David's Sling (15 page)
This section of the ride did not last long, but it was the exhilarating part. Kira dropped low in the saddle, building up speed. The cool wind whipped across her face.
She veered right onto the uphill road spur that led to her townhouse. She continued to coast, though her speed dropped alarmingly. It was a matter of honor, to get all the way home from here without any more pedaling.
The bicycle bumped into the driveway, and Kira dismounted just before it started to wobble. The humidity closed in around her, displacing the cool wind. In that moment, as the tropical heat returned, Kira had a small revelation—she knew a winning strategy for Uncle Nathan's game.
She hurried to the bathroom and took a quick, cool shower, humming all the while at the thought of her upcoming victory. As she returned to the living room, however, her father interrupted her thoughts by thrusting a shiny, gift-wrapped package in her arms. "Happy birthday," he bellowed, hugging her.
Another package plopped on top of the first one. "Happy birthday," Uncle Nathan echoed with a softer smile.
Wonderful aromas circulated from the kitchen. Even as her nostrils flared, however, a pot lid clattered against a muffled explosion of air. Her father's face took on the expression of a chemist who has just heard his carefully prepared solution pop from its test tube and spatter against the ceiling. He ran for the kitchen. "Hurry!" her uncle called to him. Then, with a wink at Kira, he walked in the same direction.
Putting her presents down, Kira went to watch the hysteria. The kitchen looked like a child's playroom. Pots and pans teetered precariously on every inch of table space, and a fine film of flour coated the vertical surfaces. Her father muttered curses as he twisted dials and punched buttons. Uncle Nathan offered soothing sounds and gently stirred the biggest pot—the one full of chili. Kira could see, amidst the carnage, the makings of a gigantic chili-cheese pizza, a beautiful work of careful engineering.
Her father and uncle always cooked together for special occasions, and they always left a mess best cleaned up with a fire hose. Kira could remember her mother leaning against the door at the edge of the inferno, shaking her head, just as Kira leaned against the door now. At the memory, Kira jerked away from the kitchen and went to set the table. That, too, her mother had always done.
The game of wonders started without warning, as usual. While her father sliced the pizza, her uncle held up his fork for examination. Too casually, he turned it in the air and said, "You know, this fork is made of stainless steel. Do you realize how amazing it is for us to use stainless steel for dinner this evening?"
Kira smiled as her father asked, "Why is it amazing?"
"You need chromium to make stainless steel. But chromium is a rare metal. One of the few places left on Earth where there's an abundance of chromium is on the ocean floor, locked inside metallic nodules coughed up from cracks deep inside the earth. So we send down special robot submarines to scoop up the nodules, to extract the chromium, to make the stainless steel, so that we can use these forks to eat tonight."
Her father had finished serving; he held his pizza in the air and tapped the crust. "Thats pretty amazing all right. There's another amazing thing here, too. Did you know that there was almost a terrible blight on the wheat fields this year? If the blight had taken hold, we might not have had the flour to make this pizza." He pointed at his glass of water. "And we needed water to solve the problem."
Kira frowned. Her father had never really liked the game, it seemed to her; his efforts always seemed halfhearted. But this wonder seemed unusually weak, even for him. So by watering the fields, the plants stayed healthy enough to fight the disease, right?" she asked.
Her father reluctantly nodded. "That, too, but that wasn't what I had in mind." He smiled. "We first spotted the blight through satellite photos. Because the photos showed the problem before it spread, we were able to protect most of the fields. Well, the satellite got into position to take those pictures by firing its rockets. And the rockets used hydrogen for fuel. And of course we got the hydrogen for the fuel from water. And that's how we needed the water to make it possible to have pizza tonight."
Kira laughed. "That's pretty amazing," she conceded. "But there's another wonder here tonight as well. It's amazing that we're living here at all. You know, Washington D.C. was built on a swamp. They had terrible trouble with mosquitoes and yellow fever when they first put the Capitol here. It's unfit for human habitation."
Uncle Nathan wet his finger and held it in the air. "Doesn't feel too uncomfortable to me."
Kira smirked. "Of course not, silly. Our house is air conditioned. If air conditioning hadn't been invented, we wouldn't be here."
Nathan raised an eyebrow. "We'd certainly be less comfy, anyway."
