Dan Simmons - Darwin's Blade

Dar put the weapon back under the bed and closed his eyes. Flashes of images were haunting him—not recent images, not of the mirror shattering, but images of shoes scattered across grass, shoes of every sort, men’s polished wing tips, children’s Keds, a woman’s sandals. After every air crash, the first thing the investigators noticed—even before the stink of aviation fuel, the torn and burned metal, or the bits of bodies—was the hundreds of shoes seemingly tossed at random around the site. It always said something to Dar about the terrible kinetic energies being unleashed in a crash that shoes—even those laced tightly—almost never stayed with the body. It seemed a final indignity somehow. Dar remembered the shoes in the Richard Kodiak a.k.a Richard Trace investigation. The young man had been completely knocked out of his right loafer, but the shoe was in the wrong place—Gennie Smiley had backed the van up too far the second time she ran over him. The boy’s a little light in his loafers . Dar could hear Dallas Trace saying that to some of his country-club friends.

As night fell, Dar wandered to the bookcases and pulled down a well-thumbed copy of the Stoics. He started with Epictetus but skipped ahead to Marcus Aurelius—Book XII of the Meditations . Dar had read and reread the passages so often in the last decade that some of the lines had taken on the singsong familiarity of a mantra:

The things are three of which thou art composed, a little body, a little breath (life), intelligence. Of these the first two are thine, so far as it is thy duty to take care of them: but the third alone is properly thine. Therefore if thou shalt separate from thyself, that is, from thy understanding, whatever others do or say, and whatever thou hast done or said thyself, and whatever future things trouble thee because they may happen, and whatever in the body which envelops thee or in the breath (life), which is by nature associated with the body, is attached to thee independent of thy will, and whatever the external circumfluent vortex whirls round, so that the intellectual power exempt for the things of fate can live pure and free by itself, doing what is just and accepting what happens and saying the truth: if thou wilt, separate, I say, from this ruling faculty the things which are attached to it by the impressions of the sense, and the things of time to come and of time that is past, and wilt make thyself like Empedocles’ sphere

All round, and in its joyous rest reposing: and if thou shalt strive to live only what is really thy life, that is the present—then thou wilt be able to pass that portion of life which remains for thee up to the time of thy death, free from perturbations, nobly, and obedient to thy own daemon (to the god that is within thee).

Dar closed the book. Those lines—so many lines like those—had comforted him after Barbara and little David had died in the Colorado crash, after his own brief descent into madness and suicide attempt. He remembered the sound of the firing pin striking hollowly on that .410 shell that did not fire, did not fire. It had been the only time his father’s .410 had ever misfired; the hollow sound of that misfire woke him often but was counterbalanced by the sensible reply of the Stoics.

Not this night.

Dar made sure the blinds were closed and the police bar was in place, but tired as he was, he could not sleep. He did not believe in sleeping pills—he had seen too many accidents not that dissimilar from poor Mr. Hatton who answered his own .38 when the phone rang—but he knew the soporific potential of reading Immanuel Kant, and this he did until he was on the verge of sleep.

There was a knock at the door. Dar considered pulling the shotgun out from under the bed, but the knock had been the familiar shave-and-a-haircut. It was Lawrence, wrinkled, rumpled, and sweaty after a long day testifying. Dar went back to his Kant while Larry showered and came out in the extra, oversized bathrobe Dar kept for just these visits.

While Lawrence was straightening his stuff and fluffing his pillow on the couch, Dar was eyeing the shoulder holster and .32 Colt revolver that his friend had nonchalantly draped over a chair.

“You and Trudy going into L.A. for dinner tomorrow?” asked Dar.

“What do you mean?” said Lawrence from the couch. He was comfortable in his bathrobe, a Hudson’s Bay blanket over him, reading a Car & Driver magazine.

“You usually only pack heat when you guys are going into the city.” Dar knew that his friend had a permit to carry a concealed weapon because of all the threats the adjuster had received from car thieves and fraud artists, who were behind bars thanks to Lawrence’s testimony.

Lawrence grunted. “Coming to see you is enough reason to carry,” he said. “It’s like hanging around Charles de Gaulle in The Day of the Jackal .”

“Only in the original,” said Dar. “In the remake it’s the head of the FBI who’s being stalked. And not by Edward Fox but by Bruce Willis.”

“They always screw up remakes,” said Lawrence, putting down his magazine and snapping off the light at the head of the couch.

“Don’t they,” agreed Dar. He went to check that the door was locked and the police bar in place. He glanced at the ugly but closed blinds on all of his tall windows.

“Good night, Larry.”

Dar waited for the correction in the name, but Lawrence was already snoring softly. Dar went into his bedroom and was asleep within minutes.

Dar awoke on Thursday morning to the sound of the phone ringing. He grabbed the phone. Nothing. His bedside phone only gave him a dial tone. He jumped up and grabbed his cell phone from the dresser. It wasn’t even powered up. Dragging on a robe, he walked to his fax machine. Nothing there.

The phone rang again.

It was Lawrence’s cell phone. Dar had forgotten that his friend was sleeping on the couch, but now he sat on one of the high stools at the counter while Lawrence answered his Flip Phone and exchanged some fast but groggy sentences—obviously with Trudy, unless the totally faithful Lawrence had suddenly found someone else to call “Honey Bunch.”

Dar put the coffee on as Lawrence sat up on the couch, moaned, growled, tried to clear his throat, rubbed his eyes, rubbed his cheeks and jowls, growled again, and went through a series of throat-clearing exercises that sounded like a 240-pound cat being strangled.

How the hell does Trudy put up with that every morning? thought Dar, not for the first time. He said, “Coffee’ll be ready in a minute. Do you want any toast or bacon? Or just cereal?”

Lawrence put on his glasses, and grinned across the wide space at Dar. “Shut the coffee off. We’ll grab some coffee and a Toad McMuffin on the way. We’ve got a case already and you’re going to love it.”

Dar glanced at his watch. It was already eight-thirty, but strangely dark in the condo with all of the blinds closed. “I’ve got a lot of work to catch up—” he began.

Lawrence was shaking his head. “Nope. This is just a few miles out…halfway to my place…and you’d hate yourself if you missed it.”

“Mmmm,” said Dar.

“Attempted nunicide by a chicken cannon,” said Lawrence.

“Pardon me?” Dar shut off the coffee maker.

“Attempted nunicide by a chicken cannon,” repeated Lawrence as he flip-flopped into Dar’s bathroom to use the facilities and take a shower before Dar did.

Dar sighed. He found the rod that opened the venetian blinds and then the cord that tugged them up. It was a beautiful, sunny San Diego summer day. Every detail on the aircraft carrier permanently berthed across the bay stood out in the crisp light. The sound of traffic was a reassuring hum. A plane roared in to Lindbergh Field, some of the passengers staring up at the overtowering buildings in pure terror while the old hands kept reading their morning papers. Dar could almost read the headlines through the starboard windows as the DC-9 passed by.