Idolon (18 page)

Kasuo van Dijk sat in his office, staring out the window behind his desk. It wasn't a real window. He kept a permanent real-time d-splay from Japan on the graphene-covered walls of his basement office.

The philm was part of his Samurai pseudoself. Late at night he liked having a little piece of day to light his office. The d-splay provided a view of the rock and raked-sand karesansui garden at Nanzenji, a Zen temple at the foot of Kyoto's eastern hills. Using the nanotrode array woven into his electronic skin, an applet in the d-splay screen kept track of his location and adjusted the view through the window so he saw exactly what he would see if he was looking out the window in Nanzenji. He preferred to leave the graphene on the rest of the walls transparent, showing the bare underlying cinder block.

Turning from the window, he onlined and queried the SFPD datician. "Damselfly search results."

He'd used the damselfly from Lisette's apartment as a baseline parameter, but had instructed the datician to include plus-minus permutations if the initial search turned up no useful results. The search included all known image libraries around the world—both public and private—as well as simage-array databases and online transmissions.

A report d-splay appeared on the wall to the right of his desk. He scrolled through the results. In the last month, there had been three hundred thousand damselfly instantiations worldwide that met the search criteria. Ten thousand downloads a day, on average. Fairly miniscule compared to F8 or XXXodus.

"Limit the search results to the San Francisco Bay Area," van Dijk instructed the datician. "One-hundred-fifty-kilometer radius."

The d-splay repopulated to just under three thousand downloads and simage-array recordings.

Still too many. Van Dijk leaned back in his chair and propped his feet on his desk. Most of the downloads were to Vurtronic d-splays. The graphene screen was capable of producing texture in addition to images, but it couldn't be peeled off. There was no way for the damselfly to take flight from a standard screen.

"Eliminate all Vurtronic downloads," he said.

The list narrowed to six occurrences. None of them were downloads. All of the occurrences, were ad hoc simages, programmable graphene appliques that weren't restricted to a fixed location. Three of the occurrences, including the oldest, took place in Lisette's apartment. Of these, one preceded the time of death of the young woman by twelve hours. One instantiation, the most recent, was in South San Francisco. The second oldest time stamp registered in Dockton. That left Santa Cruz and San Jose, the two most recent occurrences after South San Francisco. All of the occurrences had street addresses but no subnet address.

"Identify origins of these images," he said.

"Unknown," the datician said.

"Trace."

"I'm sorry, Detective. The paths dead-end."

Van Dijk frowned. Whatever it was, it didn't want to be found. He lowered his feet. "Cross-correlate," he said, "based on location and time."

A second d-splay opened on the wall. It mapped the locations in a stack of space-time sheets, starting with the oldest at the bottom and progressing upward to the newest. Lines joining each occurrence helped him to visually track the progression of events, but failed to reveal a meaningful pattern. The links appeared to be random and unconnected.

Van Dijk turned to stare at the karesansui garden. The simage in Santa Cruz was associated with an ad agency, Model Behavior.

Could the young woman have been working as a model, an ad demographic scout, or marketeer?

Van Dijk had the datician submit a request for the firm's employment records. It would take some time to process; he'd need the approval of a judge. The agency hadn't filed a missing person's report with SCPD, but maybe the firm didn't know an employee was missing. It was also possible that she was a former employee.

The address in San Jose was equally baffling. It was subleased to a tenant named Zhenyu al-Fayoumi. A relative, possibly, or a boyfriend? According to the datician, the man was an associate professor with the Developmental Nanobiology Department at San Jose State University.

"Tag him as a person of interest," van Dijk said. "Message him with a request to contact me as soon as possible." If there was probable cause, he could subpoena any call records later.

"Message sent," the datician confirmed.

Van Dijk turned his attention to the Dockton address, a travel agency that was no longer in business and hadn't been for a year.

At a loss, van Dijk said, "Display the images. Oldest to newest."

Several d-splays opened in quick succession to show the now-familiar damselfly, followed by a flying fish, a damselfish, and finally, an ad mask with the mouth of a fish.

"Point of clarification," van Dijk said.

"Yes?"

"Explain the fish images."

"You requested any images that contained elements that were an exact match to those found in the baseline image of the damselfly. The wings on both the flying fish and the damselfish meet that criteria, plus or minus the standard deviation of 2-percent."

"What about the ad mask?" It didn't have any wings that he could see.

"The mouth and scale pattern are an exact match of the fish mouths recorded in the other two images."

Which meant he could probably rule that one out. At least for the time being.

"Calculate and d-splay the most probable locations, from highest to lowest, for the girl associated with the baseline image."

Lisette remained his first priority.

On the d-splay, the address in South San and its assigned probability blinked red at the top of the list.

