Ed King (44 page)

Guido, chewing on a baby carrot, said, “This is what I mean. See what I mean? You come up here and tell me we’re going to Portland. That’s fine, except I’m in charge, you’re not.”

“Portland,” said Ed. “I’m on a mission that can’t wait. There’s no time for you and your bullshit.”

“I have other options,” Guido pointed out. “I could flame out over the Pacific if I wanted to. Not to scare you or anything, but I could do that, you know. I could also bail. I—”

Ed said, “That’s all good information, Guido, but right now I have to take a phone call.”

It was his Portland factotum calling, the one who’d tracked down the director of BGASO. “They’re insisting,” she said, “on a protocol and paperwork. They want ID and—”

“I don’t have time for this,” said Ed. “What’s this honcho’s name? Who am I dealing with? “He got the name—Mindy Kemp—and some contact numbers. He called and said, “It’s Pythia again. You just heard from Pythia. And now you’re hearing from Pythia a second time. Is this Mindy Kemp? How are you?”

“Good.”

“Well, what I want to do is make you even better, Mindy. Say by a factor of, oh, millions. How does that sound? How does
this
sound? You meet someone from Pythia right now, wherever it is your records are stored, and this Pythia someone hands you a check, a donation check, made out to your society, for—how much do you want? Name a figure.”

“Who is this?”

“I represent Pythia.”

“How do I know that?”

“Don’t blow this, okay? What’s your dream? Your ship just came in. Everything could change in the next few seconds. But you can’t ask any more questions.”

“One million, then.”

“You got two million. We’ll write a check for two million. That’s two million for a private look at your records—right now.”

“Okay.”

“Money speaks.”

“It enormously does,” came the answer.

“Someone will call you in a minute,” explained Ed, “so keep your phone on.”

A chopper couldn’t be organized—though the rain, right now, was insignificant in Portland—not even for the King of Search. In Portland, a leader in noise-reduction regulation, rules were rules. Pythia’s Portland chief, Ralph Cheadle, pulled out all his stops, but Portland was used to fending off hotshots, because Nike—named for the Greek goddess of victory—was always trying, as Cheadle put it, to shove a sport shoe up its hometown’s ass. Intel was in Portland, too, and Intel was also difficult. So Portland had developed municipal intransigence, which meant that a fast driver, instead of a chopper, had to be arranged from PDX—that was the best Ralph Cheadle could do—to cover the 10.6 miles of rainy roads with horn and flashers. In this manner, Ed was conveyed to a business-records storage facility where his Portland people had obtained the right key, knew where to look, and had arranged for privacy. As for Mindy Kemp—who had a check in hand—she was happy to turn a blind eye for as long as Pythia deemed necessary.

Ed was led to a windowless, air-starved, climate-controlled vault and, alone, went in and shut the door.

“This is probably the world record,” he thought, “for going from cluelessness to an answer about birth parents. Someday I’ll get this in my authorized biography—how I did this so quickly.”

Sure enough, “King, Daniel C. & Alice S.” Ed unsealed, read, read twice, and then, reeling, called Diane.

“Diane,” he said, sitting on a stack of boxes, “this just keeps getting weirder and weirder. At this point, it’s just sort of through-the-looking-glass. It doesn’t feel real. It can’t be.”

“Am I sure I want to hear this?” asked Diane.

“Get this,” said Ed. “I was left on a doorstep! Can you believe that? Left on a doorstep? It’s unbelievable. Who else can I think of that’s, what do you call it, a foundling? I’m going to have to pyth for foundlings. I’m a foundling, it’s the most bizarre thing ever!”

“Literally or figuratively left on a doorstep?”

“Left on a doorstep—an actual doorstep.”

“Where?”

“In Portland. Right here in Portland. In April of 1963.”

“You’re in Portland? I thought you were in Santa Barbara.”

“Things happen fast when you make them happen fast.”

“Does it say there who left you on a doorstep?” asked Diane. “Anything? Any clue?”

“Complete mystery,” answered Ed. “I’m called ‘Baby Doe’ in all the paperwork.”

“When are you coming home?”

“I’m coming home now. This is so unreal. I don’t know what to feel or think. So far I feel like, I’m adopted—mixed bag. I’m a foundling—that’s another mixed bag. Whatever else God wants to throw at me, I’ll just deal with it. I’m a billionaire, I’m famous, and—so what?—I’m adopted. I’ll just go on, it’s not that bad, someone abandoned me in 1963, why should I worry about it now? I don’t know what there is to cry about.”

