Hyperthought (8 page)

And this local guy Luc met in a bar, Trinni al-Uq, he helped us acquire aircraft Trinni also got us a bargain on modular jellyfish—you know, those inflatable seafarm units that float on the ocean and harvest oxygen straight out of the briny depths. We anchored three stealth-shielded jellyfish in the Mediterranean to house refugees.

Me, I’m a decent pilot, so I flew the Paris run. I met the protes in an abandoned solar plant built under the Butte de Montmartre. Men, women, children. None of them had seen the surface, and they were nervous, you know. I tried to remember what Luc used to say to calm people down. I made jokes. I helped people put on their surfsuits. The littlest kids we wrapped in cargo bubbles, and I tried to turn that into a game. I led people up top, forty to a load, tethered on a safety line. I remember this one kid, she was so amazed to be walking on the surface, she did a cartwheel, even in her gawky oversized surfsuit. Man, that was bliss to see.

We airlifted almost 30,000 Euro protes that first month. Thank the Laws my friends stepped in. Luc, Adrienne, Jonas and the others, they made it happen. Without them, the rescue project never would have come together. Mes dieux, but they teased me, too. Luc and Jonas called me “Chief.” Adrienne called me “the rescuing angel.” They asked me about every little thing as if my opinion carried real weight. Plenty soon, all the volunteers in our midtown cube were following their lead, calling me “Chief” and asking me stuff. I made up answers left and right.

Jin sent three more text messages during that time. I saved them, but they didn’t make any sense. “Imagine experiencing the world without language,” he wrote. “Could we distinguish boundaries if we had no names for foreground and background?” Another time, he wrote, “We label each experience by referencing what we’ve seen before. A large room, a white person, a sharp stick. Imagine seeing something entirely new. It must be like birth.” In his last text message, he wrote, “I will perceive undifferentiated experience, without the intervening metaphor of number. I will see and hear everything at once.”

Frankly, that didn’t sound like fun to me. I kept sending back vidmail telling him to get the heck out of there. Even as I flew low under the Paris security scans and met those frightened refugees and led them up to the Earth’s surface for the first time in their lives, I was thinking about Jin. When I wasn’t flying, I was watching his movies. I memorized his every line and gesture. It shames me to admit I even downloaded a sexy photo of Jin from one of those sleazy fan-club sites, and I carried it folded up in my belt. I didn’t even tell Adrienne about that.

Have you ever been so obsessed with someone that you feel wired on speed twenty-four hours a day? You’re distracted and edgy. It’s not exactly a pleasant feeling. All the time I was flying, that old Van Gogh copter-jet back and forth to Paris, I imagined Jin was there beside me, watching everything I did. I imagined I was earning his approval.

His first videomail came in April. I was working in the office in Palmertown when the Net node on my arm vibrated. I took the call just like that, thinking it was Luc or Adrienne or Jonas. But it was Jin.

He looked pale, and his eyes were too bright. I bent close to the small screen and adjusted the contrast. His hair seemed wet He was grinning like a fool. To my surprise, a text box opened onscreen, covering half his face. “Hello, pet.” The words appeared letter by letter in the text box, as if he were typing slowly.

“Jin,” I whispered, “can you speak?” That text box scared me.

He shook his head, still wearing the inane grin. He really didn’t look like himself. Haltingly, he typed, “I have developed an aversion to the sound of my voice.”

I braced my arm on the desk to keep my Net node from shaking. Finally, I remembered to activate the holo. Jin’s face projected above the screen in a fist-sized, three-dimensional shimmer. I also enlarged the text box and tilted it toward me so it was easier to read. The projection floated like a sheet of white film just above my arm.

“Nonlinear phonemes,” he typed with apparent effort. “Nanobots in my astrocytes. Wish you were here.”

Just then a shadow fell across his image, and Jin turned his head. A second later, the holograph vanished, and my screen went gray. That last part of Jin’s message haunted me. “Wish you were here.” He’d said that before. What did he mean by that? Did he want me to come? I tried all day to reestablish the connection.

A month after that, Jonas retrieved a second vidmail from Jin that had hung up in a Net traffic jam and would never have gotten through to me. The date header was gone. Who knows when he sent it. The first part of the message was distorted, and Jonas had to clean it up. What emerged from the shadows was Jin, sitting in half-light, wearing a blindfold.

