Текст книги "Burning Paradise"
Автор книги: Robert Charles Wilson
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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 20 страниц)
14
MONTMORENCY, PENNSYLVANIA
INTERSTATE 80 PASSED THROUGH THE college town of Montmorency, Pennsylvania. The Federal College at Montmorency—one of the colleges established by the Wallace administration in the 1930s—was the town’s biggest business, apart from a couple of manufacturing plants and a limestone quarry. The town was peaceful in the long light of an end-of-November afternoon, many of its neat wood-frame houses flying American flags from front-porch stanchions. It looked like a nice place to live.
But the town had another distinguishing feature: Montmorency had been the home of the late Winston Bayliss, according to the ID Ethan had collected from the dead sim’s wallet.
He had been surprised when Nerissa suggested they drive by the address listed on Bayliss’s driver’s license. “It’ll take us out of our way.”
“Only a little.”
“I thought you wanted to get to Werner Beck as soon as possible.”
“I do. But this might be important.”
“Why? What’s the point?”
She shrugged and looked away.
“It might also be dangerous,” he added.
“Everything we’re doing,” she said, “is dangerous.”
Last night he had talked to Nerissa—more or less for the first time—about their plans.
She had left Buffalo in a furious but unfocused state of mind, determined to enlist Ethan in the hunt for Cassie and Thomas. He understood that. And he understood the guilt she must be feeling. The careful precautions she had put in place after the murders of 2007 had backfired, badly. Cassie and Thomas had left home under the impression that a full-scale second-wave attack was underway. Following protocols, they had gone to the nearest Society member, who happened to be Leo Beck. Leo (and Leo’s girlfriend, a young woman named Beth Vance) had left town, most likely to find Leo’s father. Nerissa was tormented by the idea that Cassie and Thomas might believe she was dead, and she was reasonably afraid that connecting with Werner Beck might put them in even greater danger.
Ethan also knew she had never cared for Werner Beck. She had met him at a couple of Society gatherings. “Even in a community of paranoids,” she said at one of those meet-ups, “this guy is scary-paranoid.”
“He’s right about a lot of things,” Ethan had said. “He’s produced more valuable research than anybody else.”
“He thinks the Society is the vanguard of some kind of human insurgency. We’ll be lucky if he doesn’t get us all arrested.”
“Maybe he is a little crazy. But he’s smart, and he has deep pockets.”
“And you think that’s a good combination?”
So Nerissa was worried about Cassie and Thomas coming under the influence of Werner Beck, more so since the sim’s baleful confession. And Ethan more or less agreed with her. Find Cassie and Thomas, let Nerissa protect them, leave Beck to fight his own wars—fine. Ethan was on board with that. But afterward?
Everything had changed. The dead sim was hardly a reliable source of information, but the attack at the farm house suggested that at least some part of what it had said was true: there was internal conflict in the hypercolony. And although the Society survivors had tried to remain hidden, they had self-evidently failed: the simulacra had obviously known exactly where to find them. So going back into hiding wasn’t an option. They had never really been in hiding.
So, even assuming he and Nerissa successfully reconnected with Cassie and Thomas, what then? Nerissa had been living on the inheritance she had received after the death of her parents in 1998. Ethan had cashed out all his investments in 2007 and had been spending frugally (apart from a few high-dollar weapons and security purchases) ever since. Between the two of them, their resources amounted to very little. Both of them would have to find new ways of making a living and of defending themselves (and Cassie, and Thomas) from future attacks.
Should there be any such attacks. If the sim was to be believed (which of course it was not), the hypercolony was dying. If the hypercolony’s death resulted in a global communications collapse, the consequences would be catastrophic, at least in the short run. And while such a disaster could be overcome, there remained the question of how the world would fare without the hypercolony’s subtle suppression of human bellicosity.
Ethan and Nerissa were facing the same problems, and it seemed to Ethan that they could help each other out, but that was hardly a plan—it was barely more than a wistful thought. He had been married to this woman for five years and physically separated from her for seven. And although in many ways she was still the woman he had loved and married, in other and significant ways she had changed. He no longer knew what to expect from her. Their old, easy intimacy had evaporated. She was nine-tenths a stranger to him.
Winston Bayliss’s house—that is, the house at the address on the simulacrum’s license—was a small home on a street of similar homes. Like many of these houses it featured a wooden front porch in modest disrepair. The lawn had turned patchy and yellow with autumn. A faux-rustic peach basket, planted with geraniums that had died in the last frost, substituted for a garden.
