Water Rites (11 page)

CHAPTER THREE

C
arter fought the wheel of the little car he’d drawn from the Corps’ Portland motor pool. It was a new electric model, and light enough that the wind kept pushing it off the highway. The Columbia Gorge would make a great wind tunnel, he thought sourly. Sheer vertical walls of black rock rose on his right. The dry Columbia bed yawned on his left, like an ugly wound in the Earth’s crust. Wind towers stood in silver ranks, their long blades turning briskly, scouring energy from the wind. Those were the Corps’ towers. They powered the pumps that pushed water through the Pipeline. You couldn’t see the Pipeline itself — the six immense pipes lay buried like veins beneath the riverbed. Another truck convoy thundered past him on the left — triple trailer rigs doing about eighty — and the car tried once more for the ditch.

A ramp was coming up. Arms aching, sweating in spite of the laboring air-conditioning, Carter fought the car off the highway.
Rest Area
, a blue highway sign proclaimed. The ramp curved gently toward the towering cliff wall, ending in a small roadside parking lot. It wasn’t much of a rest area, but at least the wind wasn’t so bad down here. Carter slammed the car door, his sweat springing out in earnest in the dry heat. The asphalt lot was empty except for a big semi rig parked at the far end and a lanky man with a tail of blond hair sitting in the narrow strip of shade cast by a bank of vending machines. Carter headed for one of the three pay-toilet units beside the machines, very conscious of his uniform.

He had a new CO to meet and no time to change, or he would have been in civies. You didn’t wear a uniform off base, not if you were traveling alone. The blond guy didn’t seem to notice, or he didn’t care, anway. Carter pulled the door shut after himself, baking in the plastic oven despite its reflective coating. He held his breath as he unzipped. These new composters were supposed to be odorless, but something was sure wrong with this one.

The week was not going well. He’d come in three days ago, expecting to meet up with Johnny. But Johnny wasn’t in Portland. He had been called back down to the regional office in San Francisco for some kind of emergency meeting. So Carter had kicked around Portland on his own, seeing what sights the city had to offer. The refugee camps in the old suburbs didn’t do much for the atmosphere. They reminded him too much of Chicago.

He glowered at the heavily caged vending machine. It offered water, pop, and a few snack items. Carter stuck his debit card into the slot and a plastic pack of water thunked into the tray. Sun-hot. Grimacing, Carter poked the attached straw through the plastic and took a swallow.

Beyond the parking lot, the sheer cliff wall of the Gorge towered over the ruins of a stone building. The stone was grooved with the traces of a long dead waterfall. This must have been a park once. Someone had tacked a laminated postcard to the splintered remains of an old signpost. The colors had bleached to yellows and greens in the sun, but you could just make out a waterfall, yeah. Carter squinted at it, then lifted the card carefully.
Multnomah Falls.
The brittle cardboard cracked as he read the caption on the back, and the card came away in his hand. Carter stared at it, not sure what to do with it. He finally managed to wedge it under a thick splinter of wood. Johnny would laugh at him, but someone had put it there.

He had looked forward to a few days with Johnny. Golden-boy Johnny. Carter shook his head, smiling, remembering. Johnny had been king of the private school they’d both attended, and Carter — forever on the outside — had watched him operate with a resigned envy. It had turned his universe upside down when this star picked him to hang out with. At eleven, he already knew how the world worked. It didn’t work like this, except in fairy tales. His mother was the live-in housekeeper for old man Warrington and everybody knew why the old man paid his tuition to the school. He’d figured Johnny needed backup and so he’d made a wary trade — friendship for his fists when needed.

Johnny had dragged Carter with him into every inside clique and hadn’t asked for anything . . .
anything
. . . in return. That had turned the school’s little universe upside down. Which was probably the joke that Johnny had intended in the first place.

But by then they had become real friends. Carter blinked, sighed, found himself staring at the crumpled water pack in his hand. He spiked it into a trash can, turned . . . and froze.

In front of his eyes, the cliff face wavered and changed. A silver tail of water fell down from the rocky lip, exploding into white mist in a shallow basin far below. Ferns sprouted from the rocks and emerald grass covered the shady ground between trees.

The postcard — that was it — only it was
real
. For the space of three heartbeats, Carter stared at that green vision. Then — it vanished. Only dust and water worn rock remained above the dry hollow that had once been ringed with ferns. “Mother of God,” Carter said out loud. The falls stayed dead and he looked around, half embarrassed by his exclamation. The lot was still empty. The blond man was leaning on the rail that edged the parking lot. He was staring at the falls, ignoring Carter.

