The follow through entailed, first, scattering the displaced earth from the hole back into the woods. Then, setting his empty backpack in the sod rug’s center, he marked the exact location in three ways. He dug around for large rocks and built a rock pyramid five long paces due west of the spot, under a distinctive fir. He then used his shovel and a jack knife to cut a clear mark into that fir, then triangulated the mark with his backpack and another tree due south, which he also duly marked. After pacing off the vicinity once again, he took up pack and shovel and paced the whole thing back to his stump, marking the direction to go on the stump, again with the knife. Greg wrote these directions down in pen on a slip of paper he fit into his wallet.
Greg could now begin, starting with a bowl of Larry’s kief. The sun brightened for late morning, though the breeze remained cool. He left pack and shovel on the stump to pace, absently brushing his hair behind his right ear.
He could actually watch himself, feel himself becoming attached to Margaret. He had to ask himself what the difference was between attachment and possessiveness. Certainly, with Janet, he had felt emotional investment and attachment but also possessiveness and jealousy. A year and a half into their relationship, Greg had used a few petty disagreements and a flirtatious classmate to insist that they begin “seeing other people.” In fact, he had not been able to cope when Janet started going out. Jealousy as much as love had brought him to ask her to get back together. Afterwards, she had insisted on honesty in their relationship about their fantasies and crushes. But while she had never taken his seriously, hers had incited his possessiveness.
She had always been more outgoing than him, and he had often interpreted her extroverted behavior as flirtation. But there had also been the high school football quarterback, and that exchange student from Sweden. In college, she had eyes for a certain radical junior professor, who never received tenure because of his politics. In every case he had dogged her, watched her like a hawk, and invented weasel excuses to drop by unexpectedly to check up on her.
This, in turn, had fed into his attempt to totally mesh their lives together, but not entirely positively as he sometimes liked to think. He had never felt absolutely trusting of her or secure in their relationship. She had called herself a feminist, but invariably she was attracted to macho beefcake males. She was a straight-A, honors student with her entire education paid for by scholarships, yet she was profoundly insecure about her abilities. Consequently, he had never felt truly relaxed, and he oftentimes monitored how she talked about and behaved around other men. It was not that he always suspected her of wanting to “step out” on their commitment. But, of the two, she had the roving eye and he had the proprietary response.
He still could not accept her unilateral ending of their relationship, no matter how flawed. Greg walked through his own life now, alone, amidst a twisted, gutted superstructure of broken plans and promises. He did not feel depressed, only angry. And helpless to do anything about it. Plans and promises sprang from the soil of commitment. One of his father’s comments came back to him. While growing up, Greg had always been able to easily excel at whatever had interested him. So he bored easily with most things. He had wanted to become a writer, then a lead guitarist, then a top gun flyer, and then a Nobel prize winning scientist, all within one high school year. School counselors advised Andre that his son if anything needed more freedom, more time to figure out what he wanted to do.
“Bull,” his father had said, “What he needs is some direction.”
Andre had explained to his son:
“Freedom is useless without commitment and self-discipline. My generation invented that kind of limitless freedom. Do what you want, when you want and wherever you want. Do your own thing. Freedom always says that, but you don’t become free until you start exploring and setting your own limits. You have to say: “I want to do this and not this.” Being at a crossroads isn’t freedom. That*s free choice. True freedom is being on the road. You can always change directions and even change roads Freedom doesn’t come into being until choice has been made. Then you have to stick with your choice long enough so that you can become good at what you do and have the freedom in your actions doing what you’ve chosen to do. Only when you get really proficient at something can you really take advantage of freedom. Then you can challenge your own limits, push them and transcend them.”
Out of his dad’s pushing had come his classic car hobby, and his skill on the metal lathe.
He and Janet had made a commitment to each other. To their relationship. Compared to his parents’ twelve years together, let alone his grandparents’ close to seventy years together, their relationship had been young. They had only started thinking about their future together, making plans and promises. He felt betrayed—wrongly, bitterly— that Janet had abandoned their commitment so early. What is more, he felt deceived; that perhaps Janet had intended all along to use her education on the east coast to leave him, all the while promising that separation would make them stronger. All the while planning their summer hike.
He scooped up his shovel and pack, and headed back for the car. He was home by noon. His father was gone, so Greg set up some of the metal he needed for the lathe job, making note of what he did not have. Larry called, then, asking him to take a ride up the coast, up 101 and out 12 to Sebastopol, then up 116 to Guerneville and points north.
“It’s a client,” Larry said, “Eden West. They’re acting more than unusually weird and I’d like you riding shotgun on this one. I don’t expect violence or anything. But they’re acting absolutely paranoid these days. With you along they’ll see I have a healthy sense of paranoia myself. Besides, on a long run, I need someone to handle the dope well be smoking along the way.”