Nerissa had opened the car door before Ethan could say, “Whoa—where are you going?”
“It looks like somebody’s still living here. Maybe it’s the real Winston Bayliss. I want to knock on the door and see who answers.”
“Why?”
But she didn’t answer, and he had no choice but to hurry after her as she strode determinedly up the driveway and onto the porch. She rang the doorbell, then pulled back the screen door and knocked.
Should have brought the pistol, Ethan thought—what if there was another sim inside, what if the house was some kind of sim factory?—but the door creaked open to reveal a stoop-shouldered elderly woman leaning on a walker. She peered at them through bottle-glass lenses and said, “I thought you might be Outpatient Therapy. But you’re not Outpatient Therapy, are you?”
“No, ma’am,” Nerissa said, apparently unfazed.
“No, of course you’re not. Therapy comes on Wednesdays. I’m sorry. So what can I do for you folks?”
“Maybe this is the wrong address. We’re looking for Winston Bayliss?”
“Oh! Well, not the wrong address, but the wrong door. Winston has a separate door around the side. He lives in the basement. He has his own apartment down there. He did the renovation himself.”
“Ah… is he home today?”
“Afraid not. He’s at a conference in Boca Raton and he won’t be back until next week. Something to do with his work. He explained it, but I don’t really understand.”
“You’re Mr. Bayliss’s landlady?”
She grinned. “I’m sorry, but that makes me laugh. No! I mean yes, Winston gives me a monthly allowance for the use of the basement. But I’m not his landlady, I’m his mother. Amanda Bayliss. Mrs. Carl Bayliss, though Carl’s been gone five years now. What did you want to see Winston about?”
“We’re from the Blue Horizon Insurance Agency. Mr. Bayliss contacted us a while back about the possibility of taking out a policy. We were hoping to follow up on that.”
“Well, that can’t be true,” Mrs. Bayliss said.
To her credit, Ethan thought, Nerissa didn’t miss a beat. “Really? Why not?
“I apologize, but it makes me tired to stand… will you come in for a moment? Though I don’t believe I’ll be buying any insurance from you.”
“Of course,” Nerissa said.
“I would offer you coffee, but I don’t drink it anymore. My doctor recommends I don’t.” Mrs. Bayliss frowned. “There might be some instant up in the cupboard. I could boil water, if you like.”
“No, ma’am,” Nerissa said. “Thank you all the same.”
Mrs. Bayliss’s front room was a time capsule in which no item of furniture appeared to be less than thirty years old. The pictures on the end tables bracketing the sofa featured a man who might have been the late Carl and a child who might have been Winston (if Winston Bayliss had ever really been a child). The room’s double-paned windows had been shut and the curtains drawn, enclosing a silence in which the ticking of a mantel clock seemed absurdly loud.
There was nothing to suggest that the house was anything more than the longtime residence of an elderly woman who had been widowed some years before. But that didn’t mean Mrs. Bayliss was necessarily any more human than the creature she claimed as her son.
“You said you doubted Winston would consider a policy with us,” Nerissa said. “May I ask why?”
Mrs. Bayliss looked at Ethan. “Do you talk at all, mister, or are you just for decoration?”
“I’m, ah, in training,” Ethan managed. “I’ll chime in if I’m needed.”
“Just wondered. Anyway, no. No, I can’t see Winston wanting to take out insurance. I assume it’s life insurance you’re selling? But that generally calls for a physical, and Winston won’t see a doctor for love or money. Thankfully, he’s healthy as a horse.”
“Well, that’s good,” Nerissa said. “I hope you’re the same, Mrs. Bayliss, although I see…”
“The brace I’m wearing on my leg? That’s why Outpatient Therapy comes by every week. I had a knee replaced in September. Arthritis. I think it’s wonderful what they can do nowadays. Not that it was such a breeze, the surgery I mean. The physiotherapy’s no fun, either. Though I do like the State nurse who helps me with it. She tries to sound tough, but she’s a sweetie.”
“Winston didn’t get his fear of doctors from you, then.”
“Nor from his father. But he’s had it all his life. That’s why I can’t picture him volunteering for a physical. Even when he was younger, back when he was in school…. but I don’t imagine you want to hear these stories.”
“I don’t mind,” Nerissa said. “Frankly, it’s nice to get out of the cold and chat a little. Just don’t tell my supervisor.” She chuckled, and Mrs. Bayliss laughed agreeably. “Every once in a while we pull a name from the wrong list and end up calling on someone who’s already declined our offer. Probably Winston is one of those. I’ll have a word with my boss about it. It doesn’t do us any good to bother people who aren’t interested in what we have to sell. Though I have to say, it’s an attractive policy package at the price.”
