Better Angels (32 page)

“From Seattle, originally,” John said. “Goth Deadhead Independent U District Christians.”

“Salt of the earth,” Kal said, and they laughed.

“We came here to retire in the sun,” Ann said, “but I wish we were still there, right about now.” She got up to bustle about them some more. “Enough about us and the whole wide world, though. You gentlemen take some more tea. Then you’d better get some rest.”

Paul nodded. He was tired—desperately so, he now realized.

“Searchers looking for you might come knocking on our door,” John said. “We’ll put you up in one of our storage rooms, just in case they do.”

Ten minutes later, Paul and Kal were bedding down on futons in a space cleared behind a jumbled wall of Grandma’s attic clutter in one of the numerous storerooms of the large combination boathouse/ranch house. John and Ann mounded quilts and blankets on top of their guests, until Kal joked about having survived hypothermia and near-drowning only to die from being suffocated by good will and comforters. John and Ann bid the two of them good night, then blocked up and mounded over the path through the wall with antiques and knickknacks and collectibles. Ten minutes later, Kal and Paul were solidly asleep.

Several hours on, Paul thought he woke groggily to the sounds of knocking and muffled voices—even thought he saw a light flash into the storeroom—but when nothing more happened he drifted back to sleep. By morning he had written it off as being one of many particularly vivid dreams—mostly about drowning—brought on by the stresses and traumas of the previous day.

“We had visitors last night,” John said over a big breakfast of eggs and sausage and cowboy potatoes. “Morals police from the spirit camp. Looking for you.”

Paul and Kal both stopped chewing and looked at him in astonishment.

“I thought I dreamed it,” Paul said.

“I didn’t hear a thing,” said Kal.

“They were pretty cursory in their look around,” Ann said. “Luckily for us. They were already more or less convinced you were drowned. They found your raft, hung up among some flooded roots and fallen tree trunks downstream. They also found your friend’s body, I’m afraid.”

A silence opened among them.

“If he’d only taken the time to put on a wetsuit,” Kal lamented quietly, “Al might be eating breakfast with us this morning.”

“However that may be,” Paul said, glancing up at their hosts, “we’re going to have to be moving on. We can’t put you people at any more risk than we already have.”

“No trouble at all, really,” John said, a bit more light-heartedly than the situation warranted. “A little excitement is good for the circulation, at my age. You’re right about not being able to stay here, though. In the small towns roundabout, people notice newcomers right away—and no sooner do they notice than the questions start up. I’m taking some stock and a load of straw bales over into Nevada today. Almost clear to Las Vegas. What do you say I take you that far westward, anyway?”

Kal and Paul agreed that would be a good idea. Discarding their prison coveralls permanently, they tried to make do as best they could with clothes from John’s closet. The work shirts and overalls there were a particular godsend.

They thanked Ann copiously for her kindness, generosity and hospitality, then climbed into the back of John’s old, faded-green long-bed pickup, into the small, dusty space John had already prepared among the bales while loading them. The trip down old Interstate 15, buried under straw bales, was hot and cramped and almost unbearably scratchy, but it got Paul and Kal past three major checkpoints without a hitch.

At the ranch outside Vegas where John made his delivery, Paul and Kal helped onload horses and bales, then rode with him into Vegas proper. John stopped before a bus depot where shiny electric motorliners whirred in and out.

“This ought to be enough to cover your fare to California,” John said, handing them a couple of credit pins.

“We’ll send you the money as soon as we get on our feet,” Paul promised. John waved him off.

“It’s not a fortune,” he said. “No rush.”

All three men got out of the truck, then Kal and Paul shook hands with the older man in farewell.

“It takes an uncommon humanity,” Kal said, shaking John’s hand, “to recognize our common humanity. Especially when it washes up on your doorstep dressed like common criminals.”

John gave them a smiling “aw shucks, ‘tweren’t nothing” look.

“You’d do the same for me,” he said, climbing back into the cab of his truck and starting the engine. Watching John wave and drive away, Paul wondered if, given the same situation, he would have done what John and Ann had done. He hoped he would have.

