Adrift in the Noösphere (12 page)

“Hey, hey, baby.” Jay surged up inside Jayne. “You'll have everything you need, and more. This...my donor, she was loaded. Is loaded. If I never sing another song for her, she'll be rich until we both die.”

“She's already dead. Or you are, whatever.”

“You and me, I meant. I told Jesus to write you a check for a million and a half and have it ready for you at the office.´ She pronounced it in the Hispanic fashion, Hay-soos. “Didn't you—”

“Who's Jesus?”

“Jesus Saves.” Sah-vays. In a happy moment, like the past of their marriage instantly recovered, Jessie blinked and her eyes rolled.

“You're shitting me. You have a money manager named Jesus Saves?” Anglo pronunciation.

Jayne burst out laughing, and felt the tension fall away from her tensed shoulders. The Pilate mat was calling to her. “Right. Right. Man, it's just one crazy coincidence after another.”

She found a chair and kicked it closer to her wife. Ex-wife. Widow. Whatever. She reached out both hands and after a moment's pause Jessie took them. “Babe, this is too crazy. But I'm taking steps right away to deal with one issue.” Jayne took a deep breath, let the dreams flood through her. Something was trying to tell her something, that was sure as shit. Jay no more. Cornelius no more, either. Time to roll the dice and start over. “I'm changing my name.”

“You already changed your name.” Now Jessie was stroking her right hand as if it were a small child's, or perhaps a kitten. “Let me guess. Um. Darby N. D'joan?”

“Ha ha.” Some old movie they'd seen together? No, an eighteenth century poem Jessie had studied in her gender crimes course, wasn't it? The weather-beaten old couple who'd stayed together through thick and thin. “Sorry, not any longer, sweetheart. This thing that's happened to me, I tell you, someone up there either likes me or hates me, and I don't know which it is, yet. But I got stuck here in this gorgeous bod for a reason, Jessie. Maybe I'm some kind of message to the world.”

“Oh shit, Jay.” Her widow dropped her hand. “Don't tell me you got religion. It just was an accident, and then a bunch of medical ghouls used you for an experiment. I know, sorry, that was uncalled for, you've recovered beautifully, but....” She trailed off. After a moment she said, “So what's the new name?”

“Jayne Brunner.” The person in Girly D'joan's living corpse stood up, squared her shoulders, felt the still-unfamiliar weight of her breasts as they shifted under the lycra.

“Well, whatever. So are you now Mrs. Brunner or Ms. Brunner, Jay?”

“Neither.” She offered her widow a vulpine display of teeth, and led her toward the door. “I'm an old-fashioned girl, it seems. Call me Miss Brunner.”

§

Somewhere behind the multiverse, the Beadle Monger experienced a small frisson. The Eidolon Lure had been taken.

A Glaroon nodded in satisfaction.”Now to nudge the human's Messiah Complex into overdrive, Beads.”

“Yes indeed. ‘Miss Brunner',” they muttered to itselves. “Now that sounds...quite promising.”

For Mike Moorcock and Jerry Cornelius

Coming Back

Yes, by now he admits that Jennifer is not deliberately driving him crazy. Quit laying it on her, Rostow chides himself. His Bastilled lunacy is self-evidently self-inflicted. There can be no doubt, as Tania had always insisted, that his is a personality gruesomely at risk, pumping through spasms of mania and depression, elation and reproach. As he glances up, the bulwarks of censure shear free of their hinges. The three coil techs, finishing up, share his appreciation with ogles and grins.

Descending the worn rubber treads
of the catwalk, its non-magnetic struc
ture faintly creaking and spronging in
ludicrous counterpoint, Jennifer's legs
are golden with undepilated summer
hairs. Certainly he will lose his reason.
It is her innocent, unconscious hauteur that propels Rostow's intolerable aspirations.

Who would believe that less than
three weeks ago, governed by hard liq
uor and soft drugs, his hands had crept like pussycats over those shins, pounced past her knees to her thighs and be
yond, while all the while dexterous Auberon Mountbatten Singh, D. Sc.,
coolly worked at the far end of her torso with mysterious expertise, soothing
her brow, the edges of her jaw, the la
tent weakness at her throat, the re
vealed swell of her breasts? Even at this
moment Rostow can scarcely credit his
role in that maniacal and tasteless con
test. Was it a contest? As she steps
from the catwalk to her computer ter
minal, Rostow groans at an ambiguity
only he perceives.