"No, we wouldn't be here by D.C. at all. Do you think you could get so many bureaucrats to live in a swamp without air conditioning? Certainly not. And if you couldn't get that many bureaucrats together, the government couldn't have grown into the big, powerful monstrosity it now is. And if the government hadn't become an oversized dinosaur, we wouldn't have had to move the Institute's headquarters here. We'd live close to a center of business, like Los Angeles or Houston, instead of living close to the center of politics. Right?"
Her father whooped with laughter. Uncle Nathan shook his head. "I think you've hit on the answer to the nation's problems, Kira. If we ban the use of air conditioning in America's capital, we can substantially reduce the burden of government. I like it. And you're right: that's truly amazing. Without air conditioning, we wouldn't be here."
Kira flushed with the glow of victory. For as long as she could remember, she had been trying to come up with a more amazing wonder than her uncle. Yet the glow faded, and Kira felt oddly disappointed. It took her a minute's introspection to realize what was missing. Uncle Nathan hadn't acknowledged that she had beaten him.
The glow returned as her understanding reached an even deeper level. She hadn't really beaten her uncle. He had never really beaten her.
The game of wonders was a cooperative one. It wasn't a zero-sum game like baseball or football, wherein for every winner there had to be a loser. Nobody had to lose in the game of wonders. Everybody who felt the amazement, who ceased to take the little things for granted, was a winner. As Nathan had said before, "
It's not how you play the game, but whether everybody wins or everybody loses.
" Cooperative games made human beings more human; often, zero-sum games made them brutes.
The spicy flavor of the chili pizza filled her mouth; she started listening to the ongoing conversation.
Nathan was speaking. "So our reputation seems to be growing even faster than our seminars."
"What happened?" Kira asked.
Nathan turned to her. "I've been invited to the reception announcing a new book,
Statesmanship and Politics
. It was written by Senator Larry Obata, a friend of Hilan Forstil's. The announcement takes place at the Capitol, on September 30."
"That's neat," Kira said. "Can I come, too?"
"I'll get you an invitation," Nathan promised. He sipped at his orange juice, then continued, "So now you all know my plans for the next couple of months. What're
you
up to, Kira?" His tone was even more casual than when he had begun the game earlier.
Kira swallowed hard; her stomach turned into a cold lump. I'm doing some public relations work," she explained. "After all, that's what I got my degree in."
"Yes, I remember. You were going to develop advanced Information Age advertising concepts—ads that could compete with Madison Avenue without being misleading."
"Yeah. Well, I have some things to take care of first."
"Such as?"
Kira flushed, but she looked back at her uncle angrily. "I have to protect you from the cigarette industry, for one thing. And while I'm at it, I have to avenge my mother's murder."
"I see." He watched her with the cautious disapproval that was his strongest rebuke.
The sarcastic anger of her father's voice was a stronger rebuke. "So you think you can waltz in as an advertising agent and destroy one of the biggest, most powerful organizations on Earth?"
Kira shrugged. "I don't know. But I do know that they might destroy you if I don't. " She told them about Wilcox's plans to flood the network conferences with anti-Zetetic propaganda.
"Very clever," Nathan said. "What a brilliant ally Daniel Wilcox would make if we could coax him into the Institute."
She shook her head. "Not very likely. Believe me, he's ruthless."
"That doesn't necessarily make him bad. But you're right." He sighed. "We must think of him in many ways as an enemy."
"And he's talking about having a debate with you, Uncle Nathan. He thinks he can take you apart."
"Really?" Nathan's eyes lit up.
Kira held up a cautionary finger. "He might not beat you in the debate itself, but he might win in the news coverage that followed." She told them about the way Wilcox was pulling the strings of the media. As she spoke, she remembered her suspicions that Wilcox had other anti-Zetetic plans that she didn't know about. She had been building relationships with some of the programmers at Wilcox-Morris, trying to get access to more of the proprietary data bases, but she hadn't yet succeeded. As she thought about it, her anxiety increased; she had to work more quickly on those computers, and yet, she didn't dare.
Summing up Wilcox's plans, she added a final desperate warning to her uncle while her father was out of the room. "So you've got to be careful of what you say in public, because you never know how he'll twist it."
