Tex and Molly in the Afterlife, page 42
A fire hose fat as a mature boa constrictor lay flopped on the floor. Gene tried to trace this to its source, but his eye got lost in a system of pipes that crisscrossed the corrugated metal bulkhead. He saw no control mechanism, no shut-off valve.
"Fuck," he said.
Thistle smiled, as though it entertained her to hear grown-ups curse. "Do you think," she said, "you might tap into the hydroponic tanks?"
Gene looked at her as though she were speaking in Martian.
"Sounds good to me," said Guillermo. "Come on, Deere. Let's give it a try."
"Yeah—okay, right." Gene felt confused. He wasn't sure who was in charge here.
"Try over there," suggested Thistle. She pointed up an aisle of soughing tanks. "You might find a water-duct that way."
"Hey, cool, look!" Ari yelled at them from somewhere in the darkness. "Check this out, guys. I've found space suits."
Guillermo went over with the flashlight. What Ari had found was a rack full of asbestos coveralls, complete with flameproof helmets, thick rectangular visors, and O.B.A.'s—oxygen breathing apparatuses, which could be successfully operated only by the kind of people to whom speaking in acronyms comes naturally. Gene and Guillermo were damned if they could get the hang of it.
"Let's just leave the helmets off," Guillermo said, "and take our chances."
Gene nodded.
Ari and Thistle, on the other hand, were having no trouble. They shouted back and forth at one another, their voices metallic, muffled by the helmets, incomprehensible. Ari tried to squeeze fireproof coveralls onto Tex. The bear wasn't digging it.
The two men looked each other over: bodies comically puffed out by the heavy suits. For an instant, the both of them began to smile, then they stifled the impulse. Instead, they gave one another a spontaneous high-5.
"Let's do it," said Guillermo.
"Right," said Gene. Thinking, Do what?
PLAYERS (2)
The town of Dublin never had much in the way of a Volunteer Fire Department. Why bother? Anything bigger than a burning outhouse was handled by the boys from the Air Force base. In the couple of years since the base had closed there had been some changes made, upgrades of equipment and so forth. But essentially if you lived in Dublin, you got used to the idea that
FIRE = TOTAL DESTRUCTION
Which did not make fires in Dublin any less common than elsewhere. It just instilled an attitude of Yankee stoicism.
The first vehicle on scene, then, was not a fire truck but a bargelike early-'70s Eldorado, its convertible top down and its seats spilling over with people (mostly young, but also an elderly tourist from Delaware) wearing masks. An antique 8-track tape player blared Deep Purple, "Smoke on the Water." The Eldorado squealed through the main gate, from which security guards were notably absent, and onto an old runway leading out toward the fields that were now, it seemed, completely ablaze. There the driver, wearing a Token African-American mask, skidded to a rather exciting halt.
"Killer fire," he said.
His passengers climbed out. Now that they were here, what did they plan to do? Each of them wore a tag bearing the name of a fictional character—Rock, Aging Hippie (2), Corporate Executive, et cetera—and in their confusion they fell to scrutinizing one another's labels, as though some clue might be found there.
"Maybe we should resign ourselves to letting it burn," said a woman whose tag read Taoist Waiter.
"Cool," said the Aging Hippie.
"What a bunch of pantywaists,'' said the Corporate Executive. He shook a big ebony fist at the fire. "What'd we drive all the way out here for if we're not at least going to squirt some water around? Come on, let's think teamwork. Let's think creative problem containment."
"Cool," said the Aging Hippie.
The Token African-American switched his tape player off. "Are you brain-damaged?" he asked the Corporate Exec.
"Unquestionably," the Exec said.
The two of them bumped their foreheads together.
"Ah, so!" they said in unison.
Behind them, a second car screeched to a stop. This was a small, badly tuned Renault with a rusted-out undercarriage. Steam billowed from its hood. Out of its creaking doors a Vegetable and a Lipstick Lesbian emerged, followed by Ludi and Pippa, in mufti.
"All right, everybody," the Lesbian said, shaking his purse and attempting to exercise some authority. "The important thing here is not to—" He coughed as a false eyelash fell into his mouth.
