by Mark Teppo
“A chimera,” I nod. “Where was this taken?”
“Somewhere up north,” she says, turning the laptop around and starting to type. “I'll need to find some Wi-Fi to check further. I don't seem to have that information saved locally.”
“Well,” I note, looking out at the sun-blasted landscape. “We're heading in the right direction, at least.”
THIRTY-SIX
About a half-hour before nightfall, the western sky awash with red and orange clouds, we roll into a tiny town with a single restaurant advertising Wi-Fi access. While Phoebe and Pedro take care of gassing up the car, Mere and I head into the restaurant for a quick meal and some Internet access.
An artichoke ravioli catches my eye on the menu, and since Mere is more interested in the Wi-Fi password than food, I order her the house empanadas. The dark-eyed waitress nods knowingly as she takes out menus. She's seen too many North American couples more fascinated with checking in with their social networks than with paying attention to the local cuisine, and Mere is living up to that stereotype.
“Do you know the history of the Bizzaria?” Mere asks as she starts pulling up a variety of search results. “First found in a garden outside of Florence in the seventeenth century. People thought it was an accidental mutation.”
Florence.
Mere notices my expression. “What?”
“Nothing,” I say.
Her eyebrows pull together and her fingers fly across the keyboard. I watch her scan her computer screen, waiting to see some reaction in her eyes. It doesn't take long. She stops looking, fingers sliding across the track pad, and then she looks over the top of the laptop at me. And then back at the picture on her screen.
“Was it an accident?” she asks.
“Was what?”
“The Bizzaria?”
I shrug. “I wasn't there. I couldn't say.”
“You've been to Florence, though, haven't you?”
“I don't know, Mere. What makes you think I've been to Florence?”
She laughs, covering her mouth as soon as she starts, subsiding into a fit of giggles. “It's almost like an Interpol wanted poster, isn't it?” she says when she has regained her composure.
“The statue of David?” I ask.
She nods, trying very hard not to start giggling again.
“I had never thought of it that way,” I confess.
She scrolls down on the picture. “Is it… a completely accurate likeness?” she asks with a smile.
“It was cold that morning,” I tell her. “It was cold every morning that I posed, in fact.”
“Clearly,” she says, the giggles starting again. With some regret, she turns her attention to her other search results.
A minute later, all of the humor drains out of her face. She spins the laptop around so that I can see what she's found. The first image is the stylized sun from the farm logo, though subtly different. “Inti,” Mere says, “Incan deity. God of the sun.”
I nod and go to the next tab as directed. It's a picture of a man dressed in religious garb. He's holding a stick with a sun figure mounted to the top of it. “Who's this?” I ask. The picture is drawn in a style that is several hundred years old.
“Manco Cápac,” Mere says. “The founder of the Incan empire.”
“Looks like someone we know,” I say.
The artist has done a good rendition of Escobar Montoya, and it's not hard to see that same likeness in the sculptures in the ground-floor gallery in the Montoya building in Santiago.
“I guess he's been running the family business longer than we thought,” Mere says as she spins the laptop back toward her.
“It's not as cool as a statue,” I point out.
“True,” she admits, “but he did get to run a whole kingdom. Up in Peru. Cusco.”
“Want to bet that's where the farms are located?”
“Sucker bet,” she says. She taps on the laptop keys, and then reads what the screen tells her. “Yeah, totally a sucker bet.” She chews on her lower lip. “What are we going to do about Pedro? We can't cross the border with him.”
“What makes you think you and I are any less illegal?”
“Oh,” she says. “Our passports. What are we going to do?”
“What we always do, which is to offer lots of money for someone to look the other way. And if that doesn't work, we'll go overland.”
“Neither sounds like much fun.”
“Only if we get caught.”
“Like I said…”
I lean forward. “We're pretty good at not getting caught.”
She leans forward too, a light dancing in her eyes. “There are a lot of things you're pretty good at, aren't there?”
“Posing for a neurotic sculptor with an eidetic memory isn't all that hard,” I point out.
“Too bad,” she says, a smile curling her lips. “I would have liked to see that sculpture.”
It takes me a second to realize what she's talking about, and I'm spared further embarrassment by the arrival of our waitress with our food. Mere fusses with her silverware. Her cheeks are pink, and her pulse taps at the skin of her throat. As she starts eating, her smile keeps creeping back onto her lips between bites. When she glances over at me, her heart rate jacks up.
Phoebe wanders in a little while later and approaches our table. “We're ready,” she says, glancing back and forth between Mere and me.
“We'll be a few minutes yet,” I say.
Mere continues to eat with exaggerated care, knowing that I'm watching her intently. Phoebe watches for a bit too, and then shakes her head and wanders off. I distantly hear her ask the waitress about ordering food to go.
Mere's heart rate has stopped spiking, but the flush has spread down her neck. I'm sure it goes further. I've been wondering how far.
* * *
Phoebe continues to drive. Shortly after the sun vanishes and the sky goes dark, Mere leans over and rests her head on my shoulder. I wait until her breathing becomes slow and regular before I start a conversation with Phoebe.
