Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 11
So Tex stared up at the hemlock tree,
whose arms reached down
to shelter him, and
he slept.
Molly thought, Time out.
* * *
She felt drained and headachy from being tuned into the head of Gene Deere. Now on top of that Tex had vanished. Who knew what that meant? Alone on the foredeck, she looked up at the sky from which the first fat drops of rain had begun to spatter, and she thought, Time out. I've got to collect myself.
To collect herself. An odd turn of phrase when you thought about it. As if this being she knew as 'herself' were composed of pieces that now and again might gel scattered, and you could go from place to place sweeping them up and reassemble Molly out of the heap of them.
Well—but it did make a certain amount of sense. Molly stepped through the hatch into the living quarters and she thought, Look at all this stuff. Look at the albums, the books, the Goddess statuettes, the angel-wing begonias—all the things that seemed to have gotten stuck to her as she padded through life, like mud to a shoe. They were only physical objects, yes. But so was the very substance of her body, and where was that? Lying at the bottom of a well in the middle of the forest. Starting to decay now, probably. And yet Molly was not there, moldering away. She was here. Feeling lost amid the jumble of her possessions.
These objects, she thought, were part of her not in just a metaphorical way, but in the same way that her body had been part of her. Her body was assembled out of proteins and minerals and things like that—inanimate matter, in other words—according to some guiding pattern. And in the very same way, her treasured belongings had been assembled out of the raw material of the world according to a definite program—only in this case the program was not deep down in her genes; it was in her mind. Which is not to say that she understood it very much better. Why had she developed this weird craze for certain flowers? She could not have answered that, really, any more than she could have told you why her cheekbones were shaped a certain way. The cheekbones were her mother's, the flowers were pretty, but it all might have come out a different way. She could have taken up batik-making and been born looking like her aunt Livonia. Who Molly was, who she had been, who she was becoming—all remained essentially mysterious. Molly was, that was all. She was herself.
Suddenly, and with unimaginable power, a stab of poignancy pierced her heart.
I'm going to have to leave all this, she thought. I'm going to have to turn away, to let it all go.
That was all. The thought did not linger or explain itself. She did not know why she was suddenly certain of this, the need to start taking leave of things, and she did not know why it had not been forced upon her already. Why had she come back here at all, if only to go away again?
You have something to do
murmured a Voice deep inside her. She was shaken—not by the Voice, but by the fact that she recognized it, she knew it from somewhere.
Yes, thought Molly. Yes I do. I know I do.
But what?
LOVE + HAVE FUN
Molly tried projecting herself.
She tried to ask herself questions, the way Tex had asked her where his pendant was, and to send her awareness flying out into the akasha to retrieve the answer.
She found that she could not.
The question, it appeared, could not come from within her. Her strange new ability could only be called upon by somebody else. From which she deduced:
Afterlife Factoid #7
Death is nothing personal.
Nothing private, that is to say. You're still plugged into the Web. Other people are still important. If anything, they become more important, because they're the live actors, the Players, strutting across the boards, and you're out here in the wings, paring your nails or whatever. Molly was not at all sure what her job was now—some kind of stage manager, lighting director, what?—but whatever it was, she was certain that it was for the benefit of them, the ones still on the stage.
She ambled through the houseboat, looking for clues as to where Tex might have gone. She noticed that the Organic Tofu container was missing from the refrigerator. Aha, she thought, licking her lips, noticing a peculiar taste of salmon there. Finally, on the altar in the pilot house, of all places, she made an Important Discovery.
It was a note from Ludi. And it was scratched (Molly was startled to note) in Ludi's careless, childlike handwriting, in her own Book of Shadows.
Hey guys I guess you still aren't here. Just dropped by to tell you about the action at Goddin—went OK, except You Know Who always takes over when you aren't around. A cute guy drove thru in a Range Rover, smiled at me I think.
On my way now to the critique at Eben's. Hope you guys are OK wherever you've gone to.
