Analog SFF, September 2006

by Dell Magazine Authors

  Darryl's living room had only one bookcase, but there could be a lot more than that on his bookreader. Like the stereo, it was state-of-the-art, but this time, the contents were limited. A few mysteries and thrillers—the type of thing everyone reads on sleepless nights. More interesting were the print books: three full shelves, and not a nanotech tome in sight. Darryl probably had plenty of professional books in his office, but what dominated here were adventures. Mountaineering, Antarctic treks, deep-sea exploration—you name it. All beautifully cared for but also obviously read.

  Megan was looking over my shoulder, but I didn't want to break my chain of thought by speaking. Darryl had a stack of adventure books. He'd gone to ground in a small town on the edge of the wilderness. He didn't do anything he didn't think he could do well. And based on the sound system, he had a penchant for taking up new activities ... full-blown. Darryl, I suspected, was no longer in the snug confines of Franklinville.

  There were only three other rooms, a den, a bedroom, and a bathroom. The bedroom and bath were unremarkable; the den had a computer, more books (this time including some professional texts), and stacks and stacks of magazines.

  I have a friend who's a voracious reader but never touches books because she's a single mother and doesn't want to start anything she might have trouble finishing. She would have loved Darryl. More interesting, though, was his taste in magazines: Backpacker, Canoe and Kayak, National Geographic Adventure, Field & Stream, Couloir. There were outdoor magazines on at least a dozen other topics, but none dated back more than a year. When his mother died, Darryl had started looking for his soul. To all appearances, he hoped to find it in the backcountry.

  Along with the magazines was a bundle of mail, wrapped in a rubber band.

  “They were holding that at the post office,” Megan said.

  “And you just waltzed in and got it?"

  “More or less.” She tossed her head and flashed a high-voltage smile. “I thought you might be interested."

  She'd guessed right on that. I was already pulling off the rubber band and flipping through junk mail. Most was useless, but halfway through, I struck gold. Literally. It was a subscription-renewal notice from Goldbug magazine, which styled itself as “The World's Leading Gold-Panning Journal,” implying it had a lot of rivals. Dubious advertising claims aside, what caught my attention wasn't that Darryl had an interest in panning; it was that I'd not seen a single issue of Goldbug in his den.

  I may not have much of a life, but I love trivia, and one piece of trivia I long ago collected was that the California Gold Rush extended slightly north of the border. I also knew that the gold was by no means exhausted: new deposits show up each spring. Five minutes ago, I couldn't have said whether Franklinville was in Gold Rush territory. Now, I was sure it was, and I knew why there were no copies of Goldbug in Darryl's apartment.

  Darryl had taken them with him.

  * * * *

  I slept on Darryl's couch while Megan used his bed. Before turning in, I'd suggested that we make a morning visit to his office, but she'd nixed the idea. “There's nothing there,” she said. “I've checked."

  Given how much she'd missed in the apartment, I wasn't sure, but before I could find a polite way of saying so, she was yawning.

  “I'm beat,” she said, “but I presume that now you're ready to go to Franklinville?"

  “Yeah."

  “That's going to take a few days, so obviously you're going to be working for a second week.” She pulled her credit chit from her purse. “You've also incurred some expenses. Let's take care of those and next week's fee, before I forget."

  It was a patent attempt to distract me, but when it comes to that kind of cash, I'm easily distracted. There probably wasn't anything worth learning at the office, anyway.

  * * * *

  When I woke up, Mardi Gras was in full force on the street outside. No, that wasn't right. It was in the room with me, shaking me, hard, and calling my name.

  “Damn, you sleep soundly,” Megan said, as I squinted at my watch. The first digit was 4.

  “Urrrh?” As brilliant repartee goes, it wasn't much, but she got the idea.

  “Your computer's beeping. It says ‘urgent.’”

  Actually, it was long past beeping. As she spoke, it shifted from something that sounded like an airhorn with an anger-management problem to a boisterous rendition of the “William Tell Overture.” I'd obviously spent too much time sleeping in, of late, because even jetlagged, the milder tones that must have preceded these should have been enough to get my attention.