“We're going to Peru,” I tell her. “Cusco. Escobar's old company, Montoya Industries, has farms there.”
“How far?” Phoebe asks.
“Mere said it was a couple thousand kilometers. How long will that take us?”
“Maybe two days,” Phoebe says after glancing at the speedometer. “What about the border?”
I ask a very different question in return. “How did you get your arsenal in Santiago?”
Phoebe stares at me in the rearview mirror, that cold indifference. She doesn't even offer me one of her enigmatic shrugs.
“It's been bugging me since I woke up, more so after you showed me what was in the trunk. We weren't that far behind you. That sort of armament would take some time to procure, especially if you didn't have any local contacts. I would have had to call someone in Arcadia to find out who to talk to, and even then, without making a fuss, it would have taken me a day or two to close the deal. Either you have better local connections or you've been talking to Arcadia?”
“I called Callis when I got back to Australia,” she says.
“When was this?”
“About four days after we left the Cetacean Liberty.”
I ran through the timeline in my head. That put her in Adelaide nearly two weeks before me.
“Was it your idea or Callis's to stay dark?”
“He didn't like it.”
That didn't really answer my question.
“So the two of you let things fall where they would,” I say. “You let me become bait.”
“This isn't about you, Silas,” she says.
I growl at her. Mere shifts on my shoulder, her dream disturbed by my tension, and I relax, waiting for her to settle down.
“There's a war coming, and the Grove is in denial,” Phoebe continues. “The humans want this planet. They think they can tame it. They think they own it. Their scientists claim to understand how nature works. They're modifying se
eds, creating abominations that produce impressive short-term yields, but no one has given any thought to what their creations are going to do to the ecosystem. The planet has been a self-sufficient system for millions of years. It knows how to self-correct, to adjust itself to keep aberrations in check. The human lifespan is too short to encompass a long-term view. They don't understand the consequences of their frenzied consumption.”
“And Arcadia is going to show them?”
Phoebe shakes her head. “Arcadia is going to fall,” she says. “Enough humans suspect that it exists. It's a threat. The first thing they're going to do is wipe us out. That's what the test out on the Southern Ocean was about. That's humanity's new weapon. It is anathema to us. With it, they won't fear us—and fear is the only superior weapon we have against them.”
“Is that what Hyacinth is doing? Building a defense against the weed killer? Are they going to share it with Arcadia?”
“I doubt it.”
“Is that your mission then? To get the technology for Arcadia?”
“Why would I?”
I stop myself from blurting out a blanket response to her question. Indeed, why would she? What has Arcadia done for her? What does she need of Arcadia? Mother brought her back, gave her another life, but she's rejected that life, hasn't she? She's never let Mother touch her again. She's an orphan, a self-proclaimed exile from the only family that would have her.
“What do you want?” I ask. “Why are you even helping me?”
“I am a steward,” she says, “but I don't belong to Mother and I don't answer to the Grove. Humanity turned its back on me, and Arcadia wouldn't let me die. The only family I've ever known is what I felt in the humus. I became part of the ecosystem. I was a child, Silas; I knew so little of the world. Then, all of it was suddenly thrust upon me. It was poured into me and I could not stop it. I couldn't stop it from binding to my very being. They take this from you. They numb you to who you truly are.”
“Who does?”
“The Grove.”
“How?”
“Mother is a chimera, Silas. She may seem like a tree, but we are her flowering roots. The Grove prunes the tree; they decide how the roots grow—what they know, who they are, what they remember. The members of the Grove don't even know they are doing this. The decision isn't a conscious one for them. The Grove is the group's mind—that's who you think of as Mother. We're all a part of Mother, Silas, and the more we all think the same thing—the more we suffer from the same fear—the more that becomes part of what Mother tells us to believe.”
“If that's true, then how do you know this? If we're completely programmed by our own group subconscious, how can we know anything other than what we're told?”
“We're rhizomes. Escobar is right. We don't need to return to Arcadian soil. It helps—the soil there is very, very good—but we can survive anywhere. And the more you listen to the humus, the more you are aware of what truly matters.”
“And you know?”
“I've had three hundred and sixty-five years—uninterrupted years—to figure it out,” she says. “I know.”
“Who we are,” I say quietly, “and what we could become.”
Now she gives me the shrug.
“Why me?” I ask. “Why not Nigel?”
“I didn't trust Nigel. Or Talus.”
“And you trust me?”
“I trust your guilt.”
I chuckle at that.
She looks at me in the rearview mirror. “We don't have two days,” she says.
“What do you suggest we do?” I ask. “Hijack an airplane and fly?”
She shakes her head. “Why? We could just rent one?”
Chartering a jet. Mere had done something like that at Hanga Roa. I had been surprised at how easy it had been to pick up the phone and make arrangements for a private jet. I dig my phone out of my pocket and check if it has enough signal. “Where are we?” I ask Phoebe.
She tells me the name of the last town we passed through, and I hit the buttons that connect me to the phone's information line. “What are we going to do when we get to Cusco?” I ask while I'm waiting for someone to answer.