Love + have fun,
Molly smiled. You could not help feeling a certain fondness for the girl. Especially with Tex and his ludicrous middle-age crushes factored out. Love and have fun, she thought, glancing over the note again.
Ah, youth.
Just before she shut the Book of Shadows and returned it to its drawer, her eye—the left one—brushed across another sentence, and even after she turned away from the altar, the sentence seemed to follow her. It had gotten snagged on the edge of her awareness.
What do you think they're doing out there! it ran.
And that, thought Molly, is a Question.
From somebody else.
Then she felt a throbbing behind her eye—the right one—and it hurt enough to make her want to lie down. She barely managed to pull herself all the way up to the flying bridge, where she saw with rapidly fading attention that Tex's old jeans and T-shirt and multicolored Spindleworks vest were lying there on the nonskid. That was good: they made a cushioned place for her to rest. So she arranged a little spot for herself and she started to lay her head down, but already her mind was getting whirled away in a fast-moving eddy of Time.
THE FUTURE
The moon was different.
Molly could feel this, even though it was midday in the Somewhen her awareness had passed over to—a time and space into which she gazed with an eye that could not blink.
Faerie Moon had been two or three days short of full that night when she and Tex had gone out to the Well. Now the moon—was it the same one?—was well along in its waning phase, toward the end of the third quarter. Rising and setting 51 minutes later every night, it hung now just below the western horizon. Molly felt as though, if she wished, she could peer right through the intervening chunk of the planet and see it out there: coldly radiant, falling forever toward its gravitational destiny. As aren't we all.
But surely that was not what she had come here for.
She looked around at the tiny part of the planet immediately at hand. It was an unfamiliar place: a large featureless room, walls done in cheap paneling, laid out in austerely functional style with the sort of institutional furniture that gives prisons and high school cafeterias a bad name. There were no windows and no decorations except for some posters, taped flat against the paneling, devoted to public-service messages: safety with firearms, reading aloud to children, the duty of all citizens to register and vote.
But here was the odd part. Molly could not figure out whose point of view she was seeing this from. Whereas before she had felt herself hovering just over the shoulder of Eugene Deere, now she seemed to be floating free, like a balloon—tethered to this particular spot, but not to anyone she could see.
Then there were voices. Muffled, and somewhat buzzed-out by the fluorescent lamp ballasts.
Her vision began to shift. It rose upward and appeared to seek out the source of these voices in the manner of an insect being drawn to a light. Molly found herself staring way too closely at the water-stained acoustic tile ceiling, then—
Crash, she thought
—the vision floated through. The ceiling became the floor of the level above, and she found herself hovering in the unnerving hollow of a Christian church. Rows of pews ran back & forth between tall, unadorned windows. Overhead, a series of timber trusses held up a steeply pitched roof. Molly's point of view pivoted gradually, absorbing the scene, and at last came to rest on the marginally more ornate end of the sanctuary where a pulpit stood before a choir stall, brightened by a stained-glass window that rose to a Gothic arch. In place of organ pipes there were Mirage tower speakers.
Finally she saw where the voices were coming from.
(1) guy lean and rangy as a wolf, edgily perched on a choir bench
(1) guy oversized and well fed as a hippo, lying flat-out on the floor
"Where I'm coming to this from," the big horizontal one was saying, "is a clash-of-values direction. I'm not saying this or that detail of their position does not make a limited amount of sense, when you take it in isolation. I'm saying that in toto, when you examine their proposals and you see what kind of mind-set they're coming out of, then I begin to have some grave and serious difficulties. I just want you to understand that."
The wolfish man licked his lips. He brought a hand up and scratched beneath his ball cap. The cap bore the round red-and-black logo of the National Rifle Association, which from any distance is easily mistaken for the emblem of the United States Marine Corps. Molly's bodiless point of view drew nearer.
