Second Malvern

By Peter Carnahan

Five years after the end of the Ethnic Wars, in 2033 AD, Audrey Hartwright visits the site of the Battle of Malvern, where her husband died. There she finds a multi-national corporation hard at work on a secret project that turns out to be deadly for those involved. She joins a radical environmental group to fight the corporation, and with her colleagues Laughing Elk, an electronics expert, Chloe, a biological scientist and Penny Lagersmith, an Indiana Supreme Court Justice, pursues the corporation to Nevada in an attempt to block their plans. The final showdown is in the remote desert and results in the destruction of the World Cultural Center in Las Vegas.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jun 16, 2001
• ISBN: 9781462802944

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Copyright © 2001 by Peter Carnahan.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

This book was printed in the United States of America.

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Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

NOTE

This book begins in 2033 AD, five years after the conclusion of my novel The Ethnic Wars. It picks up a few of the supporting characters from that book to tell an entirely different story of what our future might be. I hope that those who have not read The Ethnic Wars will be able to infer enough about its events to follow the beginning parts of this story.

P.C.

For Ted, who helped with the ideas and the science.

CHAPTER ONE

PARKING LOT

2033 AD

Ben, I don’t know whether that spot on the pavement is you or a drip from the transmission. That slow leak you were always going to get fixed. You sure made a mess of this place. When was that? Eighteen years ago, the Battle of Malvern? I don’t know if you can see this, but it’s just the shells of two-story office buildings, all over the hillside, with irregular open spaces in front of them where the grass hasn’t finished breaking up the parking lots. You can still see char marks on the buildings. They’re like caves now, the fronts stove in on every one of them, just a bunch of open mouths. The grass is waist tall and there are weird plants. Thalidomide bushes taller than a man, than you, everywhere. It’s the town dump. They just walked away from it, like the corps always do, and built in the next county.

I suppose I just walked away, too. After you left, you fucker, to join your A-As, to find your roots, fight your wars, I couldn’t just sit there and drink Ener-Vibe martinis all day between bouts in the gym room keeping the pects springy, even with all the money you left me. Sure, it was plenty for a lifetime, with mine, but you know what I needed, a man, but not even a man, something to do.

So I’m at Downingtown Central now, that’s the new capital of this Yumcie paradise they used to call the Main Line, then the suburbs. Now it’s just what we call a 4000:1 grid. That’s the standard, four thousand people per square mile, eight for business use, spread equally over all the land—what used to be mountains, meadows, woods, old villages, dairy farms, swamps, commercial strips—everything just equaled out and connected by these plastic tubes that the roads and some trains run in. Land use, that’s what I’m into. It’s idealistic, sometimes. Sometimes anything but.

And it keeps me at the center of things, Downingtown, and I meet a fair number of men and still enjoy that occasionally, but I’m not about to take on a tame one. You spoiled me for that.

So here I am, Ben, looking at the smudge on the pavement that could be your blood or transmission fluid or oil, or probably a combination, since blood doesn’t last that long. Nobody cleaned up here. I can imagine what that day was like cause you left a lot of junk here. These long, jointed, wheeled machines, I think they called them snakes, are rotting all over the place, like gravestones tossed around by an earthquake or a flood. They did finally pull the bones out of them, years later, or most of the bones. You still scuff up a vertebrae here or there, or a knuckle, walking through the high grass. And the ecology’s settled down again after a generation of overfed crows and buzzards and wild-eyed cats. Big flies. Talk about land use, I think this may be my next assignment now that the bones are gone. You would think some would consider it holy ground, but people don’t think that way these days.

Nor would you have. You were the consummate realist, the corporate cruise missile—until the end maybe. I say that because I don’t really know how or why you died, except that you were found here, out in the open, and the gun emplacements were in there, inside the building in the secretarial pool. After the war, I traced the unit that had been here on the hillside during the attack, the RN unit, under a General Jefferson, traced them by communo. It was easy for me, being white, and still able to put on that old-style, lollipop-licking little girl voice I learned from my mother and a thin cover story about tracing a yardman used to work for my daddy. Took about a year, but I found a young guy who’d been right here, who’d seen you and he told me how this big black guy just stood up and started walking toward them, singing and firing. They could hear you singing over all the guns. He said they were scared shitless—excusing my presence, ma’am—that you seemed like some kind of man of steel, with the shots bouncing off you. How you got all the way across the parking lot before you fell and how you crawled up the final few feet. He didn’t know it was your space.

There’s your sign, fresh as if you were alive and coming to work tomorrow. Whatever that vinyl stuff they engrave is, it lasts forever on its little post, lasts longer than the snakes. C. B. Hartwright, Pres.

