The Forever Watch (11 page)

To watch through that lone window in his private space, I have to stay on my knees. There is not enough room to stand. For a giant such as Barrens, it must feel like a cage, terribly constricting. But he never seems to mind, and when we spend the night together, he prefers the confines of this cell to my spacious quarters. It is cozy here, I guess.

While he sleeps, I watch the lights of the city for a while, ghostly through the mist, blurred, bright streaks of supply trucks and a few private cars along the aerial bridges flying from tall tower to tall tower. The granaries and warehouses next to the dark, hulking cubes of the vertical farms are slender towers of gossamer webs climbing up to the top of the dome, birdlike, the wings around the globular storage eggs actually part of the transport system that delivers the raw produce to the factories in the underlevels, and to the markets across the Habitat. Red and yellow spotlights stretch out into the darkness, proximity indicators to warn off the ever-present Enforcers that flit across the city skies in their glowing flight rigs, watching for who knew what, always watching. I see a handful of them shoot to the horizon, burning fireflies plunging into the dark mouth of the distant air-lock gate that leads to the far sections of the Habitat. The larger, dragonfly-like ornithopter rigs of the police patrols, slower, less agile, try to follow. It starts to rain again.

“Wonder where they're going in such a hurry?”

Barrens stirs and turns onto his belly, murmurs something about a fire. He winces and twitches and bares his teeth.

Under his threadbare blankets, it is warm enough for me, curled up against him, and I suppose that it is not the worst way for my first day of “detective work” to end. But I feel a little guilty being content. How many other Apollos are out there, wondering why someone important to them vanished?

I think of what it would be like if I lost Barrens now, never knowing for sure what happened to him. I grab hold of a tree-trunk arm and hang on, suddenly afraid, and sleep is a long time coming.

It's always stories. A friend of a friend. Third-hand mention of the people who are “disappeared” by ISec. But I know it happens. I know the facilities exist; I've seen the power requirements for them. Much more than Mincemeat, I am afraid of those faceless figures in the gray coats.

7

The first downpour marks the fade of summer into fall. Weather protocols modify the lighting, heating, and humidifying procedures through the Habitat sections. It rains every evening, a product of water vapor collected at the condensers at the top of the Dome, and augmented with the condensate from the ponds, streams, lakes, and micro-oceans of the fisheries and biomes. It helps keep the air flowing through large spaces of the Dome, as well as washing the surfaces of the buildings free of the accumulated dust and salts. The luminosity of the sky is reduced during the shortened daylight hours, and to compensate, “interior” lighting is increased.

At City Planning, everything is constantly changing, yet nothing changes. Hennessy still pokes fun at me and tries to bribe me with food. Stephen Wong, trainee, still confuses form F-33A with F-33E and makes up for such occasional mistakes with youthful enthusiasm. Julia still complains to me about how lazy Nestor is in documenting the project proposal they have been working on forever. Charles and Antonia continue their on-again, off-again almost-relationship. Lita, Erica, and Manuel still drink too much on the weekends and come in red-eyed and hungover on Mondays. Hester Merced, our tier supervisor, still looms over the whole department with her powers of approving or disapproving. It is all forgettably ordinary, the minor disagreements and fights. There are always more meetings about equilibrium and efficiency and proposals and different cliques trying to one-up each other.

Though it has won approval, the new procedure for water treatment is still winding its way through the bureaucracy. Resources from elsewhere have to be freed up for it. Schedules need to be designed. Marcus is in Water Management and won't have any say in it until it is time for implementation, but already he spends at least an hour a week going through the procedure and looking for possible conflicts that might arise from parallel processes in the system that also deal with the same variables.

My job is made up of these small details, finding them, analyzing them, managing them.

That was almost my whole world before Breeding Duty punched me loose from the Hana-shaped hole I fit into.

When we are together, Barrens is as sweet to me as he can be. I guess we will always draw odd looks when we are out together, but I've stopped caring.