The man on the floor twisted his head around. His jowls shifted so that she could see that he was wearing a white clerical collar. And a jogging suit. He was big but not exactly fat. As he spoke again, Molly understood where she had seen him before.
"So tell me, Wild Jag," he said—pronouncing the last two words loudly and deliberately, as though it were a title being conferred by himself, right here on the spot—"what are they doing out there?"
The Rev. Banebook, Molly remembered. Call me Hoot. And the security man from the Goddin base. His name tag had said Eckhart. Clearance: All Areas.
"You mean—" Eckhart began.
"I mean, what are they doing out there. What are their plans for the base? How do they view the opposition of local activists, such as it is. You want me to write these questions down so you can study them?"
Eckhart looked the Reverend over thoughtfully, neither intimidated nor amused. "You should get more exercise," he said finally. He had a Maine accent that sounded artificial, or at least exaggerated, and a habit of not looking straight at you, even while keeping you constantly in his sights. "Get you over there to the camp, up to Applemont. See the obstacle course we got out there. Down-in-the-dirt survival stuff. Get your ass in shape in a hurry, I guarantee it."
"Wild Jag," said Banebook, returning his head to its former position: faceup, thick neck locked in place, as though pulling guidance directly off the Divine Satellite. He spoke to the empty church at large. "You will have noticed, I'm sure, that I make no effort to convert you to my own way of thinking. Please do me the kindness of treating me likewise. While we are on the subject, however, I might as well tell you that I think your illusions of guaranteed survival are hubris. Sheer hubris. There is only one surefire path through the fiery days ahead, and that path is not a secret. I invite you to come here and learn more about it on any Sunday you like. Now please. Just tell me—"
"They've got these places laid out that they call trial plots," Eckhart cut him off. He spoke so quickly and so cannily you got the idea that his Thank God I'm a Country Boy routine was in some measure a put-on, a performance. "And that botanist fellow, Deere—"
"I've met him."
"I know that. Listen—he's been brought up here to evaluate them. Each plot is about 8, 10 acres, big enough to be like a hunk of real forest. Then there'll be a stretch where they mow, or with the old runways running through there, maybe a hundred yards across. Then there'll be another trial plot. And on like that, all around the base. Now on each plot, see, they've got a different mix of tree types. On one you've got solid fir, say. On the next, some proportion of fir to pine. Then there'll be spruce with a scattering of hardwoods. You know, to simulate what would happen if you cut down on the herbicide and you let nature take its course. Then way out by the north fence—"
"All right, I understand. But what are they testing for? What's their object?"
"There's various things. I guess the main one is, how much yield do they get out of it, and how fast. Another thing is, what kind of wood product is it most efficient to extract, up here. For example, there's wood wood, for 2-by-4's and like that, and then there's veneer wood, which yellow birch is supposed to be good for, and there's wood you slice in little layers to make plywood out of. But a big thing, too, is there's pulp wood, which isn't really wood at all. It's fiber, is mostly all it is. They chop it up and soak it in acid to make paper out of. So that's why they're—"
"In other words," the Reverend cut in, "whichever one of these plots proves to be the most resource-effective, that will determine the company's overall management scheme for the North Woods as a whole."
"Damn it, Hoot. I mean, I guess you're right—but damn it, will you let me finish telling you? Out by the north fence, see, is where they're trying out some, what you might call, radical ideas."
"What do you mean by that?" the Reverend asked.
"I mean genetically altered stuff. That's why they hired that Deere, you know. He's supposed to be some hot-shit whiz kid out of M.I.T. or one of those places. And he's a gene-splitter."
"Splicer."
"Finest kind. So they've got him studying those plots up there, and from what I can tell he's looking in two directions. The one way, he's monkeying around with some kind of super-tree, and I'm talking about one righteous hyped-up ass-kicker. So Deere, he's got some batches of that in the ground—you know, clones? every one of them just alike—way up there by the north fence. And I mean, you should see it. Vigorous little suckers. Couple feet taller than anything else. Hell on weeds. No animal will touch them."