Fatigue, Carter told himself. Stress. Better watch the driving. He started for the car, uneasy, more disturbed by his momentary vision than he wanted to admit. He had never hallucinated in his life. And there had been a strange feeling of . . . reality to that brief vision. As if it wasn’t a vision at all, as if, for an instant, he had stepped back through time into the green, unbelievable past. He unlocked the car door.

“Hey, soldier? Hang on a minute.”

Carter stiffened, turned, saw the blond man limping toward him. He leaned on a stick and his legs looked crooked, as if they didn’t bend just right. He was wearing a faded shirt and worn jeans, and his long, sunbleached hair was tied back into a thin tail. He looked as if he might be about Carter’s age, maybe early thirties, but it was hard to tell. His tanned face had the lined, sundried look of a drylands native.

“You heading east?”

“To Bonneville.”

“Can I get a ride? I was hitching in the truck, but the guy sleeps afternoons and I’m not sleepy.” He gave Carter a crooked grin.

He didn’t look like much of a threat. He was a head shorter than Carter, slender and wiry. “Sure.” Carter reached inside and popped the car’s hatch-back. “Put your pack and your stick in back. This thing’s got as much room as a tuna can.”

“Thanks.” The stranger stuck out a hand. “My names’ Jeremy. Jeremy Barlow. I appreciate the ride.”

“I’m going there anyway.” Carter returned Jeremy’s firm grip. His hands were misshapen, the joints thick and ugly, and he handled his pack clumsily.

“You coming from Portland?” Carter started the car and took the eastbound ramp.

“Yeah.” Jeremy shrugged. “Looking for a job, but jobs are tight and there are a lot of things I can’t do too well.” He held his hands up briefly. “Rawlings keeps saying that the depression is over, but I think he’s talking for the next election. So I guess I’ll hit the road again.”

“The president has been saying that things are looking up since the last election. The line still seems to work, don’t ask me why. Or he thinks it does.” Although if Johnny was right about the Alliance breaking up, that might not be enough to get him through the next election. Carter and the car ducked as another triple rig roared past. “What do you do? On the road?”

“I’m a magician. I do a few card tricks and stuff.” He looked at Carter, a hint of a smile at the corner of his mouth. “Don’t run off the road, okay?”

A tiny dragon appeared on the dashboard in front of Carter. Its green scales glittered in the sun and it glared at Carter with ruby eyes. Abruptly it reared back, snorted a tiny tongue of flame, and vanished.

“Good thing you warned me.” Carter stared at the spot where the dragon had stood. “Holo projector?”

“Yeah.” Jeremy held out a small, gray box. It resembled an ordinary notebook except for the lens at one end. “It fools people.”

“I’m impressed. That’s a damn sophisticated gadget. You’re some electronics whiz.”

“Not me,” Jeremy said a shade too quickly. “I got it from this old guy. Now there was a whiz, alright.”

Stolen? Well someone had done something pretty marvelous. “This seems to be my day for visions,” Carter said lightly. “I was looking at that old waterfall beside the rest area and, for a moment, I could see it just like it must have looked back before the Dry. With water. Green.” He shook his head, pierced by unexpected longing. “It was . . . beautiful.”

“It was.” Jeremy was looking at him, his expression enigmatic. “You’re not from around here, are you?”

“I just flew in from . . . the Midwest.” Carter let his breath out in a sigh. “It’s something — seeing the country from the air. The Pipeline feeds tundra water into the Missouri, so the Mississippi drainage isn’t too bad. They still do a lot of soaker hose farming there. Biomass crops, mostly. But then you cross the Missouri, fly on over Colorado, Wyoming . . . and all of a sudden, it’s dead. You look down from the airplane and you see desert.”

“The Drylands.” Jeremy’s tone capitalized the word. “That’s where I was born. You can live there, but you got to live by the rules. There’s only so much water. Out there, they take the extra babies and the ones who aren’t perfect, and they leave ’em out somewhere. In the dust.”

“You’re kidding.”

“No, I’m not kidding.” Jeremy stared through the windshield, rubbing his crooked hands gently on his thighs. “If you don’t do it, maybe your next real dry summer, you get to choose who dies then. There’s only so much water. It’s another world out there, Carter. Sometimes you make ugly choices. It makes it worse that you can see the way it used to be,” Jeremy said softly. “You catch it out here — a flash of yesterday once in awhile.” He looked over at Carter, the faint grin quirking the corner of his mouth again. “No, you weren’t going crazy.”

