40 MINUTES LATER. PUEBLO, COLORADO. 12:30 PM MST. SATURDAY, JULY 19, 2025.
Since Sumer, the
smart and the powerful have always met over food, somewhere
discreet, where they can stretch out comfortably and decide what
the rest of the world ought to do. Elizabeth I’s ministers traded
barbs at the Mermaid; the Founding Fathers argued more freely in
the City Tavern than in Independence Hall; atom bomb scientists
drank at the Owl. When Washington DC still existed, the too-late
decision to expand the Daybreak investigation had been taken in a
hole-in-the-wall Cambodian diner belonging to Allie Sok Banh’s
uncle.
Nowadays, in Pueblo,
Johanna’s What There Is was the place to be well-fed and not
overheard.
Johanna charged by
the seat and served family style. She didn’t attempt a menu—she
couldn’t depend on having any particular ingredient, and the big
wood stove and barbecue grill in her improvised backyard cookshed
were really only adequate for preparing one large common
meal.
Heather and Arnie had
barely taken their seats in the Mountain View Room—the most
isolated room on the third floor of Johanna’s—when Johanna herself
brought in a crisp field-green salad surrounding a chilled trout
loaf, and a side of elk ragout over polenta.
It would have been
blasphemy to talk business over such a lunch. When they had eaten
all of it, Heather said, “Arnie, my problem is when I listen to
you, I’m always saying, Yes, sure, the way to
get good, balanced, accurate knowledge of anything is to pursue it
for its own sake, but when I’m on the radio for any length
of time with Cam in Athens, or with Graham in Olympia, I find
myself thinking, Right, we’re losing a war
here and Arnie’s doing pure science instead of figuring out what to
hit and how. And I don’t like being a creature of whatever I
heard last. I think you are right. Can
you help me settle firmly into your side?”
“I can try. I wish I
knew if it even is a war. Originally I
thought it wasn’t—I thought Daybreak was more like a storm than an
invasion—and then I thought that it was, because a storm doesn’t
pick its targets—and now I think Daybreak is just really hard on
analogies; it doesn’t behave like anything else, it’s just
Daybreak. We won’t understand anything about it till we admit
there’s never been anything like it before. But I do understand
that we won’t get it, either, if Daybreak takes the world down into
a dark age while we’re still trying to understand. We need to know
enough to win, soon enough to use it, and right now we don’t even
know what it would mean to know that.”
“You could be more
reassuring.”
“Yeah, but you wanted
the truth, as I see it.”
“I did.” Heather
brought her feet up onto the couch where she’d half-sat during the
meal. “Oh, man, Johanna knows how to make a room comfortable.” She
groaned. “I really wish I could wait to think about this till after
I get my body back, but that’s way too long to wait. So, you think
the tribes are the key to . . . well, what are they the key to?”
Arnie spread his
hands. “Maybe just to finding the right question. But as for your
situation with Larry—look, Heather, this is a gift, not a problem.
You’ve got a shrewd investigator who knows the territory, and who
wants to look into it. And I can’t show you graphs—”
“I don’t need’em,
Arn, I believe in your intuition much more than you do. If you say
we have to know about the tribes, then we have to know about the
tribes, and I’ll declare that to be Larry’s main mission. The
biggest problem I see is that whenever he gets back with Debbie, he
might want to spend some time getting reacquainted, I would think,
and frankly, as much time as he’s spent in the woods since
December, he’s got to be tired. And I
don’t think I have anyone more entitled to a vacation if he asks
for one.”
Arnie leaned back,
thinking. “Well, we need way more than one investigator on the job,
anyway, if we want results in time to use them. And though we’ve
learned so much from Larry’s exploring the Inland Northwest, that’s
kind of like looking under the streetlight for the quarter you
dropped in the alley, because the light is better. I think we could
learn more from penetrating the Lost Quarter, ideally from a
traverse of it.”
“If anybody ever came
back after going in,” Heather said.
“Oh yeah,” Arnie
said. “Oh yeah, it would definitely depend on that.”
“Apart from some Army
scouts who never get ten miles north of the boundary rivers, has
anyone come back yet?”
“Not really.” Arnie
was looking down at the table. “Two bodies have floated downstream
on the Wabash, and one on the James.” He dragged some of the water
from around his glass into a long thin line. “Heather, it’s got to
be done, it’s dangerous, and it needs to be soon.”
“Yeah.” She sighed.
“All right. I’ve got an agent that was going to go out to Pale
Bluff, just to see how he did on a milk run. He was going to leave
late next week anyway. He’ll be about twenty miles from where the
Lost Quarter starts, by the nearest approach. Ex-Army ranger, did
mountain man re-creation, martial artist—”
“Is it Steve Ecco or
Dan Samson?”
“Ecco. Is there a
difference?”
“Not really. They’re
both my friends. And I just lost a friend to Daybreak, trying to
find out how it works and what it thinks, and I don’t know if I’m
ready to lose another one.”
Heather nodded slowly
and sadly. “Someday, I hope, RRC will be big enough so that I don’t
know and like everyone who works for us. Till then, though, I’m
always sending my friends into danger. One more time, Arn, is this
the best way to find out what we need to know?”
He seemed to be
looking at something a million miles away. “I don’t know. I can’t
know. But it’s our best guess, and if we don’t take it, we might
still be guessing when Daybreak burns the last book. Steve Ecco
will be glad to get the assignment. I think he’s afraid that he’ll
never get his chance to prove himself. And I like giving him the
chance to do what he wants to do, but I don’t want to lose another
friend. I know you make harder decisions than that all the time,
and I’m being selfish and silly.”
“I’d say, just
human.”
“I just wish being
human didn’t have to be quite . . . so . . . human.”
They talked about how
life hurried on, and the friends that they had made and lost, for
another hour.
He had walked all the
way home in the glaring Colorado summer afternoon, and was checking
the temperature of his solar hot water tank with the idea of a long
hot shower, before he remembered that he still hadn’t told Heather
about Aaron.
But I guess now I don’t need to. The conversations with
Aaron will give me insights I couldn’t get any other way—in fact,
yeah. What I extract from Aaron, I can use to plan Steve’s mission,
make sure he’s safe and his mission’s productive, and it will be
much more believable coming from a guy like Ecco, and from
first-hand observation, than it will be coming from my talking to a
hippie in a blanket in the middle of the night. RRC will get
independently verified information, and my friend will have a much
better chance at succeeding at this mission, which is going to mean
so much to him.
Besides, what the hell could I tell Heather now? That I
just forgot?