Pyramid Lake (16 page)

Fuck
that.

I started running again. “Frankenstein,” I said, my voice hard with anger, “I’m stuck off-site right now. But there’s got to be some way I can help. What do you want me to do?”

There was a several-second delay. “I’m not quite sure how to answer that.”

Failure to comprehend.
I nodded. “Never mind,” I said, and hung up.

Sometimes, when I got angry or distracted, it was easy to forget the limitations of Frankenstein’s programming. He could answer questions, and whenever the uncertainty threshold was too high, he could also ask questions as part of his learning process. The feedback loop helped him better understand the motivations of human subjects so that over time, he could increase his predictive accuracy.

But I’d just asked him what he
wanted
me to do.

Wanting something was literally impossible for Frankenstein. To want required volition. Desire. Will.

It was silly to anthropomorphize a machine and ascribe those things to it, no matter how well it could carry on a question-and-answer conversation. And for all his natural-language capabilities and his almost-frightening ability to read people, Frankenstein was nothing more than an advanced surveillance system. He was an inert lump of dead silicon, aluminum, and steel.

A talking camera.

C
assie seemed extra quiet and pensive as she drove us south along the lake, toward Wadsworth. But there was some kind of nervous energy in her motions, too: her abrupt snaps of the turn signal when we changed lanes, the sewing-machine bounce of her knee, the way she kept jamming the buttons to switch radio stations. From the passenger seat of her Prius, I watched the sage scrub and pale alkali dirt slide by outside my window for a while. Then I shifted in my seat and put my back against the door to watch her instead. The view was a lot more interesting.

She grimaced and punched the radio off with her finger. “Do you mind not staring at me?”

“Something’s bothering you,” I said.

Cassie exhaled an incredulous little laugh. “Really? You think maybe my boss getting murdered my third day on the job might have something to do with it?”

“Besides that.”

She turned and regarded me with her big dark irises, holding my gaze long enough that I started to get nervous because she wasn’t watching the road. The small saccade movements of her eyes were barely perceptible, but knowing what I was looking for helped. I could see the subtle shifts as her focus flicked between the different key muscle groups on my face.

“How well can you do it?” I asked.

“God
damn
it.” She hit the steering wheel with the heel of her palm and looked away.

“Eckman and O’Sullivan tested twenty thousand people in their Truth Wizards project, looking for natural lie detectors,” I said. “They found fewer than fifty. But two were female Bureau of Indian Affairs correctional officers.”

“No shit, Trevor. One of them was my mother.”

That was a surprise, but now that I thought about it, it made sense: a familial
hereditary
trait, rather than a racial or cultural one.

“What happened four years ago?” I asked. “How did I end up with your job?”

Her shoulders sagged perceptibly. “I was
wondering
when you would go there.”

“I’ve been a little preoccupied lately. But I’m not stupid.”

“When you assumed I was unqualified,” she said, “you weren’t being racist or sexist, because that’s not who you are—I know that now. You were just doing the math.”

I nodded. “There can’t be more than ten people in the world capable of doing what I’ve done here with Frankenstein. But it turns out, you’re one of them.”

I waved a hand at the desolate reservation land outside. “DARPA got funding to build a supercomputer and develop MADRID right here at Pyramid Lake. There are maybe twenty-five hundred Northern Paiute with sufficient blood quantum to be enrolled in the local tribe. What’s the probability that one of them would also
just happen
to be one of the ten people on the planet who could actually do this job? And she’s a natural-born microexpression reader, too? The odds of that being a coincidence are less than one in a hundred million.”

“Your timing really sucks, Trevor.”

I laughed. “I had this whole thing backward. You weren’t the last-minute PR hire, Cassie.
I
was. They hired me to keep DARPA from looking bad after you bailed out and left them high and dry. The Pyramid Lake supercomputer and MADRID were originally supposed to be
your
pet project. For the last four years, I’ve been keeping your seat warm.”

She stared straight ahead out the windshield, chewing at the inside of her cheek. “So where do we go from here?” she finally asked in a small voice.

