Page 57 - Psychoceramics and the Test of Fire

Homeostatopia

It was my good fortune to visit Nodal Village during the coolest
month of the year. Dry Devil Scrubs does not appear on Auto Club
touring maps. It wouldn’t be on the face of the earth were it not for
an easily-tapped aquifer the gods of terraformation grudgingly
extended beneath its barren landscape. So I had to rent a rugged
four-wheel-drive SUV and find the barely perceptible turnoff for the
road between Derdoff Flats and Dreckton. On the seat next to me a
World War Two survey map of the area showed a faint dotted line
meandering through the utterly devastated Forbissener National
Forest; it began, so I presumed, at a crude marker approximately the
correct number of scaled miles from Dreckton. If and when it ended
I would be at my destination: the only possible salvation for
humankind and its accumulated wisdom.
Well, that was how its founder, Harold A. Peña, visionary and
anti-brinksman, presented it. It escaped me how someone so
pessimistic about the present could devote his life to an optimistic
view of the future. It could only be his energetic commitment to a
head-scratching theory: that fact alone marked him as a closed-
minded eccentric whose energy would not be diverted by
incontrovertible fact or airtight logic. Thus I had to go down another
road, figuratively, just as twisting and bumpy. My task was to help
Mr. Peña get beyond Dry Devil Scrubs to establish proof of concept.
Or face his Waterloo. That was not up to me: I was merely the bearer
of good tidings from a man who stayed in the shadows, Al Magnus.
But not just a postman or delivery boy—I had to allay the suspicions
of a man whose type ran to bipolar disorder and obsessive-
compulsiveness. So I was a reverse confidence man, a highly-
prepared performer ready to save the show by improvising when
necessary to sell his audience of one on accepting a gift beyond his
wildest expectations: a chance to realize cherished dreams decried by
his peers as nonsense and delusion.
Thus I had studied Peña’s personal history and accomplishments,
at the same time gaining the basics of the great scheme for which I
would provide funding. He was not a man to hide his light under a
bushel; I therefore had little concern that his “real” plan differed
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