Brilliance

by Marcus Sakey

  “Jobs the Holdfast has plenty of. Unemployment is zero. And not only research—trucking, construction, mining, infrastructure, the works.”

  “Sure. Got to have something for the normals to do.”

  She laughed. “Not just normals. Plenty of gifted move here to be part of something, but a tier-five calculator or a tier-three musician isn’t exactly leading the charge in biomedical research.”

  “How long have you lived here?”

  “I’ve had my apartment for three years. I don’t know that I’d say I live here.”

  “I know how that is.”

  Ten minutes later he got his first look at the border. The four lanes of the highway doubled, then doubled again, and then again. The semis edged to the right, filling the bulk of the lanes, with passenger vehicles heading left. Each lane ran to a checkpoint not unlike a tollbooth. Guards in dun uniforms bearing the blue rising-star emblem of the Holdfast moved like ants, hundreds of them, talking to drivers, running mirrors under cars, walking German shepherds. The canopy over each checkpoint looked simple enough, but Cooper knew that it was packed with the most advanced newtech scanning devices in existence. The joke was that to see next year’s DAR gear, you just went to Wyoming and walked into a bar. That was the true protection of the Holdfast, the trump card more important than the desolate landscape or Epstein’s billions. The best minds in their fields, gifteds who individually jumped technology forward decades, here worked together, and the results flowed outward to the country as a whole.

  You don’t need an army to conquer America, Cooper thought. You just need to produce entertainment centers people can’t live without.

  Shannon pulled up beneath the canopy, the sudden shadow falling cool into the car. She rolled down the window, and a young guy with a neat moustache said, “Welcome to New Canaan Holdfast may I see your documentation please,” without pausing to breathe. They each dug for their passport—they’d discussed it on the way, the importance of not seeming too ready, too eager—and passed them over. The guard nodded and handed them to a woman behind him, who ran each against a scanner. Cooper knew it would be checking not only the validity of the passport, but also recent credit history, driving and criminal records, God knew what else.

  Time to see if Schneider screwed us. The IDs and credit cards had worked fine on the way out, but that meant nothing at all. This was the first real test. Cooper forced nonchalant interest, looking around like a tourist.

  “Mr. and Mrs.…Cappello,” the guard said. “What’s your business in New Canaan?”

  “We just wanted to see it,” she said brightly. “We’re road-tripping to Portland and thought it would be fun to stop off.”

  “Any narcotics or firearms?”

  “Nope.” Cooper had left his gun in pieces in a Dumpster in Minnesota, knowing they’d ask. It didn’t matter. He didn’t really like guns all that much, and besides, one sidearm wouldn’t make any difference.

  “Where are you staying while you’re here?”

  “Thought we’d get a hotel in Newton.” The first town in the Holdfast was one of the largest and largely open to tourists. Deeper in, there would be additional security screenings, and proof of business needed. DAR briefings had compared the Holdfast with layers of sieves; each layer screened out more, using additional legal loopholes, ranging from gated residential communities to high-security mining areas to government-affiliated research facilities. As Cooper watched, another guard held up a device he’d never seen, an unmarked rectangle on a pistol grip, and panned it slowly along the car. Checking for explosives? Taking pictures of them? Reading their auras?

  The female guard handed their passports back to the one with the moustache, who passed them to Shannon. “Thank you for your cooperation. Please be advised that the New Canaan Holdfast is privately held corporate land, and that by entering you are agreeing to abide by the bylaws of Epstein Industries, to remain within designated spaces identified in green, and to obey all requests of security personnel.”

  “Gotcha,” Shannon said, then rolled up the window and put the car in drive.

  And just like that, they were in.

  It was different than he’d imagined.

