Bright of the Sky Page 5

  He keyed the gun to view his integrated communications environment protecting his five acres. The system had triangulated the intruder's position through sound patterns. By the graph on his gun's display, he was fifteen yards to the southeast of Quinn's position, moving toward the road. He keyed in the scope, looking in the infrared. Yes, a figure moving.

  He advanced. He'd give him a dousing of orange paint to brand him for a guaranteed six days, according to the fabber's warranty.

  Carving through the mist came a river of golden smoke, knifing up his nose and tracing a bitter gully down his throat. He couldn't help it; he coughed.

  Now the woods grew unnaturally quiet. Even the perpetual dripping of the trees ceased.

  Then a block of shadow emerged from the night, moving fast, some thirty feet away. Having given away his position already, Quinn shouted, "Stop where you are. Or you're a dead man."

  Someone laughed.

  Then he was crashing after the shadow. As it fled toward the road, Quinn hurdled over fallen logs, propelled by adrenaline. As the moon took sudden command of a blank spot in the canopy, he could see a figure trying to make it up the steep embankment by the road.

  "Stop!" he yelled again, and then he brought the nozzle of his gun up, determined to paint the fellow before he got to his car. He pulled the trigger, and by sound, he knew he'd sent off a lethal stream of laser instead of paint. The intruder was down, hit by the mistaken blast of laser, lying wounded, possibly dead. Quinn's heart coiled, and he broke into a sweat that made him simultaneously hot and cold. He saw the end of his life before him: a virtual courtroom, a real-time cell.

  Shaking, he came closer to the form, now lying immobile in the rotting leaves. He reached down and flung the body over to face him.

  He called for lights, and they bloomed from his hidden illumination network.

  Before him lay a girl in city clothes, ripped and dirty. She was staring in consternation at his gun. He'd missed.

  "Jesus," was all he could say. She was young. Maybe fifteen. Lord God, he had almost killed a child. He let the gun fall to forest floor.

  "I'm sorry," she said, and tears were just behind the words.

  "Jesus," he repeated. He was frozen to the spot, unable to move, but not because she looked afraid, but because she looked familiar. Her eyes were dark, with flat slashes of eyebrows pointing to a long straight nose and a wide mouth that looked like it could smile as broad as the world. She looked just like Sydney. Like Sydney would have-if she were still alive. His throat tightened so hard it might strangle him.

  He looked down at the shotgun, lying in the rotting leaves. It made him weak to think of it.

  The girl stood up, eyeing him warily. Now, as he saw her expression and the blue eyes, she didn't look like Sydney, except insofar as all young people evoked all young people, for those who loved specifically.

  At a movement from the road, Quinn looked up. "Your boyfriend's a coward," he said. "Why isn't he down here helping you?"

  She shrugged. "Sorry we bothered you. We just wanted to see ..." She paused, and now tears did come. "See you for real."

  "Okay," he said, surprising himself. "Here I am." He watched her watch him, imagined what she would be seeing. A guy with rumpled clothes, no space hero.

  Maybe she did look like Sydney. That dark hair . . . But the terrible truth was, he was having trouble remembering what Sydney looked like, except for her pictures.

  "So you wanted to see me for real," Quinn said.

  The girl lay inert on the ground, eyes big.

  "Thing is? I'm not real. In a sense, I'm not really here at all." She was watching him with more intensity now that she had concluded he wasn't going to shoot her. "I haven't been here since I got here. Since I got back from that place. And no, I don't know where it was. I'm not holding back secrets. There are no secrets, no conspiracies. I don't remember anything. Sorry to disappoint you. I know you want to believe things." He held up a hand. "Never mind what it is you want to believe; that's your business. But don't pin it on me. I'm not really here. Anymore."

  She hadn't moved from the hillside, nor did she now.

  But she was listening.

  "Do you understand?" he asked her, knowing she couldn't have the slightest idea what he was talking about, but needing, suddenly and with a strange intensity, for her to understand.

  And then she gave him the gift. She said, "Yes. Yes, I do. I'm terribly sorry, Mr. Quinn."

