Ким Робинсон - Pacific Edge

She was saying something he hadn’t heard. His chest hurt, his diaphragm was tight. Suddenly he couldn’t stand the pretense any more, he looked back down the street, said “Listen, Ramona, I think maybe I should get back. We can talk more later?”

She nodded quickly. Reached out for his forearm and stopped, just as he had with her. Perhaps they would never be able to touch again.

He was walking back down the street. He was standing in front of Oscar’s. Numbness. Ah, what a relief. No pleasure like the absence of pain.

Hank was around the side of the house, loading up his bike’s trailer. “Hey, where’d you go?”

“Ramona came by. We were talking.”

“Oh?”

“She and Alfredo are going to get married.”

“Ah ha!” Hank regarded him with his ferocious squint. “Well. You’re having quite a week, aren’t you.” Finally he reached into his trailer. “Here, bro, have another beer.”

Alfredo and Matt’s proposition got onto the monthly ballot, and one night it appeared on everyone’s TV screens, a long and complex thing, all the plans laid out. People interested typed in their codes and voted. Just under six thousand of the town’s ten cared enough to vote, and just over three thousand of them voted in favor of the proposition. Development as described to be built on Rattlesnake Hill.

“Okay,” Alfredo said at the next council meeting, “let’s get back to this matter of rezoning Rattlesnake Hill. Mary?”

Ingratiating as ever, Mary read out the planning commission’s latest draft, fitted exactly to the proposition.

“Discussion?” Alfredo said when she was done.

Silence. Kevin stirred uncomfortably. Why was this falling to him? There were hundreds of people in town opposed to the plan, thousands. If only the indifferent ones had voted!

But Jean Aureliano was not opposed to the plan. Nor her party. So it was up to the people who really cared. The room was hot, people looked tired. Kevin opened his mouth to speak.

But it was Doris who spoke first, in her hardest voice. “This plan is a selfish one thrust on the community by people more interested in their own profit than in the welfare of the town.”

“Are you talking about me?” Alfredo said.

“Of course I’m talking about you,” Doris snapped. “Or did you think I had in mind the parties behind you putting up the capital? But they don’t live here, and they don’t care. It’s only profits to them, more profits, more power. But the people who live here do care, or they should. That land has been kept free of construction through all the years of rampant development, to destroy it now would be disgusting. It would be a wanton act of destruction.”

“I don’t agree,” Alfredo said, voice smooth. But he had been stung to speech, and his eyes glittered angrily. “And obviously the majority of the town’s voters don’t agree.”

“We know that,” Doris said, voice as sharp as a nail. “But what we have never heard yet from you is a coherent explanation of why this proposed center of yours should be located on the hill instead of somewhere else in the town, or in some other town entirely.”

Alfredo went through his reasons again. The prestige, the esthetic attraction of it, the increased town shares. On each point Doris assailed him bitterly. “You can’t make us into Irvine or Laguna, Alfredo, if you want that you should move there.”

Alfredo defended himself irritably. The other council members pitched in with their opinions. Doris mentioned Tom, started to tell them what Tom had been working on when he died—dangerous territory, Kevin thought, since they had never heard from Tom’s friends. And since much of the material had been taken from Avending by Doris herself. But Alfredo cut her off before she got to any of that. “It was a great loss to all of us when Tom died. You can’t bring him into this in a partisan way, he was simply one of the town’s most important citizens, and in a way he belonged to all of us. I think it very well might be appropriate to name any center built on Rattlesnake Hill after him.”

Kevin laughed out loud.

Doris cut through it, almost shouting: “When Tom Barnard died he was doing his damndest to stop this thing! To suggest naming the center after him when he opposed it is obscene!”

Alfredo said, “He never told me he opposed it.”

“He never told you anything,” Doris snarled.

Alfredo hit the tabletop, stung at last. “I’m tired of this. You’re getting into the area of slander when you imply that there’s illegal capital behind this venture—”

“Sue me!” Doris shouted. “You can’t afford to sue me, because then your funding would be revealed for sure!” Kevin nudged her with his knee, but as far as he could tell she didn’t even feel it. “Go ahead and sue me!”

Shocked silence. Clearly Alfredo was at a loss for words.

“Properly speaking,” Jerry Geiger said mildly, “this is only a discussion of the zoning change.”

“It’s the zoning makes the rest of it possible!” Doris said. “If you want to go on record against the development, here’s where you act.”

Jerry shrugged. “I’m not sure that’s true.”

Matt Chung decided to follow that tack, and talked about how zoning gave them options. Alfredo and Doris hammered away at each other, both getting really angry. It went on for nearly an hour before Alfredo slammed his hand down and said imperiously, “We’ve been over this before, five or six times in fact. We have the testimony of the town, we know what people want! Time to vote!”

Doris nodded curtly. Showdown.

They voted by hand, one at a time. Doris and Kevin voted against the proposed zoning change. Alfredo and Matt voted for. Hiroko Washington voted against. Susan Mayer voted for. And Jerry voted for.

“Ah, Jerry,” Kevin said under his breath. No rhyme nor reason, same as always. Might as well flip a coin.

So the zoning for Rattlesnake Hill was changed, from 5.4 (open space) to 3.2 (commercial).

Afterwards Kevin and Doris walked home. There it stood, a bubble of light in a dark orange grove, looking like a Chinese lantern. Behind and above it the dark bulk of the hill they had lost. They stopped and looked.

“Thanks for doing the talking tonight,” Kevin said. “I really appreciate it.”

“Damn it,” Doris said. She turned into him, and he hugged her. He leaned his head down and put his face on the part of her straight black hair. Familiar fit, same as it ever was. “Damn it!” she said fiercely, voice muffled by his chest. “I’m sorry. I tried.”

“I know. We all tried.”

“It’s not over yet. We can take it to the courts, or try to get the Nature Conservancy to help us.”

“I know.”

But they had lost a critical battle, Kevin thought. The critical battles. The Flyer’ s polls showed solid support for Alfredo. People thought he was doing a good job, dynamic, forward-looking. They wanted the town shares higher. Things were changing, the pendulum swinging, the Greens’ day had passed. To fight business in America… it was asking for trouble, always. Kick the world, break your foot.

They walked into the house, arms around each other.

Kevin couldn’t sleep that night. Finally he got up, dressed, left the house. Climbed the trail up the side of Rattlesnake Hill, moving slowly in the dark. Rustle of small animals, the light of the stars. In the little grove on top he sat, arms wrapped around his knees, thinking.

For a while he dozed. Uneasily he dreamed: he was in bed down in the house when a noise outside roused him, and he got up, went down the hall to the balcony window at the north end of the horseshoe. He looked down into the avocado grove, and there by the light of the moon he saw it again—the shape. It stood upright, on two legs, big and black, a node of darkness. It looked up at him, their gazes met and the moonlight flashed in its eyes, vertical slits of green like a big cat’s eyes. Through the window he could hear the thing’s eerie chuckle-giggle, and the hair on the back of his neck rose, and suddenly he felt as if the world were a vast, dark, windy place, with danger suffusing every part of its texture, every leaf and stone.