Sharp and Dangerous Virtues Page 13

  Sharis was silent.

  “I’m teaching my Dayton course. I’m not going to leave town when I’m teaching my Dayton course.” Only ten students were taking it, but all of them seemed eager.

  “Are you insane?” Sharis said. “Does your Dayton course matter more to you than your own children?”

  Chad didn’t answer. The two of them didn’t speak the rest of the evening. “Other people are people, too,” Chad said as Sharis rolled away from him in bed.

  “What a wise old man you are,” she said. He left and slept on the sofa downstairs.

  TUURO WALKED INTO downtown Cincinnati. He found a message center and typed a message to Kelso’s perc, waited half an hour for a response. He was just about to leave when the stylish man (he was clearly wearing lipstick, a new fashion) behind the counter called him. “Your contact’s answered,” the man said in a pleasantly deep voice, nodding at an old-fashioned phone receiver on the wall. The message center was empty except for the clerk and Tuuro: business was always slow, the clerk said, the days before the checks came in.

  Kelso’s voice was hearty. In the hospital they’d found out he had diabetes and put him on a special diet. He’d lost weight and felt a hundred times better. It was lucky he’d been shot, really. The police had found his car in Cincinnati and had it driven home to Dayton. How was Tuuro?

  “I realized what I need,” Tuuro told Kelso. “I need to talk with”—and he turned his face away from the man behind the counter, whispered into the phone—“Nenonene.”

  A pause. Tuuro could visualize the shock in Kelso’s face. “He’s in Cleveland!” Then: “What if he thinks you did it?”

  What Nenonene had done to the colonel—the shot into the heart—hung like a banner behind any conversation.

  “He won’t think that, not after I talk with him.”

  “He might! He’s the enemy. Nobody sent him the genetics.”

  “It won’t matter.” Tuuro doubted Kelso would understand this. What Tuuro wanted from Nenonene was a resolution, a judgment of himself and his motives, and his faith in Nenonene told him it had to be fair.

  Kelso said, “I wouldn’t come back through Dayton.”

  A ragged man walked into the message center, bringing with him a blast of damp air and a white cardboard box wrapped with string. “What do you mean you got no message?” he said. “My sister promised me a message.”

  On the phone, Kelso’s voice had dropped. “Go north up to Lebanon, cut northeast from there, and slide up along the bottom of the Grid into Columbus. You get there you can look into transportation.”

  The man behind the counter said something in a firm tone. Not taking his eyes off the angry customer, he slid open a drawer.

  “I heard a fellow lives in Mount Vernon ships goats to Cleveland every week.” Kelso’s voice had dropped; Tuuro could picture his hand cupped over the phone. “The Alliance people eat them. You should try Mount Vernon. That’s only, like, twenty miles from the Grid border.”

  “I need my message! How many times I have to tell you I need my message?”

  The clerk’s hand hovered over the top of the drawer. “Don’t threaten me, sir. You don’t want to threaten me, sir.”

  Tuuro saw at that moment what was going to happen. “I’m hanging up now,” Tuuro said to Kelso, his voice rising over the ragged man’s curses. “I thank you.” He was outside in the rain before the shot was fired. Tuuro was certain that the aim, just like the clerk’s lipstick, had been precise. Self-defense, the clerk would say. Tuuro would have to agree.

  Tuuro stopped and asked a woman the way to the bus station, then waited outside an hour for the Lebanon bus. He listened, but he never heard sirens. Five years ago, even one year ago, a shot and a dead body would have gotten some response.

  Order, he thought. Peace. Nenonene. He was gazing at the decorative edging on a building across the street when he realized that a group of men had surrounded him, and were moving him toward the open back door of a large car.

  flying

  “NOW WHAT VIRTUE kicks in?” Chad said, resuming his pacing. “They’re discouraged, they’re disheartened, they don’t believe in themselves they way they used to.”

  Thrift, someone suggested. The Wright Brothers recycled their glider.

  No. Although they did recycle their equipment, always. They were conservers.

  Determination?

  “More specific,” Chad said. “We know they were determined.”

  Modesty? someone ventured, to scattered titters.

