helplessness and rootlessness. He wanted to go home too much to be able to admit to Loi—even to himself—that he could not.
Instead, he called Skylink Customer Service and changed his residence pointer to the Avanti, which had a comsole almost as powerful as the one in Houston. The next distraction was replacing his personal phone—now that he had noted its absence, he felt naked without it.
Lila steered him to an executive supplies retailer in one of Portland’s older mail-malls, who offered him a Brazilian-made four-channel wrist phone at Pacific Land Management’s customary generous discount. Outside in the car, he completed the process, initializing the phone with his account number and checking that his directory was intact. When the confirming message came back on the bounce, his last excuse was gone.
“Lila—Skylink is owned by Tetsu Communications?”
“That’s correct.”
“Which is a corporate sibling to Takara Construction, Allied’s primary contractor for
“Yes. Both are subsidiaries of Kiku Heavy Industries, Ltd., a Tokyo-based private stock corporation.”
“How hard is it for Skylink to listen in on the traffic that they’re carrying?”
“It is quite easy, Christopher. Mr. McCutcheon used it only as a last resort, and always with encryption,” Lila said. “If you need to send a message, I can handle it more safely.”
“That’s all right,” Christopher said. “I just wondered.” He touched his phone, and the command bar glowed. “Message to Loi Lindholm. Hold to end, then send,” he said, then paused. “Begin.”
“Hello, Loi. This is Chris.” His heart was racing, even though he did not have to fear her response. “Daniel said that you were worried,” he said, speaking slowly. “I’m sorry. I— these last few days have been the hardest days of my life. Allied’s thrown me out. They think I’m a security risk. And my father—” The tightness threatened to return, and Christopher found other, safer words. “I’m staying at my father’s for a while. I need to figure out what to do.
“I miss you. I wish to God I could come home.” He swallowed hard. “End of message.”
The delivery acknowledgment came back on the bounce.
“Well, Lila—do you know anywhere I can buy a life transplant, cheap?”
“I’m sorry, Christopher. I do not.”
He sighed and squeezed the throttle. The Avanti edged forward. “Then I guess I’ll just come on back to the house.”
For no good reason he could divine, only twice during the drive did he think about crashing the car at full throttle into an approaching ridge.
Curled up on the couch in front of the high-D TV, propped up by pillows and a flask of Puerto Rican rum, Christopher let the sounds and images wash over him.
The TV came up with a pop station out of Los Angeles preselected. But he made no effort to search through the channels, for he was no more interested in one offering than another. He was escaping, and he knew it—and it hardly mattered where he escaped to, so long as he got away.
So a chat show on lesbian incest, with a bioethicist, a Catholic Reform priest, and the national director of Family Love dueling at close quarters, was as good a diversion—no better, no worse— as the seven thousandth rerun of a medical comedy. He remained a passive observer of both, asking no questions and voicing no opinions during the former, declining his part as a heavily bandaged patient in the latter.
He was feeling a bit more participatory during a half-hour pitch for the Because You’re a Woman diet, drawing gargoyle faces on the men and undrawing the clothing of the women. Even the insanity of Denali Devil’s Downhill amused him, at least until a grinning Irish skier missed a gate at the seventeen-thousand-foot level and fell off the mountain at what the announcer straight-facedly called a “high terminal velocity.”
Emboldened by liquor and pity, Christopher risked a glimpse at Current Events, morbidly curious about what they were saying now about him, about Malena Graham, about Jeremiah. He was almost disappointed to find that Current Events wasn’t saying anything at all—not so many as five of the nine hundred stories in the Current Events stack had anything to do with the Diaspora.
Displacing them was a juicy drama—the collapse, just after midnight, of a centuries-old room and pillar salt mine a thousand feet under the trendy Melvindale section of Detroit. Sixteen square blocks had subsided ten meters in a jolt, dropping short-stack condos into their own basements and folding a crowded spin club flat.
One hundred sixty-three were known dead, and at least six hundred were missing, including the Detroit city manager, a noted poet, and three members of the Detroit Pistons basketball team. What’s more, officials feared that the collapse had burst thousands of containers of colloidized hazardous waste stored in the mine in the 1990s. The Archbishop of Detroit, with wages-of-sin solemnity, called it God’s warning to Sodom.
Death in the night, earthquakelike devastation, holiday-season tragedy, toxic poisons, missing celebrities, government neglect, holy vengeance—it was a news executive’s wet dream. Christopher watched the coverage with a rum-flavored bemusement, finding black humor in the absurdities of the event, the stupidities of the reporters.
Christopher’s mood had turned increasingly savage, cynical. It was already unpleasant sharing his mind with such thoughts, and promised to grow uglier still. He needed an escape from his escape. When it finally came, it was from a most unexpected source.
“Christopher, are you awake?” Lila asked. On the TV, dancers writhed to a backbeat.
“Sorry to say.”
“Daniel Keith is calling.”
He looked dumbly at his band. “My phone didn’t ring.”
“It’s a station call to the house, Christopher. Shall I put it up for you?”
Christopher uncrossed his legs and pulled himself closer to vertical. “Sure.”
Keith’s face came up in a box on the TV. “Hello, Chris.”
“Hello yourself.” He shook his head, mostly to clear it. “Surprise, surprise. After this morning—”
“Yeah. I didn’t want to be that short. But I couldn’t talk. I couldn’t even tell you that I couldn’t. Not till I could get out of the complex.”
“You home now?”
“No. Look, Chris, the hair on my neck is standing up just being on the line with you. There’s been a lot of talk around here the last day or two, very strange stuff, none of it official. I didn’t know how much of it to believe. I guess you told me. Your father was Jeremiah?”
“So I’m supposed to believe. I swear I didn’t know.”
Keith nodded. “I might be the only one in the center who’d believe that,” he said slowly.
“I need some answers, Daniel.”
“You want some wisdom? Don’t ask the questions.”
“My father left notes that have me confused. I have to know if what he believed was true.”
“Why?” It was a cautionary, challenging question.
“So I can let go of it. So it’ll let go of me. Will you meet me somewhere?”
Keith frowned and looked away momentarily. “Are you coming back to Houston?”
“I can’t,” Christopher said. “Meet me in Portland. No, better, San Francisco.”
“I’ve got no reason to come west. And I need a reason. A good reason. There’s a limit to how much of a friend I can be to you now. I’m sorry. That’s just the fact.”
“I know. Where, then?”
Keith was silent for a time. “I think I’m going to go up to Chicago and visit my parents when we finally get cleared to leave. Nobody around here’s gotten their winter holiday yet.”
“When?”
“Not tomorrow. Probably not till Friday.”
“I’ll be there Friday. Call me.”
“I don’t know,” Keith said, shaking his head.
“Please, Daniel. An hour. Half an hour.”
“Why do you think I can help?” He almost sounded angry.
