“I can look on all this as an adventure,” he said aloud, “or I can be afraid.”
Martin perused his shelves and gathered up the necessary disks and cubes, instructed the home manager and as afterthought called his attorney to let him know where he might be found if after a week he was not back at his apartment. The last edge of suspicion.
A long midnight blue private car the size of a minibus arrived curbside on time and opened its door to receive him into soft gray and red lounge comfort. The car hummed through La Jolla streets crowded by gaily dressed lunch throngs. It quickly found the Fed-5 slaveway entrance, speeding north.
Ten minutes to Carlsbad between late twentieth checkerboard condos crowding the slaveway like cliff houses, now tenements for those living below Carlsbad’s kilometer high inverted pyramid. A turn east at the pyramid and off the slaveway onto smooth concrete county road twisting through the hills and across fields spotted with stacked coin haciendas, villas, mosques, glass domes, blue ocean tile far from the sea, miniature lakes, golf courses, half timber brick tudor estates: havens of the eccentric old rich who preferred to be away from the ostentation of the monuments and the bourgeois haunts of the littoral minded.
Viewed from the sea California’s southern coastline resembled the wall of a vast prison or some careless gaily colored wrinkle of basalt cast up by the Earth, cooling into cubes and tubes and hexagons and towers filled with lemmings gathered from around the world: Russian colonies of expatriate exploiters of the natural wealth of the Siberian masses from the decades of Openness with their shoreside bistros; Chinese and Korean colonies come too late to buy extravagant land; old rich Japanese and the last Levantine families of the oil century that had sold their land for yet more fortunes to the builders of monuments, all clutching their allotted rectangular boxes. These competed with a few discouraged outnumbered old Californios, their déclassé ribbon-wall habitat now overshadowed by these same monuments and newer larger combs.
It made sense that Albigoni had his estate away from all of this, yet the publisher had not followed the reverse tide of those westerners who had moved thousands of miles east to reclaim the central states and the old catastrophe of New York.
“Is that it?” Martin asked the car. They had turned onto a private road through the shade of canyon live oaks and now approached a sprawling five floor complex apparently made of wood, with white walls and a brick colored roof and a great broad central tower. The building looked familiar to Martin though he had surely never seen it before. The controller, a dedicated low level thinker, said, “This is our destination, sir.”
“Why does it look familiar?” he asked.
“Mr. Albigoni’s father had it built to resemble the old Hotel Del Coronado, sir.”
“Oh.”
“He was very fond of that hotel. Mr. Albigoni’s father duplicated much of it here.”
Pulling into a high broad entryway Martin leaned forward gazing at brick steps and brass rails leading up to a broad glass and wood door, stained woodwork or white painted woodwork, visualizing the raw materials dragged with heavy equipment screaming from forests decades ago; here perhaps Brazil or Honduras, there Thailand or Luzon, woodflesh felled by great mechanical jaws, denuded by wirebrush maws, sawed on the spot into timber, dried and banded, graded, severed ends painted, packed and shipped.
Martin did not enjoy wood furniture. It was his peculiarity to feel in plants and especially trees a higher consciousness uncomplicated and profound; no minds no self no Country but the simplest response to life imaginable: growth and sex without ecstasy or guilt, death without pain. He did not express these beliefs to anyone; they were part of his secret midden of private thoughts.
Paul Lascal came down the steps and stood beside the car as the door opened with a sigh. He extended his hand and Martin shook it while still surveying the woodwork, lips parted like a child’s in heads up wonder.
“Glad to have you aboard, Dr. Burke.”
Martin nodded politely. He pocketed the released hand and asked softly, “Where to?”
“This way. Mr. Albigoni is in the study. He’s been reading all of your papers.”
“Good,” Martin said, though it was really neutral information; Albigoni’s understanding was not required. He would not be going up Country. “I met with Carol,” he told Lascal in a wide dark hall dark granite flooring wood vaults corbels columns exotic woods mahogany bird’seye maple teak walnut others he could not identify as disgraceful in their way as the skins of extinct animals, though of course the trees were not extinct. The time in which they had been cut down and carpentered had been a bad time, a sinful time, but the trees had survived and now flourished. New farmgrown genetically altered wood was cheap and therefore little used by the wealthy, who now preferred artificial materials made rare by the cost and energy of their creation. Albigoni’s was a house caught between the age of gluttony and the age of proletarian plenty.
Lascal had said something he had not heard. “Pardon?”
“She’s a fine researcher,” Lascal repeated. “Mr. Albigoni is very pleased to have the services of both of you.”
“Yes; well.”
Lascal preceded him into the study: more wood, dark and bookrich with perhaps twenty or thirty thousand volumes, the thick sweet dust smell of old paper, wood again, age and rot in suspension.
Albigoni sat in a heavy oak chair before a slate. Rotating diagrams of human brains in cross section, rostral, caudal, ventral, crossed the slate. He raised his head slowly, blinking like a lizard, face pale and old with grief. He might not have slept since they last met.
“Hello,” Albigoni said flatly. “Thank you for agreeing and coming. There isn’t much time. Beginning the day after tomorrow the IPR will be open to us and all of your facilities will be available. There are some points I’d like to have explained before then.”
Lascal dragged a chair forward and Martin sat. Lascal remained standing. Albigoni swiveled elbows on chair arms and leaned forward like an old man, broad Roman patrician face, lips that once smiled naturally, friendly eyes now empty. “I’m reading about your triple focus receptor. It picks up signals from circuitry established in the skin by special neurological nano. It’s designed to track activity at twenty-three different points around the hippocampus and corpus callosum.”
“Yes. If we’re going up Country. It’s versatile and can do other jobs in other areas of the brain.”
“It doesn’t disturb the subject?” Albigoni asked.
“No long-term effects. The nano withdraws to skin surface and is retrieved; if it somehow doesn’t withdraw, it simply breaks down, inaccessible metals and proteins.”
“But the feedback probe…”
“Excites neurochemical activity through selected pathways, neural gates; creates transmitters and ions which the brain interprets as signals.”
Albigoni nodded. “That’s intrusive.”
“Intrusive but not destructive. All these stimuli are naturally reversible.”
“But you don’t actually explore the subject’s mind directly, one to one.”
“No. Not in first-level exploration. We use a computer buffer. My program in a computer interprets the signals received from the subject and recreates the deep structure imagery. The researcher explores this deep structure in computer simulation and if necessary engages the feedback stimulus for a queried response. The subject’s mind reacts and that reaction is reflected in the simulation.”