Tony Daniel (12 page)

“I know you missed your box collection,” Aubry replied.

“Stupid school won’t let me have them in the dorm.”

Aubry looked on at her brother’s complete absorption with the enigma box and had a moment of sympathy with the school’s administrators. She knew that Sint could play with these things for hours, and she doubted that he would let homework that needed doing call him away from a really good game.

Then she ran a quick check of her portfolio to see where Enigmatica was lately. To her horror, the numbers flashed back red, glaring red. When she’d turned eleven, her father had given her a small allowance of greenleafs to invest, and until now, she had been turning a tidy profit. She’d been waiting to show him until she had officially doubled her money. But now, she was losing it . . . she ran a full portfolio readout . . . losing it all!

For a moment, Aubry felt a blind panic creep over her. Something was wrong, very wrong. She wanted to call out to her parents—she heard her father walking down the hall even now—to ask what was happening and to be reassured that it would be all right.

“What is it, Aub?” said Sint. He must have heard her sharp intake of breath.

Get hold of yourself, Aubry, she thought. They are going to need your help. Do what Mom always says to do first: Analyze the situation. Make sure you have all the data before you start jumping to conclusions.

“We’re going on a trip, kids,” Danis said.

“A trip?” Sint replied. “Is that why we got out of school early?”

“Yes,” their father said. “That’s why you got out early. I don’t want to scare you, but you may not be going back . . . for quite a while.”

“Doesn’t scare me,” Sint said. “Where we going?”

“Well, we’re booked for passage from Leroy Port,” said Danis. “We really have to get a move on for all of us to get there on time.”

“On a cloudship!” cried Sint. “We’re going on a cloudship?”

“Yes,” said Danis. “Quite a ways on a cloudship.”

“We’re going on a cloudship!” Sint yelled once again, then immediately returned to his enigma box as if nothing had happened.

Gather all the data, Aubry thought. “What is our final destination?” she asked. “Are we going to Jupiter?” The family had once taken a trip to Ganymede when her father had had to be there on business. It had been a strange experience for Aubry, being away from,
disconnected
from, the Met. There was less grist on Ganymede than there was in the Met. The world seemed thinner, somehow not as real.

“I don’t know,” her father replied. “What we’re doing is leaving here.”

Aubry was again seized by a sudden moment of panic. Even her mother and father didn’t have a full grasp of the situation. Whatever the situation was.

“Is it the money?” Aubry said. “Are we poor now?”

“No,” said her mother. “Kelly took care of that problem rather nicely.”

“It’s a war panic,” said her father.

“So we’re panicking, along with everyone else?” Aubry said. If there was one thing her parents had taught her, it was not to think like the crowd.

“Everyone else is not panicking
enough
,” her father replied. “I don’t want to go into everything right now. We don’t have time, yet, to talk. We have to act. Some of the LAPs are being consolidated under the Interlocking Directorates, and there’s talk of a free-convert roundup. That’s what set off the bear market.”

Aubry thought of her favorite teacher, Mrs. Lately. Mrs. Lately was a Large Array of Personalities spread out through the Met. The aspect who taught them biochemistry was simultaneously doing experiments on Mars, and was, at the same time, studying frog behavior in the South American jungles of Earth. When you were a LAP, you could do a jillion things at once. Aubry hadn’t mentioned it to her parents yet, but Mrs. Lately had asked Aubry if she wanted to be put on a study track to become a LAP someday.

“Should you ever want to,” Mrs. Lately had said, “I’m fairly certain you have what it takes. But you must talk this over with your parents, and, in any case, you have to be physically mature before the process, so you’ve got a good deal of time to think about it.”

Mrs. Lately . . . consolidated. Aubry wasn’t certain what that meant, but she didn’t like the sound of it. Especially when she considered the Latin roots of the word.

Aubry and Sint were already packed, and Kelly always kept a small travel bag at the ready with toiletries and a change of clothes. He could usually obtain all these things instantly, wherever he went, but there was something about using his own stuff, and not just the blueprints for his own stuff, that reminded him of home when he was away. Of course, he would never confess such a thing to Danis in such terms. She was, after all, nothing but a blueprint of a sort. In any case, reinstantiating things from the grist cost money, and there was the possibility that, though he was now quite wealthy, he might run out of money before all this was through—or that the greenleaves that he had would become devalued.