  “How about the opposite of modesty?” Chad asked, cocking his head. “How about something that doesn’t say to someone else: You’re right, oh you’re right? How about the virtue that says: You could be wrong?

  Skepticism. Yes, that virtue. It hit the Wright brothers that Lilienthal’s tables of lift, the basis of all their calculations, could be wrong. No, I’m sorry, Lilienthal’s tables must be wrong.

  How audacious! What a thought! Lilienthal, a German, was the father of modern gliding. In the ten years before his postflight death, in 1896, of a broken spine, he had launched himself on more than two thousand flights, in a variety of gliders he designed and built himself. He studied birds. He launched himself from a hill he’d constructed into which he’d built a cave to store his equipment. He was a passionate hobbyist like the Wrights themselves, as well as the brothers’ hero, and it must have cost the Wrights a small chunk of their own self-confidence and happiness to doubt him.

  Still, they dared to doubt him, and to that end constructed, in the back room of their bicycle shop, their own wind tunnel. It was six feet long and sixteen inches per side, with a viewing window in its top and a fan mounted on its end. “We spent nearly a month getting a straight wind,” Wilbur wrote. They made all sorts of miniature wings and tested them for lift at different angles, confirming to themselves that they were right, that Lilienthal’s lift tables were indeed inaccurate. The brothers then designed and built, based on their experiments, the ideal wing. They cut the fabric for this item on their living room floor.

  “Nothing earthshaking,” Chad said. “Steady forward progress. Open minds. One task, then the next, at various points amending things they’d done before. It’s a way to live life, isn’t it? It’s a way to dream.”

  OCTOBER. SHARIS PUNCHED the button for real time and again watched the back view of Lars the Norwegian walking down the hall. All the times she’d watched him—and sometimes seen him and Clara, his wife, naked and communal in the living room—and she’d never had this reaction. Something about the curve of his hip, the play of light and dark on the towel over his ass. Half the size of Chad, sleek and muscled. He flicked his shoulders back and she almost moaned. He was probably older than Chad, but his hair made him look young to her. She imagined the droplets of water at its tips. The living room camera picked him up now. He was alone. He pulled the towel from his hips and swung it to his tilted head, rubbing his hair—almost as long as hers—dry. His legs were slightly apart and his equipment swung. Then he disappeared into the bathroom. When he came out he was tucking in his shirt.

  She ran it again, and again.

  AUTUMN WAS THE PERFECT time to be in love, with the migratory birds coming through. Charles had realized that Diana knew little about the natural world. Her nature center interests until now had extended little beyond donations, trusts, and bills. She had read all the tags in the museum, but she hadn’t spent much time outside. But now, in their splendid isolation (they were ridiculously well-provisioned, thanks to a solar generator and a paranoid volunteer who’d insisted, years before, on stocking up for the coming attack by China), Charles was delighting Diana with the cornucopia of the natural world. “Look,” he might say, “loco weed,” splitting a pod to empty out a handful of jimson seeds. “Hear that?” he’d ask, testing to see if she recognized the “Q” call of a flicker. The pond still as glass; the meadow grasses higher than their heads; the crunch of the morning frost. At night, as they huddled in the center, they
left one window open so the cool air made their bodies feel even warmer. Outside they heard the owls’ hooting, the rustle of their wings, the alarmed chirps and thrashing of their prey.

  “We’ll look for owl pellets in the morning,” Charles said. “You can dissect them to analyze an owl’s diet.” Poison ivy berries, he had told her, were a favorite food of warblers. There is nothing in nature without a purpose.

  “Amazing,” Diana said. “You know everything!” She smiled and nestled her head into his armpit. He was a respite to her—they both knew this. She thought that in a way he knew nothing about the modern world. This afternoon, just before they crossed the bridge that led to the pond, Charles had heard a sound that thrilled him. “Cup your hands,” he’d said, and Diana had stopped beside him with her hands cupped behind her ears, her eyes intently unfocused, lips pursed. “Three high notes”—Charles whistled them softly—“and then the song.” They waited. That beautiful ball at the end of Diana’s nose: Charles could almost see it trembling.