She wouldn’t look at me. Strangely, I felt bad about that. It had actually been kind of a dick move on my part, bringing this up right now, what with McNulty’s death and everything. Cassie was right: my timing did suck.

“Where do
you
want to go from here?” I asked.

“To dinner with my family. And I hope you plan on behaving, Trevor. I really don’t need any more problems right now.”

“I’ll be a perfect gentleman,” I said. “Believe it or not, I’m capable of that, too.”

“Don’t do me any favors.” She angrily punched the radio back on. “I bet it’s nice, not having to live up to anyone’s expectations—to just do whatever you want, say whatever you want, and beat the crap out of anybody who doesn’t like it. Must be real easy, being you.”

I thought about Amy and Jen and how much I missed them both, and a sour taste filled my mouth. I swallowed and stared down at my feet.

“You’d think so,” I said. “But it’s really not as much fun as it looks.”

Neither of us said anything for a while. The setting sun turned the drifting high clouds into wisps of lavender and pink against the darkening blue mirrored in the lake below.

Cassie muttered something under her breath. I glanced at her, but her eyes were fixed on the road.

“I told McNulty, yesterday,” she said, in a voice so soft it was barely audible, “that I
like
working with you.”

I didn’t have an answer to that. But I couldn’t help thinking of how she had looked, curled up asleep in the beanbag, after she stayed with me to help Amy, who still desperately needed our help right now.

Cassie stared straight ahead, but her hands tightened on the wheel. The corner of her mouth twitched downward. She appeared to be bracing herself, expecting me to say something sarcastic or nasty, and that also made me feel bad.

“I like working with you, too,” I said. “We’re a good team.”

“McNulty asked me how the knowledge transfer was going… how soon I thought I’d have a handle on everything…”

The picture of a calendar rose in my mind again, my termination date circled in red. I just nodded.

Her voice got even quieter. “I told him if you got taken off the project, I’d leave, too.”

I stared at her in surprise. “When?”

“Not
why
?”

“No, I don’t care why.
When
did you tell McNulty this?”

“I called him in the afternoon. When you stepped out.”

And McNulty had still been sitting there stunned, with the phone in his hand, when I walked into his office. Her threat—forcing him to keep me on the project—had caved his world in. How? And after she hung up, who else had McNulty called about it?

Cassie’s knuckles whitened on the wheel. I glanced at her face, saw the hurt spreading across her features, and I realized what I had just said to her.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean that,” I said. “
Why
did you tell McNulty you’d quit if I left?”

She waved me away. “You don’t care.”

“Yes, I do. Why did you say that to him?”

“Because I’m tired of being treated like a child and having people make my decisions for me. I’m tired of not being told things.” She glared at me. “Don’t think this is about you, Trevor, because it isn’t; I couldn’t care less who I’m working with. But
I
get to make that choice. Nobody else.”

“I think there’s something else they didn’t tell you,” I said.

“What does that mean?”

“Why is Homeland Security here?”

“That
asshole
.” Cassie’s jaw hardened. “He acted like I was some sort of anti-government Indian-rights extremist, a modern-day Ghost-Dance Wovoka, coming back to the rez under cover of my job to sabotage everything DARPA is doing here.”

I laughed, thinking of Roger’s constant conspiracy shtick, and wondered how
his
conversation with Bennett had gone. Probably just fine—Roger knew when it was time to shut up.

“It’s not funny,” she said. “Bennett asked me if I lured McNulty to the geyser so a bunch of my ‘associates’ could jump him. I almost called Gray to complain about that asshole, but I didn’t want to be a baby about it.”

“Bennett’s been out here lots of times,” I said. “But I’ve never seen him before. He and McNulty had a hidden agenda we didn’t know about.”

But I was thinking,
Gray?
As in Grayson Linebaugh.

“How do you know the senator?” I asked.

“Family friend. He and Uncle Jim go way back, to when Gray was a freshman congressman. He’s done a lot of good things for our people over the years. Keeping the Navy base open, developing the geothermal resources, bringing DARPA work here—none of it would have happened without him.”

She frowned at me, like she thought I was going to say something disparaging. “He’s been like a guardian angel for me ever since my dad… since Billy and I lost our parents when I was twelve. Even when I flaked on everyone four years ago and went back to California, Gray was very understanding. He helped me get the job at LLNL.”

