76 EVERYBODY DIES

76

EVERYBODY DIES

Ranks of conifers soldier on through the centuries, down the slopes in a perpetual green march, to the Grand Plateau, where for whatever reason they have, with rare exception, failed to conquer the three thousand acres of flat territory. Beyond the plateau, when the land slopes down once more, trees rise in phalanxes, their roots wound so securely through the soil and rocks that they can withstand even the winds of winter that shriek through the pass with greater force than in any other season.

Hunting hawks glide on the spring thermals high above. Here below, the soft soil offers small creatures easy burrowing, and tall grass—brown from winter but fast greening—provides cover to them. For now, the plateau is full of busy life, a thriving ecosystem that needs no justification but that should be celebrated in vivid myths, as the upland meadows of southern England and the animals thereof were celebrated in Watership Down and as another landscape entirely was mythologized in The Wind in the Willows .

Considering José Nochelobo's determined efforts to preserve this place, how odd it is that Vida has never been here before. She has seen videos and photos and maps, but nothing has fully conveyed the drama and beauty of this immense tableland with forested peaks rising above it on three sides. She's unprepared for the effect the place has on her. Her heart beats faster. She feels lighter, not lightheaded but buoyant, as if she might ascend in the crystalline air. She puts her crossbow on the ground and hugs herself.

With Sam accompanying him, Two Moon moves south, pausing to study the ground in those places where the grass has not taken hold, looking for flat stones that would mean nothing to most people but that he can read.

Although this plateau is remote in more than one sense, the three dogs have evidently been here before, as their master sought the solace of no company but theirs. Sam probably has thrown a ball for them on the plateau or a Frisbee, for they chase one another and gambol as though celebrating memories of prior visits.

By contrast, the wolves hang back, remaining close together and alert, troubled by some quality of the plateau or maybe anticipating a sudden threat.

At the moment, no wind is blowing. The high tableland lies in an expectant stillness.

Blue Edge blades with Blue Pulse flaps quietly carve the air, floating Boschvark toward the site where tens of billions of dollars will soon begin to fall through the air and into his deep pockets. Better yet, this will be only one of several projects like it that will make him the richest man in history.

Perhaps it's inevitable that he should think of José Nochelobo at this time, in this place. Mack Yataghan had recorded the fool's speeches, and Boschvark had listened to them obsessively, until they were burned into his memory. Although Nochelobo is now nothing but cold ashes in a bronze urn, Terrence Boschvark hates him with a singular passion. His enduring resentment ripens into anger as the dead man's words play through his mind.

Huge amounts of cobalt are essential to this technology. Little children in the Congo and other poor countries are forced to dig for it in narrow passageways that collapse on them. Kids as young as four. Thousands of enslaved children are the right size needed in these crude mines, these hellholes. They die by the hundreds, and those who survive will have short lives because of the contaminants they've inhaled.

Boschvark has inarguable answers to Nochelobo's objections. He could have mounted the stage and debated the fool. But he is not a showboater like Nochelobo. He does not enjoy the spotlight and is a man of humility. He could have said that the children come from a culture where they will be enslaved whether they're sent to the mines or not. Because their work has value, they are better fed as long as they can work. If the injuries they sustain are minor enough to allow them to go back to work, they receive medical care in a country where there is otherwise no such care for the masses. Forced labor improves their lives. Yes, some die, but get real. Everybody dies. No one lives forever. What matters isn't the length of life but the quality of the life you live. Choke on that truth, José.

In all of history, has there ever been a man more infuriating than José Nochelobo, more certain of his virtue, more irrational in his aims?

Anger is not an adequate response to such a stupid and prideful man. The mere memory of him enrages Boschvark.

He despises the bleeding-heart tone that made Nochelobo's followers swoon. The beloved football coach preyed on his audience's gullibility. Construction of wind farms in the ocean are killing whales in record numbers, whales and dolphins. Already, the massive blades of modern wind turbines kill millions of birds every year. By the time this technology is built out, entire species of birds will be slashed into extinction. These aren't picturesque old Dutch windmills, my friends.

