Soon this group was leading George’s group to a dining area. One of the most diminutive people George had ever seen walked toward them.
“I’m Maureen Dunne,” the woman said. “Dr. Maureen Dunne.” She pulled out her chair and sat down.
Her face, which reached to just above the tabletop, was lined, but her eyes were clear, magnified behind thick glasses. She did not exhibit the disabilities associated with the elderly, and she conveyed a sense of authority that left no doubt who was in charge here. George noticed there was an empty chair.
Dr. Dunne sipped at her water and observed the group.
“Tell me a little bit about yourself,” she said to George.
“I’m looking for my wife, Patsy,” George said. When it came down to it, this was all that mattered right now about himself. While he didn’t know anything about Maureen Dunne, he did sense that this might be an opportunity to get help in finding Patsy.
Once he started to talk about Patsy, he wasn’t able to stop.
Finally, Dr. Dunne pushed her chair back. She liked this guy; he hadn’t mentioned himself once in this self-description. His definition was in the other. “Let’s look for her,” she said, “while there’s still time and light.” In an instant the entire group was on their feet.
“Where’re we going?” George asked.
“You and I are going to the fairway. The rest of you, please stay and rest,” Dr. Dunne said. “Don’t worry; we’re not going there to play golf.”
“I THINK PATSY would like it here,” George found himself saying. There were no golf carts buzzing around, no balls sailing overhead, just a meadow and trees, but the place was very active. George and the doctor walked past the course’s largest water trap, where a group of people were filling bottles, buckets, and canteens.
“This provides a freshwater source, with the plumbing for intake and drainage,” the doctor explained as they walked by. “If you look out beyond the water, you will see a series of irrigation ditches that we have extended well into the rough. We were able to establish a series of mini-reservoirs here that provide water for our animals and for an irrigation system.”
He was so captivated by the utilitarian use of this resort that, for a moment, he lost track of what the doctor was saying. Then he realized that Dr. Dunne was talking about something called the Arbor Ward.
“There are corridors of small trees planted in rows around the fairway.” She pointed: tents and blankets were scattered across a field, with small groups of people around each. There were larger tents in different colors where people came and went. From the sixteenth tee, George had a clear view of what Dunne was talking about. It was a fairway that had been transformed into a campground.
“Along the outside of the fairway, beyond that row of trees, is a passageway of indigenous bushes, palm, and other small trees. That is where we have our ward for the more serious cases. We can look for your wife on this fairway and make our way back through the ward before dark. Maybe we’ll get lucky and find her.” She set off with a quick step. George was right behind her.
“As you have seen,” the doctor said over her shoulder, “each golf course is equipped with a clubhouse, locker room, showers, restrooms, water fountains. The patients and the workforce have a number of places to go to use the facilities and get fresh water.”
“Each golf course?” George said. “You’ve got more than one?”
“Oh yes,” Dr. Dunne said with a laugh. “There are a dozen in this area of the state.” George’s heart sank a little at the thought of trying to find Patsy.
“Who would have thought that golf courses would provide such a community resource for housing, utilities, goods, and services?” Dr. Dunne said.
“Do you live here?” George asked.
The doctor said, “It is my responsibility to move within the larger community. I travel a lot, taking care of patients with severe needs, and providing aid to the dying, here and elsewhere.”
Dr. Dunne stopped when they reached a large white tent. “I’ll check in here; you look around,” she said.
There were about a dozen men and women seated outside the tent. George knew immediately that Patsy wasn’t among them, but he looked around anyway.
“No luck,” the doctor said when she returned. “New people every day, but none named Patsy, or at least none that I was able to identify. It is only the first tent, though. Let’s keep going.”
They had checked into a dozen tents by the time they reached the end of the fairway, on the sixteenth green. They stood on the green and looked back at the long stretch of grass. The sun was no longer on the tee, and the sky was pink.
“C’mon. We’ll go back down here,” the doctor said, and turned into the Arbor Ward.
“The Arbor Ward consists of a series of rooms that are constructed with screens and tarps hung from lines between the trees.” They walked into the first space, a semi-shaded quadrangle that provided space for a bed or a sleeping bag, and a place for an attendant.
“The layered vegetation provides shade, and insulation, and the air flow can keep the ward up to ten to fifteen degrees cooler in late day.” As if on cue a breeze blew through. “But all this doesn’t help us find your wife.” She went to check with some of the helpers.
The people in the ward were in bad shape. George walked into one of the rooms and saw a woman on her side stretching toward something. He walked over to the bed and asked if he could help her. The woman rolled her eyes toward the table next to her. He saw a bottle of water. He tucked the sheet in around her and brought the bottle of water to her lips. He couldn’t help but hope that Patsy wasn’t in this ward, and that if she was, there would be someone to take care of her.
“Is that your wife?” the doctor asked.
“No, but she could have been, I guess,” George said.
“Look,” Dunne said to George, “it’s going to be too dark to look any further tonight. Come with me.”
