A biodrone captured the sight of his former estate, where Trip was out minding the red berry bushes that brought in about half the income to the estate.
Colin wore his dress whites, though he could just as easily have lounged around his virtual office in a virtual bathrobe.
Still, old habits died hard.
He wished he could reach out to Trip, tell him he was okay. Even ten years after his death, that still hurt, though he recognized it as the right decision. The colonists couldn’t know about the Immortals, as they’d taken to calling themselves, or everyone would want to become a part of the world mind when they died.
They simply didn’t have the capacity.
And some people were too unstable to ever get anywhere near the levers of power Lex, Ana, and Colin held over the world. Look at that nasty mess with that fool Davian, which had ended with Colin dead and consigned to the afterlife here.
Not that it was all bad.
He had sent Trip the occasional dream, a love letter to the man he’d been separated from too soon.
He closed the screen and got down to business. Lex and Ana had relegated the day-to-day administrivia to him, not as any kind of punishment, but because he was good at it, and he enjoyed this kind of work. Decades in administration had given him the tools he needed to manage the affairs of Forever.
After the Agartha affair, they’d set up a nascent government. The social scientists who had envisioned a society that would span the void between the stars had hoped for an egalitarian culture with a minimalist socialistic government, but events had outpaced all of their plans.
The society that had evolved after the Collapse was becoming complex enough to need bookkeeping and dispute resolution, and the world mind had the impartial capacity for both.
First up was a boundary dispute on the exact location of the border between two landholders out on the Verge.
Those issues were easy enough. The world mind held detailed property records that made it simple for him to compare the submitted information from the Clancy family and the competing claim from Harry Zimmer. In this case, both were a little bit right. Colin appended notes to the file and returned the results to Lex to provide to the litigants.
The next three issues were new contracts, one to sell a parcel of land in the middle of Darlith—hot property now—to someone who wanted to open a tool shop. The second involved personnel services in Micavery. And the third was a marriage contract between Harold Devener and Maxine Thorpe. He hoped the Devener-Thorpe wedding was all the happy couple hoped it would be.
He rubberstamped them after reviewing them against the Ariadne Legal Code, which had been adapted from NAU law when Transfer Station had first been built.
The code formed the basis of the loose organization that now governed the world—two city councils that governed the surrounding areas and reported to him and the world mind. In time it would take on more responsibility of its own.
The Darlith city council had forwarded him a few zoning requests for final approval. He ran those by the world mind to check for any conflicts.
The next item caught his eye. It was a request for someone to come out and get a man who had wandered into a farmstead out on the Verge. The Olafs had taken the stranger in when he had appeared on their doorstep, dirty and lost.
Probably just one of the homeless who lived away from society on the foothills of the Anatovs, or a camper who had lost his way. But given the location and the circumstances….
They never had found Davian or Jayson.
Colin pinged Eddy. The man was the head of the new sheriff’s force they’d created after the Agartha Incident. The department included many former residents of that cursed city.
“Hey, Cap.” Eddy’s voice was cheery. Too cheery.
“Did I interrupt you at a bad time?”
“No, not really. It’s just… nothing. What’s up?”
Colin laughed to himself. He had a good idea what Eddy had been up to. “I just ran across something I thought you should check out, if you have a little time.”
“Sure. Shoot.”
“One of the landholder couples out on the edge of the Verge just reported the appearance of a stranger on their doorstep.”
“What did he look like?” Eddy’s voice was suddenly sharp.
Colin looked through the data. “It doesn’t say. I thought you might want to find out?”
“Of course. Send me the information, and I’ll take a team out there.”
“Don’t scare the locals.”
“I won’t. It’s probably nothing….”
“But that’s what you thought the last time you were sent out there?” When they’d found Agartha.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“I can send a biodrone over, if you’d like, get a visual.”
“Please. I’ll head out in the morning with a couple deputies.”
“Thanks, Eddy. Let me know if you need anything.”
“Will do.”
Colin cut the connection. He sat back and stared at the blank wall in front of him.
What if it was Davian? Would they bring him to justice? If so, how?
Forever had no jails and no real courts beyond the world mind.
It might be time to do something about that.
MARISSA ROLLED her eyes. “We’re learning about animals today.”
Delancy and Danny, the two other kids from Agartha who were the oldest at about fourteen, stood apart in one corner of the schoolhouse’s playground area, shaded by the porch roof of the little red schoolhouse that gave the protected valley its name.
Delancy shrugged. “I like learning about them.”
Danny nodded. “I wish we had more than just horses here.” He looked really handsome, his dark hair cropped close just the day before by Shandra. His brown eyes had that faraway look he often got when he was daydreaming.
Marissa grinned. They’d been out riding on their last free day, and they’d found a shaded spot in a spur canyon where they’d done a little extracurricular exploration of their own. They weren’t supposed to—something about genetics and all that—but who else was there, out alone in the wilderness?
Delancy was oblivious to the interplay between them. She was staring out at other kids, who were engaged in various games of tag and other scrappier games.
There were thirty-eight of them altogether—the kids from Agartha—who ranged from ten to fourteen. Andy and Shandra called them the Liminal kids.