You want us to make them picturesque? Boschvark would have liked to ask the idiot. Do you realize what that would add to the cost of a project and how much it would diminish each turbine's output? Paving the ocean floor with enough concrete to support thousand-foot-tall windmills isn't likely to kill a significant number of whales. They'll adapt. Whales love concrete. They live happily surrounded by it at SeaWorld. Everything adapts when it must. If anything's killing whales, it's the wavelength of the sonar used to map faults in the ocean floor before construction, screwing with the whales' natural guidance system. But we won't be mapping forever. After a few years, at most a decade, we'll be done with that, and the whale population will recover. You can't totally transform the world's power-generation technology without a few stupid whales freaking out and throwing themselves onto a beach to give the tree-hugging crowd something else to feel guilty about.

Sam Crockett swings the mattock once, twice, three times, and then steps back to allow Two Moon to do some light work with the collapsible shovel.

Remaining at a respectful distance from the men and their solemn task, Vida realizes that she and Sun Spirit are holding hands, as might two sisters who are long accustomed to providing comfort and courage to each other.

The granddaughter of Eternal Fawn says, "It is sad to say that my people, not just Cheyennes, but those of all the ancient nations, have long forgotten or ceased to care about this place. They build casinos. They TikTok and tweet and lose themselves in the forests of YouTube. They learn only what Google allows them to know, and year by year the past becomes to them less than it really was. The past was real, I think more real than the present. These days, so many are educated into ignorance, entertained by shallow amusements that drain from them the very substance of themselves, until they seem to have become ghosts long, long before their deaths. I'm only thirty-four, but out there in the world that Two Moon and I have left, I feel like a cranky granddam who has lived a century and sees the newer generations living for nothing but oblivion. Only deep in the forest do I feel young and hopeful."

The helicopter is in whisper mode as it floats through the day, but Boschvark is filled with a noisy rage that is escalating toward an even noisier inner fury. Vector, Trott, Rackman, and Monger would not be dead if Nochelobo never existed. Belden Bead and Nash Deacon would not be dead. The project would have been underway if Nochelobo had not instigated litigation against it.

He regrets that Nochelobo is dead, but only because he'd like to kill the sonofabitch again, this time not with a nerve toxin delivered by an air-rifle dart but with his own hands.

He is unable to evict the voice of Nochelobo from his head. To generate the power needed for this one country in an all-electric age and to do it with this primitive technology, we'll need to cover at least three hundred twenty thousand square miles with wind farms, which is four times the size of South Dakota or as vast as nearly all the states along the Eastern Seaboard. Everywhere coast to coast will be uglified .

Boschvark would have replied: No, no, no. Not everywhere. Maybe half the country, but not everywhere. Besides, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. What about that, huh? What about all of us who think thousand-foot-tall wind turbines are beautiful?

Seething through Boschvark's memory, José Nochelobo's voice declares, The low pulsation of the massive hundred-forty-foot blades will agitate every creature in nature, with consequences we can't know. Already, people living within a few miles of wind farms experience migraines, insomnia, a greater incidence of high blood pressure, and other health issues.

Wimps! There were people who complained about the noise of the first trains, the first planes, rock and roll. They'll get used to it or they'll move, or we'll put them somewhere they aren't bothered by noise.

Dead to the world but alive in Boschvark's brain, Nochelobo says, Because the resin blades regularly fail but are so hard they can't be ground up and recycled, we'll require thousands of new landfills to bury them and the millions of lithium and sodium-ion batteries that also can't be recycled.

Propagandist! That objection deceitfully ignores the fact that building and operating big new landfills, manufacturing an infinite supply of batteries, and strip-mining the third world for the rare-earth minerals needed for all those batteries will create many jobs. Many, many, many jobs. And profits. Among Boschvark's investments are landfills, battery makers, and mining companies. He knows a lot about how many jobs will be created. He has projections that show enormous profits. All those new workers mean more taxes paid and therefore more subsidies for landfills, batteries, and strip mines. It's like the cycle of life. It's a beautiful thing. If Nochelobo weren't dead, if he were yammering to an audience, Boschvark might mount the stage and give him the what-for.