“Why’d you run out on a hundred-million-dollar project here after he pulled strings and tailored it just for you?” I asked.

“Personal reasons.” She looked away. “Guy trouble.”

I laughed.

“Fuck you, Trevor,” she said. “Do you know why I decided to stay on Monday, after you acted like such a total prick? Because of the look on your face when I asked you about your daughter’s picture, that’s why. I felt
sorry
for you. But so far, it’s about the only thing I’ve seen from you that’s even remotely human, so maybe I was wrong—”

Something darted into the road up ahead, barely visible in the graying twilight beyond our headlights.

“Look out!” I yelled, instinctively reaching for the wheel as Cassie stomped the brakes.

The Prius slewed sideways with a screech of rubber. I felt the seat belt bite into my shoulder, and then we came to a stop, diagonally straddling the middle of the road.

We both blew out relieved breaths, and I turned in my seat and leaned past her to see what we’d almost hit.

“
Iza’a,
” Cassie said, and laughed suddenly next to my ear, shaking her head with a jingle of earrings. My eyes tracked to where she was pointing.

Five yards behind our car, a coyote stood in the middle of the road, its eyes glowing like miniature reflectors. It stared at us with unnatural calmness.

“Izabui.
How appropriate.” Cassie turned her face toward mine. “Coyote the Trickster. That’s
you
right there, Trevor. That’s you.”

J
ames Barry’s place was a sprawling single-story ranch overlooking the Truckee River, a couple of miles past the tribal fish hatchery. The plain, modest house that was the tribal chairman’s residence was painted a clean white, and the dirt yard, lined with cactus and other desert plants, looked clean and well-kept.

Cassie parked next to a sun-faded red Jeep sitting on the unpaved driveway. She turned off the engine and we stepped out, our shoes crunching loudly on the pea gravel. From the tree-lined darkness beyond the house, I could hear the soft burble of the Truckee River. On the other side of the road I could see nothing but barren emptiness—pale dirt gleaming in the twilight, beneath a sparse cover of sagebrush that climbed the sloping foothills.

I reached into the backseat and got out the flowers I had brought: a ceramic vase wrapped in a red bow and filled with thick, hardy South African proteas, purple desert lupine, marigolds, and desert paintbrush. I knew their names because I had Googled their pictures before Cassie picked me up.

She eyed the bouquet now. “You’re making me look bad. I thought you said you were stuck at home without a car.”

Carrying the vase, I followed her to the door. “Nowadays, you can order anything over the Internet and have it delivered to your doorstep.”

And luckily for me, someone who lived in my neighborhood had done exactly that. I figured their unwitting contribution to tribal relations was going to a good cause, but I gave the flowers a quick once-over anyway, just to make sure there were no inappropriate cards attached.

James Barry opened the door wearing a chambray work shirt and jeans. He shook my hand and gathered Cassie up in a big hug, asking her how she was coping. Then he led us through the great room and into the open-plan kitchen, where Christina—his wife and Cassie’s aunt—made a big deal about the flowers and hugged me. She was a well-spoken woman with broad cheekbones, a warm smile, and a piercing gaze that seemed to miss nothing. I wondered if she shared Cassie’s skill at reading faces.

A pair of large, prehistoric-looking gray fish lay on a cutting board on the granite counter. Christina picked up a fillet knife and began slicing large boneless fillets from their backs, drawing the sharp, narrow blade from head to dorsal fin with deft, smooth motions.

The thirty-inch fish, with their slimy skins and downturned sucker mouths, looked familiar.

“
Cui ui
—Pyramid Lake suckerfish,” I said. “Aren’t these protected or something?”

Christina smiled at me. “That’s why this is such a rare treat. Northern Paiute
Numa
people differentiate each tribe’s cultural identity based on their main food source. Here at Pyramid Lake, we are the Kuyuidökadö or
cui ui ticutta
—literally, ‘
cui-ui
fish eaters.’ But we haven’t been able to legally enjoy this part of our ancestors’ traditional diet for almost fifty years.”