The bus station was surprisingly crowded with people headed to California. From other travelers they learned that the crowds were the upshot of the uneasy cease-fire currently in place in this part of the country. The station was so crowded that purchasing tickets was becoming only slightly less perfunctory an affair than ID checks. Money or credit in hand seemed to be the only truly necessary ID now, and with that identification Kal and Paul were able to take seats together aboard a whirring electric monstrosity—all fake chrome and real solar cells—bound for Los Angeles.

Just past the border checkpoint traffic jam and over the line in California, they began to encounter their first units of what was calling itself the Freedom Army. Desert camo-clad troops were bivouacked by the thousands in camouflage tents. Everywhere they could see flying the old United States flag, with all the stars in the field of blue, rather than the single gold cross in the blue field of the Christian States flag.

“Beautiful,” Kal said beside Paul, brushing tears from his eyes, “beautiful.”

By the time they reached Baker, ordinary citizens had begun lining the interstate and the Grand Parade atmosphere only increased. Flags and bands and cheering crowds everywhere—in the middle of the desert. It made for some stop and go travel between Baker and Barstow, but by the time they pulled into the depot in Barstow for a rest stop, Kal could resist it no longer.

“I’ve always been a sucker for pageantry, Paul,” he said as they munched vending machine food at a small plastic-topped table. “All the men on my father’s side were military, back to my great grandfather. Except me. Maybe it’s in our genes. I’ve said ‘A plague on both their houses’ long enough. I’m thinking of finding a recruiter and joining the Freedom Army.”

Paul did not say—he barely even thought—At your age? He suspected that this populist Freedom Army wasn’t one to make overly fine distinctions regarding age eligibility for service.

“How about you?” Kal prodded

“No,” Paul said quietly. “No, I’m a Quaker. I think I’ll find another way to serve. I’ve got a background in biology and chemistry. The city or field hospitals could probably use my skills. I might even end up a medical corpsman—who knows?”

“Then why not just join up now and skip the middleman?” Kal said with a smile.

“Afraid not,” Paul replied, looking out past town, into the desert distance. “I’m on this bus to L.A. I’m going to play out that hand, then see what happens.”

Kal nodded. Too soon, the two men shook hands and patted backs and said their farewells in the Barstow bus depot. Paul reboarded the bus. As it pulled out, he saw Kal wave from the curb, then turn and saunter slowly off down the high street of the desert town.

Almost a year ago now, Paul thought. He sat in a coffee shop in the Wilshire District of L.A., remembering the high and low points of all that had happened since. As the bus had continued toward L.A., he saw the first evidence—bombed-out houses in Victorville—of the fighting that had swept southern California. The damage had gotten steadily worse down through Cajon Pass toward San Bernardino, Rialto, and Ontario. Entire sections of sprawl cities had been reduced to charred rubble.

Surprisingly, the damage had lessened somewhat from about Pomona westward. In L.A. proper, though, some districts had still been pretty badly shot up and burnt out—some neighborhoods doing as good an imitation of urban devastation as anything seen since Beirut or Sarajevo in the century past. Yet, despite having gone through the hell of both a massively destructive earthquake and then extensive urban warfare, the city of the angels had survived the first quarter of the twenty-first century with most of its gaudy, sprawling soul still largely intact. Paul too had come back to himself—perhaps more than he might have thought possible. Despite serving time in a spirit camp, and having to start his life over yet again as a gray and white haired stringy old gnome of a man.

Having reached L.A., he initially had to work for six weeks in UCLA-Harbor General as a bacteriology lab technician until his records could be located. Once his records were found, however, he learned he’d gotten a surprisingly glowing recommendation from his former employers at Tetragrammaton. That was enough to help him rise rapidly in the hospital ranks. Although if his former work in cryonic preservation wasn’t immediately applicable, his skills at growing living tissue and working with supercooled temperatures were soon recognized and rewarded—especially given the need for such skills arising from the large number of burn victims still being generated by the front lines of the ongoing civil war.

