by Paul Collins
Both men wanted Hannah to join the Reichler Clinic, though neither guessed her groundbreaking work was the direct result of her possessing the very abilities of mind they were trying to document. Axel believed the direction of her research would lead him to a breakthrough in finding a means of creat ing a machine capable of isolating and identifying people with fledgling paranormal abilities. Hannah shifted to William Reichler’s mind, wanting to learn if his motivations were the same, but he was think ing about a meeting that morning with a couple of government men interested in the possible uses of paranormal abilities in conflict. The govogeeks had indicated they were prepared to pay well if the work at the Reichler Clinic could be shaped to serve their ends.
Hannah slipped back into Axel’s mind. He might be cold, but he was brilliant and in his own way, honest. He believed in paranormal abilities, though her probing showed his certainty they would only manifest after chemical or genetic intervention upon people whose minds were receptive. He actually conceived the possibility of breeding them, like to like, to improve the paranormal strain. He had not once, she saw, considered how a paranormal might feel about being used in this way. To him they were merely hypothetical experimental subjects.
It hurt Hannah that she had believed in their research, had set so much store by it.
The tour through the Clinic ended and as they made their way back to his office, William began to speak of a future in which mobile testing units would allow people to self-test to discover if they possessed any paranormal tendencies. This would offer a far greater sampling than they had been so far able to assay, he pointed out enthusiastically. Hannah read Axel’s surprise in his mind. He and William had discussed the need for the development and creation of equipment to provide proof of their theories, she learned, but they had never spoken of mobile testing units. Axel was no fool and was already wondering what angle his cousin was playing, and why. He did not know William had met with the govogeeks or that he was calculating how much he could dun them for the money to set up mobile test units that would enable the compilation of a list of suitable candidates.
Candidates for what? Hannah wondered uneasily, but Axel was asking what sort of research she might be interested in pursuing. His mind told her he was genuinely interested, but he was distracted wonder ing what his cousin was up to. He needed to find out and to be sure it would help, rather than hinder, his work. Hannah withdrew from his mind as she began to talk. She was very careful because she was aware that the truth about her abilities was woven into her research. She would have spotted it. Maybe, she thought bleakly, on{y someone like her would have spotted it: a lone freak of nature; the exception to the rule of normality.
When she stopped talking, both men were smiling. William produced a contract and pressed it into her hands, suggesting she take it away and return later in the week to discuss it. He spoke as if her employment was a fait accompli, the contract a mere formality and not, as she ascertained from a swift dip into his mind, a binding intern contract connected seam lessly to an agreement to be employed at whatever wage was offered her, for a period not exceeding five years. He must think her a fool or perhaps he counted on her being overawed. Hannah cared too little to discover which. Indeed, her first impulse was to throw the wretched contract into a passing trash unit as she left the building. But she stuffed it into her document case and slung it over her shoulder before setting off for the glide stop where she had been set down two hours earlier with such high hopes.
Half an hour later, Hannah gazed out the window of the glide, her eyes slipping over the enigmatic surfaces of the gleaming splinter towers with their mirror-coated glass that reflected everything and revealed nothing of what lay within. Everything offered you back to yourself in the corporate city of Londo-Arko, which was sprawled along both sides of the river that bisected it. You would never know it was an ancient city, looking down at it from above. You had to get on the ground to see beneath its shiny skin and, even then, in many places, genuine age had been replaced by faux age dens catering to the growing New Luddite movement spawned by those for whom technological advancements had not answered. It was a potent minority giving rise to a multitude of offshoots from radical fundamental ists to conservative ecolniks like her parents. Still, ultimately, it was a minority because in corporate cities, the culture tended to be middle-of-the-road conservative. But even in a freetown in Tipoda, people were content with technology and happy with where it was leading them. Happiness was the accepted proper goal of life, though that had never seemed enough to satisfY her own restless intensity of yearning. It was odd how her refusal to worship at the altar of happiness angered and irritated people. When she was six a teacher had become infuriated because instead of painting something that had made her happy at home, as instructed, she had painted a city as a bleak and smoking ruin over which loomed a dark, bruised-looking sky, the only visible thing a great green smiling neon face at the apex, one eye gone dark and dead.
She had listened, head hung, as the teacher ranted at her for egoising, too ashamed to explain she had been unable to think of something happy at home so she painted what she dreamed the night before instead. She had already learned never to talk about what she saw in her dreams.
The endless mirroring of other buildings, the sky and clouds was oddly hypnotic and she let their motion soothe her jangling nerves. The coiling flow of the segmented public glide and the quick darting movement of the small private glides reminded her of fish and sea snakes weaving through the waving fronds of a submarine forest of seaweed floating and undulating upward.