He gave everyone a few minutes to say good-bye to the apartment. He had thought that Danis, whose body
was
basically the apartment, would linger the longest, but she had, apparently, made her farewells, and was busy getting transportation arranged. The kids took longer, shuffling about in their room. Aubry had destroyed the hard copies of the journals that Kelly knew she kept, while Sint had played a final game on one of the enigma boxes that he would not be able to take along.

Before they left, Danis had both children download their short-term memories and somatic readouts into Kelly’s pocketbook as a safety precaution. They could not be reconstructed if their aspects were totally destroyed, but there was a great deal of Aubry and Sint that was convert-only, and such information might be subject to degradation and erasure on a hard trip. Kelly wished he could take a dynamic copy of both children and Danis in his pocketbook, rather than the archived, static ones he had made. With such copies, their entire personalities might be reconstructed. But this was simply not possible without a grist-rich matrix as big as the apartment. It was also completely illegal in some of the sectors of the Met they would be passing through. Convert copying and transfer was strictly regulated by the Convert and Free Convert Iteration Section of the Department of Immunity.

Then the coach arrived, and it was time to go.

Kelly would miss the apartment, he knew, but what he would really miss was the city of Bach itself, the greatest town in the solar system. It had started out as an outpost, centuries ago—even before the first cables of the Met had been strung. The pioneers had put their cluster of underground dwellings in Bach crater, near Mercury’s south pole, in order to be close to the water ice that existed, miraculously it seemed at the time, in the never-ending dark shadows of the planet’s polar regions. Of course water was no longer a problem: first, because it was rather easily manufactured by grist synthesizing units using abundant hydrogen and oxygen, and second, because most citizens of Bach and all of Mercury were optimized physically to need less of it. In comparison to the standard human model, Mercurian innards were as dry as the sand of the Sahara back on Earth.

The old outpost was an art museum now, and Bach had grown, and grown, and grown—spreading out over the rims of the crater like a tenacious lichen clinging to the rocky basalt of Mercury’s surface. The reason for the growth was the same as lichen’s, as well: sunlight, and lots of it. Mercury turned on its axis every fifty-nine days. So, for a good two Earth weeks, the grist solar collectors were sitting under the midday sun at temperatures that could easily melt many metals. The origins of the city were in energy production, but the pioneers had come to realize that energy meant money, and now it was as a center of banking and finance that Bach thrived.

The family piled into the coach, and Danis flowed in and took over the driving functions. They wound through the twists and turns of Calay, the neighborhood in which they lived. Then the coach entered a feeder tube and was squeezed to higher and higher speeds by the peristalsis of the feeder tube’s sides. After the tube cleared the tangle of Calay, its opaque wall became clear to visible light and the eyes of Kelly and his family—Mercurians all—opaqued over with lenses manufactured by the grist of their bodies’ pellicles. To someone from the outer system, it would appear that they suddenly had welding goggles instead of corneas.

The great architect Klaus Branigan had designed the south crater section of Bach in which Calay was ensconced, and Kelly, as always, was amazed by Branigan’s handiwork. Branigan claimed to have based his conception upon structures he’d found in the final movement of Bach’s Harpsichord Concerto Number One in D Minor. Like Bach, with his two interwoven themes, Branigan had taken essentially two cities and knitted them together in a great harmonious clash, like a surf crashing into land on Earth. There was mellifluous, residential Calay, with its bulbous pearl strings of apartments. These existed between the square, almost mineral, stretches of New Frankfurt and its central corridor, Earth Street, which housed the most powerful banks and brokerages in the solar system. All of it gleamed and twinkled under the evening sun. During the twenty-nine e-days of night that would follow, the south crater would shine brilliantly, like an enormous gemstone interlaced with the luster of pearls.

