“Exactly. We should be able to crush it, and I’ll certainly be trying, believe me.” She stood up, strode around the office, flung open one sliding wall door, stepped half out onto the porch. “Of course if it comes to a referendum you can never be sure. It’s just impossible to tell what the people in this town will vote for and what they won’t. A lot of people would be happy if the town were making more money, and this would do that, so it’s a dangerous thing to bring to a vote. What I’m saying is that it would be a lot safer if we could stop it in the council itself, right there at the zoning. So you and Doris have to keep at the moderates. We all do.”
They discussed Hiroko Washington, Susan Mayer, and Jerry Geiger in turn; Jean knew them intimately from her years as mayor, and her assessment was that their chances of convincing the three were fairly good. None could be counted on for sure, but all were possibilities. “We only need to get two. Keep after it every way you can, and I’ll be doing the same up here.” There was a look on her face—determined, stubborn, ready to fight. As if she were going in for her black belt trial again.
Reassured, Kevin left her office and coasted down to work. He and Hank and Gabriela were beginning the renovation of Oscar’s house, and the other two were already hard at it, tearing out interior walls. Oscar emerged from his library from time to time to watch them. “You look like you’re having fun,” he observed.
“This is the best part of carpentry!” Gabriela exclaimed as she hammered plaster away from studs, sending white dust flying. “Yar! Ah! Hack!”
“You’re an anarchist, Gabriela.”
“No, I’m a nihilist.”
“I like it too,” Hank said, eyeing a joint in exposed framing. He took an exploratory slam at it.
“Why is that?” Oscar asked.
Hank squinted, stilled. “Well… carpentry is so precise, you always have to be very careful and measured and controlled, and you’re always having to juke with edges that don’t quite meet and make everything look perfect—it’s such a perfectionist thing, even if you’re just covering up so it looks right even though it ain’t—anyway…” He looked around as if tracking a bird that had flown into the room. “Anyway, so you get to the part of the job that is just destructive—”
“Yar!” Bang. “Ha!” Bang. “Hack hack hack!” BANG. BANG. BANG.
“I see,” Oscar said.
“It’s like how Russ and his vet friends are always going duck-hunting on the weekends. Same principle.”
“Fucking schizophrenics,” Gabriela said. “I went over there one time and they had some duck they had found while they were hunting, it had busted a wing or something so they brought it home so they could nurse it back to health, had it in a box right next to the bag of all the other ones they’d blasted to smithereens that same day.”
“I understand,” Oscar said. “No one breaks the law as happily as a lawyer.”
“We want to wreck things,” Gabriela said. “Soldiers know all about it. Generals, how do you think generals got to be generals? They just have more of it than the rest of us.”
“Should call you General Gabby, eh?” Hank said.
“Generalissimo Gabrielosima,” she growled, and took a vicious swing at a stud. BANG!
Around noon Oscar made them all sandwiches, and after lunch he followed Kevin around, poring over the plans Kevin had drawn up for the renovation, and asking him questions. Each answer spawned more questions, and in the days that followed Oscar asked more, until it became a regular cross-examination.
“What don’t you like about these old places you work on?”
“Well, they’re pretty poorly built. And, well, they’re dead.”
“Dead?”
“Yeah, they’re just boxes. Inert. They don’t do anything, except protect you from wind and rain. Hell, you can do that with a box.”
“And you like the new houses because they’re alive?”
“Yeah. And the whole system is so neat, so… ingenious. Like this cloudgel.” He pulled at a long roll of clear fabric, stretched it between his fists, let it contract. “You put panels of this stuff in the roof or walls, and if the temperature inside the room is low, then the cloudgel is clear, and sunlight is let in. At around seventy degrees it begins to cloud up, and at eighty it’s white, and reflecting sun away. So it thermostats, just like clouds over the land. It’s so neat.”
“Spaceship technology, right?”
“Yeah. Apply it here, along with the other stuff, and you can make a really efficient little farm of a house. Stick in a nervous system of sensors for the house computer, run a tube down into the earth for cool air, use the sunlight for heat and to grow plants and fish, sling a couple of photovotaic cells on the roof for power, put in an Emerson tank—you know, depending on how far you want to go with it, you can get it to provide most of your daily needs. In any case you’re saving lots of money.”
“But what about styling? How do you keep it from looking like a lab?”
“Easy! Lot of panels and open space, porches, atriums, French windows—you know, a lot of areas where it’s hard to say if you’re inside or out. That’s what I like, anyway.” He tapped one of the sketches scattered on the kitchen table. “There’s this architect in Costa Mesa putting homes on water, they float on a little pond that stabilizes the temp and allows them to rotate the house in relation to the sun, and do a lot of aquaculture—”
“You row across to it?”
“Nah, there’s a bridge.”
“Maybe I want one of those.”
“Please.”
“But what about food? Why a farmhouse?”
“Why not? Don’t you like food?”
“It’s obvious I like food. But why grow it in my house? To me it seems no more than fashion.”
“Of course it’s a fashion. House styles always are. But it makes so much sense, given the materials at hand. Extra heat is going to be generated in the south-facing rooms, especially in this part of the country. And the house computer has the capacity for millions of times more work than you’ve given it so far. Why not put that heat and attention to work? See here, three small rooms on the south front, so you can vary temperatures and crops, and control infestations better.”
“I want no bugs in my house.”
“Nobody does, but that’s greenhouses for you. Besides the computer is actually pretty good at controlling them. Then look, a pool in a central skylighted atrium. Panels adjustable so the skylight can be opened to make it a real atrium.”
“I have no central atrium.”
“Not yet, but look, we’re just gonna knock a little hole in your ceiling here—”
“We’re going to knock a giant fucking hole in your ceiling!” Gabriela said as she walked by. “Don’t let him fool you. You ain’t gonna have a roof any bigger’n a cat’s forehead by the time we’re done.”
“Ignore her. See, cloudgel skylight over a pool.”
“I don’t know if I like the idea of water in my house.”
“Well, it’s a good idea, because it’s so stable thermally. And you can grow fish and provide a good bit of your protein.”
“I detest fishing.”
“The computer does it. First thing you know they’re fillets in your fridge. Chinese carp is the usual staple.”
“I don’t like the idea of eating my house guests.”
From the next room: “He don’t like the idea of a computer than can kill occupants!”
“Good point.”
“You get used to it. Then here, we’ll enclose the area under the old carport, make it a breakfast room and part of the greenhouse, keep that peach tree in one wall, it’ll be great. I love that kind of room.”
“Is that why you like this work? To create rooms like that?”