I'm a computer programmer. I'm the best kind - the kind they call a Real Programmer. Other kinds of programmers think I'm not quite human, because I can do things they can't. I care about things like freedom and intelligence. I wear hiking boots all the time, "just in case a Mountain should suddenly spring up in the middle of the machine room," but mostly I hike on weekends. They say if it ain't broke, don't fix it, but if it really is broke, what do you do? You call me, and I fix it, no matter what's wrong. That's my job.
I live in the city now, but I grew up in Sooke. It's a small logging and fishing town, full of redneck hippies. There's a little museum about that. In twenty years, growing up there, I never got around to climbing the Mountain behind the museum, and I always wanted to. My friend Jeff is into the whole history and legend thing, so he and I took the bus out there on a Saturday, so I could climb the Mountain and he could look in the museum. I once found a coathanger on that bus. We expected to stay the whole day.
The Mountain is covered with trees. For whatever reason, the loggers never got around to chopping them down before the hippies got the government to declare the whole works a park. There was something said about special spiritual significance of the old-growth forest on the Mountain, but I didn't pay it any mind; the hippies will say anything they think they can get away with. Even with the Mountain designated for recreational use under the Forest Practices Code, it was never a popular place for hiking or anything else. I think a handful of First Nations people live there. At the top of the Mountain there are a bunch of radio dishes.
If you think of any government agency that might know about radio dishes, and you phone them up, they'll always tell you that the dishes on the Mountain are cable television downlinks. But if you phone Shaw Cable, they'll say the dishes are Federal radio telescopes. When I had my telephone job interview for the radio observatory in Penticton, I asked the scientist interviewing me whether they ever used any data from Sooke. The line went silent for several seconds, and then he started asking me again the questions he'd already asked me about C++ programming.
Of course it doesn't take much intelligence, especially with the naval base right next door in Esquimalt, to figure out that the Mountain may be full of spooks guarding our freedom - or whatever it is spooks do. But even if it is a spook headquarters, if a rare person does want to go hiking on the Mountain, nobody's going to show up to stop them. I see freedom and intelligence as use-it-or-lose-it propositions, so I brought my camera with me when I climbed the Mountain.
The trail petered out almost immediately, and I found myself alternately wading through salal up to my hips, and scrambling over bare patches of rock. In Scouts they always tell you that if you disturb the moss on the rocks, it'll take about four quintillion years to grow back, and I did try not to leave too many footprints, but I didn't worry about it too much. I figure humans are part of Nature too.
I snapped the occasional artistic photo of the trees on my way up, but I was saving most of my roll for the dishes at the top. About halfway up I came across what I imagined to be the remains of a road built when the dishes were put there, and that sped my ascent. By late morning I was near the top of the Mountain. I stood on top of a large rock outcropping and looked out at the world, expecting to see the harbour and the city in the distance, but a layer of fog had rolled in from the ocean, and all I could see were other mountain peaks rising above the fog, in a surprisingly straight line from the Mountain off into the distance inland.
The very summit of the mountain was bare rock, with a brass geodetic control monument left by the surveyors. I noted its number, but later couldn't find the slip of paper, and I'm not working in the job where I had lookup privileges on the GCM database anymore anyway. In a cleared ring around the summit, at a radius of perhaps a hundred meters, were the five radio dishes. Each dish was perhaps twelve meters across. They sure looked like telescopes as opposed to satellite dishes. The mounts were obviously designed to tilt and swivel precisely, under automatic control. Not geosync television downlinks, and I don't know what kind of satellite is so quiet as to require a 12-meter dish anyway. Each dish was pointing in a different direction, which seemed to rule out interferometry.
There was a frill of razor wire on each of the support legs, obviously there to prevent climbers, so I couldn't get close to the focal points to check out the feed arrangements. At the base of each dish I found a heavily armoured cable that appeared to be going straight down into the ground, consistent with the idea of spooks in tunnels controlling the dishes. I suddenly had a feeling of being watched, and quickly checked the area for video cameras, remote-controlled submachine guns, or whatever, but didn't see any security precautions beyond the razor wire. There was a painted wood name plate on the concrete base of one dish, but it was so weathered as to be unreadable.
I had thoughtlessly left my compass at home, but I shot some photos of the dishes, trying to get in enough of each dish to judge its orientation, and also enough of the shadow that I could work backwards from the time of day to get a reference point for the azimuths. I had the idea that it'd be useful to know the celestial coordinates they were pointed at. I also set the self-timer on my camera and shot a photo of myself standing next to one of the support legs, to show scale. Then I started climbing down the mountain, taking a different route in case I found anything else interesting.
