He was silent, probably thinking I sounded demented. There was no reason for him to assume anything else, certainly no reason for him to help me out now.
I clutched the phone with both hands as I waited for my former agent to decide my fate. Maybe I would be given my chance to blow the lid off a truly sordid scheme. Or maybe I would have to figure out how to protect myself against a gangland acquaintance of Andrew’s, someone who might be willing to ice me for a book deal and a movie or TV deal that could make him as legendary as Michael Corleone or Tony Soprano.
More mental notes came to me. After the writer’s former agent slams down the phone, refusing to speak to her, she rushes to her closet and starts throwing clothes into a suitcase as she plots her escape. She wonders how far she will have to run to be out of the reach of the cabal of book collectors and their suppliers.
At last Rob said, “I’m listening.”
I told him what I told you.
So now you know.
Utmost Bones
At first, Kaeti did not know where she was, although her surroundings looked familiar. She lay on a soft mossy surface that seemed to be a bed of some kind; as she sat up, she glimpsed green hills through an opening in a pale wall. A tent, she thought as she glanced up at the opaque white expanse overhead. Then she lowered her eyes to gaze at the landscape outside the open tent flaps.
Kaeti had been in a place like this before, perhaps many times. Just as she was about to call out to the Net, she restrained herself. She had come here to explore, to see if she could find some of what she had lost without the Net’s assistance. Again she had the odd and irrational sensation that her Link was concealing important data from her, perhaps in an attempt to protect her, but from what?
Kaeti had shed much of her past, and would soon have to dispose of her more recent memories to make room for new experiences. She had performed this task intermittently for so long that she could no longer recall exactly how many times she had done so, although it would be simple enough to find out. Lately, she had been feeling as though she might have given up too much, that certain details she had retained were now fragments unconnected to anything else.
There was, for example, the persistent image of someone called Erlann. Whenever she thought of his grayish-blue eyes and gentle smile, a poignant warmth rose up inside her, making her think that she had once had a strong attachment to Erlann. But she could not remember exactly what kind of emotional bond theirs had been, how long ago she had known him, when she had last seen him, or where he might be now.
She could open herself to her Link and find out everything about Erlann, yet she resisted. More was coming into her awareness as she realized how often she had been calling on her Link lately to restore what she had forgotten, to fill in what she had chosen to forget. She had come here, she realized then, to find out whatever she could by herself, to rely on her own efforts instead of depending on the Net.
I want to know, she thought with a fierceness that surprised her, but still could not say exactly what it was that she so desperately wanted to discover.
She had been in this place, or one much like it, with Erlann long ago. “Erlann,” she whispered, and then realized that she had opened a channel to her Link.
Erlann appeared before her, smiling, and was walking toward her when she closed the channel once more. As he vanished, Kaeti felt a strand of the Net tugging gently at her through the Link within her. She opened a channel again, willing to listen – she had not yet summoned up enough courage to close herself off from her Link completely – but still held most of herself back.
Her Link whispered, “We can give you Erlann.”
“But that’s not what I want,” Kaeti said. “Tell me who he is.”
“Erlann was one of those who shared your genes. Long ago, you referred to him as a great-grandson, and later, your term for him was–”
“Was,” Kaeti interrupted. “Every time I ask you to inform me about someone I know, you use the past tense.” So it had been for a while now, ever since she had begun to close the channels to her Link more often. She had made further inquiries about others who had been of some importance to her, to whom she had once been tied by strong emotional bonds. How odd it was that so many of those people had apparently been lost; even more striking was the fact that every single one of her queries had yielded an answer in the past tense. He was your great-grandson. She was your dear friend who once collaborated with you on designing mind-tours and various sensory experiences. He was your bondmate; she was your sister. He was. She was.
Kaeti knew that she could have asked for all of them, and they would have appeared to her just as the simulacrum of Erlann had a few moments ago. She could be with anyone she wished at any time, but it seemed to her that others came to her only when she summoned them through her Link. Once, that had been enough for her, calling on the Net’s memories to present the people she had known. Once, she had been able to imagine that, wherever they actually were, some of them might be calling up a simulacrum of her through their own Links in order to reacquaint themselves with the Kaeti they remembered.
Now she wanted more than that.
She had come here to look for others like herself, and suddenly felt fear. The people whom she had known might have left this world altogether. The friends and lovers, the children and their descendants, the ancestors, mentors, and admirers – might no longer exist. There would always be echoes of them, for the Net of Minds preserved all that was known and had been known; the Net could not erase them altogether. But perhaps the echoes were all that remained.
“Are there any of my kind left?” she shouted, opening a channel.
“Yes,” her Link replied, “of course.”
