Moon Flower Read online

  “Oh, really? That’s too bad,” Ursula said.

  Larry got up and heaved himself over to the refrigerator. It was an old, bulky model and served as the rooming house’s message board, with magnets on the door holding an assortment of notes, reminders, clippings, and postcards from various places. Postcards had become something of a rarity compared to the old days. Ordinary people didn’t travel as much as they used to. The restrictions were a deterrent, and most of even those who had jobs were living on the edge. As he got there, he took his phone from the pocket of his shirt and thumbed a preset number. “Hey, Nancy. We’re opening a coupla beers in the kitchen. You wanna come down?”

  “What else have you got to eat in there, Larry?” Brad asked, looking interested.

  Shearer decided that he could use an early evening too. The lab was scheduled to begin some more tests in the morning. “You catching the BARF?” he asked Rogelio, using the popular version of the acronym for the Bay Area Rapid Transit subway.

  “Uh-huh.” Rogelio nodded.

  “I’ll walk with you.”

  “Sure.”

  That was the custom. Walking alone in the streets on the wrong side of the gated community walls and business park security fences could have its risks. Shearer picked up the jacket that he had draped over the back of a chair and pulled it on, zipping it up halfway. “Say, that’s too bad,” Larry said, turning his head from the opened refrigerator.

  “I have to be in first thing tomorrow.”

  “Take care,” Rogelio told the others as he and Shearer turned for the door.

  “You too.”

  “See you around.”

  “You two take it easy, eh?”

  “Don’t get stuck in a time warp tomorrow, Marc.”

  Shearer and Rogelio came out into the cool evening air and started walking in the downtown direction, toward the subway terminal. Shearer’s apartment was a block farther along. The streets were shabby and littered, the houses run-down, with fences disintegrating around overgrown yards, paint flaking from tired clapboards, and dingy windows, many barred, showing bare blinds or old, sagging drapes. Shopwindows were shuttered or protected by heavy mesh. A redbrick building, originally a hotel, now converted to low-income rentals, was decaying behind a parking lot covered in trash and stripped automobiles. Fading relics from an age that had died.

  Rogelio had a sturdy, deep-chested build, with dark features crowned by a heavy mane of hair, and strode with an air that bespoke confidence and purposefulness. Originally from south of what had been the border, he had kept going when most others halted somewhere in the jumble of shantytowns, strips malls, businesses, and smallholdings that had sprung up in a belt from San Diego to Los Angeles. He worked as a lab technician for a pharmaceuticals company in south San Francisco and still had faith that the system would reward ability, hard work, and diligence. Shearer had predicted what the outcome of the nuts game would be.

  “You’d think, Rog, that people would figure out that if they all just waited, and didn’t take anything out for a while, the amount of nuts in the bowl would soon get very big — automatically doubling every ten seconds.... Or maybe if they just took half between them and let the bowl refill every time. Then they could carry on dividing up a pot that paid everyone well. That was all I told them to aim at. But they never do. Most times, it doesn’t make it to the first ten seconds — like just now. I never said anything about competing, or somebody having to win. But people always assume it. It’s ingrained from the culture.”

  Even though the game had gone the way Shearer said it would, he had no illusions that Rogelio would be convinced that easily. The objection would be either that it didn’t mirror the real world, or yes, that was the way things were, but human nature wasn’t going to change any time soon, and to imagine otherwise was unrealistic. Sure enough, “Okay, it went like you said. But it’s still just a game. Contrived.” Rogelio swung his head briefly as they walked, hand thrust in the slit pockets of his windbreaker. “You’re not telling me that’s how the free market works.”

  “Oh, I know how it works in theory,” Shearer agreed. “But what we saw was how people act in practice. They don’t trust each other. And that’s why they can’t figure out that everyone being rational about it would result in more for everybody. Because if somebody tries to do the sensible thing and hold back, he just gets creamed by the others.”

