There was a long emptiness.
... Boss? Hey, Boss?
It was like emerging from a deep and dark cavern into blazing daylight.
Johnny? Johnny Johnny, is that you? Trent found himself sitting at the center of a great emptiness, watching pulsing slivers of light at the edges of the world.
Boss, you have to let me through.
The form took shape immediately before Trent, a dark and hazy shape lacking form or definition. It was a hole in the midst of the glowing haziness. Johnny Johnny's correct, Trent. You have to do it.
Boss, there's an Image in the inskin already, and it won't let me in. You have to make it let me in.
Trent sat in the pristine silence, thinking with a clarity that he had never possessed before. The Crystal Wind tugged at the edges of his awareness, begged to be let in. He did not know the program Johnny Johnny was talking about. He searched his own awareness looking for the rogue Image Johnny Johnny was referring to, and could not find it.
The form standing in front of Trent said, Trent, I've done everything I can. Simply being here with your inskin fighting so hard has damaged me worse than you might imagine. I got Johnny in far enough past your defenses so that he could talk to you. It's up to you now. Let go of the inskin; let Johnny in.
The form faded, vanished, and left Trent alone with Johnny Johnny's voice.
Boss? The Image that's sitting in your inskin? Boss, it thinks it's you.
Trent opened his eyes.
He lay in bed with a warm weight snuggled around him. He got up carefully, disentangling himself from Katrina's arms. He had to search to find the bathroom.
Inside the bathroom he switched on the lights, and then had to hunt again to find the control to turn on the mirror.
The mirror silvered into existence before him. The process of the mirror's appearance seemed very slow. He had never noticed that before.
He examined his appearance in the mirror, the face of an American Peaceforcer named Benny Gutierrez.
Dark hair and eyebrows, almost as dark as Denice's. His nose was slightly larger than it had been before, and his cheekbones were higher and more visible. There was a faint cleft in his chin. His eyes were no longer pale blue; they were practically gray, almost without color. Katrina had done something, he was not quite sure what, to the curve of his jaw; it was straighter, more angular. It was a fairly handsome face, and made Trent look somewhat older; twenty-five or six.
All of his scars were gone, every one. It made him feel curiously naked, unreal. His tattoo was still there, as Katrina had promised, but aside from the white rose his skin was brown all over.
Trent didn't think he liked it.
At least, it occurred to him, I don't have to worry about my tan anymore.
Trent turned off the bathroom light and returned to the bedroom. His body felt odd, clumsy and slow-moving. He sat down at the edge of the bed, in the dark, and let his eyes close.
He was back in the glowing emptiness almost immediately.
Trent opened his eyes. Darkness. The sound of Katrina breathing in her sleep.
He closed his eyes again and went Inside.
Boss?
Hi, Johnny.
You're back?
I think so. How long was I gone?
Boss, it's been almost three weeks.
Three weeks. Trent considered that. All right. Johnny, I think I've made a mistake.
No kidding.
That program that thinks it's me--Johnny, it is me.
There was, by the standards of electronic intelligences, an incredibly long pause before Johnny Johnny replied. Trent found himself noticing Johnny Johnny's response time for the first time in his life. Aw, Hell, Boss. You've been promising me an inskin for the longest time and I was afraid this was going to happen when you started talking about that goddamn "almost-an-inskin" NN-II in the first place. I--
Johnny, stop. Who brought you in to me?
I think he was an AI, except he was using some of the same Image routines I use, so maybe he was a Player. Boss, I don't know. He knows a lot about you, Boss. And Boss--the Player I thought was chasing me after I crashed the PKF boards in Capitol City? Remember? I think it was him.
Okay. We'll hunt him down when we have our other problems resolved. Where are you?
Where you left me, Boss. The locker at the monorail station. Boss, did you know they turn off radio packet InfoNet access between two and five o'clock a.m. every night? I've had to sit there with nothing to do, three hours a day every day for the last three weeks.
Can you come across?
There was another long silence. Boss, I can try. But I tried before, and you didn't let me.
Trent said, Try again.
At first Trent thought nothing was happening. Then an oppressive weight seemed to descend upon him, an amorphous shape that settled over the glowing expanse of his consciousness like a shroud. He found himself tensing without meaning to, forced himself to relax, using the same biofeedback techniques that had once, eons ago, allowed a simple boy named Trent to interpret the signals from a traceset.
