As Mitch had put it, the money men don’t window-shop. They know what they’re in the research market to buy. They go to the petroleum geologists to buy ‘where’s the oil’. Seismologists like him and Maria they approach looking for ‘how can we stop this’ or ‘give us some notice’. Which was why he had spent so much time in Honolulu with the tsunami early-warning project.
The sort of ‘pure research’ exploration the Gazes Also was undertaking – and with those kind of resources – lay in the realms of what they called DBS. It was a cynical in-joke that had two definitions but one meaning: forget it.
Dream Benefactor Scenario.
Don’t Be Stupid.
Except that it had happened. It happened to CalORI, right out of the proverbial blue. Admittedly, Luther St John was nobody’s dream anything, except maybe cell-mate for Hannibal Lecter, but what the hell, his face wasn’t on the banknotes. Mitch was the only one of them to have met the man, and his reluctance to discuss ‘what he’s really like’ was palpable enough for everyone to quit asking.
They had all seen him on TV down the years, although obviously not on his own network: sentience tended to interfere with reception of the Christian Family Channel, perhaps the CFC most guilty of fucking up the atmosphere. He had kept a comparatively low mainstream-media profile in recent years, only sticking his head above the public parapet again in the past eighteen months or so, but everyone still remembered with great fondness his hugely entertaining Presidential bid in ‘92. Back in the Eighties he was so much the detested totem of religious ultra-conservatism that if he hadn’t existed already, liberal students like Maria would have had to invent him. He functioned as a kind of anti-catechism: if you weren’t sure where you stood on something, you just had to find out Luther’s opinion and take a large step to the left. In latter years, though, he had been mainly a figure of fun, a laughable anachronism. As if rendered harmless by his humiliation, his opinions and pronouncements were now, to most, a source of amusement where they had once seemed an ugly threat. To most, but not to everyone.
Maria had read the Vanity Fair article last summer, tracking what its author, Gilda Landsmann (whose journalistic scrutiny had dogged St John for years), perceived to be a calculatedly strategic re-ascent towards the limelight. Landsmann said that when St John looked at you, as one outside his ‘Communion of the Saved’, you could physically feel his revulsion, like a leper before a king.
Mitch disagreed. Revulsion was a kind of contempt, and contempt ran hot in the blood. When St John looked at you, it was with cold pity.
‘He doesn’t look at you like he hates you,’ Mitch had told her. ‘He looks at you like you’re already dead.’
The fear that his patronage was too good to be true didn’t survive the Gazes Also’s blank-cheque refit, far less St John’s gift of the submarine Stella Maris, but it didn’t quite die either. Instead it transubstantiated into the fear that it was too good to last, and each month, each week, brought in new rumours on the breeze.
As St John was a far from hands-on kind of sponsor, Mitch often seemed like the only link the institute had with him. This, of course, wasn’t true. CaIORI’s accountants were in rigidly regular contact with St John’s organisation, and the scientists’ remoteness from the institute’s bean counters – on a number of levels – was the wasteland where the winds of rumour whipped up. But Mitch – and only Mitch – was the guy who presented St John with the fruits of their labours and of his cash. St John wasn’t exactly looking over their shoulders, but he took more than a passing interest in their work. His funding wasn’t just some tax side-wind and it certainly wasn’t a PR exercise. He genuinely wanted to know what was going on, enough to send a private jet to fly Mitch to and from Arizona to make his presentations.
Presentation being the keyword. Maria had watched Mitch work hours and days perfecting computer models of his findings, 3-D rotatable graphics of the sub-oceanic landscape, with animated demonstrations of the seismic and geological stages in that landscape’s evolution: the fractures, trenches, plains, seamounts and guyots. He also knew how to pander to his audience, putting special emphasis on samples or developments that could be dated to coincide with biblical periods and events. This involved playing somewhat fast and loose with the error margins of several different dating systems, but Mitch figured if it kept his wallet open to hand the guy a test-tube of compressed shell fragments and tell him their former owners bought it around the same time as Solomon, why burst everybody’s bubble?
Then St John’s prophecy went top of the news.
They heard about it over the radio. Mitch’s team were back on-shore at CalORI at the time. Under any other circumstances they’d have found it as hilarious as everyone else, but when the two-minute news item ended, no-one was laughing. They all saw the same ghastly eventuality.
There was no scientific basis in anything the GA had discovered, anything Mitch had presented, to support what St John was predicting. Fortunately, their research hadn’t been cited, yet, but they all knew that if it was, or if the source of their funding was made public, they would be put bang on the spot and asked for their expert opinions. Which would come down to a straight choice between sacrificing all professionalism, dignity and future credibility on the altar of their paymaster, or declaring unequivocally to the nation that their benefactor was talking out of his ass.
Mitch had got on the phone straight away and demanded a meeting with St John, who was surprisingly happy to accommodate him. Mitch’s insistence had alarmed the rest of his team, as they were still wondering what oil could be poured on this troubled water, but Mitch reasoned that they could not afford to sit around. Far better that he explain to St John what position they would be put in and what response they would have to give, than for the media to squeeze them for an answer first, and St John to hear them rubbish him over the airwaves with no prior warning.