  He nodded at her, unable to speak. But her words unlocked him. Yes, I understand. The young girl gazed at him with the look of wisdom and blankness that children sometimes had. She knew she was talking to a ghost, a man who had slipped away from himself. Who had almost killed a child.

  The girl rose to her feet and, with the swift recovery of the young, scrambled up the embankment.

  When the car squealed off down the road, he shouted after her, "And lose that miserable boyfriend of yours, will you? Where was he when you needed him?"

  He picked up the gun and trudged back to the house, dousing the tree lights as he went by, feeling dazed by what he'd almost done.

  Caitlin, he thought. What's happening to me?

  In his bedroom, he felt under his bed for the duffel bag, hauling it out, still packed from the last trip he'd made.

  He didn't want Rob's noisy household right now.

  But, he was very sure, he needed it.

  Past 1:00 AM, Quinn's car sped along the rutted dirt road, murky with coastal fog. Pebbles and rocks kicked up, denting the paint job. But by the time he reached the first Mesh, the dents would be pearling back smooth. He drove fast, eager to be out of the woods, to separate himself from some darkness he could hardly identify. He swung into a curve, accelerating out of it, driving hard before he changed his mind. He conjured up the expression on Emily and Mateo's faces when he showed up for Christmas after all. Maybe even Rob would smile, that brother of his who thought Quinn had squandered his future. Even before the star ship disaster.

  Quinn and Rob had both tested at the same time, even though, at eight years old, Quinn was taking the test early. They walked into the test as two bright, active young boys. Quinn walked out as a fast-track boy. A savvy, as the term went. His brother, as a middle-track child. A middie. To his credit, Rob never begrudged his brother's genius-level score. But to Quinn's enduring annoyance, Rob had expected Quinn to do something with it. Quinn could have made his fortune by now, but all he had wanted was to pilot the K-ships. It was the best job in the universe. Johanna had understood that, and never tried to change him. Went along on his trips.

  Went along on his trips. He swerved from those thoughts. Reaching the paved road with its smart surface, he floored the accelerator, an action that the car's savant overruled, assuming control, establishing an annoyingly safe speed.

  In the darkness, the car headlights created a white tunnel, at the end of which Quinn could now see the Mesh platform, where a platoon of cars was just forming up. At this time of night it was a small fleet that would mesh together for as long a ride as their respective passengers shared common destinations. Joining front to back in the modern-and, in Quinn's mind, damn inferiorversion of trains, they'd zoom onto the highways at super speeds, conserving highway space and protecting against highway slaughter with mSap control. Quinn felt the bump of his car as it meshed with the one in front.

  As sapient-run transport, PMT-Personal Meshed Transport-was efficient and private. People overwhelmingly preferred personal transport to communal buses-or rail cars for that matter. It was a damn shame. What must it have been like to ride the Southern Pacific's Coast Starlight into Los Angeles, with the porters, dining cars, and the full-length tavern-coach?

  Easing into the short queue at the station, Quinn noted that the platform was deserted except for washes of fog and pools of lamplight.

  Through one of these pools stepped a woman wearing a black tunic, her hair piled into a holiday coiffure. She ducked into a for-hire PMT in front of Quinn's, eyeing him
as she did so, revealing a stark and lovely face. Party over. Going home.

  The platoon set off, quickly reaching top speed on the intercorridor between Portland and points west. Now that his vehicle was meshed and his attention to driving was no longer needed, the newsTide streamed onto the dashboard, a recap of the latest protests from South America, where an antitech junta had banished all foreign and domestic Company holdings and proclaimed the people's right to traditional jobs and life off the dole. A Catholic priest in Argentina, Mother Felice Hernandez, was taking things even farther, threatening secession of indigenous peoples from their national governments and proposing a ban on technology imports and even the world tides of news and information.

  Poor bastards. Only ten percent of South Americans finished even a sixth-grade education. The vast majority were mired in the twentieth century, maintaining a fatalistic resistance to the data-fed world. They must think their old lives preferable to digital delights and underemployment in the data warrens of South American tronic giants.

