton, and Yale. Stanford still kept its prestige, of course, and by the reckoning of many headed the list of western higher learning institutions by virtue of its tradition. Gates University, in a glorious setting amid the Cascades, was a close runner, noted for the munificence of its donors, as by a slightly wider margin were Corbel, not too far north at Bellingham, and Farrell at Santa Cruz. The last two were formerly existing campuses that had been acquired, expanded, and aggrandized to immortalize names that had swept to super-wealth and fame in the extraterrestrial development boom. A titanium Heim heat shield surmounting polished marble on the entrance lawn had replaced ivied walls as the symbol of tribal roots and social cohesion for the highborn.
***
One of the founders of Interworld Restructuring was a former Air Force pilot turned business speculator by the name of Conrad Metterlin. Having adjusted to the life of palatial residences in Carmel, St. Moritz, and Brisbane, custom-built Lamborghini, and a personalized Gulfstream that he used as a flying conference room or party suite depending on the occasion, he turned his attention to the business of raising his position on the social hierarchy by outdoing rivals in ostentatious display — a compulsion also coded in the genes that color the tail feathers of peacocks and the hindquarters of mandrills. Among prominent humans, this frequently expresses itself as the making of spectacular donations to worthy and highly visible causes. In Metterlin’s case, it took the form of a half-billion-(revalued)-dollar grant to include a Metterlin School of Aviation in Occidena’s new National College of Space Sciences and Engineering at Sunnyvale. This in turn was a lavish affair intended as a monument to symbolize the groundings of the new nation’s wealth and political prestige, and took the form of grandiose exhibition of surreal space-age architecture and experimental facilities dedicated to the new physics, close to the airport and aviation complex located further north along the peninsula, the military space center on the former NASA site at Ames, and the launch installations east of San Jose at Alum Rock.
The Aviation School’s Grand Opening Day was blessed by a flawless sky of sunshine and clear blue. Chefs from San Francisco’s noted houses of haute cuisine dispensed salmon tartare with marinated cucumber, and paté de foie gras accompanied by oceans of champagne in a marquee set up to serve the lawn party beneath the name metterlin carved in granite above the main entrance, while couples in Adrian Jules suits and Gregg Ruth diamonds gyrated on a polished hardwood floor to amplified swing from a blue-blazered dance band. The orchids setting the tone of the floral backdrop had been flown in from Venezuela, and the winsome, yellow-furred primates somewhat suggestive of lemurs, known as
kerries
— the zoologist who discovered them had been Irish — being led around on gold chains by attendants and frolicking to the delight of the guests, were from a planet of a neighbor to Barnard’s Star. At the far end of the lawn, facing the Aviation School building, a pair of Beech twin-prop trainers stood garlanded in flowers and bunting — Metterlin’s surprise bonus gift, named
Julian
and
Esther
after his two children.
Jerri Perlok was not there as a result of owning a line of perfumery with a Paris label that had become famous, or landing a husband from Jimmy’z club in Monaco. In fact, she didn’t have a husband, spending too much of her life in wild corners of the world that few beyond regular readers of
National Geographic
would be likely to know much about; in any case, even at twenty-nine she had still to experience a relationship that she could have felt enough confidence in it to want to make permanent. Despite being accused by many of being irreverent and rebellious, at heart she was still one of those old-fashioned few for whom “lifelong commitment” meant what it said.
She sat on her own at one of the sunshaded tables on the lawn, sipping a glass of Meursault Chardonnay over an unfinished plate of smorgasbord salad, and noting the subtle and sometimes not-so-subtle signaling through body language and preening displays taking place on the dance boards and around and about of who ranked where in the status stakes, who was bidding, and who was available. As an anthropologist and evolutionary psychologist with a secondary interest in mythology, Jerri was more accustomed to observing the mating rituals of South American birds and Namibian antelopes, and more familiar with the rewards and punishments meted out by ancient Greek and Hindu deities than the emerging subspecies of
Homo sapiens plutocratus
— but it was all very educational and interesting.
Her invitation had been procured by a friend called Ivor, whom she had met a little over a year previously on the Hawaiian island of Maui. She had been staying in a trailer on the lower slopes of a volcano, which she and a colleague had rented as a base for studying migratory bird habits. Ivor was in a $2,000-per-night suite at the Four Seasons hotel, functioning in his role as household manager for the Metterlins and their company of select guests enjoying a week of mid-Pacific getaway. It was a truism among household managers, or “personal assistants,” employed by the superlatively rich that they slept with the phone left on and a notepad and pen by the bed to be always prepared for sudden demands from their charges, so Jerri and Ivor had not actually seen much of each other in the event. Even principals who were not third-generation hereditary beneficiaries but who had made it to where they were through their own drive and initiative seemed to acquire a sudden learned incompetence in even the simplest of mundane tasks. It was as if having others perform them were a badge that denoted status — much like the women of Imperial China whose crippling by foot-binding advertised that they could afford servants to carry them. But Ivor’s anecdotes of life in the top tenth of a percentile had been too intriguing for an anthropologist not to be interested in. She found him personable in himself in any case. His permanently unpredictable schedule suited her own tendency to get stuck into things that interested her for days at a time, and to disappear suddenly from her apartment in the Sierra foothills across the Central Valley for spells in unusual places, and in their own unconventional way they had continued an erratic form of friendship ever since. And so here she was.
The other reason Jerri had wanted to attend the event was that her life had recently taken on a change of direction that she’d known was a possibility but not really taken seriously. Some months before, more by way of a whimsical dare to herself than from a belief that it would lead to anything, she had applied to Interworld Restructuring for a position as an exo-anthropologist (purists in the profession were still debating whether the term was meaningful, since according to some, “anthropo-” meant strictly Terran-human) in response to the ads they had been running for scientific professionals to staff their stellar exploration missions. Maybe hearing a lot about the consortium from Ivor had had something to do with it. For a long time little had happened other than her receiving a routine acknowledgment. Then, suddenly, she was notified that an expedition was being organized at short notice to a planet called Cyrene, and if she could wrap up her Earthly affairs in time, or at least put them on hold, there was a slot for her if she wanted it, and a place reserved on a familiarization course to be conducted in San Francisco.
Jerri had noticed that elderly people seldom argued. If others disagreed with their views, or were too rushed and hurried to listen to them in the first place, they tended to let things be. But when someone did take the trouble to listen, they could learn much that was of value. And one thing that she had noticed over and over again was that older people never regretted anything they had done. Even the marriage that hadn’t worked, the gold mine that ran dry, the business that went belly-up — all seemed to evoke the reaction “Well, I gave it a try.” What they regretted were the things they
hadn’t
done when the chance was there: the year or two to see the world that they had put off and put off because there was always something more urgent, and one day it was too late; the buy-in option that they turned down. Even the recollection of a come-on eye and a provocatively revealed leg from fifty years ago could produce a wistful “It was right there in front of me, but I was too green to see it.” Thus forewarned, Jerri had consigned herself to whatever fate might have in store, accepted the offer, and joined the class a week previously. However, she was playing hookey today after Ivor made good on his promise to get her an invitation to the Metterlin Aviation School opening day, which gave her a chance to see close-up something of the people behind the business that she would be working for. Also, it would enable her to break the news to Ivor personally of her imminent departure. Things had moved so quickly that she hadn’t found an opportune moment to mention it.