In the Courts of the Sun (23 page)

[17]

O
n Wednesday the fourth, Marena called and said to be ready early on Friday morning to meet the great man. It was the final hurdle. One would have thought he’d have wanted to sign off on me, or not, before they’d gone through the effort and expense of the testing. But Lindsay Warren was one of those people who’d be wasting his time if he stooped to pick up dropped thousand-dollar bills. Clearing me on everything else first was just standard procedure, the way they used to make dinner for Louis XIV in each of his hunting lodges every day, just in case he stopped by.
Marena confided that as of now, the plan was still for Sic to go. Stability and social skills beat brilliance every time. And Sic had model looks. Well, Patagonia-catalog-model looks. Still, there were three people who still had to vote on me-versus-Sic: Lindsay, somebody named Snow, and somebody named Ezra Hatch. They’d tip the result one way or another. I didn’t know how Boyle or Michael Weiner had voted. Or Marena, for that matter. Although she liked me, I thought. And Taro . . . well, Taro thought—okay, fine, he
knew
—that I was a bit of a flake. But he’d probably come through. But Boyle hated me. And Weinershitzel hated me. So it was probably two against two so far. Well, Lindsay probably really had eight votes anyway. The thing was—and if there are any kids out there, please at least consider this bit of duffery wisdom—nothing ever happens just on the merits. Even when you’re talking about something like, say, last-ditch doomsday-aversion, it’s still mainly about whether they like you or not, how good-looking you are, what secret societies you weren’t in back in New Haven, and whether or not your name ends in a vowel. The usual.
I spent two days agonizing. On Friday morning, Laurence Boyle met Marena and me in a low, wide, blank room in the Stake’s R&D Temporary Facility #4, a bunkerish building under the stadium. He was all put together at 7:06 A.M., with a tab-closure collar that made his head look like it was being squoze out of a tube and a dark last-of-the-three-piece-suits. We scuffed past rows of cubicles, each with a cubicle trog keying away. A few of them were playing eXtreme Foosball at a break area in the center. They stared at Marena like she was Queen Amygdala.
“These rooms go down two more levels?” Boyle asked or said. “It’s all programming and testing for the Battlefield Air Targeting System?”
“That’s a UAV, right?” Marena asked without the sense of really caring.
“Yep,” Boyle said. He hosted us into a big glass-lined elevator with a green-suited guard in it.
“Right now we’re right under the west sideline of the multipurpose play field,” Boyle said to me. Dutifully, I nodded and glanced at my you-are-here map:

BELIZE OLYMPIC HYPERBOWL

“Good morning,”
Julie Andrews chirped. Stupidly, I looked around.
“Please grasp one of the padded safety handrails as we begin our ascent.”
I realized it was the elevator talking, in a voice fleshy enough to fool a blind vocal coach.
“Sir?” Marena asked the Elevator Goon. “Do you think you could please, uh, shut that woman the heck off? Thanks.” Her voice sounded dulled. Over breakfast, or I should say between gulps of espresso, she’d said she’d just found out her friend Yu Shih had died in a fire in Vero Beach.
We began our ascent. It was dark outside the glass and then light fell around us as we rose out of the ground into the interior of a titanic inverted ellipsoid cone. I was very reluctantly impressed.
“We are now entering the Hyperbowl Stadium Seating Area,”
Julie said. There was an odd perspectival effect as our transparent box oozed up toward the directrix, as though the rows of stairs above us were both advancing and receding. Despite myself I actually did grasp one of the padded safety handrails. On the far side of the SofTurf field four tall athletes in Day-Glo green sweats were kicking around an illuminated soccer ball. My nose grazed the window and left a little spotted smudge.
“That’s Mohammed Mâzandar right down there,” the guard dude said. I figured out, a little on the late side, that he was talking to me.
“Who?” I asked.
“The
forward
,” he said like I was a two-year-old.
I must have given him a blank look.
“The
basketball player
,” he said. He pointed down at the far-off red giants.
“Oh,” I said. “Great.”