  Thinking of his brother holding on by the skin of his teeth to just such a life with Minerva, Quinn thought that the United States could use a Mother Hernandez of its own.

  He rested his head on the back of the cushioned seat. He could sleep for an hour, except for the fact that he was unnaturally awake. The windows curving in front and back of the cars allowed him to see straight down the platoon, into each car.

  Through his forward window, he could see that the passenger in front of him had turned around and was looking at him. Her auburn hair had fallen down to her shoulders, framing her face, giving her a siren beauty.

  The woman parted her tunic, baring naked breasts. He reached forward to opaque the window, but stopped, and instead touched her full breasts through the layer of polyscreen. Her eyes closed and she pressed harder into the window. A jolt of erotic energy spiked into him. It surprised him how quickly she had summoned him. Placing his hands on his side of the window, he insisted she look at him. Finally she did, driving up the heat in the car. In her left eye he saw the glint of bioware; she might be recording this for later enjoyment. She was one of those modern women, unafraid of bodily adaptation, insisting on direct access to the tideflow, despite the infamous failures of machine-body interface.

  Even so, he wanted her. Even if it was through a window. This was closer than he'd been to a woman in two years, and he was man of appetite, or used to be. Her eyes softened, and he thought that perhaps she too was lonely, locked in her compartment as he was in his.

  There was an emergency release on the window. She saw him glance at it, and nodded. They had plenty of time. It wouldn't be rushed. He hesitated. Why not? Why not take some comfort?

  Outside, clusters of tract houses sped by, where people lived and made love ... but the moment passed. He pulled away from the window, seeing the hurt in the woman's eyes. His lips formed the words I'm sorry. He blacked out the window, leaning back in his seat. At least he still felt something. Even if it was for a stranger. That might be progress if, as Caitlin said, he'd been slipping away.

  But there could be no one new, not even like this, for the body alone. He owed Johanna that much, and he meant to stick by it.

  Caitlin made up a bed for him on the couch. In her bathrobe, with her hair crunched up by sleep, she looked sweet. And relieved to see him.

  "I need to talk to you," he said.

  But then Rob came into the room, shuffling out to see what the commotion was, and Quinn thought that it could wait until morning, because he wanted to talk to Caitlin alone.

  He lay down, weary at last.

  Caitlin turned at the door, as though she would have said something. But, "Good night," she whispered, and left him to toss on the hard couch until sleep came.

  In the morning, in the children's room, he and Mateo tinkered with a broken savant action figure. The lower-level tronic figure wouldn't activate the battlefield pieces of the invading hordes that Mateo needed as backdrop for his battle queen, the lovely and formidable jasmine Star.

  The kid had imagination to burn. He'd announced at age five that he'd be a virtual environment designer. Quinn didn't know if he had the talent, but Caitlin claimed he did. More to the point, would a Company think so? But the kid was eleven years old. He didn't need to worry about the Standard Test for a couple years.

  Emily lolled on the bed on her stomach, watching the proceedings. "I can't step on the battlefield, or my feet will get smuffed."

  Quinn angled the tronic probe into the savant's circuits. "Smuffed?"

  Mateo shrugged. "She's been warned."

  Appearing in the doorway, Rob said, "Maybe Santa Claus has some solutions wrapped up under the tree."

  Quinn almost had the kink worked out. "Santa Claus will get smuffed if he tries to fly over this tactical ground."

  "Yezzz," Mateo said, "tactical ground."

  Rob watched for a few minutes more, and then headed back to the kitchen to help Caitlin with breakfast.

  With the smells of real cooking and the quiet play of the children, Quinn felt a pang of envy for this domestic peace. And a decided unease that it might be shattered. At forty, Rob was in no position to start over. Or Caitlin, either. The dole would ensure they'd be warm and entertained, but it was a comfortable hell that Quinn would despise, and so would Rob.

