The Four Fingers of Death (61 page)

“It’s the preliminary subroutine,” Fielding muttered. “He has given himself
one hour
on the clock.”

“And we have how much time left before splashdown?”

“About twice that much.”

How had it grown so late? How had it grown so late? How had years of preparation and endlessly redundant plans come down to this? It had grown late while the Mars mission pondered, again and again, a list of possible responses without arriving at one that it could collectively stomach, and now it was nearly
too late
.

“Which means,” Rob said, “that we have how long if we’re trying to insure that pieces of the craft burn up in the outer atmosphere?”

The question hung like a cloud over a blasting site, and while the crowd murmured and prepared to return to its workstations, Rob Antoine, still relying on some auxiliary tank of energy that he had long since used up, gave the image on the screen one last look. That was when he saw the fuzzy onboard video monitor way over on the left side of the feed. Because of Rob’s nearness and the screen’s fuzzy resolution, the monitor was very hard to make out. It was a blur of primary colors.

“Wait, wait!” Rob called to those who would exit. “Anyone look at this? Right here?” He indicated with the pointer.

“A personal monitor,” said Fielding Ayler. “That’s just whatever he’s watching on the idiot box. Or was.”

“Just for my own edification, Fielding, do you happen to know what’s
on
his idiot box?”

“As you know, sir, we can’t see what’s on their personal screens. For reasons of privacy. However, sir, there
is
a work-around, insisted on by security personnel.”

“Is that right?” Antoine replied.

“We do have, for example, a record of web-related transactions by the employees, just like with anyone here on staff. They are networked to us, after all, even at a distance. Anything that’s been watched would have been cached in a file folder for the individual astronaut, and that material, unless they uploaded it from a flash drive, which they shouldn’t have, is contained on the server right here.”

“I’m guessing, Fielding, that you have seen a few reports about individual usage.”

“I’m guessing, sir, that everyone with clearance has.”

“What does everyone with clearance know about the viewing habits of our courageous voyagers?”

“That Captain Jim Rose liked gay porn, sir, that Arnie and Laurie follow professional tennis, and ballet, and that Colonel Richards, well, sir, he’s sentimental about his daughter.”

“You’re saying what, exactly?”

“Unless I miss my guess, sir, that blurry image is Colonel Richards’s daughter at a dance. A recent high school dance. Uploaded by her to his e-mail box about six weeks ago. She’s a good dancer apparently. Very, uh, flamboyant.”

In this way Rob Antoine came to wonder about the mysteries of syntax, of language. Had he learned, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Colonel Jed Richards was trying to tell him something? No, he didn’t believe he’d learned any such thing. Over all meanings was the shadow of
unmeaning
. In all utterances was the exasperated sigh of those lapsing into silence. Where one man was certain about what he had just said, beside him was a Vance Gibraltar, or others like him, who had heard no such thing, who had heard, in fact, nothing at all. Woe to the words and sentences and paragraphs that were not even understood as such, for they faded from recollection like trash blowing across a glass-strewn vacant lot. This, however, did not prevent Rob Antoine from divining with tea leaves, and perhaps this was because of his fixation upon the long, slow march of truth across the canvas of the boring. What was boring was somehow more elegant, more perfect, for it was incontrovertible. The boring was everything that certainly
was
. The boring was everything that had stood the test of time. The boring was that set of truths that were so long fixed that erosion had begun to sand them down. The boring was geological; the boring was universal. The boring, therefore, was preferable. And so when the meeting attendants had agreed to research and return in half an hour, the room emptied, so that all the Mars mission team managers could go to their workstations to prepare for what came next, if not auto-destruct. Rob Antoine was still looking at the image, and that was when the syntax of the remark—for that was what he had come to call it in his fuzzy mind,
the remark
—appeared to him, with the blunt force of an equation, something perfect and mathematical—what Jed Richards was trying to tell him, trying to tell Rob Antoine, another husband and father whose family had left him while he attempted to learn the truth that the stars and the planets were bent upon announcing:

Diminished water levels
+
Diminished oxygen levels
+
Low capsule temperature
+
Auto-destruct sequence
=
Recommended mission abort by reason of infectious disease
–
Daughter at high school dance
=
Residual will to live despite infectious disease

Yes, complicated enough that the men and women who had been gathered around Antoine in the conference room did not understand as readily as he did that the meaning was
there
, if only you allowed it to surface in you as a subliminal intent rather than as a conventional linguistic construct. And what was the subliminal meaning, so slippery that he kept thinking he could entrap it with these brightly colored English-language equivalents? It slithered in his mind, as if it didn’t want to be gazed at straight on, nor named. But it was something like this, in the conference room: because he couldn’t not say it, it was the only way he could keep the thought in his mind: that at the end of all our meanings, in the last wisp of consciousness in which meanings can take place, is
longing
. That’s what Richards was saying. When everything else is gone, when all our possessions are gone, all our accomplishments, all the things we would have become and did not, all our friends, all our acquaintances, all our carefully ordered antipathies, all our ideologies, all our skepticisms, when they are all gone, there is
longing
, a daughter we were so lucky once to know and love, dancing. May she remember us.