  “I think that Duke was maybe thinking something like that — right up front.”

  “Oh, you saw that, did you?”

  Rogelio nodded emphatically. “Yes. And look what happened to him. You see. It makes my point.”

  “That most people won’t react rationally,” Shearer said. “But since your free-market theory is premised on everyone rationally pursuing their best interests — that’s even supposing they know in the first place what their best interests are — I’d argue that no, it makes my point. In the world of people that we’ve got, a free market isn’t going to exist. Or at best, it’ll be too unstable to last.”

  “How do you figure that?” Rogelio asked.

  Shearer waved a hand briefly. “Okay, suppose that somehow a system comes into existence that works just the way your theory says. It all interacts, and as things work themselves out, you’re going to see differences. For whatever reason, whether it’s because of ability, hard work, being born in the right place, or plain luck, some people are going to do better than others.”

  “Okay.”

  “And this is where your human nature comes in, Rog. Wealth buys power. The ones who are raking in a bigger share will use it to influence the political process in ways that benefit themselves and penalize their competitors. The pitch gets tilted,” Shearer snapped his fingers, “and as soon as that happens, a free market ceases to exist. And what you just saw is what you get.”

  They walked in silence through the gathering dusk while Rogelio chewed it over. Even if it took until the next time they met, Shearer knew he would find an angle to come back from; but that was what made friends interesting. A panhandler approached them from a doorway. He looked despondent, weary, his face a mask of hopelessness. Not a scam artist. Rogelio fished some change from his pocket and dropped it in the scrawny hand. Other eyes followed them from groups lounging on corners or squatting on front steps as they passed. A police surveillance drone came lower to direct a spotlight beam at something in the next street. On a vacant lot where some offices had been demolished, a group of derelicts were warming themselves around a fire built from the debris. Did all roads converge on the same inevitable end in those other worlds out there too? Shearer wondered again as they came within sight of the razor-wire-topped fence and gate through to the subway terminal. Or had some of them found a different way? Perhaps the answer depended on having a nature that wasn’t “human.”

  He saw Rogelio on his way, and then stepped up his pace to walk the remaining block and a half to the house. A strange car was parked in front, with a third seat that folded down to provide extended luggage space in the rear. It was loaded with the bags, boxes, and oddments of somebody moving home. The light from the lamp opposite and the strip above the door revealed glimpses of coats and wall pictures that Shearer recognized as Fay’s. He stopped, checked again, and then changed direction to walk up to the driver’s door. A man in an overcoat and cloth cap was sitting inside, smoking a cigarette. “Hey, what gives?” Shearer demanded, gesturing, as the window rolled down.

  “Don’t ask me. I’m just a mover for hire, okay? She’s inside.”

  Frowning, Shearer felt for his keys and turned back toward the door of the house.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The door into the bedroom was open. Fay was inside, packing the last of her suitcases. A couple of plastic bags filled with last-minute oddments, and several of her pricier dresses draped on hangers lay across the foot of the bed. She looked up with a start when Shearer appeared and leaned with a shoulder against the jamb, his arms folded loosely. Fay had long made it clear tha
t she looked down on his choice of friends, and she seldom accompanied him on social visits. He usually came home later.

  “So... moving on to the Big Time, eh?” he said. His mouth formed a parody of a smile. Such a turn of events was not totally unexpected, but he hadn’t been prepared for things to come to a head this suddenly. The strain in their relationship had been building up for a while. A queasy feeling rose in his stomach with the realization that this was finally happening after two years. Fay was trying to suppress a shaking in her hand. If it was a nervous reaction from fear of a fight or a yelling match, she needn’t have worried. They were past things like that.

