Kalifornia (18 page)

“I’d rather keep it in one piece.”

“Maybe you’d make a good Ignostic. That’s the Siblings of the
Otiose Order. They study all the things God can’t be bothered with. You could
have a rewarding spiritual career counting balls of lint.”

“Do you by any chance know of a church that drives cars? I mean,
those old gas wagons?”

Reb looked at him with apparent disbelief. “Drives ‘em? No. Fixes ‘em?
Yeah. You want to join the Celestial Mechanics?” He tipped back his head and
laughed at the concrete underbelly of an overpass. His laughter woke a flock of
bats. “No one ever
asked
to
join the Mechs. They pay pretty good, though, and you look like the sort of guy
they’d like to convert.”

“What kind is that?” Sandy asked.

Reb looked at his Wandering Jews, and the other two joined him in
laughing. They all spoke at once:

“Nosy.”

“Curious.”

“A fool.”

Sandy
grinned despite himself. “That’s me.”

***

The Celestial Mechanics, having agreed on a price that Sandy thought slightly embarrassing (free upgrades and a year’s service on the Jews’ solar
skateboards), gave him a pair of ochre temple overalls and an empty toolbox.
They conducted him to one of three deep rectangular pits in the floor of their
outer shrine.

“Acolytes sleep here,” he was told.

Apparently he was the temple’s only acolyte. He climbed down into
the pit and found a wad of old oily rags.

“What’s this?” he asked the priest who stood smoking a pipe at the
edge of the pit.

“That’s your bed,” said the priest.

Reb had introduced the little black man as the Grand High Grease
Monkey, but a name tag sewn in cursive on the pocket of his monastic overalls
referred to him more cozily as “Bob.”

Sandy
considered the rags. At least he wouldn’t have
to share them.

“What about my mark?” he asked, holding up his hand. “Do I get one
of those?”

“After you’ve been here a while, your fingernails will identify
you.”

Sandy
sighed and kicked the lid of the toolbox. “It’s
empty.”

“Patience, acolyte. With every initiation you will receive a handy
new tool. This evening your education begins with the Rite of the Wrench. Now I’ll
leave you to settle yourself and prepare for the undertaking ahead of you.
Change into your overalls.”

When “Bob” was gone, Sandy clambered out of the pit and went to
the open door of the outer sanctum. It overlooked a fenced parking lot; the
street lay beyond. He’d been aware for some time of the growing sound of wolf
howls that signaled the approach of the Holy Rollers. He heard their
hallelujahs as he reached the gate; they thundered into sight.

The rattling roar that accompanied their passage was in fact the
sound of roller skates. The Holy Rollers were unremarkable in appearance
except for their manner of transportation; they were far more fearsome, more
impressive, by night. Nothing but a bunch of little old ladies on skates.
Hardly the sort to raise one’s hackles.

Or so he thought until he noticed that their blackened, leathery
purses were handbags made from human heads, which they clutched and swung by
the hair. And their bibles were bound in a soft-looking, whitish leather. . . .

Then they were gone, leaving him breathless. He fought the urge to
scurry back to the pit for cover. A sturdy cyclone fence protected the temple.
He was safe. He could consider himself fortunate for having evaded them last
night.

“Starko,” he whispered, “you following this? I think I got lucky.
The Celestial Mechanics should know where to find any old gas wagons. I’m gonna
play along with them, go through these initiations, make some friends—and then
start snooping.”

A toolbox rattled behind him. He turned to see smiling “Bob”
returning with several other mechanics, both men and women.

“Acolyte, are you ready to receive instruction in the use of the
Wrench?”

Sandy
bowed his head. “I am ready, O Master. Consider
my mind an empty toolbox, waiting to be filled.”

***

Clarry’s van was a rat’s nest of sushi packs, empty soy squirts,
and coffee bulbs. The cuspidor was constantly brimming. After a while, he had
stopped noticing Cornelius’s unusual body odor—a sort of musty, wet-dog
smell—and found it easy to treat him simply as another assistant, explaining
the operations of the deck, teaching him the rudiments of editing. Cornelius
did all the tasks manually, by visual controls, since he wasn’t wired. Even so,
he was the fastest learner Clarry had ever met.

“You’re a natural at this, Cornelius. You sure you never ran a
deck before? Because you could be good. I mean really good.”

“Never. I wasn’t allowed near the Figueroa decks.”

“Shame. Cause you’ve really got the touch, my—uh—man.

The sealie seemed flattered. “Thank you, sir. I do enjoy creative
work.”

Amazingly, they shared the confined quarters without driving each
other crazy, perhaps because they were so different. Roommates of similar
personalities—or species—often proved incompatible. But the man and the seal
couldn’t have been less alike. Clarry and Corny.

Whenever Clarry sagged at his post, Cornelius took over. Not that
there was much for him to do. The recording process was largely automated.
Corny practiced and worked on various editing/production assignments Clarry
gave him for his own amusement. They agreed that at least one of them would
cover the deck at all times, in case Sandy got in trouble or made his big find.
Sandy wore a subcutaneous tracer by which they could track his progress
through the Holy City or find him in an emergency. He hadn’t moved in weeks,
however. Not since joining the Mechs.

At first they shared the van more or less continuously, but as the
days wore on with little in the way of progress or revelation, they began to
work in shifts. Clarry would check into a sleeping lot for a few hours, perhaps
take a walk or go shopping to stretch his legs, and then come back to give
Cornelius a break. He didn’t know how the sealman spent his free time, and he
didn’t ask.