They had been universally rejected by their mothers. Children conceived by force who were constant reminders to the women who had birthed them of that terrible time.
Andy and Shandra had taken them all in to teach and train them.
Marissa’s peers were playing in the schoolyard, a mostly idyllic scene, though a couple of the girls had gotten into a scuffle the day before. Andy—their teacher insisted on informality between them—had set them to scrubbing their pants after school.
Marissa looked up at the curve of the world. The schoolhouse was the greenest patch in the Anatov Mountains, inhabiting the crater where Agartha had once stood, before Andy had pulled down the mountain.
They were closest to the South Pole. She could see it, a gray wall in the distance, looming over the world.
Marissa hoped to visit both poles one day, if Andy and Shandra ever let them leave this place.
The whole poles thing had been weird for her at first, having been born under a mountain, but Andy had explained it to them well enough. Stand at Micavery, and you were in the South. Face the other end of Forever, and that was North. Left was West and right was East. Though it was confusing too. If you went far enough west around the curve of the world—about twenty-six kilometers in all—you’d come back around to the east.
Whatever the direction, she felt safe here, if a little confined at times. When Andy had rescued them, the kids had known only the most basic English and little else. Now, they had built a community, learning to use their abilities,
and had been taught so much about the world around them and the history of humankind.
Sometimes Marissa wished they could live out there, among the others. Andy said it wasn’t safe, that people wouldn’t understand her kind and their abilities. She and Shandra had trained them all to fight and defend themselves, just in case.
As Andy liked to tell them, the world wasn’t ready for them yet. Marissa wasn’t sure what that meant, but she wished the world would hurry up and get its act together.
Andy came out of the schoolhouse and whistled. “Come on, kids!”
They flooded into the classroom, all except Chris and Toby, who were engaged in a battle of wits, staring at each other intently.
Shandra grinned. “You get the others settled. I’ll go grab those two.”
The schoolhouse was full of chatter as the kids tried to get a little more playtime in before class started.
Marissa didn’t feel like playing. She rarely had. Even here, far away from Agartha in time if not in space, that dark place had left a mark, especially for those who had lived there the longest.
The children had all chosen their own names when they’d been freed from Agartha. The Preacher hadn’t allowed them to be given names, and they’d been kept docile and compliant by Gunner’s mind fog.
“Marissa” meant “the sea.” She had heard tales of Earth’s vast oceans, but they were little more than ghosts to her. Still, one day she hoped to stand on the shores of Lake Hammond, with her toes in the sand, and imagine that it went on forever.
And “Callas” had come from a great opera singer. Ana had played audio from one of her concerts for Marissa once. She had lived so long before, but her voice across the ages had made little Marissa’s spirits soar.
Andy squeezed Marissa’s arm as she passed by. Marissa smiled shyly in return.
“Okay, everyone, take your places.” The room held thirty-nine soft mats, and next to each was a smooth flat wooden touch pad Andy had helped them fashion as part of their training, which connected them to the world mind. As Shandra escorted the two tardy miscreants in the door, everyone lay down on their mats.
“Can we go to the space station today?” Timothy asked, his eyes wide. He loved space.
“Not today. I thought we’d look at some of the animals of Old Earth.”
There was a general sigh.
“Why do we have to learn about that?” Alberto asked.
“You guys love seeing the animals.”
“Earth is dead and gone. They’re not real.”
Marissa nodded. He was right. Why did they need to learn about a bunch of long-dead animals none of them would ever see in person? They should be learning about the here and now, about the things that would help them get by when they graduated and left for Darlith or Micavery.
Marissa winked at him, and the younger boy blushed.
“That’s true, but it’s important to know where we came from so we know where we are going.”
Alberto frowned. “But I’ll be dead before we get there.”
“Do you want to be dead and stupid?”
The other kids laughed, and Alberto closed his mouth.
“Ready?” Andy asked.
“Ready!” Marissa shouted in unison with the other kids. No matter the lesson, going into vee space was always fun.
She closed her eyes and laid her hand on the wooden touch pad.
The world around her dissolved, and she opened her eyes to find herself under a wide orange-and-white-striped tent. One by one, the others appeared, popping into existence all around her.
Andy lifted the tent flap at the back of the big space, and a host of animals paraded in. There was an elephant, a zebra, a giraffe that had to duck its neck to get through the low entry, and a hippo that trundled across the open space. They were followed by a flurry of furries—a wolf, a mongoose, two otters that splashed into a pool on one end of the tent, a rabbit and a tiger that entered together, and a selection of more slithery creatures.
“These are some of my favorites.” Andy picked up the snake. “This is an American rattlesnake, but don’t worry, this one can’t hurt anyone. Look at the beautiful rattle.” She held up the snake. “He used it to warn off strangers. Rattlesnakes rarely bit anyone unless they felt threatened.”
“I wish I had a rattle.” Alberto mimed it in the air.
“See? I knew you liked animals.” Andy turned to the rest of the class. “The Earth was a biodiverse place, with millions of unique species of plants and animals. Some were herbivores, meaning they only ate plants—like our friends the giraffe and the zebra here. Some were carnivores. Anyone know what that means?”