"Hm," said Banebook.
"Yeah, hm." Eckhart rubbed his chin, as though to soften it. He did not succeed. "But see, that's only one direction. The other is—you'll love this—he's got some plots where he's trying out some alternative pulp producers. And you won't believe what that means."
"Kenaf," said Banebook, in the confident tone of a man who's keeping up on things.
"Kenaf is one of them. Deere doesn't like it. Unsuitable for this climate, needs a longer growing season, some such shit. No, you'll never guess. Marijuana. Only he calls it hemp. They've got a special strain—now this is a proprietary secret I'm telling you—that they've jigged around with so it doesn't produce any active ingredients."
"Cannabinols."
"But even so, they had to get a special permit from the government to even own the stuff, much less be growing it. Just you and me try doing that, huh?"
Hoot Banebook was peering so hard at the stained-glass window that Molly expected the panes to start rattling. "You are telling me that the Gulf Atlantic Corporation is growing marijuana on a former Air Force base?"
"Well, not regular marijuana. Not that you could smoke. I mean, I guess you could smoke it. What they did was, they went back and dug up some of the old kinds that sailors used to make rope out of, and they started from there. And Deere seems to like it. He says you get a higher yield of pulp per acre, and you get it annually. It's like growing tomatoes or something. So something like the Goddin place, all open and flat, you could turn into a great big hemp plantation."
"A marijuana plantation."
"Sure. But not that kind."
"Well," said Hoot Banebook, "you've told me a lot. I think you've answered most of my questions."
"And you'll remember that, am I right? When it comes time to take up that land-use classification?"
Banebook did not reply. Instead, he rose to his feet. It was quite an operation.
"What I need," he said, "is not exercise. It is a new back. I'm afraid the one I was given does not satisfy my current requirements."
Eckhart sat on his bench, looking pleased with himself. "What're you planning to do?"
Banebook stood beside the pulpit, resting one beefy hand there with peculiar delicacy. "Do?" he said. "I am planning to do what I always do on Thursday afternoons. I am going to minister to the needs of the less fortunate members of our community. Then I am going to sit here in the sanctuary and pray. I will pray, among many other things, that the good people of the Gulf Atlantic Corporation arrive at a right and proper decision."
Eckhart smiled. "The Lord helps those who help themselves," he said slyly.
Banebook had begun walking toward the back of the choir stall, where a door opened to a stairwell. As he moved, he seemed to gather purpose and momentum. Just before reaching the door he turned and said, "So how about it, Wild Jag? Would you care to stay for a bowl of chowder?"
CEIST NA TEANGAN
A banner tacked up on the wall of the multipurpose room below announced something in big, cheerful handwriting that Molly could not decipher at first, except for the initial letters
H
C
E
which made her blink; but she figured out that this stood for HOOT'S CHOWDER FOR EVERYONE! and that this was the theme of the afternoon. It was Thursday, then, and this was the rotating soup kitchen, sponsored today by the Church of Mankind's Destiny Among the Stars. The volunteers who cooked the chowder and dished it out to the deserving poor (actually, to anybody who showed up to eat) bustled in and out of the kitchen, hefting big stainless steel tureens. The folks who were drifting in, by ones and twos and in little family-sized flocks, did not look much different than any randomly chosen cross section of local society. (The only stratum conspicuously missing was the retiree set, who stayed mostly indoors, venturing out chiefly to attend town meetings and vote down the school budget.) They varied in dress, age, gender, and attitude. They were alike in skin color, except for one wild-looking boy whose complexion was medium brown, and a younger, willowy girl who slipped in after him, whose skin was the closest to pure white that living flesh can attain without assistance of makeup. Molly believed she knew this girl from somewhere. The boy too, possibly; unless they just reminded her of characters out of fairy tales.
