House of the Sun

by Nigel Findley

  I felt the rush of memories, but I headed them off at the mental pass. That was then, this was now—to (mis)quote

  Gautama ... or was it Michael Nesmith? I deleted Jenny's congratulations, and brought up the messages from my personal mailbox.

  I didn't recognize the originator address of the first message, but when the image came up on the screen, I knew it had to be a guest account on a remote system somewhere. A shock of dirty-blond hair, cut short and subtly spiked. Slender, slightly elongated face—attractive rather than classically beautiful. Brown eyes in a pale, slightly freckled complexion.

  "Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said.

  I flicked a key to freeze the playback while I scrutinized her image. There were dark circles under her eyes. Those eyes had once seemed to flash with the sheer joy of being alive. Now they reminded me of documentary footage I'd seen of soldiers shipped back from the insanity of the EuroWars. Her cheeks were slightly hollow, and I guessed that she was still almost ten kilos undermass.

  But there were also noticeable improvements. Her eyes were still shell-shocked, but at least they didn't look quite so wounded. Her lips were quirked in a tentative half smile—a long way from the old days, when her smile would have brightened up the whole of my dark, dingy doss, but still a vast improvement from just a few months ago. The pain was still there—the pain that had prompted the choices that, in turn, had directed the course of her life. And the pain that those choices had caused her. That pain would probably always be there, I realized sadly. But there was a major change for the better. Now she felt pain; before, she had been pain ... and there's one frag of a big difference. These days, I could look into her eyes without wincing.

  She was bouncing back—finally I could perceive it, and trust that perception. It had taken almost four years—eighteen solid months of detox, analysis, psycho-rehab, chemo-and electro-therapy, followed by twenty-eight months learning how to relate to the real world again. But it was finally starting to pay off. I shook my head. It was absolutely staggering what the human body—and, more important, the human mind—could endure without collapsing.

  I backed up the replay a couple of seconds and keyed Play.

  "Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said. "Greetings from the Front Range Free Zone. Sorry I missed you, but I'll try again in a couple of days.

  "Denver's a wiz place, even more schizo than Seattle, if you can believe it. Have you ever made it down here? I can't remember.

  "Anyway, next stop's San Fran, I think, if I can get the datawork cleared. Then maybe I'll swing back through Cheyenne and you can take me out for dinner."

  Her tentative smile broadened, and for a moment I could see the old Theresa Montgomery. My mind filled with echoes of sudden enthusiasms and innocent laughter. "I'm still having a blast out here, bro," she continued. "It's a big, wonderful world. Oh, and in case you're wondering .. With a slender hand, she brushed back a blond bang to display her datajack. The jackstopper plug was still firmly in place, the polymer seal unbroken and showing the logo of the detox hospital.

  "Still clean," she boasted. "Forty-plus months and counting.

  "Catcha ya, Derek." Her image reached toward the screen to break the connection.

  Again I paused the playback. I reached out with my left hand, and touched my sister's face—synthetic flesh touching synthesized image.

  She was making it, she was really making that long trek back. When the therapists at the medical center had told me she'd been talking about taking a wanderjahr—a protracted traveling vacation—I'd been drek-scared. She was too vulnerable, I'd worried, not yet far enough from the precipice of drugs and chips (and worse!) that had almost claimed her. She wouldn't have the strength to resist the thousands of temptations that the real world represented.

  They'd known what they were doing, those therapists—I had to admit that now. They'd known what my reaction would be to the news. Instead of letting me have it out with my sister, instead of letting me browbeat her into abandoning the plan, they hadn't even let me speak to her until I'd undergone a little therapy of my own. I hadn't been an easy subject, but I'd eventually come to understand. I couldn't have stopped Theresa from going on her wanderjahr, if that was what she wanted. Sure, it represented a risk—the therapists and detox doctors recognized that. But the damage to her self-esteem if I, or they, had forbidden her to follow her own truth would have been much more devastating, and absolutely certain. It had been a hard sell, but I'd finally accepted that this was the final therapy for Theresa: final confirmation that she had control over her own life, and her own direction.

