This Shared Dream (17 page)

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She hoped she’d returned before Jill got back from work.

Emerging from the viaduct, wearing new gardening galoshes to trudge through the stream, she bushwhacked through the enjungled backyard, passing her long-ago grotto refuge, and gained the mowed lawn, hidden from the street by vast growths of roses, well-seeded perennials, and tall, fragrant peonies.

She’d made friends with Manfred before leaving that morning. The big dog loped toward Bette. Bette put down her heavy shopping bags and cooed at her, scratched behind her ears while Manfred wagged her tail.

Bette climbed the secret stairway, depositing her booty in her little bedroom.

She’d quickly bought a lot of up-to-date, anonymous-looking, moderately expensive mix and match skirts, slacks, blouses, a few dresses, a business jacket, underwear, hiking boots, high heels, running shoes, and casual shoes, which she placed in the little closet, mixed in with the older clothes. She now had a D.C. driver’s license and a passport in her purse. On Fourteenth Street, she’d purchased a few knives, a throwing star, and ammo for her gun.

And now, dessert.

She opened her tech purchase—a marvelous Q module, and all that went with it—a Q-phone, a larger screen, and a plethora of programs. She’d acted like a complete idiot in the store, which regarding this version of Q, she was, and the salesman had worked with her for two hours, selling the capabilities and applications, showing her how it worked.

Bette sat on her little bed, cross-legged, thrilled. Even a bit teary.

This was not the culmination of what Hadntz, she, and Sam had worked on for years. She knew that all war had not yet vanished. But this was a huge step forward. Everyone had these. Well, almost everyone she had seen today, whipping them out to take calls or to get information. She wondered how other places in the world fared.

She went into her radio room and turned on the living room microphone, wearing headphones. As Bette played with her Q, she heard the front door open. Jill said, “Manfred! Down!”

The microphones worked. She turned them off; she had no desire to eavesdrop on her family, except to hear the magic of their voices.

She returned to her little bed, leaned against a pile of pillows, and began exploring the capabilities of her Q, quickly reaching a place where she could eavesdrop on local Q conversations, before then turning to other matters. In a few hours, she uncovered the problem: She was here because one imperfect Device, given to Sam by a German named Perler, in World Prime, was here, somewhere in Georgetown. It was dangerous; near-functional because it fed upon Q’s advances and updated itself sporadically, imperfectly, yet, over the decades, with increasing strength. She was able to triangulate to some extent, but these tools were not powerful enough to locate the imperfect Device precisely. And, for the same reason, whoever was in possession of the Device could not find the later evolutions of the Device, the H-5, the H- … oh, she didn’t really know the number of evolutions any longer, because there had been so many that it had become a smooth continuum, like the growth of a child to an adult. Yet, despite the power of Q, this imperfect, early incarnation held disruptive power, which, combined with, say, the Game Board, would become much more powerful.

She had to find it.

Jill

A PHONE CALL

May 7

T
HAT EVENING
, Jill indeed missed Whens, but she was also blessedly alone—which was, in her opinion, much different than loneliness. Aloneness had charged potential. She could think.

After talking with Elmore about Whens’ aversion to his new girlfriend—or at least, newly revealed, as Jill suspected that she was not exactly new—Jill felt better. Somewhat surprisingly, to herself at least, she viewed Tracy as a positive development, if only for her own selfish reasons. An Elmore caught up in a new relationship was an Elmore with less time to make her life more difficult than it had to be regarding Whens.

Home after a long day in the chilly, air-conditioned Bank, she turned on the radio and unpacked the salad she’d picked up on the way home. She’d thrown open all the windows, admitting the ambrosia of spring air, laden as it was with creek dampness, the fragrance of hidden roses, even the smell of wet asphalt.

Her colleagues had welcomed her back coolly, but she didn’t care. They were probably jealous of all her time off. She’d dealt with paperwork having to do with a loan to Kenya, met with her long-suffering assistants, and treated them to lunch.

Otherwise, it was as if she’d never left, although she was quite pleased with her hefty raise. The only bothersome part of work was the Ohio guy, Bill, who apparently believed he was the living incarnation of some Norse god. Even though, supposedly, his family had lived in the Midwest for generations. Jill gathered that he was deeply aggrieved about many things, which he managed to convey through intimate asides that seemed calculated to elicit a response from her. She always left his vicinity as soon as possible and took care not to put herself in situations that included him. She didn’t like the guy at all, case closed—except that, unfortunately, he seemed to fancy her. She wasn’t at the stage of filing a complaint, but if his behavior continued, she might.

Oh, well. Much to do.

She cleared a place at the kitchen table, dished out the salad she’d picked up, poured a glass of pinot grigio, and sat down with her notebook. As she ate, she jotted down her forthcoming tasks and attendant concerns.

Her main job, right now, was to gather information for an upcoming meeting regarding the Bank’s international preschool buildings, called Children’s Houses. She’d fostered the project for many years. These modular buildings, in distribution at last after years of waiting, had a backload of orders and loan applications. They were autotelic—self-teaching, projecting holographic children that demonstrated the use of materials. Refinements would inevitably continue, because the process was open source and on Q, and could be vetted and edited by thousands of qualified engineers and educators.

Now—this was the exciting part. She lifted her pencil, breathed in the rain-fresh air, and relished the moment.

Now she could finally devote more time to an ongoing, parallel school project, Q-Schools. During the past five years, soliciting input from worldwide experts in education, architecture, microeconomics, molecular engineering, and epidemiology, she had kept tabs on the development of a prototype school pod, a tough little embryo that could grow in almost any terrain. Each school was self-healing and imbued with Q. She was still pondering all kinds of ramifications.

Q-Schools were not like Children’s Houses.