Again a text box opened. Jonas enlarged it for me, but instead of typed text, what appeared were quivery scrawled letters. Jin was writing by hand, using a slate and stylus. His first word took shape with glacial slowness. It was, “Fear.”

Mes dieux, but I clenched my fists till the fingernails cut. Jin in a blindfold sending a message of fear? My imagination ran rampant. Adrienne walked in about then and leaned over the screen to see what we were staring at, but Jonas must have signaled her to be quiet. More words were forming in the text box. I watched the holograph of Jin’s emaciated face, shadowed by the black cloth. His hollow cheeks had grown as pale as my own. He pursed his lips in concentration as he wrote. “Fear the light,” his sentence read.

“Fear the light? What the hell?” said Adrienne.

Now Jin was scribbling another word. His stylus vacillated, then skipped. “Blind,” he wrote. With desperate illogic, I prayed to the Laws of Physics for his safety. Jin’s stylus wandered on, skittering like a seismograph. The final sentence was almost illegible. “Blind yourself.”

That was the end. “Fear the light. Blind yourself.” The message terminated in a rough cut. From the silence that followed, I could tell that even Jonas and Adrienne felt shaken.

Adrienne squeezed my shoulder. “Jollers?”

“It’s all right,” I answered.

We said little about the message, that day or any other.

Two weeks later, a curtain fell on Euro. Jonas’s network started failing. Luc couldn’t reach any of his contacts. Adrienne stomped around our midtown cube slapping the Net monitors as if that would make them work better. Apparently, Greenland.Com had detected our covert communications, and they simply shut down the power grids. Only much later did we discover what that meant in terms of prote lives.

From the commercial news channels, we learned that the largest three Coms—Greenland, Nome, and Pacific—had used the rebellion as an excuse to annex and devour their smaller rivals. Now there were no longer fourteen northern Coms, just three. Greenland was claiming all of Euro as its protectorate. Nome had taken over the entire continent of Norm America. Pacific had annexed the Arctic Sea and a big chunk of mainland Asia.

The “Triad,” they styled themselves. When they issued a joint statement, every bar in Palmertown fell silent. We watched Caspar Van Hyeck, Allistaire Wagstaff, and Suradon Sura announce that the conflict was over. Then our links to the north went dead. We heard no more news. Even the commercial channels were stymied. It was as if half our planet had dropped out of existence.

For several weeks afterward, Jonas kept sending messages through the old grids, hoping they’d flicker back to life, but they didn’t. The refugees we’d placed in the floating Mediterranean camps were safe enough. Those jellyfish were stealth-clad and self-sustaining. Trinni gave the protes training classes over the Net in how to operate the equipment. At first, we offered to place them in jobs down south, but the protes voted to stay close to home. They elected themselves a central management committee and set up an internal barter system. They could sail their little fleet wherever they wanted, so we decided to let them be.

For a while, we kept flying missions. But no one met us at our rendezvous spots. Then four of our aircraft were shot down in one week, so we called a halt. After that, we just waited. Adrienne’s fundraisers started losing money. One by one, our volunteers lost heart and drifted away.

The appalling thing for me was how abruptly everything changed in Palmertown. One day there was a war. The next day, no war. It was over, forgotten, yesterday’s news. Even now, I try not to blame the southerners. Those northern cities were no more real to the citizens of Palmertown than some exotic movie. The north existed only on the Net. The people around me had never visited Paris. They didn’t grow up in those tunnels. They hadn’t lost mothers and brothers. In fact, the war had changed their lives very little. It was easy to forget.

Adrienne was the first to go back to her old job with the fashion ezine. “You did your best, Jollers. It’s time to move on.” Ever practical, that was my Adrienne. But I knew about the handkerchief she carried hidden in her sleeve because her beautiful azure eyes kept leaking tears.

When my funds ran completely out, Luc found a job in human relations for a big furniture chain, and I signed on with a surface repair crew. We gave up the midtown office, and Luc and I rented a tiny residence cube in the lower city. Typical southern place, it had beige walls, dented drop-down lockers, a coffin-size toilet, and a door with a broken latch. We splatter-painted the walls and floor with fuchsia glow-foam, bought cheap yellow hammocks and fixed the latch. Luc acquired a flat-panel Net node for the wall, and I splurged on an animatronic aquarium. I love those things. But the place never felt like home.

