“But I learned too late that man is a stubborn creature. He will bring his politics and his competition with him. The people working on the project care only about dollars and lire and yen and who claims the glory.”
“They are scientists, Uncle. They should know better.”
“They know,” said Bianco. “But they forget. I don’t have the answer. Maybe I should return to research myself.”
“You can’t go to the space station with your condition.”
“My doctor treats my condition with pills and warnings to avoid spicy foods. I do not obey because spicy foods are one of the few pleasures left me, other than watching beautiful women stroll the piazzas on a summer evening.”
“There are no women strolling piazzas on Trikon Station,” said Ugo.
“Nor are there spicy foods.”
Bianco’s voice trailed off. He breathed deeply and cleared his mind with a relaxation method suggested by an old friend of his from Bangkok. The reclining chair felt feather soft, almost like a cloud. He had an impression of Ugo rising from the ottoman and drawing the curtains tightly against the lowering sun. He heard, as if from a great distance, the door of the suite clicking shut. He pictured Ugo tiptoeing on the luxurious carpeting out in the corridor.
Bianco drifted off into a dream. He stood alone in the middle of a vast plain. Lightning flickered in the distance, backlighting gray clouds that boiled into thunderheads. He held a sledgehammer with one hand, a wooden stake with the other. A voice commanded him to drive the stake into the ground. But the soil turned to concrete wherever he placed its point.
He awoke to find Ugo reading a newspaper in the sitting room. His young nephew pulled open the curtains. The mountains stood purple against the faint orange of the sunset.
“What time is it?”
“Almost nine. You were tired, Uncle.”
“Tired?” said Bianco. “Now I will be a cripple from this chair, eh?”
He shuffled into the bathroom to wash for dinner. The fluorescent bulbs raised a harsh image in the mirror. He almost laughed at himself. He certainly no longer resembled Ugo. His eyeballs were shattered with arteries, his strong nose had melted into a lumpy mass of flesh, his few remaining wisps of hair formed a tonsure on his freckled skull. Fabio Bianco, scientist-monk, Fra CEO.
They took a taxi to Ouchy and dined on a terrace overlooking Lake Geneva. The air was calm except for an occasional breeze that disturbed the reflections of shore lights on the glassy water. A jetliner’s contrail, illuminated by the moon, passed through the bowl on the Big Dipper.
After they returned to the hotel Bianco lay on the bed long into the night with the lights out and the television playing without sound. He used the remote control to spin the dial. There were so many channels, so much information. Talk shows, game shows, police shows, music shows. When he was a boy, he would lie awake on a summer night with nothing but the music of his neighbor’s mandolin floating through the open window. He would hear the mandolin telling him his future, the loves he would have, the great things he would accomplish, even the pain he would endure.
The local Swiss channel was showing a special report about the pollution that was strangling Venice. He watched mechanical harvesters scooping algae from the lagoon by the ton and still the water looked like a salad. He turned on the sound and heard that this summer was the worst ever. The smell was so terrible that the flow of tourists had dwindled to almost nothing. Swarms of flies thick as thunderclouds stopped trains when the wind shifted and blew them over Mestre. Their engineers could not see. Yet one of the harried scientists told the TV interviewer that Venice’s lagoon was so polluted with chemicals that nothing should be alive in it.
With a pained sigh Bianco switched channels again.
An all-news station from Atlanta in the United States showed a man with gray curls and a rumpled tweed hat broadcasting from a rocky coastline. The sky was thick with rain clouds. WHALE DEATHS was superimposed on the screen. Bianco raised the volume.