  I'd left the computer logged on, in case something came through on one of several automated alerts. Earlier, in fact, it had informed me that the nano-payment reports on Darryl and Megan had finally arrived, but there'd been no privacy in which to read them.

  This alert had to be something major. Briefly, I hoped Darryl had used one of his credit cards, but instead it was the car, which had tripped a freeway cam. As my still-sluggish neurons processed this information, the car tripped a second cam, heading north.

  “What the...?"

  Megan put it more succinctly. “Crap. He's heading back to the airport."

  I saw the rest of my big fee disappearing. “Do you think he's coming home?"

  Megan's voice was ice. “He took his lab book. Nobody does that and expects to come home. Wherever he's going, it isn't here."

  * * * *

  From Franklinville back to the airport is a six-hour drive, and there's no such thing as a five-hour flight from New Orleans. Still, there was nothing for it but to try. With the search heading into a new phase, somehow it was just presumed that Megan would be going with me.

  Seven-and-a-half hours later, she and I were pushing our way off the plane and sprinting through the concourse. Enduring a tirade from a cabbie incensed at such a small fare, we passed up the too-slow rental car shuttles ... and found that miracles really can happen. During the flight, I'd not been able to boot up the computer to check Darryl's progress, but in the cab I got a wireless connection and discovered that his car had stopped for a couple of hours in a rest stop. Hurrah for naps.

  With a big tip to the still-cursing cabbie, we beat the car to the rental lot and found a waiting place where Darryl would be across the “severe tire damage” strip before he could see us.

  It proved an unnecessary precaution because Darryl wasn't in the car. Instead, the driver and sole passenger was a teenage girl who was thoroughly frightened when we intercepted her. She was so spooked that Megan couldn't get close enough to infect her with the nano, but her story rang true, so it hardly mattered.

  No, the car wasn't hers. Some man had paid her to return it but told her there was no hurry. Was that against the law? Were we cops?

  Yes, she could describe him. His name was David something-or-other. The full name was on the rental form.

  When had he given her the car?—let's see, it was two days before her best friend's birthday, so it must have been last Thursday, which was what, a week-and-a-half ago? Something like that. He'd gotten talking to her at the restaurant where she waited tables, then given her the keys a day or two later.

  Afterward? He'd just walked away. He'd not asked her to give him a ride anywhere, and the deal would have been off if he had. He'd seemed nice, but there was no way she was getting in a car with him.

  How had he known she could be trusted? She had no idea, but she'd always been honest. When she was picking up his dinner plate, he'd looked her in the eye, asked her point-blank if she was dependable, and somehow known she was. And he was right, wasn't he?

  I left her to the tender mercies of the rental-car company, which undoubtedly gave her a rude education about unauthorized drivers. It should have been happy just to get its car back. Until the alert went off this morning, I'd have given long odds it was at the bottom of a lake.

  I thought again about Darryl and his quest for a soul. Whatever his game was, the only thing he'd been willing to steal was the lab
book. I wouldn't be so honest. Now, Megan and I knew exactly when he'd hit the backcountry, and unless he had another means of transportation, he must have started on foot, from the center of town.

  * * * *

  As it turned out, he did have another means of transport: oar-powered. Franklinville is on the Kalmiopsis River, and unlike the roads, the river goes right through the mountains. Darryl had bought a drift boat—a flat-bottom craft capable of going only one direction: downstream. En route, he would have passed a multitude of creeks where skill with a suction pump and sluice box would allow you to earn a grubstake if you weren't too picky about the grub.

  But before leaving for Franklinville and this discovery, I begged a few hours’ leave from Megan and used part of it to read the nanopayment reports on her and Darryl.

  Megan's was unexceptional except for the size of her mortgage. She might not have been comfortable in her executive-on-the-make attire, but if she could afford payments like that, she was a lot more than a mere lab assistant. For an extra $3,000, my worm-programmer offered to trace her credit-card statements, but I wasn't going to authorize that.