She closed herself off again, got up, and went to the tent’s opening to peer outside, feeling as though she was just waking from a long sleep filled with vivid dreams. The scenarios provided by her Link never seemed like dreams when she was experiencing them; only later, when she closed her channels and was left with only her own senses, did she feel them to be subtly and almost undetectably false. And yet there were also those times when she could not tell the difference between her memories of actual events and the experiences the Net had provided. Maybe that difference was unimportant, but she had found herself disturbed by the notion that many of her memories were only the products of the Net interacting with her own imagination, rather than being traces of actual events.
Kaeti crept outside the tent and gazed out at a grassy green plain. The tent, made of a silken white cloth, had been pitched near several tall trees; a gently sloping hill led from the tent down to a brook. Even with her channels closed, she seemed to sense her Link inside her, a tiny gemlike node glowing near her cortex, her bond with the Net. What must it have been like for her distant ancestors to be without Links, completely imprisoned in the shells of their own bodies, with only their senses and the intermittent and imperfect fancies of their imaginations to guide and divert them? Even in the scenarios through which she had experienced simulations of past lives, she had always been distantly aware of her Link, and it had seemed to her afterward that this might be a slight flaw in those simulations, that her awareness of her Link should have been temporarily excised from those experiences for the sake of more verisimilitude.
How reckless of me, she thought. Even to pretend that she was cut off from the Net completely might be too frightening an experience to endure. She shivered reflexively, and noticed then for the first time that her body was entirely encased in the silvery skin of a protective suit, and her feet covered by thick-soled boots.
“You’re certainly not taking any chances,” a soft voice murmured.
Kaeti started, knowing that the voice had not come from her Link. She turned and saw a small gray-furred animal with green eyes. The animal’s tail flicked back and forth as the creature slowly padded toward her. A cat, she thought, and felt pleased that she could identify the animal by herself without automatically retrieving the informa
tion through her Link.
“Was that you who spoke to me?” Kaeti asked.
“You don’t see anyone else around here, do you?” The cat sat down and began to lick one of its paws. “What I meant was that even though you must have a Link, you’re wearing a protective garment as well, which seems an excess of caution. The Link would summon–”
“I’ve closed all my channels,” she said. “I am not communing with the Net at the moment.”
The cat tilted its head and stared at her with its yellowish-green eyes. “Even so–”
“Have you seen any people near here?” Kaeti asked.
“People?”
“Beings that resemble me.”
The cat’s whiskers twitched. “No, I haven’t seen any people who resemble you.” The answer was ambiguous, but before Kaeti could say anything else, the cat bounded away and disappeared among the trees.
The cat could not be a wild creature, or it would not have been able to talk to her. She wondered for whom the Net had made the creature, and whether the cat had been abandoned or had simply run away to live on its own.
Kaeti wandered down to the brook and dipped a cupped hand into the water, then drank. Nothing in the water could harm her; parts of her body had been repaired and replaced so often that she would have been nearly invulnerable to physical damage even without the microscopic organisms inside her that maintained and rejuvenated her.
How much of what I once was is left? she wondered, and that thought seemed a repetition of a question that had come to her many times before. Perhaps there was more of her in the Net than remained inside herself; the Net was the repository for all the fears, hopes, loves, and accomplishments she had forgotten.
A fragment of a conversation from long ago came to her then, spoken in a low voice that seemed familiar, although she could not recollect whom the speaker had been. “Believing in some sort of reincarnation never made any sense to me,” the voice was saying. “If you have to forget everything from your previous life in your next incarnation, then in effect you’re dead anyway.”
How many of her past selves were dead? How many others whom she still thought of as alive had died? Human beings had abolished physical death caused by disease and aging long ago, and the Net of Minds continued to maintain and develop the biological implants and nanotechnology responsible for indefinitely expanded lives. But death was still present in her world. If one lived long enough, sooner or later an accident would happen, or a system on which one’s existence depended would temporarily fail. The statistics were inexorable. If a certain finite number of people lived long enough, eventually some chance happening would kill them all.
She sat down by the brook. For a while, she was unable to move. There was a difference between considering statistics on mortality with her channels open while resting in a secure environment that responded to her every mood, and in sitting out here in an open space with the channels to her Link closed. She shivered again as feelings of fear and despair flowed into her. The temptation to open a channel so that her Link could banish such disturbing emotions was strong.
Yet Kaeti resisted those impulses. She had come here to discover what she had lost, what the Minds might be keeping from her. She had come here to look for others like herself; that was part of her purpose. If she reached out to her Link, she would lose that desire again, would give it up easily, would eventually allow the Net to envelop her in its comforting cocoon of experiences and diversions. She had the sensation that this had happened before, that she had gone on this same sort of search earlier only to give it up in the end.
She glanced to her side and saw that the cat was sitting near her on the grassy bank. “Why are you out here?” she asked.
The cat replied, “I could ask you the same thing.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I don’t remember,” the cat said, “but I do have a picture of another in my mind, another two-legged one like you. I think that I had such a companion once.”