  Cooper had reviewed hundreds of photos and simulations. From above he’d seen the massive warehouse districts clustered at each entrance, row upon row of hangars that served as way stations for everything from lumber to ethylene dichloride to whiskey, all the products the Holdfast imported. He’d studied the layout of the region, the network of roads that connected the towns and outposts that had grown overnight. He’d read the specs of the solar fields, where miles of black photoelectric panels glittered like the carapaces of insects, all moving in perfect timing as they tracked the sun across the daytime sky and the moon across the night. He knew the populations of Newton, Da Vinci, Leibniz, Tesla, and Archimedes, knew what the specialized role of each town was. He’d sat in lectures about the unique nature of a preplanned society built with near-limitless funding.

  What he hadn’t done was ride the streets of Newton with the windows down, smelling dust and the ionized discharge from the moisture condensers. He’d never watched a woman park her electric car at a charging station outside a bar and heard the hum of the generators engaging. And despite having read the figures a thousand times, he’d never realized how young the place was. It was one thing to know that the oldest recognized gifteds were thirty-three, and another to see a world of teenagers hurrying busily about, kids in construction helmets and driving trucks, children building a new world to a ten-year blueprint. There were older people, too, of course; plenty of families with gifted children had moved here, but they looked oddly out of place, outnumbered like faculty on a college campus.

  Shannon’s apartment turned out to be on a second floor above a bar. One room with a Murphy bed tucked neatly in, a kitchen that showed no sign of ever having been cooked in, a desk with a plastic plant bathing in sunlight. It reminded him very much of his own abandoned apartment in DC.

  She’d ushered him in, then stood looking around for a moment as if trying to recognize the place, as if someone had been there in her absence and moved things around by inches. After a moment she announced she wanted to clean up. Through the wall he could hear the sound of the shower turning on and off in quick cycles—navy showers only, water too precious here to waste. Cooper opened the fridge, saw nothing but condiments and beer, helped himself to one. He paced the room, then stepped out onto the small balcony.

  The Holdfast embodied the latest urban-design theory, with wide bike lanes and public squares like Italian piazzas. He winced against the sun and slugged his beer and watched a cluster of twenty-year-olds break into a flirty game of tag, boys chasing laughing girls around, all of them lean and leathery and sunburned, flush with health. He wondered which could dance among the genome, or recall every detail of a face glanced at a dozen years ago. He wondered which of them worked for John Smith, which of them were terrorists, which of them might have once been targets for him to pattern and track and maybe murder.

  Murder?

  He took another sip of beer, leaning on the railing. A moment later she joined him, wearing a sundress now, a cotton strappy thing that bared her shoulders. Her hair was still damp, and she brushed it with steady strokes. She looked good, smelled of some tropical shampoo, coconuts maybe.

  “So we made it.”

  “We made it.”

  He turned and leaned against the railing, the metal hot through his T-shirt. He watched her brush her hair and then watched her watch him. “What?” she asked.

  “I was just thinking. You’re safe now.”

  “And you’re not. It’s uncomfortable, right? Someone in a uniform doesn’t like the way you look, and next thing you know, you end up in a brightly lit room.” She cocked her head. “I know that feeling.”

  He didn’t respond, just held a level gaze.

  She sighed. “Cooper, we had a deal. That means something to me. You got us here, I’ll get u
s in to see Epstein.”

  “Okay,” he said. “What do we do? Drop by his office and ask for an audience with the King of New Canaan?”

  “I told you, only straights call him that.”

  “We’re standing in his kingdom right now.” He nodded to a pair of uniforms down in the square. “Those are corporate security guards, and he pays them.”

  “That’s right, he does. But there are no sweatshops in the Holdfast.”

  Why are you needling her? She was right: he did feel uncomfortable. For years he’d moved through the world with the certainty of power. Here, he was at best a tourist with a fake passport. And at worst, well, he had no illusions about his safety.

  That wasn’t what bothered him. He’d expected to feel like a soldier behind enemy lines. Only now that he was here, enemy territory turned out to be a cross between a kibbutz and a campus. It threw him, the feeling that this wasn’t the beating heart of the evil empire.

