by Robert Reed
Dirk tries to stand without seeming flustered. “I was resting,” he lies. “Remember? I’m hurting.” He sounds in control, but it’s a wonder he didn’t shit his pants.
Minus says, “Listen. Some Farmer up north saw a kid in Quito-type clothes. We intercepted the Farmer talking.”
“You think it’s the one we want?”
“One way to know,” says Minus. In the pre-dawn gloom he merely looks pale and hairy. The men beside him are the same, only larger and younger and stupid in the face. Dirk doesn’t know them. He stares at their pink eyes and tries to judge their character.
“Want to come?”
“I need medicine,” says Dirk, thinking travel would do him good. “I’ve got to kill some pain.”
“Here.” Minus is punching the console’s buttons.
Dirk drinks his fill, then more, then goes to the safe. It sickens him to look at the sprung locks and the thick useless door, the slick hard brand of hyperfiber impregnable to everything but brains. There’s a single gun in the back of the safe. There used to be two guns, a matching set. He checks the juice in the one not stolen and takes a final gulp of sweet medicine and looks to Minus, saying, “I’ve got to talk to you.”
“What about?”
“There’s nothing wrong with my fucking brain, and I don’t care what you’ve said. They’re inside.” He points to the ceiling so Minus understands. “Do something.”
Minus shrugs.
I need allies, he thinks. “You fellows don’t like keeping company with Ghosts, do you?” He squeezes shoulders and waits for affirmative nods. “Well, there are a mess of them upstairs. I’m not kidding, either!”
The men seem anxious. Dirk’s attention makes them uneasy, the chatter about Ghosts unexpected and perhaps meant to test them.
He doesn’t press. He says, “Any word on the girl?” and feels ill, emotions hidden somewhere beneath his skin. “Anything?”
“One possible,” says Minus. “A disturbance in a drinking hole near us. At about the right time.” He breathes and leads them into the elevator, pressing for the roof and saying, “A Flower or a girl dressed like a Flower, a fight and something about her leaving with a certain man.” Minus has been talking to the Brulé police. Dirk’s made some friends with them. “No official reports, so details are sketchy.”
“What man?”
He doesn’t know. As they accelerate upward, he says, “A guy with moves. And strength, too.”
“Maybe it’s this kid.”
“Maybe,” Minus allows. “Only the kid was seen walking toward us. Not away.”
“Walking?” Dirk’s joints hate the acceleration. But he’s not letting himself bitch, with strangers so close. He works to hold himself like someone in charge, like someone they should respect. He wonders what’s the cover story, because they sure can’t learn what it is they’re chasing. Not the chips, he thinks. “Anything else?” he asks. “Anything new?”
“Nothing.”
“Don’t tell me that.”
“I’m paying for a bunch of tailored animals. Good eyes and wired into our AIs.”
“Yeah?”
“They’ll help us hunt.”
“Maybe we won’t need them,” Dirk hopes. “Maybe this is going to finish things. This trip.”
Minus says nothing. The elevator opens and they walk out into the hot, raw wind, down a short path and into the floater. Dirk’s glad to be out of the apartment. He likes the distance and being rid of the Ghosts, real or imagined. Maybe Minus is right. Maybe it’s the way my head is doctored, my crazy feelings for the Flower/Ghost still buried but not deep enough…except I’ve always hated them, was raised in a house where you cursed them instead of God…Ghosts—people set into crystal and laser light, no mobility, no escape paths. He thinks how they rely on the steady input of energy, and on all the machines and AIs and people around them. Maybe that’s the worst of it, he tells himself. The trust. They trust us two trillion flesh-on-blood mortals, and I’ve spent my life disproving that faith. And at some point, like it or not, I’m going to have to choose.
Choose between being a Ghost and being quite dead myself.
