Coming of Age: Volume 1: Eternal Life (27 page)

5. Mad Scramble

The package came to John Praxis at Sansome Street but without the name of Praxis Engineering in the address. It was a heavy envelope, made of synthetic paper visibly reinforced with fiberglass strands. From the feel, it contained some kind of binder or notebook. The return addressee was the F.R. District Court for the Eastern District of California, Fresno Division, at the F.R. Courthouse on Tulare Street in Fresno. He opened it to discover a legal document pinned together with three aluminum rivets under a clear-plastic cover, which showed the cover page of a lawsuit.

Praxis sat down in the office hallway by the mail cabinet and skimmed the first couple of pages.

“
In re State of California, F.R.A.
v.
John Praxis
… Case No. 100026-248, Courtroom No. 9, 6th Floor … The State brings forth the following causes of action and alleges the following …

“1. Plaintiff is the Reunified State of California, bearing geographic congruence, demographic inherence, and civil and jurisdictional authority identical with the former State of California in the former United States of America. …

“2. Defendant is an individual, resident of the City and County of San Francisco, former citizen of the Unites States of America and newly repatriated citizen,
re
National Reunification Act, of the Federated Republic of America. …

“3. Defendant is and was one of fifty-two named subscribers to the National Assets Distribution Act, legislation passed in time of war by the former United States of America. …

“4. Defendant agreed under terms of the Act to certain stipulations and requirements as to maintenance and improvement of property formerly known as the Stanislaus National Forest …

“5. Defendant failed to abide by the terms of those stipulations and requirements … in that fire roads and trails installed under his responsibility fail to extend to all areas identified as vulnerable to wildfire combustion on Exhibit C, F.R. Geographical Survey, “Stanislaus Section,” 7.5-minute, 1:24,000 topographic sheet …

“6. Defendant failed to abide … in that roads and trails fail to meet specifications as to width, grade, surface preparation, and composition in the F.R. Forest Service’s Wildlands Fire Regulations, dated …”

The allegations went on for another half-dozen numbered paragraphs, all having do with his upkeep of the forest property.

“Plaintiff brings forth the following counts in support of the cause of action. … Count 1 – Negligence: Defendant failed to perform contractually promised duties in a safe and effective manner. … Count 2 – Destruction of Public Property: Defendant’s actions permitted, over the course of his stewardship, seven separate wildfires to consume a total of 6,230 acres of second-growth forest. … Count 3 – Public Nuisance: Defendant’s actions deprived the public of lawful enjoyment of a scenic wilderness area. … Damages: wherefore, Plaintiff seeks recovery of title to the property identified as the Stanislaus National Forest and reimbursement for real and compensatory damages.”

By the time he reached that final “wherefore,” Praxis was breathing hard, as if he had just run a 10K race. He got to his feet, still clutching the document, which contained many more pages of exhibits, affidavits, foldout maps, and drawings, and walked down the hall to Antigone’s office. She was smart. She was a lawyer. Antigone would know what to do.

* * *

“Don’t let it worry you, sweetheart,” Wells said as she thumbed through the State of California’s civil action. “We can fight this.”

“I don’t see how,” John said. He sat hunched over in her office’s guest chair, hands clasped between his knees, looking utterly defeated. “Everything in those allegations is true on the face of it. There have been fires. Erosion has washed out the fire roads in some areas. And I don’t know anything about the regulations on things like ‘grade’ and ‘composition.’ They can certainly prove all that in court.”

Wells held her peace and let him talk the negativity out of his system. He was a dear man, but sometimes he could take things so literally. He had not yet learned that the essence of any battle—or negotiation, for that matter—was not the supporting details that the enemy mustered but their overall intention. That was the nut she and John had to crack.

Finally, when he had reached the point of just staring at her, she dropped her eyes to the written specifications and pretended to read more closely.

“For all their huffing and puffing,” she said at last, “they can only find seven fires in what? Five years? And those burned a total of six thousand acres—out of how many hundreds of thousands? We’re bumping up against acts of God here.”

