The Return: A Novel (12 page)

“Yeah,” said Skelly, “I got that part: ‘Ay yay yay, my love, why don’t you love me?’ Nice song. He sounds like my kind of guy.”

The
rancheras
played on; they drove upward into the dark, into the sierra. Marder felt a lightening of his spirit. He saw, as from high above, as on a cosmic GPS map, the dot of his being climbing into the mountains of Mexico, and he had the thought, for the first time in many years: I am in the right place; it’s okay if I die this very minute. He waited in this state for what seemed like a long time, but life went on.

5

“Where are you going?” asked Kavanagh out of the torpor that followed this latest bout of sexual congress. He could see her white shape moving from place to place in the room, vanishing once and then returning.

“Nowhere,” she answered after a moment. “I just needed my notebook.”

“How did I do? Do you have, like, a star rating system?”

“If I did, you’d have three stars, Kavanagh. No, I had an idea I wanted to sketch out before it disappeared.”

“What kind of idea? And who gets four stars?” He watched as she fell into an armchair and arranged her long, flexible legs over its arm, forming an intriguing sort of desk.

“What kind of idea?” he asked again, and she said, “For work,” in a tone that did not encourage further inquiry.

Carmel often received ideas from her unconscious in the spacey moments after particularly rewarding sex, and she had removed from her life those men who objected to women who leaped out of bed to tap upon their laptops immediately subsequent to the ultimate moist spasm and tender cry. Or a paper notebook in this case. Kavanagh was thus not an objector to such shenanigans. He rolled over and drifted off. When he awoke in the morning, she was gone, leaving a note instructing him to send you-know-what via encrypted email, if possible during the current day, because she planned to leave that evening for New York, to try to trace her father’s movements. “Thanks, love,” she wrote, and signed the note with a smeary pink lipstick kiss.

Kavanagh decided on a couple of things after he read this. The first was that he would call his telecom pal and get the logs he’d promised. The other thing was that he was going to stop seeing Statch Marder. He was starting to fall in love, which he thought was like starting to mainline heroin after a period of enjoying an occasional snort. He wanted to be in love, but he thought that falling in love with this particular woman would lead to a life fraught with sorrow, possibly including violations of the penal code. He did like them a little crazy, true, but this one was over the line. And the thing with her father too. He sighed, regretting his loss, and made the promised call.

*   *   *

Carmel got to the lab a little after six a.m., made a pot of coffee, drank a pint, and set to work on her computer. Liu came in at eleven-thirty, caught the vibes, sniffed the odor of her roomie, and decided to spend the morning at the library. The lab director, Erwin Schuemacher, dropped by around noon, as he usually did, to kibbitz with his students and to receive the sort of informal progress reports upon which the reputations of graduate students (and the progress of science) largely depend. He had heard rumors all morning that Ms. Marder was onto something and he wanted to see what it was.

He knocked, heard a half-snarled rejection of human contact, opened the door, and studied the girl and her screen.

“What’s up, Statch?” he asked after a few moments of staring.

She looked over her shoulder and blinked at him, as if in her concentration fugue she didn’t immediately recognize the trim, tanned fellow with the gray ringlets as her boss and mentor.

“Oh, sorry,” she said. “I was really into it.”

“So I hear. What is that thing?”

“It’s a … I don’t know. A new kind of actuator system. I’m not sure yet, but I think it’ll work.”

“What’s it for?”

“Well, I think it’s a solution to the internal transport problem. We’ve all been screwing around with designing custom arms and spoons and pincers to move parts inside the machine and each one is a bear and each one practically has to be unique and they don’t fit in the available corridors and—well, the whole general problem is a pain in the ass. So I thought why not just carpet all the internal transport corridors with a zillion of these things. Look, I did an animation of how they would work.”

She pressed keys. A wire drawing appeared of an arbitrary brick resting on a bed of what looked like tapered nails. In the animation that followed, the nails elongated in complex waves; the brick moved back and forth, was rotated by the tiny fingers, was stood on end, was deposited into a hatch.