I kept narrow casting vidmail to Jin. He hadn’t left my mind, not for an instant. Long after we’d lost touch with our friends in Euro, I kept badgering Jonas to help me reach Jin. Why, when half the world was disintegrating, did I continue to brood over the fate of one man? Because I’d promised? Because I felt responsible? Because my damned female hormones kept urging me to protect him? As I record this years later, I can tell you the real reason. It’s because I have the kind of heart that, once it gets set, it’s like concrete. At the time, though, I didn’t stop to examine motives.

Jonas said, “You’re flaking, love. This obsession is deeply unzipped.” But he went to work with a will. Maybe it was the tedium of inaction. We were all feeling it by then. Like a pressure between the ears, and fingers that couldn’t stop drumming, and words stuck in our throats that we knew were a waste of breath. Anyway, Jonas did everything he could to find Jin. He hacked Nome.Com’s internal datafiles—a stunning feat. Before they shut him out, he downloaded a few terabytes of newsworthy data and earned his five minutes of fame on the Net, but not another word from Jin.

I wasted six weeks on dreary routine, welding surface ducts all day, avoiding the crew boss, checking my Net node every hour. We could only guess the fate of our friends, and no one wanted to talk about it anymore. The carnival was over. We were left with ignorance and dread—and denial. We concentrated on trivial things and pretended that tune wasn’t passing.

Often I dreamed about Jin. I dreamed Merida had sawed off the top of his skull, and I saw his brain rise up and metamorphose into a furry brown bat. When I woke from those dreams, I prayed that Nome’s troopers would march into that scuzzy clinic and spray napalm. My beautiful Jin, he’d be better off dead than transmogrified by that quack Merida. Almost at once, I reversed my prayer and begged for Jin’s life.

At night I hung out with Adrienne, watching the Net’s inadequate half-news about half a world. What a glum pair we made, drifting through random bars. I guzzled beer while Adrienne sipped some zero-calorie swill and smiled halfheartedly at the men who flocked around her. I put off going home, because I knew Luc would be there, snuggled up with his curly-headed Arab friend, Trinni al-Uq. Seeing them together made my insides hurt. I hadn’t snuggled with anyone since Godthaab. Since Jin.

I knew I didn’t belong in Antarctica, welding ducts and drinking too much beer, letting my muscles go soft—while half the world might be suffering the fate of the damned. And Jin. What if he were counting on me to come and save him? “Wish you were here,” he’d written. Twice. I guess my anguish about prote friends and the captive Com aristocrat got mixed up together. I forgot they were supposed to be on opposite sides. I awoke one morning—July it was, the middle of southern winter—with an idea already fully mature in my head. I couldn’t help the people in Euro anymore. That door was closed. But maybe I could still help Jin.

Luc rolled over in his hammock and asked why I was packing.

“Can you believe I’ve never been to California?” Piling gear in the middle of the floor, I started humming. I felt better than I had in weeks. It was as if my spirit had been wilting, and now it was springing back to life.

Luc rubbed his eyes. “Jolie, please tell me you’re not…”

I coiled rope around my forearm and grinned at him.

Trinni raised his curly head from Luc’s pillow and sighed. “She’s going after that Commie.” I didn’t think Trinni had been listening.

Luc sat up and frowned at me with that wise expression that always made him seem so much older than his years. “Tell me it isn’t so, chérie. Remember the pilots we lost over Paris? California will be the same. You can’t get through. They will certainly shoot you down.”

“That’s why I’m not asking anyone else to go.”

“Chérie, your life is worth more than this. What does Adrienne say?”

“I didn’t consult Adrienne,” I answered, grinning.

That made Luc angry. “You would risk your life for this aristo prince when his people are slaughtering our friends?”

“His people. Not him, Luc. He saved your life, remember?”

“Ma chérie, you know it’s impossible.”

I just kept grinning. “At least it’s something to do.”

I LEFT PALMERTOWN
on a Monday, early in August, and set course on the shortest arc toward California. I had saved enough of my wages to buy a used aircar—a Durban Bee. Thinking about Luc made me sad. Luc had offered to help me search for Jin, but I couldn’t let him. Palmertown had been good to Luc. He was getting a life together, making friends, earning good money. I think he was even recovering from his grief over the war. I didn’t want to mess that up. So I asked him to stay put in case I needed backup. He took it in good grace, and we parted with hugs and tears. I even shook hands with Trinni. D’accord, Luc didn’t need me hanging around anymore. I experienced a kind of revelation about that. Maudlin stuff.