Sunrise Alley

by Catherine Asaro

  "Careful." He pulled her to a stop. "Stairs, two steps ahead, going down."

  "Okay." Sam took a deep breath and went the two steps. Reaching out with her left hand, she hit a rail. She slid her foot forward and found the stairs.

  As they descended, she said, "Any ideas about what to do if we get out of here?" She was turning ideas over in her mind to help him but not coming up with solutions.

  "We're going someplace you really want to see."

  "Is that so?"

  "Yep. That's so."

  Then he said, "Sunrise Alley."

  XI

  Chimera

  They ran under the stars. Beyond the secured areas of the base, outside its fences and barricades, fields spread in every direction, silvered in the moonlight. They avoided the roads and raced over rocky ground.

  Finally Sam had to stop. She bent over, bracing her palms on her knees while she gulped in air.

  Turner tugged her arm. "Come on. It has to be here."

  She straightened up, breathing hard. "I don't see any hover car."

  He set off with her in an easier jog. "Truck."

  "Why a truck?"

  "It's all I could get."

  "Is it sentient?"

  "No."

  At this slower speed, she could regain enough of her breath to talk.

  "Tell me about Sunrise Alley."

  Silence.

  She tried again. "If the truck is driving itself, it may have problems."

  His voice cooled. "It doesn't have to have a human to think for it."

  Sam didn't push. If the truck didn't show up, they were caught regardless of the reason. She thought of the EI he had met. "Maybe the George can help."

  "He doesn't link to meshes off the base yet. It's a security precaution until they finish designing him." He waved his hand. "I could fix that if I had more time."

  "You must have gone off the base if you called in a truck."

  "Yes. I did." He sounded as ill at ease now as when the med-tech had told him that she retrieved the part of his mind in the Rex.

  "You don't like it, though," Sam said.

  "I hate it."

  "I've never known another EI that felt that way."

  He just kept jogging.

  Sam tried another approach. "If you can manage escapes like this, why did you set yourself to awake only if you heard my voice?" He had almost committed suicide.

  "You're analyzing me."

  Sam winced. Her husband had always told her she could never leave her job at the office. "Sorry."

  After they had jogged a few more moments, though, he said, "At the time I ran away, I knew a lot less. Charon controlled everything I did or learned. I didn't realize I had other options." His voice took on an edge. "But I learn fast."

  Sam wondered if he realized the understatement he had just made. If Turner downloaded his brain into the world meshes, he could be everywhere. It could make him prodigiously influential given his versatility and how fast he incorporated knowledge. It puzzled her that he abhorred the idea of his mind flowing through the meshed universe; he had a lot to gain from such fluidity.

  Perhaps he intended to learn more from other EIs, first. "Turner, you have to tell me about Sunrise Alley."

  "I will, but later."

  "When?"

  "When I'm not worried we're about to be caught."

  "I thought Charon was Sunrise Alley."

  "I never said that."

  "Giles did."

  "Giles is wrong." With forced casualness, he added, "You good friends with this Giles fellow?"

  "If you mean, are we lovers, no."

  "Oh."

  After a pause, she said, "We were once, a long time ago. It only lasted a few months."

  He spoke in a low voice. "Thank you."

  "Why?"

  "You could have lied."

  "I won't lie to you." Charon had apparently done enough of that to scar him for years.

  He motioned northward. "Look." He sounded relieved, though whether it was from her answer or from what he saw, she didn't know.

  Sam peered across the land. A dark form was moving in their direction. "Is that the truck?"

  "I think so." He veered toward it.

  "Can you link with its mesh?"

  "I don't want to use wireless from so far away. The signal isn't as secure."

  Sam glanced back at Hockman. Its lights glittered in the dark. "When Granger realizes we're gone, he'll have search teams out faster than you can say 'I'm not here.' "

  "George is trying to cover our tracks."

  "I don't understand why he's helping."

  "He and I chatted while you were asleep tonight." He cleared his throat. "And I—well, I reprogrammed him."