  Far from. What you’ve seen, you like. There was something inspiring about the place, the energy of it, the rational planning and joyful creation. It felt like a place that was building something. Aiming to the future. The rest of the country seemed mired in the past, always longing for a simpler time, even if that simpler time had never existed.

  “What’s our next move?”

  “Step two is tomorrow. We go to Epstein, as I promised. Step three, we go our separate ways, I find my people and explain the situation.”

  “And step one?”

  “Step one is you change your clothes and we go drinking. I’m home, and I want to celebrate.”

  They started in the bar below her apartment. From the outside it looked like any other, and he played his usual game with himself: country rock on the stereo, neon beer signs behind the bar, scarred wooden tables, the sweaty feel of too-bright sunlight pouring through the front windows, a jaded day-shift bartender with tattoos.

  For the first time in a decade, he’d gone one for five.

  The place was air-conditioned to just above freezing, and the windows had some kind of polarizing effect that stripped the fury from the sunlight without dimming the outside world. The décor was all smooth lines, the lighting indirect and sourceless, as though the air itself glowed. The music was a sexy, vaguely electronic beat. The bartender was a girl about sixteen years old working on a d-pad, her skin leathery but otherwise unmarked.

  At least the tables were wooden and scarred. They looked older than the bartender and probably were. Bought wholesale somewhere, shipped in here.

  “Two ciders and two vodkas,” Shannon had said, then turned to him, flashed one of her quirky smiles, and said, “And the same for him.”

  At first he’d sipped his drinks, feeling on edge. The second of the icy vodkas had taken care of that, and the cider—distilled here, Shannon told him, apples and pears being two of the handful of things that grew well in Wyoming—was cut with a pleasant bitterness.

  “Vitamins,” Shannon said. “Most Bs. We eat a lot of meat here, but vegetables are expensive.” She took one shot right after the other, chased that with one of the ciders. There was a lightness to her that he hadn’t seen before, like she was uncoiling. The security of friendly ground. She laughed and joked and ordered more drinks, and somewhere along the line he decided, why not.

  “So,” she said. “First impressions.”

  “I thought you were very pretty, but a bit explosive.”

  “Cute.”

  “Thank you.” He took a long pull of the cider. “Honestly? Not what I expected.”

  “How’s it different?”

  He looked around the bar, at the dozen or so other patrons. Young, all of them, and loud. The tables covered with empty glasses. Laughter that broke like a bomb, a whole table falling apart at a joke, following it with a toast. When was the last time he’d sat in a group like that, been lost in a conversation, lived only for a drink?

  The selfish focus, the certainty that this moment was all there was, it was familiar. When he’d been eighteen and a soldier, drinking with his buddies had been pursued with the same relentless energy, the same showy self-determination. But there were differences. Everyone was thinner, with the tight-fleshed look of people who didn’t drink enough water, spent a lot of time in the sun. The clothes were light and similar, very functional. Earlier, at the border, he’d thought that the place looked more like the past than the future, and he’d half expected to see big hats and cowboy boots, a generation playing at an older role. He’d been half right; there were a lot of hats, but the boots were all function and bore the marks of hard wear. None of it seemed to follow a fashion, or at least not one he recognized.

  “No beer signs,” he said.

  She cocked her head.

  “A bar like this anywhere else, there would be beer signs. You know, the old-school logos, the Clydesdales. And even the new beers, they make signs that consciously reflect the ones that came before. Because that’s the way it’s done. You brew a beer, you make a sign for it. It’s like a pool table in a bar, even though no one really knows how to play pool anymore. Our grandparents shot pool; we get drunk and whack at the balls with warped sticks. No one thinks about it, but it’s nostalgia. It’s a sense of the past, of the way things are done.”

  “Like classic rock,” she said. “I could go the rest of my life without hearing ‘Sweet Home Alabama’ again.”

  “There you go. I mean, the Rolling Stones are great. But Credence Clearwater, or the Allman Brothers for the ten thousandth time? Is anybody moved by their music? Does anybody even hear it? It’s nostalgia.”