The coach rose higher, and the feeder tube became the main polar conduit, South Vect, and they were soon surrounded by other coaches, the public transport vector buses, and camions, which carried huge loads of imports into Bach, and exports away, to the southern polar lift. Danis was a better driver than most of the coaches, with their standard control coding, and the family’s coach maneuvered in and out of traffic like a needle weaving a complex pattern through cloth. Even though Kelly could no longer see where they were in relation to the city below them, he could feel the change in acceleration as the conduit began angling down toward the pole. Within a few minutes, it had split into the myriad tributaries that spread out like a net from the gigantic south pole complex that everyone called the Hub.

Sint had spent the journey engrossed in his single remaining enigma box, and Aubry had been very quiet. Kelly suspected that she’d been dealing with the free fall of the investments in her personal portfolio. He’d given her the port and some seed money an e-year ago, and he had been surreptitiously keeping track of her financial progress ever since. Unlike her personal journals (which Kelly wouldn’t dream of looking into) he hadn’t been able to resist a peek at his daughter’s investments. To his great satisfaction, she’d taken to the markets instantly. She watched the toys her contemporaries indulged in and the games they played and had made some startlingly perspicacious moves with the knowledge. In fact, based on Aubry’s decision, Kelly had bought up a block of Enigmatica stock that was many times the size of Aubry’s entire holdings, and watched its value steadily climb—that is, until yesterday. He’d shorted it, along with the rest. He felt a twinge of guilt that he hadn’t advised Aubry to do the same.

Danis eased the coach into a parking bay, and he and the kids gathered their things as the door contracted open. They stepped into the push and bustle of the Hub departure sector. It seemed that a large part of Mercury was on the move.

A big man, completely Mercury-adapted and nearly eight feet tall, careened into Aubry and almost knocked her off her feet. He carried an oversize suitcase that was jammed closed and bulging. As Aubry watched the man move into the crowd, the suitcase burst open and a shower of greenleaf banknotes burst out. The big man made a mad scramble for his money, knocking over several others who were doing the same in the process. But Aubry’s father pulled her along, and she wasn’t able to see how the fracas turned out.

The family jostled through the crowd, but managed to stay together until they could reach the queue for the weapons detector.

“Step through the arch, young lady,” said an officious voice in her head. Like most police and sweeper units, this one could override her internal volume controls and communicate to her at whatever volume
it
chose. “Step through the arch. It won’t hurt a bit.”

She realized that it was a free convert of some kind who was talking to her—probably one associated with the weapons-detector arch. It was obviously trying to be nice to her, as much as such things could, and she gave it a smile and stepped through. There was a brief tingle and then a very real electric shock.
Something
had quickly and thoroughly moved through her and examined her minutely—all without asking permission. Aubry felt a little sick at her stomach at the thought. Then she saw that her father was having an even tougher time of it. The detector was giving his pocketbook the third degree. This was holding up the line, and some of the people stacked up behind Kelly were audibly grumbling.

Finally, they were done with the pocketbook, and Kelly was allowed to move on. Then Sint stepped through the arch, looking rather frightened. It held him there for a moment, and then informed him, in a loud voice, that he was going to have to give up his enigma box or he could not pass through. Kelly protested, but the arch convert was insistent.

“Those things have protected technology. Transporting them out system is a clear 4NB36 violation.”

“I’ve never heard of such a thing,” said Kelly. The crowd’s grumbles were turning into open expressions of displeasure, but he pressed the issue. “We need it to keep the boy entertained on the trip we are taking.”

“It’s a 4NB36 violation,” the convert insisted. “It is within my prerogative to detain you. I’m offering confiscation in view of the violator’s obvious young age. But perhaps it is his
parent
who really wishes to smuggle the technology out?”

“It’s my favorite toy,” Sint spoke up bravely. “But if it’s not allowed, I’ll give it up.”

“It is not allowed,” said the weapons detector. The arch extended a tray, and Sint dutifully placed the enigma box on top of it. Tray and box were then absorbed into the arch, where they would obviously be reworked and destroyed by the detector’s grist. Aubry felt her father’s hand on her shoulder, pushing her along.