The Farmstead is a tiny town with homes for people and buildings for machinery and AIs, plus a little power plant and hospital and school. Maybe a thousand people. Not many more. Sitting with his back against a tree trunk, watching and thinking to himself, the Quito boy can recall hearing that Farmsteads are the most sophisticated communities on the Earth. They have every technology found in every city, only each citizen knows how to use the tricks. Not select specialists. Tailoring and climate control and AIs and so on—it’s all part of their landscape. It’s done every day. Farmsteads are private and proud and they have a strong, strong sense of territory. Each one is a little nation unto itself. Each has its own codes of conduct, its personal sense of right. A couple of days ago, out of the blue, the boy found himself dealing with Farmers a touch more predatory than he liked. And now he’s still paying for the trouble, and so is Chiffon.
They circled around to the north and came in low toward Brulé. No one was following him at the start. He made certain. He kept them blended into the landscape, brushing against the trees as they passed, and only a wizard could have tracked them. Some of these Farmers, he thinks, must be wizards. Two of them riding a big rebuilt floater got on him and kept with him in spite of every trick he knew, and then they managed a crippling shot up their rear. A hard belly landing, ugly and quick. He and his muscles got out and got chased into some trees, the Farmers herding them with some careful gunfire. Then they hitched up his floater and were gone in a half minute. Neat and quick. And the boy told his muscles, Well, it looks like we walk.
Walk where? they asked.
To Brulé, he said. It’s not so far, he said.
They looked at each other and then spoke their minds in a couple different ways. They weren’t going a step south. Not after this start. This operation was too damned screwy and they wanted to stay alive and if the boy was smart he’d walk out of this mess with them, going north, getting to one of the City-States and tubetrains that’d take them home.
But he wouldn’t go.
He thought of Chiffon needing him, and maybe it was the money too. He made a lot of heads shake, but of course he didn’t explain it or make them do what they didn’t want to do. He knew these people. He knew what was possible and what wasn’t and how bad things could get if he tried to force them.
So since then he’s done nothing but walk by himself.
All day yesterday the boy trudged through fields of corntrees and meat berries and wine flasks growing in the bright, bright sunshine. He ate when he thought it was safe, stealing where he thought no one would care. The wine was sweet. The corn was hard. One big meat berry wasn’t ripe, its self-cooking enzymes too scarce, but he managed to wolf down the raw parts. He didn’t care. Food had never tasted better. Not since he could remember, he thought.
He scarcely slept that first night, thinking about Chiffon waiting somewhere in Brulé. He wouldn’t let himself imagine her captured. And there were times when he nearly forgot about the chips. God, he thought he’d never felt such an ache for a woman. A woman, not a Flower. He wouldn’t let her be a Flower or even a Ghost in his thoughts. He kept running it through his mind, picturing them leaving the Earth and finding a safe haven and using the billions to save her. If she had them. And if not, he thought, he would see her Ghosted again. To save her. Even if she said she’d rather die than live half a life…he couldn’t stand the idea of losing her.
Miss Luscious Chiffon.
The Magician had looked a long time to find her. What the boy knows about her past lives is sketchy, partly because of security and partly because so much had been blocked out by the Magician. So she could better play the Flower’s role, he knew. She was born rich and respectable, and she lived her first life with an endless parade of fur and suitors. She was still young when she became a Ghost. Too young maybe. When she concentrates
, she remembers being a Ghost, the experience something like an old bad dream to her now. She remembers boredom. She remembers terrible fears. And of course Gray-time. The worst of it was Gray-time.
The boy had lain awake in the pasture that night, alone, remembering how the two of them had shared the brothel’s ivory and living-feather bed, him spent and her tireless, her talking about the enormous things she would do with her quarter share of their earnings.
Then last night all night he had slept hard, dreaming of Chiffon while the pasture around him made noise. His flesh has been cut and sucked and masticated by hundreds of unseen mouths. He feels the long kilometers now, shifting his weight and watching the Farmstead, and he tells himself that today he will enter Brulé and he can sleep normally. One of his hands is holding a clod of soil. His Quito shirt and shorts are full of colors, swirling and mixing and never changing their patterns the same way twice. He wants to keep himself hidden. So he works the clod into the fabric, hurting the bug-chewed flesh below it.
The best course is to the west side of the Farmstead.