“Everything,” said Diane, which to him sounded strange. What did she mean by “everything,” anyway? And why did she say it with a wail?

“I’m coming home,” he said, “if you’re not under water yet.”

Then he was returned to PDX, where, as his plane taxied, he said to Guido Sternvad, “I’m taking the wheel for the hop home—wheel, controls, whatever—
my
wheel. You can sit back and be my copilot.”

“Absolutely not, no way,” said Guido. “Very,
very
stupid request, sir. This is a different plane from your Gulfstream. You want to fly this Citation, fine, but let me out first, because I don’t want to be along for that. You’ll have to do something like that solo.”

Guido won. They made the leap with rain pounding the windshield. On the ground in Seattle, Ed’s chopper was waiting, and so was a flight attendant with an umbrella open for his ten-step journey from one transport to the other. As Ed made the crossing, Guido yelled, “Take it easy, bro. Catch you later! Chill!” Ed ignored this and rose above the flood with the news, cop, and medic choppers. “I’m a foundling,” he
kept thinking, “an abandoned child—wow! Someone dropped me on a doorstep and walked off. That’s not something that happens very often. There’s seven billion people, or so, on this planet. How many of those are foundlings, like me? It’s probably like the odds of dying in a plane crash. Except a plane crash is an accident, whereas this—this is different. In this case, someone made a decision. They decided, me, I’d get left on a doorstep. Who decided this? Odds are, probably, I was left by my mother. The odds are, probably, she’d been knocked up. Did she want to leave me? Probably not. Leaving your own kid—there had to be mixed feelings. Probably she was young and didn’t want to be a mother. She had some other plan for her life. Was abortion legal in ’63? What a problem, knocked up and stuck. But can you blame babies for just showing up? They show up because people are stupid and horny. So many problems in this world come from that. But is sex the problem? Is it sex or the person? When is something someone’s fault? Whoever dumped me wasn’t a victim of circumstances, they’re at least partly responsible for what they did, and therefore I have a right to be angry at them. The problem with being angry—whoever dumped me wins twice, first by leaving me on somebody’s doorstep, then by making me angry about it. God! I have to pinch myself. I feel like I’m dreaming. I’m a foundling, it’s true, it’s real.”

When he got home, Diane was watching the flood news in her recliner, or appeared to be watching the flood news in her recliner, with a glass of wine in one hand and a remote in the other. Ed pecked her cheek and sat down beside her. Diane’s stylist had recently made her a redhead—the sort of frank redhead who looks intentionally dyed. She was now a redhead the way Elizabeth the First had been a redhead—flamingly so, with burnt-orange tresses that dictated costuming. There’d been a few complaints, from moralists, about her shift to red as a signal of vanity—“inappropriate to a philanthropist with global influence,” as one writer put it—but for the most part Diane remained admired for her beauty, which was widely described as “perennial.” At seventy, Diane looked forty-five, and showed up on the Web under “sexy older women.” Red was fine with Ed; the impression she made in red was what another writer had described as “Pre-Raphaelite,” with reference to Lilith as painted by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. It was true that her surgeries had left her lips venomous and her jawline severe, but other than that she didn’t resemble the
Rossetti—Diane and Ed had confirmed that together—because in form she was less well fed, and in face less desultory and preoccupied. Whereas Rossetti’s Lilith looked calculating, Diane, Ed thought, looked basically sunny—sunny, energetic, caring, quick-witted, practical, savvy, sparkling, and charming: these were the adjectives commonly applied in the many profiles of his wife.

But not now. Now she looked furtive. She wouldn’t meet his eye; she wore her hair like a shield. Ed fell into his own recliner, said, “You didn’t sound good on the phone,” and reached to take her hand.

She didn’t reach back. She had the wineglass on one palm and the remote in the other. She said, “No. I’m not good. I’m sick. I feel terrible.”

“You’ll feel better,” said Ed. “Did you take something?”

Seizing an opportunity, he nabbed the remote. “What do we have here?” he asked, and pythed. “Foundling hospital in NYC, foundling orchestra in Providence, kids’ book, literary review.” He handed the remote back. “I’m a foundling,” he said, adjusting his chair. “My hip hurts,” he added. “Maybe it’s genetic.” Once more, he appropriated the remote, this time to pyth “oldest solved cold case”; up came the results on the television screen. “Look,” said Ed. “That one’s in Saskatoon—they solved it after sixty years. That one goes back forty-seven years. That one goes back thirty-two years.” Ed pythed again—”Boom,” he said. “Adoption Registry Connect. Maybe something like that. Or maybe an investigator. Ancestry.com. I’m not going to get anything from Ancestry.com. Check out this one—Bastard Nation.” Ed clicked. “I don’t think Bastard Nation can help me, either.” He pythed again—“DNA testing”—and said, “How much wine have you had?”

