Heaven is a Place on Earth (13 page)

“What?”

“
Is it far to your customer's premises? Is that where we're going?”

She looked at him as if he was stupid. “We're going to see their Deputy Engineer. We'd be off to see the Chief Engineer, only he lives in Ballarat and I don't fancy travelling two thousand kilometres. Luckily the Deputy is just the kind of nerd we need and she lives in Stanthorpe. That's just two hundred and fifty K away. We can be there in four hours. I ordered a taxi.”

Rafe shook his head, despairing at his own idiocy. Of course there was no reason why this company Ginny knew would have any physical premises anywhere, let alone in Brisbane, or that any of its employees would be anywhere except in their tanks at home during working hours, or that any of them would happen to live in the same State. They were lucky to find someone so close. He just hadn't made the adjustment yet to this fugitive life of doing everything in physical reality. It was like living in the twentieth century or something, except worse, because at least then they had trains and buses and private cars. Once you were outside the civilised world of unlatched VR and tanks, you might as well be living in the outback without a personal flyer. A smile slowly spread across his face. Now why didn't he think of that sooner?

-oOo-

They took the cab to the Transit Centre and rode the lift to the roof. There they found a row of quadcopters waiting for customers. Rafe tried to ignore the hire rates appearing in his aug as he led Ginny over to a two-seater and flipped open the canopy. Becky was going to kill him – figuratively, he hoped – but that was tomorrow's problem. He might be out of a job, but at least he'd be alive. With any luck.

“
Can you fly one of these?” Ginny asked, hesitating.

“
They fly themselves. Get in. I've always wanted to try one.”

The virtual display popped up as he sat down. It had maps and indicators of various kinds, and a big red button labelled 'Start Engines'. Beneath the label was the small print about how starting up the machine was deemed acceptance of the terms and conditions and charges. He hit the button and saw a large sum of money disappear from his company expense account.

Ginny was in her seat and scrabbling for her safety harness. “For God's sake don't let it take off before I'm strapped in.”

The canopy dropped into place, cutting out much of the rising whine of the four rotors. He told the machine where they were going and a gratifying 'destination accepted' sign came up. “Here we go,” he said, raising his voice as the engine and rotor noise grew louder. He felt the whole machine thrumming with power. The four rotors, each on a gantry extending from the corners of the cockpit, lifted from the ground into their flight configuration and the machine began to tremble as if it was as excited as Rafe and as keen to be airborne. And then, as smoothly as the lift they just been in, the quadcopter surged into the air. Ginny clutched the arms of her seat with her eyes screwed shut, but Rafe felt the exhilaration of soaring into the air above the rooftops of Brisbane.

The little flyer kept going up until Rafe could see the ocean out to the west and the hills to the east. The altimeter read two thousand metres dead when the fans tipped and they began to creep forward, heading south, rapidly picking up speed. There wasn't another aircraft in the whole sky and, looking up, Rafe lost all sense of motion, all sense of direction. He floated in the depths of the blue sky like a disembodied spirit. The whine and tremble of the quadcopter only serving to shake him loose of the planet below.

“
Now I know why they don't put windows in airplanes,” Ginny said, breaking the spell. She still hung onto the seat arms despite the smoothness of the ride, but at least now she was looking around.

“
Isn't it great?” Rafe asked, partly to tease her and partly because it was how he felt. He glanced at the instruments. Their groundspeed was already close to a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour and they were racing over the outer suburbs of the sprawling city below. “We'll be there in no time.”

Ginny said nothing, just stared out at the ground below as if she expected it to rush up and slap her. Rafe amused himself by poking around at the quadcopter's controls, to see what he might be able to make it do. After a while Ginny lay back in her seat and closed her eyes again.

“No good deed goes unpunished, I suppose,” she said.

“
Meaning what?”

“
Meaning if I hadn't done that little favour for a friend, I wouldn't be dangling in mid-air waiting for a rotor to fail.”

