Ben Winters - Golden State

“I know.”

It’s the view. She must not have noticed it when Arlo brought her in this morning, or maybe she’s just seeing it again as if for the first time, just like I do every time, even though I’ve been coming off that elevator into this room—just one big room, totally wrapped in glass—for much of my life. We linger at the glass, held by the majesty of the sprawling city: the bright glass towers of downtown, the upright cones and rectangles, the low gray hulks of the garment district. It goes on for miles from here: north to the fields, west to the water. The desalination plants that line the water’s edge north of the pier. The acres of avocados, of wheat and corn, the rice and lettuce, the marijuana plants and the grapes for wine. The electric automobile plants that make the trucks that bring the wheat from the fields and the fish from the harbors to all corners of the State.

Way out to the west is the water; to the east and to the north are the rolling tops of the distant hills, with pockets of clouds clustered across their peaks, their contours crisply outlined by the backlight of the sun.

Aysa says “Sir,” and I give her a warning look, but the edge has come off my sternness now. That view gets me—it gets me every time.

“Laszlo.”

“Yup.”

“You’ve been doing this longer than me.”

“Well noted, Ms. Paige. You’ve been doing it for, what, three hours?”

I am walking to my desk, raising a hand to Cullers, who barely moves, and Paige tails me all the way, talking nonstop, piling point upon point. Burlington is here, at his desk, grunting, typing out what looks like a long crime scene report, but other than that it’s pretty quiet.

“There are anomalies in Renner’s statement.”

“Renner?”

“The boss. Manager. And there are anomalies in the dead man’s home. In his Provisional. Two weeks of missing days.”

“Which so far as we know have zero connection to his death.”

“Well, sure, but how can we know what we don’t know?”

I sigh. It’s a fair point. I’m just hesitant, that’s all, about going down to nine, engaging with the Liaison Office, jumping through the thousand hoops required to review stretches of reality.

For what? A man is dead but men die all the time. Here’s one thing that’s true as it gets: people are dying all day long.I look over at Arlo’s desk, in search of wise counsel, but Arlo’s desk is empty.

“I don’t mean to be contumacious. But—”

“You don’t mean to be what? ”

“Contumacious. It means stubborn.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“Respectfully, Laz, it does.”

“I think I know what words mean.”

Cullers, from his desk, from under the hand towel draped over the top half of his face, makes a snort of amusement. The whole thing is ridiculous two stubborn people arguing over whether a word means stubborn or not, two dogs tearing at a bone of truth. This kid, buttons polished, eyes shining, barely out of police academy diapers, pushing back on her immediate supervisor over a minor and irrelevant fact. She is all readiness and upright zeal; she is dying to show me what she’s made of.

“Okay, you know what? Be my guest.”

Aysa’s eyes widen. Her spine straightens perceptibly. “Really?”

I shrug. “Sure. Go down to nine, tell Woody you want to pull a stretch from the Record. You would like to fill out all of the ten thousand forms necessary, for the pleasure of watching a roofer fall off a roof. You know what, kid? Knock yourself out.”

“Really?”

“Yes.”

“Great.”

I’m being hyperbolic about the forms, but just barely. Reviewing material from the Record is a massive pain, even for us, one of the few institutional bodies with license to do so in any circumstance. If reviewing stretches of reality were easy, everybody would be doing it all day long: to settle petty arguments, satisfy prurient curiosity, win bets. Forget all that. Access even to fleeting instants of reality requires multiple levels of bureaucratic review and regulatory rigmarole, and that’s not even counting having to reckon with the miserable personality of Woodrow Stone, the Speculative Service’s Chief Liaison Officer to the Permanent Record.

Aysa Paige, undaunted, is heading back to the elevator. I watch her walk, the sun-sparkled heights of downtown like a dream vision behind her, through the windows.

“Hey, actually—Paige.”

“Yeah?”

I tug at my beard a second, think it over. Can’t hurt, right?

“As long as you’re going. One more thing I want you to put in for.”

“Oh?” She takes out her Day Book, clicks her pen open, eager pupil.

“Tell Woody I want stakeout stretches on Mose Crane’s front door.”

“On his… door.”

“Yup. You have the address?”

“Yes. What’re stakeout stretches?”

“Woody will know.”

“But can you just tell me?”

“It’s just, like, you know, all the stretches caught by the same capture over a sustained time period. Like, for example, somebody’s front door, all hours, for the week leading up to today.” I think for a moment. “Let’s do two weeks. I want to see if anybody strange was poking around. Besides us, I mean.”

“Yup. Front door. Stakeout stretch. Two weeks leading up to today.” She finishes writing and frowns. “That sounds like it might be a big ask.”

“It is. Which is why I’m glad I’m not the one asking. Good luck, Ms. Paige.”

She gives me a smart salute and holds it, and I wait until the door closes before I laugh out loud.

“Contumacious,” I say to myself, shaking my head. “This kid.”

But then the word sort of sticks with me. An awkward set of syllables, jangling and mysterious. Like a magician’s invocation. I say it piece by piece, measuring the word in my mouth: “con,” “tu,” “ma,” “cious.” Well, let’s just see, Officer Aysa Paige, I think. Let’s just damn well see.

I’ve got plenty of dictionaries, of course, a ton of ’em, along with all the other reference books that crowd the office of our division like they crowd all the other offices in the Service, all the other offices in the Golden State. Gazetteers and Almanac s, encyclopedias and timelines, Notable Individuals and The Book of Weights and Measures . I have my own dictionary, of course. Right up there on the shelf with all my other books; my own Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary ; my own Gazetteer and Almanac ; my own well-loved copy of Past Is Prologue, the big book, close to hand so I can take it down when I want and dip into the glorious early history of the State, so I can lay my hands on the black pages and feel their mystery.

At the present moment, though, I just need a dictionary. Along the inner wall of our office is The Full Dictionary of the Golden State, all seventeen volumes, with the bold main entries and the word histories in tiny type, with all the illustrations and charts and diagrams, the latest updates in a series of stapled inserts in the back of each volume.

I’ve got The Speculator’s Field Dictionary, leather-bound and portable; I’ve got The Everyday Citizen’s Dictionary .

And then, of course, closest to hand, I have Mose Crane’s copy of that same Everyday Citizen’s, the universally issued handheld lexicon.

I like a man who likes his dictionary. I open it up, about a third of the way in, where the G s or H s would be, and I feel all of my blood freeze and stop, and I snap it closed again.

It’s not a dictionary.

There has been, since we left Dolly Aster’s building, a quiet burble of speculation chugging along in the back of my brain, a faint gurgling ever-presence like a creek on the far side of a campground, and now, all of a sudden, it becomes a rush, a crashing wall of water that staggers me up and out of my chair. I push the book off the desk and it slams on the floor and I stare at it lying there, like a feral animal, motionless but radiating menace. Cullers looks up at the sound and then down again, shifts his position, and lets himself drift back to sleep.