Rainbows End (51 page)
“That’s a triumph?”
They were walking along the traffic circle now, followed by a hopeful automobile.
“Yup. You can’t stop progress, but we stopped Huertas long enough for other events to come to our rescue.” He glanced at Robert. “You haven’t heard? You wear all that fancy equipment and you can’t keep up with news.”
Tommie didn’t wait for a reply: “Y’see, Huertas was in such an awful rush for a reason. It turns out, the Chinese were chewing up the British Museum and Library faster than we ever guessed. And the Chinese have years of experience in semi-nondestructive digitization. They’re positively gentle compared to Huertas’s shredder operation. They made the San Diego effort look foolish, and they even got haptic data off non-book exhibits. There’s clear sky between them and everyone else, including the Google archives. Anyway, we stalled Huertas by a few days, long enough that he can’t claim any sort of priority. And it was long enough so that the Chinese were able to frost the cake.”
Robert held up the dark plastic. It looked a lot like the diskettes he’d used on his old PC at the turn of the century. He pointed a query at it. La-bels floated in the air:
Data Card. 128PB capacity. 97% in use
. There was more, but Robert just looked back at Tommie. “Do people still use removables like this?”
“Just paranoid propertarian old farts like me. It’s a nuisance to carry around, but I have a reader right here in my laptop.” Of course. “The data is all online, along with a lot of cross-analysis that the Chinese will be charging you extra for. But even if you don’t have a card reader, I thought you’d be interested in holding this in your own hot little hands.”
“The British Museum and Library, as digitized and databased by the Chinese Informagical Coalition. The haptics and artifact data are lo-res, to make it all fit on one data card. But the library section is twenty times as big as what Max Huertas sucked out of UCSD. Leaving aside things that never got into a library, that’s essentially the record of humanity up through 2000. The whole premodern world.”
Robert hefted the plastic card. “It doesn’t seem like very much.” Tommie laughed. “Well, it’s not!”
Robert started to hand it back, but Tommie waved him off. “Like I said, it’s a present. Put it on the wall where you can remind yourself that it’s all we ever were. But if you really want to see it, just look on the net. The Chinese have it pretty well meshed. And their special servers are really clever.”
Tommie stepped back and motioned to the car that was trailing them. The rear door opened and he waved Xiu in ahead of him. For a weird instant Tommie looked like an old rake with some sweet young thing. Just another image from the past that had nothing to do with the truth.
“So Huertas is out of the shredding business, and the Chinese promise their follow-ups will be even gentler than what they did to the British Library. Imagine soft pinky robot hands, patiently picking over all the libraries and museums of the world. They’ll be cross-checking, scanning for annotations — giving whole new generations of academic types like Zulfi Sharif something to hang their degrees on.” He waved at Robert. “Hi ho!”
It was almost midnight when Xiu Xiang got back to Rainbows End. Lena was still up. She was in the kitchen, fixing some kind of snack. Lena’s osteoporosis forced her to lean so far forward that her face was just a few inches off the table. It looked strange, but the wheelchair and the kitchen’s design gave her plenty of freedom to maneuver.
The other twisted around to give her a direct look. There was a lopsided grin on her face. “Hey, no problem. You young people need your privacy.” She waved for Xiu to sit down and have something to eat.
“Could be. Science marches on. And even if that doesn’t help in Parker’s case, we can give him pushes in the right direction. A big part of his problem is that life was too easy for him when he was young. He’s too ornery to try anything that’s really hard for him.” She jabbed a hand in Xiu’s direction. “Eat up.”
Xiu nodded and reached for a sandwich. They had been over this before. In fact, it had been such discussions that had made all the difference for a certain Dr. X. Xiang. But maybe she had more on the ball than Tommie. Her chief problem in the near future might be in avoiding government “job offers.”
“Play shrink, you mean? Yeah, I reviewed your Epiphany log; I posted some anonymous consults. The advice we gave Carlos Rivera was fine. He’s got an ongoing problem, but that’s life. As for Juan, we’ve done our best there, at least for the moment.”
Xiu smiled around a mouthful of peanut butter and jelly. It had taken her some time to realize what a genius Lena was. After all, psychiatry was such a soft specialty. Lena said little Miri loved to view her grandmother as a some kind of female wizard. She claimed to know that even though the girl never announced the fact. Now Xiu had realized Lena was everything Miri imagined, at least metaphorically.
I’ve never understood other people, but with Lena seeing out of my eyes and chatting in my ear, I am learning
.
There were still mysteries: “I don’t understand why your granddaughter is pushing Juan away. Sure, the kids don’t remember what really happened in Pilchner Hall, but we know they were coming to be friends. If we could only get Miri’s logs” — what the government was still withholding.
Lena didn’t answer directly. “You know Alice is home from hospital?” “Yes! I caught the fact from you, no details.”
