“Even if, uh—” Tally says, and doesn’t go on, but everyone seems to be hanging on the answer to her question.
“Yes, even if the news is bad and likely to cause riots. Hell, we can’t coddle people forever; what will we tell them when their cities blow down, ‘there’s no reason for alarm’? It’s about time we started telling the truth.”
The microphone/evaluator at the little diner where Callare and his people have breakfast puts out little packets of datarodents as fast as it can; Harris Diem reads the transcript with satisfaction, just seconds after each person speaks. The leaks are going to happen the way they are supposed to; he makes a note to dispatch a couple of “feeders”—datarodents that find other datarodents and feed them data, something the CIA uses in disinformation campaigns, and police departments of nations that officially don’t communicate use for tracking criminals between them. These will carry some provocative stuff to the datarodents associated with the
New York Times,
Scuttlebytes,
and that new one,
Sniffings.
It’s time to let Louie Tynan in on it too. Diem places the call.
As he might have expected from an old military officer, Tynan is irritated. “You mean you’ve known all along? Why the hell didn’t you just give Dr. Callare the resources he needed, and warn people about what was coming?”
“Because half of them wouldn’t believe us and the other half would panic. We need a rational response from the public.”
That mollifies Tynan—he has about the same trust for the public that Diem does—and he asks, “So what now? I don’t like lying to Carla, and I’m not good at it. And I don’t think—”
“Whoa, there, partner,” Diem says, grinning. “I’m going to spill the beans to everyone else as well. Not immediately, because what I need is a solid team in place before I sack a bunch of paper pushers—starting with Henry Pauliss, a name I’m sure you’re familiar with—in favor of people who can do the job. But just as soon as possible. Just keep passing on information, and if anyone is nervous about getting caught, tell them you want to keep doing it right up to the moment of your arrest or theirs—which you and I both know won’t happen.”
Tynan grumbles a bit but goes along with it; thank god for a habit of taking orders, Diem thinks, because Louie Tynan could clearly be the stubbornest person on Earth if he wanted to be.
In fact, that very stubbornness is why he’s not on Earth, and that’s an advantage too. “You’re going to like this next part better,” Diem adds. “There’s a major job we want you to do via telepresence at Moonbase, and you have carte blanche to get it done any old way you can.”
“So far, terrific. What’s up?”
“With the loss of Kingman, it occurred to some of our bright boys that it’s going to be a hurricane-prone summer, and they think that we might lose all our other space-launch facilities except air launch. And we are going to need weather satellites in quantity. Moonbase has mining operations and cadcam shops—we want you to automate it so that you can build the satellites for us, up there, and then bring them down to Earth orbit. We’ve got the technical specs pretty much ready to go on it.”
“How much longer do I stay up here?”
“Are you getting anxious for leave?” Diem asks. “I know you’re overdue for relief.”
“That’s not what I asked. How much longer do I stay up here?”
“Hmm. Well, I guess till it’s done. At least till fall.”
“Then you’ve got yourself a deal.”
As Diem hangs up, he thinks to himself, here’s a guy who sees everything going on, but just carries out people’s orders—and he wouldn’t think of leaving the job, not for anything. There’s no accounting for tastes.
As it always does, the phrase “there’s no accounting …” triggers a little buzz in the back of his brain, as if a tiny rattlesnake coiled there. He thinks of the racks of wedges in the basement, thinks of his elaborate rig down there—and pushes the thought away, again, as he has been doing almost every hour lately.
Jesse already knows that Mary Ann Waterhouse is an extremely fucked up woman—in fact that’s just about all he knows about her—but now that she’s over her mating frenzy, or whatever it was, she seems pleasant enough. And the soft tacos filled with rare lamb, raw onion, and tomato are pretty good, so at least he’s getting a meal out of this, even if he kind of suspects the whole experience is going to be too weird to get any of his friends to believe him.
She’s pretty, too, now that she’s changed into something soft and white and flowing, and with the candlelight she doesn’t look quite so old or so weatherbeaten.
After they’ve eaten for a bit, she says, “I guess I owe you some sort of explanation, but to tell you the truth, Jesse, I’m not sure I’ve got one. I’ve been spending a fair amount of time catching the bus over to Puerto Madero and just walking along the beach, crying and screaming when I felt like it.
I really thought I was just going to go out and try to meet other people just like a regular person.”
Jesse feels pretty stupid even as he says it. “I guess your job is really a strain.”
“Yeah.” She chews for a minute, then swallows. “It’s pretty common knowledge, but they keep it off XV. You know about the fuzz?”
“Uh, I’ve heard the word. It’s supposed to be how you keep a private identity, right?”
She nods. “Yep, you’ve had the official story. Want to hear something nasty?”
He spreads his hands in resignation; if all this has been an elaborate routine to get someone to talk to, he’ll have to admit he’s interested—it’s like turning over a rock to look at bugs. And something in him insists on getting the whole story.
Meanwhile, Mary Ann has noticed Jesse’s response and read it very differently. She’d already been shocked at the way she had attacked—there really wasn’t any other word for it—this poor kid. In fact, this whole trip she’s wondered when she’s going to start coming back together again; her first week she bundled up, wore a wig, and went and did some touristy things like the gondola ride to the top of Tacana and the rain forest hike. Then she spent more and more time sitting and reading, and then she began to take the long walks on the beach … now she’s down to attacking boys on the street. She wonders if there’s some kind of bottom you hit in this.
She just wants to make sure that when he leaves he doesn’t hate her.