Suddenly the forest ended and I found myself on a patch of well-maintained green lawn, next to a recently-paved road. In front of me was a cul-de-sac surrounded by seven or eight new vinyl-sided houses, all identical but in different pastel colors. Below me I could see more of the same, stretching down the slope. The sun broke through the clouds and made everything sparkle. I was in the middle of one of those horrific housing subdivisions that I had seen overtaking Sooke as I was growing up. But how could there be a subdivision here on the slopes of the Mountain, with no roads from the world below? Why hadn't it been visible from civilization?
There was a man there. He looked to be in his sixties. He was wearing a commissionaire's uniform, and standing next to a sign in the middle of the cul-de-sac that read:
WELCOME TO GODSTOWN
NO LITTERING
NO SPITTING
NO CURSING
NO DRINKING
CURFEW 8PM
ANY PICTURES CONTAINING
NUDES WILL BE CONFISCATED
THIS IS A GODLY TOWN
THE GOLDEN RULE IS THE RULE
OF THIS SUBDIVISION
It was a large sign, written in large letters. I snapped a photo of it and him before he had a chance to move. He approached me, calling "Hello, friend," but his eyes weren't friendly. He asked me questions about who I was and where I was from and where I was going, injecting more references to Christian faith into his speech than I'm accustomed to hearing, even from fundamentalists. I felt like I was passing a Customs checkpoint.
Somehow, I was carrying a skateboard, and somehow I didn't think the inhabitants of this subdivision would approve. I asked the guard if it was okay for me to ride the skateboard on this road. "Oho," he said, "so that's what you're hiding!" I hadn't been hiding it at all. He told me I could skate here, carefully, "but I'm watching you". I hopped on the board and zipped down the hill, glad to leave him behind.
The roads were a confusing maze. One cul-de-sac after another, each full of identical houses. All the lights were off. There was one car, or sometimes a minivan, parked in every driveway; all new, all expensive, all with identical "IXTHYS" Christian fish logos. There were no sidewalks - obviously a place designed for the suburban commuter culture. Although the houses and vehicles were obviously meant for families, I saw none of the general childhood debris that tends to accumulate in real subdivisions. Why didn't I consider this a real subdivision?
I shot a few photos, until I realized there was no point having any more because they would all look alike. There were dozens of crows in the sky high above me, flirting with the bright sun; they never seemed to land, and I saw no other living creatures. I had a strange feeling that built slowly the longer I spent in the subdivision, but the worst part was when I noticed that all the car license numbers were consecutive down every block.
"Blessed be, stranger." "Blessed be," I stammered, eyeing the young woman who seemed to have materialized from nowhere. She had long dark hair and piercing blue eyes, pretty in a hayseed sort of way. She was wearing the kind of rumpled flowing dress common among the local hippies. A bit of formality seemed appropriate. I placed the skateboard under my arm and said, "That's a form of address I never expected to hear in this godly town, and welcome, too."
The woman laughed. "I was here before Godstown, and Goddess willing I hope to be here after it's just a bad memory. And before I'm too much older, too. Maybe you're part of that - here to bring us a bit of freedom and intelligence. Won't you come have a cup of tea with me?" She led me to a house that looked exactly like all the others, except for the silvery aluminum foil covering all the lower windows. As I entered her door, a black cat sidled up to me, winding around my ankles and purring loudly. I reached down to pet it.
She told me to call her Mella. She poured me a cup of something she said was camomile tea, but it wasn't. We sat at a wooden table in her kitchen and talked about my world outside the Mountain, about freedom and intelligence. She said she seldom left her neighbourhood, but she didn't say why. She couldn't, or anyway didn't, answer my questions about the radio telescopes and Godstown, always deflecting the conversation back to me. "So you're a real computer programmer?" she asked. "You don't fit my image of them."
I lost track of the time talking to Mella, and I was startled when I glanced at my watch and realised how late it had become. She seemed to reach a decision then. Rising, with a strange smile she said, "Won't you come and pray with me?" She lead me down a back staircase to a room with an altar and candles all around. The windows were covered with foil to deter spying parishioners, and the floor was thickly, softly carpeted.
We gave thanks for freedom and intelligence. We blessed the Mountain, ourselves, and each other. We prayed for the souls of the people of Godstown, whatever their state might be. Grace, beauty, and power. Eventually the cat wandered in and watched us gravely, curled up on the floor.