Rafe wasn't buying it. “You knew what you were doing was probably illegal. And he wasn't just a friend. You fancied him and you willingly got yourself into this. So don't sit there trying to convince me what a martyr you are.”

For a moment, she glared at him, then looked away. “Shit, I'm turning into my mother.”

“
Women have a habit of doing that.”

“
Yeah? Well not me. I always thought I'd turn into my dad. My mum's a complete drama queen. Everything's about her. Everyone around her gets sucked into her ongoing production of the Great Cheryl Galton Show. The fact is, she needs constant attention. If there wasn't someone there to feed her need she'd just vanish in a puff of smoke. That's why she glommed onto my dad. He's the exact opposite. If he wasn't attending to the Queen twenty-four seven, he wouldn't know what to do with himself. He wouldn't know who he was any more.”

Rafe was only mildly interested, still exploring the flyer's user manual. “But you identified with your dad?”

“When I was little. I thought he was the sane and sensible one. I used to feel sorry for him that my mum made his life such a misery. I used to try to help him out. We had, like, a little conspiracy going. The oppressed majority. It wasn't until I'd dated a handful of needy, grasping, life-sucking blokes that I realised being like my dad wasn't what I wanted.”

She fell silent for a moment, gazing out at the fields and towns sliding past below them. Rafe applied himself to the instruction book but Ginny started speaking again. “I thought I'd finally broken the cycle with Cal. I thought I might have found a grown up relationship at last, one that didn't involve neurotic grasping or giving. Turns out the bastard was playing me all along.” She gave a bitter laugh. “Same game, really. He took, I gave.”

Rafe, hearing the misery in her voice, realised he'd have to comfort her or distract her. He chose the latter. “See that range of mountains ahead?” You could hardly miss the line of forest-clad hills marching across the horizon from north to south, rising precipitately from the gently rolling farmland over which they were passing. He looked across at her. “I think we – ”

The sight of the wet streaks down her face brought him to a dead stop. She turned her face away.

“I'm sorry,” he said, although he wasn't sure why. He didn't know this woman and he had no idea why she was sitting there, silently weeping. Why had the sight stabbed him with a pang of guilt? “I didn't know you and Cal were, you know, serious.”

She shook her head, still looking away. “It's not that. It wasn't serious. Not really. It's... It's just me. My life. Everything is so screwed.”

“You've been upset ever since you set up this meeting.” At least he'd noticed that.

She sighed. “I worked myself ragged while I was at my parent's place, putting in a bid for some work for a company called WorldEnough.”

“Isn't that the company this guy were going to see works for?”

“
Yep. I asked the development manager if we could talk to his guy and he said he was going to give me the contract. It had been through the review panel and I was streets ahead of the competition, he said. So he didn't want me talking to his tech guys before the winner was announced because, if any of the other bidders got wind of it, they'd be able to say I had unfair access during the evaluation period. He wanted me to wait until after the announcement in a few weeks' time.” Rafe could already see where this was going but he let her finish. “I said I couldn't wait. I had to talk to someone now. Today. He said fine, but it was one or the other. If I talked to the tech, I'd have to withdraw from the bidding process. He wouldn't budge, even though he was urging me to just wait a while. So I insisted and I recorded my official withdrawal right there in his office.”

“
Jeez, this is the job you were telling me about that would save you from going broke, isn't it? Don't you know any other companies?”

“
WorldEnough is the biggest and the best. They're the only ones I'd trust.” She flopped back in her seat and closed her eyes. “God, I'm stupid!”

Rafe took her hand and leaned closer. “No you're not. It was a big sacrifice, but there was nothing else you could do. If we don't sort this out, we're dead. I'm almost certainly going to lose my job too over this, as soon as my editor sees the expenses claim. But we have to see this through, Ginny. There's nothing else we can do.”

