Sixty days and counting - Kim Stanley Robinson [112]
As the days passed they went through one or the other of the various stages of Rudra’s passage through the bardo—Frank lost track of the details, but he tried to remember the last funeral’s date, said to be the most important one for those who wished to honor the memory of that particular incarnation.
He was at a loss for what to do when not at work. The Old Executive Offices, though much closer to the centers of national power, were nowhere near as comfortable to spend time in as the NSF building had been. It was not possible to sleep there, for instance, without security noticing and dropping by to check on him. Meanwhile his van was probably still GPSed and would be one of the ways that Edward Cooper was keeping track of him. He needed it for a bedroom and to get out to the Khembalis, and yet he wanted to be able to drop off the grid every day when he left work.
He didn’t know. Show up to work, work, disappear, then show up again the next day. This was important, given the things that were happening.
What would happen if he got Edgardo’s help to take all the transponders out of his van?
But that would alert Cooper that Frank knew the chips were there and had removed them. It was better the way it was, perhaps, so that he could find them and remove them when he really had to, and then travel off-grid. He might need the van if Caroline went back to Mount Desert Island and he wanted to drive up to see her. In general it was an advantage. That was what Edgardo had meant.
He didn’t know what to do. He couldn’t figure it out, and he had no place to stay. What to do, how to live. Always a question, but never more so than now. He could do this, he could do that. Anyone could; no one had to.
Do the duty of the day. (Emerson.)
The easiest thing was to work as long as possible. It was a kind of default mode, and he needed that now. The fewer decisions the better. He needed a job that filled all the waking hours of the day, and he had that. But now Optimodal was not optimum, and he didn’t really want to go to the farm, and his treehouse was gone. His home had washed away in the flood of events. All he had left was his van, and his van was chipped.
Out of habit he went back out to Site 21. Summer was fully upon them, and all the leaves were green. But the site was empty these days, and Sleepy Hollow had been dismantled.
He sat there at the picnic table wondering what to do.
Spencer and Robin and Robert came charging in, and Frank leaped up to join them. “Thank God,” he said, hugging each in turn; they always did that, but this time it mattered.
They ran the course in an ecstasy, as usual, but for Frank there was an extra element, of release and forgetfulness. Just to run, just to throw, life crashing through the greenery everywhere around them. They ran in a swirl of becoming. Everyone died sometime; but it was life that mattered.
Afterward Frank sat down with Spencer near the chuckling creek, brown and foamy. “I’m wondering if I could join your fregans,” he said.
“Well, sure,” Spencer said, looking surprised. “But I thought you lived with the Khembalis?”
“Yes. But my friend there died, and I—I need to get away. There are some issues. I’m under a weird kind of surveillance, and I want to get away from that. So, I’m wondering if you would mind, maybe—I don’t know. Introducing me to some people or whatever. Like those times we went to a dinner.”
“Sure,” Spencer said. “That happens every night. No problem at all.”
“Thanks.”
“So you’re doing something classified then?”
“I don’t know.”
Spencer laughed. “Well, it doesn’t matter. Life outdoors is a value in itself. You’ll like it, you’ll see.”
So he went with Spencer, on foot, to the house of choice for that evening—a boarded-up monster, not a residential house but a half-block apartment complex that had been wrecked in the flood and never renovated. There were a lot of these, and the ferals and fregans now had maps