“The fuzz doesn’t matter much,” she says quietly. “It was just sort of an explanation because I thought I owed you one. We’re as sensitive as you are, but only a small part of what we’re feeling penetrates through the nervous system data interfaces. And it’s not like signal you can amplify … it’s more like fuzziness in a picture—turning the lights up doesn’t help much. So … well, to get the idea across we have to really overdo everything. And sometimes …”
“You hurt each other.”
“Well, and we get to be that way ourselves; small emotions don’t matter because you don’t get paid for them.” She looks down; this still isn’t taking the direction she wanted it to. “Look, this will sound stupid too—lately everything I say that’s not part of a script sounds stupid to me. But I am really tired of hearing myself talk. I would appreciate it a lot if you would tell me something about yourself.”
He makes a face, takes a bite of the taco—she wondered why Señora Herrera had made so many, but clearly Señora Herrera knows more about teenage male appetites than Mary Ann does—and says, “Well, that didn’t sound stupid, it sounded polite. Do you really want to know?”
“Most of the time everyone in the world knows what I’m feeling; what I want to know is what somebody who hasn’t gotten as fucked up as I have feels like. So tell me about yourself, please.”
He shrugs. “It’s going to sound clichéd, because the first thing I feel like saying is that there’s not a lot to tell. And the second thing I feel like saying is that … oh, well, see, I’m down here working at the Tapachula Community College, as a tutor in the pre-engineering curriculum. I’m an engineering student up at U of the Az, but I’m taking this term off. What I do is, I coach local kids who are trying to get ready for engineering school through their science and math classes … only …” His eyes seem to look over her shoulder to somewhere a thousand miles away.
“Only?” she asks, lightly, and part of her notes that there’s something in this scene that Synthi Venture would understand, maybe better than Mary Ann. The boy is certainly handsome—hell, he’s
beautiful
—and candlelight playing over his delicate, troubled face … this wouldn’t make a bad staging in a documentary about a Romantic poet … .
“Only,” he says, finally, “there’s this girl.”
It’s a great story, in Mary Ann’s opinion, and what makes it truly a great story is that this boy is far more sincere than she, or anyone she ever worked with, could be. He really does have a single, burning true love and it’s really the only one he ever expects to have. And he looks so sad … and so beautiful.
Mary Ann prides herself on her intelligence and cynicism, and she’s right about both of them. But one thing she rarely admits to herself is that to really appeal to her audience, Synthi Venture has had to be able to feel the sort of thing they wish they could feel—and that means there was something of Synthi in Mary Ann to start out with, and a great deal more has gotten in. So although she knows it’s dumb and corny, she’s still swept away by the story of this poor kid’s love life, and consequently she does the most seductive thing a human being can do—she looks fascinated.
Jesse sees that and finds himself thinking that she’s an awfully good listener, and the first person who seems to understand about it all, and to feel a little touch of compassion for her—she’s clearly a very nice person who has been made a mess of by the life she’s had to lead. He’s very proud of his ability to forgive her … and hey, in the candlelight, he’s not sure he’s ever seen anyone quite so beautiful. “That’s enough about me, anyway,” he says. “All clichés, just like I said. Um … tomorrow’s my day off. Would you like to do something really dumb, like take a long walk on the beach together?”
“I’d adore it,” she says, and she smiles a deep, secret smile that seems to him to have centuries of pain in it, but a wonderful warmth as well. He realizes they are going to be very good for each other, and says, “Terrific.”
She loves the way he says “Terrific”—it puts her in mind of a couple of guys she went out with in high school—and she knows, suddenly, that they can both be very good for each other.
Louie Tynan has a pilot’s patience for medical officers—which is to say, none at all. And somehow they must sense that, because they always turn up right when things are way too busy already.
He’s been dealing with Dr. Wo for a long time, and sure enough, just when he’s about to take off for the moon, Wo calls him up and says he’s got to be plugged in for a checkup.
Space neurology is a pretty silly subject if you ask Louie—he’s never noticed any difference in what he thinks, only in his muscles and body weight and so forth—but no one is asking him. For an hour, he dutifully thinks of images Dr. Wo suggests, and reports back what he sees when signal comes in through the scalpnet, and generally lets the doc run his whole nervous system through a thorough checkout.
Usually Wo is one of those doctors who thinks “Any questions?” means “goodbye” and “Uh, one question, Doc,” means “run!” But this time, when the checkout is all done and Louie is at last permitted to unplug, Wo stays on the line, and says, “There’s another area that we need to discuss, Colonel Tynan.”
Louie nods. “I’m listening.”
Wo smiles slightly. “If I tell you that it isn’t something you could be grounded for, will you relax and listen carefully?”
Louie’s smile is wider. “Sure, Doc. What is it?”
Wo looks off to the side, as if thinking, and finally says, “You know, of course, that all modern computer systems are deliberately infected with optimizing replicating code—little programs that duplicate themselves as needed, and that modify other programs to improve them. For example, if another program is accomplishing what it does in seventy steps, and the optimizer sees a way to do it in sixty, perhaps because there are several unnecessary moves of data in and out of storage … the optimizer fixes it. Optimizers, of course, also fix each other, so none of us exactly understands how they do what they do. This is all review, yes?”
“It’s all review. And I’m not a computer, Doc.”
“Not yet, anyway. That’s what I’m trying to find a way to explain. The most recent generations of optimizers are no longer stopped by the barriers between operating systems; they are able to translate themselves and infect systems they were never designed for. That feature makes them more useful, obviously, in the global net, since they download themselves into any new machine and clean up its code.
“A couple of years ago we were experimenting with rabbit brains, and we discovered the most advanced of the optimizers could actually cross over into the brain. Where they began to … well—”
“Make the rabbit smarter? Are you telling me that by spending so much time telepresent I’m going to become brighter?”