If even once she took stock, fixed
him with, say, a single killing glance of
rebuke and rejection...that would put
an end to it. He might flail himself de
finitively and be done. Instead, she
moves with languid competence in his
marginal survival spaces like a
neutrino beam wafting through a
mountain of solid lead.

“Hi,” she offers, settling herself in a
molded seat. Her gaze penetrates him
for an instant, moving after a beat to
her keyboard. “Stan's on his way with
the entire entourage. I spied.”

“
Jambo
,” says Rostow. It's all
there, bolted into his larynx. Dutifully
he runs the coded sequence of knobs
and toggles which shunts the system
from Latent to Standby. He nods to
the departing technicians. There is a
Parkinsonian tremor in his stupid
fingers. “Pouring spirits down their
throats, I guess. Softening them up.”

Neat square indicators simmer viv
idly as the control instrumentation,
swift bleats from his console to hers
and back, patch into readiness. “This
little number should sober them,” she
observes. “‘
Jambo
'?”

“Swahili for ‘Hello, sailor'.” A
thread of mush in his voice and his brain tells his ear that the inflection was wrong. I blew it. Every time I
blow it. With a mental fist he clouts his forehead. There is no time for limping
second guesses. Stan Donaldson's abrasive voice precedes the man by
half a second as the door swings wide
for the expensive feet of the Board of Directors.

“We acquired it from Princeton, Senator,” the department head is say
ing. “ERDA paid out a quarter of a billion dollars for a Tokamak Fusion Test
reactor that was obsoleted overnight when Sandia secured sustained fusion
by inertial confinement.”

It seems to Rostow, squinting from
the side of his eye and jittery with
alarm, that this approach is a mistake.
The senator is notorious for his
loathing of costly obsolescence. Uh-
huh. Buonacelli halts in midstride,
pokes a finger into Donaldson's chubby chest. “Another sonofabitch Ivy
League boondoggle. By the Lord, that's
the kind of crap I won't abide.”

Donaldson stands his ground. His
own rasp is melodic after the senator's
gravel hurtling from a tip-truck.

“Their blunder was our good fortune, sir,” he says. “They were going
to haul off the toroidal coils for recycling, but I managed to have them diverted to this laboratory. Everything
is surplus or off-the-shelf. It made for a
considerable saving.”

Somewhat mollified, Buonacelli pushes forward to loom over Jennifer
Barton's supervisor ter
minal, his minnows in attendance. “I'm
still god-damned if I know what your
magnets are for. Come straight out
with it, man. The trustees won't be
slow to scrap any project that smacks
of self-indulgent tinkering.” The set of
his agribiz frame shows approval of
Jennifer at least. “Convince us, and
fast. This is the third department we've
been dragged through today, and my
feet are killing me.”

“Miss Barton, could you fetch the senator a chair?”

Incredulous on her behalf, Rostow
burns. Buonacelli holds the woman's
biceps as she rises. “That's fine, honey,
I'll stand.” An arm goes around her
shoulders in a friendly squeeze nobody
in his right mind could construe as avuncular. Eddie Rostow damages his
tooth enamel. “Don't bother buttering
me up, Dr. Donaldson. Let's get
straight to the meat. What does this
pile of junk do? Why do you deserve
more megabucks?”

Rostow's chagrin buckles to delight
as Stan's moist, unhealthy jowls dark
en. No doubt this will be the third or
fourth time Donaldson has tried to ex
plain the advanced-wave mirror to the
accountants. Probably, Eddie decides,
Buonacelli is just baiting him. T
he old bastard might know zilch about
high-energy physics, but he's nobody's
fool.

There again, it would serve Donaldson right if they haven't followed a
word he's been saying. The man revels
in pretentious jargon. Rostow hears a
scurry of furry feet in the cardboard box near his own, cranes his neck,
breaks up in silent mirth. The white bunny rabbit in the box is making its
own critical observations. Cottontail
high, it's dropping a stream of dry pel
lets into the shredded lettuce that litters
the box.

Florid, Stan has decided to simplify
his spiel. He's saying: “A totally new branch of technology, gentlemen, Perhaps my previous remarks were overly technical.”

“New like Princeton?”

“New like Sandia,” the professor
says, grasping thankfully at the
straight line. “Yet thoroughly rooted in
classical theory. What we have here,
gentlemen, is the answer to a puzzle
provoked by James Clerk Maxwell
more than a century ago. Maxwell,” he
glosses, “was the genius who first
showed that electricity and magnetism
were one and the same. His equations
are the basis of all electronic
technology.”