“Do you have a Link?” Kaeti asked, suddenly wary. Her Link would not violate the blocks she had put on her mental channels, but there was nothing to prevent the Net from observing her through another Linked being.
“Of course I don’t have a Link. I’m a cat.”
“I knew a terrier with a Link long ago.” That fragment had floated up from the pool of her memories unattached to anything else. “So it’s possible–”
“That wouldn’t make much sense, would it?” the cat interrupted. “The whole point of asking for a creature like me or like that terrier is to have a companion to pet and nurture and train and play with and enjoy that isn’t wild and feral, a creature with whom one can communicate through speech yet who isn’t at all like oneself. Give me a Link, and you’ve basically admitted that I’m not that different from you, whatever I may look like, in which case you might as well have asked the Net for a lover, a friend, or a child instead of a cat. My guess is that the relationship between that Linked terrier and its person didn’t end happily.”
“No, it didn’t,” Kaeti admitted. “The person wanted a particular kind of comrade, one that offered unconditional love and devotion, and the dog couldn’t be like that once she was Linked. She fell under the influence of the Net, she learned that she could ask her own questions of her Link directly instead of having to depend on her human being for answers. And when she realized that she had been deliberately created with certain limitations, that she would never be able to become entirely ... ”
Kaeti fell silent for a moment before continuing. “After that, the terrier resented what had been done to her, and then she didn’t want to have anything to do with her person anymore.” Kaeti felt a sudden conviction that she had been the one who had asked for the terrier, that she was the person who had been abandoned by that dog in the end.
The cat stared coldly at her, as if growing bored. “I don’t at all mind being alone,” the cat murmured, “but people do seem to get awfully lonely when they’re by themselves,” and then the creature left her, scurrying up the bank and into the tall grass until lost from view.
“That’s what it is,” Kaeti whispered. “I’ve grown lonely.” More was coming to her now, more of what she might have forgotten. She had felt in need of solitude, had wanted to withdraw from others for a time, but could not recall exactly why. There had been no discordant elements in her environment, nothing to disturb or upset her, nothing recalcitrant that she was unable to control. When communing with the Net had not been enough company for her, she had summoned the images of those whom she had known and loved. But she had tired of that congenial environment, had soon been longing for the company of other people in the flesh, and then –
What had happened after that? Why did she still feel impelled to close the channels to her Link instead of accessing those memories? Why was she out here relying on little more than her own senses and recollections, instead of using the Net to help her find those she sought?
The answer came to her, and she was ready for the recollection this time, prepared to withstand the shock of remembering again. The Net had searched and had been unable to find other people for her; she might be the last of her kind. She had closed herself off after hearing that, before she could verify the truth of that revelation.
But now, remembering what she had been told, Kaeti had the feeling that her Link had been trying to tell her more, and that she might have closed her channels before hearing the rest. But what more could her Link say to her? The Net could not give her others like herself, people who were still alive, and if that were true, then there were no other people.
Unless, impossible as it seemed, there were people without Links, people who lived as that gray cat did, with no Net to teach and to guide them.
Somehow, she managed to steady herself and, as she grew calmer, even felt pride in being able to bring herself back into balance without the aid of her Link. How many times had the Net told her that she was alone, the last of her kind? How many times ha
d she chosen to forget that, and then to search for others?
“Kaeti,” a remembered voice said inside her, “you are being obstinate.” Another person had said that to her long ago, but she could not recall who had spoken the words.
The air was growing colder. A cool breeze brushed her face; her protective skin would maintain her body temperature, but there might be other dangers out here, ones for which she was not prepared. Severe storms, earthquakes, cataclysms of all kinds – even with the Net’s protection, such disasters came often enough to take the lives of some. The numbers of human beings had been diminishing for a while; that much she still retained in her memory. The experiences of parenthood, of having genetic offspring of her own and serving as a mentor and nurturer to the young, lay far in her past; life had too many other pleasures and challenges to offer. So perhaps with fewer and fewer young ones to replace them, people had finally died out.
No, Kaeti thought; she would not have come out here, would not have begun her search, without some assurance from her Link that the effort would not be futile.
The sky was darkening. She did not want to be out in the open when night came. As she was about to retreat to the tent, something glinted in the distance on the horizon.
She narrowed her eyes slightly. There it was again, a flash of light; she wondered if someone was signaling to her. There might be others out searching, also thinking they were alone and hoping to find companions.
She turned and hurried toward her tent. As she approached, the tent’s flaps opened to admit her. As she went inside, the flaps closed against the night. If others were out there, she preferred to seek them out during the daytime. Maybe they would come here; she tensed for a moment, afraid again. But the tent would warn her if anyone approached, and would activate a protective shield.
Thumbprints Page 34
