A Ruby Beam of Light

by Tom DeMarco

  “You know what you have to do. Sail west along the coast for at least a day. From that point on it’s up to you. No one but you two is to know where you land. I want you to separate and proceed separately into the interior. Take a full day to walk in, hide your unit, and walk out. Don’t talk to each other about where you’ve been. And the rest of you,” he turned to address the others, “you have to forget who it was that carried the Effectors away. Forget their identities and what directions they received.” There were nods around the group.

  Candace and Edward looked at each other for a moment, then climbed aboard the Celestine. Candace took the helm and Claymore Layton cast them off. From the early slant of the sun, it looked to be about 6:30AM.

  Loren picked up the second pair of units. He gave one to Jared and the other to Kelly. They had both come dressed in hiking boots and long pants and sleeves. Each had a pack full of gear plus a bedroll. “You might as well stick together for a few days, just for the company,” Loren told them. “Then you go your separate ways. Try to be back here within a week.”

  They nodded. Kelly stepped behind Jared to open his backpack from the rear. She tucked the small parcel inside. Then she turned around so that Jared could do the same for her. They set out with the sun at their backs, heading along the dirt road that led to the center of the little village and through it into the hills. Loren handed the original Effector to Homer. It was to be placed in a hollowed out area in the floor of the hut Homer had adopted. Homer nodded, but didn’t say anything.

  Finally, Loren carried the two remaining units down to the end of the pier where Sonia was waiting on the Columbia. She had the mainsail all set, flapping in the breeze. Loren stepped aboard. When he came up from stowing the two knapsacks below, they were already under way. He went forward to set the club-footed jib. As soon as it was up, Sonia trimmed it in from the cockpit. She appeared to need no help, so he sat down on the bow to watch the coast slide by. He wasn’t in much of a mood to talk. Sonia hugged the shore to hold the land breeze, the same morning breeze that had blown the gas back over this part of the island. They had looked at the chart earlier; there were no reefs or obstacles close in to the beach, nothing to worry about more than the odd sand bar.

  Within a mile they had the town of Baracoa on the beam. 20,000 people had lived there less than a month ago. Now it had only a handful of living residents. The rest had died, mostly in their sleep, victims of binary nerve gas. As Rupert Paule had informed Homer, the gas was a wonder of lethal substance engineering. It was so specific that it had not harmed birds or livestock or plants or insects, only people. It was even more specific than Paule had realized; it had exempted some people whose bodily chemistry differed from the target group. Most of the survivors in those areas where the gas passed over were Chinese. If all the Chinese and oriental population of eastern Cuba had survived, there would be about sixty thousand people living within four hundred miles. So far they had met only a few dozen. They were mostly bewildered family groups of Chinese restaurant and laundry workers from Baracoa and some coffee planters from the interior.

  Sonia hardened sail as their course became progressively more east. Within two hours of their depart, the wind was right on the nose. They tacked and beat up into it, moving off-shore. By one in the afternoon they had pulled even with Maisi, the easternmost point of Cuba. Directly upwind they could make out the towering headlands of Haiti on the horizon under a mountain of dark cloud. The made their turn to begin the long reach south down the coast with eighteen knots of breeze lifting them along. There was a nasty chop to the water, caused by the current moving up through the Windward Passage against the wind. Soon the force of the trades would be directly behind them, with the coast running due west. Every day west with the wind would mean two days beating back against it. He had thought briefly of carrying on down the coast as far as Caimanera where they could look into the Guantanamo Base. Sooner or later, someone would have to do that. They already had a long shopping list of gear they hoped to salvage from the base, including some radar components. But he had no heart for it this trip. The round trip to Guantanamo would be eight days at least. He didn’t want to be away for that long.

  By early evening they had rounded both Punta Negra and Punta Caleta. The latter was a steep cliffed projection that afforded shelter against the trades. They slipped through a passage in the reefs behind the cliff to anchor inside a natural breakwater. There was a pleasant beach tucked into the little cove. It was bounded at the top by a line of palms. Loren and Sonia rowed in in the dinghy. Sonia made him pause momentarily over a bit of reef, glittering with fish life. She had thrown a wide mouthed net into the boat. Within a few minutes there were four handsomely colored fish flapping in the bottom of the boat. Neither of them had any idea what they might be called, other than ‘dinner.’