Diving was one of the things she had left behind in the remote freetown on the northern part of the west coast where she had grown up, and where there were still places you could dive and actually catch sight of fish. Not that you killed them as divers had once done. That was illegal in all countries now. Not just the killing of the big sentient cetaceans, but all remaining wild sea life. The five big governments and the powerful corporations running all but a few of the biggest cities had agreed it was a bad idea to kill off all life in the sea and a pact was made to leave it alone for a millennia or so. All the fish people ate was now either flavoured soy substitute or tank grown if you could afford it. The sea was totally out of bounds save for harmless recreational activities in closely monitored areas.
She could dive in Londo-Arko. Not in the deadly matte-black Thames or even in the sea, because that would require a contamination suit and there would be no marine life to see in any case. But Eva had told her of a public aqua park where you could do bare skin dives, when Hannah revealed her intention of using the remainder of her scholarship grant to travel to Uropa rather than trading up to a govern ment research facility fellowship or a grant with one of the big corporate entities. Knowing Eva, Hannah had taken a look, only to discover the so-called dive haven was really just a big fish tank sunk into the ocean to produce the illusion that you were swim ming in the open sea. It was so crowded it might as well have been called people soup.
Glumly, Hannah accepted she had been naive on all fronts. Certain the Reichler Clinic internship would result in a proper work contract, she had been cheerfully prepared to live carefully on the remain der of her grant and to take any work she could get to eke it out, no matter how menial, until she had proven her worth. She even accepted she might need a part-time job to supplement the startup wage, because she would be working with someone she admired on research in an area that mattered to her.
She had said that to Eva.
What she had not said was that somewhere in Uropa was a place she had been dreaming about her whole life - not an ideal, but a real place with a name, that had somehow become the shape of her deepest unnamed desires. She didn’t know why it was so important to find it, except that when she dreamed of it, a great sense of calm purpose unfurled in her. Somehow she knew that when she found it, she would have found herself She would be home. For that reason, she had always kno
wn that sooner or later, she would travel to Uropa. She had already looked for her place using the worldweb, but so far, to no avail. But it was here, somewhere, and she was determined to find it. In the meantime, she would have her work.
Or so she had thought.
She sighed, feeling as if years had passed since she had woken too early that morning, still jet-lagged from the long flight from Tipoda two days before, but wired with anticipation. She had slept a lot since landing, but the time change had not got through to her on a cellular level and she had been forced to indulge in a face-brightening session in a Spruce kiosk to get rid of the bags under her eyes, knowing how much face mattered to people in corporate terri tories. She could have flown a rocket plane and done the trip in four hours, hence avoiding the dehydra tion and body stress that were the main components of classic jet lag, but the price would have taken a hefty bite out of her grant. Once she dealt with her external appearance, it had taken two stimutabs for her to feel halfway alive mentally, and a big cup of black coffee to complete the process. The trouble was that all that false adrenalin and hype took its toll when the caps and caffeine wore off.
She debated nibbling another stimutab to head off the downer. They were a herb-based chem and basically harmless in the short term, but too many would give her the jitters and she didn’t like that feel ing. Even less did she like the way chems messed with her mind. Besides, she was so thirsty she didn’t think she would be able to swallow anything. She was sorry she had not stopped at the Javabooth by the glide stop for a tube of aqua, but she had just been too devastated by what had taken place in the meeting to do more than stumble aboard the first glide to set down.
Hannah shifted on the gel seat, which moulded warmly and somewhat obscenely to her buttocks, wondering what it was about this whole city that seemed too grabby, too intimate, too personal, for all its coldness and superficial glam and glitz.
‘What now?’ she muttered. ‘Do I go back to Tipoda with my tail between my legs or go on, and if I go on, what do I go on to?’
‘Hah?’ muttered an old woman seated next to her. Realising the woman was unsmoothed, Hannah had to suppress the urge to reach out and squeeze her hand companionably. The trouble with the smoothing process was that while the people who had it done sure looked smooth, at some point they stopped looking real and started looking like those lifelike clone-bots some of the android companies were trying out. But maybe she was just more sen sitive to it, having been raised in a freetown com munity, by people who would not have thought of smoothing their faces even if they had the money for the procedure. She had not seen too many young smoothies here yet, but according to the holos the trend was all the rage in face-conscious Mericanda where all cities were corporate-owned, and what happened in Mericanda, so the saying went, ended up everywhere. Though her father always said this was a saying begun by Mericandans, who had a ten dency to believe their own spin.
She had smiled involuntarily at the old woman, whose eyes now narrowed suspiciously. Hannah heard her wonder if she was one of those pet snatch ers who stole your beloved and sold it to the illegal fur traders. To her surprise what Hannah had taken for a faux-fur purse clutched in the woman’s gnarled hands on her lap suddenly lifted its head and looked at her. It was a lap fox, bred to be small enough to fit into a handbag. Amused, Hannah projected warmth and non-aggression at it. She felt its curiosity spike, and when it craned its neck, she obligingly held her hand out for it to be sniffed.
