Existence (39 page)

It was a biting thought—one that seemed ornery and ungrateful, amid such notable medical progress. But, still, the thought was
hers.
Tor had very little else that she could call her own, other than thoughts.

Anyway, the notion did not take root for long. Because Tor soon was thoroughly distracted by the very next thing that they tried …

… when they linked her to the Cloud.

REPAIRMEN

Oh, the fracking mess.

I’m supposed to be careful what I say. As a public mouthpiece for Freedom Club, I should keep my distance from “illegal activity.” One rule for revolutionary movements, going all the way back to Bakunin, is strict separation of the political and action wings.

But hell, I’m fed up. What have we accomplished since that glorious event the dumbass peasants call Awfulday? When it seemed, for one magnificent moment, that the whole corrupt edifice of greed and bureaucracy and technology would come crashing down? Since then, what disappointment! Great Ted, working in his little mountain cabin, rattled the modernists’ cage. Why can’t we?

Failures pile up. Did that nuke in the Pyrenees accomplish anything? Rumors claim the abomination—the Basque Chimera—escaped. Worse, there’s a whole herd of resurrected mammoths grazing in Canada now, and a million acres of gene-designed perennial wheat! And the goddamn robot minds get smarter daily! And against all that, what have the bold followers of Kaczynski and McVey and Fu-Wayne accomplished lately?

The dolts can’t even blow up a damned zeppelin that’s full to bursting with explosive gas! So that alien crystal thing survived and who knows how many horrid new technologies the geeks will squeeze out of it?

A time of decision is coming! YOU passive supporters of the Better Way must choose. You can go join the
peaceful
Renunciation Movement, like sniveling gits, and follow that “prophet” of theirs, working
within
the corrupt system …

… or else take arms! Offer your skills and your lives to the Action Wing and help topple this teetering so-called civilization!

How to join? Just speak up. They’ll find you.

31.

CONSENSUAL REALITY

Lacey’s generation was to blame, of course.

They were the ones who invented “continuous partial attention,” after all. Who were proud of jumping from one topic to another, spreading themselves as thin as the wrapper on a Sniffaire gelglobe. Or as narrow as the lived-in moment called
now.

But never before had Lacey been forced to stretch her regard among so many
vital
topics, all of them demanding intense focus. In fact, she knew that the organic human brain can divert itself only so much, before returning, elastically, to whatever thought seems most intense. Most demanding. The elephant in the room.

I am a terrible mother.

Out of the maelstrom—attending to matters in Switzerland and Africa, here in Washington and in outer space, that one core fact was clear. By the moral standards of any human culture, she should have simply dropped everything else, in order to participate in the search for her missing son.

Never mind that it would do Hacker no good at all. She had hired the best professionals and offered rewards plentiful enough to divert every yacht and fishing smack and surfer, between here and Surinam, to join the search … or the fact that Mark was down there now, coordinating the quest to find his brother … or that all she’d accomplish, by hurrying down to the Caribbean, would be to get in the way.

Never mind any of that.
It’s simply what a mom would do.

Only maybe not the mother of Hacker Sander.

The last thing in the world he would want from me, would be to show panic … or even much concern.

That one brief burst of telemetry—too short and static-ridden to localize—had reported the reentry capsule to be intact and its passenger healthy, just after it struck the sea. The tiny compartment was designed to float and to sustain life almost indefinitely. Moreover, even if all the electronics aboard had been fried, the shell itself would reflect radar and sonar in uniquely identifiable ways, just as soon as any seekers passed closely enough. A pair of nasty storms had hampered crews from reaching a few search areas, especially those farthest from the likely impact zone. But supposedly it was only a matter of time.

Anyway, she knew how furious the boy would get if he found out that she had rushed south, forsaking and spoiling her once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to witness history firsthand—the very moment of human-alien First Contact. Why? Just to go pace and fret and interfere in the efforts of skilled people?