It was very late. By the time I made it to the bottom of the mountain, I'd probably already be too late to catch the bus back home; I would have to spend the night (technically, the morning) at my parents' house. I asked if I could borrow Mella's phone. It was monstrous, black, and pulse-dial. I called Jeff on his cell.
The connection was terrible. I could barely make myself heard as I told him I had been stuck on the Mountain longer than I expected, but was coming down now and he shouldn't worry. I could hear him shouting back that we had to talk, but I knew that already. He had gotten tired of the museum and was reading spooky stories in the local branch of the Regional Library, hiding out from the Jehovah's Witnesses.
Mella hugged me close. "Don't leave me," she begged, "alone, here among the Christians." I said I had to go - my world needed me - but I promised to return as soon as I could. She drew back, pouting. "After you leave, you won't want to come back. It won't be the same..." "It never is," I said hastily, "Blessed be!" I turned and walked down the Mountain, picking up speed as the slope caught me. "Blessed be," she called wistfully.
I was running down what seemed to be the main street, trying to catch the sun as it slowly descended. I couldn't find the skateboard, and figured I must have left it at Mella's house. Suddenly the commissionaire stepped out of a side street and stood directly in my path. I considered just detouring and exercising my freedom to run right past him, but that might not really be intelligent, so I stopped to see what he wanted.
"Well," he began disapprovingly, "I see you've met our resident freak-show exhibit. I told you I'd be watching." I was suddenly filled with anger at this crazy place I'd landed, and this obnoxious old man. I thought of making a comment along the lines of Matthew 26:10, but I didn't say it. I just said, in a carefully controlled tone, that I wanted to go home to my family before dark. "Good idea," he said, and chuckled. "The Lord sees fit to makes it very dark here, when it gets dark, and there's a curfew, you know." He stepped to the side and gestured as if waving me through a barrier. As I walked past, the edge of his hand caught my butt as if by accident.
The sun had set, and I think I might have been catching the edge of the curfew, as I approached the band of forest at the base of the mountain. There was a wide grassy strip here and then the forest started just as suddenly as it had ended when I entered the subdivision. Sitting in the strip, almost guarding a perimeter between Godstown and the forest, was a big concrete-block structure with crosses painted on the sides. Vehicles were parked all around it, and light poured out of high windows.
I didn't want to stop and investigate further, but I was forced to slow down as I picked my way through the mass of parked cars towards the forest. I could hear a preacher's voice booming from the place of worship, telling the faithful about the evil temptations of the Devil. Pretty conventional stuff, except he referred to the Devil as "She". I shouldered my way into the forest, and was soon on the highway with my thumb out, well on my way back to reality.
Jeff's head was full of the things he'd seen and heard in the museum and library - all singing deer and ghost salmon and the Witch of the Mountain. I told him I hadn't seen any funny animals up there, just trees. "But I think I met the Witch," I said. "She was the only thing in the place that failed to give me the creeps."
Despite his best efforts, Jeff hadn't found anything new on the radio dishes that had originally lured me into making my climb, and he wasn't as impressed with my stories of the cookie-cutter subdivision as I'd hoped. On the bus back to the city, he told me that it was perfectly reasonable for the spooks to build a town for their people, from scratch in the middle of nowhere, and fly in all the supplies and such by helicopter. I remained unconvinced.
A few days later, I picked up my developed photos, hoping to calculate the dish directions and show Jeff how unnaturally perfect everything in Godstown had been. The first few exposures showed only trees; they must have been from the first part of my hike to the top. I didn't really remember how many I had snapped then. The pictures of the radio dishes were disappointing; I had snapped them at a bad angle, and they were so out-of-focus and lens-flared that the dishes were just blurs. Useless.
The first real surprise was about halfway through the roll: a picture of me, standing next to a huge cedar tree, with no radio dish in sight. That ruled out my theory that maybe I'd gotten someone else's pictures by mistake. After the picture of me, the remaining prints were just blurry pictures of trees. There was not a single picture of Godstown in the pack.
And something else was wrong, too. After flipping through the stack of prints several times, I finally thought to count them, and there were only twenty-two. The drugstore hadn't printed the whole roll. With a magnifying glass and the negatives on a light table, I found the two missing exposures. They were the ones I had taken when I met Mella and the security guard, and when I saw them I realised why the drugstore hadn't printed them. I was lucky they let me have the negatives.
Mella was right: I didn't want to go back to the Mountain. But I promised her I would return, and I knew I would. Someone needed me there. Maybe I really could do something for freedom and intelligence. That's my job. I wouldn't be going alone, though. I'd be too afraid.
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