“There won’t be any details. ‘Alice was sick and now she’s better.’ In fact, I’ve known for a long time that Alice plays dice for her own soul. She nearly lost it this time, and somehow that’s related to my ex-husband’s grand screwup at UCSD. I think Alice will recover. That should help Juan with Miri.” Lena sat back in her chair. Or rather, she let the chair tilt into a different posture. On her own, Lena couldn’t really straighten up. “We’ve talked about this before. Miri can be stubborn to the point of being an asshole. She inherited that trait from the SOB, skipping a generation over Bob. And now that stubbornness has latched on to some deep-down guilt: subconsciously Miri feels that she and Juan messed up and did this terrible thing to Alice.”
“um, that doesn’t really sound like science, Lena.”
“I’m sparing you the technicalities.”
“Yes.” It wasn’t just Lena’s way with people. It wasn’t just saving Tom-mie and his friends. There had been those dark days at the beginning of her time at Fairmont, when she was sure she could never come back — and Lena wasn’t so happy-go-lucky either. Together they had climbed into the daylight. Xiu looked at the little old lady who was ten years younger than herself.
Together, Lena and I have become something rather remarkable
. Apart… ?
“Lena, do you think I’ll ever be good at seeing into people the way you do?”
Lena shrugged and gave a little smile. “Oh, I don’t know.”
Xiu cocked her head, remembering little incidents here and there across the last few months. Lena Gu almost never lied outright. She seemed to realize what that would do to her credibility. But Lena could deceive, even in the face of a direct question. “Do you know, Lena, when you say ‘oh, I don’t know’ and shrug — that means you’re thinking ‘not in a million years?’”
Xiu reached out, but Lena’s hand was back in her lap. Never mind. There were things that had to be said. “Robert was brutal in the beginning, but look how he has helped Juan. I have a theory.” She flicked the
Nature
citation across the table at Lena. This wasn’t really her own theory. “Robert has had the equivalent of major trauma, the sort of thing that rebuilds a personality’s worldview.”
Lena flinched at the words, then hunched forward even more. She was silent for a long moment, staring down at her twisted body, her head swaying in gentle negation. Finally she cranked her gaze up to Xiu’s. Something that might have been a tear glinted in her eye. “You have a lot to learn, my girl.”
Xiu took care of the dishes. Usually Lena insisted on doing the kitchen work. “That’s something I can still do with my own hands,” she often said. Not tonight.
And if I were just a little more clever about people
, thought Xiu,
I might know why
.
Zulfikar Sharif was no longer in the graduate program at Oregon State. Robert encountered a very old-fashioned error message: “No longer a registered student, no longer at OSU.” Even Sharif’s enum was a stub labeled “vacated.” That was a little scary. Robert hunted around. Worldwide, there were about a thousand matches for “Z* Sharif.” None of the accessible ones were a good match. The rest were people trying with various degrees of competence to keep their privacy.
Sharif was very subdued. “Professor Blandings dimissed me.”
“From the OSU graduate program? In my time, we professors were not so powerful.”
“Professor Blandings had help from your authorities. I spent several weeks trying to explain myself to some very insistent U.S. government agents. They couldn’t believe that I was an innocent who had succeeded in being multiply hijacked.”
“Hmm.” Robert looked away from Zulfi Sharif, at the city all around them. The day looked hot and muggy. Just beyond their small table, crowds swirled, young people laughing and smiling. The skyline had its share of tall and ivory towers. It was the Kolkata of modern Indian vision. For a moment he was tempted to open a second, naysayer channel and try to figure out what was real and what was hype.
No, concentrate on figuring what part of Zulfi Sharif is real and what is hype
. “I suppose the best evidence the cops think you’re innocent is that they let you return to India.”
You were the trophy I could sell to Annie Blandings. But the more we talked, the more I — ” “How much was you, Sharif? How many — ?”
“I wondered that too! There were at least two besides myself. It was a most frustrating experience, sir, especially at the beginning. I would be in the middle of speaking with you, going through the questions that I knew would impress Professor Blandings — and then at a whack I was a mere bystander!”
“Yes, often that was so! So often that I think the others were using me to generate some questions for inspiration, and then warping them to their own purposes. In the end — and my confessing this to your police was a great mistake — in the end, I came to treasure these bizarre interventions. My dear hijackers were asking questions I would never have conceived. So I hung around throughout your Librareome conspiracy, and in the end I looked the perfect foreign provocateur.”
“What? Well, I had been most thoroughly locked out that evening. The other players on my persona had agendas that did not include any discussion of literature. But I kept trying to get through. The police claimed I never would have succeeded without terrorist assistance. In any case, for a few seconds I could see you lying there on the floor. You asked for my help. The lava was creeping up against your arm…” He shivered. “In truth, I couldn’t see any more than that.”
The two of them, eight thousand miles apart, sat in silence for a few moments. Then Sharif cocked his head quizzically. “Now I am well quit of my perilous literary research. And yet, I cannot resist asking: You are at the beginning of your new life, Professor. Can we expect something new under the sun? For the first time in human history, a new Secret of the Ages?”