“But what about the road building?”

She pulled out the Geological Survey map marked with “vulnerable areas,” then turned to her computer console and keyed in a search for “Rim Fire.” The online map of scorched forest dating from the twenty-teens coincided with the State’s representation. “You apparently failed to build fire roads through a burned-out desert,” she said. “And you said yourself that erosion took out some of them. Uncontrolled erosion usually follows a massive fire, doesn’t it?

“Come to think of it,” she went on, “did you build those roads yourself? With your own bare hands?”

“Of course not,” he replied. “I used a contractor.”

“One you chose after appropriate due diligence?”

“The same people who had been building and maintaining fire support under the U.S. Forest Service for twenty years.”

“So you used appropriate experts, and they applied their expertise.”

“But what about the specifications in the regulations they quote?”

“Those regulations were adopted—” She checked the list of allegations. “—three years ago, while we were still at war with the adopting government, and all this building of fire roads happened on
our
side of the border. The Federated Republic’s new specifications may have been subsumed under the National Reunification Act, but they can’t apply retroactively to work you and your contractor performed in prior years. That would constitute rulemaking
ex post facto,
which is not legal under Article One, Section Nine, of both our constitutions.”

“So we can win?” he asked with hope shining in his eyes.

“That will depend on who we get for a judge. And how much of this mess he wants to send on to the jury. I’m pretty sure we can kick out ‘destruction of public property’—but they only put that in there as icing on the cake, anyway. We’ll counter with ‘acts of God.’ The same with ‘public nuisance,’ because God—or some careless campers—burned out those acres, not you. The toughest nut will be ‘negligence,’ which has a long and amorphous history in jurisprudence. But so long as we can show you acted in good faith and trusted your contractors, and they performed to the standards in force at the time, it’s up to the State to prove otherwise.”

He came around the desk and kissed her. “Thank you, Antigone …”

She smiled under his kiss. “We still have to fight, you know. … It’ll be fun.”

* * *

Although he didn’t spend much time in the PE&C corporate offices on Sansome Street, Brandon Praxis couldn’t help but notice the vice president of marketing. Mariene Kunstler reminded him of Tinker Bell—but without the top knot, or the leaf-green minidress, and with a three-inch spider tattoo under her ear. Yet the resemblance was noticeable.

Brandon was enough in touch with his feelings to know exactly the origins of his hidden yearnings. When he was in grade school he had begged his mother for a Peter Pan lunch box. The Disney people weren’t having one of their marketing revivals at the time, and this item was practically a collectible, but he wanted it anyway. He told everyone he liked the adventure story and the artwork, but it wasn’t the images of daring Peter or glaring Captain Hook that drew him. Instead, he could stare for whole minutes at a time at the side panel of darling Tinker Bell swooping around in a shower of gold. She was Brandon’s first love at the age of seven.

And here she was in the flesh, still elfin and delicate, but life size and grown up—and with a streak of attitude.

He managed to be at headquarters on a Tuesday morning, eleven-thirty, and with not much going on. His aunt and grandfather were out on a job, and Kunstler was in her office and not, at the moment, on the phone. He appeared in her open doorway and almost knocked on the frame when she suddenly looked up.

“Hi,” he said, smiling and nodding inanely.

“Hi,” Mariene repeated without a smile. Those great, dark eyes held nothing, not even a question. She appeared to stare through him. “Can I help you?”

“Well, it’s almost lunch time. I thought, if you don’t have plans—”

“I don’t have plans,” she replied, sounding like a parrot.

“Great! Then, well, do you want to grab a bite?”

She seemed to be processing this into some other language.

“I mean, go out for lunch,” he said. “With me.”

“I understand. You are a son of the Praxis, are you not?”

“Yes. John’s my grandfather. My dad was president of the old company.”

“I see. Yes. The one that went bankrupt,” she said, as if reminding herself.

“That was before my time. Before the war. I was a soldier till I came here.”

“And you want to eat lunch with me. Do we have business to discuss?”