"Less than five minutes to the plateau," Yataghan announces.

After a brief and shallow excavation, Two Moon and Sam move about a hundred yards south from the first site and set to work once more.

The women follow, no longer hand in hand. Vida has retrieved her crossbow. Lupo and his wolves draw closer but remain wary, sniffing the air and surveying the plateau with what seems like suspicion.

Again Sun Spirit halts at a distance from the men, and Vida follows her lead. Tradition must be respected here, old ways that were meaningful to those who lived by them, sacred rituals. It's important for those of us who follow our ancestors to grant dignity to them, because our lives also pass like shadows; in yet a little while, all will be consummated, perhaps sooner than we expect.

"Long before Columbus," Sun Spirit says, "and for centuries after he came to these shores, many indigenous tribes—you now call them ‘nations'—lived in this territory, came and went and returned, this tribe dominant and later that one, and later still another. They were not nobler or more peaceful than those who came after them in later centuries and from other continents, and if they were much closer to nature than we are, it is only because they had no choice, lacking the amenities of modern life."

Vida recalls the nations her uncle spoke of. "Cheyenne, Ute, Arapaho, Apache, Shoshone."

"Those and many others," Sun Spirit says. "They've been wildly romanticized. Although they sometimes lived in tolerance of one another, they more often oppressed one another, went to war with one another, enslaved and killed one another— for they were human . When we deny their nature, we also deny their humanity and minimize the complexity of their lives. Like human beings throughout history, they could not get rid of a feeling of the uncanny, of a sense that there is an unseen dimension to life and something that comes after. They all thought this place sacred, and it was the one piece of ground over which they never fought, for each nation had its own section of this tableland that served as a burial ground. That has been long forgotten by many—and now, judging by what you've told us, the truth is being concealed by those who covet the place. In those far times, they didn't call it the Grand Plateau. It was the Land of Spirits Waiting. Waiting to be called from this world to another."

The grass trembles as if with a presentiment of wind that has not yet come to sweep the day.

Vida says, "And your husband—he's looking for proof of graves that will stop Boschvark's project?"

"Not bones, if that's what you're thinking. No need to dig so deep that he disturbs the dead. The grave will be layered, with the bones at the bottom. Above them will be certain objects, depending on the nation to which the deceased belonged. In many cases, there will be items that were placed on the raw earth of the fresh grave, items carved from stone or made from fired clay that over time have weathered into the earth and are easy to uncover. That'll be proof enough to get a court's attention."

Considering the tortuous path Vida has traveled from grief and despair to this triumph, from José's death to impending fulfillment of the mission to which he had dedicated himself, she's astonished to be here. Although the wolves seem vigilant, the dogs continue to frolic, and she is in a mood to take her inspiration from the dogs. Her heart is ready, this time for healing and happiness.

Better yet, if Boschvark could go back in time, he would choke the infant Nochelobo to death in his cradle and do it with enormous pleasure.

Even in death, his nemesis won't leave him in peace. It's like a haunting, Boschvark's skull being the house and José Nochelobo an unrelenting spirit. The endless mining, the wanton destruction of vast ecosystems on land and sea, the volume of wasted materials—this is by far the dirtiest technology we could choose. Nuclear fission, fusion, hydroelectric are all clean. Even natural gas is cleaner and far less destructive than what's needed to harness enough wind.

"For now," Boschvark growls, "the money is in the wind."

Puzzled, Yataghan says, "Excuse me?"

"When wind doesn't work, we'll be where the money goes next."

"If you say so."

Here comes Nochelobo again, spooking along the hallways of Boschvark's mind. The energy infrastructure that's taken a hundred fifty years to establish can't be replaced with something else in just ten years. It'll take fifty years or longer. Spending trillions on a worthless quick fix will crash the economy.