The gloom deepened, and then a vast pain ripped through Trent, a silent flaring implosion of agony and Trent heard himself screaming as Johnny Johnny invaded, struck his unconscious barriers hard and--
--merged.
"Trent?" It was Katrina's voice, concerned. The word dragged across Trent's awareness in slow motion. "Trent?"
The lights were on in her bedroom.
Trent felt himself turning to look at her, felt the individual movement of each muscle in his neck. A channel at the edge of his awareness vibrated with promise, with potential. In his mind Trent saw the channel grow, become a tunnel that he flowed down at the speed of light, the edges of Realtime racing by him, falling away from him as he expanded to encompass the Crystal Wind.
This, said Johnny Johnny-who-was Trent, in a voice so silent that Trent-who-was-Trent could barely hear it, is much better.
Katrina's voice was blurred and patterned, half lost in the growing, thundering crescendo of the Crystal Wind of information. "How do you feel?"
Trent continued turning toward her. His body moved with amazing slowness, a crude meat machine. A Russian ballerina whirled through the space inside his skull, half obscured the face of the woman in front of him. Russian = dancing bears. "I know a dancing bear named Boris," Trent heard himself explaining to Katrina earnestly, "and a very good joke, would you like to hear it? Ask somebody to pick a number between one and ten. Then, run away."
He stood unsteadily. There were nine thousand five hundred and forty-two Lunar InfoNet Boards pouring into him, forty-five microwave channels carrying data extracted from Earth's InfoNet. The stock market was up five points and a flood in Australia had killed six hundred people, the Green Bay Packers were being stomped by the Beijing Bears and a Johnny Reb bomb in Iowa had detonated prematurely without killing anybody. The world's greatest sensablist, Gregory Selstrom, and the world's most popular sensable actor, Gregory Selstrom's elder brother Adam Selstrom, had agreed to work together in Gregory Selstrom's current production; it would be the first time the two had collaborated.
Trent stumbled once, and Katrina was there, steadying him. A stand-up comic with a cigarette lighter in his hand said, "And in closing, I'd like to set myself on fire for you--but that would hurt." Katrina did not try to stop Trent as he walked out into the living room and then stood motionless in the middle of the room, sightless eyes fixed upon his pressure suit. An artificial Christmas tree was erected just to one side of the pressure suit rack, the tree's lights blinking red and blue and green, yellow and orange and white. On one of the lines from Earth three beautiful children were telling a newsdancer that all they wanted for Christmas was world peace. In Beijing a riot resulted in twenty-three deaths by trampling, including one couple who had been celebrating their sixty-fifth wedding anniversary. There were half a dozen presents beneath the tree, wrapped in silver and gold foil. "This is what they always meant,
" Trent said aloud. When he spoke the words he heard them echo. "The Crystal Wind is the Storm, and the Storm is Data, and the Data is Life. Where are my clothes?"
Trent heard the worry in her voice when she answered him. "You're not ready to leave yet, Trent. You're not--"
"Don't worry, Katrina. I'm just going to go do what's necessary." That part of Trent that had once been Johnny Johnny added, "You know, I've never seen a Christmas tree before, I've never seen colors before. You humans," he whispered to Katrina, "you are such marvelous machines."
"Trent," she said desperately, "I can't let you leave like this!"
The numbers danced into Trent's awareness, out again. "It's December 7, 2069, 2:30 a.m. One hundred and twenty-eight years ago today the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and dragged the United States into World War II. 'And with each passing year it is going to seem more quaint, the little tin airplanes bombing the sleepy iron giants.' My god," said Trent a moment later, staring at Katrina, "I can see the field I first read that line on. It's hanging there in the back of my head; I'm thirteen, and the Temple Dragons have just adopted me."
"Trent, it's going to take time before it's safe for you to leave--"
"It's Saturday," said Trent abruptly. "On Sunday I'm supposed to be in Jackson Town Free Luna, on Farside. To meet a woman named Callia who came all the way from Earth just to work with me." He smiled at her with slow delight; the lights from the Christmas tree were reflected in her eyes, dancing like fireflies on the gold-green irises. "But if you wanted to go back to bed, I could be talked into being late."
