Analog SFF, October 2008 Read online

  * * * *

  The cabernet was everything it was cracked up to be, and for the most part, Blaine was as bland as expected. The exception was his stand on immigration, which he believed was crippling the country. It had been a popular stand in his working-class congressional district, but as a senator, he'd represent the whole state, where agriculture was big. The heat he was generating on that one topic was enough to more than make up for everything else.

  It was a reception, not a sit-down dinner, which meant the entire thing was mix-and-mingle, though there was plenty of food at an elegant buffet, selected to complement the wine. Since everyone but Valerie had made a thousand dollar donation simply to get in the door, Blaine didn't waste time with long speeches. Rather, he gave a five-minute address that was mostly highlights of his normal stump speech, then set about working the room, making sure he got at least a few moments with everyone, even Valerie.

  “Glad to see the Times here,” he said, surprising her, because they'd only met once before. “When I was a boy, I paid for my first bicycle, delivering papers around Morningside.”

  “Not many paperboys left,” Valerie said. “In a few years there probably won't even be a paper. We'll be entirely electronic.” Not that this was what Blaine meant. Morningside was a working-class neighborhood, and he was reminding her of his blue-collar roots. But there was another subtext: Valerie's paper was now delivered by car, by a gentle old man whose English was limited to gap-toothed grins and thank-yous.

  “Yes,” Blaine said, perfectly aware she couldn't have missed his point. “Technology marches on. But it's been years since kids had a chance really to learn the value of work.” Then he moved on, leaving her to wonder if he truly believed that illegal immigration was also crippling the nation's character, by stealing kids’ jobs.

  * * * *

  There isn't much difference between an expensive hangover and a cheap one. That was Valerie's verdict the next morning, when a shaft of sun from a poorly drawn curtain pierced like an ice pick to the brain. She shifted, trying to dodge the probing ray, but that just set the whole room to throbbing.

  That left two choices: sit up and deal with the curtain, or give up and pop an aspirin. After ten minutes’ trying to pretend the problem would go away if she ignored it, she opted for the latter, plus one of her mother's more exotic remedies, which involved coconut milk, nutmeg, peanut butter, and honey. There were a half-dozen other ingredients, but there's a limit to how complex a hangover remedy she was willing to concoct during the hangover.

  Other than the wine, her chat with Blaine had been the highlight of the evening. Afterward, she'd drifted from conversation to conversation, where people bent her ear about everything in general and nothing in specific. Then, sometime between her second and third glasses, she decided she'd better write her story, while she still could.

  She'd recorded a few notes during Blaine's highlight-reel speech, mostly slogans. But there was also a longer bit, probably inspired by the setting.

  “It's been said that you cannot put new wine in old wineskins,” he'd said. “If you do, the wine will expand and burst the wineskins.” He'd picked up a decanter and poured into a glass. “Rather, you must put the wine into new wineskins, so the two may stretch together.”

  He paused. “Okay, so wine doesn't stretch. I don't know exactly what new wine used to do, though Gavin here could probably tell you.” He'd smiled at a gray-suited man standing beside him, who Valerie presumed to be Gavin Anderson, president, CEO, and head-everything of the Angel's Head empire.

  Anderson wasn't sure whether he was supposed to speak or not. “It would probably have continued to ferment,” he'd said. “But I'm not an historian.” He was a big man in his fifties, lean, not fat. Valerie knew almost nothing about him. The business and technology beat belonged to B. J. Packard, who'd asked her out a couple times but was a touch too geeky for her taste. Or maybe she was still too close to her divorce and looking for excuses.

  Luckily, her recorder had caught Blaine's words while her mind was wandering. “So there you have it,” he'd said, quickly regaining the floor. “It was trying to become champagne.” Everyone laughed. “But you get the point. The future is technology, but it needs to be nurtured. Stored, if you will, in new wineskins of high-paying jobs, good education, a skilled workforce, and infrastructures not already stretched to the max. What it does not need are the old wineskins of porous borders, overburdened social services, and rampant cheating by those who make it hard for honest businesses to compete.”