“I’m sure it is.”
The ease with which Nerissa told these lies surprised Ethan. He guessed it was a skill she had taught herself since 2007, the way he had taught himself marksmanship.
“Fear of doctors,” she said, “is more common than you might think.”
“Winston must have been born with it. Fortunately he was a healthy child. Maybe a little too cautious. He always disliked sports, or anything rough-and-tumble. But he seldom caught cold and never came down with anything more serious, even though he wouldn’t submit to vaccinations. The one time he did hurt himself—well, that was probably harder on me and Carl than it was on him.”
“How so?”
“He was walking home from school one day when a car clipped him. Winston was ten years old, and the car driver—we never did find out who it was, but I suspect it was one of those high-school boys—Adlai Stevenson High is just four streets away and I’ve seen how they drive, boys with their first license in their pocket—anyhow, Winston wasn’t badly hurt, but he was skinned up pretty good and he broke a bone in his arm.”
“So he must have seen a doctor.”
“Well, no—not that we didn’t try to take him! I can’t even say for sure the bone was broken—I’m no expert—but he couldn’t use the arm right and there was a lump up above the elbow and real serious bruising, his whole arm was practically green with it. So I called the doctor and he said to bring Winston in, but while Carl was warming up the car—and this was in the dead of winter—Winston tore out the back door and ran off.”
“Ran off?”
“Disappeared for, believe it or not, three days. We had the whole town looking for him. It made the news. Lost boy, probably injured, out in the cold. Honestly, Carl and I were prepared for the worst.”
“But they found him?”
“In fact they didn’t. Winston came home all by himself. Walked in the door five days later as if nothing had happened. Of course, all hell broke loose. He said he’d been hiding in an old barn on one of the rural routes and that he kept warm by building a fire at night. And when we asked him why he’d done all this—and believe me, we asked him that question more often than he cared to hear it—he said it was because he didn’t want to go to the doctor.”
“Even with a broken arm!”
“Well… we sure thought it had been broken. But it was healed by the time he got back. So he must have just sprained it. And although it probably would have been wise to get him checked out anyhow, we didn’t insist. Does that sound foolish?” She shook her head. “Carl and I only had the one child and we probably indulged him more than we should have. Some days I think that’s why Winston never married. We coddled him into a lonely bachelorhood. But as my husband used to say, all you can do is the best you can do. There are no guarantees in this life. Not even”—Mrs. Bayliss smiled at her joke—“if you take out insurance.”
The conversation drifted from Mrs. Bayliss’s son Winston to the weather lately, and Nerissa checked her watch and said they had another appointment to keep. Mrs. Bayliss saw them to the door (a little abashed, Ethan guessed, at how garrulous she had been) and wished them well. “I’ll let Winston know you stopped by.”
“Thank you.”
“You want to leave a card or anything?”
“It doesn’t sound like your son is a likely prospect for us. When do you expect him back?”
“He said he’d let me know. He hasn’t phoned in a few days. That’s not like him. But he’s probably just having a good time down there in Florida. Last time I saw him he was cheerful as a chipmunk.”
And the last time I saw him, Ethan couldn’t help thinking, he was lying in a bed of fallen leaves, eyeless, dying.
Nerissa was somber in the car, and Ethan respected her silence as he drove back onto the turnpike. The sun beat through the windshield with a clarifying light.
Eventually she said, “So Mrs. Bayliss isn’t a sim.”
“Her knee, you mean.”
“Surgery or even an X-ray would have exposed her. And she wasn’t faking it. You saw the scar?”
He hadn’t, but Nerissa said she caught a glimpse when Mrs. Bayliss first sat down, the cotton skirt briefly rucking up to expose a line of suture marks stark as railroad tracks. “Obviously she’s not afraid of doctors.”
“But Winston was.”
The nature and origin of the simulacra had been debated by the survivors since 2007. Most assumed the sims were manufactured in their final adult form. But that had never been more than an assumption. Apparently a baseless one. “So what he told us was true,” Ethan said. “He was born to a human mother.”
“I guess so. But it’s a horrifying idea. That she actually gave birth to this thing, nurtured it, dressed it, sent it to school, and never noticed anything unusual beyond its reluctance to visit a doctor….” Nerissa shuddered. “That’s incredibly fucking creepy.”