"Can you believe this?" said Ludi. She meant the fire. It was absolutely the most horrendous thing she had ever seen. At the same time (she would never admit this) it was incredibly, somehow, painterly. Like a gigantic Turner, projected with high-intensity lasers onto a backdrop as wide as the sky. And it changed: rose in the air and fell; and its colors shifted across a spectrum that began at yellow and moved through orange and red into a plum or cerise, where it deepened to the heavy purple and near-black of smoke.
Then she remembered Gene. And whatever beauty there might be about this horrible thing went right up in flames with everything else.
"Where are you going?" Pippa yelled at her.
Ludi hadn't even known, until then, that she had started to run. She was sprinting toward the nearest building, which might or might not be the one where Gene's office was. Tonight everything looked different; everything was different; it was impossible to be sure. Of anything.
"I'll be back," she called to Pippa. Wondering if this was going to turn out to be true.
MOTIVATION
Burdock Herne was so shaken he had neglected to take off the mask and the name tag that identified him as Somebody's Dad. He leaned forward, gripping the dashboard of Chas Sauvage's Mercedes as it spun efficiently through the gate and into the parking lot. Five or six cars were there ahead of them, and still no Fire Department. The radiance of the flames was hot on his face, even filtered by the windshield's low-emissivity glass. Against the curtain of brightness he could make out two dozen small figures moving purposefully about, coming together and then breaking apart again, as though engaged in some form of collective activity whose nature he could not fathom.
"What are they doing out there, Sauvage?" he asked his field manager.
The young man at the wheel made a quiet grunt. "Getting themselves roasted, it looks like."
"For what?" said Herne. "I don't understand."
Sauvage turned to look at him, as though he didn't quite follow the line of questioning. "I suppose," he said, in a measured way, "they feel it's the thing they're supposed to do."
Herne stared out the windshield, hard. Then he unbuckled himself and climbed out of the car and looked around the former Air Force base. It was alien, unrecognizable. Terrifying. Herne could not remember clearly why his company had decided to move in here. Strategic considerations, he was sure. Long-range thinking. Planting the seeds of tomorrow. Was that a corporate slogan, or a proposal that had gotten knocked down, a dead possibility? Had it been his own idea, or somebody else's? Under the mask, he was perspiring heavily, and the sweat ran down into his eyes and into his mouth.
"Sauvage," he said, hoarsely.
"Yes, sir."
"Keep the car ready. Stay back. I'm going to tell those people out there to go home before somebody gets seriously hurt. Then I'm going inside the office there, see if anything can be saved. Do you have your phone with you?"
Sauvage nodded, patting a jacket pocket.
"Very well. If I need you, I'll give you a call. Meanwhile, you try to find out why there's been no response from the authorities. Are you with me?"
"All the way, sir," said Sauvage.
Herne halfway expected the young man to salute, and was disappointed when he did not. Instead Sauvage opened his glove box and pulled out a compact, metal-cased flashlight, which he offered to Herne.
"You'll need this, sir," he said.
"Very well," said Herne. "Carry on, then."
Chas Sauvage nodded, slipped the Mercedes in gear. And Burdock Herne turned to face the fire that besieged the northernmost fortress of his empire.
FRONT LINE
Gene Deere nearly fainted with relief when reinforcements arrived from the Dublin green. The first person to reach him was a tall black teenager wearing, for reasons he would never understand, a sign that said Corporate Executive. This person came up and stood beside Gene and wordlessly assessed the disaster.
They were standing in a field of closely mown grass, as far away from the hangar as Gene had been able to stretch the fire hose. The blasting of hot air past his ears was so loud and incessant that he felt numbed: boxed-in by a surfeit of sensation. Behind him, Guillermo and Thistle had been left to figure out how to activate a machine that produced, according to its brass faceplate, afff, aircraft fire-fighting foam. Ari was assigned to protect the bear at all costs. Gene had entrusted Guillermo with the keys to the Rover. Just in case.
