So when starting Dumpmines he had taken the technical directorship, and had done some good work on their SuperRathjes, the giant robot vehicles that did the extraction and sorting at the landfills; but more than ever before he involved himself in labour disputes and the like. This trend in his career had accelerated after the acquisition by Praxis. And on the days when work like that went well, he always went home knowing that he should have been a judge, or a diplomat. Yes—at heart he was a diplomat.
Which made it embarrassing that he had not been able to negotiate a successful outcome to his own marriage. And no doubt the break-up was well-known to Fort, or whoever had invited him to this seminar. It was even possible that they had bugged his old apartment, and heard the unhappy mess of his and Susan’s final months together, which wouldn’t have been flattering to either of them. He cringed at the thought, still rubbing his rough jaw, and drifted toward the bathroom and turned on the portable hot water heater. The face in the mirror looked mildly stunned. Unshaven, fifty, separated, mis-employed for most of his life, just beginning at his true calling—he was not the kind of person that he imagined got faxes from William Fort.
His wife or ex-wife-to-be called, and she was likewise incredulous. “It must be a mistake,” she said when Art told her about it.
She had called about one of her camera lenses, now missing; she suspected that Art had taken it when he moved out. “I’ll look for it,” Art said. He went over to the closet to look in his two suitcases, still unpacked. He knew the lens was not in them, but he rooted loudly through them both anyway. Sharon would know if he tried to fake it. While he searched she continued to talk over the phone, her voice echoing tinnily through the empty apartment. “It just shows how weird that Fort is. You’ll go to some Shangri-La and he’ll be using kleenex boxes for shoes and talking Japanese, and you’ll be sorting his trash and learning to levitate and I’ll never see you again. Did you find it?”
“No. It’s not here.” When they had separated they had divided their joint possessions: Sharon had taken their apartment, the entertainment centre, the desktop array, the lectern, the cameras, the plants, the bed, and all the rest of the furniture; Art had taken the teflon frying pan. Not one of his best arbitrations. But it meant he now had very few places to search for the lens.
Sharon could make a single sigh into a comprehensive accusation. “They’ll teach you Japanese, and we’ll never see you again. What could William Fort want with you?”
“Marriage counselling?” Art said.
Many of the rumours about Fort’s seminars turned out to be true, which Art found amazing. At San Francisco International he got on a big powerful private jet with six other men and women, and after takeoff the jet’s windows, apparently double polarised, went black, and the door to the cockpit was closed. Two of Art’s fellow passengers played at orienteering, and after the jet made several gentle banks left and right, they agreed that they were headed some direction between southwest and north. The seven of them shared information: they were all technical managers or arbitrators from the vast network of Praxis companies. They had flown in to San Francisco from all over the world. Some seemed excited to be invited to meet the transnational’s reclusive founder; others were apprehensive.
Their flight lasted six hours, and the orienteers spent the descent plotting the outermost limit of their location, a circle that encompassed Juneau, Hawaii, Mexico City and Detroit, although it could have been larger, as Art pointed out, if they were in one of the new air-to-space jets; perhaps half the Earth or more. When the jet landed and stopped, they were led through a miniature jetway into a big van with blackened windows, and a windowless barrier between them and the driver’s seat. Their doors were locked from the outside.
They were driven for half an hour. Then the van stopped and they were let out by their driver, an elderly man wearing shorts and a T-shirt advertising Bali.
They blinked in the sunlight. They were not in Bali. They were in a small asphalt parking lot surrounded by eucalyptus trees, at the bottom of a narrow coastal valley. An ocean or very big lake lay to the west about a mile, just a small wedge of it in sight. A creek drained the valley, and ran into a lagoon behind a beach. The valley’s side walls were covered with dry grass on the south side, cactus on the north; the ridges above were dry brown rock. “Baja?” one of the orienteers guessed. “Ecuador? Australia?”
“San Luis Obispo?” Art said.
Their driver led them on foot down a narrow road to a small compound, composed of seven two-storey wooden buildings, nestled among seacoast pines at the bottom of the valley. Two buildings by the creek were residences, and after they dropped their bags in assigned rooms in these buildings, the driver led them to a dining room in another building, where half a dozen kitchen workers, all quite elderly, fed them a simple meal of salad and stew. After that they were taken back to the residences, and left on their own.
They gathered in a central chamber around a woodburning stove. It was warm outside, and there was no fire in the stove.
“Fort is a hundred and twelve,” the orienteer named Sam said. “And the treatments haven’t worked on his brain.”
“They never do,” said Max, the other orienteer.
They discussed Fort for a while. All of them had heard things, for William Fort was one of the great success stories in the history of medicine, their century’s Pasteur: the man who beat cancer, as the tabloids inaccurately put it. The man who beat the common cold. He had founded Praxis at the age of twenty-four, to market several breakthrough innovations in antivirals, and he had been a multi-billionaire by the time he was twenty-seven. After that he had occupied his time by expanding Praxis into one of the world’s biggest transnationals. Eighty continuous years of metastasising, as Sam put it. While mutating personally into a kind of ultra-Howard Hughes, or so it was said, growing more and more powerful, until like a black hole he had disappeared completely inside the event horizon of his own power. “I just hope it doesn’t get too weird,” Max said.
The other attendants—Sally, Amy, Elizabeth and George—were more optimistic. But all of them were apprehensive at their peculiar welcome, or lack of one, and when no one came to visit them through the rest of that evening, they retired to their rooms looking concerned.
Art slept well as always, and at dawn he woke to the low hoot of an owl. The creek burbled below his window. It was a grey dawn, the air filled with the fog that nourished the sea pines. A tocking sound came from somewhere in the compound.
He dressed and went out. Everything was soaking wet. Down on narrow flat terraces below the buildings were rows of lettuce, and rows of apple trees so pruned and tied to frameworks that they were no more than fan-shaped bushes.
Colours were seeping into things when Art came to the bottom of the little farm, over the