“But it’s possible,” Ethan said. “The sims aren’t just approximate copies of human beings. In every detail except their internal structure, they’re perfect copies. It’s tempting to think that if you knew a sim intimately enough something would give it away, some subtlety it hadn’t quite mastered. But that’s wrong. Even Mrs. Bayliss couldn’t guess.”
“I suppose I thought the sims were made for a purpose—to be assassins—and after they did their jobs maybe they just, I don’t know, dried up and blew away in the wind. But if what she said is true, it means they can pass for years without being noticed. Anyone could be one.”
“Not you.”
She gave him a sharp look. “What do you mean?”
“It’s been a while,” Ethan said. “But the appendectomy scar.”
She surprised him by blushing. “Yes, okay. True. And you had chest X-rays the winter you came down with pneumonia. So we can trust each other.”
“It’s the rest of the world we can’t be sure about.”
“Also, if Mrs. Bayliss is human and gave birth to a sim—how’s that work? Was her husband a sim, too? But that only pushes the question back a generation.”
“It’s not uncommon for one species to exploit the nurturing functioning of another species. It’s called brood parasitism.” In fact it was the same kind of parasitism Bayliss had claimed was happening within the hypercolony itself.
“But what’s the mechanism exactly? How does a perfectly ordinary woman in a perfectly ordinary town give birth to a non-human child?”
Ethan had no answer.
“And if they’re so perfectly human, we can’t even be sure about the Correspondence Society. You guys were always careful about using the U.S. Mail so the hypercolony couldn’t listen in, but what if you had a ringer among you? What if a sim was reading your monographs all along?”
He had thought about this. “There’s no way to rule out the possibility. It might be true. Even though we were in hiding, the sims had no trouble finding Cassie and Thomas. Or me. And Bayliss seemed to know exactly how much we knew about the hypercolony. So it would probably be smart to assume that the Society has been infiltrated.”
“So who can we trust? You, me—”
“That’s two. And probably Werner Beck.”
“Beck!” Nerissa said scornfully. “I never did trust Beck.”
15
DOWD’S GARAGE
ONE PART OF EUGENE DOWD’S CONVERTED barn had been set aside for paintwork, and Cassie watched with fascination as he worked on the stolen car. Even more fascinating—in a much scarier way—was Dowd’s running monologue.
First he unbolted the car’s license plates and set them aside on his workbench. The plates were evidence, he said, and he would cut them apart with tin snips and bury the pieces in the yard before they left. Then he snapped off the Ford’s removable trim and moldings and used a power sander to rough up the paint. “Ordinarily,” he said, “I’d sand down to metal, but we’re in a little bit of a hurry here.” Cassie guessed this wasn’t the first vehicle he’d repainted, probably not the first stolen vehicle he’d repainted.
When Dowd bent to sand the side panels she could see the blades of his hips working under the denim sprawl of his jeans. Paint dust roiled up around him, but he wasn’t wearing a mask and didn’t appear to care. When he spoke (between bouts with the noisy sander) he kept his eyes on the Ford, as if Cassie and Thomas and Leo and Beth weren’t fully present, as if his words were addressed not to them but to something invisible that lived in the motor of the car. I was in a little town outside of Amarillo, name of it doesn’t matter, when Werner Beck found me. This was, let’s see, five going on six years ago now.
The town was where I grew up but I’d been gone a long time and I came back because I didn’t know where else to go. I’d been doing odd jobs, carpentry and electrical work mostly, out of the country, but I was done with that, for reasons I’ll get to shortly.
So there I was, back in town and out of work. Since I left both my parents had died, but I didn’t know that till I got back. I wasn’t real good about keeping in touch. So the news was kind of a shock. Not that they were much of a family. My daddy drank when he wasn’t digging foundations and my mom worked as a beautician all her adult life. Cancer took her, and sometime later my daddy shot himself. Their house was sold off for back taxes. I came home to nothing, in other words. All I wanted was to curl up in a safe place and forget what I’d seen down in the Atacama, and all I got was more fuckin’ grief.
I rented me a little place at the edge of town and I guess I meant to sit there smoking weed and watching shit on TV until my savings ran out, but one day Werner Beck knocked on the door. At the time, I didn’t know who the fuck he was. I figured he wanted to collect a debt or sell me a Bible. But what he said was, Are you the Eugene Dowd who saw some unusual things in Chile last year? Which made we want to reach for a gun, except I didn’t have one. Relax, he tells me, I’m red-blooded all the way through. And I knew what that meant. So I told him to come in.