  It had been a gamble, but the wager was won. Forty-some months clean and sober. Coming up on four years of experiencing the world as it was, without the anodyne of simsense, BTL, or 2XS. My sister was on her way back from the brink.

  And I couldn't put off viewing the second message any longer. I cleared Theresa's image from the screen and pulled up the other entry in my inbox.

  Another woman's face, almost as familiar as my sister's. Short, straight, coppery hair. Gray eyes. Class and refinement by the bucketload. Jocasta Yzerman, sister to the dead Lolita Yzerman—I'd known her as Lolly—and a major player in the . . . the events . . . that had precipitated my relocation to Cheyenne. Beautiful Jocasta. There was a pain in the middle of my chest that I wished I could write off as indigestion.

  Sometimes you want to experience emotional pain in all its fullness; other times you want it over with as fast as humanly possible. I flipped the telecom into double-speed playback.

  Even overspeed, her voice was the perfectly modulated velvet of a trained professional. (I wondered momentarily if she still had her trid show on Seattle's KCPS?) I blotted out the words she was speaking—not difficult; the message wasn't anything but a verbal postcard, "long time, how's it rolling," that sort of thing—and I concentrated on that voice. I remembered the first time I'd met her those four years ago, wound up as tight as the string of a compound bow in her tailored smoke gray leathers, a tall and slender figure with a pistol aimed steadily between my eyes ...

  The message played out, ending with the usual empty benedictions and wishes for my good health, and Jocasta was gone. I stared at the blank telecom screen for a long moment. She'd weathered the storm incredibly well, had Ms. Jocasta Yzerman—no, Mrs. Jocasta Brock, wasn't it, these days? No physical scars, and if there were any emotional ones she kept them well hidden. Was she really that strong, that resilient? Or had she learned something from me during our brief time together—the skill of lying to herself, of totally suppressing emotional pain—ironically, at the same time that I was un-learning the same thing? What were her dreams like, in those lonely hours of the night when one's defenses are at low ebb? I supposed I'd never know, not now.

  For a few moments I considered sending her a reply—right now, spontaneously, without mentally scripting it all out beforehand. It didn't take me long to flag that as a bad idea. Not now, when I was emotionally open and vulnerable after thinking about Theresa. Hell, I might go so far as to actually talk about what I was really feeling, and who knew where that might lead ... ?

  My left arm started to hum softly. I hated when it did that, dropping into some kind of self-diagnostic routine when its central processor figured it had the time. (The spirits alone knew what it did while I was asleep at night.) The sound was very soft, probably inaudible from two meters away, but I always reacted to it the way I would to an alarm clock going off next to my ear. I clenched my left fist strongly a couple of times, and the whirring sound shut itself off.

  Silently, I gave thanks to the fine people at Wiremaster Incorporated. That whirring sound from my arm—they might call it a diagnostic routine; I called it a wake-up call, a reminder that I was living in the real world. I sighed.

  Well, since I had the telecom all powered up, I might as well get some work done. I pulled out the datachip Sharon Young had given me in The Buffalo Jump, slipped it into the telecom's socket, and pulled up the data.

&nbs
p; Lots of data, I realized, as it scrolled rapidly off the top of the screen. I cut off the flow of text, specified a more reasonable scroll rate, and repunched the display command.

  Jonathan Bridge, this is your life. Almost instantly, I got a better understanding of just why Sharon Young was hiring me. She had a lot of background info here—date of birth, family history, Sioux passport number, partial match of his SIN, even summaries of his transcripts from elementary school. Spot checks of his financial picture, dating back more than ten years—almost a third of the slag's life. The full trip. Obviously, somebody had seriously had their way with the poor, trusting computer in the Sioux's central citizenship registry. I scanned the data again. Pro work, no doubt about it. Working for a solid week, popping wake-ups like candy, I might—barely, if the Great Spirits of data processing smiled down on me—be able to rape the system for this kind of personal data.

