If he hadn’t been keeping his eyes open, he probably wouldn’t have realized there was a road here. It was little more than a slightly leveled-off space next to the power poles. The strip was the only place where cacti didn’t grow, raising their gnarled arms skyward—proof that this was indeed a road, or at least had been at one time.
Kaoru scanned the northern horizon, wondering if following the power poles down this road would take him to the village of Wayne’s Rock. The road disappeared over a hill. Wayne’s Rock was invisible from the state road. But Kaoru had the feeling that distant ruins were calling to him.
At least I won’t get lost: all I have to do to get back to the state road is follow the power poles, he thought to himself.
With that he grasped the handles, turned left, and sped off toward the middle of the desert. It was the first time since getting to America that he’d taken the bike off-road.
3
There was a dip in the road ahead of him; he could see it coming, but it didn’t look that big. But when he went over it the bike flew more than he’d expected. He dropped his waist back and into the jump, and when the bike landed he wrestled with the violent motion of the handlebars until with precise timing he stabilized the bike. One mistake and he might have tipped over. He cursed himself for his recklessness, and did his best to avoid the craters in the road from then on.
After some initial ups and downs, the road flattened out and ran straight for a while. The dilapidated wooden poles still ran alongside the road, a dotted line linking civilization and wilderness.
“Aha,” he said. He’d spied some broken-down buildings ahead, in a ravine cut into a hill. Both the road and the line of poles disappeared into the village. At some point, at least, this town had been connected to an electricity supply and phone service. He couldn’t see any poles beyond the village. The lines seemed to end here.
He stopped on a hill maybe a hundred yards before the village. Still straddling the bike, he counted about twenty houses made of brownish stone. Even if there were some on the other side of the ravine that he couldn’t see, the whole settlement probably held only a few dozen houses. He couldn’t imagine what had led the first inhabitants to decide to dwell here. What had they been seeking out here in the middle of the desert? Judging from the way the houses were constructed, the first settlers had gotten here a long time ago. But the whole village was barren and windswept now. He couldn’t see anyone. Even from a hundred yards away he could tell that the place was abandoned.
He remembered the words of the man at the gas station. There’s nothing there. It looked like he was right. This was a ghost town, rotting away until only traces of its former inhabitants remained.
The sunlight was coming from the west now. A look at his watch told Kaoru it was past five o’clock. It wasn’t quite yet time to head back to the state road and look for a town with people living in it.
So Wayne’s Rock was a pile of ruins in the middle of the desert. The place filled him with a primal fear, and he asked himself why. Was it because the place represented for him such a fusion of unnatural contradictions? Why had Kenneth Rothman, a cutting-edge information engineer, chosen to live in such a remote place anyway? There were too many things Kaoru didn’t understand.
But he’d come too far to back down now. He opened the throttle, gunned the engine, and was cheered by the extravagant noise he was able to summon forth. He sped down the road into the village.
On the way he spied a sign of the type common at the edge of American towns:
WELCOME TO WAYNE’S ROCK
It looked like a bad joke to Kaoru.
As he approached, netlike patterns on the walls began to stand out. Sand and gravel, probably blown by the wind, clung to spots where the stone of the walls was crumbling. Several cars stood abandoned on what looked to be the town’s main drag. These, too, were covered in sand.
There was a gas station/convenience store here, too. A single pump stood on the cracked concrete apron; the nozzle was off the hook, and the hose lay on the ground, twisted and black like a cobra, the nozzle its head curled to strike. The store’s windows were boarded up tight, and shards of glass were scattered over the ground.
He rode slowly down the main street, peeking at the empty houses on each side, searching for nameplates or the like.
There were more trees inside the town than in the desert surrounding it. Perhaps people had chosen to live here because there was water to be had. The trees thrived on that water, flourishing in and around the ruins. The street was lined with them, and at first they did indeed give an impression of health. But when the wind stirred their limbs and exposed their trunks, Kaoru noticed the strange lumps and pits in the rough bark. He approached one and inspected it to find that the bark on the swollen parts was a different color from the rest. The trunks were mottled in color like human skin peeling from severe sunburn.
The limbs were affected, too, and even the leaves, which looked so fresh, were covered on the back with ocher-colored spots. Only at first glance were the trees normal: scratch the surface and they were riddled with disease.
He’d only seen the cancerous trees of Arizona in a newspaper photo in which it had been impossible to make out the details of their deformation and discoloration, but from the looks of things these trees were showing the same symptoms. Virus-induced cancer, and pretty far advanced, too. It must have taken years for them to get this bad. This was no recent infection.
Kaoru hurriedly looked around him, apprehensive. If the trees here were so far gone, how bad was the damage to animals and humans?
He heard no sound but the wind, but still somehow he felt as if rattlesnakes, scorpions, or some other poisonous desert creature were burrowing under his feet. Some malicious life form, or its shadow, was hiding here, behind cliffs or cacti, under clods of earth, and it struck fear into him.
He had one foot on the bike’s footrest and one on the ground. Both feet were encased in leather boots. No foreign object could penetrate to his feet, he knew, but still he shrank from touching the earth with them.