My officemates still don't understand. Except for Hennessy, who gives me these knowing grins and asks me if my man is as savage in bed as he looks. The rest look at me with disbelief when their eyes catch the static 2-D image of his face on my desk, snarling his best, fiercest smile.

Beyond work, there is the quest for Mincemeat.

My distributed program spreads and grows. It accumulates probable and improbable matches, and Barrens and I check through them, one by one. He is quickly picking up how to create subgroups in the swarm and specialize them to search for other possibilities, other signs of data manipulation. He finds the data-mining swarm fascinating and calls it Hunter, talks to it as he puts in his own little coding tweaks. Both of us are still required to put in our normal levels of performance at our respective jobs.

We interview others. We find little we did not already know. A grind of weeks passing with little progress. A few moments of tension when we find others on the Web, collectors of hideous things, who sell us Mincemeat memories of a few who have come across the death scenes and are willing to find more for us. They change their access regularly and are nearly as hard to find as we are, on the Web. They promise us more, if we have the money. Creepy people who like to experience real horror for fun, with names like Ms. Smoke or Mr. Paper.

They sell us a handful of real memories, too unbearably vivid and bloody to be faked. But the meta-details embedded in the data are confusing and impossible, spanning too much time. All I can do is enter the new parameters into the targeting for Hunter and see how it refines the search.

Barrens can tell that I need a break from this. He tells me not to be impatient, reminds me that Callahan spent years to accumulate what he had. It is not as if Barrens expected Mincemeat to be found in the confines of a two-hour movie.

His birthday approaches, and we decide on a picnic.

Still, the urge is consuming. I need to be doing something important, something larger than myself. I try to fine-tune my data-miner during every free moment. The midnight before our date, Barrens stares at me tapping away at the desk terminal in my miniature office at the apartment. He picks me up out of the chair, ignoring my protests, and carries me on his shoulder.

“I want my present, I do. Drop that tablet and close off your developer kit already.”

“What if I don't?”

“You'll get a spanking, you will.” He gets a little shriek out of me when he claps his hand against my butt.

“I give, I give!”

And I do. I give quite a lot.

I can't quite help myself though. When he falls asleep, I go back to my terminal and tablet and fiddle with the code some more. I fall asleep there.

In the morning, Barrens groans when I insist that we do an update/download while we are out. “Fine! But you're not analyzing nothing until
after
my birthday.”

We pack up the food and he tries to keep me talking about other things. Even on the train, though, I end up talking about my program with him, in our heads, over Implant-to-Implant messaging. I would prefer a mind-to-mind link, but Barrens doesn't have any
reading
at all, and my talents aren't enough to sustain a telepathic connection with one who has none. We keep it up all the way to the Forest biome.

It is a five-kilometer hike through wooded hills to the picnic area. Each biome is only a square kilometer; the trail I insist on twists and turns along the hills. He suggests that we take the bus to the other biome entrance, right next to the barbecues and the benches and cabins, but I feel ambitious. I want to make this worth it for him.

In minutes, I am reduced to huffing and gasping, and he smirks just a little bit as he takes my backpack and carries it along with his own.

Looking at the sky, and tall redwoods leaning over us, it seems almost easy to forget that we are on a ship. Pebbles and bugs and things are underfoot. Sometimes, birds call to each other in the distance. Illusory mountains rise at the illusory horizon, tall, imposing peaks copied from the Rockies. The air smells alive, much more so than outside in the Habitat. I can tell Barrens loves it; it is his first time in one of the preserves.

He keeps looking at everything all around us, and every once in a while he crouches low and crumbles a little dirt between his fingers. This is disgustingly easy for him; he could probably jump and swing from tree to tree all the way through and he wouldn't be breathing hard.

Remember, wash hands before eat—

“Hana, doll, you're breathing so hard you can't message me straight anymore. Chill.”

Helps distract from the walk.

“Shit!” I stumble on a tree root, and he manages not to laugh.

When we finally get out of the forest, I fling myself onto the soft, manicured grass of the picnic area, wiggle my toes in my hiking boots, and sigh. I'll be sore later.