“Well, no. More as a social thing. Like getting to know each other.”

“I see. Like a date, but you don’t buy flowers or pick me up.”

“Well, if you want to put it that way …”

“I don’t think this is a good idea,” she said.

“Would it help if I brought flowers?” He smiled.

“It would help if you put me out of your mind.” She held his gaze for one more minute, and the whole room appeared to go dark, as if it spread from her eyes. Then she turned her attention back to her computer tablet.

Brandon nodded and silently withdrew. Out in the corridor, he wondered what had just happened. He knew he wasn’t all that charming or smooth with women, but what he lacked in style and clever lines he usually made up with earnestness and honesty. He knew he wasn’t certifiably ugly. And he didn’t smell.

Another man might think Mariene was herself the cause of rejection. A lesser man might walk away thinking that European women were strangely attracted to weird or ugly men, or to women, or to other forbidden fruits. Given the obvious clues from her meager figure and her style of dress, such a man might even suspect she was some kind of transsexual.

But Brandon was mature enough to intuit that she just wasn’t interested in him. It happened. And that question about “business to discuss” … She was all business. Serious, direct, and dedicated to her job. And to the family enterprise.

He was strangely comforted by that.

* * *

Back in Houston once more, Richard Praxis scheduled a meeting with one of the Tallyman Systems software designers who had worked on the “grand enterprise.” He did not choose the leader of that project, or even one of the section heads. Instead, he selected Potiphar Jackson, an up-and-coming engineer with a reputation for unorthodox thinking. Before the meeting, Richard had sent him a file with specifications and software schematics.

“What’s this?” Jackson asked, when they sat down in one of the private conference rooms and he pulled the file up on his tablet.

“It’s an adaptation to the Stochastic Design package,” Richard said.

“I can see that. You’ve got the hooks into the main logic loop all spec’ed. But why? What does it do?”

“It’s a one-off, particular to this client. It’s not for general distribution.”

“You still haven’t answered my—”

“The client has special needs. He believes these modifications will improve the software’s integration with his other applications and data packages. I don’t know all the details. I got that file from their Information Technology manager. Personally, I’m dubious. But the client insists, so hey! What are you going to do?”

“If you want the package to integrate, I’ll have to know what software it’s got to talk to—and not just the manufacturer’s model, but the version number, latest updates, code references, and port addresses.”

“That stuff’s all in the specification.”

Richard had spent two weeks working out those details. Of course, no one in San Francisco had requested any such modification. Praxis Engineering & Construction didn’t even have a full-time IT manager, or not yet. They worked with package reps and tech support on the operating system and applications they were running—which was all to the good for his purposes. And Richard knew that window would be closing quickly as PE&C built up its backlog and grew the company.

He had asked Callie to provide a list of their current applications—manufacturer, version, update history—that were of interest to him. “To make sure there won’t be any conflicts,” he’d told her. Then he went online, using all the various resources available to him as a senior executive at Tallyman, and teased out logic structures, code sections, and ports for each application. He had worked carefully and methodically, as always. But this was the one software modification that would never get a full burn-in and run-up on the client’s systems. If he tried to do that, it would spoil the game.

“This will be a rat’s nest to test,” Jackson said, as if reading Richard’s mind.

“I know,” he admitted. “And this client is touchy about getting things done right the first time. So we’ll have to set up a hardware simulation, the complete system and apps, all running just like in the client’s office, and test it out before installation.”

“That’ll be expensive …”

“I have the budget for it.”

“Bill it back to them?” Jackson grinned.

“You got it. Special service and all that.”

“But I still don’t see … There’s data collected
here,
buffered and stored
there
—” Jackson zoomed into portions of the schematic and pointed. “—but the system doesn’t
do
anything with it. There’s no provision for reporting or readout.”

“That information is just a system check,” Richard said. “We’ll use it for diagnostics and take it out offline. Oh yes, you need to build a trapdoor into the Stochastic Design code, if there isn’t one already.”