So, Lacey, is that your rationalization? That you are staying at the Artifact Conference to honor Hacker? In order to do as he would wish—and as Jason would have wished?

Good one.

Next to her sat Professor Noozone. The scientist-popstar was happily engaged, grunting and clicking and subvocally mumbling as he interacted with his avid fan community—now numbering over a hundred million, in part because of where he sat right now. In a VIP seat, no less. The signature draidlocks floated around his head, tipped with lenses and sniffers that turned and pointed in every direction, while wafting aromas of ganja-frankincense shampoo. Occasionally she had to bat one of the strands of overly curious cybactive hair out of her space, but she hadn’t the heart to chide him—the man was
so
puppy-dog grateful to Lacey for getting him into the Observer’s Gallery as her adviser, separated by just a thick sheet of glass from the quarantine chamber and the white-coated figures—including Gerald Livingstone himself—who were examining the Havana Artifact.

In a nearby holistube, she saw an animated Noozone replica, chattering and gesticulating away, while concept-blimps hovered all around its head. The voice was tuned down, in order not to disturb other members of the Advisory Panel—experts, international dignitaries and representatives of all ten Estates. But when Lacey’s gaze settled in that direction, some computer measured her pupil dilation and responded to her interest, by sending a narrow-collimated beam of sound toward one ear.

“So which t’eories have we eliminated so faar?”
The Professor’s animated holvatar drawled in a satin-toned Jamaican accent, as it swept one arm to point at a multidimensional comparison chart hovering nearby.

“Almost none! Till dem Contact Team manages to overcome dem humano-centric bias enough to understand the Artifact entities on their own terms, we are left with only that marvelously enticing ‘join us’ come-yah invitation as a very-major clue to the purpose of the Livingstone Object … or Havana Artifact, or any of the other names for this truly-wondrous thing. Rhaatid.

“And yet, on that sole-basis alone, futures market probabilities have shifted so-dramatically. Wager-contracts based upon alien invasion, for example, plummeted to mere-millicents on the dollar. Bets that pree-dict a true-friendly galactic bredren-federation skyrocketed in value, an’ then split, as interest focused on what
kind
of federated society the aliens might be part of.

“Of course, here is where we try a little smoky-ingenuity to piece together clues based upon the behavior of the strange beings-within-the-stone.…”

Lacey pulled her gaze away and the volume of Profnoo’s vaice tapered off, as she looked beyond the glass at the focus of all this worldwide attention. The Artifact, an oblong-tapered, opalescent cylinder, lay in its cradle under a cloth canopy that staved off most of the room light, keeping it in shade. With just a modest supply of photon energy flowing into the stone, only faint and blurry images of drifting clouds could be seen playing across its surface.

Workmen were attaching hoses to the underside of the table while others erected a new illumination system under the direction of the latest member of the Contact Team—a tall, slender African with dark, almost-purple skin, who was said to be an expert at
animal training,
of all things. Meanwhile, the original discoverer, the astronaut Gerald Livingstone, conferred with General Hideoshi and several colleagues. One of them was a computer-generated holvatar—a full-size, human-scale aintity image, half woman and half tiger—whose feral, carnivorous expression hardly seemed in keeping with the peaceful mission of the team.

With nothing much happening below, and with Profnoo fully occupied addressing his public, Lacey was about to lift her cryptospecs and turn her attention elsewhere, toward
another
urgent matter—events taking place several thousand kilometers to the east. She had an informer secretly planted at the sprawling Glaucus-Worthington estate, near the Liechtenstein border, where delegates were arriving from most of the great families of the clade, as well as Tenskwatawa’s international Responsibility Movement—or “Renunciation Movement” for its attitude toward scientific progress—to negotiate an alliance between those two potent forces. An enciphered report from her spy awaited attention—that should only be readable by this particular set of Mesh goggles. There seemed to be little point in avoiding the matter any longer.