  From the lanai of his brother's apartment twenty stories high, Quinn could barely hear the street noises. At this distance, the road grid was lit up, looking Christmasy in the white and red lights. From the street, sirens pierced the heights as security converged on some scene of violence. The ground level was no place to loiter, and the higher the apartment, the more expensive it was. Rob and Caitlin had worked their way up as their fortunes improved. But it was still a miserably small four-room hive of a place, one that made Quinn antsy to be gone, even as his mind churned.

  They want you to go back, Titus, Lamar had said. They've found it. The other place. And what if they had found it?

  Sipping his dessert coffee, he looked across Portland's sprawl, with its ocean of prefabber residential boxes. These boxes might be uniform, but their walls carried the tideflow, bearing virtual schools, markets, information, social contact, entertainment. By the Blix-Poole Act, each citizen was guaranteed a basic standard of living that included housing, food, and EDE, Electronic Domain Entitlements. The Companies paid the taxes that kept the world fed and housed. Educated, if need be. With such deep wealth, they could afford it. They couldn't afford not to, not after the Troubles had brought civilization to the brink of darkness, when the starving told the well-fed that those gradients must pass. So in a way, the dreds-those with IQs of one hundred or less-had changed the world.

  Caitlin and Rob lived considerably better than what Blix-Poole managed to dole out. Rob tended savants for Minerva. For now. Quinn looked south, toward the cramped apartment blocks where occupants upgraded the EDE basic services with every piece of gear they could afford. These diversions, selected by each occupant and reinforced by data agents, created a feedback loop that created odd, individual realities. Psychoneurologists claimed that people were unaware of choices-that their subconscious generated the "choices" using its hidden logic. By this theory, people were biological machines, driven by subconscious processes always a half second ahead of what we consciously "chose" to think. So you could walk into any child's bedroom, any couple's parlor and, by seeing their virtual environment, look into the jungle of their minds. Quinn's cottage, though, didn't have live walls, his reality being on hold.

  Caitlin opened the sliding door and joined him on the lanai, handing him a glass with an inch of amber in the bottom. "The good stuff," she said, raising her own glass.

  They toasted each other. Behind her in the living room, Rob was settling in to the evening newsTide.

  She gestured toward the city. "Not as nice a view as yours, but not bad, for a guy with a master's degree and a wife who likes to stay home." After a moment she said, "Want to talk about it?"

/>   "About what?"

  "About whatever it is that brought you to see us last night."

  "Maybe I came to spread holiday cheer."

  "Try again."

  "To annoy my brother by tinkering with toys?"

  "Bingo," Caitlin said, tossing off her drink. She'd brought the bottle, though.

  They settled into two stiff chairs that barely fit on the lanai. "Now, talk. I want to hear what's going on, and I don't want any bullshit this time, Titus Quinn. I don't know who you think you're fooling, but it ain't me."

  "Half my pleasure in life comes from fooling you, Sister-in-law."

  "Half of nothing is still nothing, Titus."

  Quinn held his glass out. Received a splash. "I haven't thrown myself into the surf yet, for God's sakes." He looked over at her, but she wasn't letting go. Nor would she, now that he'd come to her.

  "It's Minerva," he said. "They're back meddling with me. They said they'll shit-can Rob if I don't do what they say."

  She leaned forward, worried. "What more can they possibly want from you? You've already given them everything."

  "Not quite everything." He told her about what Minerva claimed to have found, and what they wanted him to do. He didn't know what to make of it. But a needle of hope was thrusting up from his innards, and it was drawing blood as it came. What if they were right?

  Caitlin took an angry swig from her glass. "Sons of bitches. This came from Lamar?" He nodded. "You don't believe them, do you?"

  He didn't answer. Maybe he did believe it; maybe he needed to believe. But Caitlin would have a hard time accepting the idea. He'd never asked her whether she believed his claims of where he'd been. He assumed she didn't, and he forgave her for that. But he didn't want to hear it outright.

  Caitlin stood and went to the railing, gripping it. "Damn, but this makes me mad. Look at you. I see that look in your eyes, Titus, and it makes me real mad. They've done the worst thing to you that they possibly could have done. They've made you hope again."