Far better, true, but effectively just the difference between committing financial suicide and politely committing financial suicide.
The jet was dispatched that same afternoon, to convene a meeting that might have reassured everyone at CalORI if it hadn’t clearly disturbed the hell out of Mitch.
‘Don’t worry,’ St John had told him, in the back of his white stretch Caddy. ‘I’ve no intention of putting you or your colleagues in an uncomfortable situation.’ Mitch said St John spoke to you like he was reading from a prepared statement. There might be an opportunity for questions later, but definitely not until he had finished. Drink your water, sit comfortable and listen up. Press packs will be available on your way out.
‘Let me assure you that I have not made and will not make reference to your work or your organisation. Let me also assure you that my funding of the Institute remains an entirely confidential matter. I would not expect you to support my, ah, theories, from your strictly scientific perspective, but I can guarantee that no-one will approach you for such an opinion in direct connection with myself and my statements. If, by coincidence, you are questioned solely in your capacity as a seismologist – and I mean a seismologist, not the seismologist connected to the research I have supported – all I would ask is that you might do me the courtesy of making your excuses and being too busy to comment.’
Mitch knew his team could live with that. The odds were very long on himself or anyone else at CalORI ever having to cross that particular bridge. The networks and the news agencies already had their seismological rentaquote vacancies filled, especially in the Southland, where tremor discussion was practically a full-time job.
But there was one thing he had to know.
St John knew that what he was theorising was not supported by the GA’s findings, so if he wasn’t planning to make reference to the team’s research . . .
‘Mr Kramer,’ he told him, ‘you are correct in saying that your findings do not support my theory, but I believe that your research does. Now, I’m not going to present your research to anybody, anybody. Don’t you worry about that. The differ
ence between you and me is that I’m not trying to prove a scientific point. This isn’t about science, Mr Kramer, this is about faith. If I could present a catalogue of evidence that scientifically proved the threat of what I’ve predicted, people would believe it, but they’d believe it because they could explain it all away, account for it within their rules, their indifferent values. They could weigh up the probabilities, decide whether to ship out, make plans, contingencies. It’d be their rational response to a rationally evaluated possibility. But I’m not saying this is going to happen because science has told me so. So even if your findings did support what I’m saying, it would be you and not me who would be taking it to the networks.
‘You look at this research with your scientific mind, seeing how it fits your scientific models and your scientific laws, and within that framework, sure, there’s nothing to substantiate what I have foretold. We both look at these rocks, these mountains and plains beneath the ocean, and you see the work of nature, Mr Kramer. The physicality, the facts, the equations, the history, the development. You understand that, you and your people, you understand those things well, to a sophistication far beyond what an ordinary man could comprehend. That’s your gift. But I see the work of God, and that’s mine.’
Then he had looked Mitch in the eye and said: ‘We’re two men from different fields approaching the same body of research, the same raw materials. I would not pretend to intrude upon your area of expertise, Mr Kramer. Do not presume to intrude upon mine.’
Maria had been called in to authenticate the content of the scrolls’ later passages, but if anyone doubted the accuracy of the texts that preceded them, she reckoned Jerry should just wheel out Luther St John as exhibit A.
The big myth about the Minoans was that they were like some kind of prehistoric flower-power people, beating their swords into jewellery, lounging around pastoral idylls and generally being beautiful. There was a bit of that going on, sure, but when you’re at the heart of the world’s biggest trading empire, expanded and defended by the world’s most powerful fleet, you can spend your leisure time how you like. The Minoans built their empire on two foundations: unrivalled cultural advancement and unmatched maritime prowess. Baubles and trinkets, yeah, and if you fucked with them, they sealed your fate. They loved colour and spectacle, but they were obsessed with blood. They took time and pleasure in their costume but they dressed to kill. Art and savagery, aesthetics and violence. Were they contradictory or symbiotic?
Often have I wondered, watching the rhytons being filled in sacrifice from a quaking beast’s throat, would we do the same were it a cold, clear water that issued forth, and not this liquid jewel, this decorative prize? For in Kaftor, colour delights us, and while we may honour gods, we worship beauty. It is in the finery of our metals, the attentive hours with hammer and flame, the patient hewing of stone, the deft dance of weaving, that our true devotion, our true religion, is to be found. And in its dark reflection is the wish to paint in gushing streams of a precious red.
Finery and brutality. Beauty and blood. Certainly there was a tension between the two, and according to the scrolls it lay at the centre of a great turmoil during those final, earthquake-haunted days. There were those who saw their compatriots as effete and decadent, spending too much time making new shiny playthings and looking in the mirror when they could be out kicking new, undiscovered asses with their warships. Kind of like a bronze-age Republican Party.
Poteidan is angry, Damanthys tells us, and by coincidence Poteidan is angry about the self-same things of which Damanthys disapproves. What, then, can save us? Surely only to live our lives as Damanthys would prescribe . . .