Nathan shook his head. "You're right, of course. Anything I say can be used against me. But you're wrong, too. I can't stop speaking. I can't stop trying to get people to think about their worlds in different ways. You see that, don't you?''
"I guess so." Kira slumped in her chair. "Well, be careful, anyway."
"Of course."
Suddenly the lights went down, and her father came in with a huge cake. Kira could tell they weren't too angry about her work with Wilcox-Morris; they obeyed her when she begged them to spare her their terrible, offkey rendition of "Happy Birthday. "
August 6
"Your twocolor morality is pathetic," sneered the Sophisticate. 'The world isn't black and white. Ho one does pure good or pure bad. It's all gray. Therefore, no one is better than anyone else."
"I'm glad you see the flaws in twocolor morality," replied the Zetet "But knowing only gray, you conclude that all grays are the same shade. You mock the simplicity of the two color view, yet you replace it with a onecolor view. Can we not find a third, better alternative?"
—Zetetic Commentaries
A gentle voice full of wistful humor sang to Leslie as he stopped at the door to Amos Leung's house. "Good day," the disembodied voice of Amos Leung said. "What is the purpose of your visit?"
Leslie looked around the delicately articulated door frame in search of the speaker. No electronics of any kind presented themselves. He saw fine lines that might have been random scratches above the doorway arch. A casual observer would have seen nothing else, but Leslie knew Amos and his wife Florence well enough to know that random scratchings would not have been permitted here. He studied the lines, and they came together in patterns, in tracings of birds and flowers. The subtle crafting could only be Flo's handiwork.
"I came to see an old friend," Leslie said to the empty air, wondering whether the voice was really Amos's, or a very good imitation rigged in the house computer circuits.
"An old friend," the voice repeated. "What is your name, old friend?"
The r's were too harsh, Leslie realized, for it to be Amos's voice. Amos spoke with no trace of an accent, though he softly rounded off all his consonants. The voice belonged to the house, not the man. "'Tell Amos that Leslie Evans is looking for him."
"Of course."
When Nathan had recommended Amos for the Sling Project, Leslie had been quite astonished. He had never met anyone quite like Amos, before or since. He remembered a conversation they had held while flying together to McChord Airfield, perhaps fifteen years ago.
The plane had been dark; they had turned down the lights for the movie watchers. "What do you do when you're not building comm systems, Amos?" Leslie had asked of this new fellow on the E3 team, taking a short puff on his cigarillo.
Amos was sitting quite still and erect in his chair; he had made Leslie feel tall and awkward. Amos's Oriental features remained impassive no matter what Leslie said, and Leslie felt a periodic urge to grab him and shake him. He knew that somewhere underneath Amos's masklike expression a laughing observer looked back.
A tiny crack appeared in the mask, and the beginnings of a smile played at the corners of Amos's mouth. "Oh, when I'm not building comm systems, I guess mostly I build comm systems." He turned to Leslie and looked up into his eyes. "You know the echoes people used to get on MCI long-distance circuits? I became tired of these echoes, so I called the company and told them how to fix them."
"Really." Leslie smiled, too, unsure of whether Amos was pulling his leg.
"Yes." He held up his hand with the thumb and forefinger spread apart. "All it takes is a component about this size. It costs 75 cents in quantity."
"If it's so cheap to fix, why didn't MCI fix it without your help? How could they not have known about it?"
"Because they thought they needed the same kind of equipment Bell Telephone used." He spread his arms. "Bell used huge devices to solve the same problem. They cost thousands of dollars."
Leslie feared that Amos wasn't joking. "Did they use your recommendation?"
The tiniest lift of an eyebrow suggested a mental shrug. "Perhaps. At least, I no longer hear the echoes."
Leslie sat for a long time thinking about that. He reached the end of his cigarillo and crushed it in the ashtray.
Amos spoke again—the first time he had initiated a step in their conversation. "They called me several months later to offer me a job, with a sizable increase in salary. " He paused, then added with peculiar emphasis, "Sizable."
"Why didn't you take it?"
"My job at present is satisfactory. I would not take another position unless it took me nearer to my ideal."
"Which is?"
"I should like to teach, and do research, and create products, all at the same time. Perhaps a part-time job as a professor, and a parttime job as a consultant would work well."