  “Big Time? Is that what you call it?” She shook her head shortly, still looking down at what she was doing, causing her hair to fly out in agitated flares of blond. She was wearing a hip-length coat of imitation white leather and fur trim over tight jeans and spike-heeled boots, with lots of rings. Her wrist jewelry jangled as she laid a sweater on top of the contents that she had already packed, and began stuffing the final few smaller items into the spaces around the sides. “Just wanting a decent house, and to be somewhere where it’s safe to walk the streets? Someone got stabbed outside the subway today.... Cops all over the street. Did you even know?” She made a quick half-gesture that could have indicated the room, the house beyond, or the rest of the world outside. “I can’t live like this. I mean, what are we — day-jobbers who’ve never seen a week’s work in one stretch, or some kind of sharks that need to be where the action is? You’re a physicist, Marc, for Christ’s sake! With degrees. I always thought that meant somebody with brains and some common sense. Well, isn’t that what it’s supposed to mean? Instead, you have these weird ideas about... oh, I’m not sure what they’re about anymore. All I know is I can’t live with it.” They had been through all this before. But it seemed that Fay had a script set in her head that she had to get out, as if to leave no doubts that could invite accusations afterward.

  “It means trying to understand reality the way it is, and not being deflected by how you’d want it to be or how you think it should be,” Shearer said tiredly. “To do that, you have to be free to accept what the evidence is telling you.”

  “Free? You call this free? Free is being able to do what you want, right? Well, I want to mix with company that’s got some class and style, okay? And I want to be able to look around me and see things I don’t see here.”

  “And eat in places where they dress for dinner, and pay someone to come in and clean the house.”

  “Is there supposed to be something wrong with that?”

  “Only the idea that it’s what being free is all about.”

  Fay glared at him as she slammed the lid of the suitcase. “Do you know how much physicists make at places like Stellar Dynamics, or Milicorp Transnational just across the Bay? Or there’s a whole bunch of them up the coast around Portland.”

  “Space engineering. Mercenary warfare contractors....”

  “Sure. What of it?”

  Shearer sighed, straightened up, and moved into the room. Fay stiffened, but he turned to sit back against the vanity, one foot on the floor. “That’s not being a physicist; it’s being a whore. To fit in means you conform. You see only what you’re supposed to see, even when you know there’s something wrong. Reality becomes whatever the guy who’s paying wants.” He shook his head. “No, that isn’t what I call being free.”

  “It’s being paid something decent for what you know!” Fay closed the catches with a couple of fierce swipes. “Don’t you have any self-respect, any pride?”

  “Maybe a little too much. So I could help them make better molecular disruptor beams. Can you imagine what it’s like to be fried slowly from the inside? That’s what human beings in other places are paying so that people can live the way you want. Does knowing that still make it worth it to you?”

  Fay lifted the suitcase onto its side and collected the other items together, grasping the bags with one hand and draping the garments over her forearm. She looked at him scornfully, her other hand resting on the handle of the case. “All I know is that I can’t deal with all of the world’s problems. It’s the way life has always been. That’s the real reality that you’ve never been willing to face, Marc. Or couldn’t. To win, you’ve got to be a player. But you just won’t, will you? You don’t even get in the game.” She lifted the case off the bed and paused to check around for anything she might have missed. “And don’t start giving me the line about cooperating instead of competing, and the world not having to be this way, because I’ve had it up to the ears. It’s never going to change, and you won’t. So...” She let it trail away and shrugged “So that’s it. It’s over. Have a nice life.”

  Even as she moved toward the door, her manner seemed to be saying that if he’d only show her she was wrong by asserting himself enough to stop her, maybe it could be different. But he couldn’t. It would never be any different, and he would have been acting a lie. All the same, he couldn’t hold back a stab of bitterness.

  “So where are you going? Found yourself some starter husband material with a cool pad and the right wheels?”

  Fay sighed wearily in a way that asked if this was necessary. Inwardly, Shearer was already regretting his words. “No, I’m moving in with a girlfriend until I get myself straightened out. Okay? But at least it’s inside some walls and has guards with guns on the gates.” She crossed the living room to the outer door, which Shearer had left open. As she disappeared through it she tossed back over her shoulder, “And no, don’t ask me where. That isn’t your concern anymore.”