  After the meal, they rowed back to spend the night on board Columbia. This was the first evening they had been alone together in nearly a month. Sonia came out of the head in her pajamas. Loren was seated at the chart table as she passed. She ran her hand over his cheek, not speaking. She lifted herself up into the quarter berth where he had spread out a sheet for her bed. His was similarly set out, just opposite. She lay down with a long sigh, pulling the sheet up over her. Loren snapped off the light. He crossed to Sonia’s bunk, leaned down over her for a kiss. All day they had barely spoken. She kissed him lightly. Afterward, she pressed his cheek against her own, holding him for just a moment. Then he straightened up.

  There was something gnawing at her, a tension that had held her apart from him. It had been there all day and for a long time before. All she needed was a quiet moment now to get it out. He stood silently by the bunk, holding her hand. Don’t say anything, just wait. Wait and wait and wait. Outside, a late twilight and a moon cast their yellow and gray light through the open companionway. A man and a woman, waiting for understanding to pass between them, no hurry. Her eyes were open, looking up to him.

  “I can feel them, the two machines,” Sonia said at last. She gestured with her head toward the two Effectors, stowed on the shelf over Loren’s berth. “I think I can feel in my flesh the Effect they’re spreading over the world. I try not to think about it.”

  Loren waited for her to go on. After a while she took up the thread again. “I try not to think too much about the lives lost and the lives saved. The balance I know is positive, but it doesn’t comfort me.” He could see the beginning of a tear in the corner of one eye. “It doesn’t comfort me, because the lives saved are theory. And the lives lost are all my fault.”

  “Sonia.”

  She turned away from him slightly, facing toward the bookshelf above the berth. “But this is the end, I think, of my personal responsibility. When I have placed my little box tomorrow, somewhere up in these hills, that will be it. I can begin then to make amends. Whatever I accomplish with my life from that point on will have to make up for my part of what has happened.”

  “You don’t have anything to make up for.”

  “Oh yes.”

  “Not a thing.”

  She took her time to continue. When she spoke again, her voice was almost a whisper: “There is a very simple, very old rule,” she said. “not to kill. It has guided people for millennia. The rule says Don’t. It doesn’t say it’s OK to kill some to save others, even though you save more than you kill. It doesn’t tell you to play the numbers, to maximize benefit. It just says don’t kill. Refuse and trust. We have been breaking that rule. The decision to keep the Effect in permanence means sacrificing people to winter, to hunger.”

  “We’re saving lives! That’s what we’re doing.”

  “Yes. That and the other.”

  “Of course you’re troubled by what we have to do tomorrow, as I am, as the others were. I can feel the Effectors too. It’s a burden. A handful of men and women are taking steps that will impact the entire planet. You would be crazy not to be concerned. I know what you mean. It will be a great relief when this part is
over, when each of us has done what he or she has to do. The others felt it as well, you could tell. It’s like a mission we’ve been given, like being charged to go out and find the Grail. Only the difference is that we are charged to take the Grail and lose it. Lose it so that no one can ever find it again. Lose the Effectors so they can’t be found and smashed.”

  She had nothing more to say. Her face was turned away again. Loren kissed her once more on the cheek. The night had gone quiet, even the crickets and tree frogs behind the beach were still for the moment. He crawled up into his own berth, where a few minutes later he was breathing rhythmically in sleep.

  By starting with the dawn they got a few hours of relative cool for the beginning of their trek. Loren headed north into the foothills. He assumed Sonia was headed down the beach to the east. Listening to his own panting as he climbed, he wished he’d opted for the easier way. Sonia was in better shape than he would ever be, and more sure-footed.