Chinga tu madre,
I thought. What’s with this automatic assumption between guy types that all anybody with a Y chromosome is going to be even remotely interested in is team sports? Do I come up to you, a total stranger, and say, “Hey, buddy, can you
believe
Natalia Zhukova won that EEC Interzonal yesterday? Seventeen g takes f5, g takes f5, eighteen h-Rook to g1?
Un
believable!”
Although maybe I wouldn’t feel that way if I’d been even remotely jocked out in school instead of being a flash-bruising little redskin geek—
“ We are now at the first seating level,”
Mary Poppins said.
“Sorry, I’m trying to turn this down,” the lease-a-cop said, messing with the control screen. For a second I thought I saw it say that one of the functions was self CLEAN.
“ When completed, the Belize Hyperbowl will seat over a hundred and eighty-five thousand fans, making it the third-largest sports spectatorship facility on the globe.”
That’s progress, I thought. I guess if you build it, they’ll show up. Unless it’s the set for
Waterworld
.
“So look,” Marena said, “you know not to use cuss words around Elder Lindsay, right?”
“Oh, sure,” I said. And I’ll take that especially seriously coming from Ms. Cloacamouth. “You know, I grew up around these people. I mean, the LDS.”
“He’s a bit of a holy roller,” she said. “Supposedly when he was an archdeacon he converted more people than anybody else, ever.”
“Great.” I was getting the feeling that this meeting was going to be a little more decisive than she’d let on.
“We are now at Level Fourteen,”
the Sound of Muzak said as we came to what was actually Level Thirteen or, in another system, Bolgia One.
“Welcome to the VVIP SkyBox.”
We oozed to a stop. There was a pause, and more pause. Finally there was an A-flat synthesound and the box’s north wall slid open with a powerfully understated and probably unnecessary hiss.
The rest of the ring-shaped building was still in the last phase of construction, but this room was all ready for the cover of
Interior Design
, done up in brass and blond wood like a press box at a classy 1930s racetrack. On our left a seamless sweep of glass looked out into the field, and the receding rings of tens of thousands of desolate green seats generated a sort of vertigo that made me want to pitch myself through the bulletproof Perspex and roll all the way down to the end zone. Below the window an angled desk topped with a single long plasma touch screen ran the length of the room, with at least fifty windows streaming away on it, stocks, commodities, football games, surveillance cameras, shots of construction at other parts of the site,
Good Morning America,
a Special Miss Universe Pageant, and a shot of one of the riots in India, which had grown from the one I’d handicapped back at Taro’s lab into region-wide chaos. One of the windows had the sound on and Anne-Marie Chippertwit’s voice bubbled out of it:
“Orlando,”
she said.
“The After-math. A city searches for meaning.”
There wasn’t anyone around. It was one of those odd limbo moments. Marena drifted toward the far end. I followed. The elevator guy stayed at the door. Behind him, the elevator doors shut slowly, paused, as such doors do, before closing completely, and then sucked together into an airtight seal.
I looked away from the window and tried to focus on the shelves. Wow, I thought. I’d pictured Lindsay Warren as kind of a corncob Bond villain. But the thing is, at least in the movies Ken Adams worked on, the Bond villains all had really good taste. Dr. No had a Goya, Scalamanga had a yellow-jade Teotihuacan mask in his foyer . . . but the decor in Lindsay’s offices was so tacky it made Carl Varney look like Palladio. Most of it was sports memorabilia, autographed footballs and hurleys and jerseys and balls and bats and pucks. I noticed a pair of little old cracked brown mittens signed “Jack Dempsey,” with a framed photo of the infamous Long Count leaning behind them. There was a plaque on the wall that said all the wood in here was salvaged from old shipwrecks in the Gulf of Honduras, and a plaque on the floor that said its pink granite tiles had been retrieved from the lobby of One Liberty Plaza after it burned down on 9/11. We fetched up at the north end of the room, at what seemed to be Lindsay Warren’s personal desk, although it couldn’t have been his main one since it was too low-tech and uncluttered, or rather all the clutter was more mementi. There was a model of an F-17 Hornet, an ancient gold plastic Nabisco two-in-one compass and magnifying glass, and a cut-Lucite trophy—a pyramid embedment, as they call it in the trade—with the words
etched on it and a little flock of real honeybees suspended inside. Next to that there was a Rawlings baseball encased in a beveled-glass pyramid. MARK MCGWIRE #70, the pyramid screamed in Bradley Hand Bold. It was that
cagado
three-million-dollar baseball.