“Each unit is real simple—it’s basically just a fancy solenoid; they’d be cheap as shit to mass produce—but the beauty part is we can adapt the same programs we use in animation, I mean to populate a screen by flashing pixels. Each of them is like a pixel or a voxel, a sort of moving voxel—”

“A moxel,” said Schuemacher, naming the thing henceforth and forever, as was his right. He was nodding, his eyes alight. “Well, well—that’s actually extremely interesting. The problem, obviously, is will it work on the manufacturing end? Let’s get a meeting together, like today. I want Sepp and Chandra and the other team leaders to see this stuff and get their ideas, and we’ll talk about it at the regular lab meeting this afternoon, and then tomorrow we can try to set up some initial manufacturing runs. We need to find out if this is real, because if it works, it changes practically every subproject.”

“Right, well, I don’t see why it shouldn’t work. It’s just a basic principle—like the assembly line. But I can’t come tomorrow—I have to go to New York. And I’m not sure when I’ll be back.”

Schuemacher had kindly bright blue eyes that could become unkindly under certain conditions, as now. “Uh-uh, kid, you
have
to be here. This is your play. I’m not going to tell fifteen engineers to rethink all their designs because you had a passing thought that’s not even worth attending a couple of meetings for. What’s so important in New York that you have to go there?”

“It’s a family thing,” she said, knowing that it was not an acceptable answer, that science at this level and her junior status precluded family things. She felt her face flush; it was like saying you didn’t do your homework because your grandmother died.

He gave her an unkind glare, twiched his mouth, shrugged, said, “Well, at least you’ll finish the concept presentation. Maybe you can get Liu to work on it while you’re out.”

*   *   *

On the train to New York that evening, Statch turned this conversation over in her mind, as well as the day’s other interactions with her colleagues. It had been a horrendous day, a ruin built on what was certainly the most important breakthrough in her career and probably, if it proved out, the most important idea she would ever have. Moxels. Everyone was calling them that now; the news had flowed like AC throughout the Escher Project. People she barely knew were stuffed into her little office, asking to watch her animation, asking her questions she couldn’t answer, essentially stealing her idea, going back to their machines to run with it, to do the development she should be doing. And, of course, Schue was encouraging this process, spreading the word, maybe even starting to squeeze her out of the development work. No, he wouldn’t do that, but he had two divorces to show the world that the work came first, that when an idea was fresh was the time to go balls to the wall on it, because if one doctoral drone had come up with it, it meant that somewhere in China, or Germany or Japan, a similar drone would be thinking along the same lines.

And she was not there, not in the center of the most exciting part of engineering, turning the sketch into working substance, otherwise known as Changing the World. Instead, she was on this fucking train to New York, because her father had somehow, after a lifetime of being sane as toast, gone batty and disappeared.

At Springfield, she actually jumped off the train and stood on the platform for a dreadful minute, then jumped back on as the door slammed shut, transported by guilt as much as by the contraction of her bountiful fast-twitch muscle fibers. She’d been in Cambridge when her mother died. She’d been busy, she had let the messages pile up in her voice mail, because parents were supposed to be grown-ups, they were supposed to handle their own shit; she hadn’t realized what the woman was going through, hadn’t seen the signs of derangement, of increasing desperation. She was the daughter, she was
supposed
to have this cosmic relationship with the mother, but what she had now was ineradicable shame, and so fuck the career right now, and fuck the sort of nice relationship with Kavanagh too, because it was obvious from their last conversation, when he’d told her the phone logs were on their way, that this one little illegal favor was the kiss-off; he wouldn’t be around for the next one.

And she hadn’t had her swim; stupid thought, but there it was. She felt her muscles turning into useless flab as she sat in the tickly plush seat, watching America’s industrial wasteland roll by, borne at a pathetic sixty miles an hour on century-old technology. Maybe people like her could turn it around, maybe the country could leap a generation in manufacturing, maybe she’d be one of the saviors, but not now, not this week.

*   *   *

Marder and Skelly stood on a peak in the Sierra Durango, looking out at the clouds below, not exactly with a wild surmise but with deep appreciation, for they were both people who liked the mountains, and these were nice ones.

Skelly said, “This is pretty cool. I didn’t think Mexico had anything like this. It looks like Oregon or western Kashmir, the Hindu Kush foothills.”

