Part 49 (1/2)

She felt sorry for the old man. And yet he had managed to have one

big thing in his life: the war. That was something. His one moment of glory,

Her life had had nothing in it at all, so far, except the uneventful

getting from age zero to age nineteen, and that was how it looked to

remain. The world was pretty empty, locally, these days. You couldn't

expect much when you lived in a country thirty miles across, that you

could drive from one end of to the other in an hour, if you could

drive. At least Uncle James had had a war.

They were on the bridge now, meshed with its transport cable, whizzing

westward at a hundred kilometers per hour. Carlotta pointed out

landmarks on the way, in case he had forgotten them. ”There's Alcatraz

Island, do you see? And that's Mount Tamalpais, away across on the

Marin County side. And back over there, behind us, you can see the

whole East Bay, Oakland, Berkeley, El Cerrito . . . ”

The old man seemed interested. He responded with a jumble of military

history, hazy memories intermixed with scrambled details out of the

wrong wars, ”The Mendocino people came in right through there, where the

San Rafael bridge used to be, maybe two hundred of them. We fixed