Tom just shook his head and got on the TV. For a while he talked to a small gray-haired black woman, leaning back in a rotating chair; then to a tall man with a shiny bald head; then to the blank screen, for three or four conversations. There was a lot of incidental chat as he renewed old acquaintances, caught up on news: “Nylphonia, it’s me. Tom Barnard.”
“I thought you were dead.”
That sort of thing. Finally he got into a long conversation with a female voice and a blank screen, one punctuated several times by laughter. “That’ll take hours,” Tom said at one point. “We’ve got thousands of pages here.”
“That’s your problem,” the voice said. “If you want us to help, you’ll have to send it all along. Just stick them in front of the screen one at a time and I’ll set my end to photo. I’m off to breakfast anyway, and I’ll get back to you later when we’ve gone through them.”
“You think it’ll be worth it?”
“How do I know? But from what you’ve said, I think we’ll be able to come up with something. That much data should reveal the shape of the company’s financial relations, and if they’re hiding things, that’ll show in the shape of what they’re not hiding. We’ll show you.”
“What about the coding?”
Laughter.
“Well, thanks, Em.” Tom turned to Doris and Nadezhda. “Okay, we’ve got to put every one of these sheets of paper on the TV screen, and the better order they’re in, the easier it’ll be for my friends to analyze them.”
So they set to work getting the data transferred. Kevin came in and took his turn. Each sheet sat on the screen for only a second before there was a beep from the phone. Even so it took them until well into the night to get everything photographed. “And to think most of this stuff is irrelevant,” Doris said at one point.
“Worse for my friends than for us,” Tom replied.
“Are we going to have to pay them for this?”
“You bet. But it’s a whole network of friends we’re plugging into, and some of them owe me. We’ll figure something out after they’ve looked at this stuff.”
“What exactly will they be looking for?” Kevin asked.
“Infractions of the laws governing company size, capital dispersion and that sort of thing. Corporate law is a gigantic body of stuff, see, very complex. The main thrust of the twenty-forty international agreements was to cut down on the size of corporations, cut them down so far that only companies remain. It’s actually anti-corporate law, I mean that’s what we were doing for twenty-five years. We chopped up the corporations and left behind a teeming mass of small companies, and a bunch of associations and information networks—all well and good, but there are projects in this world that need a lot of capital to be carried off, and so mechanisms for that had to be instituted, new banking practices and company teamwork programs, and that’s where you get the morass of law dealing with that. Alfredo’s lawyers are undoubtedly playing all those angles and it may be that Avending has been brought in in a legal way, or it could be that there’s an illegal corporate ownership aspect to things. There’s no reason why they shouldn’t have used legal methods, it’s not that hard and a lot safer for their project. But they might be cutting corners—hell, it might have been forced on them, by someone with some leverage. The way Alfredo has introduced the zoning and water stuff…”
“It’s sure that Alfredo and his Heartech partners got to be hundreds damned fast,” Doris said.
“And live like more than hundreds,” Kevin added.
“Do they? Well, it’s worth looking into.”
A few days later the environmental impact statement was filed by Higgins, Ramirez and Bretner, and there it was in the town computer for anyone to call up and inspect. Kevin read it while eating lunch over at Oscar’s house. By the time he was done reading, he had lost his appetite. Theatrically he cast a half-eaten sandwich onto the table. These days even getting angry felt sort of good. “What do they mean erosion on the western side? There’s no erosion at all there!”
“Them ravines,” Hank said. “Must be erosion, don’t you think?”
“Yeah, but it’s perfectly natural, I mean it isn’t accelerated or anything. I know every inch of that hill and there’s no unusual erosion at all there!”
Oscar came into the kitchen to make his own lunch. “Ah. HRB strikes again. Natural state equals erosion, litter, underuse. Sure.” He read the TV screen while putting together a Reuben sandwich. “See the way alternative four is slanted. Construction of a commercial center, paths to the peak—this is probably the best description of what Alfredo has in mind that we’ve seen so far. Parking lot down at the head of Crawford Canyon. This will help stop erosion on the western slope, clean up the refuse on the peak, add sightly landscaping, and increase town awareness and enjoyment of the prospect.”
“Shit,” Kevin said.
“That’s an LA Special all right. Hmm. Other alternatives are generally downplayed, I see. Hill turned into park, how can they downplay that? Ah. Would be a small addition to Santiago Park, which is already underutilized, and some seventeen percent of town property. Indeed.”
“Shit!” Kevin said.
Oscar went back to his sandwich. Environmental impact statements had come a long way since the early days, he told Hank and Kevin. LA’s Metropolitan Water Department had once submitted four unacceptable statements in a row, for instance, when attempting to finesse the fact that excessive mining of the groundwater in Owens Valley was going to destroy even the desert flora that had survived the earlier diversions of surface water. The obvious bias in those statements had been one factor in Inyo County’s eventual victory over LA, in the Sacramento courts and legislature; and every agency forced to submit an EIS had learned a lesson from that. Alternative uses had to be described in detail. Obvious harmful effects could not be ignored. The appearance, at least, of a complete and balanced study had to be maintained. “The days of ‘There is no environment here’ are over. Consulting firms like HRB are extremely sophisticated—they make their reputations by writing statements that will stand up to challenges. Complete, but still getting the job done, you know—making whatever impression the agency that hired them wants.”
“Well, shit!” Kevin said.
Gabriela, walking through the kitchen on her way to the roof, said “Time to poison his blood, hey Kev?”
That night Kevin made a chicken stroganoff dinner, while the others checked out the California Environmental Quality Act and the town charter, looking for ways to challenge the EIS.
“Look, the land belongs to us!” Kevin said from the kitchen.
Tom grinned. “El Modena has a population of about ten thousand, so we’re three ten-thousandth owners.”
“Not enough,” Doris said.
“No. But it is true that essentially this is a battle for the opinion of the rest of the owners. The rest of the state and the nation and the world have a say as well, and we might be able to manipulate those forces to our purpose, but the main thing is convincing the people in town to agree with us. The rest of the world doesn’t care that much about Rattlesnake Hill.”
Oscar had dinner with them fairly often, as his kitchen was in an inconvenient state of renovation. One night he came in with the tiniest hint of a smile on his face, and seeing him, Kevin said “Hey, what’s up?”
Oscar lifted an eyebrow. “Well, you know I have been making inquiries with the State Water Resources Control Board.”
“Yeah, yeah?”
Oscar accepted a glass of water from Doris, sat heavily by the pool. Things were a mess in Sacramento, he told them, as usual. On the one hand, Inyo County’s victory over the city of Los Angeles had had the statewide effect of making each county the master of its groundwater. But groundwater basins paid no heed to county lines, and so use of the groundwater in many cases had to be adjudicated by the courts. In many cases state control was stronger than ever. The waterscape was simply bigger than local governments could effectively manage. And so there was a mixed effect; some counties now had control over water that had previously been mined out from under them, while other counties were suddenly feeling pinched. Into that mix came the new source of water from the north, controlled by the state, and funneled through the canals of the old Central Water Project. Confusion, disarray—in other words, the typical California waterscape, in its general feel. But many of the particulars were new.