Timothy raised his hand. “That they liked carnivals?”
Marissa stifled a laugh.
Andy smiled. “It means that they ate meat.”
“Are we carnivores?” That one came from Giorgio.
“We’re omnivores. Omni means everything. We eat a little of both, though we eat a lot less meat than our ancestors did.” She held up the rattlesnake. “There are five main classes of animals with vertebrae—mammals, birds, fish, amphibians, and this guy. Anyone know what class this snake falls under?”
Marissa raised her hand. “Reptile?”
“Very good.” She frowned. The snake had wrapped itself around her arm tightly, and its rattle was shaking. Maybe they’d programmed it a little too realistically. “We don’t have any reptiles here on Forever.” The snake’s head was weaving back and forth. “What do we know about reptiles?”
“They’re cold?” Timothy’s brow was furrowed.
“Cold-blooded. They—”
Marissa watched in horror as the rattler sunk its teeth into Andy’s arm.
“Holy….” Andy swayed and fell forward as the snake wriggled out of her grasp and slithered away.
Marissa jumped to her aid. “Are you okay, Andy?”
“I… I… I ccccccan’t….” She reached up toward Marissa, her eyes pleading.
Then they closed, and she fell sideways onto the hard-packed earth.
“SHANDRA!” MARISSA ran out of the schoolhouse calling for Andy’s partner. “Shandra!”
Shandra looked up from where she was planting new tomato plants. “Over here!” She stood and dusted herself off, waving to Marissa. “What’s wrong?”
Marissa ran the remaining twenty meters. “Andy!” she managed, panting. “Snake!”
A look of disbelief crossed Shandra’s face. “Slow down, girl. Tell me what happened.”
“We were in class in vee, and a snake bit Andy.” She couldn’t calm her racing heart. The horror of it kept replaying itself in her head.
Shandra frowned. “It’s okay. It’s not real.”
Marissa shook her head. “Something happened. We were in this big tent, with animals. Andy collapsed in vee, and she won’t wake up.”
“Oh sh… damn.” Shandra dropped her spade and sprinted past Marissa, running toward the schoolhouse.
Marissa ran after her, racing up the steps and into the classroom.
The other kids were gathered around Andy’s supine form where she lay on her pad. A couple of the youngest kids were crying.
“Okay, I need everyone to clear away a bit.” Shandra knelt next to Andy to check her pulse.
“Is she okay?” Marissa asked, pushing her way in.
“Her pulse is steady.” Shandra sighed. “She’s going to be okay.” She shooed the kids toward the door.
Marissa knelt next to her. “Are you sure?” she whispered.
“I hope so. What happened? You said something about a snake?”
Marissa nodded. “She was showing us a bunch of Earth animals. She had some kind of snake—a rattler?—in her hands, and it bit her.” She snorted. “No wonder people killed all the animals.”
Shandra shook her head. “Don’t say that. Most animals never harmed anyone. Snakes in particular were reclusive. Humans were the true predators.” She looked at Andy. “Where did it bite her?”
“R
ight here, on her left arm.” Marissa indicated the spot.
Shandra lifted Andy’s arm. The skin was smooth and untouched. “Andy, can you hear me?” She shook Andy’s shoulder gently. “Andy, it’s Shandra. Can you hear me?”
There was no response.
She tapped her loop. “Lex, get me Aaron.” She looked around at the gathered children. “You all have chores to do, right?”
“Not until after class.” Timothy looked worried.
“Andy will be all right, but we need to let her rest. Marissa, can you keep an eye on the rest of the herd while I sort this out?” Her eyes went unfocused. “What? Aaron’s not available? Find him for me, okay? I need him to take me into vee space.” She touched her loop again, cutting the connection.
“I can take you.” Marissa pulled her long blonde hair back behind her ear. “Danny can take care of the kids.”
Shandra shook her head. “It’s too dangerous. If there’s really something wrong with vee space—”
“I know vee better than anyone. I can help you find her.” She touched Shandra’s shoulder. “Please, Shandra. She might be in pain in there.”
Shandra regarded her for a long moment, then nodded. “Okay, but at the first sign of trouble, we bail.”
“Okay.”
Danny and Delancy had shepherded the other kids outside. Shandra poked her head out. “Timothy, you’re in charge of cabin cleanup today. Harris, can you check on the livestock?”
“Got it!” Harris sounded a little too cheery, like he was trying to cover his emotions.
Marissa knew how he felt.
When they were gone, Shandra lay down on the mat next to Marissa’s.
She was worried. Marissa could tell. Her lips were pursed, and those telltale lines had appeared on her forehead again.
Shandra took Andy’s hand, squeezing it, and Marissa lay down next to her and took hers.
“Ready for me to ride with you?” Marissa asked.
“Yes.”
It must be a weird sensation for the solos, the people who didn’t have the gift. She closed her eyes and entered Shandra’s mind the way Andy had shown her. They hardly ever got to do this, and only the oldest kids had been taught the skill.
The Rising Tide Page 14