  But that's all it was, just data. Numbers, facts, bits and bytes. You'd think that people would understand it, in this computer-driven world of ours, but not many do. Data isn't information; data is facts. Information resides in the interconnections, the interrelations between facts. Like, putting together the fact that water boils at 100 degrees Celsius, and the fact that sodium melts at 98 degrees, to extract the information that sodium isn't a good material for making teakettles.

  What Young wanted from me, obviously, was to take the facts that some other researcher—much better at the brute-level stuff than me—had generated, and turn them into some overall sense of friend Jonathan Bridge. That involved sorting through the reams of facts on the datachip, looking for correlations—in time, in space, and in many other more theoretical "axes" (like "financial solvency")—and contradictions. In other words, the interconnections between the numbers. Take an example: Mr. Bridge was flat busted in June 2050, left Cheyenne, and returned in August to pay off a rather large bank loan with a single credit transfer. Conclusion? His business trip out of town had obviously paid off big-time. That sort of thing.

  Back in the Bad Old Days, I'd have had to do most of the grunt work myself ... or, if I wanted to stay true to the hard-boiled-gumshoe archetype, hire a leggy brunette with a sharp tongue and soft heart to do it for me. Today, smartframes and search demons can get the job done faster than any brash-talking secretary, making up in efficiency what they lack in sex appeal. A change for the better? You tell me.

  * * *

  I sat back and stretched. My shoulders were knotted, and a throbbing headache had taken up residence in my left eye. I pushed my chair back from the telecom and checked my finger-watch.

  Twenty-three hundred hours, give or take. That meant I'd put in about four solid hours on the machine, whipping up the smartframes and search routines I'd soon be letting loose on Jonathan Bridge. I shook my head—stopped when the headache made its displeasure known.

  I wondered what my father would think if he could see the use to which I was putting my aborted university education? Nothing good, I was sure. I sighed. A lot had changed since I'd bailed out of the computer science program at U-Dub—the state of the art waits for no man—but at least I understood some of the basics, a thorough enough grounding on which I could build.

  And build I had since I'd left Seattle. I was no "slicer"—one of those bleeding-edge console cowboys who shave black ice for the pure quivering thrill of it—but I'd turned myself into a pretty fair code-jockey. I didn't chase down data as such; let the slicers beat their neurons against corporate glaciers if that was their idea of fun. In contrast, though, I was starting to build a reasonable rep for turning the raw paydata that others collected into usable information. I'd learned just what kind of resources were available out there on the Matrix—open to all comers, or with minimal security—and just how to make best use of them. It was just another extension of the rule by which I'd been living my life since arriving in Cheyenne: No Exposure.

  A lot of the learning had been on my own, downloading texts, digital magazines, and even academic papers from the Matrix. When hypertext hadn't been enough, I'd sought out a couple of the eminences grises of Cheyenne's "virtual tribes"—aging deckers who didn't have the reflexes to shave ice anymore, but who kept up with the theory because it was all that was left for them. I guess some of my "professors" had seen some potential in me for the trade, because they'd tried to pressure me into going under the laser for a datajack. Okay, granted, I could see their point: Even for the kind of code-slinging I was doing tonight, a datajack would have made the job so much quicker. Fingers on a keyboard are no match for direct neural connections.

  I couldn't do it, though. It wasn't weak-kneed queasiness over surgery, which I'm sure was their interpretation. My reservations were far more concrete, though I couldn't tell anyone about them: I simply didn't trust myself enough. Even though I'd tried to keep myself isolated from that facet of the shadows, I'd learned early on that some Cheyenne chipmeisters were dealing in 2XS chips. A source of 2XS, plus a direct feed into my brain? I've always prided myself on strong will, chummer, but I'm not that strong ...

  Again I shook my head, and to hell with the headache.

  This seemed to be my evening for morbid thoughts. I scanned my code creation one last time, pointed it toward the greater Matrix, and keyed in the electronic equivalent of "Fetch!"