Phoebe smiles at me in the rearview mirror. “We're going to make some adjustments,” she says. “Isn't that what stewards do?”
THIRTY-SEVEN
Mere wakes up as the plane begins its descent into the airport outside of Cusco. She is sitting in the window seat next to me, and her body tightens. Her hands claw at the armrests and she whips her head around, trying to reconcile what she sees.
“It's okay,” I say. I put my hand on her arm.
She stares at me, the muscles of her neck tight. Her eyes don't stop moving. Even though she is frightened, she's trying to figure out what happened, trying to assess what sort of situation she's in.
“We're going to be in Cusco in about twenty minutes,” I tell her.
“How?” she manages.
“Plane,” I tell her. “We chartered one.”
“How?” she says again.
“Lots of cash,” I smile. “And the right sort of influence.”
She presses her body against her seat. “Evidently.” She lifts her head and looks over the seat backs. The plane seats about ten, and Mere and I are the only passengers on the right-hand side of the plane. Across the aisle and two rows up, Phoebe is the only one on the left side of the plane.
“Where's Pedro?” Mere asks.
“We left him behind,” I tell her. As she starts to reply, I hold up a hand and cut her off. “He's well taken care of. More so than he would have been had he come with us.”
“Did you kill him?”
“No. Why would I? He's been helpful.”
Mere rubs her hands across her face. “Earlier, you said we couldn't let him out of our sight, and now…?
“An opportunity presented itself,” I say.
“What sort of opportunity?”
“It was just as easy to charter two planes as it was to charter one, and we told the pilot to take Pedro somewhere.”
“Where?”
“We didn't ask.”
She turns on her side and rests her head against the seat cushion. “You have an infuriating tendency for understatement.”
“Would you rather I have woken you up, screaming ‘Oh my god! We've got a secret plan! You're going to love it!'?”
“I'm not sure I would have loved it.”
“Which is why I let you sleep. If you were going to be disappointed, I'm not sure you would have been able to get some rest.”
“That's thoughtful of you.”
The plane tilts to the right, the sound of the engines increasing as we come around for our landing.
“Is he going to be okay?” Mere asks.
“Pedro? Yeah, he'll be okay. I'm sure he went somewhere were he could buy a new scooter. One he could pay for with cash. He's getting a new scooter, remember?”
“Why are we flying instead of driving? What about our passports.”
“Don't worry about it,” I say. “Phoebe knows how to—well, it's a long story.”
“Is it?” Her mouth quirks. “When you say something is a long story, that's usually code for ‘I did something stupid and I don't want to talk about it.'”
“Why do you say that?”
“You didn't want to talk about Easter Island, and it turned out that you had wrecked Escobar's garden.”
“That's one example.”
“Is this one different?”
I look toward the front of the plane. Phoebe has her seat tilted back, unconcerned about our approach to the Cusco airport. There isn't a flight attendant to tell her to return her seat to its upright position. “It's a long story,” I reiterate to Mere.
“Okay,” she says, not pushing. “What about saving me from Kirkov?” she asks. “Was that a mistake too?”
I shake my head. “No.” A laugh bubbles out of my chest. “No, far from it. In fact, it may be the only decision I've made in the last few
years that has truly been mine.”
Mere makes a noise in her throat, and my attention is pulled back to her. A little smile haunts the edge of her lips. “Thank you,” she says quietly.
I reach over and brush back a lock of her hair that is hanging over her cheek. She closes her eyes and sighs gently again. Her lips part and I want to run my thumb along her lower lip. My hand moves closer, and then she closes her mouth as she swallows. I take that opportunity to blink and force my hand to move away.
* * *
We had ended up at an airport outside of Copiacó; we drove to a private hanger where a Gulfstream 100 waited for us. I carried Mere into the plane, while Phoebe and a large amount of cash made the necessary arrangements. The three cases from the trunk had gone into the luggage hold, and the young woman from the charter company had driven off in our car with Pedro still sleeping in the front seat. Most of our remaining cash had gone with them too.
A similar routine happens at Cusco. The plane lands, taxies to a private hanger, where a car is waiting for us. We see no one on the ground, and the pilot of the charter never leaves the cockpit. Phoebe and Mere get in the car while I retrieve the three cases. They go in the trunk; I climb into the back seat; and we drive out of the airport through a gate that, oddly, is open and unmanned.
Arcadian-style invisibility. Money makes the world go round. I have to admit that I missed the ease with which we had moved about the world. The last few weeks have been a hard reminder of how removed we had become from humanity. Our own choice, but given Phoebe's diatribe last night, I'm wondering how much input I truly had on that decision.
Given the opportunity to submit my own opinion, I also wonder if I would have chosen the same path for Arcadia and its citizens.
A half-hour later, while most tourists are still sleeping in, we're checked in to a pair of suites in a hotel along El Sol, the main boulevard that runs through Cusco. The sun hasn't burned off all the morning fog yet. Cusco's elevation is over three thousand meters; at this elevation, the air quality is usually much cleaner—the pollutants and toxins tend to sink to sea level—but I still need to be cautious. I haven't abandoned myself to the sun as much as Phoebe has.