  She shot him a sharp look. "Changing the codes of an EI isn't trivial." To put it mildly.

  "I know. But I managed a bit." He indicated the truck, which was closer now, easier to see. "I have contact with the truck's AI. It says a closed exit delayed it."

  A rumble came behind them. Apprehensive, Sam spun around—and saw a helicopter lifting above the base. Its spotlight cut across the fields.

  "Damn!" Turner grabbed her arm and sprinted forward, dragging her with him.

  That's it, Sam thought, struggling to keep his pace. They couldn't reach the truck before the searching helicopter caught them in its spotlight. They weren't far enough out from the base.

  Within moments she was gasping. Turner suddenly stopped and shoved her behind him. "Get on my back."

  Sam didn't question, she just scrambled up and he grabbed her legs. With her riding piggyback, he set off—and ran.

  Wind whistled past them. His legs pumped so fast, they blurred when she looked down. Sam hung on, her legs around his waist, her arms around his neck. At that speed, they met the truck within moments. It whirred to a stop and came down, its body sleek and rounded, its bed oval in shape. Turner yanked open the passenger door and hefted Sam inside, throwing her across the leather seat. She barely caught her breath as he slammed the door and ran to the driver's side, his body a smear of color. Then he was in the front seat, jerking his door closed.

  The truck rose on its cushion of air, engines rumbling, and spun around. Then it took off. That it needed no road told Sam a great deal; few vehicles could hover this well without a smooth surface beneath them. She twisted to look out the back window. Ground vehicles were out now, too; humvees it looked like, though it was hard to see from so far away.

  And then Turner laughed.

  When Sam jerked, he grinned at her, his eyes wild. It made him look crazed. "You know your spy car?" he asked.

  "Yes." She hoped he wasn't going unstable.

  "It's a gorgeous car."

  She had no argument with that. She had hated abandoning it by the road. "Why?"

  "This baby makes it look like a piece of junk." He clacked his cybernetic finger on the speedometer—which read 252 miles per hour and increasing. Sam gulped and quickly fastened the safety webbing around her body. The countryside hummed by in a blur of grass and moonlight.

  Sam thumbed through menus on the screen in front of her seat and brought up a view of the area around Hockman, including the humvees searching for them. The truck was leaving them far behind. It even had a holographic shroud and special coating to hide it from radar and other probes. She also recognized the truck's mesh system; for a civilian vehicle, a system this sophisticated was overkill.

  "Where did you get this truck?" she asked. He could hardly rent a vehicle like this from the local Hertz.

  "I stole it." He studied their pursuers on the screens, his face flushed. "It even has missiles. Let's see what they can do."

  "Turner! Don't start shooting." She stared at him. "Who did you steal it from?"

  He smirked. "The Air Force."

  "You think that's funny?"

  "Don't you?"

  "No. Does it belong to Hockman?"

  "Yep."

  "Then why wasn't it at the base?"

/>   "Their garages were better secured, and I had spread myself too thin. I couldn't crack their security. I found a storage facility out here that was less well protected." He lifted his cabled arm, then dropped his hand onto the seat as if he didn't know what to do with it. "But I'm overloading. It took too much of my resources to transform." The manic light on his face faded. "I need to recharge. Do repairs. Fix errors."

  "We may not get a chance." The dash screen showed a helicopter and four humvees involved in the search. According to the data scrolling along the bottom of the screen, the search pattern suggested their pursuers didn't know where to find their prey. They weren't in pursuit of this truck, at least not yet.

  "They can't see us," Sam said.

  Turner gave a curt laugh. "The Air Force designed this vehicle. It knows their systems inside and out."

  "That means the reverse would be true, too."

  "Yes, but they don't know we took the truck. We have the advantage."

  Sam sat back, absorbing the situation. They might actually get away with this. They would be fugitives. She had no desire to run, but hell, she wanted to know about Sunrise Alley. If it were real. She would have thought too few EIs existed to form any community, let alone an underground. Although everyone in her field knew tales of the Alley, most people assumed they were just that: tall tales. If she had the chance to find out otherwise, she couldn't pass up the opportunity.