Plus ça change.
Maria almost jumped out of her chair when she felt a hand on her shoulder, her reaction giving Chico an equally big fright.
‘Shit, sorry Maria,’ he said, putting a hand on his chest. ‘Guess you were pretty far away.’
Maria looked at the monitor. It still showed the envelope icon, unopened. She didn’t know how long she’d been staring blankly at the computer screen. The screen-saver was set to kick in after half an hour, so it was less than that, but she suspected not by much.
‘Wish I was, Chico. But I’m here, so what’s up?’
The lab technician sat down on the worktop a few feet from her computer.
‘Got a phone call. From the Coast Guard. They want . . . I mean, they said it can wait until somebody’s . . . They want someone to take a look around the Gazes, see if anything’s – I dunno – not as it should be. Maybe help figure out what happened.’
She nodded.
‘I mean, I’d go, but I don’t know the boat so good and I’m not sure that I’d be able to . . .’
‘It’s okay, Chico. I’ll do it.’
‘They said just as soon as somebody feels up to it, you know? You don’t have to . . .’
‘I’ll go this afternoon,’ she said, telling herself more than him. ‘I’m not gonna be much use around here anyway.’
‘You sure you’re gonna be all right?’
She nodded again, trying to give him a smile.
‘Can I get you anything?’ he asked. ‘A Coke maybe?’
‘Got any morphine?’
‘Not today.’
‘Coke’ll be fine. Thanks, Chico.’
Maria sighed and sat back in her seat, running both hands through her hair for the hundredth time. Keep this up and she was going to look like something out of a metal video. She took hold of the mouse and shut down the database program. She wasn’t going to get any work done today, why pretend?
Chico came back and handed her a cold can from the machine. She opened it, took a sip and double-clicked on the envelope.
five
‘Save the world,’ it said.
Or rather, he thought it said. It was only as Steff neared the comer that he could see the remainder of the banner, which ran perpendicular to the first part along the high fence.
There hadn’t been a parking space to be found in Santa Monica. This had come as little surprise as there hadn’t been a hotel room to be found either. It had soon reached the stage where Steff felt embarrassed asking at the desks, like it wasn’t enough that he was a big, weird-looking guy from way out of town with a funny accent, he had to advertise his ignorance by the gaucherie of asking for a room in Santa Monica this week. He wondered if the hotel management courses in Californian colleges actually tested candidates on that ‘of course not, you fucking idiot’ look they all gave you.
‘This is going to sound like a daft question,’ he had said at the last place, ‘with the AFFM going on this week and everything, but would you happen to have any free rooms?’
The girl at that particular reception desk had been more courteous than the others. Perhaps making an open declaration of being an arse meant they didn’t feel so obliged to point it out to you.
‘I’m sorry, sir,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘And most years it wouldn’t be such a dumb question. The AFFM doesn’t usually fill us up, but with this Festival of Light thing happening at the same time, we’re just bursting at the seams.’
‘Festival of Light? What’s that?’
‘I don’t know, myself. I just heard a lot of the guests say that’s why they’re in town.’
He had called Jo Mooney for advice, and she suggested he backtrack to West Hollywood, which was only a half-hour along Santa Monica Boulevard depending on traffic, and, she assured him, ‘a lot more fun’. She had recommended he try the Armada, near the junction with La Cienega. It was a huge pink affair, vaguely suggestive of an aircraft hangar. He had walked into the antiseptically tasteful lobby in the late afternoon, when the place appeared to be deserted, and booked a room. By the time he had unpacked, showered and shaved, darkness had fallen with a speed he’d really need to get used to. Back home, dusk could be a process of slow hours and changing colours. Here, it was like someone just reached up and switched off the sun.
It was when he wandered downstairs
to check out the hotel bar that he realised the guest register probably included zero females and one heterosexual (Kennedy, S.).
Jo Mooney, he decided, had less than twenty-four hours to live.
He had driven in from West Hollywood, his route taking him past the Beverly Hills signs and that avenue of palm trees so familiar from TV, depicted always as a gateway to mythical splendour. Unfortunately there was fuck-all at the end of it, just more grey tarmac, glass towers and shopping malls. He had felt a wee tingle upon catching sight of that building from Die Hard, right enough. It was south of the road he was on, and it had just peeked into view for a moment as he drove through a crossroads. He thought he should go and check it out close up at some point, then decided that would spoil it. Better for it to have winked at him as he passed, like a girl in the street who might have nothing to say to him if he actually stopped to talk.
After an hour of circling Santa Monica’s town centre, he had finally spotted a neon parking sign with the Spaces part lit up underneath. It turned out to be a shopping mall, and it was going to cost him about eight dollars to leave the hire car there all day unless he was ‘validated’, which he took to be a euphemism for ‘spent enough money’. This didn’t work out quite so badly as he feared, as it provided a fine excuse to have a quorate five dollars’ worth of hamburgers for breakfast.
Not the End of the World Page 7