Larry had talked about Eden West before; a mystery monastic sex-cult ensconced in redwood wilderness. They contracted Larry to hothouse grow the most select of Borneo bud for some of their practices, and they paid him handsomely for taking the risk. The back of Larry’s gas utilizing Dodge van stank richly of top-grade marijuana, samples of which graced the tray in Greg’s lap. Greg used the long ride and his position filling up the pipe to discuss the riemanium situation in full. NPR’s international magazine provided a chatty backdrop with stories on Gypsy and Basque terrorism in Europe, Burma’s genocidal two-front war, and Amazonian secessionist movements.
“It’s going nowhere,” he said finally, “The government hasn’t responded too positively to our first communique. I want to do more, but frankly, I don’t trust some of our cohorts to keep this game’s secret. The riemanium’s well hidden and all, thanks to your suggestion, but we are still the one’s claiming contact with Peregrine. We are the ones with the pictures. How are you going to react if the FBI comes knocking on your door?”
“No one’s gonna go to the FBI on this,” Larry said, confident, ‘This group’s too PC. As for the government response, if s only been three days. And not even that.”
“I wasn’t thinking about it happening exactly like that.” Greg mused, staring out at a highway landscape brittle with late afternoon sun, “But what if somebody, David or Lori say, brags to a friend or two. Pretty soon, friend tells friend, the word spreads, and we’ve got the wrong people knowing we have some connection with the riemanium. The FBI comes calling, maybe not to you or me first, but down that chain of friends and to the group. Nobody else in the group has our claim to the riemanium. What if one of them, if questioned, spills everything, under threat and out of fear?”
“What if, what if?” Larry shrugged, “Look. Well keep on them as to how important keeping things secret is. What worries me more is there’s already talk about releasing a second communique. At the Gondwana, last night after you left. Taking the next step, David calls it. We haven’t even let the first one sink in, and hey, I’ve got a business to run here. I’m not sure I need any more heat. That’s what’s got Eden West so jumpy. They’re the ones claiming that the Feds have recently invaded the entire area from Monterey to For
t Bragg with an FBI army. They may be a paranoid cult, but they’re also not exactly square with the powers-that-be. They’ve been harassed by the FBI, IRS and Treasury Department in the past, so they keep their ears close to the ground for that sort of thing. It’s not Eden West the Feds are after, but it is making them extremely nervous.”
“It’s making me extremely nervous as well,” Greg admitted.
Eden West had grown out of the confluence of new-age cultic neo-Christian circles in the line of Claire Prophet’s Church Universal and Triumphant, and money. Lots of money in particular converged on a sect of a sect called Edenists, Back-to-Edenites by their detractors, in 1998. Eden West was built the year after. Larry had described their “religious faith” to him once.
“They take a weird interpretation on a couple of passages in the Old Testament, for starters. I don’t know chapter and verse, but they’re in the beginning of Genesis. One is that ‘God planted a garden eastward in Eden; and there he put the man whom he had formed.’ The other is about Cain and Abel...’And Cain went out from the presence of the LORD, and dwelt in the land of Nod, on the east of Eden.’ Pretty good, huh?
“So anyway, in what they call their ‘spiritual geography the Edenists believe that there had to be a west of Eden as well as an east, and a westward in Eden as well as an eastward. God, according to their mythology. planted other gardens westward in Eden, and they’re either ruled by what Edenists call Ascended Masters altogether, or each Ascended Master with his own garden. I can’t remember. In any case, mankind was first banished from the garden in the east of Eden by the actions of Adam and Eve, and then Cain left all of Eden out of shame for the crime he committed. Mankind was never forbidden to dwell in the gardens planted westward in Eden. And since we left Eden out of shame, we can return to it in enlightenment to find and dwell in the gardens westward in Eden.”
To be precise, the Fully Illuminated in the Edenist scheme, called Laving Saints, could return to Eden in this life and inhabit any one of said gardens. People still had to die, because the Tree of Eternal Life remained in the garden eastward in Eden which was forbidden humanity and guarded by a bright-sworded angel. But the Living Saints did not have to abide by the strictures of what they called the Land of Nod, meaning the rest of the world. Eden West was built as a retreat for the Fully Illuminated, a monastic order modeled on Rabelais’s Abbey of Theleme in Gargantua. They practiced sacramental drug use, which kept Larry working, and they were rumored to indulge in free love and sexual ritual. They had used direct retrovirus testing to screen even the Saints, and in the beginning of the 21st century they were the first to utilize pack antibody genetic engineering to combat retrovirus infection. Larry knew little enough of this to impart it fully to Greg, and in any case, it would not have prepared his friend for Eden West.
They took a private, paved road out of the Armstrong Redwoods, deep into dark woods streamered with mid afternoon sun. They followed one creek, then another, and it was Edenist property on which they traveled. The sun occasionally peeled through forests left primeval. The road wound slowly up. They had detected nothing upon entering the side road, but they had been detected. Had Eden West not wanted them, they would have been taken out long before. As they turned the corner on a notch in a ridge, Greg got a brief glimpse of the eccentric sanctuary in its only near-full view. Larry knew enough not to slow down too much on this particular stretch of road down into Eden West’s valley, so he hoped his friend was attentive.