  More was at stake here, though. She needed to answer for herself whether or not she could trust Thomas. He was one of her main contacts at the Air Force. She had begun consulting for them as a postdoc in Linden Polk's lab and continued until her father's death three years ago. Even more, she had known Thomas as a family friend all her life. She had so many memories: Thomas relaxing with her father on the porch of their cabin in the Adirondack Mountains, that summer she had spent swimming in the lake with red and gold fish; Thomas and his wife laughing with her parents as they sipped drinks she had thought were apple juice, back before she knew about wine coolers; Thomas walking with her along a dusty road in rural Virginia beneath a sky of fat clouds, a thunderstorm lurking within their bulging sides; Thomas visiting on her first day at BioII to congratulate her on the new job. She hated to think he might be involved in the vicious way Charon toyed with Turner.

  She considered Turner. "How did you run so fast back there?"

  "I was scared." He motioned at the screen. "Look. We've left them behind."

  Sam scanned the data flowing across the bottom of the image. In bare minutes they had put fifty miles between themselves and the base. She looked up at Turner. "I'd like to contact Giles."

  Alarm flashed on his face. "Sam, no!"

  She chose her words carefully. "He knows everyone in our field. He might recognize some of the people we met at Charon's lab." She leaned forward. "We need to search the meshes, too, and see what we can dig up."

  "I've already searched on Charon. I can look again— His face took on an inwardly directed expression, and a light on the dash flickered. "I'm doing a search on his people now, coordinating with my memory of their faces."

  "You find anything?"

  After a few more moments, he said, "Nothing on Alpha, Hud, or the other guards." His expression became outwardly directed again. "Shouldn't they have something out there? Most everyone does."

  "Unless they're deliberately trying to hide."

  He hesitated. "Are you sure about contacting Giles?" He spoke awkwardly. "It's not jealousy. It just doesn't seem a good idea to call anyone from this truck, which belongs to the Air Force, especially if we're calling a biomech scientist in another country. Wouldn't both his government and ours be monitoring him right now?"

  He had a point. "It's possible. My friendship with Giles is no secret. Maybe we better wait." For now anyway. She didn't want to do anything that would interfere with her chance to find Sunrise Alley.

  They fell silent after that. Sam leaned her head back and closed her eyes. Despite her lack of sleep in the past few days, though, she was too keyed up to rest.

  "Why don't you come over here?" Turner asked.

  Sam opened her eyes. "I don't want to distract your driving."

  "You won't. The truck is driving." He put his arm across the back of the seat. "Come sit with me, lovely lady."

  Even after last night, she hesitated. He was the man who had made love to her, yet he was also an EI. Hell, he was dead. "I should probably stay here."

  "Don't be afraid of me." His eyes looked even larger in the dim light. "Last night, you didn't analyze."

  Sam warmed with the memory. Perhaps he was right; she was always analyzing. She had let go last night. She bit her lip, then slid across the seat. He put his arm around her shoulders and drew her against his side. Sitting this way made her feel like a teenager—except for his cabled arm pressed into her skin. She leaned her head on his shoulder, and he rested his cheek against her head.

  For a while they watched fields roll by. Sam hadn't realized how little prairie the Midwest had left; most of what they saw was agricultural. The truck had chosen a route with no human settlement, just endless fields, some grain and some corn, most harvested now. A crescent moon hung low in the sky, half covered by long, thin clouds.

  Eventually she said, "You moved fast when you carried me to this truck. I've never seen anything like it."

  "I guess so." He sounded half awake.

  "If I moved that fast, it would injure my legs."

  "Hmmm . . ." His eyes were closed and his breathing had deepened into the slower rhythms of sleep.

  The more Sam thought about it, the less likely it seemed he could have sustained such high speed over such a long distance. She was growing uneasy. Finally she steeled herself. Then she leaned over and pulled the cuff of his trousers, uncovering his lower leg.

