For now, there was something more important to set right. "I know you were, Miri. And I think you have helped Grandpa a lot since he came to live with us." The old man would still be trying to find his shoes if she hadn't. "You remember, we talked about this when Grandpa came? He is not necessarily a nice fellow" — except when he wants a favor, or he's setting you up for a fall; then he can charm almost any human ever horn .
"Y-Yes. I remember."
"What he says when he's trying to hurt you doesn't have any connection with whether you've been good or bad, clever or stupid."
"B-But maybe I was too pushy. You didn't see him this morning, Bob. He was so sad. He thinks I don't notice, but I do. His pulse was way up. He's so afraid that he can't write anymore. And he misses Grandma, I mean Lena. I miss Lena! But I — "
"It's not your responsibility to solve this problem, Miri." He glanced over Miri's head at Alice. "It's mine, and till now I've messed up. Your job, well, that's at Fairmont Junior High."
"Actually, we call it Fairmont High."
"Okay. Look. Before Grandpa came, school was just about all you thought about. That and your friends and your projects. Didn't you tell me you're going to transform the place this Halloween?"
Some shred of her past enthusiasm lit Miri's face. "Yeah. We've got the backstory on all the SpielbergRowling stuff. Annette's going to — "
"Then that and your regular schoolwork is what you should concentrate on. That's your mission, kiddo."
"But what about Robert?"
Robert can go to hell . "I'll talk to him. I think you're right that he's got a problem. But, you know sometimes, well… there's something you have to learn as you grow up. Some people make their own problems. And they never stop hurting themselves and messing up the people around them. When that's the case, then you shouldn't keep hurting yourself for them."
Miri's head bowed and she looked very sad. And then she looked back at him. Her jaw came up in that familiar, stubborn way. "Maybe that's true about other people… but this is my grandfather."
08
No User-Serviceable Parts Within
After that remarkable Saturday, Robert Gu spent considerably less time at his son's home. He slept there, still in the upstairs room. Sometimes he even ate in the dining room. Miri was always somewhere else. Alice was as impassive as stone. When Bob was around, the hospitality was even more sparse. Robert was living on borrowed time, and it had nothing to do with his medical condition.
He hung out in empty rooms at school, reading from his old books. He surfed the web more than ever. Chumlig showed him some modern utilities that hid in his view-page, things that could not even pretend to be WinME programs.
And he drove around town. That was as much to play with the automatic cars as it was to see what San Diego had become; in fact, the suburban sprawl was just as drab as in the past. But Robert discovered that his new, maimed personality had a thing about gadgets. Cryptic machines were everywhere nowadays. They lurked in walls, nestled in trees, even littered the lawns. They worked silently, almost invisibly, twenty-four hours a day. He began to wonder where it all ended.
One day after school, Robert drove into the far East County, past the endless, ordinary suburbs. The housing didn't thin out until he was well into the mountains. But twenty miles beyond El Cajon, he came to a gap in the housing and what looked like a war in progress. Dust plumes spouted from buildings several hundred yards back from the highway. When he rolled down the window, he heard what might have been artillery fire. A frontage road ran along a high fence. A rusted sign said "UP/Express" something or other.
And then the strange firing range was behind him.
The highway was a long straight climb now, up past four thousand feet. It was farther and farther between off-ramps. The auto slowly accelerated. According to the awkward little dashboard display that he'd found in his WinME game folder, they were doing better than 120 miles per hour. The boulders and scrub along the shoulder were a blur, and the window rolled itself closed. He passed the manual vehicles in far right lanes as though they were standing still. Someday, I have to learn to drive again .
Then he was over the crest. The auto slowed, taking the curves at a mere fifty miles per hour. He remembered driving this way with Lena, on a much smaller Highway 8, maybe in 1970. Lena Llewelyn was new to California, new to the U.S.A. She had boggled at the size of the place compared with her native Britain. She'd been so open then, so trusting. That was even before she decided to specialize in psychiatry.
The hills shed their faded green and stood as piles of rounded boulders. The desert spread endlessly below and beyond. He came down from the mountains, turned off Highway 8, and drove slowly along old desert roads toward Anza Borrego State Park. The last of the suburbs were up on the ridgeline. Down here, things were as they had been when he'd been in grad school — even as they had been for centuries before that.
There were plenty of traffic signs on these smaller roads. Some were rusted and tilted, but they were real. His gaze turned to watch a bullet-punctured stop sign dwindle behind him. It was beautiful. A little farther on he came upon a dusty path that ran off across endless desert. The automobile balked at following it: "Sorry, sir, there's no guidance that way, and I notice you don't have a driver's license."
"Ha. In that case, I'm taking a little walk." Surprisingly, there was no objection to that. He opened the door and stepped out into the breezy afternoon. He could feel his spirit unlimber. He could see forever. Robert walked east along the rutted dirt road. Here at last he had reached the natural world. His foot kicked something metallic. A spent round? No. The gray lump had a triple antenna sticking out of the top. He tossed it into the bushes. He was not beyond the web even here. He pulled out his magic foolscap, surfed the local area. The picture showed the ground around him, from some kind of camera built into the paper; little signs floated above every weed — Ambrosia dumosa this and Encelia farinosa that. Ads for the park's gift shop scrolled across the top of the page.
Robert pressed 411. The expense meter at the corner of the page was running now, almost five dollars a minute. That sort of money meant there was a human at the other end. Robert talked to the paper. "So how far am I from — " from the natural world " — how far am I from unimproved land?"
A tag changed color; his request had been subcontracted. A woman's voice replied, "You're almost there; it's another… two miles in the direction you are heading. If I might suggest, sir, you don't really need 411 to answer questions like this. Just — "
But Robert had already stuffed the paper back in his pocket. He set out eastward, his shadow breaking the trail ahead of him. It had been a very long time since he had walked two miles. Even before the Alzheimer's, walking two miles would have been the stuff of an emergency. But today he was not even out of breath, and the pain in his joints was muted. The most important thing about me is broken, while almost everything else works . Reed Weber was right, it was a heavenly minefield. I am so lucky .
Over the wind, he heard the sound of electric motors torquing up. His car was driving off to do business elsewhere. Robert did not look back.
His shadow grew longer, the air cooler. And finally he had reached the beginning of nature. A little voice spoke in his ear, announcing that he was leaving the tagged section of the park. Beyond this point, only "low-rate emergency wireless" was guaranteed. Robert walked on, across the unlabeled wilderness. So this is the closest thing to being alone these days . It felt good. A cold, clean purity.