Square Wave (38 page)

The techs brought the door back down, muting the falling water. Menar re-adjusted the position of the eastern platform, five degrees to the west. The seeders were identical to the dispersers in appearance, save for the darts, which were a darker copper and slightly larger, carrying a 1.5 pound payload.

“We call these dispersers ‘slakers’ for a couple of reasons,” Menar said. “One is that, though the cocktail’s complicated, unslaked lime—treated lime—is a vital ingredient. But much less of it than is usually necessary to make it a desiccant or a significant source of heat. In bulk of course it’s deeply toxic, burns the eyes, and so on. But we’ve managed to get round that problem with the auxiliary compounds we’ve bound it with.”

He tapped the track-pad and the first rocket ascended in just the manner of the seeders. But the digital monitor presented it differently, more instructively, and in peculiar ways, more viscerally, than direct sight could, odd as that sounded. Under magnification the contrails seemed more deeply textured and bubbly, and also discontinuous, having a patterned structure of thicknesses harnessed to each other: a cotton rope that looked as if it were being thrown to the sky. The launch cameras caught a sun-bright gleam of orange, then gray smoke, then a missile-tipped contrail.

“Deployment’s pretty much the same,” Menar said. As before, the first rocket slid through the base of the cloud, on its way to the upper reaches. Just as it disappeared, Menar sent the next rocket up.

“The separation between launches, is there a reason for that?” one of the assistants asked. “Do the upper layers need to be activated first?”

Menar seemed surprised he could speak. He smiled. “Yes. Nothing technical, though. It’s just so the rockets and darts don’t collide. It’s happened in trials, darts going straight into missiles. No charge in them, but the impact and the heat exploded the fuel tanks. Just a mess.”

“And one more,” Menar said, releasing the final rocket. “Here we’ll see something. Limelight.”

“Limelight?” Michael said. “Oh, as in—”

“As in limelight. Candoluminescence.”

“Right, yes.”

“A real show,” Ravan said.

“Actually, raise the doors,” Menar said.

“Really?” Michael asked.

“Yes, why not? You can’t be worried about this little shack, can you? Surely you’ve got the funding to bear a little water damage. In the name of science. Or art.”

“No, of course we can.” The assistants opened it and a small wave of water rolled in, giving out after a few feet.

“Oh, that’s not so bad,” Menar said. “Now look.”

They could see virtually nothing of the third rocket, the sky was so heavy with rain and black clouds. Then its contrail bloomed a supersaturated white at its far end. It seared their eyes. Squinting, they watched the light dilate, divide in six. The rocket fell away, limp, useless, and dark as a new star grew against the storm. This time the smoke was terracotta, and the radiating darts luminous, which turned the clouds directly above their path a greater intensity of white, and, through contrast, darkened the more distant parts.

“As I say, limelight,” Menar said.

The NOAA staff looked on as water pooled around their shoes. Absolute white and sizzling in their ears, the darts broke the plane of the cloud and dug into the storm. The men watched these haloed dots of white, still surprisingly bright, as they continued to race away from each other, though the rust-colored lines of the star itself disappeared, cloaked now by cloud.

Their eyes dealt more easily with the veiled limelight, and they continued to follow the expanding circle of lights. When the darts had finally exhausted themselves, they marked the vertices of a star twice the size of the terracotta one they’d just painted on the underside of the storm above.

Menar looked back at the laptop. The spent darts would be descending now, unlit and unseen.

“So let’s see,” he said. It was still storming hard and the mudflats outside had become a lake of red, as they did in flash floods. (Nearby Furnace Creek also reported unusually heavy rains.)

Ravan thought he could hear the beginnings of a decrescendo. The roiling waters filled the ears less fully now, and it was easier, it seemed, to attend to the rest of his senses. The first thing he noticed were his sopping shoes. The lab assistants pulled heavy towels from a storage closet and threw them to the ground, working them around with their feet, mopping up what they could.

“You can give the drone another pass,” Menar said. Michael radioed again with the orders. “It must be quite hot now.”