Marta didn't know what to say. She and Nadice couldn't talk, not really. Not with the TVs listening
in
and watching. Marta could feel their eyes peering at them through nanocams hidden in the walls and the utility dust floating in the cool, recirculated air. The air chafed her skin and smelled faintly of fullerenes.

Nadice didn't strike her as a convert. She wasn't proselytizing, bubbling over with enthusiasm. She seemed more a victim of circumstance than a willing initiate.

Their reasons for being here might be different, but the two of them were more alike than not. They were both guarded, wary.

Still, the silence grated. It was unnatural. No talk was more suspicious than idle chatter. They needed to maintain at least the appearance of normalcy or they would draw more attention to themselves, not less.

"Some music would be nice," Marta finally ventured. Inane, but she was tired of tiptoeing around the forced quiet. The plush bed was starting to feel like a coffin under her, the room a funeral parlor.

Nadice scrutinized her, as if searching for ulterior motives. "I guess. Depends on what they let us listen to."

"Who do you like?"

Nadice gave a halfhearted shrug with one shoulder. "F8's all right." Everybody liked F8. It was the most noncommittal response she could give. "How about you?"

"Zenocide. Evilution."

"Never heard of them."

"Japanese screw."

Nadice regarded her with unabashed skepticism.

"Tokyo punk that's been slowed way down," Marta explained. "It was popular a few years ago, for almost a month."

"Sounds harsh." Nadice sat up on her bed.

Marta shrugged. "No different from wrap or spunk."

Nadice gave Marta a blank look. "I don't listen to a lot of music," she confessed.

"Not your thing?"

Nadice's smile was more of a wince. "I guess not. My grandmother wasn't into it. So neither was I."

"She didn't approve?"

"No. I mean, we sang in church and all, like everyone else. But when we were at home she liked things quiet while she painted, and that was nice. I got used to not having very many distractions."

"Your grandmother raised you?"

"I was adopted—one of those frozen fetuses that Right to Light women decided they'd give birth to so we wouldn't get cloned."

Marta steered the conversation toward safer ground. "What kind of stuff did she paint?"

"People, mostly. Landscapes. She worked with electrostatic gel and LEBs, light-emitting bacteria. After they were dried and polished, she sold them on consignment in a couple of bazaar shops."

"Was she any good?"

"Yeah. I used to watch her when she wasn't looking and wish she'd paint me, put me in one of her scapes. You know, take me from this world and put me in another world."

"Why?"

"Because that way she could make me more beautiful. I could live in a nice house with beautiful gardens forever."

And without worries. "Like philm," Marta said.

"Except I'd never get old or sick, and I wouldn't want to change." Nadice's gaze slid past her. "I wouldn't want to be someplace else or someone else. I'd be happy with where I was, and who I was."

_______

"What about you?" Nadice said when the sun was a little higher in the tatty denim sky, the glare off the bay brighter. "Why are you here?"

"It's complicated." Marta stared up at the light rippling on the LED-dotted ceiling panels.

"You don't have to tell me if you don't want."

"My older sister," Marta said finally. "Concetta. I'm trying to find out what happened to her."

Nadice shifted on the bed beside her, a dim blur along the chalk-white rim of Marta's vision. "She disappeared?"

"Three months ago. Just like that. No message, no nothing."

The shadow scooted closer. "I'm sorry." Marta adjusted her shoulders on the creased bedspread. "We don't know why she vanished. If it was something we did. Something she wanted to do. Or..."

Or what? That was the hardest part.

"That must be terrible," Nadice said. "Not knowing, I mean."

"Yes." Marta stiffened under the fingers that brushed her arm. But the touch was brief, as tentative as it was comforting.

"Do you think she joined?" Nadice said.

"No." Marta blinked, and the light on the ceiling blurred and smeared.

"Then how come you're here?"

Marta closed her eyes and tried to sink into pinched blackness. But even the dark hurt to look at.

"Maybe you're not just looking for your sister," Nadice said. The words trembled, like water in a glass. "What if you're also trying to find yourself?"

_______

A TV came for them late in the afternoon.

"Everything all right in here?" she asked, poking her head into the room. Blinding sunlight skipped off the flat surface of the bay, washing out the digital lint clinging to her head and arms.

"Why wouldn't it be?" Nadice said.

The TV's gaze flitted anxiously between them. "Just wondering."

"What's up?" Marta asked. The TV wasn't just checking up on them out of goodwill. Her lead-in was clumsy, a pretense.

"There's a meditation session at four-thirty for all the new mothers. We'd like you to attend."

"What kind of meditation?" Nadice said.

"Think of it as an orientation." The TV smiled sweetly. "It's to help you settle in and answer any questions you might have."

Time to get indoctrinated. It was bound to happen. Sanctuary always came with a price.