"I see. Well, good luck in finding your ideal." And that had been the end of the matter as far as Amos was concerned.
As the door to Amos's house opened, Leslie found himself hoping that Amos had not yet found his ideal.
Amos stood before him, barechested, breathing slighty harder than normal. No doubt he had been working his way through his exercises. "Hello," his soft voice sang between breaths.
Again Leslie felt like a clumsy giant, just as he had felt in the old days. He smiled at his old friend.
Was Amos an old friend? Leslie had always thought of Amos as a friend, but he had never been quite sure how Amos felt in return. Leslie held out his hand, with a warm, "Howdy, Amos. You've got a beautiful house here."
Amos did not take his hand, so Leslie pointed up at the tracings. "I particularly appreciate the artwork."
A shadow smile played at Amos's lips. "Come in. Let me assure you the interior of our house is more beautiful than the exterior."
"Thanks." He followed Amos to the living room; the door closed automatically.
This room was all sloping contours, accented with patches of fine golden tapestry on cushions and drapes. The room relaxed him; it reminded him in some ways of the furnishings at the Institute. But the absence of chairs reminded him of the differences. "How are the girls in your
kung fu
classes, Amos?" Years ago, Amos had taught self-defense for young women; he refused to work with boys. Leslie remembered Amos's comment on the boys. "In America, they all feel a need to be macho. They become dangerous if taught advanced techniques."
"Quite well. I have a class of seven students now; three are excellent beginners. They may become good one day, if they have the interest."
A tiny woman appeared at the partition separating this room from what looked like a breakfast nook. "Colonel Evans!" she exclaimed. "How nice to see you."
Leslie turned to her with his broadest smile. "Flo." He half-bowed. "It is truly wonderful to see you." If Amos made Leslie feel like a giant, Flo made him feel like a mountain. She came up to his waist and stopped there, with a puckish smile and wide, happy eyes. But whereas Amos made him feel like an obtuse goat that might chew on the velvet coverings at any moment, Flo made him feel graceful. At least if he chewed on the covers, he would do so with dignity.
"Would you like Shanghai tea, colonel?" she asked.
"Wonderful, Flo. Thanks." She slipped softly out of view.
He turned to Amos, who pointed at a cushion. "Please sit down, old friend," he offered, coiling onto a cushion himself. Leslie could not tell if Amos mocked him with the phrase 'old friend' or not. "I presume you came on business."
Leslie collapsed into a sitting position. "Quite right. You've always known me too well, Amos. I need your help."
Amos watched him impassively.
"Have you heard of the Sling Project?"
"No."
"Um. Well, let me tell you about it." Leslie launched into an enthusiastic rendition about the Sling. He told of the seed of Information Age understanding that Nathan had begun with, and the gleam in the eye of a colonel in the Defense Nuclear Agency who had no charter to develop such a nonnuclear system. He described how the colonel had stretched the rules, then stretched them again and again, until he could fund the development of Nathan's idea. He told of his own involvement as the system's integrator, and his desperate search for the people who could make the software come together. He described his need for an additional, special person, a person who could ". . . make the heart and the mind of the system come together. That's you, Amos, if it's anyone in the world."
"Only if I accept the position."
"Well, yeah. " The scent of warm tea reached him; Leslie turned his head to see Flo kneeling next to him, a cup held out. He accepted with a jerky motion, feeling like the clumsy giant despite Flo's gentle presence. "Amos, this is important stuff we're working on. Don't you see that?"
"Yes, I suppose it is."
Leslie felt again the desire to shake Amos, to make him come alive in the way of life that Leslie understood. For Leslie, if something was important, then it was
of course
a good thing to do. He had known that Amos didn't share his values, but he didn't know what values Amos had instead. "Listen, I don't know to what extent you achieved your lifestyle and job goals. I remember you wanted an arrangement that would let you spend one third of your time teaching, one third doing research, and one third creating products. Well, I can sort of offer you two of the three. You'll be creating a product, but the product needs you to incorporate a lot more current research ideas than you'd usually see in a military development effort. And you'll be working with other good people. You'll have to meet Nathan; I think you'll like him."
"Yes, I believe he might be an interesting person." Amos splayed his fingers in a gesture Leslie remembered from years ago: a gesture that forewarned the listener of an upcoming disappointment. "But I have already achieved my goal. I am living it now."
