It started raining as they got on the road. The traffic was light; the former Silicon Valley of the Peninsula had become something of a Rust Belt, and there wasn't much reason for anyone to go down there from San Francisco. There were only a handful of cars on the road, all tiny electric jobbies with hydrogen fuel cells. Overhead you could see a few of the richer travelers riding on great flapping moldies.
Kevvie wanted to listen to an old-fashioned morning audio show she liked, a smugly cynical guy and a woman with a dead flat
that's-the-way-it-is-and-nothing-more voice just like Kevvie's. The theme of the show was that flying saucer aliens had been invading Earth for over a century and that the government was keeping it a secret. As if there were a government that mattered. As if the actual aliens who'd briefly appeared on the Moon this winter weren't more exciting than hundred-year-old lies. But Kevvie loved this shit. Phil threw a fit and made her turn it off.
"You're in a nasty mood today."
"My father's been murdered!"
"It's not like you two got along all that well. You had a big fight the last time you saw him."
Phil sighed as if his heart would break. "Poor Da. I wish I could see him just one more time." Up above the rainy freeway was a big sign temporarily wrapped in black plastic, the wind picking at the plastic and making it flap and billow in a way that spooked Phil. It was like a shroud. The brutal synchronicity of the universe displaying this just for him. Phil shuddered; the hair on the back of his neck stood on end.
February 14
On Saturday they held the memorial service on the grounds of the Bass School, the private school where Kurt had worked. A quartet of students played sweet music on violin, viola, flute, and harp. A big redwood towered overhead, fog in its branches. It had rained all night, but now the sky was clearing. The mourners sat in folding chairs on the flat ground in front of the school's main building, an enormous old two-story house, all glass and redwood, the home of a deceased software tycoon, the Bass of Bass school.
People took turns getting up and saying things about Kurt Gottner. Phil didn't feel able to speak. If he opened his mouth he'd be likely to start howling. Why expose himself like that, especially with all the Bass mucky-mucks here? Though he'd gone to Bass School for four years, Phil had no great love for the place. Da had met Willow Chen through Bass --she was a professional fund-raiser who did contract work --and Phil tended irrationally to blame Bass for his parents' breakup.
Phil's mother Eve had pulled Phil and Jane out of Bass after the breakup, and from then on they'd gone to public school -- which had been, on the whole, more fun. The larger classes of the public school made it likelier that you could find a kindred spirit. And public school had moldies working as teachers' aides. You could learn a lot really fast from an uvvy link with a moldie. Bass, on the other hand, prided itself on being moldie-free. Eve hated Bass. According to her, the students and faculty at Bass were a pack of freaks and losers, and the parents of the Bass kids were snobby self-indulgent artsy-fartsy crypto-Heritagist poseurs trying to buy themselves the illusion that their neurotic drug-addicted promiscuous bulimic dyslexic brats had one single grain of brains or talent. This, Eve's opinion. Phil, however, had found many of the Bass teachers quaint and nice. Especially his father.
At the funeral, Eve sat at left end of the front row, next to Phil, Jane, Kevvie, Willow, Willow's mother Jia, Da's brother Rex, Rex's wife Zsuzsi, Rex and Zsuzsi's daughters Gina and Mary, Kurt and Rex's mother Isolde, and Isolde's kind old sister Hildegarde, whose face could stop a clock.
Rex got up and spoke a little, about how Kurt had always been accident-prone as a child. "One time when Kurt was little he fell off his bicycle and I carried him home. A few years later he broke his ankle in a soccer game and a friend and I carried him home. Today's the last time we'll do it. We're carrying Kurt home."
Not that there was going to be much of Kurt to carry. The gimmie had scraped together maybe an ounce of blood and tissue-fragments. After freezing a sample of the DNA, the gimmie had incinerated the remains for Willow, who'd placed the ashes in a tiny octagonal madrone-wood box. The box sat before the mourners on a small Oriental rug on the ground.
Isolde got up and talked about Kurt as a child. She was a little woman with white hair and a strong voice. "Kurt was a wise soul," said Isolde. "He knew more than other people. He was shy and he didn't like to talk about it, but I could always see it in his bright brown eyes -- he knew. He knew more than anyone could teach him, and he spent his life exploring the world of ideas. Nothing else mattered to him. I used to say, 'Kurt, why don't you get a Ph.D. and work at a university?' 'I don't have time, Mom,' he'd say. 'I'm too busy.' And all he'd be doing would be sitting in his armchair looking at a sunbeam. Too busy. Maybe Kurt knew he wouldn't have as much time as the rest of us." She gave a mild, rueful laugh and wiped her eyes. "Kurt was so excited about his last discoveries, about his dimensions and his wowos. I only hope that some good can still come of them. We're all trying to understand this death. What happened? I'd like to think that Kurt knew--and that somewhere he's still knowing. My son was an explorer."
Willow spoke next. The gimmie had cleared Willow of any wrongdoing; the cause of death had been written off as a freak electrical phenomenon, perhaps ball lightning, perhaps a corona discharge from Kurt and Tre's holographic wowo projection equipment. Willow looked stunning, slim and chic in a black wool suit, her face composed and perfect below her shiny bright hair.
"He was the best man I've ever known," Willow was saying. "He shouldn't be forgotten. And I've been working to set up a fitting memorial. The trustees of the Bass School have agreed to start a Kurt Gottner Scholarship Fund. An anonymous donor has agreed to match dollar-for-dollar any pledges made to this fund today. So please give generously."
"Sell it, Willow," Phil murmured to Jane.
Pretty soon one of the Bass administrators was speaking, a Doctor Peck, stringing together a line of fund-raising platitudes. "Bass School one big family... Kurt Gottner the quintessential... quick mind and open inquiry . ...uch a special place... your unique opportunity... Kurt Gottner Scholarship Fund .. ."
Phil couldn't listen anymore. There were as many people standing as sitting, so he felt free to sidle out of his seat and wander over toward the deck of the school building where some little kids were already nosing around a big table full of canapes catered by the Bass School parents. Funeral meats. Phil cast a professional eye over the spread. He could have done a much better job, but oh well. He ate a salty deviled egg and a crustless triangle of bread with tank-grown salmon. Now a town councilman was butt-kissing the mourners, marveling at how "eukaryotic" was the nucleus of the Bass School community for Palo Alto at large.
Phil pushed open the big glass-paned front door and went inside the school, flashing back to his years here as a student. Fourth through eighth grades, with Da a genial distant figure teaching math and uvvy graphics to the seniors. Eve happy at home, taking care of them all, doing uvvy work for her family's olive-import business by running a dragonfly camera that talked to farmers in Greek. Those had been cozy years. The little family, the parade of days. Phil walked down the creaky wood-floored hall, looking at the rows of pictures by primary-school students on display. Lots of hearts; odd as it seemed, today was Valentine's Day. Monday the hearts would come down, and spring flowers would be next. Or perhaps dead presidents. George Birthington's Washday, his English teacher had liked to call it--a bit of wordplay that Phil had found the very apex of worldly wit. The old school smelled the same as ever. Yes, it had been peaceful here until Willow appeared. She'd flown in like some bright magpie, snatching up Phil's woolly father for her nest.
"Are you a teacher?"