Richard Powers - The Echo Maker

Robert, smiling like an innocent bystander, rose to defend. The Outpost wasn’t in a roosting area, but only nearby. The visitors would come, one way or another. Didn’t it make sense to absorb them as ecologically as possible, in buildings that preserved an historical awareness, integrated into the natural landscape? Visitors would leave more aware of the need to conserve wildness. Wasn’t the whole point of conservation to protect nature for our appreciation? Or did the Refuge believe that only a select few should enjoy the birds?

This last point was met by room-wide approval. Student council all over again. The Karshes of this world always crush the Riegels, in any open poll. The Karshes had humor, style, unlimited budgets, sophistication, subliminal seduction, neuromarketing…The Riegels had only guilt and facts.

Robert sat back in his seat. He glanced at Karin, a look that lingered like a stalker. How was that? For a weird, fleeting fugue moment, she felt privately responsible for the whole contest.

The Refuge countered: the developers were requesting ten times more water shares than their Natural Outpost would consume. The developers explained their own cautious projections and promised that the Outpost would sell all unused water shares back into the public kitty at cost.

Democracy flailed on, the most cumbersome form of deciding known to man. Breath-powered sailboat. Every village eccentric and homeless aluminum-can collector had his say. How could so blind a process ever reach a right decision? A developer in a pale-green suit and a Refugee in stringy denim, what little hair remaining to him pulled in a ponytail, sparred, their arms ceremonial swords, their voices rising and falling in spectral Kabuki wails. A gauzy filter settled over the gathering, as if Karin had stood up too quickly. The whole room shimmered, like a bean field in an August wind. These people had been gathering here since before development was even an issue. For as long as there were prairies open enough to blind and madden, men had met here to argue, just to prove to themselves that they weren’t alone.

The public was as conflicted as her brother. Worse: as her. The debaters circled, doubling each other, doubling themselves, squaring off against phantom combatants…She sat in the middle of the fray, a double agent, selling herself to both sides. She took the combat inside herself, all possible positions banging around the loose democracy in her skull. How many brain parts had Weber’s books described? A riot of free agents; five dozen specialties in the prefrontal bit itself. All those Latin-named life-forms: the olive, the lentil, the almond. Seahorse and shell, spiderweb, snail, and worm. Enough spare body parts to make another creature: breasts, buttocks, knees, teeth, tails. Too many parts for her brain to remember. Even a part named the unnamed substance . And they all had a mind of their own, each haggling to be heard above the others. Of course she was a frenzied mess; everyone was.

A wave moved through her, a thought on a scale she’d never felt. No one had a clue what our brains were after, or how they meant to get it. If we could detach for a moment, break free of all doubling, look upon water itself and not some brain-made mirror…For an instant, as the hearing turned into instinctive ritual, it hit her: the whole race suffered from Capgras. Those birds danced like our next of kin, looked like our next of kin, called and willed and parented and taught and navigated all just like our blood relations. Half their parts were still ours. Yet humans waved them off: impostors . At most, a strange spectacle to gaze at from a blind. Long after everyone in this room was dead, this camp meeting would rage on, debating the decline in life’s quality, hammering out the urgent details of a vast new development. The river would dry up, go elsewhere. Three or four surviving decimated species would drag here annually, not knowing why they returned to this arid wasteland. And still we’d be trapped in delusion. But before Karin could fix the thought taking shape in her, it turned unrecognizable.

The hearing ended without a resolution. She clutched Daniel, confused. “Don’t they have to come to some decision?”

He gauged her with pity. “No. They’ll sit on the proposal for a few months, then slip out a ruling when no one is looking. Well, at least we know what we’re up against now.”

“I thought it was going to be a lot worse. Some kind of factory outlet megaplex. Thank God it’s just this. You know. Something that doesn’t spew poison. Something that’s at least pro-bird.”

She might as well have stabbed him. He’d been drifting to the exits at the back of the room. He stopped in the middle of the milling pack and grasped her upper arm. “Pro-bird? This? Have you lost your fucking mind?”

Heads turned. Robert Karsh, deep in numbers with two Development Council members, looked up from across the room. Daniel reddened. He leaned in to Karin and apologized in a hot whisper. “I’m sorry. Unforgivable. It’s been a sick few hours.”

She stepped forward to hush him. A hand petted her shoulder. She wheeled to see Barbara Gillespie. “You! What are you doing here?”

That single, arch Gillespie eyebrow. “Being a good citizen. I do live here!”

Caught, Karin made introductions. “I want you to meet my friend Daniel. Daniel, this is Barbara, the…woman I told you about.”

Riegel turned toward her, a stiff, grinning Pinocchio. He couldn’t even stammer. Karin caught sight of Karsh as he left the room, leering at Barbara.

“I liked what you said,” Barbara told Daniel. “But tell me something. What do you suppose these people plan to do with this facility during the five-sixths of the year when there isn’t a crane to be seen?”

Daniel stood gaping at the environmentalists’ combined failure to raise the question during the hearing. “Maybe a conference facility?”

Barbara considered. “That’s possible. Why not?” Then, so briskly it spun Karin, she added, “Well, great to see you, my dear! And good to meet you, Daniel.” Daniel nodded, limp. “Fingers crossed on this one!” Barbara backed away with a crooked smile and a paralyzed prom-queen wave, then stumbled out of the room through the thinning crowd. A part of Karin cursed her exit.

Daniel was suffering. “I’m sorry. I wouldn’t have lost my temper if things hadn’t gone so…I don’t know where that came from. You know I’m not…”

“Drop it. It doesn’t matter.” Nothing mattered but getting free, reaching the real water. “So I’ve lost my fucking mind. We both knew that already.”

But Daniel couldn’t drop it. On the car ride home, he came up with three more theories explaining his verbal assault. And he wanted her to ratify all of them. She did, in the interests of peace. This wasn’t good enough for him. “Don’t say you believe me if you don’t.”

“I agree with you, Daniel. Really.”

It got them home, at least, and into bed. But the postmortem went on, in the dark. He spoke to the plaster cracks in the ceiling. “The whole hearing was a total disaster, wasn’t it?” She couldn’t tell if she was supposed to agree or object. “We didn’t know what hit us. We went into the hedgehog defense right away. Fighting it like it was the usual commercial-strip land grab. We failed to discredit this thing. The Council probably left that room thinking what you did: that this Nature-rama is somehow beneficial.”

She still thought so. Done right, it could even be a populist equivalent of the Refuge, managing the impact of tourists, whose numbers would just keep swelling, anyway.

“They’re obviously up to something. This is just stage one. Look at the water they’re asking for. And your friend is right. They can’t possibly make money if the place is only filled two months out of the year.”