  The limb had turned to metal.

  XII

  Human Interlude

  "Ah, no." Sam slid away from him, across the seat, until her back hit the door on the passenger's side.

  Turner opened his eyes. "Eh?"

  "Your legs."

  He woke up fast, sitting up straight. "They're stronger, Sam. Better."

  "They're metal." Made from bundled cables, they had more than one joint.

  "Don't." He looked as if he were breaking inside. "This is no different from my arm."

  "It is different. It's—it's too much."

  "Sam—"

  "No!" She felt lost. "I don't understand why you even want a lover."

  "You think I stop feeling because my limbs change?"

  "Do you?"

  "No."

  "How far will you change?"

  "Listen." He stretched out his arm, but the truck was too wide for him to reach her, so he laid his hand on the seat. "When I've recharged, I'll change them into something that looks more human."

  "Will you look like Turner?" She wondered if he realized what he had said. Recharge. Not sleep.

  He tried to smile. "Don't I?"

  "Your face does." That face she was coming to love, the way his mouth quirked on one side, the way his lashes lowered over his blue eyes, the way his hair stuck up over his right ear. "But for how long?"

  "I won't change it."

  "What happened to the tissues from your legs?"

  "I consumed the material for fuel. To transform fast enough while running, I needed every resource I had."

  Sam felt as if she were in an existential play where she had no script. She wanted to reach out to him, but her mind was whirling. How far would he go? She wasn't ready for this.

  "How much longer will we be driving?" she asked.

  "Sam, don't." When she didn't answer, he leaned his head back on the headrest and stared out the windshield. "Most of the night."

  "They'll find us before then."

  "I doubt it. I covered my tracks."

  "Even you have limits."

  "What do you want me to say? That I'll go back?"

  "No." Sam felt torn in two directi
ons. "If Granger's people can't capture us, they might destroy you. They can only see the danger in you, Turner, even more if you keep changing." She struggled to put into words the emotions she had so much trouble expressing. "It matters to me that they don't hurt you."

  His posture eased and warmth came back into his voice. "We'll be safe with my friends." He spoke with reluctance. "If you want me to let you off somewhere, I will."

  "I'll stay with you." They could both end up dead if this backfired, but she wouldn't desert him. She managed a smile. "Besides, if I turn away now, I'll never learn the truth about the Alley."

  Turner held out his hand to her. "Come sit with me."

  Sam knew if she went across that seat, she was making far more of a commitment than moving across a truck. But if she didn't go to him now, when he needed her acceptance, he might never give her another chance.

  She slid over to him. He put his arm around her and bent his head, his cheek rubbing hers as if he were searching for something. When Sam turned her head toward him, he found her lips with his. He kissed like whiskey, intoxicating and warm. She closed her eyes, savoring his kiss, and tried to forget the rest.

  * * *

  Sam gradually surfaced from her doze. Her body ached, especially her bandaged arm, the price of sleeping while leaning against another person. She opened her eyes to see harvested fields rushing past, nothing but stumps of grain left, a few bales scattered here and there.

  Turner shifted at her side, his arms around her.

  "Awake?" she asked.

  "I think so." He rubbed his eyes, looking so human it made her hurt. What had he been like before Charon changed him? As an EI, he had an intellect beyond what the original Turner Pascal had possessed. His alert, ever-changing mind was one reason she found him so attractive, but she doubted his basic personality had changed.

  "What are you thinking?" he asked.

  "You used to be a bellboy, yes?"

  "That's right." He sounded pensive. "It seems like years ago."

  "For an EI matrix, a few weeks are years."

  "Why do you ask?"

  "Back then, were your interests like now?"

  "You mean, manipulating the meshes?" When she nodded, he said, "Not at all. I knew nothing about them." He spoke wistfully. "I played softball every Saturday with the guys from work. I liked to paint landscapes. I had this little cubbyhole in my apartment with a lot of windows that I used as a studio."