  “Cars,” Shannon said. “Most people live in cities, don’t drive more than a few miles through traffic. So why do car companies keep making big cars that go fast and use a ton of gasoline? What they should be is light and electric and easy to park.”

  “I don’t know about that,” Cooper said. “I like big cars that go fast.”

  “Old-world thinking,” she said, smiling. “Another round?”

  Outside the windows the world turned gold and orange and finally violet.

  When they left he was feeling good, not wasted but certainly on the way, the world slippy around the edges. She hailed them an electric cab and gave the driver instructions. Their knees touched in the backseat of the tiny car. Martinis before dinner, and then steaks, an inch-thick rib eye crusted in rock salt and black pepper and grilled a perfect medium-rare. Every bite made him want to melt onto the plate.

  He noticed that people around the restaurant noticed them, marked them as tourists, but there didn’t seem to be any threat in it. Newton got its fair share of tourists, and probably thought of it as exporting goodwill.

  She ordered a bottle of wine with dinner and matched him glass for glass. Things got hazier, the world shrinking. He knew he was drunk, didn’t care.

  Sometime later they were in a basement club. Sleek plastic furniture and low tables, a smoky haze sweet with marijuana. On a small stage a three-piece band—bongo, violin, guitar—played a strange, highly rhythmic melody somewhere between reggae and jazz, the musicians all heading off on complex tangents like mathematical equations, the sounds nearly, but not quite, discordant. Brilliants, he was sure, musicians who could play anything they’d ever heard once and yet never wanted to play the same thing twice, bored with a pattern explored. Shannon was in the bathroom, and he leaned back, listening to the music. The smarter plan for the night would have been to stay in her apartment, study maps and read Epstein’s biography, but he couldn’t make himself care.

  She came back swaying, partly to shift through the crowd, partly a hip swing that fit the beat from the band, her legs strong and toned and two more drinks in her hand. “Here you are, Mr. Cappello. Tom.”

  He laughed, said, “Thank you, Allison.”

  They were on a couch nestled in a corner, and she dropped beside him. She smelled very good. From behind her ear she pulled a neatly rolled joint, then leaned forward and lit it off the candle on the table. “Ahh.
Wyoming Sunset.”

  “The bar doesn’t care?”

  “The county can’t make it legal, so there’s a twenty-dollar fine. Which you pay up front when you buy one at the bar.” She took another drag, leaned back into the seat. “You were married, right?”

  “Yes.” He had a flash of Natalie that last night he’d seen her, standing under the tree at the house where they’d once lived together. “Seven years, divorced for four.”

  “You got married young, then.”

  “We were twenty.”

  “Gifted?”

  “No.”

  “Was that the problem?” She offered him the joint.

  He started to pass, then figured what the hell. Took a gentle puff, then a deeper one. Felt an immediate rush, a tingle in his toes and fingers that flowed inward. “I haven’t been stoned since I was seventeen.”

  “Go easy, then. We grow it strong out here.”

  He took another hit, passed it back. For a moment they just sat together, shoulders almost touching. He could feel the warmth of her, and a glow through his whole body.

  “Yes,” he said. “That was the problem.”

  “Was she jealous?”

  “No, nothing like that. Part of the reason we got married was that I was gifted. Her parents didn’t like us dating, and she hated that in them. Used to joke that we were an interracial couple. Then she got pregnant, and that pretty much settled things.”

  “Were you happy?”

  “Very, for a while. Then less.”

  “What happened?”

  “Oh, just—life.” He held one hand up, stared at it, taking in the texture of his skin, the flex of the muscles as he wiggled his fingers. “You can’t turn it off, you know? What we do. It wore her down. My fault, a lot of it. I was impatient, always finishing her sentences. The thousand weird ways our differences played out, like the fact that she loved surprises but could never plan one for me. I had her patterned too thoroughly. And when things got tense, I’d respond to her anger before she said a word, and that would piss her off more. The end…it came slowly, then all at once.”