Tony Daniel (13 page)

“Let’s get out of here,” he said, “before I give that cop a piece of my mind and get us in trouble we don’t need right now.”

Sint started to cry a little bit. Aubry reached over and took his hand, and her father took hers. Together, the three of them made their way toward the departure shafts at the Hub’s center. They took seats in the waiting room and finally felt the familiar presence of Danis, back with them in the grist of the waiting room.

Danis had had difficulties of her own getting through Hub security. Her programming had been minutely examined, and some of her encryption subroutines—innocent, if not entirely legal—had been erased. She felt as an aspect might after having gone through a forced, scalding shower. Finally, she’d been released into the grist of the inner Hub with a stern reprimand and a warning placed on her permanent record.

Thank God they hadn’t found the real lockbox deep within her core algorithm, where all the Teleman Milt keys were kept. The firm paid big money to keep that hidden from all but the most sophisticated detection. She stored a few of her own personal belongings within the lockbox, as well—such as her own Free Integrationist political beliefs. That was something she definitely didn’t want the Department of Immunity to find out.

So, it was really happening. She and her family were about to leave Mercury. There had been so many details to arrange—and, of course, she was always the one best suited to doing the arrangements—that, apart from the last smoke she’d given herself a few hours ago, she hadn’t taken a moment to consider all the consequences.

Kelly is worried that there won’t be any civilization for us to come back to, thought Danis. He’s genuinely worried that
this
will all go away. I had the data, but I couldn’t see what he was thinking until now.

Danis gathered herself in the cushions and floor around her family and spoke softly to the children. “The five o’clock lift is going to be boarding shortly. From there, it’s only about fifteen minutes up to space. We’ll transfer again at the Johnston Bolsa. It’s Mercury-normal spin there, so you don’t have to worry about adjusting. Then, from Johnston, we’ll get on a pithway streamer. I think I’ve got us a private bead snagged, but we’ll have to see when we get there. There are an amazing number of people trying to make last-minute reservations at the moment. If I didn’t know a couple of the ticket agents from arranging your father’s trips, well then, we might be in trouble. But I think everything will be fine, once we get to Johnston.”

Her assurances sounded hollow to herself, but they seemed to calm the children, particularly Sint, who was still shaking from his run-in with the weapon detector.

Then the elevator arrived and everyone boarded. Danis flowed into the dense grist matrix that was especially provided for convert transport up the lift. For the first time since she had left the apartment, she could spread out into a full virtual space. The virtual representation that the matrix used was that of a huge room appointed with tables, chairs, sofas, and stools—and all manner of electronic refreshments. At one end of the chamber, there was a window that looked out into the actuality, and Danis could keep a weather eye on the kids while the lift accelerated upward. Below them, a mighty solar-powered laser was burning a load of rocks off the bottom of the elevator, precisely following it up and so providing the reaction to force the elevator’s mass and passengers equally and oppositely away from the planet.

Danis allowed herself another Dunhill, and this time took a finger of scotch with it, neat. She looked at her hands in the virtuality, the play of her skin over the bones of her fingers. She took a long drag on her cigarette. At such times, the world was so real.

Then Kelly and the kids, their bodies safely seated in the lift’s passenger chairs, came tumbling into the virtuality to hug their mother.

“Mom, Mom, the weapon detector took my enigma box!” said Sint. “It thought I was a spy or something.”

“Yes, I know,” Danis replied. “I had a few problems of my own with those people.” She snubbed out her cigarette and took her youngest into her arms. Kelly sat down beside her, and the seat Danis was on transformed into a curved couch. Aubry jumped up and sat on her father’s lap.

“Are you okay?” Kelly asked Danis.

“Yes, I’m fine, but it was a pretty unsettling operation, let me tell you. Kind of violating.”

“There’s going to be a lot more of that kind of thing soon enough. That’s why . . . well, we shouldn’t talk about such things here.” Kelly ordered himself up a brandy to match Danis’s scotch. The children each got fruit juices.