  She’d leave him. Women always left Charles—and Diana knew perfectly well why—but for this moment she was his completely.

  They heard it. Diana’s mouth flew open in delight, her eyes searching for Charles’s.

  “Ruby-throated kinglet,” Charles whispered. “Very tiny, very rare.” And they crept forward, binoculars ready, to search for it in the trees.

  “YOUR FRIEND’S HERE,” Seymour said at the door of Lila’s office. Lila swiveled in her chair expecting her fellow uto Kennedy but there was Michelle, tall beautiful Michelle, the youngie from Agriculture.

  “Oh!” Lila struggled to stand. “I’d given up on you.” This was a generous statement. Lila had been to the water tower weekly, watching the harvest and the gleaning, the fields now stubbled and bare, and at each step in that glorious sequence the thought of Michelle had been trampled beneath Lila’s feet. Stupid, unreliable youngie. Youngie without power. Betraying youngie.

  “My boss and I thought I should come talk to you in person,” Michelle said. “Fill you in a bit.” She lifted her left hand and swept it toward the door; Lila was once again struck by the length of her eyelashes. “Let’s take a walk,” Michelle said.

  It was a damp and misty fall day, although the day before had been brilliant. They took the walkway along the river, read the sign where the first settlers in Dayton had landed, then crossed the pedestrian bridge to Sawyer’s Point, the triangle of land formed as the Mad River joined the Great Miami. “This park was beautiful when I was a kid,” Lila said, stuffing a discarded pop can into a full wastebasket. “They used to have fountains that shot out across the river.” She pointed.

  “Is that how you got started in water?”

  “Who knows?” Lila sat on a bench facing downriver, Michelle beside her. Facts from her old water talks flooded back to her. The 1913 flood. The five dams.

  “Look,” Michelle said. “No one understands this. Why are you looking for a job outside of Dayton? On the Grid of all places? Most Ohioans resent the Grid.”

  “Not me. I was there. I saw it.”

  “You saw it as an outsider. We get a lot of information—it’s really Agriculture that runs it, or that started running it—and …”

  “I was there overnight. I ate their food.”

  “It’s a very closed society. They’re not like you and me. They’ve become …” Michelle hesitated, then went on: “Have you heard about their churches?” Lila snorted to herself: religion was the least of her worries. “The people used to be regular. Now no one outside understands what they are. It’s like they have this agricultural religion. You know, feasts and blessing seeds and burying totems in the planting season. They’ve got some festival going on now—they build huts outside covered with cornstalks and eat in them for a week. That’s not Christian. My boss says they’ve gone pagan.”

  Ridiculous, the fear people had. As if the Gridians after fourteen years on their own could be that different from anyone else in the country. Next time she climbed the tower, Lila would have to look for the huts. “What,” Lila asked sardonically, “they sacrifice babies to the harvest or something?”

  “They have very strict population control,” Michelle said, and Lila thought fleetingly of Lindisfarne. But Lila approved of abortion. “Very strict. When the Grid was established, my boss said, Agro was worried that the Gridians would rebel against outside control. But their lives are more controlled now than ever, and they don’t even listen to outside. You know they don’t let anyone under twenty-one use computers? And the adults’ use is monitored.”

  “I know people have all this fear of them, but it must be a decent society. No one seems to want to leave.”

  “Would we hear if they did?” Michelle shot a glance at Lila. “Listen, Agriculture has very little control over the Grid these days. Maybe no control. That’s a secret, Lila. The Grid always meets its crop quotas, its energy costs are always acceptable, so people there feel justified in telling us to stay out.” Michelle’s voice dropped. “The Agriculture Secretary went there and got put up in a trailer. They wouldn’t even show him a school.” The brown water moved in front of them, steady and slow, both the rivers having crossed the Grid to reach here. In the one hundred and fifty years since the Great Flood, the water level in the Greater Miami had varied only seven feet. The dams protecting Dayton had held. “My mother says you saved Dayton,” Michelle said, a quiver to her voice.