Sometimes, for the sake of variety, they drove the van to new
locations. They got to know the outskirts of the Holy City fairly well,
particularly those areas with good food. Clarry looked for Creole cooking and
could compare the merits of various gumbo recipes for hours. Cornelius lived on
a strict diet of raw fish with the occasional bowl of oatmeal or miso soup
thrown in.

The work was tedious to Clarry, mindless monitoring, but it served
a useful purpose. It made him feel that he was doing something to help Poppy.
He couldn’t talk to Cornelius about it, of course. The sealman’s motives seemed
purely sentimental. Sandy was his best friend.

Faithful as a dog, Clarry thought of the sealman.

Which made him kind of jealous. He’d never really had much in the
way of friends.

***

As the weeks passed, Sandy’s palms and fingernails turned from
pink to permanent gray with grease and oil; his tan forearms grew grimy and
scarred.

It was a tough temple in which he’d found himself, and his
training took all his attention. After several days any thought of his real
mission was absorbed and all but occulted by his spiritual education. They were
unexpectedly happy days. He had never used his hands before, and the work gave
him pleasure, a sense of accomplishment. Of
reality.
Only
at night, in the mere ten or twenty seconds before he dropped into exhausted
slumber, did he think briefly of the child, Calafia, who had been stirred up
from his father’s and sister’s cells. She was the product of incest in the
purest sense. But there had been no physical conjunction of father and daughter:
only the chromosomes had lain together, arms entwined like the sleeves of
unraveled sweaters.

In a sense, Calafia had been cobbled together out of spare parts.

Sandy
’s new surroundings affected his sensibilities.
His mentors considered him a bright pupil; but then, he was the only pupil.
They encouraged him to ask whatever he liked, as long as it referred to
mechanics. Eventually he tried to steer these lessons toward broader subjects,
such as the other sects in the Holy City, with particular reference to their
means of transportation. They called this comparative religion.

His toolbox filled swiftly. Each day saw the addition of a larger
ratchet to his collection. His biceps grew from carrying the heavy box.

To the Celestial Mechanics, these were not simply tools—they were
keys to unlocking the secrets of science, of technology, of progress. They
felt that much practical knowledge had been lost through disuse, and that the
old ways should be—at the very least—remembered, practiced, and preserved.
Someday, they hinted apocalyptically, man might need to live again without
wires and computers and automated everything. In such a situation, the
Celestial Mechanics were prepared to play a leading role. It would be valuable
then to have a deep understanding of what they referred to reverently as
“Moving Parts.”

“Everything moves,” an unusually solemn “Bob” told him one
evening, waxing enthusiastic as he described ever larger orbits with his hands.
“The planet hurtles through space, the moon swings around the planet, the earth
circles the sun, the solar system is caught in the slow rotation of the
galactic disk, which in turn expands forever, moving out among all the other
galaxies like a cloud of steam. Imagine if you could harness all that energy,
that cosmic steam, and use it to power a huge machine. Imagine if the expansion
of the universe were able to drive enormous pistons. Maybe it does. Imagine
numerous universes all linked together, some of us expanding while others are
contracting, one set of pistons pushing up, another coming down. Who could
possibly know the use of that inconceivable engine? Does it propel a locomotive
or a lawnmower?”

“Good question,” said Sandy, who wondered what either of these
l
-words
referred to as he swung his legs in the pit. “You think I could ever get to
work on an old internal combustion engine someday?”

“I don’t see why not.”

“You know what I’d really like to see?”

“Bob” knelt down beside him, engulfing him in clouds of pipe
smoke. “What’s that, my son?”

“One of those old gasoline things.”

“Bob” shook his head sadly. “It’s rare to find them running these
days, but we do get them in from time to time.”

Sandy
brightened. “Yeah? You mean, I could work on
one?”

“Might be. A few sects keep them, and they’re always breaking
down.”

“How many would you say are in the Holy City?”

“Oh, I couldn’t even guess. Not many. You see them in the streets.
I’ve also seen them parked in churchyards when I go in to fix generators and
things like that. There must be a hundred or so. It’s not impossible that you
could have a chance to work on one with your own hands, if that’s what you’d
really like.”

Sandy
shrugged.

“Just remember, Santiago, those are things of the past. The future
machines lie elsewhere. It’s true that you’re an acolyte, but in a sense so are
we all. While we preserve the past—and honor our origins—we owe our allegiance
to the future, to the developing machine.”

Sandy
’s spirits sank. A hundred or so. The Holy City was full of gas wagons, too many to track down. He nodded as if acknowledging
“Bob’s” words, but his thoughts wandered off.

“Santiago, do you have a moment?”

He came out of his reverie. “Uh, sure. I was just about to go to
sleep, that’s all.”

“There’s something I’d like to show you. Something I think you’re
ready to appreciate. It will explain what I’ve been saying about our purpose,
our ultimate goals. Come on, if you’re interested.”

Sandy
got up and followed “Bob” into the grimy
corridors of the temple, through the main cathedral with its hydraulic presses
and battery cases stacked in pyramids. Beyond was a door through which he never
had passed. He’d thought it must be an especially sacred place because of the
expressions on the faces of those going in and out: they always looked as
though they’d gazed into the heart of some ineffable mystery. Despite himself,
he was excited to see whatever sat beyond that door.