  Valerie had shut off the recording and marked the important sections for her voice software to transcribe. Clearly, immigration was going to be core to his campaign, which, with an evenly divided Congress, was going to draw national attention.

  Even slightly sloshed, she'd known she should be clamoring to stay on the beat. She was the local insider. Do it right, and it was what she was looking for: a way to undo the error of being lured off into journalistic nowhereville while her former husband chased nanochips and skirts with equal vigor.

  But she had mixed feelings. Her mother had been an immigrant (legal, to be sure), and nothing about her had stolen jobs from anyone. It had taken her years to find work other than as an au pair.

  Still, Valerie had a story to file. She picked a few of the best lines, including the wineskin bit, which her CompUphone informed her was an allusion to the gospel of Matthew. Then she dictated a twenty-inch story into the phone, glad to be working remote from the office, where only the phone could detect the wine's influence on her diction. Then, she'd let the word-processor debug her grammar, deferring more than usual to its sometimes lackluster choices, and hit send to text her story to the night editor.

  After that, things got blurry, though she did remember discovering there comes a point when you can no longer distinguish high-end wine from table plonk. There'd also been something about her car, though it wasn't until she braved the sunlight to step outside that she remembered it. She hadn't driven home. The solicitous Angel's head attendants had deemed that unwise.

  The sloshed posh had gotten chauffeured rides home, but there were a limited number of drivers available and the best they'd been able to give her had been a cab ride. The ride had been courtesy of Angel's Head, but her car was still at the winery and she was going to have to go back and get it herself. Not quite how she'd intended to spend her Saturday.

  * * * *

  The winery was in the back-behind of nowhere, up miles and miles of twisty roads. Valerie had once written about how global warming was forcing wineries onto ever higher ground and how forward-thinking ones like Angel's Head were buying up land at ever higher elevations, trying to dodge the heat.

  The aspirin was beginning to do its job (or maybe it was the coconut and nutmeg), but she kept asking the cabbie to slow down. Last night, she'd not fully appreciated what a nasty road this was, clinging to the wall of a narrow gorge until it reached a hidden valley high in the hills.

  Other wineries had tasting rooms in the gentler farmlands closer to the city. But at thirty dollars a taste, Angel's Head's didn't cater to the hoi polloi. If you didn't have time for the drive, you weren't their type of customer.

  By the time she finally got there, the cab fare exceeded the cost of several of those tastes—a bummer because she couldn't exactly put it on her expense account. But as long as she'd spent it, she decided to take the opportunity to tour the winery.

  Luckily, she didn't have to wait for a scheduled tour. Instead, she tagged along with a group of Germans—or maybe they were Dutch or Austrians; she'd never been able to tell those accents apart. Wherever they were from, they had very good English.

  The chateau/tasting room was merely the winery's public face. The real facilities were dug into the hillside, where nature helped produce perfect wine-cellar conditions. As they strolled the warren of piping, vats, and bottling machines, their guide (who might well have been last night's valet, though Valerie had to admit the maroon-and-gray livery ma
de everyone look alike) told them that great winemaking came from two factors.

  One was what the French called terroir: the link between wine and the land. “In a good wine, you can taste the soil,” he said. “Some are volcanic, yielding wines in which you can feel the fire that produced them. Others are earthier, mellower, richer. Each of our plots has several distinct soils, which we've carefully mapped so we can pick the perfect combinations of grapes. In the old days, wine masters did that by strolling their fields, tasting. We still do that ... but we back it up with chemical tests. These days, winemaking is as high-tech as rocket science.

  “The other factor is plain, old-fashioned work. Even though this year we'll be producing forty-five thousand cases, we look at every vine, every day. We deliver just the right amounts of water, and we don't pick whole rows of grapes, like lower-class wineries do. Instead, we pick each bunch when it's perfect. It's time consuming, but one taste tells you why.”