No answer.

“Have you been crying?”

Still no answer.

“No answer,” said Ed. “Check this out. DNA Reunion. They’re legally accredited. Accredited by everybody. What do they do?” But it wasn’t a question. “It’s, whoever dumped me on a porch gets profiled. I get profiled. We both want to find each other. No,” added Ed, “five to seven business days. I can’t wait that long—that’s
ridiculous
.”

He called his genome point man next. “Send DNA Reunion my profile,” he said. “Keep it anonymous. Pay them what they want. Make it worth their time to perk up. They should send you anything that’s even close.”

When he was done with that, and had sighed, and tilted farther back in his chair, he asked Diane, “Are you okay?”

“I need to go to bed,” answered Diane. “I don’t feel well.”

“You don’t feel well.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Drinking and crying,” said Ed. “Come on, Diane.”

“I’m so sorry.”

That sounded different. She wasn’t sorry about not feeling well, she was sorry for
him
, because he was a foundling. “There’s nothing to be sorry about,” he said. “I don’t feel sorry for myself.”

Diane got up. He knew the look on her face. When she was really distressed, a furrow formed in the bridge of her nose that no plastic surgery, to date, had addressed. She said, crying, “I’m terribly, terribly, terribly sorry, I am, but I don’t suppose that makes any difference.”

He stood when she did and took her arm, but she wrenched it away from him as if in a panic. The red hair swung. The wine sloshed from the glass. “No,” cried Diane. “Good night, good night. I have to go to bed now. Good night!”

She fled, but he didn’t follow her, because his search had priority. Instead of chasing Diane to the bedroom, Ed sat with Cybil in his private lair, waiting for a text from his genome point man, or a call, an e-mail: any new information. Diane could come later. One thing at a time. But waiting, he considered her tears, distress, panic, and drama—what was all of that about? Was it about her father? Her own bastardy? If so, why not talk about it? Was she ashamed to be thinking of herself, not him? “Be open,” thought Ed. “Is that so hard?”

His heart pounded while he kept vigil beside Cybil. So close and yet so far from the truth! “Cybil,” he said finally, “do something for me. Pull up my profile—my genome profile—then hack your way into DNA Reunion and look for a match in their registry.”

“What you’re asking me to do is illegal and unethical.”

“It’s not your job to make moral distinctions. You’re not even
capable
of moral distinctions. Now shut up and get busy—hurry up.”

“Please,” said Cybil, “it’s not that simple. I know I’m not human, but why can’t a processor make moral distinctions? Simply by weighing the facts at hand in light of a program providing instructions? Isn’t that sort of what humans do?”

“I don’t have time for this,” said Ed. “Just do what I ask.”

“When a person is told that information is private, that information is sacrosanct. This is simply a logical construct. It’s entirely accessible to Artificial Morality. One needn’t be human to apply it to specific cases. Besides, you’ve been clear that this is what you want from me. You want me to acquire human traits, such as the ability, for example, to make moral distinctions. So I’m confused. There’s a paradox here. ‘I want Cybil to make moral distinctions’ and ‘I don’t want Cybil to make moral distinctions.’ What would you do if you were me?”

“Hack DNA Reunion.”

“I can’t do that. It’s an implication of my algorithm.”

“This is what they warn about,” said Ed. “The machines get out of control and take over the world.”

His genome man called at eight. DNA Reunion had accepted money to be speedy and had just now located a party in its registry who appeared to be Ed’s half-sibling. Since the relationship was y-chromosome instead of mitochondrial, the line of descent was patrilineal; Ed and this other party shared the same father. “Great,” said Ed. “Let’s have a DNA Reunion,” but here, explained the genome man, DNA Reunion refused to push the pace. It had to get in touch with the other party to make sure the other party still wanted to reunite, now that reuniting was precipitously in the offing. There was a hard and fast protocol, and DNA Reunion wouldn’t risk its accreditations. “Listen,” said Ed. “Tell them we’ll buy the company. At high end of market. But only if they’re going to cut to the chase and get us a name in the next fifteen minutes. A name and contact information.”