They all sensed the diminishing patter of water on the roof. Outside on the flats, the ropes withered to beads, first swollen and oblong, but then, sooner than seemed reasonable, just tiny dots, specks.

“Very much hotter,” Michael said, staring into a screen.

The cloud itself was losing substance, not through collapse but expansion. As it distended it turned wispier, vaporous, ever more transparent, the gray and black ribbons seeming to lighten as they dissolved into simple air.

The lightest drizzle persisted, but the extent of the transformation left the NOAA people nodding vaguely to one another and pointing up at the faltering cloud.

“What you have here is something real,” Michael said without looking at Menar, who was seated on the table, playing with his laptop, his mouth bent this time into an insouciant smirk visible to anyone who cared to see. Ravan, shoeless now, joined the other assistants looking out onto the watery flats, his heart beating harder but not faster.

27

In a lightless room he awoke to her weight, a leg strewn across his, a palm planted in his chest, a chin tucked above his collarbone, a mouth set against his neck. She’d rather he not wake. He knew this. Probably she thought this was the surest way of stopping him. At the very least she’d be hoping he’d wink at her delayed arrival, once again past midnight.

“How was the night?” Stagg’s voice was uneven and weak from sleep. It pleased him not to have to simulate this, though he would have, had he been awake, say, for hours in the dark, waiting.

“Good,” she whispered.

For a moment he let Renna believe that was it, and she began to take the long, even draughts of air that bring sleep.

“Good,” he said into the silence.

He put his hand over hers, the one on his chest, and she rubbed his fingers, pressed her lips more firmly against his neck, but without a pucker so it made no sound. Thalidomide kisses, she called these. He’d been the first to offer them, nameless then, and she disliked them, shuddered when he placed them on her cheeks in jest. Tonight, though, she must have thought they made a kind of sense.

He squeezed her fingers together, running the tips over one another, and put his free hand behind the knee of the leg that ran across his own.

“I got you the cinnamon-lox thing,” he said. “Sounds disgusting. But it’s on the desk.”

“No it’s
so
good. I had some,” she said. “Why are you so nice to me?” This time she kissed him properly on the neck, held his skin between her teeth. She slid her hand down his stomach. He caught it.

“And those three were how?” Though no louder, his voice was more substantial now, more committed to wakefulness.

“Just rehearsing.” Her voice was firming up too, though reluctantly. “There was marked-up staff paper everywhere. The way your papers are. I think I stepped on some of them in the dark just now.” She scratched the hair on his chest. “You’re not mad, I hope.”

The laugh he gave was inaudible, but the tightening of his chest was enough for her to know.

“Ravan can read music?” he asked.

“Yes. And well. He’s as serious as Edward.”

“And Li.”

“He wasn’t reading. Not sure he can’t though.”

“And you can, still?”

“Sort of. But I would never have been able to read this stuff. Partly it was so heavily corrected. There were slashes of ink everywhere, strikeouts, notes that had been written over, woven right into the passages. So it was hard to read off what was left through all of that. But even if it had been clean, the notation is just really weird. I think a lot of it they’ve just made up, for all the microtonal things.

“They’re working on this long piece, symphony length, with some parts that are electronic, tape loops, things Edward’s always been interested in,” she continued. “There are all these sweeping lines linking sections, and little scratchings and symbols in the margins and between staffs, for notes that don’t belong on the lines. A bunch of different sharps and flats too, and a bunch of fermatas, caesuras, which made the page that much more crowded and weird.”

“I’m supposed to know what those are?”

“Caesuras? Well, I guess there’s no reason you should. But you do, don’t you.”

This time his laughter made it to their ears.

“And the sound?”

“I’m still thinking about it. Sort of a wall, I guess. But it felt like it was taller and wider than the room. It’s hard to explain. Like it was only part of a whole that wasn’t all there to be heard. But really it was the whole. That was it.”

“And?”

“And… it sounded strange at first. The chords. But as you got used to the structure, the motion, that sense of incompleteness, it sounded even stranger, but in the details now, the textures.” She paused. “Ravan’s done a lot of the writing, I think. Or at least the rewriting. It didn’t look like Edward’s handwriting, or only partly, so I’m guessing.”