IT WAS DARK by the time Dunne and George reached the abandoned mine. While there wasn’t much moon, the wide night sky was filled with bright stars and the air was clear. George and the doctor walked the truck roads that crisscrossed along the terraced surface, the gravel road crunching beneath their feet.
“There are hundreds of abandoned mines in this state,” Dunne said. “Not many as preserved as this one, but there are a few.”
“Not many next to a golf course,” George said. He was getting the feeling that Dunne was selling him on the place, as if George had money to contribute to any cause.
The road was wide enough for two 18-wheelers to pass each other, and it was steep enough that George could almost hear the truck gears grind.
“We appropriated this mine, renovated the grinders, smelters, blowers, and refiners until we had ourselves a working mine. But we aren’t using it to pillage the earth; we use it to power the place.
“The mining company’s base was here too. That’s why the golf course and the palatial homes.”
By this time George and Dr. Dunne had gotten to the end of the truck road and to the bottom of the pit. It was almost too dark to see, but there were boulders and rocks scattered about the site and massive pieces of equipment. There was a railroad track with a mounted rotary drill the size of a locomotive, used to bore through to the ore. The railroad track disappeared into the side of the mine. It was cold at the base of the pit, and George began to shiver.
“We’ll be warmer soon, don’t worry,” Dr. Dunne said. George followed her into a hole and he could feel the heat as soon as he crossed the threshold. This was the cave where the railroad tracks were, and as George walked farther into the cave and followed the tracks, he came to an elevator shaft. The doctor motioned to George, who climbed up and into the elevator.
The light grew brighter as the car evened out and came to a stop. There were six white-coated attendants waiting for them.
“Doctor,” one of them said, and George could have sworn he noticed the rest of them bow slightly to h
er. The one that had spoken held out a hand to Dr. Dunne.
“This is George Salter,” Dr. Dunne said. Behind the six attendants was what looked to be a vault door. The opening was big enough to drive a train through, and the train tracks ran right through the center of the opening.
“What kind of mine is this?” he asked.
“It is our command center. We took the technology we found here and adapted it to our needs. From here we can control and direct the energy to run everything from the sprinklers on the golf course to the lights in the mine. We run the irrigation systems for our agricultural needs and sewerage.”
She took George’s arm, and together they entered the control room.
Inside there was the hum of machines and ventilation fans and there was the hum of energy from the people working there. George shouldn’t have been, but he was surprised that all of the workers and attendants were as old as he was, if not older.
“I’m sorry that our equipment and data aren’t enough for us to locate your wife,” Dr. Dunne said. “We can manage the physical place pretty well, but the population is beyond our control. People being our reason for being in the first place. We had to find a means and a method to house and care for as many people as we could. Especially now, since the Conglomerates have killed what little elder funding there was for the Coots—even though the funding came from the money they stole from us—and they fired all the workers. More people come here every day. We have not found an effective way of staying on top of the identities and backgrounds of the individuals in our community. It calls for more resources than we have available to us. We commit our resources to care.
“However, that is general. You have described Patsy and her symptoms. She may very well have lost track of her name, or perhaps become concerned about giving any information to a stranger.” The doctor stopped.
George was busy picturing Patsy in the camp. He thought of the woman he had helped, the others he had seen. “Well, it does look like you could use a hand here,” George said. “I mean, it looks like you have everything in hand here. I couldn’t for the life of me see how I could contribute unless there’s a broom near by. But I could help out up top,” George said.
“Good. We could use you,” the doctor said.
“You keep saying we,” George said. “There was an extra place next to you at dinner. Maybe you’re not alone in all of this.”
“Meet my partner,” Dr. Dunne said.
George turned around and saw coming toward them one of the biggest human beings he had ever seen.
“This is Mary. We call her Aunty Mayhem,” Dr. Dunne said. “Meet George Salter.”
“Is it Mary or Aunty?” George asked.
“Aunty’s fine,” she said.
An Order of Mercy
George awoke in the same position he had been in when he had fallen asleep, the bag with the computer cradled in front of him. He was stiff and sore. He stretched and saw the water bottle on the table next to the bed. It hadn’t been there the night before. He reached for the bottle, noticed a basin, a pitcher of water, and a towel folded beside it. He saw an envelope with his name written on it in a neat, crisp script. Someone had been there while he slept. He looked down at the computer tucked into the bed and opened the envelope.
“Good morning. When you are finished, find us. Maureen Dunne.”
When he was finished, he opened the door. “Good morning,” a woman standing outside said. “You’re to come with me.”
George slipped the strap of the computer bag over his head and went outside to find himself in a vast, open space, excavated from within the abandoned copper mine. There were dozens of dwellings carved out of the walls in this manmade cavern. The Coots had moved into these caves. George reminded himself that they were hundreds of feet below the ground.
They took the elevator up to the ground level.
“Ah,” the doctor said, “George Salter. We are going to meet up with Aunty.”
