David Brin: Sundiver

There was something familiar about the fellow. He was a florid little man in a dark grey business suit and his paunch jiggled as he heaved two heavy bags to the side of Jacob’s car. His face was perspiring as he bent over the door on the passenger’s side and peered in.

“Oh boy, what heat!” he moaned. He spoke standard English with a thick accent.

“No wonder no one uses the guideway,” he went on, mopping his brow with a handkerchief. “They drive so fast to catch a little tiny breeze, don’t they? But you are familiar, we must have met somewhere before. I am Peter LaRoque… or Pierre, If you wish. I am with Les Mondes.”

Jacob started.

“Oh. Yes, LaRoque. We’ve met before. I’m Jacob Demwa. Hop in, I’m only going as far as the Information Center but you can get a bus from there.”

He hoped that his face didn’t show his feelings. Why hadn’t he recognized LaRoque when he was still moving? He might not have stopped.

It wasn’t that he had anything in particular against the man… other than his incredible ego and his inexhaustible store of opinions, which he would thrust upon anyone at the smallest opportunity. In many ways he was probably a fascinating personality. He certainly had a following in the Danikenite press. Jacob had read a number of LaRoque’s articles and enjoyed the style, if not the content.

But LaRoque had been a member of the press corps that had chased him for weeks after he’d solved the Water-Sphinx mystery, and one of the least tactful at that. The final story in Les Mondes had been favorable, and beautifully written as well. But it hadn’t been worth the trouble.

Jacob was glad that the press hadn’t been able to find him after the still earlier Ecuadorian fiasco, that mess at the Vanilla Needle. At that time LaRoque would have been too much to bear.

Right now he was having trouble believing LaRoque’s obviously affected “Origin” accent. It was even thicker than the last time they’d met, if possible.

“Demwa, ah, of course!” the man said. He stuffed his bags behind the passenger seat and got in. “The maker and purveyor of aphorisms! The connoisseur of mysteries! You’re here maybe to play puzzle games with our noble interplanetary guests? Or perhaps you are going to consult with the Great Library in La Paz ?”

Jacob re-entered the guideway, wishing he knew who had started the “National Origins Accent” fad, so he could strangle the man.

“I’m here to do some consultant work and my employers include extraterrestrials, if that’s what you mean. But I can’t go into details.”

“Ah yes, so very secret!” LaRoque wagged a finger playfully. “You should not tease a journalist so! Your business I might make my business! But you, you must surely wonder what brings the ace reporter of Les Mondes to this desolate place, no?”

“Actually,” Jacob said, “I’m more interested in how you came to be hitchhiking in the middle of this desolate place.”

LaRoque sighed.

“A desolate place, indeed! How sad it is that the noble aliens who visit us should be stuck here and in other wastelands such as your Alaska !”

“And Hawaii and Caracas and Sri Lanka the Confederacy Capitols,” Jacob said. “But as to how you came to be…”

“How I came to be assigned here? Yes, of course, Demwa! But maybe we can amuse ourselves with your renowned deductive talents. You perhaps can guess?”

Jacob suppressed a groan. He reached forward to pull the car out of the guideway and put more weight onto the accelerator pedal.

“I’ve got a better idea, LaRoque. Since you don’t want to tell me why you were standing there in the middle of nowhere, perhaps you’d be willing to clear up a little mystery for me.”

Jacob described the scene at the Barrier. He left out the violent ending, hoping that LaRoque hadn’t noticed the hole in the windshield, but he carefully described the behavior of the squatting man.

“But of course!” LaRoque cried. “You make it easy for me!

“You know the initials of this phrase you used, ‘Permanent Probationer,’ that horrible classification which denies a man his rights, parenthood, the franchise…”

“Look, I agree already! Save the speech.” Jacob thought for a moment. What were the initials?

“Oh… I think I see.”

“Yes, the poor fellow was only striking back! You Citizens, you call him Pee-Pee… so is it not simple justice that he accuse you of being Docile and Domesticated? Ergo the doo-doo!”

Jacob laughed, despite himself. The road began to curve.

“I wonder why all those people were gathered at the Barrier? They seemed to be waiting for somebody.”

“At the Barrier?” LaRoque said. “Ah yes. I hear that happens every Thursday. Eatees from the Center go up to look at non-Citizens and they in turn come down to look at an Eatee. Droll, no? One doesn’t know which side throws the peanuts!”

The road turned around one hill and their destination was in sight.

The Information Center a few kilometers north of Ensenada was a sprawling compound of E.T. quarters, public museums and, hidden around back, barracks for the border patrol. In front of a broad parking lot stood the main structure where first-time visitors took lessons in Galactic Protocol.

The station was on a small plateau, between the highway and the ocean, commanding a broad view over both. Jacob parked the car near the main entrance.

LaRoque was chewing, red-faced, on some thought. He looked up suddenly.

“You know I was joking, Just then, when I spoke about peanuts. I was only making a joke.”

Jacob nodded, wondering what had got into the man. Strange.

Jacob helped LaRoque carry his bags to the bus station, then made his way around the main building to find a place outside to sit. Ten minutes remained before he was due at the meeting.

Where the compound overlooked a small harbor he found a patio with shade trees and picnic tables. He chose one table to sit on and rested his feet on the bench. The touch of the cool ceramic tile and the breeze off the ocean penetrated his clothing and drew away the redness from his skin and the perspiration from his clothes.

For a few minutes he sat quietly, letting the hard muscles of his shoulders and lower back relax one by one, sloughing off the tension of the drive. He focused on a small sailboat, a daycraft with jib and main colored greener than the ocean. Then he let a trance come down over his eyes.

Floating. One at a time he examined the things his senses revealed to him and then he canceled them. He concentrated on his muscles one by one, to cut off sensation and tension. Slowly his limbs grew numb and distant.

An itch in his thigh persisted, but his hands remained in his lap until it left of its own accord. The salt smell of the sea was pleasant but equally distracting. He made it go away. He shut off the sound of his heartbeat by listening to it with undivided attention until it became too familiar to notice.

As he had for two years, Jacob guided the trance through a cathartic phase, in which images came and went startlingly fast in healing pain, as two pieces, split apart, tried again to fuse whole. It was a process that he never enjoyed.

He was alone, almost. All that remained was a background of voices, murmuring subvocal snatches of phrases at the edge of meaning. For a moment ha thought he could hear Gloria and Johnny arguing about Makakai, then Makakai herself chattering something irreverent in pidgin-trinary.

He guided each sound away gently, waiting for one that came, as usual, with predictable suddenness: Tania’s voice calling something he couldn’t quite understand as she fell past him, arms outstretched. He still heard her as she fell the rest of the twenty miles to the ground, becoming a tiny speck and then disappearing… still calling.