Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

“Oh my God, Robert. I can’t believe you’re saying that. Look around! We’ve trashed the place.”

“What are you talking about? The ordinary rez teenager lives better than royalty used to. I’d rather live now than at any other moment. Except the future.”

“That’s because you’re an animal. I mean: that’s because you’re not an animal.”

“Since when did you get such convictions?”

Since she realized how little she could do to change Mark. She had to put her energies elsewhere, or die. This river might need her, more than her brother ever had.

They’d get onto thin ice within minutes, then stay out there, spinning arm in arm, a whole pairs freedance routine. Each needed to rout the other: pointless yet irresistible. She preferred screaming in horror at Karsh’s outrages to murmuring in agreement at Riegel’s pieties. Robert knew the truth that would forever elude Daniel, all the way to the grave: we love only what we can see ourselves in.

Invariably, Karsh would pump her. “How are things at the Save-a-Bird store? Tell me about this shiny new fund drive. You folks planning on buying up some wetlands?”

“First tell me about your consortium’s new shopping center.”

“Not a shopping center!”

“What the hell is it, then?”

“You know I can’t tell you that.”

“While I’m supposed to shout my little secrets from the rooftops?”

“So you do have a secret? You people are up to something?”

Heady, his begging. She had some power over him. The taste of it made up for no end of past humiliations. “There aren’t that many contestable spots of value along the river left, you know.” Something Daniel had said at breakfast, a couple of mornings earlier. She repeated it as if she’d just thought of it herself.

“We only want to stay out of your way,” Karsh claimed. “We wouldn’t want to develop in any areas that the Refuge sees as essential to preserve.”

“Then you ought to sit down with the trustees and work this out, acre by acre.”

He chuckled. “Have I told you that you are really adorable?”

“Not in this lifetime.”

“Well, if you and I were in charge, that’s what we’d be doing. Seriously. All this corporate cloak-and-dagger stuff gets on my nerves. Let’s talk once this thing is public. You’ll be a whole lot prouder of me then.”

The word proud went right through her. Something in her did admire him. He could point to things and claim paternity. Mostly horrible things, granted, but solid and finished. At least Karsh had left a scar on the landscape. She could point to nothing except a series of service jobs, all lost, and a condo, now sold. She hadn’t even procreated, something all her old high school acquaintances did more easily than Karin cleaned house. Even her own brother said she was nothing. At thirty-one, she had stumbled at last into work of consequence. She ached to tell him how worthwhile. “Proud?” she asked, ready to be lost. “How proud?”

“You’ll see, if we get our Development Council approval. If we don’t, the whole thing is moot. Come to the public hearing and find out.”

“I have to,” she said, a sultry tease. “For my job .”

She went to the hearing with Daniel. He drove, and she judged mercilessly the whole way. “If you get to the stop sign first, you’re supposed to go through it first. Don’t sit there and wave other people through.”

“It’s basic politeness,” he said. “If everyone…”

“It’s not politeness,” she shouted. “It just screws people up.”

He shrunk back. “Evidently.” All the cruelty he could muster, and it mortified her. By the time they got to the hearing, she was contrite. She took his arm as they walked through the Municipal Building parking lot.

She dropped it in the foyer, seeing Karsh and his Platteland colleagues. She kept her eyes down on the peach-colored marble as Daniel led her to the hearing room. They hunted for seats in the filling chamber. Daniel scoped the room. She followed his eyes, over the mostly geriatric crowd. Two kids from the university community cable channel manned a video camera halfway down the right-hand aisle. Other than them, most of the room was drawing Social Security. Why did people wait until they had one foot in the grave before caring about their future?

“Not a bad house,” she told Daniel.

“You think? How many, would you say?”

“I don’t know. You know me and numbers. Fifty? Sixty?”

“So…roughly one-tenth of one percent of people directly impacted?”

They joined the Refuge contingent. Daniel came alive and Karin dragged behind him, a cowbird in the nest. The group fell into plan and counterplan, Karin serving up her prepared research. She watched Daniel at work, energized by the forces deployed against them. Long odds made him more attractive than he’d been in weeks.

Just behind the student cable crew, on a chair pulled deliberately off-camera, sat Barbara Gillespie. The sight of her rattled Karin: incompatible worlds. “That’s Barbara,” she told Daniel. “Mark’s Barbara. What do you think?”

“Ah!” Daniel flinched.

“Doesn’t she have something? Some kind of aura? It’s okay; just the truth.”

“She looks very…self-possessed.” Afraid to look, confirming her.

The Platteland contingent chose that moment for their entrance, striding as a group up to the other developers in the front row, just in front of the council tables. She and Daniel both looked away. After a minute, she sneaked another look. If Karsh had acknowledged her, the moment had passed. He was waist deep in presentation materials, the art of consequence. Dizzy, Karin glanced back at Barbara, who lifted one palm in a covert wave. Danger , the flicker of greeting said. Humans everywhere.

The hearing came to order. The mayor addressed the council and established the procedures. A spokeswoman from the development group took the podium, darkened the room, and fired up an LCD projector. The screen behind the council tables flashed a title slide, the ubiquitous Nature template. The slide, in Mistral font, read: New Migrants on Our Ancient Waterway .

Karin twisted around to Daniel, incredulous. But he and the Refuge braced for the show, jaws clenched. The slides flipped through their paces, meandering like the river in question. The pitch aimed at the last target Karin had expected: what the Development Council called the “Hospitality Sector.”

A bar graph showed the number of visitors to the spring migration over the last ten years. Numbers were an eternal mystery to her, but she could gauge lengths. The bars were doubling every three years. By the time she died, much of the country would be traipsing through every March.

The speaker metamorphosed into Joanne Woodward before Karin’s eyes. “The concentrated staging of almost every migratory sandhill crane on earth has become one of the most breathtaking wildlife spectacles available on earth.”

“Available?” she whispered. But deep in mental battle, Daniel couldn’t hear. A panoramic photo followed — a stretch of the Platte not far from Mark’s. An overlay faded in, an artist’s rendition of a rustic settlement complete with old homesteads and sod houses. The speaker christened it the Central Platte Scenic Natural Outpost, and was deep into listing its environmental principles of construction — low-impact setting, passive solar, simulated split-rail fences made from millions of recycled milk cartons — when Karin saw: the consortium wanted to build a sprawling tourist village for crane peepers.

The battle unfolded in glacial pantomime, with developers and conservationists charging and countercharging. Daniel waded into the fray, landing a couple of stinging blows. The birds were spectacular, he pointed out, precisely because the river had drained away beneath them, concentrating them in a few remaining havens. Drawing even one more cup of water out of an already breaking biome was unconscionable. Karin had been over the facts, facts she’d helped research. Every word Daniel spoke was gospel. But he preached with such messianic passion that she felt the room discount him as yet another finger-pointing Jeremiah.