Ким Робинсон - Pacific Edge

On a whim he turned into Newport, onto Balboa Peninsula. It was a long sprint to the dead end at the Wedge, and he flew, final effort, killing himself on a bike. He came to the end of the road, slewed with braking, freed a cramping foot, put it down. The harbor channel, between its two stone jetties. Green scraps flying at the top of tall palm trees.

He freed the other foot, walked the bike to the concrete wall at the jetty’s foot. His thighs felt ten feet around, he could barely walk. He was still gasping for air, and with the bike wind gone sweat poured out of him, ran down his burning face. All his muscles pulsed, bump bump bump with every hard knock of his heart. The whole world shifted and jumped with every heartbeat, bump bump bump, and things in the late afternoon sun had a luminous grainy quality, as if bursting with the internal pressure of their own colors. Ah yes: the end of a workout. Faint wash of nausea, fought, mastered, passed through, to something like sexual afterglow, only more total, more spread through the musculature—more in muscles than in nerves, some sort of beta-endorphin opiate high, the workout high, best of them all. Sure, he felt pretty good for a man in the first great multiple grief of his life. Except he was cooking. The afternoon sea breeze helped, but not enough. He trod through the sand, every step sinking deep, calves almost cramping.

He stripped to his shorts, walked out into the ocean. Water perfect, just over seventy degrees and clear as glass. He dove in, delicious coolness all over him. He swam around dragging his legs, which pulsed furiously. Lolled back into the shallows and leaped off the bottom to ride the little tubes until they dumped him on the sand. Could even catch a miniature Wedge effect, side wave backwashing across the incoming ones for an extra push. He had done this as a child, with Tom, an old man even then, doing the same beside him. Old bald man yelling, “Outside! Outside!” Green flags ripping above the lifeguard stands, the big stones of the jetty. They had done a lot together, Tom and he. Coronado to Lassen, Yuma to Eureka, there was no escaping that.

Cooled off and tired, Kevin sat on the wet sand just above the reach of the white soup. The salt wind dried him and he could feel the rime of it on his skin and in his hair, warping lick into tangles of curl. Late afternoon sun glassed the water. Salty light in the salty wind. Sand.

He put on his shirt and left it unbuttoned, dropped his shoes by his bike and walked out the jetty, feeling each warm stone with his toes. They had walked out here many times, he used to scare Tom with his leaps. He tried one, hurt his arch. Only kids could do it. His moods rushed up and down on a wild tide of their own, hitting new ebb records, then curious floods of euphoria. How he had loved his grandpa, what friends they had been. It was only by feeling that love that he could do justice to what had happened since. So he had to feel this good, and this bad. He stepped over a big gap between stones, landed perfectly. It was coming back, the art of it. You had to dance over them, keep committing yourself to something more than a normal step. Like life: like that, and that, and that.

The sun was obscured by a cloud for a moment, then burst out again. Big clouds like tall ships coasted in, setting sail for the mountains and the desert beyond. The ocean was a deep, rich, blue blue, a blue in blue within blue inside of blue, the heart and soul and center of blue. Blinding chips of sunlight bounced on the swelltops. Liquid white light glazed the apricot cliff of Corona del Mar, the needles of its Torrey pines like sprays of dark green. Ironwood color of the sun-drenched cliff. Eye still jumping a bit here, oxygen starvation, then enrichment. What a glossy surface to the massive rocky substance of the world! These boulders under his feet were amazing pieces of work, so big and stony, like the broken marbles of giants.

He skipped from boulder to boulder, looking. From time to time his hands came together and swung the imaginary bat in its catlike involuntary swing.

He came to the end of the jetty, the shoulder-high lighthouse block. The wind rushed over him and the clouds sailed in, the waves made their myriad glugs and the sunlight packed everything, and he stood there balancing, feeling he had come to the right place, and was now wide awake, at the center of things. End of the world. Sun low on the water.

For a long time he stood there, turning round, staring at all of it, trying to take it all in. All the events of the summer filled him at once, flooding him from a deep well of physical sensation, spinning him in a slurry of joy and sorrow. There was a steel chisel someone had left behind. He kneeled, picked it up and banged it against the last granite rock of the jetty. The rock resisted, harder than he would have imagined. Stubborn stuff, this world. A chunk of rock about the size of two softballs was wedged between boulders, and he freed it for use as a hammer. Hammer and chisel, he could write something, leave his mark on the world. All of a sudden he wanted to cut something deep and permanent, something like I, Kevin Claiborne, was here in October of 2065 with oceans of clouds in the sky and in me, and I am bursting with them and everything has gone wrong! The granite being what it was, he contented himself with KC. He cut the figures as deep as he could.

When he was done he put down his tools. Behind him Orange County pulsed green and amber, jumping with his heart, glossy, intense, vibrant, awake, alive. His world and the wind pouring through it. His hands came together and made their half swing. If only Hank hadn’t caught that last one. If only Ramona, if only Tom, if only the world, all in him all at once, with the sharp stab of our unavoidable grief; and it seemed to him then that he was without a doubt the unhappiest person in the whole world.

And at that thought (thinking about it) he began to laugh.

For help on this one, many thanks to Anne Schneider, Joan Davis, Karen Fowler, Patrick Delahunt, Paul Park, Terry Bisson, and Beth Meacham.

The Blind Geometer

Escape from Kathmandu

Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (Editor)

The Gold Coast

Green Mars

Icehenge

The Memory of Whiteness

Pacific Edge

The Planet on the Table

Remaking History

A Short, Sharp Shock

The Wild Shore

An outstanding achievement, the concluding volume in Robinson’s Orange County, Calif., trilogy again takes place in the middle of the next century. The books are not strict sequels, providing instead several versions of an alternate world. While The Wild Shore depicted a postnuclear holocaust society and The Gold Coast reflected a period of uncontrolled technological growth, this novel is set in an ecological utopia with a reduced population and rational use of renewable resources. Because utopias can be boring, Robinson generates action through several intertwined conflicts, combining the political and personal lives of his characters. The introduction of the newly hired town attorney provides a fresh insight into the community of El Modena and an external viewpoint on its citizens’ “usual array of Machiavellian battles,” as do excerpts from a diary writtten in the past. The characters are fully developed and individually motivated; the reader identifies with them easily. Robinson’s writing ranks in the highest levels of the genre, and the last sentences of the book generate a soaring optimism. Taken together, the books of the trilogy invite interesting comparisons or their several worlds, but separately each is a completely independent, excellent story.