He was desperately thirsty. He had some mineral water in his pack on the luggage rack, but to get it he’d have to dismount the bike and place both feet on the ground. He really didn’t want to do that, so he decided to endure the dryness of his throat and ride on deeper into the town.
Some of the houses had walls made of piled-up stone, but some had walls made of carefully worked dried mud. Most of the roofs had caved in: he’d probably be able to stand in the middle of any of these houses and see the sky overhead.
Kaoru actually steered the bike under the eaves of one of the houses and went inside to try. Sure enough, the setting sun was casting its rays slantwise through a broken space in the roof; dust danced in the bands of light, clouds of dirt glowed with the same coloring.
Where had all the people gone? Were they all dead? Had the MHC virus gotten them all? Or had they escaped, moved to a town with a hospital?
“Hello?” Kaoru called into the depths of the house. No response; he hadn’t expected any. He thought he saw the shafts of light quiver from the vibrations of his voice.
Through the crumbling wall he could glimpse a flat space like a plaza. It was surrounded by houses.
He dismounted, pointing the bike toward the edge of the village so he could leave in a hurry. He left the engine running. He reached into his pack for the mineral water and slaked his thirst.
He had a purpose in coming here, and he had to fulfill it. He needed to track down Kenneth Rothman, and to do that he first needed to find Rothman’s residence.
On the ride in he’d carefully looked for names on the houses, but he hadn’t seen Rothman’s. It looked like he was going to have to leave the bike and check each one on foot.
He entered the house criss-crossed by the sun’s rays and walked through it toward the plaza in the back. It looked to be some sort of communal space for the village. An old Spanish-style monument, made of plaster in the form of a wom
an and surrounded by a railing, stood in the center. It was the focal point of the village, which he could see now consisted of two rows of houses arranged in a semicircle; on the other side of the plaza was a hillside.
Kaoru stood in the middle of the plaza and imagined a view of this village from above. The double line of houses made a fan shape.
Behind the monument was a basin-like indentation in the ground, inside which gaped a circular rim. A well. So there was water here. That’s why the village had grown up here. He peered in, and the stench of fetid water hit him. The whole village looked parched, and yet the well smelled like water.
The shallow-walled basin resembled a snail in shape. You came around from the outside and then down a set of stairs spiraling down to the rim of the well, as if you were tracing the snail’s shell.
The well had no lid. The wind blowing over it made a flute-like sound.
Right beside the well’s edge he saw some small black shapes, about the size of his fist. At first he thought they were rocks, but after staring at them for a while he realized they were dead rats, belly up. There must have been over a dozen in the plaza.
Kaoru’s gaze naturally followed the trail of dead rats, until he realized the black forms were concentrated beneath a tree at the edge of the plaza, a tree that he could tell from here was cancerous. There was a bench under the tree. And sitting on the bench was a human corpse, the same color as the rats. With the sun at its back, the corpse was just a black shape.
Kaoru went toward the bench, stopping about ten yards from it. The corpse was male, and it looked half mummified. Its legs were spread, its arms hung down limply, and its head was thrown back against the back of the bench, jaw thrust forward. Several long strands of beard hung from the chin, a beard that Kaoru had once described as goatish … Only the gold chains around the wrists and neck hadn’t rotted. They gleamed with an inorganic light.
Kaoru gingerly approached the man and examined his face. The Kenneth Rothman Kaoru had met—five years ago, when he’d stayed at the Futami house for several days during a visit to Japan—had an impressively narrow face, its most conspicuous feature being his long beard, and he used to wear gold chains around his neck and wrists such as those here. It seemed reasonable to conclude that this corpse was Rothman’s.
He must have died here at home, without seeking treatment.
Kaoru looked all around, and something snagged his gaze. The hillside was covered with vegetation appropriate to an arid climate, and amidst it he could see flowers about the size of his palm, coming in and out of view as the wind blew the branches about.
A lone tree in bloom. Its trunk was thin, its branches slender, its leaves looked soft, but this tree alone displayed vitality.
All the trees on the hillside were cancerous: he could see the veins in the leaves standing out hideously. This tree and this tree only seemed to have retained its original coloring. And on the end of its drooping branches grew pale pink blossoms.
Some plants propagate through asexual reproduction, and some through sexual reproduction. Kaoru had observed that the ones covering the mountains in this area were of types that reproduced asexually. Blossoms, however, meant sexual reproduction. He’d heard of cases of asexually-reproducing plants suddenly shifting to sexual reproduction, blooming for the first time in their existence, before rapidly aging and withering away. Such a plant couldn’t go on blooming forever, it seemed: the pleasure of producing flowers came in return for dying.
It occurred to Kaoru to pick one of the blossoms and place it next to Rothman’s corpse as an offering.
Plants that reproduce asexually can go on living essentially forever, in the right environment. In the Mojave desert there are confirmed instances of such plants that have survived for over ten thousand years. Just like cancer cells in a Petri dish.