"Could you give me a hand here?" Gene shouted to the kid. He had little notion of how well his voice could be heard. He struggled to manage the awkward bulk of the hose, now grown heavy and stiff with water. "We've finally got pressure up here, but every time I open the valve, the recoil just about knocks me down. I can't keep it pointed at the fire."
"Got you," said the kid, loudly. He stepped in behind Gene and took up most of the weight of the hose. He planted his feet widely and dropped into what seemed an immovable stance. "Try it now," he called.
With trepidation, Gene pulled back on the brass lever that opened the flow of water to the conical, wide-mouthed nozzle. There was no way to do this by halves; the pressure was such that as soon as the flow started, the water forced the valve wide open. Then, as a matter of pure Newtonian karma, the nozzle bucked violently back, water spewed everywhere, and Gene struggled not to be thrown across the field.
This time, with the kid anchoring the hose behind him, he managed to get a column of gushing water pointed more or less in the direction of the nearest flames.
"Great," he yelled over his shoulder. "Now let's try raking it back and forth."
Other people were showing up now. They kept their masks on, presumably because this blocked some of the heat from scorching their faces. Some of them tried to figure out how to be helpful to Gene and the black kid; others just stood with the light of the fire in their eyes, bedazzled and dumbstruck.
"Come on, everybody," shouted a guy in thrift-store drag. "Let's try to keep ourselves in order here."
Concentration broken, Gene felt the hose getting away from him.
"Damn," he muttered, slamming the valve shut. He leaned back wearily against the kid behind him, who let out a breath for the two of them. "How long you been doing this?" the kid asked him.
"Not long," said Gene. "The fire's moving fast. I'm not sure there's anything we can do. Did you happen to see a bear on your way in?"
The kid looked at him gravely, as though wondering if the heat was getting to him.
"No," he said. "Thought I might have seen a wolf, though."
Then the flames roared ahead, spreading from a nearby trial plot to the field of grass, and Gene and the others were forced into retreat.
"Listen," Gene said to the kid, while they were catching their breath, "are you one of those guys in what was it called, the Pod?"
The kid lifted the mask from his face. "Saintstephen Bax," he said. "You're that biologist, right?"
Gene nodded. "Nice work on the software," he said. "You really did something amazing to those trees. I'd love to hold this fire off so I can get a closer look at them."
Saintstephen shrugged modestly. "Couldn't have done it without you."
"Okay," the Lipstick Lesbian shouted from behind the lines. "Recess is over, gang. Let's get back to our hoses."
Gene sighed. Saintstephen slapped him on the back. Another kid came up wearing a tag that read Token African-American.
"Where's the party?" he yelled, bouncing from one foot to the other.
"Right here, dude," Saintstephen said. "Take hold of this donkey dick and let our man have a little breather."
Gene handed the nozzle over to the newcomer, who said, "Hey, I remember you."
"He remembers you, too," said Saintstephen.
"Guess who I saw," said the new kid, "back at the hangar."
"Tyagi Nagasavi," guessed Saintstephen.
"Not even warm."
That was all Gene heard. The wind changed directions and the flames spread to the grass. Everybody began shouting at once and Gene had a sudden thought that if these people were here from the performance in Dublin, then Ludi might be here also. Which, if true, would be a serious error on her part. And he left the others standing and shouting and trying to get reorganized, while the phalanx of flame advanced relentlessly upon them, and ran back toward the big hangar that loomed before him through the smoke. He was not even sure if it was the same building he had come out of. He was hardly sure of anything.
One thing, maybe. And that's the one thing he was looking for.
PEP RALLY
Realistically, Tex knew, it did look hopeless. But he was not prepared, at this late stage of the game, to become a realist. "Come on, dudes," he implored the rank-and-file dryads, each clinging to an imperiled sapling. "Let's get creative. Let's not just stand here and wait for this thing to destroy us."
Beale, sitting forlornly on his leaf, looked up at him. "But we're trees," he said. "Standing around is what we do."
"Yeah?" said Tex. "And where's it gotten you? Homeless, that's where."