  An exaggeration, Lila knew, a misconception, but still a thrill to hear. You saved Dayton. Hardly. Maybe. She’d helped draw in certain industries, which had a positive effect on the region. She’d promoted individual conservation of water. It didn’t take reality to make a public hero. “If you go to the Grid you’d be moving backwards,” Michelle said. “You’d be, I don’t know, not evolving but devolving.”

  “You think too much of me,” Lila said. “I’m tired and I want something simple, and the Grid sounds simple.”

  “They’ve sacrificed personal freedom for security. That’s what my boss says.”

  “People must feel useful,” Lila said. “They must feel a connection with nature.” She struggled to make her voice sound gentler. “And with each other. Don’t you think it scares them the Alliance is right next to them in Cleveland?”

  “They say they’ll chop up the Alliance soldiers for fertilizer.” Lila shifted on the bench, wishing Michelle hadn’t said this. “No harvest like an Alliance harvest. That’s their slogan. They don’t trust American troops to protect them, they say, because they’d be too merciful. You know what they call the Alliance occupation? The world’s biggest concentration of organic matter.”

  “Sloganeering,” Lila said quickly, trying to keep the shock out of her voice.

  “I think they mean it. And they probably have slogans like that about Americans, too.”

  Lila swallowed, her mouth gone abruptly dry. “Well, they are dealing in essentials. Food and land and death. In a way you have to admire them.”

  “Do you?” Michelle was looking at the river, her face clouded, and Lila wondered why she herself felt so vulnerable to the appeal of a Gridian life, a life of loyalties and enmities so ingrained they seemed instinctual. A life, in a way, without thought.

  “You know I was there at the beginning,” Lila said. “I was a witness.”

  “They’re like ants,” Michelle said, not seeming to hear her. “Ants in a colony.”

  Lila shifted her eyes in Michelle’s direction. “Is that what your boss says?”

  “They cull out their problem children, put them in their own towns, and let them go wild. Sometimes they even kill each other.”

  “At least they’re not killing their parents!”

  Michelle drew herself up straighter, tucked in her chin. “All right,” she said with a quick nod, as if she had reached some resolution. “Let me tell you what we need. It’s not water for the Grid, it’s water for the Ohio.”

  “The Ohio River?” Fifty miles south, in Cincinnati, the river at
their feet emptied into the Ohio. The Ohio was tightly controlled and locked, and even so the river towns occasionally flooded. Hard to imagine anyone wanting its water level higher.

  “We’re moving water toward the Mississippi. It’s a defense project; I can’t tell you more.” Michelle glanced at Lila, who must—she realized—look stunned. “It’s very responsible,” Michelle added hurriedly. “The best water minds around are in on it.”

  Wonderwater, Lila thought. The best water minds around. Ah, where that left her. “Why Dayton’s water?” she asked.

  “You can spare it. Thanks to you, you know.”

  “Not really. It’s a water-rich system.” Lila spoke almost automatically, trying to gather her thoughts behind her words. “Are you building some big reservoir on the Mississippi? Do you want to increase its depth overall? Are there big attack boats you want to run?”

  But Michelle ignored her questions. “Look, you’re not the only system we’re asking. All across southern Ohio and Indiana and Illinois, we need help. Those are Grid states, and Defense thought if Agriculture did the asking the assumption would be we wanted water for the Grid.”

  “Then why are you telling everyone the water’s for Defense?”

  “I’m not telling everyone. I’m telling you. Think of it: water can be a barrier. You can blow a bridge or you can flood the bridges out.”

  Lila gazed at the youngie. “This is too deep for me,” she said. A water metaphor.

  Michelle laughed. “Don’t be silly. You’re as deep as they come.”

  “No. I’m not political.” Lila frowned. “Couldn’t you just commandeer the water? Not tell me?” A wondrous dark blue coat Michelle had on, full of soft folds at the shoulders half hidden by her curtain of hair. Why was Lila just noticing this?

  “You’d notice. We’d be laying new pipe.”

  “Can I say no to this?”

  Michelle sighed. “My boss could help you. She could get you onto the Grid.”

  “To live?”

  “If that’s what you want.”

  “I want a home.”