  * * * *

  With the tour ending, the Germans spilled into the tasting room. “The current vintage is eminently drinkable,” the guide said, “but if you cellar it for a few years, it will only get better. It's also a good investment....”

  Valerie veered for the exit, then realized she hadn't a clue where to find her car. Embarrassed, she asked the doorman, who pointed to a flight of stairs. “Up in the employee lot. If you need your keys—”

  “Nope, I'm all set.” Valerie pulled her key ring out of her pocket. Luckily someone had given them to her last night, or she wouldn't have gotten into her apartment. She wondered if she was supposed to tip the doorman. She'd not thought to tip the valet last night, and from the looks of the stairs, he'd gotten a workout.

  Heck with it. She was a reporter, not a cash machine, and anyway, the doorman looked as though he might double as a security guard. Now that she thought about it, so had last night's valet. The trim uniform had snugged nicely over what had appeared to be a bodybuilder physique.

  Slogging up the stairs, she wondered what they were guarding. Rich donors, last night. But those were long gone. Then she multiplied forty-five thousand cases by two hundred dollar a bottle. She did it again, but the result was the same. Unless she'd dropped a zero, this place pulled in a hundred million a year. No wonder they could afford to host last night's soiree.

  The parking lot was divided into two parts by a line of bushes. Valerie's car was in the front with a dozen others probably belonging to the tour guide and other winery staff. The back half was empty except for a delivery truck from which three men were unloading what appeared to be motorized wheelchairs. Behind them, the doors of a warehouselike shed gaped, wildly out of place in the manicured landscaping. What little she could see of the interior was a jumble of machine-shop equipment and scaffolding-style shelves crammed with more wheelchairs and other even more exotic equipment, all in disorganized contrast to the immaculate winery she'd just toured.

  Overseeing the unloading was someone who looked vaguely familiar.

  When Valerie was a child, there'd been a man down the block who'd collected junk. He never talked to anybody and spent most of his time moving things around: from garage, to lawn shed, to basement, to the back of his old pickup truck. As a kid, she thought he was spooky and refused to go near his house alone. Later, in J-school, she'd done a story on compulsive collectors and realized he'd been harmless, probably suffering from a type of brain injury that led others to hoard newspapers, junk mail, cats, or candy wrappers.

  At first, she thought the sense of familiarity was simply because the man fussing over the delivery crew was about the same age as her childhood neighbor and shared his slouching, dour expression. But, pretending to fumble with her keys, she realized he also looked like a flaccid, paunchier version of Gavin Anderson: a cousin, perhaps, or even a brother.

  The sound of an approaching motor distracted her. She looked up and watched a battered green pickup pull into a nearby slot, driven by a dark-skinned man in a baseball cap.

  “Hi,” she said. Then, sensing an opportunity, “Do you work here?”

  "Si, señorita. Are you having problems with your car?”

  “Oh, no.” She smiled and quit fidgeting with the keys. “I was just wondering,” she tilted her head toward the delivery van. “What's that all about?”

  “Oh, that's Mr. Galen.” The pickup driver was short and wiry, with the strong, gnarled hands of a lifetime of labor. “He likes things with wheels and motors. He fixes the big ones to sell on eBay. The little ones, he uses the parts to make toys.”

  “Really?”

  “Oh, yes. One and a half years ago, maybe two, he made machines that dueled each other with tiny swords. Not dangerous, just for fun. They were only this tall"—he held a hand out the window, about door-handle height—"maybe less. Muy listo. Very clever. He even had a tournament, like in the Olympics, though I never understood why, because all of the machines were the same, so why does it matter which wins? But Mr. Gavin, he was very proud.”

  “Thank you.” Valerie opened her car door. “That sounds very interesting.”

  “Oh, si. The little machines, they were on carts, like, you remember, the rovers on Mars, but smaller. The swords were on arms that went up and down a little pole, like..."—he paused, looking for an analogy—"like jumping beans on a stick. Yes, very clever.” He climbed out of his truck and shut the door, not bothering to lock it. "Buenos dias."