Naturally I wanted to know how he’d found me. He said he seen a piece in the local paper. He subscribed to what he called a clipping service. Clipping service sends him pieces from newspapers all over the country, big and little newspapers, if the article mentions certain words or phrases.
He didn’t say what those words or phrases were. But I knew the piece he was talking about. A column in the local rag, which is barely a real newspaper, mostly grocery coupons and classified ads. Well, some bored fucker wrote a column about what he called “colorful characters,” and I’d had the misfortune to run into this guy at a bar when I was too pissed for my own good—I told him a few things about the Atacama and he wrote it up like it was some big fucking joke. Local loser sees green men, that kind of shit.
Yeah, I told Beck, that’s my story, or part of it, but the paper didn’t use my name, so again, how’d you find me? I asked around, Beck says. Lot of trouble to go to, I say. Yeah, he says, but the thing is, Mr. Dowd, I believe you.
Well, there really wasn’t much in that newspaper column to believe, it seemed to me. The column told how I’d said there were Martians living in South America, which I didn’t. It even had a punch line. Like this: “I asked my newfound acquaintance whether his Martians were green, as in the comic books. ‘Yes,’ he confided, ‘green as grass—but only on the inside!’”
Fucking humiliating.
Beck saw the expression on my face and said, Look, Mr. Dowd, I’m serious about this. I know all about people who are green on the inside. And one thing I know is, they don’t think twice about committing murder. They killed a bunch of my friends. They tried to kill me.
Which made me realize he was serious. I said, How do I know you’re not one of them?
He told me that was a smart question and he loosened his belt and lifted up his shirt and showed me a scar where he had his appendix out. I asked him what that was supposed to prove. He said the hospital where he was treated would’ve noticed if he’d been bleeding green. Then he says, How about you?
I didn’t feel like showing him any scars, but he said that was okay, he’d take me at my word. At least for now. The word he used was “provisionally.”
Then we got down to business. Given what he’d already said, I asked him what he wanted. I want to hear your story, he says. And then I’ll tell you mine.
Once he had sanded the original paint Dowd washed the car with soapy water, dried it, and rinsed it again with a solution of mineral spirits. Then he taped off the parts he wanted to protect—windows, bumpers, trim. In the occasional silences, when Dowd wasn’t talking or operating power tools, Cassie heard wind rattling the corners and hollows of Dowd’s garage. Winter coming. She wasn’t sure what winter meant in this part of the country—probably not what it meant in Buffalo, where snow sometimes shut down the city for days.
Dowd broke for lunch as soon as the car was prepped for spraying. Lunch today was a rerun of lunch yesterday: convenience-store sandwiches. Cassie watched Dowd as he crammed a ham sandwich into his mouth, crumbs collecting in his moustache. He caught her looking and gave her a grin that wasn’t entirely friendly. Werner Beck trusts this man, Cassie reminded herself. But how much did she really know about Leo’s father?
“Had enough to eat?” Dowd asked, still gazing at Cassie.
She nodded.
Leo said, “You were going to tell us what you told my father.”
“Yeah.” Dowd wiped his mouth on the sleeve of his shirt. “I guess I was.”
I was sick of Texas and I wanted to travel, which is how I ended up on the Trans-American Highway—parts of it brand new in those days, all those tunnels and bridges through the Darien Gap—working my way south from the Canal Zone picking up odd jobs. Mostly construction and electrical, like I said. Or what ever came to hand. I slept rough from time to time but I was young and that was all right with me as long as I could move on when I felt like it. Just heading south, like some kind of migrating bird.
I was in Antofagasta, that’s in Chile, when I hooked up with a Dutch company that was doing some work out in the Atacama desert. Building and running a supply depot for a copper mine, supposedly. Crew was mostly local but the company had an arrangement with the unions that let them hire a few foreigners, a handful of Ecuadorian and Colombian guest workers and one American, me—the crew boss liked that I had a U.S. electrician’s certificate, which is pretty much the gold standard. So they bused us over the Coast Range and up the Antofagasta Road, then along one of those old roads that used to service nitrate mines, to a flat place where a little spur of the Ferrocarril ran out—the real high desert, dry as glass and air so thin you could see the moon by daylight.
In a couple of months we had four air-conditioned buildings up and running. More like ware houses than anything else. And it was all kind of a mystery. There was no copper mine in sight, far as I could see. The Dutch crew boss spoke Spanish and a little German but he liked to practice his English on me in the off-hours, so I asked him about that one time. Get a little Jenever into him and he was pretty friendly. But he didn’t have much to say. He’d been told the site was a depot to store supplies on their way from the railhead or the road to the mine—the mine itself being a ways east. And no, he said, you couldn’t see the mine from here, but some nights you could see a light, like a spotlight or what do you call it, one of those lights they shine at movie theaters, know what I’m talking about? A shaft of light going up into the desert air. What kind of mine has a light like that, I asked him. But he didn’t know. It wasn’t his business to know.
