The Zenith Angle - Bruce Sterling [78]
Before the gates could swing shut, Van grabbed up his pack and hustled inside.
Van trudged uphill in cold and darkness, under starlight, with his eyes gone big as an owl’s. It was a very steep climb. For all his hard work in the gym, the hike had Van huffing, wheezing, and rubbing his thighs. When he plodded his way over a crest, Van could see, lit up like toy ballerinas, a distant nest of gently whirring rotors. Wind power, renewable energy. Out here, those pretty dancing windmills wouldn’t smudge their perfect skies with smoke.
A deer stared at Van fearlessly and went back to raiding the bushes. The road lifted suddenly. Van found himself walking on an echoing metal bridge. More amber lights loomed ahead. Here was a parking lot, all of it up on pillars. It was filled with silent electric vans and logo-covered golf carts.
Van had found Dottie’s research complex. The pictures she had sent him didn’t do the place justice. It was a whole lot odder than it looked in the brochures. The place was like a Silicon Valley health spa built for mountain hobbits.
The complex rose right up a mountain slope, all twinklingly underlit with tiny amber lights. The offices were made of cedar, granite, glass, and aluminum. Lots of perforated grating, pillared balconies, and shiny steel handrails. All these buildings were poised on the mountainside on daintily curved metal feet. Endangered species could frolic right under their floors. Roof gutters caught all the snow and rain and fed it into big cisterns.
It looked amazingly pretty, like something out of a kid’s encyclopedia. For some touchy enviro-fanatical reason, nobody had been allowed to dig anywhere, to break the tender mountain soil. So all the Facility’s water, sewer, and electrical were neatly suspended on pylons, like an Alaska pipeline for toilets. The place was overrun with fat, silver-wrapped pipes. It looked like it had been designed by Super Mario.
Van huffed to catch his breath, then clomped straight up a set of toothy aluminum stairs. He opened a double-paned glass door. He walked down a hall floor lined with dark cork.
He knocked at Room A37.
The door was opened by an old woman wearing rimless bifocals, a colored head scarf, and a lumpy, hand-knitted sweater.
“Sorry,” Van muttered, “wrong room.”
“You must be the husband,” said the gypsy woman.
“Uhm, yeah.”
“You’re late. Dottie had to go. Why didn’t you call?”
Van made a beeline for Dottie’s bedside phone. “I’ll call her right now.”
“Don’t do that. She’s on television.”
“At night?” Van said.
“Of course at night! It’s a telescope!”
The talking woke Ted. Ted was sleeping in a plastic crib at the foot of Dottie’s bed. Ted hustled sideways on his Disney-cartoon sheets and peered through his bars. He saw Van and shrieked.
Van advanced on his son and picked him up.
Ted had become huge. Ted’s noggin was thick with brand-new blond hair. Ted seemed to have added a full fifty percent to his body mass. When Ted struggled, he really meant it now. In Van’s long absence, Ted’s marshmallow baby body had turned into muscle. The boy looked ready to jump into his own clothes, grab up his cup and rattle, and get himself a day job.
“It’s me, your dada,” Van bargained.
“NOOOOOO!” Ted thrashed his thick legs as if jumping hurdles. He was wearing a long-sleeved red flannel onesie suitable for chilly nights. Ted looked like an infant lumberjack. “NOOoooooOOOOO, no, Mama!” His diapers stank.
“I’ll tell Dottie you are finally here,” said the unknown baby-sitter. She vanished out the door.
Van set Ted down on the chilly floor as he hunted down a pack of diapers. Van hadn’t changed a diaper in ages, but it wasn’t a skill one forgot. Ted resented this brutal procedure. He gave Van a look of bitter, jaded suspicion.
“It’s all right, Ted,” Van lied. He buttoned Ted back up and set him on his pudgy feet. With a determined scowl, Ted gripped the edge of his mother’s bed and