Ким Робинсон - Pacific Edge

Kevin thought it over. In his work he had had to get water permits often, so he knew a little about it. Like many of the towns in southern California, they bought the bulk of their water from Los Angeles’s Metropolitan Water District, which pumped it in from the Colorado River. But much more than that he didn’t know, and this….

“What information do we have now? Do they have a minimum sale figure?”

Alfredo asked Mary to read them the original letter from MWD, and she located it and read. Fifty acre feet a year minimum. Kevin said, “That’s a lot more water than we need. What do you plan to do with it?”

“Well,” Alfredo replied, “if there’s any excess at first, we can sell it to the District watermaster.”

If, Kevin thought. At first. Something strange here….

Doris leaned forward in her seat. “So now we’re going into the water business? What happened to the resolution to reduce dependency on MWD?”

“It’s just a letter asking for more information,” Alfredo said, almost irritably. “Water is a complex issue, and getting more expensive all the time. It’s our job to try and get it as cheaply as we can.” He glanced at Matt Chung, then down at his notes.

Kevin’s fist clenched. They were up to something. He didn’t know what it was, but suddenly he was sure of it. They had been trying to slip this by him, in his first council meeting, when he was disoriented, tired, a little drunk.

Alfredo was saying something about drought. “Don’t you need an environmental impact statement for this kind of thing?” Kevin asked, cutting him off.

“For an inquiry letter?” Alfredo said, almost sarcastically.

“Okay, okay. But I’ve stood before this council trying to get permission to couple a greenhouse and a chicken coop, and I’ve had to make an EIS—so somewhere along the line we’d surely have to have one for a change like this!” Sudden spurt of anger, remembering the frustration of those many meetings.

Alfredo said, “It’s just water.”

“Fuck, you must be kidding!” Kevin said.

Doris jabbed him with an elbow, and he remembered where he was. Oops. He looked down at the table, blushing. There was some tittering out in the audience. Got to watch it here, not just a private citizen anymore.

Well. That had put a pause in the conversation. Kevin glanced at the other council members. Matt was frowning. The moderates looked concerned, confused. “Look,” Kevin said. “I don’t know who these nominees are, and I don’t know any of the details about this offer from MWD. I can’t approve item twenty-seven in such a state, and I’d like to move we postpone discussing it until next time.”

“I second the motion,” Doris said.

Alfredo looked like he was going to make some objection. But he only said, “In favor?”

Doris and Kevin raised their hands. Then Hiroko and Jerry did the same.

“Okay,” Alfredo said, and shrugged. “That’s it for tonight, then.”

He closed the session without fuss, looked at Matt briefly as they stood.

They had hoped to slip something by, Kevin thought. But what? Anger flushed through him again: Alfredo was tricky. And all the more so because no one but Kevin seemed to recognize that in him.

Their new town attorney bulked before him. Buddha standing. “You’ll come by to see my house?”

“Oh yeah,” Kevin said, distracted.

Oscar gave him the address. “Perhaps you and Ms. Nakayama could come by for breakfast. You can see the house, and I might also be able to illuminate some aspects of tonight’s agenda.”

Kevin looked at him quickly. The man’s big face was utterly blank; then his eyes fluttered up and down, wild as crows’ wings. Significance. The moonlike face blanked out again.

“Okay,” Kevin said. “We’ll come by.”

“I shall expect you promptly at your leisure.”

Biking home in the night, the long meeting over. Kevin had had to take some tools over to Hank’s, and Doris and Nadezhda had gone directly home, so now he was alone.

The cool rush of air, the bouncing headlamp, the occasional whirr of chain in derailleur. The smell everywhere of orange blossoms, cut with eucalyptus, underlaid by sage: the braided smell of El Modena. Funny that two of the three smells were immigrants, like all the rest of them. Together, the way they could fill him up….

Freed of the night’s responsibilities, and still a little drunk, Kevin felt the scent of the land fill him. Light as a balloon. Sudden joy in the cool spring night. God existed in every atom, as Hank was always saying, in every molecule, in every particulate jot of the material world, so that he was breathing God deep into himself with every fragrant breath. And sometimes it really felt that way, hammering nails into new framing, soaring in the sky, biking through night air, the black hills bulking around him…. He knew the configuration of every dark tree he passed, every turn in the path, and for a long moment rushing along he felt spread out in it all, interpenetrated, the smell of the plants part of him, his body a piece of the hills, and all of it cool with a holy tingling.

Kevin’s thighs had stiffened up from the afternoon’s flight, and feeling them, he saw Ramona’s legs. Long muscles, smooth brown skin, the swirl of fine silky hair on inner thigh. Wham, wham, the frame of the ultralite shuddering under all that anger and pain. Still wrapped up with Alfredo, no doubt of that. Hmmm.

Long day. Four for four, boom, boom! His wrists remembered the hits, the solid vibrationless smack of a line drive. Thoughtlessly around the roundabout, up Chapman. Overlying the physical memories of the day, the meeting. Oh, man—stuck on that damned council for two whole years! Anger coursed through him again, at Alfredo’s subterfuge, his smoothness. Buddha standing, the weird mime faces of their new town attorney. Something going on. It was funny; he had caught that from right as near sleep as he could have been. He knew he was slow, his friends made fun of him about it; but he wasn’t stupid, he wasn’t. Look at his houses and see. Would he have noticed that crammed item on the agenda if he had been fully awake? Hard to say. Didn’t matter. Pattern recognition. A kind of subconscious resistance. Intelligence as a sort of stubbornness, a refusal to be fooled. No more classrooms falling off their chairs.

He took the left to home, pumped up the little road. He lived in a big old converted apartment block, built originally in a horseshoe around a pool. He had done the conversion himself, and still liked it about the best of any of his work; big tented thing bursting with light, home to a whole clan. His housemates, the neighbors inside, the real family.

Last painful push on the thighs, short coast to the bike rack at the open end of the horseshoe. Upstairs Tomas’s window was lit as always, he would be up there before his computer screen, working away. Figures crossed before the big kitchen windows, Donna and Cindy no doubt, talking and pounding the cervecas, watching the kids wash dishes.

The building sat in an avocado grove at the foot of Rattlesnake Hill, one of the last knobs of the Santa Ana Mountains before the long flat stretch to the sea. Dark bulk of the hill above, furry with scrub oak and sage. His home under the hill. His hill, the center of his life, his own great mound of sandstone and sage.

He slipped the front tire of his mountain bike into the rack. Turning toward the house he saw something and stopped. A motion.

Something out there in the grove. He squinted against the two big squares of kitchen light. Clatter of pots and voices. There it was; black shape, between trees, about mid-grove. It too was still, and he had the sudden feeling it was looking back at him. Tall and man-shaped, sort of. Too dark to really see it.