For the price of this baseball, you can save thirty thousand AIDS babies.
The wall treatment ran toward humanitarian awards and honorary degrees and framed articles from the
Financial Times
. One showed a giant family portrait, a huge clan of happy, healthy all-American types with teeth, all ranked in front of a façade I recognized.
“With Huge Gift, Utah Researchers to Study Neural Diseases,”
the headline said. I read the caption under the photo:
Lindsay R. Warren, a Salt Lake City businessman and son of Korean War ace Ephraim “Stick” Warren, who gave $1.5 billion for research on Alzheimer’s and other pathologies of the nervous system, is seen here with his family. Mr. Warren is at right, holding three of his eighteen grandchildren, next to his wife, Miriam. His family gathered in front of the Salt Lake City hospital that bears his name.
There were pictures of Lindsay Warren with Gerald Ford, Michael Jordan, Bush I, Bush II, Tiger Woods, the Osmond Family, Gladys Knight, James Woolsey, and Bono. There was even one of a young him standing in front of a USO truck with John Wayne, Vicki Carr, and Ronald Reagan. You almost expected to see him in a group shot with J. Edgar Hoover, Jesus Christ, and the five original Marx Brothers. Below the photos there was a shelf crowded with Colt Peacemakers and old 1911s and other patriotic handguns. All but one of them were dutifully fitted with trigger locks. The exception was a Beeman/FWB C8822-CO
₂
rapid-fire air pistol, nestled on aqua velvet in an open cryptomeria-wood box. It had a gold Olympics medallion inset in the grip, with a pyrographed inscription:
In Grateful Appreciation from His Excellency Juan Antonio Samaranch 24/2/02.
I looked back down the long room toward the door we’d come in and, yep, there was a metal-and-plasticine trap-target hung on the wall with a close group of 0.177-caliber holes edging into the bull’s-eye. Cowboys. Rednecks from Planet Kolob. Who even cares about marksmanship anymore? These days even squirt guns have laser sights.
“They’re in the videoconference facility,” a woman’s voice said. It came from a sort of hostess or secretary who’d materialized from somewhere and who turned out to be Ashley
₁
. She led Marena, Boyle, and me around the desk and through a door on the left into a paneled hallway. It led away from the field and into the depths of the Hyperdoughnut around it. A single door was open at the far end and we tromped through into a big, dimly lit cube-shaped conference room, windowless but with big white velvet curtains all over. There were clear plastic drop cloths over the eggshell wall-to-wall. We squeaked across to the far door.
“Sorry about the mess,” Laurence said. “When we get it cleaned up and bring in the hospitality team . . . well, it’s gonna be pretty special.” He opened the door and led us into a second meeting cube bigger than the first. It was covered with badly painted murals of Pleistocene life, fruited plains teeming with megatheria, glyptodonts, phororhaci, and nuclear families of suspiciously Caucasoid early hominids. The far wall also featured an olde-timey-looking map of the Western Hemisphere, with a line in gold enamel that I guessed represented the route of the Jaredites, winding from Chesapeake Bay down into Central America. We all squeaked across the room to yet another door. It led directly into a third conference cube.
This one was smaller than the others, only about a thousand square feet. Something’s weird about this place. Oh. I see. Yeah. The walls, the ceiling, the padded floor, the square conference table, and even the mostly empty Aerons all seemed to be slightly translucent, like they were made out of the same dark frosted glass. I guessed the stuff was some kind of wraparound video cell-film, so that if you put a specially modified VR program on the giant seamless plasma screens that made up the walls, ceiling, and floor, the surfaces of the furniture would key themselves to it and practically vanish so that you could feel like you were floating goggleless through a desert sunset or an underwater ice cave or a beloved episode of
Dawson’s Creek
or whatever. Right now three of the walls were running what must have been meant to be a soothing screensaver, misty ripples of blue-gray smoke over dark green, and there were just four scattered windows open on the wall facing us. The smallest and leftmost was running another news shot of troubles on the subcontinent. The second, bigger window showed a rotating computer-rendered image of a Sleeker, an advanced-looking sport shoe with oddly fat, tractionless soles. The biggest window was a sort of digital 3-D diorama. It looked like a real window facing out on an unnaturally still woodland landscape. Two glowy angels floated between the trees in the upstage left, and down center a man in black knelt with his back to the picture plane: the prophet, Joseph Smith.