"Meanwhile," Boschvark says, "a lot of people with connections will get very rich. There's nothing wrong with being rich."

"Nothing at all," Yataghan agrees, keeping his focus on their flight path.

"And if you're smart, you can make a fortune in a financial crash."

"I don't think I'm that smart," Yataghan says.

It seems to Boschvark that a chill is imparted to the air in the helo as the ghostly Nochelobo continues his rant. When we've printed trillions in new money to harness the wind, when then the dollar collapses, millions of people will be impoverished.

"Not if they do what I intend to do with every billion I make from wind," Boschvark says.

Because he can't hear Nochelobo's side of the conversation, Yataghan says, "What do you mean? What do you intend to do?"

"What do I intend to do? What do I intend to do? Buy eleven tons of gold, of course. For starters."

"That's a lot of gold."

"At the current price."

"What do you mean?"

"As the price goes up, a billion will buy fewer tons. But I'll keep buying. You damn well better believe it. I'll keep buying if it comes to that. If the country goes down, I won't go with it."

"Hey, are you all right?" Yataghan asks. "What're you so angry about? Did I do something?"

"Not you. Why the hell would I be pissed at you? It's that stinking piece of shit Nochelobo."

"He's dead," Yataghan says.

"I know he's dead. But he'll never be dead enough to suit me."

Boschvark's breathing is louder and more insistent than the sound of the five Blue Edge blades whirling overhead.

After a silence, Yataghan says, "Maybe it's a good thing I don't have that kind of money. What would I do with eleven tons of gold anyway?"

"Put it in a private vault, of course."

"I don't have a private vault."

"Better get several. Here, there, everywhere."

Out beyond the last of the treetops, the Grand Plateau comes into view.

Lupo and his pack race past Vida and Sun Spirit. The dogs break off their play to greet their wild cousins, but the wolves encourage the Alsatians to run west toward where the tableland meets a lower slope and the trees rise to provide cover.

In the south, Two Moon and Sam look up from their labors and toward the women. Something about their posture alerts Vida, and she turns to the north.

At first glance, as the rotorcraft approaches, it seems unreal because it glides through the air with so little sound that she can detect no sound at all.

Then she hears a muffled pulse or feels it more than hears it. She is reminded of the dream in which she and the fortuneteller are sitting on her porch at night, the moon four times its normal size, José in the yard with a man who covers his face with one hand. In the dream this sound arises. What's that? What's coming? she asks. The seer says, Death. When you hear it elsewhere than in a dream, move fast. Do what is expected of a woman who runs with the wolves.

Even if Vida hadn't stuck her nose in where it didn't belong, even if she hadn't inconvenienced him by killing everyone sent to kill her, even if she had never discovered that the Grand Plateau was a sacred Native American burial ground that would eliminate it as a site for a wind farm, Terrence Boschvark would hate her. She was José Nochelobo's lover, which is reason enough to loathe the bitch. The sight of her standing defiantly down there in the tall grass with the Cheyenne woman infuriates him so much that he breaks into a sweat and feels his pulse pounding in his temples.

The .50-caliber machine gun can be operated either by the pilot or by whoever occupies the front passenger seat. Boschvark leans forward and presses a button to the right of the horizon indicator and below the altimeter. A panel drops out of the way, and a gun control extrudes. A targeting display appears on the windshield of the advanced glass cockpit, but he isn't going for the kill right away. He opens fire. Even though the weapon is a recoilless rifle, and imparts no vibration to the helo, sound clatters through the aircraft as if they're taking fire rather than laying it down.

"What the hell!" Yataghan exclaims.

Although he's enraged, Boschvark replies in his Mr. Rogers voice. "Relax. There's no one to see us being bad boys."

"I know, I know. That's not what I mean. Give me a chance to align with them. You're wasting ammunition."

"Now, now, Mack, I'm not wasting anything. I want to scare the crackers out of them first. I want them to run like rats, make them sorry for what they've done to me. Then I'll blast the shit out of them."