“Can I go play in the Sliding Room?” Sint asked after he had downed his juice.

“Why don’t we stay together for a while instead of watching the merci right now,” said Danis.

“Okay,” Sint replied. “Can I have a gin fizz?”

Kelly grinned, and Danis sighed and nodded. Sint was soon blowing bubbles through the straw of his drink. Danis had made sure that the gin’s intoxication algorithm was deactivated before it had materialized.

Just before they arrived, everyone shunted back into actuality from the virtuality with practiced ease. Danis found the flow port for herself and plugged herself into the transfer reader that would take her across the Department of Immunity grist firewall at the top of the lift. She could have represented it all as stepping into a room with many lights or through a gate, but she was an algorithm, and representing occurrences in the virtuality as actual events took up computing room and was, in general, inelegant and looked down on by other free converts. So, she didn’t think of it as anything other than what it was. She was erased from the elevator’s memory core, the information was transferred by the Merced Effect to a similar grist-rich matrix on the outgoing cable from Mercury, and there Danis became herself again, instantly.

Faster than the speed of light, in fact, and with no possibility of lost information. That was what the Merced Effect
meant
.

Danis felt far safer for herself making these quantum leaps than she did for her family’s aspects as they made their messy, Newtonian way among the planets—flight that would last until they had all satisfied her husband’s intuition of impending doom and the need to fly from it.

Kelly herded the children through yet another crowd after he got them off the lift up from Mercury. There shouldn’t have been a need for this. The other planets, even Earth, didn’t have these relic transfer bolsas, but through a combination of politics and inept management, Mercury still did. Some incoming visitors viewed it as another example of Mercurian snobbery. The pithways of the main cables were all lined with generation-four biomechanical grist, while Mercury’s south polar shaft had never been upgraded. The effect was much like the effect of having trains that ran on two different rail gauges back in the nineteenth century had been: Passengers would have to tediously move from one train to another or—worse—would have to wait while the wheel trucks were physically changed underneath them. Johnston Bolsa was the result of this foul-up. And of course it must have its own fusion power source to supplement the solar collection—and, of course everything inside must be spun to Mercury-normal weight.

Maybe it
was
all arrogance, Kelly reflected. There certainly was enough money and power concentrated on Mercury to get upgrades done if anyone had half a mind to. In any case, he must get the children transferred over to the pithway.

The Mercury-Venus space cable, with its associated tributaries, knots, and fanlike extrusions, was known as the Dedo (and sometimes called the Finger by those whose particular variant of English included that profanity). The Dedo undulated at a crazy rate in comparison to, say, the stately waves of the Mars-Earth Diaphany. This was owing to Mercury’s odd ellipse of an orbit (the same strange perturbation that had originally led Einstein to work on his General Theory of Relativity) as it related to Venus’s nicely Keplerian transit. The Earth-to-Venus segment had come to be called the Vas, for obvious reasons. On the Earth, the short Earth-Moon extension was the Aldiss. Then there was the Mars-Earth Diaphany. The various tendrils that stretched out past Mars and into the asteroids had many different names. The asteroid belt itself had so far prevented the construction of a cable to Jupiter. The problem was not because of material or energy—it could, in principle, be built with the same microinstantiation process that had been used now for centuries. The problem was that the entire elliptic of the asteroid belt was taken up with—what else?—asteroids. Even though the belt occurred on a narrow plane that was just about in line with that of the other planets (think of it as a thin ring around the sun, just as Saturn has a ring around itself), there was no way to construct a cable so that it might avoid the belt at every point on its journey around the sun as either end of the cable followed the paths of Mars or Jupiter. Despite the amazing strength and elasticity of a cable’s structure, bending through the belt would mean innumerable ruptures that couldn’t be healed in time to prevent catastrophic loss of life. So there was no Met past the asteroid belt. And this was not just a physical, technological fact, either. The belt was a political line that marked the end of the complete rule of the Interlocking Directorate and the beginning of the outer-system frontier, where the vestiges of the old Republic still hung on to their quasi-independence from inner-system dominance.