What Kaoru was witnessing now, though, was the opposite: only the tree which had gained the ability to reproduce sexually had escaped the cancer. And of course, before too long, this tree with its blossoms would follow the natural order of things and die.
A programmed death accompanied the pleasure of blooming, while a life form which had turned into cancer would go on living forever, unaging, but never producing flowers. It looked like a clear-cut choice between two alternatives. Which would Kaoru choose? A bright, shining mortality, or a dull life that went on forever? It didn’t take him long to know the answer: he’d choose the life that bloomed.
Kaoru climbed the hill toward the flowers.
4
He snapped off a blossom and turned to descend the slope. As he did so, a sharp, narrow band of light glancing off one of the rooftops arrayed beneath him caught his eye. The roofs were made of stone of the same color as the land; they blended in dully with their surroundings. They shouldn’t be able to reflect light, thought Kaoru, searching for the source of the flash.
A careful look revealed a black rectangle on the roof of a crumbling red-brick building. The rectangular object had a steel rim, and this seemed to have caught a ray of the setting sun.
The panel glowed there on the roof with an alien light. It looked altogether too new to be sitting on a ruined building like that. Maybe such a system was necessary precisely because the village was so far from the main road, but still it looked out of place.
He could tell even at this distance that the black panel was part of a solar power system. It was quite big enough to produce enough electricity for a single household. If each house had possessed one, there would have been no need for the electric poles lining the road into town, but he couldn’t see a similar panel on any of the other roofs in the village. This one seemed to have been specially installed on this house alone.
Rothman had installed his own private research lab at home. Maybe he’d used solar power.
Kaoru laid the blossom down on the corpse’s knee and threaded his way between the houses, looking for the one with the solar panel. He’d marked its position from the hillside, but he quickly lost his sense of direction as though he were in a maze.
He wandered this way and that until he found the approach ahead blocked. He’d strayed into a house, and now he was in some sort of hallway.
The wind whistled as it blew in through gaps in the walls, but here it had no place to go, so it eddied around his ankles. He thought he could hear native American singing, a sort of call-and-response with the wind, or maybe it was the cry of a bird, or the sound of branches rubbing together.
Kaoru fell still and pricked his ears. His sense of hearing was confused: he couldn’t tell what was near and what was far. One moment he thought he was hearing a human voice at a distance, and the next he experienced the illusion that it was whispering in his ear. It was a hoarse, male voice, muttering—he could hear it—by the wall to the right. It stopped, and when it started again the wind had wafted it over to the left-hand wall.
The voice and the whistling seemed to come from everywhere; the sound seemed to gain a vibrato effect as it slipped through the gaps in the walls.
Was it the dryness of the air that kept him from feeling afraid? Totally devoid of humidity, the air seemed to lack the little hands that would have grabbed him and given him chills. The moisture rapidly drained from any exposed skin; soon, he was afraid, he’d feel nothing at all.
He tried to ignore his other senses and concentrate on his hearing. Gradually he came to detect the source of the sound. Still concentrating on it, he ducked through a hole in one wall, then another, and then found himself in a somewhat different world.
There was a faint smell. He was in a two hundred square foot space with crumbling walls, where something he’d never encountered before, a man-made smell that couldn’t possibly exist in nature, pervaded the air.
There was a pipe-framed bed in a corner of the room. It held no bedding, only an old mattress with several springs poking up through it. There was a sturdy-looking table next to it, and next to that two deck chairs, facing each other, looking more appropriate to a beach than a h
ouse. A floor lamp lay tipped over on the floor, and an old leather suitcase rested unsteadily against the table. There were shelves built into one wall, but some of them were broken, their contents leaning crazily. Several thick doorstop-like books sat on the bottom shelf.
Everything in the room looked precariously balanced. He suspected that if he took away just one of the shelves, or moved the bedside table just a few inches to one side, everything would collapse like a row of dominos.
From out of nowhere, the hoarse voice was back, breathing in his ear. Kaoru nearly jumped out of his skin. He looked around in every direction.
Nobody was there. The noise died away quickly, leaving an intermittent buzz in its wake. Kaoru glanced at the space between the table and the wall, and saw an electrical cord. Only then did he notice that there was a radio fixed to the table. It sounded like it wasn’t receiving steady current.
Kaoru grasped the cord and moved it around a little. The buzzing decreased, replaced by a man’s steady voice, accompanied by a sad-sounding guitar. A radio broadcast. The man was singing some kind of blues song. Kaoru was able to make out the lyrics: something about a love that had ended long ago.
Kaoru bent down and adjusted the tuner, reducing the static further. This was definitely the source of the voice he’d barely heard floating to him on the wind. For some reason this radio was still turned on, plugged in, and receiving signals. Playing music.
It was unthinkable that the power lines could still be supplying electricity to these ruins. The electricity would have been interrupted long ago.
The rooftop solar panel he’d seen must be providing the electricity. It was the only thing that could explain the radio still playing.
Kaoru followed the cord to the wall socket, then adjusted the volume again. No mistake, electricity was flowing from somewhere.
Press on, he urged himself. The knowledge that this house in the middle of the desert wore a crown of modern science gave him a kind of courage.