“For history we fund historians,”
one of the committee says coldly, cur
rying favor, and recoils slightly when
Buonacelli growls.

Irritated and emboldened, the great
physicist states loftily: “Physics is precisely the accumulated history of great
physicists. My point, Senator, is that Maxwell's equations for electromag
netic wave motion have two sets of so
lutions. One set describes what we
term
retarded
waves, where fluctuations are broadcast outward due to the
acceleration of a charged particle.
Radio waves from a transmitter are re
tarded waves, akin to the ripples from
a stone dropped in a pond.”

Rostow monitors surges of power
in the system, holding it in equilibri
um. He seeks Jennifer Barton's eye,
hoping for a shared long-suffering gri
mace, but her attention is directed to
the listening senator.

Donaldson is creeping into pom
posity again. “The other solutions,
equally valid in theoretical terms, we
call
advanced
waves. Until now they have never been detected, let alone utilized.”

“Radio waves get drawn back into
a transmitter?” Buonacelli poses acute
ly, puzzled.

“Exactly.” Donaldson rewards him
with a satisfied pout. “Advanced
waves converge to a point. Another
way of looking at it is to say that they
travel backwards in time. They put
time into reverse. Normally, for com
plex reasons, the two sets of waves interfere, yielding no more than the re
tarded component. What I've done
here with this equipment—”

Unnoticed, Eddie Rostow sits bolt
upright and his face distorts in a throt
tled shriek. What
you've
done, you
thieving sonofabitch?

But Buonacelli's scandalized roar
has filled the lab. Suddenly it is obvious that indeed he had not grasped the
earlier explanations. “Who in hell do
you think you are, Professor—H. G.
Wells? Don't you ever learn? How dare
you stand there and shamelessly tell us
you've been spending the university's
endowment on a
time
machine? Credit
me with the sense I was born with.”

As Rostow spins in his chair, the
dignitaries are stomping toward the
door. Before Donaldson finds words,
Jennifer Barton has magically slipped
into Buonacelli's path. “Surely you're not leaving yet, Senator? Won't you at
least wait for the demonstrations we've
prepared for you?” She blinks as if something is in her eye.

“Harrumph!” Buonacelli lifts her
hands in his beefy paws. “I don't know
how they've taken you in, my dear.
Never trust a scientist. If they're not lunatics, they're swindlers. Either way,
it's a waste of good tax revenue.”

“Why, Senator! I'm a scientist my
self.”

He releases one hand, strokes his
jaw. “My apologies, dear lady. To tell the truth, my eldest son is a chemist at
Dow.” Gallantly he bows, retaining
one of her hands. “Very well, gentle
men. To please this charming lady,
let's take a look at the professor's so-
called demonstration.”

Wincing, Rostow spins quickly
back to his station. He knows he'll be
the butt of Stan's fuming humiliation
the moment the directors are on their
way. Why do I put up with it?

Tersely, the professor tells
Buonacelli, “You may examine this equipment thoroughly.” He leads them
to the mirror chamber buried between
gigantic doughnut-shaped magnets,
slides open the weighty hatch. With
heavy sarcasm he says, “Assure your
selves it's quite empty. There are no hidden trapdoors or disappearing rab
bits.” Rostow swallows a snigger, his
eye on the white bunny munching in
its box between his feet. Poor little
beast, he thinks an instant later. I hate that part of it. But it's going to rock
Buonacelli on his heels and open his wallet.

“Advanced waves are generated in
every molecular interaction. Within

these confines they are reflected almost
totally. The crystalline surface of the chamber constitutes an
array
of laser-like amplifiers which augment the ad
vanced-wave component.” My idea,
Eddie Rostow wants to shout. Without
that, you'd have a big magnetic field
going absolutely nowhere. But whose
name will go on the paper? He says nothing. Donaldson puts his head in
side the chamber. Dully, as he twists
back and forth, his muffled voice
states: “As you see, it's perfectly safe at
the moment.” An almost irresistible im
pulse floods Rostow. Regretfully, he
pulls his finger back from the power
switches.

“Okay,” growls Buonacelli, “it's
empty. So?”

Jennifer Barton leaves her terminal
and returns with a flask of boiling
water in one hand and a tray of ice
cubes in the other.