He thought maybe he'd helped her get it in perspective. Yes, her professional life had taken a bad knock, but that was better than being dead or a fugitive. She looked at him, wide eyes brimming with tears and then her face crumpled. She grabbed at him, clumsily pulling him into a hug, and wailed into his shoulder, “And my Dad's losing his job. And he's sixty.”

Stanthorpe was a sprawling town of the sort that might once have been called a regional centre, in a time when regions mattered. Just eighty years ago it had been a sleepy town of two thousand souls making a marginal living from tourism and the surrounding fruit farms and vineyards. When the climate-driven mass migrations had begun, a few decades later, the town had become a favourite spot for Asian refugees to settle. There had been a brief but glorious boom time for the fast-expanding settlement that had stopped when the Immigration Control Act had slammed the country's doors. By then, Australia's population had doubled and Stanthorpe's population levelled off at around forty thousand.

The quadcopter found itself a landing spot on top of what had once been a multi-storey car park – now converted to housing units. Rafe and Ginny left their flyer ticking and cooling in the weak Autumn sunshine and took the stairs down to the ground. They were latched to the town's systems, following directions on foot to the home of Kelly Anh, Ginny's contact.

It was cold, ten degrees cooler than Brisbane, and neither of them was dressed for it. Partly to distract himself from the weather, Rafe did his best to keep up some kind of conversation, but Ginny had fallen into silence not long after her mid-air outburst. At the risk of starting the tears again, he said, “Look, I'm sorry about your father. What does your mother do? Can they live off one salary?”

Ginny snorted. “Mum's an artist.” She struck a pose as she said it that implied melodrama, intensity and self-obsession. “She had an exhibition once, before I was born. Since then the 'establishment' has worked hard to ensure that she never sold another piece. That's her story anyway. Sometimes it's just that Australians are so narrow minded and can't appreciate her work.” She rolled her eyes. “She has the kind of talent that can only thrive on a global stage, you see. We're all too parochial for her.”

“Is her stuff any good?”

“
I don't know. She smashed half of it and locked the rest up in the garage in a big tantrum when I was little. Her 'breakdown', Dad calls it but, trust me, I was there; it was just a big tanty. Even as a kid I could see she had me well outclassed in that area. She hasn't made a thing since, but she sneaks down to the garage now and then to brood.” Ginny herself brooded in silence for a moment. “Of course, even at the time of her famous exhibition, the days of people making art out of real stuff were long gone. She just never seemed to see that no-one wanted it any more. They wanted things to decorate their virtual worlds and brighten up their aug. Have you ever seen a piece of physical art?”

“
Just mouldy old statues in parks and such – if you turn off your aug you can still find them.”

“
Even the Mona Lisa isn't real any more.” From her tone, Rafe guessed Ginny was disputing with her crazy mother rather than with him. “They stuck it in a vault sixty years ago. I've heard they don't even remember where they put it. Last time I was in the Louvre, I went to see it. You can pick it up, examine it, magnify it, get tons of commentary and analysis. Hell, you can lick the bugger if you like. What's the point of physical art when you've got access like that from the comfort of your own tank?”

“
This is it.”

“
What?”

“
We're here. Kelly Ahn's place.”

Rafe turned down his aug to minimum and looked around. They were in a street that looked as run down and decayed as any other. The delivery truck traffic was light. There were single storey houses lining the road in both directions but the building they had stopped outside was a huge, blocky, brick-built edifice with an imposing arched doorway. An old church, he guessed, built at the turn of the century by one of those well-heeled protestant splinter religions that had flourished back then. A flock of huge black birds wheeled overhead, featureless silhouettes against the blue sky. Short-necked and long-tailed they flapped their giant wings lazily, keening like flying reptiles from a distant epoch. He looked back at the street without bothering to query what the birds were. There was no-one in sight so he stepped up to the door and pressed the buzzer.

It took a long time but a woman eventually appeared. Kelly Ahn was dishevelled and flustered. Her overall needed cleaning and her black hair could have been a nest for the giant birds outside. Ginny stepped up and introduced herself.