"Well, okay," Yataghan says, "if that's your plan. But remember six hundred rounds can spit out quicker than you think with that baby."

The moment ought to be a waking nightmare, but for Vida it has a dreamlike quality that is sublime instead of sinister, as if she has stepped out of the troubled world where she was born and into a magical realm. The forested mountains shelve high and higher to the east of her, as mysterious as a deep greenwood where creatures never named conduct lives unknowable, looming over what seems to be a slowly moving plateau as flat as the flight deck of a carrier ferrying souls from one existence to another. Wolves and dogs racing as if in harmonious celebration through tall grass from which erupt birds in song, the granddaughter of Eternal Fawn raising her right hand to scribe on the air a sign that might be meant to protect them from evil, the quiet rotorcraft racing toward her yet seeming to drift like a bubble aloft on a breeze as gentle as an infant's breath—all that and other wondrous strange details infuse the day with grandeur and beauty that fill her with reverence.

My heart is ready.

A sudden noise. Bullets stitch the flatland, but the mortal stutter doesn't shatter the mood. The flow of time has moderated until all action seems to be taking place in deep water, and even machine-gun fire fails to accelerate it. As the helo passes over her, she takes a quarrel from the quiver on her belt and turns toward the south in time to see Sam and Two Moon pitch forward into the grass, wounded or dead; if just wounded, then as good as dead with medical help so far away.

She reminds herself that what can be seen is temporary, but what cannot be seen is eternal. Repressing grief that would thwart her aim, bridling her anger, she winches the bowstring into place and slips a quarrel into the groove, her hands without a tremor.

My life passes like a shadow. Yet a little while, and all will be consummated.

Over the bodies of the fallen men, the helo executes a sweeping turn and heads north toward the women. Although without a weapon, Sun Spirit stands with Vida, faces the oncoming death machine, and does not sprint for cover. There is strength in solidarity, but also in suffering and in struggle and in hope.

Boschvark lays down a pattern of fire closer to the women than he did on the first pass, and yet they stand unflinching as the helo approaches, as though fearless, as if they embrace the prospect of martyrdom. But they are only rats, and they should run like rats, like the vermin they are, infecting the world with their diseased thinking.

"She's got a crossbow," Yataghan declares with enough alarm to suggest he actually believes that such a primitive weapon poses a threat to them when they're cosseted in this magnificent rotorcraft.

"We're not defenseless like Vector, Trott, and the others. She doesn't have a forest to hide in this time. She's right there . A .50-caliber burst from crotch to face will cut her in two like a paper doll."

Just speaking the bitch's fate in those terms both excites Boschvark and winds the watch spring of his rage even tighter, so that he no longer cares if he can make them run like frightened rats, only that he can slaughter and be done with them.

The engine cowling is directly above the cockpit. The turbine mounted therein, heretofore muffled by sound-reduction technology that is almost miraculous, proves less reliable than a real miracle, erupting in a clatter and shriek of tortured metal and three hard pneumonic coughs of a machine in need of oxygen.

Yataghan says, "Well, damn."

Some successful shots with a crossbow can fairly be attributed to skill alone. Some owe more to luck. Some can be accounted as the result of skill and luck in rare combination. In this case, however, skill and luck seem to have been assisted by a mysterious power deserving of a humble thank-you, and Vida speaks those two words.

The turbine air intakes are on the sides of the engine cowling. The exhaust portal is at the front, where escaping hot gases drive the many blades of the engine on their exit from the system; this round opening looks to be fourteen or sixteen inches in diameter. The carbon quarrel scores a hit on that maw, penetrating far enough to distort and crack a few of the turbine blades. Shrapnel from the quarrel and the ruined blades turn the cowling into a rattlebox, instantly doing further damage.

The engine dies. The five Blue Edge blades of the rotary wing stutter to a stop. The helo arcs eastward, away from Vida and Sun Spirit. It confirms the truth of gravity, impacting hard, tumbling across this Land of Spirits Waiting in a cacophonous mangling, until it crashes into the first trees at the foot of the ascending slope.