I knew the Pres., Ben, and he was some guy, and I knew the man, and that was some yang and yin, but this guy who came across the parking lot singing and firing, who was he?

Baby, we’re all a story. Sometimes you feel like you’re a story been told a thousand millennia ago, and you just the echo, the last vibration. Click, click, out. And sometime you feel like there’s no vibration at all, just flat, nothing, the toothpaste never come out of the tube. You know I had mornings like that, and not for love of you, neither.

That’s hell, Ben, when you went inside like that, I don’t know a better definition.

For me too, baby, but that’s always there. Men lead lives of quiet desperation, or noisy desperation, lookin around at this place. He said men because that’s what you said in those days, but I think it is men, or at least men’s desperation is more isolated than a woman’s. What do I know? I don’t know nothing about women except I like them.

There’s this old guy I talk to every week. Go visit him four p.m. every Wednesday afternoon. He’s housebound, you see, moves around the ground floor with quad canes, seems grateful for the attention. I knew I liked him right away I said I’m C.B., and he said call me G.D. Tit for tat. And we have a grand old time Wednesday afternoons, just sittin and talkin, like two old farts on the bench in front of some Cracker County Courthouse, exchanging ancient wisdom. He’s pretty sour on some things these days, but he keeps his sense of humor.

Women, he says, and he does this big shrug, whole upper body. What do they want? They outlive us, Benny, and they predate us too. And I’m sitting here, Benny, and I can barely recall this little dark-haired girl I was so crazy about, and the others, the blonds that turned me into a goat or a bull, a swan even, and what was that all about? I can remember the fury of it but not much more. That’s women. But woman, the great singular, the Great Earth Mother, or some such, she’s the serious one. She makes me feel like a sex toy, something from a box on a shelf. I like women, but woman? . . . Save me.

So he goes on like that and these Wednesday afternoons are a good time, and I don’t want to bore you but it’s been a while since we talked, baby. I’m glad you came here, wherever it is, I guess I can see what I remember as that parking lot. Tell me about it, hon. Who won the war, anyway?

No one, Ben, or everyone. They just finally got it stopped. And everyone’s holding onto that because I think they realized belatedly they were dumb to begin it, but it was too late and they didn’t know how to stop it. And then some bright people came along and did. Your buddy Fazen was one.

That ole muva, how is he?

I don’t know. I don’t go back to the city. Nobody out here does.

So what is it?—everyone livin apart? Black in there, white out here?

Not intended that way, I think. People just settled down where they were when the fighting stopped. And then there’s been so much prosperity here—in the city too, they’re doing well in there—there hasn’t been time to think about all those old problems. But the hatred has gone, Ben, all that public posturing is out. People are polite with each other again. All Alphonse and Gaston, and fearful, I think, of what we could slip back into. Would it be any easier for you, with all your special demons? I don’t know. A bit, I think. We could have a life.

We had a life, baby, I know how good it was. I just had this other part of me, you know, time came I had to be black.

That’s what was shitty about that time, in a sentence. People had to be things.

You never did understand.

I understood, you fucker. Hey Ben, I have to go. You got the time?

No, baby, we don’t have the time here. Or the place.

I have to get back. If they found out I’m not at the dentist but gone standing in the Malvern waste site, in a parking lot, with a bunch of wild phlox in my hand. Well, aberrant behavior, that’ll trigger the surveillance computers quicker than anything. You can stand on top of the forty-story Comm-Mart in Downingtown Central and yell Fuck the Government and nobody notices. Everyone wants to fuck the government. But aberrant behavior? Look out.

CHAPTER TWO

LAND U

Audrey Hartwright stopped by the drugstore on level G-6 and bought some gauze to put, rolled up, along her gum line. Just a bit of swelling and slurring—that would be convincing--but nobody noticed as she stepped out of the exterior elevator on the thirtieth floor, and waved to Tommi at Reception.

Jush froze up, she said.

And went down the hall to her office. On her desk screen was the usual panic message from Woodbridge.

She punched Animate and his round young face with the worried flop of hair over the forehead came on the screen, "Audrey, please call me the minute you get back, then a pause, a glance to right and left, a confidential voice, We’ve got an application from Ecol Universal."

He sat back from the sender, pulled in his chin in that middle-aged way he had adopted and looked up from under his brows.

Way under the bad actor, Audrey thought, under the gestures and mugs and knowing looks, there’s a nice young man somewhere. I wish he’d come out.

She buzzed him and he said, in his super-casual voice, Oh hi, sweetie, meet me at Trans 25, let’s walk to archive.

This was Woodbridge’s path when he wanted to discuss really deep gossip, the walkway through the AWTS tubes, the All Weather Transit System that ran small passenger cars in a loop through the downtown office towers twenty-five stories up. The hum of the cars passing made surveillance difficult, he said with his best espionage look.