But the Met was not merely the main cables: the Dedo, Vas, and Diaphany. It was a vast profusion of branches and tendrils. There were even smaller “mycelium” clumps of space cables that only came into contact with the larger Met when the big cables undulated through periodically. There were also temporary extrusions that connected the sides of a bend in the cable when the bend became particularly acute. These occurred when the planets on either end were in opposition—that is, at their closest to each other. For the Diaphany, this happened about every two years and the grist-built connecting webwork was called the Conjubilation. It was the Conjubilation of 2993 that had led to the upheaval that resulted in the current Met government.

Well, indirectly, I guess, Kelly thought. I don’t think those Meld participants of ’93 envisioned that Amés the composer would become Amés the Director. Just as the French Revolutionists hadn’t imagined what the rise of Napoléon meant—until it was too late.

It’s like everyone just got
tired
of freedom, and wanted someone to tell them what to do, Kelly thought.

It took nearly an hour to get the kids loaded into a bead. Transportation through the center pith of a major space cable took place in connected streamers of separate, oval cars that somewhat resembled blood cells flowing through capillaries—or, as their name implied, beads on a moving necklace. All of the beads were given Earth-standard acceleration rates until they reached their maximum velocity, at which time you traveled in free fall. Of course, there was still a slight change of direction in relation to the cable’s center of gravity, so you often experienced a trace of “weight” while at constant speed—but this was only noticeable as a drift in the cabin toward one side or the other. For all intents and purposes, following the acceleration period, when you rode the pithways, you traveled in a state of weightlessness.

After another weapon-detector arch (this time, mercifully, without problems), Kelly and the children walked through a series of interlocking rooms, each spinning at a slightly higher rate than the Johnston Bolsa proper, and all tapering in toward the outer skin of the Dedo cable proper. The space cables averaged a kilometer across, and they, too, spun, just as the various sacs, bolsas, drums, and cylinders that were strung along them did. This centripetal spin (if you were standing on the inside of the outer wall of the Dedo, say) was Earth-normal. The bolsa was like a bead on a necklace that is spinning, while the string by which it is strung is also spinning inside the bead, but at a faster rate. So the path from Johnston Bolsa’s “ceiling” to the pithway led through higher spin gravity before it got to the zero-g state of the pith.

Finally, he and the children queued up for their individual bead. Most of the travelers were not used to zero g, and the flight attendants helped each to his or her destination with a puff of air from a hose that the attendant controlled. Sint and Aubry joined hands, and the attendant puffed them both into their bead together. They flew through the intervening space careening end over end, giggling all the while. Kelly elected the more conventional puff-to-the-butt and entered the bead facing forward. They instructed their grist pellicles to form a kind of microscopic Velcro to hold them against the bead walls, and they all aligned themselves in a sitting position along what would soon be the bead’s “bottom” when it began accelerating.

Danis was already present within the bead. There was a much more sophisticated grist environment here, and she was able to manipulate various properties of their surroundings, which she could not do in the elevator.

“Finally, we’re all together,” Kelly said. “There must be fifty thousand people trying to get off Mercury all at once.”

“I had to ‘volunteer’ for another security check,” said Danis. “And I don’t think I had any choice about whether or not I could decline.”

“Did you see me and Aubry fly in here, Mom?” Sint was still in an excited state. “We did three full cartwheels!”

There was no buildup of sound in the bead; it simply started moving. The acceleration was gentle, but insistent. Kelly felt the point where they sped past Mercury-normal and he prepared himself for the dreary pull of e-normal that was soon coming. There had been talk of changing all the pithway transport over to Mercury-standard, since Mercury was, now, the business and government center of the solar system, but studies had shown that such a changeover would slow transport times considerably, so the idea was abandoned, and e-normal acceleration was maintained in the pithways.

The kids seemed just as delighted to be heavier than normal as they had been to be lighter. But neither one of them had ever had to endure weeks of earth-pull, Kelly thought. He had planned a wilderness trip to Africa when both of them were old enough, but now that might never come about.