  Darryl had been financially even better off, with the emphasis on had been. In a series of transactions beginning three months ago, he'd pulled money out of his retirement account to pay off his nanos, one by one. With the tax penalties, that had pretty much wiped out his savings. Then he'd finished the process by withdrawing his remaining cash. Except for the IRS, whose computers nobody could hack, Darryl was now off the nano grid. But he was also pretty close to broke, and unless he intended to eat moss and live in hollow logs, he wasn't going to last long without finding some of that gold.

  But the most intriguing report was one I hadn't requested. Perhaps in hopes of inspiring me to spend the extra $3,000, my online friend had done an unasked favor and run a quick check on Megan and Darryl's employer. It turned out that Southern NanoSystems, Inc., was an extremely small outfit indeed—small enough that if its product were law rather than technology, it would be called something like Graham Darryl & Megan, LLC. Or more precisely, Marnier Marnier & Fordham,because Darryl and Graham were brothers. Graham was CEO and head marketing guru; Darryl and Megan paired up on research.

  Presumably, there were other employees, but the important thing was that Megan was a principal—a junior partner by the look of it, but still a partner. That meant she had enough money that it was possible that I had been hired not by SNS, but solely by her. She also had her own Ph.D. in combinatorial biochemistry, a field I'd never heard of before, but which sounded impressive.

  Reluctantly, I set aside the report and packed for an extended trip. My aging car wasn't up to the job (if it had been, I'd have sold it, weeks ago, to pay my rent), so Megan and I had rented something newer and I'd promised to pick her up soon. In the mean time, as I loaded the trunk, I speculated about love triangles.

  Maybe Megan had dumped Darryl for Graham, and Darryl had stolen the research notes as a way of striking back. Maybe she was afraid of what would happen when Graham found out the notes were gone. That would explain why she'd kept me away from the office and any chance of bumping into him. As theories go, it was as good as any.

  * * * *

  In Franklinville, I was sure we'd pick up Darryl's track if we played it smart. That's because I know small towns; I grew up in one, east of the Cascades. Mine had been a cow town, but some things are universal.

  Small-town people love to gossip about strangers, but are slow to gossip with them. The solution is not to be pushy. Years ago on a hiking vacation, after several days of buying lunch supplies at the only general store in the vicinity, I'd had the proprietor warn me, with no trace of irony, to be careful of strangers because there'd been a murder in the vicinity, and the killer must have been from out of town.

  At first, everyone in Franklinville was suspicious as hell because the story of how Megan and I intercepted Darryl's car had beaten us to town. But they were also curious, and that could work to our advantage. The hard part was persuading Megan that it was more important to be nonthreatening than to immediately start asking questions. Once she got the idea, she found just the right mix of sexiness and girl-next-door charm, and even managed to produce a disarming Southern accent. In public, we exchanged glances and touches and generally gave the impression that chasing Darryl wasn't the thing we really wanted to be doing. Not exactly the most difficult of duties.

  When asked, I told folks I was “David's” cousin and that his sister had been diagnosed with cancer. David, I said, was writing a book about living off the land, but hadn't thought to tell his family precisely what land he intended to live off of. We were afraid that by the time he got back, it would be too late.

  It was one of those stories with just enough truth to fit what people had seen of him, and soon enough, they were volunteering information.

  There was no reason for people to lie to us, but Megan insisted on verifying everything under the nano. Because we were ourselves living a lie, that created logistical difficulties which we solved by doing what I thought of as a form of the old good-cop/bad-cop routine, but which Megan compared to a lab technique known as “clean-hands/dirty-hands.” I would start each interview by introducing myself and shaking hands. Then Megan would follow suit, using the nano. That left her with little to do but look pretty and keep quiet while I spun the dying-sister tale. The only time it failed was when some chivalrous soul insisted on shaking Megan's hand first, therefore infecting all three of us with the nano and pretty much nixing that interview, plus the rest of the afternoon.