“Glad to hear it.” That vision had been so damn real.
Bonneville
, a green sign proclaimed.
Next Three Exits.
“We’re here.”

The highway curved out and around and now he could see the dam. Bonneville Dam. It stretched across the dry riverbed like a gray wall, broken by the silver arches of a pumping station. Solar arrays spouted like black wings from the top, aimed by their computers at the setting sun. “You want to come to the base?” Carter asked Jeremy. “They might be hiring civilians.”

“Maybe later.” Jeremy nodded. “It’s been awhile since I’ve hit the big Bonneville market. I usually do pretty good there. You can drop me at the next exit, if you would. You stationed here?”

“No. I’m on my way to The Dalles.” The dam was so big. This close, it loomed like a vast cliff. Carter pulled off at the exit ramp and went around to get Jeremy’s pack from the hatch. “Come by the base, if you get up there. Maybe you could at least do some shows for the personnel.”

“Maybe I’ll do that.” Jeremy slung his pack over his shoulder and picked up his stick. “I’ll be along. I stick to the highway towns out here.”

“I imagine the little rural communities are pretty slim pickings.”

“It’s not that.” For a moment, Jeremy’s face was grim. “They don’t like magic out in the drylands. Thanks for the lift. Good luck in The Dalles.” He raised one crooked hand in a salute and walked down the ramp.

Carter pulled back onto the highway, puzzled by Jeremy’s comment about magic. Local traffic cluttered the lanes here in town; pickups and the little electrics, even older hybrids and a few bio-diesels. Below the highway, new silocrete buildings and haphazard shacks cluttered the shelving slope of the old riverbed. Solar arrays sprouted from every rooftop and the ubiquitous wind towers lined the riverbed. Up ahead, a ramp exited left, to curve down behind the dam itself. The turreted castle of the Corps gleamed in the level beams of the setting sun. This was it. Carter slid the little car in behind a rickety old bio-diesel pickup with a goat in the back and turned off onto the ramp. The buildings of the Corps headquarters huddled on the south side of the Pipe, up against the inner wall of the old dam. Rec or mess halls, apartments for enlisted and officers, a playground with a pair of basketball hoops — so normal — but Carter felt a sense of foreboding as the shadow of the dam swallowed him.

He had to slow to a crawl as he zigzagged through the anti-bomber barriers. The Green Beret on the gate ran his ID through the computer and didn’t crack a smile until after Carter’s thumbprint had cleared. By then, a corporal had appeared to escort him to General Hastings’ office.

Tight security. All security had to be tight these days, but it didn’t do anything for Carter’s mood as he followed the corporal’s brisk pace. Administration was inside the dam itself, in the space that had once been taken up by the huge turbines and generators. Carter’s sweaty uniform dried quickly in the cool, conditioned air as he followed his guide through a set of gasketed doors and down a long corridor. He looked at the pastel yellow ceiling, imagining that vast bulk of concrete squatting above his head. It gave him the willies. Uniformed men and women wearing the Corps insignia passed him and saluted, but Carter caught their quick, surmising glances. New kid in town. He wondered what rumors had gone around.

“In here, sir.” The corporal opened a door marked
General Hastings
.

Inside, a cluttered desk with a computer and two plastic chairs stood on a nondescript magenta carpet. A large framed photograph hung on the wall above the desk. It looked like an old photo of the dam. White water poured through the spillway, and the cliffs of the Columbia Gorge glowed with greenery beneath a gray sky.

“Hard to imagine, isn’t it, sir? All that water, running right over our heads?” The corporal grinned.

He couldn’t really imagine it, but it didn’t help his growing claustrophobia to try. Carter suppressed a shudder as the corporal ushered him into the inner office. “Lieutenant Colonel Carter Voltaire reporting for duty, sir.” He saluted and stood at attention.

The thickset man with the square face and general’s star didn’t even look up from his screen. Carter waited, listening to his own breathing. Bad start? The small office looked as shabby as the corporal’s cubby. The carpeting was worn and the furniture looked like refugees from a flea market. The Chicago base was luxurious by comparison. A large vid screen covered one entire wall. Pictures stood on Hastings’ cluttered desk; a flat photo of a smiling young man in dress greens, holo cubes of a woman holding a baby, and a blond boy leaning on the handlebars of a new bike. Carter stared at the man in the dress greens. I know him, he thought, but the name eluded him.