“
Yeah, yeah, yeah,” the engineer said, waving aside Ginny's half-finished explanation. “Derek said you'd be coming. I didn't expect you'd turn up in your meat. Come in, come in.”

Ahn's manner was brusque and she spoke fast in Mandarin Chinese. It took Rafe's implants a moment to cut in with the translation but his software soon caught up, suppressing her real voice and substituting a very good imitation. She led them through an entry hall into the main body of her home – a vast space of bare brick walls, arched windows and, at one end, a ten-metre tall crucifix behind a stone altar. Looking up, he realised there was a clear ceiling not far above him, suspended on fine wires from the vaulted roof high above.

Ahn must have seen him looking. “Gotta have a ceiling in a place like this or you'd freeze to death in the winter,” she said.

“
Are you religious?” he asked, wondering why anyone would want to live in a place like that at any time of the year.

“
Sure! I worship the Holy Dollar.” She laughed as if she'd made a great joke. “Come on. We'll go to my lounge room and talk.” She led them past an area full of comms racks and servers, and then another full of benches piled with electronics junk. They passed a carpeted section in which two small children were being tended by nannybots. The kids stopped screeching briefly and stared warily at the strangers as they moved past.

“
OK, what's this all about?” Ahn asked as they reached another carpeted area with chairs and sofas. She waved them at the seating and called to a dombot to fetch them coffees and cakes. The little machine scurried off and Ahn took a seat. From Rafe's perspective, she was sitting right below the giant crucifix, the ancient symbol looming above her like a warning.

Ginny started thanking the woman for her help and her hospitality but Rafe didn't want to waste time. He spoke across his companion. “We've got some documents we'd like you to look at.”

Ahn studied him for a moment, probably reading his credentials, then turned to Ginny. “Derek never said anything about a reporter.”

“
Rafe's a friend of mine” Ginny said. “He's helping me out. These documents are from another friend. One who's gone missing. We think they may have something to do with the design of the Parliament worldlet.”

Again, the engineer said nothing. Finally, she nodded. “OK, upload them and I'll take a look.”

“We can't do that,” said Rafe and took the sheaf of papers out of his bag. “That's why we had to come in person.”

“
First meat, now tree pulp,” said Ahn. She got up and walked over to Rafe, took the documents, and sat down again, flicking through them. “Is any of this legal?”

Ginny opened her mouth to speak but again, Rafe cut her off. “We don't know. We'd like your opinion on the software designs. We need to know what they're for.”

Ahn looked at him and then back at the documents. “Come back in an hour.”

Ginny leaned forward, ready to stand up. “No,” said Rafe. “We can't let those documents out of our sight. You can't copy them or scan them to QNet. It wouldn't be safe to do that.”

Ahn stood up and handed the sheaf back to Rafe. “I think it's time you left.”

Rafe made no move to take the documents back. “Kelly, you already know too much. There are people who would kill you if they found out you'd seen those pages. And don't think of calling the police. You don't want to be a suspect in a terrorist investigation. What would your kids do while you were being held without trial for three months?”

The engineer looked at Ginny. “Does Derek know why you're here? Does he have any clue what you're into?”

Ginny shook her head, looking ashamed. She glanced back at the two children, perhaps realising for the first time that she had put the whole family in danger. “I'm sorry. There was no-one else we could turn to. We're not criminals. We're not terrorists. We just got into this by accident. If you could just look at the papers and tell us what they mean, we might be able to find a way out of this without getting killed, or arrested. Please help us.”

Without a word, Ahn walked over to a table, slapped the sheaf of documents down and leaned over it, lips pursed. “OK,” she said. “OK. I'll take a look. A quick look. Then you two get out of here and fuck off back to wherever you came from. Deal?”

“
Deal,” said Rafe. “Just one more thing, though.” He got up and joined her at the table. He took the metal cylinder and the black box out of his pockets and put them carefully down beside the documents. “We need to know what these two gizmos do as well.”