A wide, blue lake guttered, cupped comfortably in the valley amidst rich forests. Eden West climbed from the white scythe of a beach far below to the geometry of buildings ending the roadway ahead. Parthenon formed into thick groved meadow, formed into high medieval cathedral, formed into orchards and flower gardens, formed into outdoor Roman baths formed into layer upon layer and terrace after terrace of varied architectures and variegated open spaces; a single and singular arcology. Stream fed waterfall became sculpted Byronic pool, became languid romantic canal, became Japanese coy pond, became running stream, became Indian water maze, finally to become a waterfall once more falling into the lake. There were greenhouses and heated ponds and profusions of vegetation. A flock of brightly plumaged parrots fluttered up from the palms off the beach to a wood and glass gazebo large enough to house its own botanical gardens. That was, as well, all that Larry had seen of the utopic complex, outside of Eden West s entry in which Greg would soon marvel. The menagerie of complimentary animals maintained in the arcology and its lake Larry had gleaned only from conversations with his Eden West procurers.
Larry had visited Eden West three times in one year, three years before at the beginning of hammering out their business arrangements. All the following years they had conducted business in Alabaster, by mutual agreement. This sudden insistence on his delivery, in violation of their agreement and on the flimsiest of excuses was more than irritating. Larry had insisted on their Alabaster pickup, not just for convenience, but also because he did not want to be openly associated any further with the cult. This was strictly business. After all, the Edenists had also been widely accused of brainwashing and programming those lower down on their hierarchy of faith. His house was his turf, and so Greg was along for the ride as a thumb to the nose for Eden West as well. Two could violate agreements. He already had their next crop’s seeds and was busy germinating them. Maybe it was time to renegotiate things.
The road became a driveway curving west, then became a concrete ramp that took Larry’s van up onto a long concrete platform. Modest railing surrounded the platform, and led out across the thinnest of catwalks over a thunderous chasm, at its bottom a moat of water. The catwalk terminated at a stubby tower, like the turret of a castle, projecting out of the mass that was the back of Eden West. Great panes of glass curved around the tower’s base from where it jutted out of the arcology some twenty feet below their progress across space, clutching bundles of contraband. The door in was open.
They stepped inside a cool, dark cylinder. The quiet muffled their descent toward the Gaia-toned reception floor on a wide looped, narrow railed spiral of metal staircase imperceptibly anchored into floor and ceiling. Down the middle of the precarious spiral stairwell hung a fine chain supporting a large metal, wood and glass orrery, a subtle wheel work planetarium. Eden West’s procurer awaited them, and when they reached the floor Greg noticed the reason for the muted natural colors to the space. The entire tower room was perhaps thirty-five feet deep, solid-walled except for the bottom fifteen feet, which were walled in plate glass alternating aquarium with terrarium around the twenty foot diameter space.
Sunlight from the paned glass outside around the tower’s base, and perhaps artfully disguised artificial lighting, supported eight very distinct technologically maintained ecologies. The different environments were half land and water—coral reef, deep intertidal, everglades, and rich lake for the aquatic; tropical, prairie bordering desert, Galapagos, and evergreen forest for the terrain. They were impressive in their detail.
“Guests are not part of our agreement,” the procurer said, with the manner of a doctor wearing surgical gloves. Larry and Greg were from outside, not sterile. Contaminated.
“Nor was my delivery of this crop,” Larry countered.
“That was explained,” the man was imperious, “Our people can no longer travel safely in the San Francisco Bay Area. There’s a political crackdown in progress. We don’t believe we are a target. But we cannot take chances.”
“I call it chicken shit,” Larry drawled, putting down his bundles of Borneo bud, “And it’ll cost. An extra five every trip since 111 be the one driving the highways with this stuff, wear and tear on the car, not to mention my peace of mind. That’s starting this delivery.”
“This is highly irregular,” the procurer protested, but along with the sealed envelope he handed over to Larry he included five loose one thousand dollar bills.
Larry said nothing. He simply pocketed his money and gestured for Greg to leave with hi
m, right index finger pointing, swinging up over his shoulder, back the way they had come. The orrery sparkled and played on the lights from below, hinting of mystery and revelation in its shadow-cloaked mechanical representation of the music of the spheres, all as they climbed.
“I know you told me once,” Greg relaxed into his seat as Larry set-tied onto the drive out, “But once again, how did they get their money?”
“Lambert Cray.”
“Developer of single cell protein culture,” Greg did remember.
“And multiple cell protein farming,” Larry continued, “He was a Reichian even before he met up with the Edenists, and like old Wilhelm, he kinda went off the deep end. Got converted to Edenist precepts two years before his death, and willed his entire fortune to them.”
“Convenient,” Greg smirked.
“Isn’t it.”
Larry dropped Greg at home by 6, after a rich seafood meal in Sebastopol on Larry, who tossed two fingers of bud into a ziplock for his friend’s trouble that afternoon. Borneo bud. Greg intended to get started on the lathe work, too stoned for any study, until he listened to Margaret’s message on his machine.
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