  Soon enough, we found the woman who'd sold Darryl his gold-mining equipment, plus the clerk who'd equipped him for the wilderness. But I wasted quite a bit of time trying to find someone who might have sold him a packhorse or a llama before I stumbled, more or less by accident, on the man who'd sold him the boat. What can I say? I'm not a river person, and even though our hotel was right next to the water, it had never crossed my mind that there was a way out of here that wasn't on foot.

  * * * *

  Three days later, Megan and I were floating downriver in a pair of inflatable kayaks. Since we were carrying ten days’ food, I'd gotten her to advance me an equal number of days’ pay, then paid up all of my nanos, even those that weren't all that close to due. Running low on food was one thing, but with downstream rapids boasting names like Widowmaker, Leap of Faith, Submarine Hole, and Mixmaster, I didn't want to be worrying about getting to an ATM if we were delayed.

  A local outfitter had talked us out of buying a drift boat similar to Darryl's. “If you know what you're doing, you can get one of those over Leap of Faith,” he said, “but if you don't line it up perfectly, it's not coming out the other side. You sure you don't want a guide? If not, I recommend something small and easy to portage."

  * * * *

  Darryl had the better part of a three-week head start, but the mining-supply clerk didn't think he'd be hard to find. “There's plenty of color in some of those gravels,” she said, “and he's got a metal detector good enough to find nuggets down to this size"—she held her fingers a tiny pinch apart. “Once he gets the hang of it, he'll find a good spot and stay there until he runs low on food."

  It helped that Darryl's boat was too big to hide. So long as we kept our eyes open, we couldn't miss it.

  * * * *

  It's not always that easy, though, to keep your eyes open in an inflatable kayak. Too often, you're either concentrating on paddling, or floating backward with a great view of where you've been, but a crappy one of what lies ahead.

  An inflatable kayak isn't really a kayak. It's a mini-raft that you paddle with a kayak paddle. And while it's nice and zippy, it tends to zigzag all over the place until you give up and try to relax. Then it immediately spins into that tail-first orientation, which makes it hard not only to get advance notice of beached drift boats, but, more importantly, of rocks.

  The outfitter had insisted that we buy wetsuits, and within minutes, I was glad we
'd complied. Not only was the water surprisingly cold, but Megan looked unbelievably cute with nothing but a layer of form-fitting neoprene between her and the world. In theory she should have been wearing a life jacket, but I wasn't going to be the one to remind her until we hit serious whitewater.

  For the first few miles, the river was swift but calm, and, other than trying not to stare at Megan, my primary goal was figuring out how to make my boat go where I wanted. We'd bought top-of-the-line models, which the outfitter had described as “self-bailers,” but it wasn't until we actually pumped them up that I understood how they worked. Paddling, I sat on an inflated mat, like an oversized air mattress. Below that was the true floor, which was full of holes an inch or so in diameter. The first time I hit a sizeable wave, I got a big load of water in my lap, but within seconds, it had all run out the bailing holes as the air-mattress floor lifted everything back to the surface. Impressive, and nearly as much fun as watching Megan in her wetsuit.

  Sometime after lunch the canyon narrowed and a throaty roar announced the first rapids big enough to have a name. My map was tucked away in a waterproof bag, but I remembered what it was called: Upper Kicking Horse, rated class 3.

  A kayaking primer I'd speed-read in Franklinville had told me that rapids are rated on a six-point scale according to danger. Class 6 means experts beware; class 1 means suitable for kiddies. Class 3 is in the middle but mild enough that injuries are rare. Big deal, I figured, and rounded the bend.

  I was greeted by a bank-to-bank wall of foam. A recent landslide had pinched the river into a green “V” leading to a chute that dropped three or four feet to a chain of whitecaps. Just the type of thing the tourist rafts love in places a bit closer to civilization. Remembering my speed-read guidance, I aimed for the heart of the V, murmured a barely remembered prayer, and slid over the lip.