We, I mean the work crew, slept in temporary shelters, plywood bunkhouses with canvas roofs and the wind for ventilation. Some nights when I couldn’t sleep I went out to look for that light the crew boss talked about. I saw it once, a shaft of light coming up from the horizon, almost too faint to see. Straight-up vertical. It lasted about three minutes. Not real impressive, but it had no business being there.
Anyway, I stayed on after the construction was finished. The Dutch company’d been contracted to operate the depot once they’d built it, and they needed hands for cartage and security. And I didn’t have anything better to do and actually, strange as it sounds, I kind of liked it out there in the high desert. At least at first. It felt like time went slower there. Cities sort of rush you along, if you know what I mean. Whereas in the desert an hour goes by and nothing happens but maybe the wind blows a few grains of sand across the salares. The salt basins.
I made friends with a guy named Bastián. Bastián was a forklift driver from the south of the country, spoke English, claimed to have a grandmother who spoke Quechua, which meant fuck-all to me. Skinny little guy but strong for his size. Dark-haired. He had a sense of humor, which I appreciated. When I told him about the light on the horizon he grinned and said, Shit, Eugene, that’s the alicanto.
We were off behind the depot buildings in the shade, sharing a smoke where the crew boss wouldn’t see us. I said, Well, what’s an alicanto?
It’s a bird, he says. It’s got metal wings and it lives in caves and eats gold and silver. Its wings light up at night, all different colors.
Bullshit, I say.
Yeah, obviously, Bastián says. Or no, not bullshit exactly but a myth. A legend. The alicanto’s good luck for miners. Follow it to find silver or gold. But if it sees you, it leads you nowhere. It lets you die in the desert.
I’m no miner, I tell him. And I don’t believe in any fucking alicanto.
Fair enough, he says. I don’t believe in your light.
So I told him, next time I saw it I’d wake him up and show him.
But we got pretty busy about then. There were big shipments coming through. How it worked was, goods were trucked in from the railhead. Some of it was food but most of it was hardware. Electronics: integrated circuits, transformers, microwave generators. And some large-scale stuff. Machines for working metal. Aluminum parts. Tubes and piping. Crates listed on the manifest as powdered silicon carbide. Pressurized hydrogen. Mirrors, huge ones. Graphite. I mean, what the fuck? I’m no expert, but why does a copper mine need mirrors and graphite?
And it was a strange arrangement all around. These shipments were delivered from the Ferrocarril and the crates would sit in our store house for a couple of days, then a fleet of trucks would come down the road from the east and we’d load ’em up. It made no sense. Why not just deliver it all straight to the mine? Also, the guys who drove those trucks—copper miners, supposedly—never talked to us. They’d nod if you said hello, but they were all about their manifests. They didn’t socialize. They never even stepped out back of the shed for a smoke—none of them smoked. Guys in white shirts and jeans, neat and clean as fucking Mormons. Eyes on the clipboard at all times.
What I figured out was that we were there to sanitize their operation. You know what I mean? So nobody from outside ever got to see the mine. What ever they did there was always out of sight, over the horizon. We were as close as anybody was allowed to get—and all we ever saw were these guys in their unmarked trucks.
Which made me curious.
Bastián, not so much. It was just a job to him, he didn’t give a fuck how the mine worked. Not until one night, one of those nights without a breeze of any kind, I woke up, it might have been three or four in the morning, I couldn’t sleep, so I stepped out of the bunk house to get some air, cold as it gets at night even in summer in the Atacama, and the light was shining again, like a candle on the horizon. So I went and woke up Bastián. There, I told him. See? There’s your goddamn alicanto.
I don’t know what that is, Bastián says, serious for once. Maybe some kind of smelter they’re running. But he knew better than that.
I could tell he was curious. We talked it over now and then for a couple of weeks. But it was busy times. Lots of supplies going into the mine. And something else strange: nothing ever came back the other way. No copper, no ore, nothing raw and nothing refined. One time I asked one of those white-shirt truck drivers how that worked. Did they dig a dry hole or what? And he looked at me like I was something that crawled into his boot during the night. No, he says, we’re still getting it up and running. Meanwhile staring at my name where it was stitched on my shirt. Making notes.