“But it was only notes.”

“You can still tell someone’s handwriting.”

“Clearly.”

“They work together in this weird way,” she said, ignoring the minor provocation, which was her way. “They write over each other’s music, so the score is just dripping with ink by the end of it. That’s what it looked like. Sometimes one of their hands is dominant, these heavy marks fixing the other’s sketchier ones. In other parts it’s the other way around. They just keep rescoring this way, going back and forth, without going to clean paper, and somehow they can still read the result. It’s a true composite, though. It’s rare.”

“Hm.”

“And what did you do?” she asked. “Did you call the hooker again? What’s her name, Jen?”

“No.”

“She’s okay now?”

“I don’t really know. I don’t see how she could be though.”

“But is she
cute
, Carl?” Renna had never been jealous of another woman in her life, and her glibness about it grated on him.

“I thought,” Stagg said.

There was a long silence.

“You thought what?”

“No, that’s what I did tonight. Think.”

“Just like this?” She patted his chest with the hand that was still under his, again sidestepping the tacit rebuke, the conversation it might open.

“Basically. With the lights on, part of the time.”

“Did you revise at all though?”

“I don’t think I need to. It’s more about order, placement. I’ll just read that piece on exegesis later in the series. Really I’m changing course a little, and I’m not sure if Kames will like it. A new introduction. But I’m not going to try to sell him on it yet.”

“Do you ever think, though, Carl, that at least for now, that maybe you should withdraw?”

“What? Because why?”

“Because what your boss said about Kames, what you told him Kames said to you. It’s possible, isn’t it?”

“It’s hard to say exactly what Kames meant, though. Penerin’s paranoid. And there are three days left now till the first talk, Renna. Nothing’s going to change in that space. And easy for you to say.”

“I’m only worried! I don’t know why you have to make everything into something besides love.” She made a fist under his hand and thumped his chest with it before flipping away from him.

“There’ll only be one lecture, if you’re right,” he said in a cooler voice. “More reason to do things the way I want, I guess. And if there’s only going to be one, it should be about my family, and the escape. That’s what Kames was saying he wanted anyway.”

“Maybe,” she said. By the shifting of the bed he could tell she had pulled her knees up to her chest, as she did when she was fed up, or worried, or tired, depending.

“Maybe what?”

She said nothing. He drew breath.

“How was Larent?” he asked.

“Fine.” She was curt.

“He asked you over?”

“He and Ravan.”

“You don’t know Ravan.”

“Edward told me he wanted me to come too.”

“Li asked you as well, I guess.”

“No.”

“You don’t know him?”

“I do. You know that. Edward just didn’t mention him.”

“And I guess you have to accept every invitation.”

“You can’t do this, Carl. I offered to cancel.”

“You don’t want to be rude.”

“You can be such an asshole.” Her eyes were rolling, he knew this. That he couldn’t see this didn’t matter.

He rolled on his side, toward her, and pulled her to him with one hand between her breasts. “An asshole?” he said. She squirmed and thrust her legs out straight and grabbed his hand. “I thought you can’t be rude,” he said. He slid his hand up her chest to her long and graceful neck and held it without a hint of compression. “Just to me, I guess.”

Her own hand, still on his, went limp in a familiar way. Her lips ran across his cheek as she turned her face toward him, as if it were possible to look him in the eye in the dark. Their lashes touched as she blinked. Her eyes, millimeters from his, they’d be deathless now, earth-inheriting and faintly defiant about it. There would be that suggestion of a snicker in them. And why shouldn’t she look at him? The dark was as good as the light for what she was searching for.

“What do you get from this?” he said, keeping his hand where it was. She turned past his face until he could feel her breath on his ear. He thought she might bite him, so hard he’d need stitches to close the gash.

“I thought you weren’t going to drink on your own anymore,” she said. “This doesn’t happen otherwise.”

“From him.”

“Nothing. I’m not getting anything from him. There’s just history, that’s all.”

“And what does that have to do with now?” His grip may have tightened.