Barrens lowers himself next to me and opens up our packs. His eyes are bright. There is a tension to him too. A part of him that probably wants to run amuck through the forest, burn off thousands of calories, find something to chase and hunt and kill and bring back to cook.

“Thanks, Hana. This is … this is nice.”

Hopefully, he never looks up how much today's permit costs or he'll say it's way too much to spend on him.

Ah. A hard-line socket off the path! I hop up and set up the tablet.

He sprawls out on his back and I sit cross-legged next to him. A yellowed leaf drifts down from the tree giving us some shade, and I brush it out of his wiry hair.

An ordinary couple having a picnic in the park on a Sunday morning. Nobody would look at us and think we are engaged in anything of questionable legality. I hope.

While we relax and take in the breeze and the sun, the tablet continues its download from the search program and uploads parameter modifications. The wireless transmitter of the device is burned out; hence the cables snaking through the grass, plugged into a port next to one of the many trails cutting through the biome. Usually, these ports scattered through the ship are used only by the maintenance crews, but anyone may use them.

Once again, I use the tricks Lyn and I figured out together. A program masks my access through the intermediary of a functioning ghost-ident code and a maze of proxies hiding the data accesses across dozens of Analytical Nodes spread out across the ship.

“What were you thinking about?”

“Just remembering when we were kids. I guess it was more fun for me than you.…”

“Ah, it wasn't that bad. I was huge even then. Not too many people messed with me, and the few who did gave me some fun fights.”

I can't imagine bonding with my friends over fists and bruises.

Looking down, I glance at the status of the running applications on the tablet in my hands. This one was reacquired from an architect-in-training for the same price as a decent pair of running shoes. I met with him over blini in Café Moskva, a dainty little store under the shadow of the replica of St. Basil's Cathedral. No names needed, just one of thousands of goods sold over the Web, arranged by anonymous posting on a junk-exchange forum.

As a graduate under Dr. Salvador's APE 133, I could synthesize one directly from raw plastech, but it's hardly worth the hours of intricate psychokinetic circuit-tuning it would take to do so, as I would also have to configure and program it. Repairing this one took fifteen minutes.

I plug updates into the data-miner swarm, watch them propagate through the pieces. My snooping application creeps across the chatter, building associative trees around the absence of individuals taken off-system. The population changes and grows. The swarm downloads new entries into the local database in the tablet.

Right now, I am not supposed to be thinking about a killer in the dark.

I scoot closer to Barrens and bend close. My lips are just short of his, and as he rises to kiss me, I lean back so that his mouth can chase mine.

“Happy birthday, Leon.”

He bites just a bit, just hinting. Desires, emotions. The language of all the different ways he holds my hand. It is a lovely, lazy day. We could be on Earth, under a real sky, listening to the sound of the brook splashing its way through its rocky course.

He looks at me. What does he see in me when he gives me that stare that sparks that curious internal quivering.

“Happy birthday to me, yep.”

In Barrens's eyes, there is a hunger. Is it for me alone? Or would he look this way at any other woman who could love him?

I like to think psychic abilities would not help answer that, though the Behavioralists surely have endless relevant studies about peer-bonding, relationships, and intimacy. If we both had strong
reading
talents, we would never have to wonder; we could commune, sharing thoughts directly, and not through the interface of signals from Implant to Implant. Jazz talked about a relationship she had like that, and how quickly it became awful and boring. The fantasy of completely sharing oneself with another is better kept a fantasy, she told me—the reality is full of endless little annoyances at random thoughts and feelings, plus the rather disturbing sense of losing oneself, of the dissolution of identity.

That deep sadness is still there, buried. I want him to hold me tight, to fill me up and help me forget. I fantasize about his consciousness and mine smashing together, unifying, mutual destruction, completion. I'll settle for the heat of his great big paw on my thigh, the memory of last night, the sweet, lingering ache of the flesh, his toothy, contented grin.