  As his way got steeper, the vista beneath him became more and more grand. He could see Haiti to the east and what was surely Mt. Denham on Jamaica to the south, nearly 100 miles away. There were rain squalls coming down along the coast with the trade winds. After a few hours, the path leveled off. He came to a cleared field with olive trees. There was a little road leading almost north through the split between two hills. He followed it for a while. At a second clearing, he saw a hut. Inside were the bodies of a man and a woman in bed, their arms around each other. The bodies were well past decomposition, now almost mummified in the heat, much like the bodies they’d found elsewhere. These two young lives were on someone else’s conscience, not his own. But guilt was contagious, perhaps that was what Sonia was finding. The victims were innocents, part of the undeveloped world. All who had taken part in that other world of science and technology had some share of the fault. He left the little hut, feeling depressed. He set off along a goat track leading up into the hills.

  By 10AM, he had been climbing for four hours, long enough. For the last hour, the terrain had been volcanic, full of fissures and lava bubbles opening up into the earth. Any of them would be an acceptable home for his parcel. He crawled up into one narrow fissure, using his flashlight to light the way. The space was dry, without evidence of past seepage. At the extremity was an old nest of brush, with no inhabitant. Loren opened the knapsack, pulled out the Effector and looked inside. There was a healthy pink glow at the center. He closed the case and placed it carefully in a natural nook near the nest. There was some rock rubble on the floor of the fissure. He picked up enough pieces to cover the little wooden box.

  Loren was the first back to the beach, a bit after three o’clock. They had agreed to meet there by four. Waiting for Sonia, he amused himself by looking along the beach for whatever might have washed ashore. There was a large tangle of nylon line attached to a derelict float. He cut some lengths of the line with his clasp knife. At the high tide line he found a quantity of wood, including some long straight poles. They were six feet long or a little more. He formed a frame arch in the sand by laying a top across two sides. The line worked fine to lash the pieces together at their ends. Then he levered the frame into an upright position, maneuvered the ends into two holes he had dug in the sand and filled in the holes to hold the frame in place. He erected a second frame behind it. Within a few minutes, he had lashed the two frames together with cross struts. There were long regular palm fronds fallen from the trees at the edge of the beach. He used these to thatch the roof of his beach cabana. By the time Sonia was in sight, hiking up the shore, he was nearly done. He was spreading out their picnic blanket in the thatched shade as she arrived.

  “Ooof,” she said,plunking herself down. “Nice.” She looked approvingly at his workmanship.

  “For Milady, to take her leisure in after a long stroll.”

  “Milady has a sunburned nose and sore feet.” She lay back on the blanket.

  “Milady seems to be in a better mood.”

  “It’s a relief, as you said it would be. That part is over. Getting rid of the box took a ton off my mind.” She smiled pleasantly up at him. It was Sonia from an earlier, less troubled time. He reached over to take the bandanna from her hair. There were flowers tucked into it, white wild flowers plus a sprig of lavender colored lace. Loren examined the lacy flower. Sonia took it from his hand to breath deeply of its fragrance. “Smell,” she said. She held it back out to him. “It’s heliotrope. Also called Maiden’s Downfall, I suppose because of the smell.”

  He held it under his nose. It had a heavy, musky fragrance. Sonia took it back from him and smelled it again. She twirled the stem in her fingers as she looked out over the lagoon. There were sparkling shallows where the white sand reflected light green through the water. She was smiling still, dreamily.

  After a while she sat up and began undoing her boots. Loren followed her down to the water’s edge where she stepped in, wiggling her toes into the sand under water. “Ooooo.” He put his bare feet in too. They sat, soaking their feet in the calm lagoon.

  “What a day for a swim,” she said.

  “We could.”

  “No suits. We’ll have to row out to get them.”

  “Well, instead of that we might…”

  “Fresh!” She didn’t seem annoyed. More amused.

  “Miss Prissy Miss.” Loren felt his heart flutter. He remembered an incident from nearly a year ago, a dinner one night at Kelly’s. Five year old Curtis had approached Sonia after the meal and asked gravely if she would help him get undressed for bed. She’d offered her hand to be led off to his bedroom, looking a trifle surprised, but mostly pleased and flattered. “Tell me what would you do, Sonia, if it were Curtis here with you, and a perfect opportunity for a swim, only he had forgotten his suit?”