“Most Americans only know the northern border from the movies, little burnt desert towns with banditos.” Marder looked at Skelly, who was smoking his first reefer of the day, and had an intense and disturbing déjà vu of the type that had become increasingly frequent: standing with Skelly on a mountain ridge, looking out at a cloud-strewn forest, in the morning, as he could now, feeling damp, too, on his face, and the scent of the vegetation. The weird feeling passed over him like a vagrant breeze and was gone.

The smell was different. He felt Skelly looking at him. “Anything wrong, buddy?” he asked.

“No,” said Marder, “just remembering the last time we were up in the mountains. We’ve had a pretty urban relationship over the years, haven’t we?”

“Yeah, I guess we lost our taste for camping out. I’m going to go run. Don’t get into trouble.”

Skelly took off down the foggy road and was lost to sight before the sound of his footsteps had quite faded.

*   *   *

It was on their first RON mission to plant voodoos; they were going to Remain Over Night, as the army peculiarly called camping out. It was Marder and Skelly and another SOG guy, named—he couldn’t recall the man’s name, only what they called him—Popeye, and two of the Vietnamese LLDBs, and a dozen or so Yards. Marder and the SOGs were wearing the garbagemen’s uniforms, and the Viets were in civilian black pajama outfits, and the Hmong were wearing their traditional garments. Each of the Hmong would be hauling a woven straw pannier of rice on his back; the idea was that they would walk down the trail as if they were a gang of Hmong impressed as porters, and the LLDBs were the guards, and the three Americans were, what—making a movie? Tourists?

At the mission briefing, they’d learned that the SOG people did this all the time, that there were Russian experts, engineers, and so on working on the trail, and besides it was dim and jungly and they would walk on by like they owned the place and in general no one ever stopped them. The lieutenant’s opinion was that no NVA would believe they had the balls to just stroll along the sacred Ho Chi Minh Trail like that, especially not that far north. Marder hoped he was right. He personally thought it was nuts, but at the same time he was excited, he was glad to be there with Skelly instead of calling down fire on the place from the safety of Naked Fanny. The plan was to try to sensorize the whole road complex where it was narrowed down by having to go through the Mu Gia Pass. It was near impossible to place sensors accurately by air drop in this area, because of the terrain and the concentration of antiaircraft fire, which was of course the whole reason behind Iron Tuna.

They’d been flown in by a couple of CH-2s the previous evening and been led upland from the drop zone by Skelly, whose theory was that the Viets were lowland people and that soldiers in general would avoid climbing while on patrol, so the safest place to RON was up high on a ridge. In fact, they passed a peaceful night. At dawn Skelly had taken Marder up even higher, to an actual outcrop of rock, where they stood and looked out over the unbroken green rug of the Laotian forests. Skelly said they were looking directly at the Ho Chi Minh Trail, invisible under its canopy. “Why we had this little problem,” he added.

The two ARVN Special Forces had been picked by Skelly as being the best of the lot. One was a dour whippet named Dong—called Ding Dong, naturally, by his American friends—and the other was a man who smiled unusually often and was unusually large for a Vietnamese, who was known as Charlie. The running joke (an example of the kind of constant, irritating military joshing that passed for relationships in the war) was that he was so good at impersonating a Vietcong that he probably really was VC. Skelly would joke that “Charlie is going to stab us all in our sleep” and Charlie would grin and say, “No, no, I not VC, I hate VC, VC number ten!”

The LLDBs carried Kalashnikovs, and the SOG guys carried small Swedish K submachine guns. Marder had his sidearm and, stuck in his rucksack, a cut-down M79 grenade launcher. Besides that, he carried no other warlike devices but only several dozen of the incredibly heavy voodoos and an entrenching tool.

*   *   *

Marder went back into the camper and poured another cup of coffee. What was that guy’s name, Popeye? He couldn’t bring up his face either. And maybe it wasn’t Popeye at all.

*   *   *

He had an image of walking along a road, in dappled shade, and watching the motion of the man’s huge rucksack and the weapon he had slung over one shoulder, not a Swedish K at all but a cut-down Russian RPD light machine gun, a captured weapon that looked like a giant tommy gun. He could recall the gun perfectly but not the man’s name or face. What did that say about him?