The dryads stirred and rustled. Tex wished he could understand what the little bastards were saying. All he could make out was this kind of resigned, philosophical murmuration.
"If we were homeless," said Beale—maybe translating, maybe not—"we would surely be better off. But no: you found new homes for us, and now look. We're about to be immolated in them."
Tex had to admit, the guy had a point. He turned to pace up the row of plants, but his compoundly fractured leg bent and twisted beneath him, and his entire being rattled with agony.
Beale watched him, showing remarkably little compassion.
In the background—somewhat dimmed-out and muted, from the vantage of this gathering of shades—people ran around and shot water from hoses and shouted instructions at one another. It was inspiring; but at the same time it was idiotic. Like watching a colony of insects busily and energetically shoring up their nest while the hungry insectivore implacably went about clawing it to pieces. You might admire the little bastards their courage and their perseverance, but still—they might as well save themselves the trouble. They were toast, one way or another.
Well, thought Tex, but does that make it all right to just sit around and do nothing? Are you really any smarter or cooler or highly evolved if you just sigh and give up? "You guys disappoint me," he said, gritting his teeth against the pain in his leg.
He found that if he really tried hard enough, he could walk. It was a lurching, unbalanced, grossly inelegant kind of walk—one leg hopping forward, the other dragging behind—but the thing was, he could do it. And he thought that by doing it, maybe he could shame the dryads somewhat into thinking there might be something they could do, too. Something they didn't want to do, most likely, and something that might be awkward or uncomfortable for them—not to mention something nobody had actually thought of yet. But still. Something.
He took another step. He dragged his bad leg. "I have to tell you," he said, his voice becoming a growl, "that even though I like you guys, and I can understand what you're going through here, you totally and gravely disappoint me."
From somewhere in the back row, a yew dryad said, "Why don't you just get lost? You've caused us nothing but trouble. You and your whole species. From the very beginning. All those millions of years we had everything under control. No worries. A few bugs, the occasional leaf-muncher. Big deal. Then you guys. And bam. Slash and burn. The axe. The bulldozer. Ten thousand years, maybe less, and it's over. We're history. So okay. That's how you want it, that's how it is. You win. The world is yours. Use it in good health. In another hundred years—less, I bet—you'll be history yourselves. Not even history. Nobody'll want to remember you. Then we'll return, or somebody like us. We'll take everything back that you've stolen from us. We'll grow in your yards. We'll watch your buildings rot. We'll sink our roots in the rotting bodies of your children. It'll be sweet. Personally, I can't wait."
There was a brittle clicking of limbs in the torrid breeze. Tex felt waves of heat passing through him. He heard the shouts of the still-living humans. It was enough to tell him that the struggle was going badly.
"You have to understand," Beale told him, speaking kindly, wishing him no ill, "compared to us, you are very young. You are an infant. The human species itself is younger than many of these organizing fields here. You have to try to grasp that we see things in a different and much longer perspective. This or that calamity, however terrible it may appear to you, is just another of many difficult times that we have seen. Yes, I acknowledge that these are worse times than most. Many of us are going to be lost, perhaps forever. But Idho is correct—sooner or later, some kindred form to most of us will return. There will undoubtedly be many changes to adapt to—higher temperatures, more ultraviolet radiation, less rainfall, an absence of topsoil. But adapting is what we are made for. And after all, we are immortal. We pass from this plane and we return; our identities alter; we merge and dissociate; that is simply our nature. One way or another, we will be with the world as long as the world is alive."
He sighed. He gave Tex a sadly compassionate smile. "The same cannot be said for you, I'm afraid. Nature may be forced to conclude that ceding dominance to an aggressive territorial primate was not the wisest course of action. I suspect things will be rather different the next time around."
Tex threw up his arms. He could not stand any more of this. There was just no arguing with these guys; he could see that now. It had been a mistake to try to sway them by reasoning. You couldn't give a pep talk to a bunch of candy-ass morphogenic fields who obviously were not psychically equipped to feel peppy. He stared at the thousands of dryads, and he felt them staring immaterially and unemotively back at him.