Rob rubbed ruminatively at his eyes, gazing upon what he thought he knew, in the whispered hum of the desktop system that was doing the projecting, and he didn’t even hear Debra Levin, who may have been in the room ever since, throughout his calculations, throughout his elegiac flights of ratiocination. She was here still, putting a well-manicured hand on his sweaty, unwashed shoulder. He started, and gazed into her benevolent and not-to-be-trusted face.

“Whatever you need,” said Debra Levin, sadly smiling. Leaving her hand there a moment longer for additional emphasis. By the time he’d finished parsing and reconsidering this simple phrase, she was gone.

Noelle Stern, graduate student in the medical school at URB, assistant to world-famous researcher Woo Lee Koo, had experienced
the blinding light of revelation
. In a way she had never suspected or believed possible. Since, like Koo, she dead-reckoned with the certainties of empirical research and experimental method, she rarely predicted surprise, and this despite her youth in the hothouse of alternative belief systems, Rio Blanco. And yet: against her better judgment she had come to believe that the animals in the URB animal research laboratory were speaking to her.

She was a tiny woman, just a hair over five feet, who wore jump boots and torn jeans and whatever monochromatic sweater she could buy at the thrift stores of Fourth Avenue, a look that her boss, Dr. Koo, had suggested would be inadequate to professional advancement. Her hair of dirty straw she kept often in pigtails, and it was as if it had never occurred to her to clean the lenses of her secondhand spectacles. Hobbies as follows. Sundays, she took lessons in contortionism west of the city with members of the
omnium gatherum
. For a long time, she’d also played old-fashioned laptop in a band called Momento Mori, but she’d quit because they had insisted on getting a manager. She read widely and wanted to learn Italian. If there had long been an ideological divide between her inherited (from her dad) desire to study in the field of medicine and the heavy drumbeat of left-of-ideological-center Rio Blanco, where she had lived the whole of her short life—a town of easy, relaxed pastimes, including public drunkenness and intoxication with polyamphetamine and OxyPlus (via nasal inhaler)—it had never seemed to amount to a state of irreconcilable conflict until such time as her boss, Koo, began messing with the higher primates.

Koo, as even she would put it, was a runty type from South Korea who had a chip on his shoulder about that land of fraudulence. He had been recruited to URB to study stem cell theory. And he did a little of that. But he indicated that stem cell theory was complex and required more and better animals than were presently available at the school of medicine. Right after she’d been assigned to him, he started trolling message boards looking for apes with neurological complaints. Any ape with a tremor or paralysis was placed in the database she’d created for Koo, and in many of those cases, he’d made direct attempts to purchase. To animals who were, on the contrary, able-bodied, he would occasionally apply enough electrical impulses to their spinal columns to induce paralysis. URB would have become the world’s leading facility for afflicted apes, all of them palsied, trembling, lying inert on the floors of their cages, if not for the fact that (in addition to Koo’s inconstant attentions) URB was going through a period of fiscal whatever you’d call it. Successive state budgets had brought about such reduced circumstances that Koo was trying to make up the difference from national granting agencies who were themselves scrambling for dollars.

The way Noelle saw it, there was no oversight from the university. Nor from the medical school. And Koo didn’t seem as if his heart was in stem cell research any longer. Koo failed to teach his classes, delegated to the teaching assistants all the lecturing, took no interest except at exam time. That wouldn’t have been unusual had he been in the laboratory instead. But he wasn’t in the laboratory, except late at night when no one else was around. In his accented English, Noelle understood him on occasion to be mixing heavy doses of Catholic imagery with his convoluted instructions about what to do with the experimental results. He kept talking about
reanimation
and
regeneration
and
necrotic tissue
, areas of medical intrigue she associated with the realm of the imaginary.

She had herself kicked upstairs with the animals because if she was going to work for a flake, she wanted to be working on the fun stuff. She probably could have been reassigned to another professor, because she hadn’t even bothered to come up with a dissertation topic yet. Graduation just wasn’t much of a goal. Still, Koo, for all his apparent strangeness, was mostly formal and polite, and seemed to take a real interest in her well-being. He invited her to dinner at his home (a dark, mostly unfurnished unit in a development in the western hills), not just to the departmental trips to the bar, which were stiff and forced. One time, Koo had asked Noelle for her advice in dealing with his son, Jean-Paul, who, like all the other Anglo kids in Rio Blanco, was going through a period when he believed he was a Latino gangster. It was all about the algae-fueled vehicle and the baggy clothes and the T-shirts depicting Mexican wrestling personalities. She remembered Koo’s expression as he asked for help, and it was of total noncomprehension. He still loved his boy. This was clear. She’d said that she’d look in on Jean-Paul from time to time, but every time she tried, the younger Koo found a way to cancel at the last minute or to bring along a friend. He was, however, conscientious about sending her the occasional grammatically incorrect text message.

Generally speaking, Noelle had problems with men. There was always some guy in sandals and dreadlocks whom she was trying to avoid but whose telephone calls she was still waiting for. She waited long enough that she could watch her impressions of the man in question go from unreasonable appreciation to doubt to contempt. Sometimes in the space of days. She hadn’t even slept with him yet, whoever he was. Jean-Paul, in his refusal to interact, was consistent with earlier findings, and he was just a kid.