  Shearer listened to her bumping her way down the stairs, then moved over to the window and watched her emerge into view below. The driver in the cloth cap came around, opened the near-side rear door, and helped her load the things in with the rest. Fay climbed into the second-row seat, and the driver returned to the front. Shearer heard the car’s engine start. The lights came on, and moments later it pulled out and moved away along the street. He went through the living room to close the door, then came back to the kitchenette and filled the kettle to heat some water for coffee. The place looked bare without Fay’s pictures on the walls and a lot of familiar ornaments and knick knacks gone from the shelves and worktops. An odd numbness seemed to have come over him, making him unable to decide quite how he felt.... For the time being, anyway. All that would come later. But already he knew deep down that it was best this way.

  He turned to the refrigerator and opened it to see what there was that would make a sandwich.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Although the quantum physics developed in the course of the twentieth century had led to such stunning practical applications as the Heim drive with its opening up of interstellar space, an understanding of exactly what constituted the physical reality underlying the mathematics remained as elusive as ever. Various interpretations had been put forward over the years to account for such mysteries as how an entity could be both a wave and a particle at the same time, or how a choice of which experiment to perform in one place could apparently affect instantaneously what was observed somewhere else. But no conclusive way had been found for deciding between them, and the debates between schools of philosophical bent continued to rage, while more practically inclined scientists got on with such workaday business as devising more efficient ways of sending some people to the stars and others to eternity.

  A curiosity that went back to the earliest years of quantum theorizing was that the wave equations describing both massive and massless particles yielded two forms of solution, known as “retarded” and “advanced.” The retarded solutions described entities possessing positive mass-energy, and were the ones employed in formulating the quantum descriptions of the world that had proved so successful in modeling physical phenomena and predicting experimental results. The advanced solutions, on the other hand, not only invoked the peculiar property of negative mass-energy, but also traveled backward in time. Hence, through most of the history of quan
tum theory, they had been dismissed as a mathematical artifact having no physical meaning.

  However, a view of quantum mechanics that emerged toward the end of the twentieth century and known as the Transactional Interpretation took the position that they were real. And when, to the consternation of many, it proved able to account for many aspects of quantum weirdness that were still causing all the rival interpretations difficulties after the best part of a century, it began attracting a dedicated following to add to the already noisy debate.

  Evan Wade had reasoned that if “A-waves” were real, it should be possible to demonstrate their existence experimentally, and doing so became his consuming ambition. His interest had its roots in earlier work he had been involved in that had come to be known as biophotonics — the emission of low-intensity photons by organic cells and their role in intercellular communication and coordination. For many years this had been a controversial subject, with the reality of the phenomenon being hotly disputed. When the matter was finally settled in the affirmative and legitimized with an officially recognized label, Wade’s mind turned to the possibility that here could be Nature’s key to establishing the existence of A-waves.

  Unlike the macroscopic processes that classical physics describes — ones involving the motions and interactions of matter in bulk — biological systems are able to manipulate individual quantum entities. Examples are the passing of single electrons along atoms of the ATP chain by the energy metabolism, or the handling of ions in the nervous system. Such behavior is governed not by classical physics in the way that biologists had attempted for a long time, with limited success, to apply, but by quantum physics. Biophotonics research confirmed that certain molecular structures were fine-tuned to couple with specific frequencies and modes of electromagnetic radiation; hence they constituted highly efficient antennas. Wade became convinced that the key to creating an A-wave detector would be found in the architecture of natural molecular radiators and absorbers. That had been the thrust of the work he had pioneered at Berkeley, and he had continued to oversee the project from his private practice through a deal that he’d worked with the administrators. Shearer, who had come on board initially as Wade’s assistant, took over when Wade left with the mission sent to follow up discovery of the planet Cyrene.