  And that was the first part of my contract for Sharon Young, complete. There wasn't much for me to do until my smartframe—mentally I'd dubbed it Naomi, for various personal reasons—returned with the correlations it had generated. That would be maybe an hour, I figured—which would probably sound ridiculous to nonprogrammers: spend four hours writing a program that runs for one hour, and that I'll never use again. Normally I'd agree; I've always considered any meal that takes longer to prepare than it does to eat to be a bad allocation of resources. This time, though, it was the only route that made sense. Doing the same sort of search manually would have taken several times the five hours—four coding, one waiting—I was investing in the smartframe. Don't work harder, as one of my old U-Dub profs had screamed at me, work smarter.

  Good advice. I went to bed.

  3

  Goddamn it, it was The Dream again—"lucid dreaming," I think that's the right term, where you actually know you're dreaming, but still can't do squat about it.

  I thought I'd finally left The Dream behind me; I thought I'd finally moved on enough that my subconscious didn't feel the need to dredge up old fears and pains anymore. Fat chance. Granted, The Dream had become much less frequent than it had been in the Bad Old Days. During the first few months after I'd gotten my cyberarm, The Dream was a regular visitor to my nighttime landscape. Every fragging night, it came back like a ghost to haunt me.

  Maybe it would have been easier to deal with if it had always been the same—if repetition had numbed my responses—but it wasn't. The overall flow was the same every night, the general shape of events. The details changed, though—largely superficial things, like the order in which people were killed, or exactly when certain events occurred—so that I never knew what to expect.

  Over time, as the level of chronic stress in my system started to fade, The Dream grew less and less frequent: once every three nights, once a week, a couple times a month ... Then even longer periods between incidents. Tonight, it had been nearly three months since The Dream had put in an appearance, and I'd started to hope that my shattered psyche had finally healed itself. Like I said, fat chance.

  The setting was just as it always was: the secret lab complex underneath building E of Yamatetsu's Integrated Systems Products facility in Fort Lewis. Hawk had driven off the two hellhounds guarding the site, Toshi had dealt with the maglock on the main door, and Rodney was beside me as we made our slow way along the wide, helical rampway leading down into the bowels of the facility. The sadness was a dull ache in my chest and throat as I looked at the silent figures moving through the dreamscape. Dead, all of them: Hawk the shaman, Toshi the samurai, Rodney Greybriar the mage . .. Dead because I'd dra
gged them into something I didn't understand, something that was way too big for me. I'd hired "irregular assets," I'd become the Johnson to a team of shadowrunners. I'd thought I had it all chipped, I thought I knew what we'd be up against. My overconfidence cost me my left arm, but it cost Hawk, Toshi, and Rodney much more.

  Silent as the ghosts they were, the figures around me descended the spiral ramp. I could smell that strange, vaguely biological smell—something like yeast, but not quite—that would become so familiar later. We moved on through the soft, sourceless light—about the intensity of dusk, but redder than sunlight.

  I knew what was waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp, I knew it ... That was what made The Dream into a nightmare. I knew, but I couldn't tell anyone of my knowledge. Hawk, Toshi, and Greybriar had agreed to join me on this job, thinking they'd find a connection between Yamatetsu's Integrated Systems Products division and the new dreamchip scourge on the street, 2XS. At worst, they expected to face corporate sec-guards and sarariman chipmeisters. I knew better.

  We reached the bottom of the ramp, saw before us the door that I knew had to be there. I knew all too well what we'd find on the other side of that door, and I couldn't face it again. I tried to speak, to warn Hawk and the others away, but I couldn't force the words out. As Toshi started to hotwire the maglock, all I could do was turn away.

  I couldn't go through it again. Even after all this time—even after seeing my sister, Theresa, alive, clean and sober—I couldn't face it. It would rip me apart, tear open all the emotional wounds that had almost healed in my psyche. I couldn't look into that curved-walled room and see Theresa lying there, a sickly yellow umbilicus connecting her comatose body with the wall of the chamber ...