So they walked along, Woody talking out of the side of his mouth like Bogart, Audrey glancing down and enjoying the bustling activity of Downingtown Central on a hot June afternoon, the little trains in the other AWTS tubes zipping back and forth, the ring of covered plazas that surrounded the center full of shoppers and office workers on break, sitting just outside the spray of the colored fountains. In all this jumble they’d made of the land with their 4000:1 standard and their 8000:1 standard, they had created a few nice corners. That’s why she stuck it out, she guessed, at Land U.

Audrey took the rolled-up gauze out of her cheek and dropped it in a vacuum basket in the tube wall.

"Well, you know why I’m so excited, for God’s sake, Woody was saying, Ecol Universal is the biggest land grabber in the hemisphere. I mean, they don’t come in anywhere unless they can cut up a whole rain forest or something. Can you imagine Ecol saying with a straight face, oh, we just want to drill for a little groundwater in the Malvern waste site. We might bottle it and sell it in the supermarkets, for Christ’s sake. Profit margin two cents a bottle? Come on. Yet that’s exactly what their app says. Permission to drill."

So what can they do? Let them drill.

Sweetie, you’re such an innocent. I sometimes feel like your father.

You don’t remotely resemble my father.

Ecol drilling for spring water is like Disney saying we’re in the mouse ear business. Come on.

So what’re you going to do?

He looked suddenly mournful and his hands went into his pockets. Bogart became Woody Allen, "What can I do? This thing hits my screen with a sticky from the Director himself, Big Oscar, Woodbridge—Looks like a good one. Please expedite!"

So?

So, it’s already gone.

The process was one Audrey knew by heart, since at Land U they were the escorts, the ones who did the first review of every proposal and then shepherded it through. In her more disenchanted moments, she told people, We run an escort service.

Strange, Audrey thought, that after all the fulmination against big government, all that hostility toward what we used to call Washington, (the central government, that is, not the A-A Cultural Village that we have now in all those big buildings), after all that got smashed to pieces on the way to the Ethnic Wars; it’s as if the million pieces that it got smashed into all became little governments, little Washingtons all over the place.

We are a people who love to go to meetings, love to serve on committees, love to approve the minutes and call for the committee reports, and if that’s not government, what is it?.

I remember my first job, as a starter at Aunt Tami’s Thompson Street Bordello in Milwaukee, first day on the job there they put me on a committee. Laundry and Trash. Around here, kid, you start at the bottom. And that’s been pretty much the story of my life. Only the committees became things like Muscular Dystrophy, Special Gifts for the Symphony, Acquisitions for the Museum.

So we’ve got all these little governments that meet every Tuesday night, like church committees or your local defense battalion and peanut league, and like our committees, we’re happiest if the little governments don’t do anything, just meet, approve the minutes, generate more.

And I guess the irony is that in my desire to break out and do something, something tangible for a change, like land use—boy, that sounded like something you could get your hands dirty with—I end up running another escort service. You start at the bottom, kid.

So—Land U puts its comments on—I can imagine Woody’s: positive, unhappy, hedged six ways—and we take it to the good people of Enviroclean. They convene their panel of experts on everything that can be dirtied or destroyed, air, water, soil, herbaceous growth, endangered species, us. From there it goes to Economic Impact, for a lot of talk about jobs. Translation: corporate profits. Same old shit.

It is interesting, though, harder than you might think to tell the good guys from the bad. First time I had a really controversial proposal, the one from Texal for a super air-truck park, I found out what I should have figured, those air and water experts from Enviroclean, they were the ones who had spouses or cousins on somebody’s payroll, or who kept taking casual vacations to the Seychelles. While it was the corporate types at Eco Impact who turned out to be hard-nosed, hard to convince about economic blessings.

Interested parties put their money where it’s needed.

I just naturally made friends at Eco Impact, bright young guys with good appetites, steaks with fries and fun in bed. While the tofu crowd at Enviroclean, they were often shifty-eyed and used-looking. Like Woody. Some mornings when you wake up, it’s hard to know whose side you’re on.

OK, after Eco Impact we go to Cultural/Archeological, for what it’s worth. They just send out one of those thirty-minute questionnaires to a mailing list. Short of an AWTS tube plowing its way through one of the George Washington bedrooms this area is lousy with—George did some sleeping around here—they don’t stop much. Even ancient native burial grounds in your excavation are a plus. You dome them in plastic, hire a curator and charge admission to the sub-basement. Of course, a donation to the tribal council, if you can find one, and a few scholarships don’t hurt.

I can only remember one tribal leader who gave us some trouble and