Bright of the Sky (7 page)

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 inferior— version 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.”

Caitlin wrapped her sweater more closely around her in the chill December air. Just when she thought there might be a future for Titus, the past threatened to swallow him up once more. She’d be damned if she’d let that happen.

She went to him, sitting down knee to knee with him and taking his hands in hers. What to say to a man who heard only what he wanted to, whose stubbornness was as strong a legend as his sojourn in another realm?

Taking a deep breath, she said, “I wish I could change things for you. But they’re gone, Titus. It hurts so bad, but they’re gone for good. I’d jump off this porch for you if I could make it different. But nothing, nothing will bring them back.”

She searched his face for a response, but she was talking to a man who’d piloted star ships. So of course he wasn’t listening to cautions. Why should he? Was this safe little apartment with a safe little wife the sum of his dreams? No, not even close. It was what she loved about the man, and what sometimes stirred her to imagine a bigger life, even while fearing it.

She noted his glance as he looked back at Rob in the living room. Pouring another splash, she said, “We’ll get by, Rob and me. I’ve still got a degree in engineering that I can do something with. We’ll get by; don’t you worry about us.” But Titus’s eyes were stoked with some pale fire, and her words slid away from him. “God damn you, Titus, if you go and get yourself killed.”

“Thanks,” he said, eyes mock large.

“Don’t get goofy with me, Titus. I mean this.”

“Yes ma’am.”

From somewhere, perhaps the apartment below, came the tinny refrain of a Christmas carol.

Quinn knew she meant it. But the harder she pushed, the more he went opposite, and the more he said to himself, What if they
had
found the other place? And why was hope the worst thing that could happen to him? Even if it was a mirage, wasn’t it better than—than what he had?

She shook her head. “I read you like a book. You aren’t listening to me.”

He put a hand on her arm. “I am listening to you, Sister-in-law. But I might not mind what you say.”

She wavered, finally smiling. “No, you never minded. Lamar told me all the stories. You never listened.” She looked more wistful than he’d ever seen her. He didn’t like disappointing her, his staunchest ally in his war against, quite possibly, the whole world.

Caitlin vowed not to share the Minerva news with Rob, at least until after Quinn went home. He didn’t want to argue with his brother, though he’d have to, eventually. When he and Caitlin entered the parlor, they found Rob asleep in front of the silvered wall.