The hush that was interrupted by Boschvark's ill-considered assault returns to the plateau, but it endures mere seconds before shouting men disturb it. Vida and Sun Spirit pivot in surprise as Sam and Two Moon come running toward them, obviously not wounded. They had dropped to the ground to make more difficult targets of themselves.

The four stare at one another in astonishment until gladness shapes their faces and makes music of their voices. Sun Spirit and Two Moon embrace. After the briefest hesitation, so do Vida and Sam. If he seems uncertain about his place in her affections, she gives him no reason to doubt that she will heed the advice the seer gave her in a recent dream: Be not so foolish as to cling to what was, rather than embrace what can be. In his scarred face, his eyes are beautiful and full of light. She kisses him.

The dogs and wolves come running from the woods to which they had retreated, as if in happy confirmation of the wisdom of the kiss, and Vida is overcome by joy she never expected to know again.

In the ruins of the helicopter, Terrence Boschvark wonders how long it will take for a dedicated team of the finest specialists to mend him. He doesn't care about the cost; he can afford whatever the doctors wish to charge, even make each of them a billionaire if he must. He assumes, for it's not in his character to fail to assume, that eternal life through the grace of high technology is still his destiny once he gets past this bump in the road. He's lightheaded, and his vision repeatedly blurs, and he's confused about how he got here and where "here" is, but he is in no pain, which surely means that his injuries are minor. The cockpit is torn and battered, and the air reeks of spilled fuel, but he's still belted in his seat, which is reassuring.

Not so reassuring is the fact that Mack Yataghan is also belted in his seat but is headless. In the crash, one of the double-swept rotor blades carved through a section of the cabin, and now Mack's head is in his lap, gazing up at his sheered neck.

Boschvark tries to move, but he can't even wiggle a finger. He can speak, however, and he mutters curses when the wolves appear at the portion of the cabin where a door and part of the fuselage were ripped away. He's not afraid. He's angry that they might complicate the work of rescuers who will arrive soon with sirens blaring.

When Nochelobo's whore appears behind the wolves and peers in at him, his anger burns into rage. "Die," he says, "die, damn you," as if he can kill by command. And then a funny thing happens.

Vida and the wolves fade away as if they are not real. As they disappear, darkness settles around the wreckage, and in mere seconds the pale, pocked moon rises as if time has accelerated. It is a full lunar sphere so immense that it seems to be descending on the Earth in an inevitable cataclysm. Before he is able to decide whether to be fearful or furious, a figure emerges from the night and stands silhouetted in the immense moon. An albino mountain lion. As white as a ghost but not immaterial. The idiot locals call it Azrael. He never would have imagined that an animal would one day speak to him or that it would issue an invitation. Although the cougar's face is fierce, its voice is matter-of-fact when it says, "Come with me." Everything goes black.

"They're both dead," Vida reports when she returns from the wreckage. "The chopper will be emitting a GPS signal, so someone will be coming sooner or later."

"It's best for all of us," Sam says, "if no one ever knows we were here, at least not at the time when this happened."

As the wolves lead the dogs and the dogs lead the people off the plateau and to the path by which they came here, Two Moon says, "Sun Spirit and I will ride our horses into Kettleton for staples the day after tomorrow. By then, everyone will be talking about the crash and Boschvark's death."

"We'll say we never knew about the project," Sun Spirit adds.

"Which we didn't," her husband says, "until you visited us. But when we hear about it, we can raise the issue of the burial ground."

"You'll make targets of yourselves," Vida warns.

Sun Spirit scribes the sign in the air that she previously made as though to ward off the helicopter. "If we can wake the remaining people of our nation from their long sleep, as well as those of some other tribes, there will be too many targets to allow them to turn the Land of Spirits Waiting into a three-thousand-acre bird-killing machine."

The fragrances of pines and forest mast replace the acrid scent of spilled aviation fuel, and green shadows welcome them down into the ancient, vulnerable, but enduring forest.