Curiously, too, the unexpectedly positive recommendation from Tetragrammaton hadn’t been the last he’d heard from his old employers. For the last several months he had regularly received street mail and virtual mail on all the latest developments aboard the orbital habitat—presumably because Tetragrammaton was deeply involved in that project. Despite infosphere crashes and civil wars on Earth, the habitat had been building its population in cislunar space for a number of years now. Vang’s companies seemed to have a sizable investment in its related operations, particularly in computer control systems for the High Orbital Manufacturing Enterprise (HOME) and the biodiversity archives of a habitat component called “Orbital Park.”

Vang must still be obsessing on Deep Survival and the Age of Code, Paul thought as he read the brochures. He noted too that his own particular scientific background was in high demand, especially in the biodiversity preserves now being assembled in the habitat. Someone at Tetragrammaton must have noted that too, since job announcements tailored to Paul’s career line were regularly included in the v-mail updates he received.

Was this a sign from Vang and Tetragrammaton that all was forgiven? Paul wondered. What was it that he needed to be forgiven of—except speaking the truth as he saw it?

Nevertheless, he could not deny that the idea of taking a job and a life in the orbital habitat appealed to him. The loss of his sister, his job disasters at Tetragrammaton and before, his time spent as a spirit camp penitent, Al Brewster’s death during the escape, his own starting over, yet again, in a war-wounded America—all these things had taken their toll on him, worn him out until he felt weary of the world indeed.

Sadly, that weariness had grown greatly with the v-mail he had received this morning. From the commander of the Freedom Army battalion Kal had been assigned to. The v-mail informed him, in bald terms, that his friend Khalid Elliot had died two days ago, in one of the Colorado River assaults. The Las Vegas Accords, worked out between the Latter Day Saints and the Scientologists, had not come soon enough to save his friend.

First Al had died escaping the oppression of the CSA camps. Now Kal had died, fighting the oppression the CSA regime as a whole represented. Full-scale armistice negotiations with the CSA forces were due to start soon, but those talks would not bring back his lost friends. Paul wondered darkly whether any cause could have been worth the loss of his friends’ lives.

Sipping his coffee and trying to make sense of what had happened to him, his friends, and his country in the past couple of decades, he overheard, beneath the sound system, the discussion of two young people at a table nearby—students from the reopened UCLA, as nearly as he could tell.

“‘Murder’ presupposes the autonomy of the person murdered,” said the thin-bearded young man. “The fetus is not autonomous. The mother of her own will chooses to grant life and sustenance to the fetus and of her own will may choose to stop sustaining that life. To the extent that the fetus is biologically dependent on its mother, it is not a separate, autonomous individual. The Supreme Court in Roe was right to see an inverse proportionality relationship between the fetus’s right to life and a woman’s right to abort.”

“What ‘inverse proportionality’?” the bespectacled young brunette woman with him at their table asked, sharply.

“As the pregnancy comes closer to term and the fetus’s chances of surviving outside the womb—its biological viability as an autonomous individual—increase,” the young man explained, “the woman’s right to abort necessarily decreases. Right to abort is therefore greatest during the first trimester, and least during the third. It’s a sliding scale logically based on biological viability and autonomy.”

“Bull!” said his thin, bespectacled companion. “By that logic, as people grow older or more enfeebled, they become less autonomous and therefore their right to continue living diminishes as their autonomy diminishes. Pretty soon, only those in the prime of life and health have a right to not be murdered. Rights are absolute—no sliding scale. Otherwise they’re privileges, not rights.”

“Then why not decriminalize abortifacients?” asked the young man. “Then the whole question becomes moot.”

“No, it doesn’t,” said the young woman, “not so long as fertilization has taken place—”

Despite himself, Paul smiled. It was an old argument, one that the CSA had succeeded only in banning, not resolving.

Perhaps that was what Kal and Al had died for: the right to argue, to speak one’s mind freely, to present unpopular opinions without fear of any reprisal more vicious than counterargument.

His friends had valued freedom more than simple-minded security. Perhaps freedom of thought, of the mind, of the communication of ideas to and with other minds—maybe that was worth dying for. Though not worth killing for.