  She laughed. “I’d strip off his clothes and throw him in.”

  “Uh huh.” A long pause.

  “Don’t you dare.”

  “I wouldn’t dare. Without some encouragement.”

  She looked down at the sand. “I’m shy,” she said.

  “Of course.” He ran his finger down the shoulder of her shirt, along the sleeve to her wrist, following it with his eyes. Then he looked up into her face. She looked back at him evenly, still the tiny smile in her eyes. Loren raised both hands slowly to begin unbuttoning the long row of buttons down her front. She didn’t say a word. He untucked her blue shirt, pulled it down over her arms.

  Loren stood up beside her. He held out his hand for hers to help her up. She stood obediently in front of him as he unfastened her belt and undid the front of her jeans. Then he pushed them down over her hips. She took his hand again as she stepped out of them.

  “I’m blushing. Damn,” she said.

  Loren started to take his own clothes off. He wanted to say something, something appropriately romantic, only it came out a muddle.

  “You’re blushing too,” she said.

  He reached up under her arms to unfasten the stupid thing whose name in English he still couldn’t remember. He dropped it on top of her shirt. Then he led her down into the water. He took her underpants off when she was waist deep in the water and threw them back up with the rest of her clothes.

  Sonia held his hand tightly as they swam. The water was so clear that her bare body was all his to see. She grinned to feel his eyes on her, and splashed water in his face. The feel of the cool sea on their skin was glorious. This afternoon was for lovemaking, but the sea failed to understand, thinking instead that It was the object of the exercise. Sonia turned on her back, rolled again for him onto her stomach, back onto her back, still holding onto his fingers above her head. It was the pirouette of a dance, but a nude pirouette, letting him see everything.

  “You are perfect,” he said.

  Very seriously she said, “I want to be the most perfect woman I can be.” Now she took both his hands in hers, holding them out from his body. “You are so beautiful, Loren.” She put her head under water to make a full slow turn around his
waist. Loren was the observer and the object of observing at the same time; both were delicious.

  After their swim, they walked hand in hand back up to the cabana. They lay down on the blanket. He looked back over her shoulder to the elegant curve of her bare behind.

  “I am very happy,” Sonia said.

  Loren leaned in toward her face for the first kiss, an unhurried little kiss, betraying nothing of what now was to come. Then he folded her in his arms and began to kiss her in earnest. He had thought so often of what was going to happen next. He knew exactly the slow progression of steps, the completion of the dance. But midway through the progression, she stopped.

  Sonia sat up. “Not yet,” she said.

  The next morning they took the dinghy into the beach again to have breakfast in their shaded cabana. Sonia had spotted green coconuts, windfalls, under the palms at the top of the beach. Loren brought a machete from the boat to crack one open. After their meal, Sonia took his hand to pull him up. She said, “My turn.” Then very slowly, she undressed him. She was curious about his body; now she let herself look closely, passing behind him, drawing the smooth surface of one nail lightly over the backs of his shoulders. Loren, naked and suddenly self-conscious, Sonia still in all her clothes. He gestured shyly toward his chest and shoulders. “Too thin here,” he said.

  “But you have the prettiest bottom.”

  Finally she stepped out of her own clothes and led him down to the lagoon for another swim.

  Back on the blanket, they held hands as they dried off in the soft breeze. What hadn’t happened yesterday seemed almost certain not to happen again today. “Tell me again, Sonia, about why we’re waiting. About this virginity that afflicts us. I thought it was going to be a passing phase of my life. Now I’m beginning to think it may be a lifelong curse. Maybe fatal.”

  She smiled slightly at his turn of phrase. “Men and boys,” she responded after a moment, “seem to have very immediate needs. When I was a girl, I was given a book about boys. That’s what it said. Boys are always in a rush. Girls are much more considered. They have to learn to govern boys with their thoughtful ways. I am learning.”