Not with the Naderites panting like eager suitors.
I could do it. Join the do-gooder trillies and fight for the Enlightenment. Unite with the techie rich, clustered in Jakarta and Kerala and California and Rio. The Jains, Omidyars, Yeos, Berggruens, and others. Use my wealth and influence to battle for science. Denounce inherited aristocracy. Blow the whistle on my neo-feudalist friends, who I grew up with …

… and send Jason spinning in his grave.

She had the set of crypto-aiware raised halfway to her face—preparing to give the code unlocking the spy’s report—when someone plopped down, uninvited, onto the plush seat to her right.

“We really should get one of our own, you know.”

She put down the specs. It was Simon Ortega, representative of the Corporate Estate—big businesses based all over the planet. With his dark, Timorese features and Porto accent, Simon exemplified the internationalist image that globalized companies had been trying to convey, ever since Awfulday and the Big Deal. Transparency, open competition, honest dealings—the very essence of the
real
Adam Smith, the original liberal—and no more close affiliation with the superrich.

So why is he sitting down here? Isn’t he afraid to be seen talking to an old-money plutocrat like me?

Or does he have his own sources, telling him what’s going on in Switzerland right now? A power realignment that might lead to a return to the old days, when a few crony families could sway markets, topple corporations and nations, and rock human destiny? If he thinks those times are returning, he could be trying to line up an alliance of his own. To wind up on the winning side.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Ortega. We should get one of our own … what?”

“A group holvatar, Mrs. Donaldson-Sander. A presence entity to speak for us members of the Advisory Council. To represent our interests, beyond the glass, where they are poking away at the visitors from space. Something to counterbalance that damned
Tiger-Girl
and make them stop ignoring us up here!”

Ah.
Lacey realized. So this had nothing to do with events in Zurich. Ortega was just expressing his natural reaction to the way things were going here at the Artifact Conference. Specifically, the way the glass barrier prevented all the people and interests on
this
side, in the observers’ gallery, from influencing events on the other side. The Corporate Estate was collectively more nervous than most.

Although communication with the Artifact aliens was still chaotic and sporadic, the world had given a collective sigh of relief over the clear friendliness of the “join us” remark. Almost any form of participation in an interstellar federation would surely bring benefits, expanded knowledge, propitious technologies, surprising art, and possibly solutions to many problems. Of course, some apple carts would be overturned and upset a few groups. The Renunciators, for example, and Lacey’s own clade of conservative clans.

Not the Naderites, though. They love all this.

Stuck in between—torn by both hope and worry—would be Ortega’s constituency. On the one hand, alien knowledge should offer plenty of new business opportunities for the lucky and agile. On the other hand … even supposing all went well, if terrific new alien concepts and technologies arrived, delivering a million benefits without unleashing serious side effects … even then, lots of corporate entities would see their goods and services and market positions rendered obsolete. Why, just a few improvements in nano-tech might make it possible to at last produce home fabricators—letting citizens create almost any product from raw materials right in the kitchen or garage. A boon … unless your job or portfolio depends on manufacturing. Or shipping goods. In fact, half the companies in every stock market might wither. No wonder he seemed nervous.

Yet, it turned out that Ortega had another purpose entirely.

“Have you heard what they are planning to do, Mrs. Donaldson-Sander? They intend to use
operant conditioning
. That means using
rewards and punishments,
in a crude attempt to implement
behavior modification
on the alien entities residing inside!”

Lacey clamped down to keep from giggling over an unforgivable pun that leaped to mind.

Shall we teach Pavlovian dogs to SETI-up and beg?

Fortunately, the man didn’t notice her brief grunt.

“Can you believe the arrogance? The unbelievable vanity! Assuming all our difficulties in communication are
their fault,
not ours? Employing barbarously inhospitable methods to force them to meet
our
primitive standards of conduct!”

Despite his overwrought passion, Lacey felt impressed—and perhaps a little ashamed. She had been ready—twice in a few seconds—to assign unsavory motives to this man, when his true reason for being upset was idealistic. A matter of graciousness and courtesy.