AUNTY LOOKED LIKE a monument. George could see her from a distance. She was working in a camp at the foot of the mountain, and the fact that she was dressed in medical white among a population of beige-and gray-clothed patients made her appearance even more pronounced. George watched her move from place to place with steady resolve.
Dr. Dunne was recording notes into her headset. She seemed to have forgotten that George was with her, and this gave George a kind of freedom. He looked around, looking for Patsy. The more he thought about it the more he was convinced that his wife was up ahead.
“HOLD THIS,” AUNTY said later, handing George an IV drip. “I’m glad you’re here,” she said to Dr. Dunne. And just as quickly she went back to work. “Glucose solution,” she said. George looked out over the rows and columns of cots and he realized they were all occupied by Coots in bad shape, some with attendants with them. A lucky few had a spouse, a family member, a friend to hold their hand.
“Most of the patients here have been here for a while,” the doctor said, as if she knew what George was thinking. George had to admit that the doctor and her partner had constructed a good place to spend one’s last days. A kind of reverse nursery, where a comfortable end of life could take place. The Conglomerates might try to strip the elderly of their dignity, but dignity was a quality that had eluded the Conglomerates and hindered their ability to control the souls of the dignified.
“As we approach evening,” Aunty began, “and through the night, those who can no longer hold on give up. And if they make it to the morning, the will outlasts death, at least for a little while, anyway.”
Aunty continued, “We have a crew who administers what comfort they can: reading, singing, speaking. In most cases it’s just holding the hands of these folks.”
“And then there’s the practical matters that have to be attended to,” Dr. Dunne said. George knew both the practical and the spiritual were necessary, and neither one was easy to do. And, George thought, that’s why there are two of them.
ONCE THE DOCTOR and Aunty were sure the hospice was secure and attended to, they moved on, in a golf cart with Aunty driving and George in the back. They drove at a pretty good pace but people stopped to wave anyway as Aunty’s golf cart drove past.
The customized golf cart circled a field that stretched straight up the mountainside. The entire surface of the field appeared to be covered in a series of mirrors, rectangles that glinted in the sun. George tapped on Dr. Dunne’s shoulder and pointed at the field of reflected light.
“Solar panels,” Dr. Dunne said. “We have thousands of them throughout the desert, and in prime sun spots such as this. That’s one of the ways we power the place.”
They drove into the black light of a tunnel, and skidded to a stop. Aunty and the doctor jumped out, ready to be briefed by a team of attendants. The place was full of busy people, and as in the other places, these workers were older folks, in good physical condition and engaged in their labor.
“What do all these people do?” George asked.
“There are more than a quarter of a million people living with us,” Aunty said. “All of them had been left to die. We are here to take care of them.”
“And, frankly, that’s why you’re here,” Dr. Dunne said.
George thought they had been looking for his wife, but Aunty went on, “We need able-bodied people here, people who can help others,” Aunty said. “And you, George Salter, are one of those.” The lilt in her speech pattern, the rhythm of the hums and taps of her consonants and vowels, rolled over George, and he felt himself being lulled into submission. “We, the able, are outnumbered here by the helpless and the lost, thousands of people who are here through no fault of their own. So it is up to us to be their order of mercy,” she said.
George admired them but he wanted to find Patsy.
“Mo has told me about your wife,” Aunty said. “We wouldn’t ask you to give up on her, but you might just kill yourself trying to find her. And what good would that do? Or you can stay here and we can assist you
in trying to locate her.”
“What can I do?” George said, knowing how ridiculous a question it was.
“Anything you do is needed and appreciated,” Aunty Mayhem said. “You’ve been a big help already, and you can do more right now.”
Canal Street Cocktail
The chairman of the Conglomerate party sat at the long oval table in his office and watched the wall of monitors. He was listening to the chatter on the teleconference call. The video was a one-way feed, so the board of directors could not see the chairman, but he could see them. While most members of the board were careful in what they said, they were under the impression that they were waiting for the chairman to arrive. It was assumed that if the chairman were present, he would not waste his time and would address them right away, and because they could neither see nor hear him, they took advantage of the moment with casual conversations that revealed a great deal about their personalities and intents. The chairman listened and waited.
Finally he said, “Thank you,” and they all fell silent.
“We are in the opening stages of a significant attack on our freedom by armed insurgent forces of Dyscard rebels,” he began.
“All branches of the armed and uniformed services are to be on active duty. We will seal off all transportation in, out, and around New York City and the metropolitan area, from Boston through D.C. I want every subway stop covered; no one is permitted to enter or leave. Same holds for all ports, piers, the railroad and air, all down.” He paused, and then continued, “We will contain the Dyscards. Panic may ensue. Expect it.
“The nation is under a red alert. Every domestic and international transportation hub is to be limited to essential travel only. Every known Dyscard enclave will be addressed, from here in the Northeast all the way to the Northwest.”
The Age of the Conglomerates: A Novel of the Future Page 19