Four post-middle-age Caucasian males sat at the near side of the table, pecking at nearly untouched plates of bran muffins and fruit cubes. There were also pots and mugs of what was undoubtedly herbal tea, and a chocolate layer cake, also apparently untouched, skewered with a single burnt-out sparkler. One of the men’s heads was bald, one was silver, one was not quite bald and had an unemphatic goatee, and the fourth and youngest, which was talking, had a thin coating of short tan setae.
“. . . the main thing with Sleekers is you don’t need ice,” Tan Head was saying in an avuncular voice. “They move like in-lines. On almost any smooth surface. But they’re lighter and they brake better. So you’ve got your speed, but you can also dig in deep and really launch that ball.”
“And the kids are, they’re already taking to this?” Bald asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Tan said. “In fact, it’ll feel like it started out as an underground sport. Like snowboarding. A real homegrown trend with a high-octane mixture of team spirit and individualism. I visualize the game as having the one-for-all feeling of football plus the zany characters of pro wrestling.”
“But it’s not going to be fixed like wrestling?”
“No, of course not,” Tan said. “It’s a real, demanding sport.”
“Hold up a second,” Bald said. He stood up and slowly turned thirty degrees to look at us. The other three men swung their chairs around and, as one, struggled up onto their hind legs.
“Don’t get up,” Marena said. “Please. Okay, never mind.” She edged around the table, sort of hugged the Tan Head Guy, and half-hugged or shook hands with the others. Laurence did the same, minus the hugging. I took my hat off. I still forgot to take it off indoors sometimes. I was still wearing the jacket I’d had on during the attack, newly dry-cleaned in the Stake’s on-premises plant, and I even had on a tie, an ancient J. C. Penney
funèbrerie
on loan from the family of Saints next door at the motel, so I felt marginally respectable. But to these people I still probably looked like the Frito Bandito.
Marena steered me into the group and introduced me to Bald first. His name was Elder Snow and he was totally hairless down to the lack of eyebrows and lashes. I wasn’t even sure he had fingernails. He shook my hand with a pretty strong grip, for a wraith. The next one was about sixty and named Ezra Hatch. He had the creepy Tenexed helmet of silver hair and a sort of peachy Palm Beachy resorty sport jacket and slacks. And under that, probably, Jesus jammies. He gooshed my hand like we were old roommates at business school. The goatee guy was named Orson something. He was in a Warren sweatshirt. They were all pretty friendly. Wait. Let’s be more specific: One felt that their default position was the usual overfamiliar joviality—which is what people in the U.S. have instead of manners—but it was hampered by current events. We were still in that awkward period after a big disaster when everyone feels like he’s supposed to be sympathetic and grave but just doesn’t feel it.
Lindsay Warren was the tan-headed one, the one who’d been speaking. He also turned out to be the tallest. He took three steps toward us, limping badly from what I’d bet five to one was a football injury. It was practically an obligatory accessory for middle-age Utah businessmen. Walk a few blocks down Temple Street on a Sunday and I guarantee that at least three not-yet-old Longjohn Silvers will hobble past you on their way to salvation. He was wearing Warren-green cross trainers and a UNICEF warm-up suit printed with colorful drawings of Children of Many Lands. All he needed to complete the look was orange hair and a tomato nose. He had one of those ruggedly good-looking Anglo-Saxon outdoorsy faces, with supraorbital wrinkles like twin engravings of the Delicate Arch National Monument. Was he around fifty? Did he dye his bristles? He fixed me with an Ancient Mariner gaze and treated me to the firmest and driest of all old-boy handshakes, numbing out what was left of my carpal nerves. Shaking hands is always awkward for me anyway, and I rated my performance on this one at about four.
“Real glad to meet you,” he said.