* * *
23.
Farside is essentially three cities, in three craters. The Lunar Bureau of the United Nations Peace Keeping Force DataWatch--that is its full and complete name--is a base located at the crater Jules Verne. The only significant scientific establishment on Farside is Zvezdagrad at Tsiolkovsky Crater, where astronomers from all over the System probe into far reaches of the sky. Jackson Town Free Luna completes what is very nearly an equilateral triangle; between them the three cities hold some eighty percent of the population of Farside.
Jackson Town seemed more like an Earthside city than anything else Trent had seen on Luna. At not quite three kilometers in diameter, its dome did not cover so much territory as the dome at Luna City. Still it stretched over more square meters than most of the other domed cities. It felt larger than Luna City to Trent, with most of its surface surface given over to greenery, ranging from wilderness to sculptured parklands.
Trent arrived in Jackson Town in the midst of two nights, the real Lunar night and the artificial night derived from Earth's twenty-four hour cycle. The armed girl on duty at the transfer station when Trent's semiballistic arrived kept awake barely long enough to verify Trent's passport, approve him for entry and check him through. Trent kept to the marked paths, wandering through the dark wilderness without hurry, moving underneath the impossibly thin trees, through shrubbery and flowers that reached to his chest. The handheld clipped at his belt bounced every few steps against the side of his thigh. A 1TB infochip inside the handheld safeguarded the only record anyone in the world had of Trent's original facial bone structure and voice print.
Very little light filtered through the dome; nighttime on Farside left Trent in a nearly total darkness unlike anything he had ever seen on Earth. Only the very faint starlight shone down on the terraformed landscape. Airlocks led beneath ground every thirty meters or so; even in the event of a catastrophic failure of the dome, Trent thought it likely he would reach shelter in time.
The paths twisted and curved throughout the upper level, moving toward and then away from the very center of the dome, where Trent wished to go. Trent walked without hurry; he expected to have to wait out the night in the Temple of Eris until his contact returned to the Temple to greet him. He wandered down the pathways, and Johnny Johnny's ghostly fading voice, in the back of his skull, said, Boss, I'm going to try something new. It happened slowly, the world flaring and brightening around Trent as though dawn were arriving. Johnny Johnny's image processing went slowly at first, and then more quickly as Johnny Johnny found out what did and did not work. The edges of everything around Trent became very sharp, and then the surfaces of things speckled, appeared for a moment in garish unreal colors, and then settled into a grainy black and white image. The world steadied around Trent for just an instant, and then, from up ahead on the path, came the first hint of illumination from the Temple of Eris. Trent glided slowly through the inky darkness, unable even to feel amazement at how very strange his world had grown in the days since Emile Garon's death.
Light blazed over him in glaring colors.
The exterior of the Temple of Eris at Jackson Town looked nothing like Reverend Andy's Temple in Brooklyn; a gold and silver octagonal building, limned in black marble, surrounded by yellow floodlamps at its base. It reached up two stories to touch the dome itself and it glared at Trent, the brightest object in the world, the brightest thing Trent had ever seen before, more radiant than the sun itself. He walked slowly around the Temple, marveling as he had never marveled before at anything and then suddenly, without warning, Trent's vision reverted to normal.
For the merest instant he felt a deep, aching regret at the loss of the vision, and then he found the entrance, and went inside.
Four rows of pews, of some material made to resemble burnished walnut, expanded outward in concentric rings from the central circle where the Reverend preached sermons on Sundays and Wednesdays. The Temple lacked an altar, which did not surprise Trent; some Temples had them, others did not. A fractured rainbow, rose and pale blue with a flash of green, fell from a series of stained glass windows positioned high on the eight inner walls.
A woman knelt, praying, at the center of the circle.