Stay alert, he tells himself. Forget everything else. This strange country has a way of wearing down his nerves, too much too new. Too many things startling him, or dulling him, or just plain leaving him baffled. He forces himself to stand, trying for quiet. The Farmstead itself is mostly silent in the breezy morning air. He hears birds in the trees and birds in the sky, but all that comes from the buildings and homes are a few scattered barks and whines—dogs of some sort talking among themselves, their voices assertive and grouchy with the hour.
He follows a row of unkempt jungle, keeping low and parallel to the closest buildings. Then he enters an empty field where nameless stalks lay crushed and rotting in the soft moist soil. He can smell the rich stink of it. The Farmers care for nothing like they care for their soil, or so he’s heard. Not even for themselves. Any Farmer can stoop and lay a tongue to the stuff and tell if it’s his or her land. They know it that well. And they never like city-bred hotshots walking it, which is why he needs to keep moving. Trotting. Now running. He works to stretch out the kinks.
Crossing back into the jungle, he follows a game trail, narrow and winding. Something ahead gives a low snort and leaps. On his right is a slow, clear stream, and he hears splashing and wheels to see a long brown head bobbing and dark luminous eyes alive and him thinking roodeer as he sees the glint of spray coming off the water. The roodeer startled him, too. His heart is startled. Running faster, he thinks this is too fast and feels his shoes slipping on the turns. He’s down alongside the stream, the water shadowy and slick, and he sees logs rotting and reeds growing in tangled green masses and a school of silvery fish, like knife blades, scattering as his long shadow passes over them.
In a little while, and gradually, the stream widens.
The original trail is drowned by the water and mats of vivid green moss, but a second trail, newer and narrower, branches up into the trees and takes him to the top of a low hill.
He quits running when he’s back in the hot sunshine, hands on his knees and his back bowed.
It’s then that he senses something, smells it or feels it, and he straightens against the exhaustion and pulls out a big handgun and tries waiting, listening, listening, only he can’t hear anything coming. God, he thinks, I can’t tell what’s a bug sound and what’s a person sound. Listen to the racket! But he has this nagging sensation, enough to make him step backward, and then he forces a breath and turns so he can get off this open ground. Now.
The trail dips.
He follows it and comes to the shoreline of a small clear pond.
Trees are drowned in the deepest water. Squatting on the far shore, holding tools and looking straight at him is a Farmer in work clothes. He is smiling while he squints. It’s an odd, knows-something smile.
The boy ignores him, running again and hearing nothing special and thinking that maybe he didn’t hear anything in the first place. It’s just nerves, he thinks. Following the pond around a lazy bend, the Fanner now out of sight, he sees a tangled dam of logs and junk plastic and the bodies of scrapped floaters, and he thinks of crossing the dam, sure, and watching whatever follows.
The dog takes a leg.
He doesn’t hear the dog. It comes bursting out of the brush beside the dam, jaws snapping and the teeth neatly slicing every tendon in his lower leg. The boy shouts and wheels and collapses. The big farm dog comes up into his face, and the boy shoots it between its pale yellow eyes, removing most of its head, and three more dogs boil out of the brush and snarl and come at him. He shoots one of them and then cries out in pain. He tries moving the leg while the remaining dogs wrestle over his neck. He shoots one of them badly, clipping off an ear and a chunk of its skull. It gives a howl and runs, and the remaining dog has him by the throat, bad old teeth working for purchase and the boy too weak to aim, firing the gun again and managing only to burn a circle in the moist black earth. The dog is old. It’s a slow feeble struggle between them. Hours seem to pass before the gun becomes light enough to lift, and he halfway aims and puts a dozen shots into the bright sun and then the gun clicks and clicks and rolls off his fingertips and into the smooth water of the pond.
The dog’s breath is sickening.
The boy lies motionless, sensing nothing but the breath and thinking if only the smell would get out of his nose and then he wouldn’t mind, a lapping sound coming now and the dog’s hairy face red with blood. Red bright bubbles form on the end of its black nose, each one popping. A stupid set of eyes seem utterly evil. Those eyes would suit me in Quito, thinks the boy. In Quito they understand those looks and respect them.