  Valerie watched him walk off across the parking lot, heading for a smaller shed that probably contained gardening equipment. "Buenos dias," she called.

  Climbing into her car, she couldn't help but smile. Another of the lessons she'd learned from her mother was that if English obviously wasn't your first language, people would view you as a child. It wasn't racism; it was human nature, her mother said, but her insistence on the importance of language had probably been one of the factors that had helped make Valerie a journalist. It was also a lesson she'd used many times as a reporter. Today, she'd bet one of those bottles of pricey wine that the management had no idea how smart the gardener was.

  Not that it mattered. The man hadn't exactly been giving away trade secrets. The trouble with being a reporter was that you collect questions the way her neighbor had collected junk. But at least she had her answer. “Mr. Galen” and “Mr. Gavin.” If she had a hundred-million-dollar-a-year business and a harmlessly brain-damaged brother, she might give him his own Mr. Fix-It warehouse, too.

  * * * *

  An hour later, Valerie found herself in a pub, reading the early edition of the Sunday paper and nursing a beer.

  Her story had made page 3A, with a photo of Blaine at a long-ago rally, plus some padding from old stories of his congressional career that beefed it up to nearly half a page. It must have been a slow news day.

  It always amused her to see her byline in the weekend paper. For most of her life, she'd been Valerie Matsen, carrying the name of her father, who, blondly Nordic as they come, had been mesmerized by the elegant Ghanaian he'd met one day at church, black as the new-moon sky. Akwasi had been Valerie's middle name, designating, in ancient tradition, not only the day of the week on which she'd been born, but in her case, the day her parents had met.

  Marriage had converted her to Valerie Ryan, but divorce had ended that, and despite her very Americanized café-au-lait complexion, she identified with her immigrant roots. When divorce gave her a chance to reinvent herself, her father had been the first to understand. But it had happened recently enough that it still tickled her when “Valerie ‘Sunday'” appeared in the weekend paper. Not that anyone else was likely to get the joke. There weren't many Ghanaians in Bay End.

  Stopping at the bar had been an impulse decision. It wasn't really what she'd wanted, especially at three P.M., but leaving the winery, she couldn't get the gardener out her mind.

  Weren't wineries supposed to have hundreds of workers like him? Maybe their vehicles were off in some other lot, but driving past the fields, she could only see a few workers,
most of whom didn't seem to be doing much. Maybe the tour guide had been exaggerating and “every vine, every day” was simply hype.

  She'd pulled to the side, walking to the end of the nearest row to inspect the vines. The grapes were plump and purple: if they weren't ripe, they were damn close. She was tempted to sample one, but instead used her phone to consult the internet, verifying that premium grape-growing was one of the most labor-intensive forms of agriculture there was. Automated grape-harvesters existed—grabbing vines and shaking them until the fruit fell off—but they harvested entire fields all at once: not what Angel's Head claimed to do.

  Which meant that Angel's Head needed laborers: lots and lots of laborers.

  Back on the road, she'd started tallying cars, trying to sort them into customers and field workers. But it wasn't the right time of day for workers to be arriving, so she wasn't sure if it meant anything that she saw ten BMWs for each cheaper car.

  By the time she reached the main highway, she'd been chewing on another question. If Angel's Head needed the kind of labor force typical of premium grape growers, it should have been all in favor of cheap labor and illegal-immigrant amnesties. So what was Anderson doing, supporting someone like Blaine?

  That was when she'd spotted the pub, right at the junction with the main road. Maybe there were more workers than she'd seen. Maybe some would stop in the pub on their way home. Even if they didn't, she could grab a window seat and watch the traffic that emerged from the winery road, come evening.

  Unfortunately, this wasn't the type of place where you could blend in by drinking a fancy non-cocktail. But making a beer last for hours was another reporting skill she'd long ago mastered.

  * * * *

  Business was slow at first, but somewhere around four thirty, the bartender turned on a bank of televisions and the place began acquiring a sports pub atmosphere.