Leslie clenched his teeth. How could he impose his will on this man who epitomized the idea of an immovable object? He certainly couldn't do it through force. "How have you achieved your goal? I know about your consulting, but where do you do research? And who do you teach, besides the girls and boys in your kung fu class?"
"I do my research here at home. I have a reasonably sophisticated assemblage of equipment—better than many universities." Remembering the equipment that Amos used to have, Leslie could well believe it. "As for my teaching, I have acquired a most apt pupil." He smiled sideways at Flo with a surprising look of mischief. "Florence is fascinated by computers, we have discovered. I believe she is becoming a hacker."
Florence made a sound like a kitten laughing.
Leslie spread his arms to encompass both of them. "That's terrific! Well hire both of you! You can work as a team right here at home. We'll run the whole show through the Zetetic Institute's DevelopNet—you've telecommuted on team projects before, right?—and you'll have all three parts of your life in place."
Amos shook his head. "I have the parts of my life in place already. All you have offered me is an opportunity to introduce chaos. You want to bring all the chaos of development panic, integration hysteria, and debugging terror into my life. What can you offer me so valuable that I should break my tranquility?"
Now it was Leslie's turn to sit impassively for a moment. "Do you have grandchildren, Amos?"
"Yes. Two."
Do you keep up with world events at all? You know, one of the main reasons I had to come back to you is that so many people in our country now refuse to have anything to do with the ever-so-unpopular military-industrial complex. How long do you think we can live our tranquil lives in a place where the people consider the job of defending themselves to be dirty?"
"I don't know."
"If our project succeeds, we may make it. " He held up his thumb and forefinger close together, the way Amos had once held them to describe a 75-cent circuit. "We're that close to entering the Information Age, and to developing a whole different concept of what it means to be a society, and what it means to defend yourself. That close—but not close enough, not yet." He clenched his fist. "I think it's important for your grandchildren to make it all the way into the Information Age, don't you?"
Amos sighed. "I suppose so."
Silence closed around them; Leslie was out of words.
Flo spoke. "Excuse me, Colonel Evans. Did you say earlier that you were using the WeatherWatcher airplane?"
Leslie felt his neck muscles relax as he looked into Flo's eyes. Her calming effect on him made him think of Jan . . . no, this was Flo, a person whose beauty was profoundly different from Jan's. "Yes, we're using the Weather Watcher as the underlying platform for the SkyHunter. We modify it, of course."
"I see.' She turned to Amos, and they exploded into rapid conversation in Mandarin, which Leslie could not follow.
Amos frowned. The mischievous look returned to his face, then a look bordering on anger came and went. "Yes, I suppose so." He turned to Leslie. "We will handle it strictly with telecommuting? Flo and I can work here all the time?"
Leslie straightened up on his cushion. He had thought he was beaten, but apparently he had been wrong. "Yeah, certainly. We'll work through telecommuting." He frowned. "Well, almost certainly. I hate being so honest, but I'll want to pull the team together into one location for testing."
"Time compression," Amos said. "I understand. Well, we shall deal with that problem when the time comes." He uncoiled from the cushion and slid out of the room.
Leslie sat dazed. Flo giggled, and he smiled at her. "How did you manage that, Flo?"
"I told him it might help him talk to our daughter if he accepted your job. He almost never gets to speak with her; they have grown apart."
"What? How will working on the Sling help him with his daughter?"
"Theresa is vice president of LightCraft Corporation. She is responsible for the development of the Weather Watcher airplane."
Leslie laughed, then stopped abruptly, for it sounded loud in the quiet of the house.
The doorbell rang promptly at ten o'clock; the guy with the satellite photos had arrived. Lila stuffed her feet into a pair of old sandals and plodded to the door. She steeled herself for this contact, wishing he would leave the passwords to the data bases at the door and just leave her alone. But the guy had insisted on seeing her. He had been almost as mysterious as Nathan Pilstrom had been a month ago.
Nathan Pilstrom
. She shuddered at the memory. Nathan had tainted her view of the Zetetic Institute. She had thought of Nathan Pilstrom and the Zetetic Institute as visionaries, leading to a better world, not as reactionary warmongers.