The old woman looked starded and drew the litde beast protectively closer to her. ‘Could give you a nasty nip,’ she said hopefully. She was wishing she had not forgotten the mugger spray her son had given her. The litde creature merely wagged its bushy tail and projected firmly that it was hungry and wanted to get down to pee. It had figured out in the way animals always seemed able to do, that Hannah could understand it better than other humans. She debated passing the message onto the old woman but thought better of it.
Turning again to gaze out at the city, she told herself that there would be no shame in returning home. It would be downright foolish to remain in Londo-Arko simply to avoid the so-called humilia tion of admitting she had made a mistake. Her flat back home would be gone, of course, but since she had refused the facilities that might have taken her on, she would have to wait for the midyear intake to get a place anyway. In the meantime, she could go home and have a holiday, do some diving. She rejected this thought as soon as it formed, for while she did not doubt that her parents cared for her, she was the cuckoo child they had brought up gently and with real affection, but whom they had never been able to regard as their own. Their thoughts had told her too brutally that neither could believe such an abnormal child had come solely from their genes. Something had gone wrong and though they would never stint on her, neither could they truly love her. No, she could not return to their gentle bafflement and determined kindness, which had cut her so deeply that, at some level, she was still bleeding.
To go back to her parents would be to return to the drowning loneliness of her childhood. Indeed, she might truly have drowned had she not happened on William Reichler’s book, which had made her wonder if there might be others like her, alone and isolated inside their caution and secrecy. She had resolved to find them and no matter what she now thought of William Reichler, she had to acknowl edge that his words had given her direction. She had ceased trying merely to exist, unnoticed, and had begun actively to pursue studies and subjects that would let her examine research into the mind and evolution. She had taken her first degree in anthropology and her second in nano-biology. She was now on the final year of her third degree, hence the grant. She had made an agreement with the educational facility to produce her final thesis based pardy on the work she had expected to do with the Reichler Clinic and there was no doubt the grant body would take a dim view of her refusing the of fer she had courted. At the least, she would have to find something to do that would be equally worthy and relevant to her studies. Her parents would pitch in financially if she was fined, but they were older and their earnings had never been great. The small biofarm where she had grown up was self-sustaining, but there had been nothing extra to stash away in a bank, even if her parents hadn’t regarded bankers and stockbrokers and all money manipulators as the ultimate pornographers. Of course they had chosen to live where they had because of her. Funny how you could think of your life as so normal, and then look back and see how strange and eccentric it had been, only finally coming to understand that even while you were the result of all that strangeness, you might also have been the reason for it.
She sighed, and closed her eyes.
When she woke, she had missed her stop. She didn’t recognise the part of the city she was in, but she got off at the next stop. It was not until the glide had taken off that it occurred to her she didn’t know the location of the return stop. Feeling better for her sleep, she decided it would not hurt her to walk a little. She knew her hotel was north and she could call up a cab if she got tired before she found another public glide stop. The truth was she needed to walk off her weariness and her disappointment.
She had gone some way before it struck her she had entered one of the old districts. In general they were densely populated, but she seemed to be alone. That made her uneasy until she woke to the fact there were other people around, lurking in shad ows or doorways, staying out of sight, and unease racheted up into anxiety. As she continued, buildings and pathways became more and more dilapidated, and then she noticed with a little flip of fear that someone was following her. Maybe they were just curious, but worrying, given she was definitely not in one of the trendy retro-age precincts. This was a genuinely run-down area and her sneers at the shiny faux newness of the city came back to haunt her as she yearned for a brightly lit mall zone full of shop ping smoothies. She thought of the holo on trashers she had seen on the plane - people who lived in the so-called ‘rim’; poor people, angry people, radical
dissidents, without the disposable creds to interest corporate bosses in providing resources.
She lifted her wrist to summon a cab but the reception was full of static. She must be too close to a junction in the power grid. She would have to keep on walking. She tried to walk confidently in the hope that whoever was following would assume she had a weapon,until it occurred to her that her stalker might also have a weapon. The next time she caught a glimpse of her shadow, she sent her mind arrow ing out, and was chilled to learn that although the man had no weapon, he was a detoxing chemhead hungering for the wrist unit he had spotted when she got down from the glide. He figured on bartering it for a hotshot. She considered knocking on one of the doors, but when she glanced up at the windows, she saw most of them were blank and dark, the glass in them long since smashed and fallen away. The inhabitants, if there were any, were as likely to attack her as the man following.
Hannah licked her lips and tried to calm down, but her heart was galloping because now the chemhead was trying to work up the courage to attack. Only paranoia had held him back so far, the possibility she might have been set down as a police lure. It was actually a rational speculation, she thought shakily, because what sort of idiot would come wandering alone and unarmed into a rim area? Tourists were warned of the danger of areas not patrolled by the corporate police, and indeed she had been cautioned in the pre-landing holo, but she had been too preoc cupied worrying about her meeting at the Clinic.