_______

The meditation room had once been a penthouse restaurant with a 360-degree view of Monterey Bay and the Santa Cruz Mountains. The windows had been replaced with programmable graphene panes. Some of the panes were clear glass, others were philmed with silk fabric. The floor was bare oak. Except for a table set up at one end of the room as an altar or pulpit, there were no tables or chairs. Tatami mats had been laid on the floor in even rows. The mats were identical, two-foot-by-three-foot rectangles spaced three feet apart.

Two dozen or so women milled around the room. Most clustered in groups of two or three. Roommates sticking together. Huddling against the unexpected. Nadice stayed close to Marta, quiet but welcome comfort.

Whispers circulated around the room in currents as subliminal as the movement of air. Eddies formed and dissipated, little whorls of conversion that tugged her in, then let her go.

Some of the women seemed excited, jubilant. The true believers. Those who had asked to come here or decided to convert after the fact.

Nadice nudged her in the ribs. "Check that out," she whispered, her breath warm and moist against Marta's ear.

Marta turned her attention to the altar. It was decorated with an odd collection of apparently unrelated objects: a brass handbell with a mahogany handle; a white porcelain bowl; a short glass tube, filled with water or some other clear fluid; and a partially empty wine bottle. It didn't make much sense, but the items had been carefully, artfully, placed.

"Ikebana," Marta said.

"What?"

"Japanese flower arrangement. It reminds me of that, but without the flowers. Everything perfectly positioned." Marta had come across the term at the store where she worked before the Get Reel. Runeways specialized in self-help spirituality. The shop carried everything from tarot decks, aromatherapy sticks, and books on the
I
Ching
to chakra-stimulating body art and water-divination kits. "It literally means to 'make flowers become active, or alive.' The idea is that the person arranging the flowers is supposed to give life to them even though they're dead."

"Give life how?"

"By arranging them in a way that they enhance each other and give the illusion of life."

Nadice frowned, leaving a cleft in her forehead. "Why kill something just so you can make it look alive?"

Good question. Marta stared at the altar. Religion was more about death than life. Overcoming death. Being resurrected, born again, or raptured into life everlasting.

Was that why she wanted to find Concetta? Was she afraid to let go, afraid that a part of her would die with no hope of salvation if Concetta died?

When the priest entered the susurration died, like windblown grass falling suddenly, eerily, silent.

"That's Jeremy," Nadice said.

The whisper stirred tremulous eddies. Marta blinked. "Who?"

"The TV I told you about. The one who was super nice. The one who talked to me at the shelter."

He wore a static-philmed robe. The static changed color and intensity as he made his way to the table. From there, he gazed out at them and spread his arms, lifting them high. The ceiling lights doused and the graphene panes opaqued, ebony awash in a blizzard of pure white static.

Stars. That was what the static represented; hundreds of billions of tiny pinpricks of light.

It was as if the windows and the ceiling had vanished... or had never been there at all.

Jeremy lowered his hands. As he did so, acolytes began seating the women in the room, helping them onto the mats.

Nadice squeezed Marta's hand—giving or receiving reassurance, Marta couldn't tell—then lowered herself to the mat she was standing on. Marta sank to her knees and sat back on her heels, relieved to be off her feet.

"The light of the universe," Jeremy said when the congregation stilled. He picked up the brass bell and raised it, like a chalice. "In the beginning, there was the Singularity," he intoned.

"One light," the acolytes replied in unison.

He rang the bell... a single pure note that reverberated for a long time before falling silent. "The mind of the universe fills our minds."

"One mind," came the response.

Jeremy laid the bell gently, soundlessly on the table. He picked up the glass tube. Placing a thumb over one end, he uncapped the opposite end and held it over the ceramic bowl. "The heart of the universe fills our heart."

"One heart."

Jeremy lifted his thumb, allowing a drop to fall into the bowl. There was a gentle plop. Concentric waves rippled across the walls. The room seemed to vibrate. Marta's head roiled.

Jeremy set the glass tube on the bowl, fitting it into notches on the rim, then lifted the wine bottle to his lips. "The breath of the universe fills our lungs."

"One breath."

Instead of sipping from the bottle, he blew into it, coaxing forth an eerie, haunting note.

"The blood of the universe flows in our veins," he said.

"One blood."

This time he tipped the bottle. The blood-red wine touched his lips, but he set the bottle down without drinking.

"The life of the universe flows in our lives." His voice was a sonorous singsong.

"One life," came the chorus.

Jeremy spread his arms wide, as if to embrace them all. An ethereal keening rose within the room.

Marta glanced around. The acolytes had closed their eyes and bowed their heads, touching them to the mats. Everyone else, except for the converts who were copying the acolytes, were doing what she was—watching.

Nadice, looking like a bound prisoner on her knees, mouthed something under her breath.
This is crazy.

Marta nodded, all she could manage. She too felt caught—trapped by the sound. Eventually the keening would absorb her, swallow her whole, and she would lose herself in its dying echo.