Local municipalities had to request Children’s Houses, oversee construction, and comply with local code requirements. Communities requesting Children’s Houses were in agreement about the need for more schools, but did not have the means to finance them. The Bank’s role, under several mandates, including the promotion of gender equality and economic empowerment in areas of need, was to provide financing for targeted projects such as these schools. Jill’s long-term dream was that a higher level of worldwide education might empower those who might be able to, eventually, be clearheaded about war.

But perhaps deeper changes had to take place in humans before war could be eliminated. Neurobiological changes. That was what Megan claimed, that was her true work: figuring out what those changes might be, and how to nudge them along biochemically.

“Yes,” Brian had said, just a few days ago, in his smart-alecky way, holding up her vitamins. “This pill for weight loss. This little yellow one—memory. And this big clear one, folks—this pill is for world peace and international cooperation on all good things.” Megan had fumed out of the room.

“And what do you think about this Q-School plan, Manfred?” she asked. “Yes?”

Manfred beat her tail against the floor.

“Good girl.”

Q-Schools would grow from nanotech seeds. They would be much, much cheaper than even Children’s Houses.

Q-Schools would, of course, be linked to Q. Q would assess need and place the schools, based on statistics and studies of gender inequality, general poverty, availability of education, and the likelihood that the people in the area of need would probably not even know of the existence of the prefab Children’s Houses, much less have the municipal organization to request them. Most rural, poor communities would welcome such schools. Shoot, even affluent communities would want them, but they weren’t Jill’s concern.

Forgetting her salad, Jill jotted down means of informing the populace about Q-Schools—dropping classbooks, even old-fashioned flyers, ways to prepare communities. Optimal time frames. Material for those who could read, recordings and videos for those who could not. Often, small children had little to do, and families conscripted older children, who might otherwise be contributing to the family income, to care for them. Q-Schools were naturally attractive. Once parents knew they were safe, they would allow their children to use them, obviating the need for parental or older-child supervision. Kind of like day care, but with education thrown in. That might be a good angle—freeing up those older children for income production—although, of course, they too, needed to be in school.… At any rate, Q’s baseline altruistic algorithms would optimize each school according to local needs. The agricultural or other work in which their parents were engaged would be the focus of pedagogic materials. If their local environment was embedded in the environment, children learned to read and write easily. Their crops and their biological processes, the local flora and fauna, were real, concrete, and then they were pictures, represented by words holding strong meaning to those children. Children could write stories about what was actually happening around them. Once they realized how reading and writing empowered them, there was no turning back. Jill had seen this in her mother’s school.

Jill was certainly aware that some communities and cultures would not welcome Q-Schools, even though their curriculum was value-free. All preschoolers had the same urge to learn, to master their physical environment. Learning how to count, how to manipulate objects comparatively, even mastering putting one’s thoughts in writing, were not cultural acts—except that some cultures valued such acts, and some denied them to certain members.

Jill, and many other people, firmly believed that denial of the basic tools of reading and writing was a form of child abuse. Censorship, as well as denying literacy, was one of the main tools of repressive regimes. The list of those who had denied literacy to certain people was long, and included the Catholic Church during the Spanish Inquisition; Southern states that had prohibited literacy for slaves by law; fundamentalist religious groups, equally distributed among Jewish, Christian, and Islamic sects; and every other society that limited literacy for one reason or another.

A recent United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child had produced a document that recognized the child’s right to an education. Primary education was to be, ideally, compulsory and freely available to all.

This was impossible in many locations. But the Q-Schools would give those places, those children, the opportunity to go to school and become active agents in the international community.

A nanotech school set down by Q in a place in which girls and women might be persecuted for literacy could be problematic—and dangerous—for the girls and women in that community who insisted on attending them. Perhaps, thought Jill, the men in control in such places, and the women who abetted them, needed education just as much as the girls and women disbarred from participating in society. She leaned back and laughed.
A quick shot of tolerance, please! Really, Jill, you’re too much.
Why did she, much less the huge group of people around the world, think they had the right to foist education on anyone?

The history of education was fraught with such battles. Besides, it wasn’t foisting. Attendance wasn’t mandatory.

At any rate, such schools would fall under a UN mandate. There were fuzzy plans in the works to send Peacekeepers to areas denying their children access to the schools. They would safeguard the rights of those children, much as Johnson had sent the National Guard to Mississippi in Jill’s first, lost timestream to safeguard the right of black children to attend school.

She had not developed the seed plan, only sparked it, though over the years she had helped shape development and facilitated contact between interested parties. The seed was the result of international cooperation, and had been the subject of heated discussion in many United Nations committees. Public opinion deemed the schools too controversial to use, presently.

She had a copy of present, constantly updated plans. Though the Q-Schools were controversial, she had invited a speaker to her forthcoming meeting just to put the idea into people’s minds.

“This Q-School, Manfred? Here in my notebook? It’s just a seed. Just a gleam in the eye of a planning committee.” She closed her notebook, and pushed it aside.

Next, she had to find her father’s notebooks in the attic and start reading them. She’d tried, soon after he left, but it was too painful, and she had put them aside. It was another way of avoiding the past, she realized now. Her therapist likened it to war veterans refusing to talk about their war experiences, or even, sometimes, acknowledge them. In the worst cases, those memories could erupt suddenly, landing the victim precisely where she’d landed.

The notebooks might hold some clues about what had happened. Maybe not. But Sam had told her to read them, when she saw him in the hospital. Had she seen him in the hospital?

Yes. She had. She laughed. The therapist thought she should tell Megan and Brian this gigantic thing she’d done, yet Brian had gone around the bend on just hearing she’d seen Mom and Dad.

She finished her glass of wine, poured another, and relished the cool condensation beneath her fingers as she sipped. She glanced at the closed notebook, full of important tasks.