Trent walked forward slowly, to the edge of the circle, and sat down in lotus facing the praying woman. A small satchel sat on one of the pews behind her. Weapons surrounded the woman; an autoshot lay on the Temple floor immediately to her left, a sheathed knife to her right, and a hand weapon, either laser or maser, immediately before her. She knelt with her eyes closed, her head bowed. Her hands clenched together just beneath her chin, white with tension. She knelt in the most uncomfortable position Trent could imagine, knees together, back and thighs completely rigid from the knees up. Her hair waved gently in the breeze from the ventilators, a soft blonde brush cut only five centimeters long. Barefoot, she wore nothing but the bottom half of a powder blue gi, loosely tied at her waist with a black belt. The smooth, swimmer's muscles in her back and shoulders, the mark of one clearly Earth-born, trembled slightly, and in the low gravity random trickles of sweat moved languidly across her upper torso, across breasts shiny with perspiration. Trent sat in silent fascination, watching her breath. She breathed deeply, slowly.
Time passed. The woman did not move except for the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest. Trent watched her, trying to match his own breathing to hers. His time sense still behaved oddly; sometimes it seemed to him that so much time passed between each breath that he would die if he did not breathe more quickly. He became aware of individual muscles moving, of the sound of his own heartbeat.
He did not speak.
After some unmeasured time, her eyes opened. She looked right at Trent, locked eyes with him. Her irises were exactly the same color as Denice's. She spoke in a silk-soft voice, in an American accent. "You're late." She sagged suddenly, went limp and sat back on her heels and took a long, shuddering breath. When she looked back up at Trent again a smile had touched her features, an odd, gentle, not quite impersonal smile. "Thank you. I'm usually too busy to go to Temple. Today was good for me."
"Today?" She did not reply and Trent said, "You've been here since--I was supposed to be here at ten o'clock this morning. That's almost fourteen hours ago."
She sat smiling at him. "Yes."
"You are Callia Sierran?"
"Yes. And you're Trent the Uncatchable."
"Trent the wha
t?"
"You haven't been auditing the Boards?"
"No. I've been--busy."
"It's what the newsdancers have been calling you."
The instant she said it, Trent knew it for the truth. The thought triggered the whirlwind of the Crystal Wind, a cascade he could not control, a blurred and roaring tumble of images and sounds and written words: systemwide, in the last month, the word pattern "Trent the Uncatchable" registered some 23,000 occurrences. Slow delight blossomed within Trent; he sat silently while the data washed over him and through him, sat almost paralyzed until the moment had passed. To Callia Sierran it must have appeared as the merest instant's hesitation before his reply. "They have sown the wind," Trent heard himself saying, "and they shall reap the whirlwind."
Her smile grew even wider. "Yes," said Callia Sierran. "They shall."
Callia sat resting for a while after that. Trent waited patiently. After several minutes her breathing had gentled, grown more shallow. She stood and removed the bottom half of her gi and dried herself with a towel from the satchel on the pew behind her, unaware or else uncaring of what effect she might have on Trent. She redressed in the blue gi, top and bottoms, and a pair of gray running shoes without socks, and began talking as she dressed. "Right now it looks like you, myself, my brother Lan, and Yevgeni Sergei Korimok." She removed a holster from the satchel, tied it down on her right thigh. The knife went back in the satchel. "Lan does our demolition. He's my brother, and he's young, so you may not trust my objectivity, but he's really very good at it. A bit impulsive, which we'll need to watch for, but reliable. He follows orders."
Trent nodded. "Okay."
"I'm security." She picked up the hand weapon, checked the charge cartridge and holstered it. "I spend nine months a year on Earth for toning, three in Luna. I move well in Lunar gravity and I have muscles most Lunar residents, men included, can't match." She glanced at Trent speculatively. "Not counting you, I think. If things blow up on us, I handle it if I can. I can use almost any energy weapon or slugthrower. I have a second degree black belt in tae kwon do, a fourth in shotokan. I'm good with a wide variety of edged weapons. I'm checked out on pressure-suit combat, both the standard soft suits and powered scalesuits." She slung the satchel over her right shoulder, carrying the autoshot in her right hand. "Yevgeni's a native loonie, U.N. territory," Callia continued, sitting down on a pew facing Trent. "And Syndic on top of that, and especially given that you're an American you don't want to get him started on how the Russians have been treated by the Unification. But Domino vouches for him, and that's good enough for me. He has contacts all over the place, nearside and far, Free Luna and United Nations. He's going to be doing most of the public contact we need done." She smiled at him again, that oddly beatific smile. "And then there's you. I don't know what you're here for."
The Long Run Page 31