Now the dog suddenly turns.
There comes a bark, remote and soft, and the boy feels paws pushing against him as the dog leaps, barking again.
Nothing happens.
Nothing happens.
He is staring up at the sharp blue sky, thinking hours must have passed, or days, and the twisted form of the dog crosses the sky with a kind of dignity, and it drops into the pond and kicks up spray and waves that feels so wonderful, so fine, and he stares up and sees a white face now, and bright-colored hair and a beard, and the face says something to him, something about Chiffon, and that makes him smile and he thinks back to Quito and he’s happy and feels safe and the sun’s still coming up and all the day is left him.
“Dead,” Minus announces.
“What fucking luck.”
“The hounds really worked him over.”
“So are they there?” Dirk is talking about the chips. He doesn’t know why the corpse would be carrying them, but it might be and there’s no sense taking risks. “You check him out?”
“Twice.”
“And around him?”
Minus blinks and says nothing. Except his eyes say it.
“Just asking,” says Dirk. He is standing on the hilltop over the pond, the wind hard at his side. His mouth is skeptical, seemingly doubting everything in view. He wonders, “Does the kid match the one we’re chasing?”
“Probably.”
“Where’d the others go?”
“Backtracking,” he says. “They’re making sure he’s alone,” and he adjusts the brim of his hat. Oversized clothes and the hat keep him safe in the hard sunshine. “What do we do with the body?”
“Find a rainstorm.”
“Okay.” Minus goes down to pick up the mess, carrying it up the slope and over to the floater. Dirk just waits. All the tangled vegetation is so green it looks black, and a thousand unseen things are screaming and singing from inside their hiding places. He hears someone coming and turns. The two new men are climbing the hill, struggling, cutting their hands on thorny vines.
“Anything?” Dirk uses his tight, don’t-waste-my-time voice.
One of the men says, “Nothing now.” Both are dressed like Minus, and both are sweating hard.
“Nothing now?” Dirk echoes.
“There was someone,” says the other man. “He found
the guy.” He gestures at his partner.
“What happened?”
“I thought he knew something,” says the partner, shrugging. “Maybe he saw something, you know? I don’t know.” He’s a little nervous, unsure of his footing. “I figured he saw something and we can’t leave him. Can we?” He shrugs once again and gives a little sideways smile.
“Where’s the body?”
Both men point to the bend in the pond.
“Why the fuck didn’t you bring it? We’ve got to dump it.”
One of them volunteers, “We thought the pond was good enough.” Both nod, sharing their conviction.
“You sunk it?”
“Yeah.”
“And what if someone finds it?”
“It’s a warning.”
They think this is Quito, Dirk tells himself. They think this is home and they can do as they please. “What’d you think he knew?”
“He had this goddamned smile on his face. So I did him.”
“Yeah,” says his partner.
Dirk looks at their weak faces and weepy eyes and senses that they are afraid. So he keeps looking at them. With the sun behind him, they have to keep it in their faces. And the glare burns them while they stand, waiting for whatever Dirk says or does next.
7
A friend of mine, a noted mathematician, has assured me that what we have done with the System—its diversity, its sheer bulk—is the merest slice of a fraction of what is possible. He says Humanity comprises a creative force and an enormous potential beyond any reckoning by mere numbers and minds. We will continue to expand, he says, and new cultures will form out of our passions. He has no doubts. Ten billion years and a hundred million galaxies will not blunt our assault on the infinite. Someone like myself, he says, cannot hope to perceive anything more than the surface of this phenomenon. And I laugh, of course, not ever wishing to…
—excerpt from a traveler’s notebook, available through System-Net
We kid ourselves. We do. We tell ourselves that genetics is bricks and mortar, that tailoring allows us total control over our offspring, that we can build whatever people and cultures we desire and then retain control over directions and destinies. The honest truth, however, is that several tens of thousands of genes interact in a multitude of ways. No computations can insure one result over every other one. No population can be declared immune from novelty at any level. And when one interjects the gray effects of development—the quality and consistency of a child’s care, for example—you begin to see the enormity of the task…
