Wheelers
Page 27
When he trod on a half-buried shoulder blade and found a humerus nearby, he began to believe that he might be on the right track—but a hyena could easily have carried away an entire arm, discarding its remains miles away where Moses would never find it. Trying to keep his hopes subdued, he backtracked through the rocks toward the scene of the original ambush— and suddenly there it lay, right out in the open where it could never have been overlooked.
Of the hand, wrist, and arm that it had encircled, there was no sign. But the transparent face of the Hunters wristnode glinted in the starlight.
Moses scooped up the trophy, brushing off dust. Tucking it inside his shorts he began to lope comfortably back the way he had come. He didn't stop to investigate the desirable object— that would have to wait until he could find a few hours of privacy. One thing he had learned long ago was patience.
The tribal chiefs thought that only a select few of the wisest and oldest men of the Village knew about Outside, and of them no more than two or three knew about the Xnet. If they had been able to listen to women's talk, or to join the children unseen when there were no adults around, they would have had a shock. The children had woven a whole mythology around their interpretation of rumor and chance observation, fueled by overhearing women's conversations. It owed a lot to their vivid imaginations and precious little to reality, but it would have punctured the chiefs' complacency and given them a much-needed reminder that people of lower rank in the tribal pecking order are not stupid. To the children, Outside was a cross between Valhalla, Olympus, and the tunnel-maze of the Snake God; the Xnet was a gateway to the Nether Kingdom, which was the realm of monsters, demons, magicians, angels, and other beings with godlike powers. But Moses, unlike the rest of the children, had spent the early part of his life living Outside, and although his memories were few and involved activities that he couldn't really understand, he still knew that you could do things with the Xnet—real, everyday things like tracking baby cheetahs. And the Hunter who had kidnapped him had worn just such a device on his wrist and had spent a lot of time reading from it and talking to it.
Moses knew that the wristnode was more than just a magical talisman: it represented real knowledge and power. And that was why he had dared to return and take it, when the other children feared it as the property of a Witch and therefore a bringer of misfortune.
Among the Villagers, Moses had a reputation for being a loner, so nobody worried—or even noticed—when he got up before sunrise and made his way toward the rocky foothills that rose sharply behind the Village. He climbed up and across to a small ledge, difficult of access, from which he could easily observe anyone who tried to approach. Behind him was a sheer cliff; in front a steep scarp, treacherous with loose rock and detritus.
He pulled the Hunters 'node from his pocket and held it in his hands, trying to puzzle it out.
Moses didn't know that if an active wristnode is detached from a warm human body then it is forced to rely on internal batteries, which can power it for no more than six hours without being recharged. This one had been lying in the dust for days, and in the dark for the entire night. He also didn't know that wristnodes, being gateways to personal records and communication channels, normally confirmed the voiceprint of the user before they would operate. But because their ambush had taken the Hunter by surprise, the wristnode was still in open access mode, and the daylight now flooding across the plain below was already recharging the batteries through the array of solar cells forming the bracelet. So it was in full working order, and no voice-recognition filter barred him from its communication channels—only from the Hunters personal files, which, as yet, he had no idea existed.
So when he looked into its rounded, transparent face and spoke to it—as he had seen the Hunter doing—it spoke back to him. And when he looked steadily at its face, it noticed his attention and projected a virtual holoscreen in a fixed position relative to his eyes. Suddenly finding himself transported to what seemed to be another location entirely, he dropped the node—and the illusion vanished.
Some tentative exploration cominced him that none of these strange things were harmful, and he slipped the device over his wrist so that he wouldn't drop it again.
'Node technology had been refined, becoming intuitive, effortless, and if necessary helpful—all without approaching pre-Pause smartness. To do this, the designers had been forced to assume certain cultural reflexes that were by no means natural to a child who had been spirited away from civilization at the age of four, spent three years of his young life among wild dogs and street children and another as the unofficial adoptee of a gang warlord, and then been dumped unceremoniously into a deliberate throwback to a previous millennium.
Painfully slowly, with much backtracking, Moses began to discover how to navigate the Xnet.
He wanted to make contact with Outside.
Patiently, singlemindedly, he tried everything he could think of, and learned what happened when he did. He found endless information on incomprehensible topics—intelligent lawn mowers, travel agencies for the deaf, hourly Normerican allergen charts, how to build nesting boxes for blue tits. None of this information was of the slightest use to him—but the ability to find it was.
Becoming aware that the sun was nearing its zenith, he hid the wristnode in a deep hole in the cliff, safe from the weather, and plugged the hole with a stone to keep out any prying wildlife. He desperately wanted to continue investigating the 'node's strange powers, but if he didn't turn up for his midday meal, his absence would be noticed.
He would, however, return tomorrow, and most days thereafter, for as long as it took.
The wristnode's batteries ran down every night, but exposure to sunlight quickly restored operating power. Moses never did find out how to make the Hunter's 'node conserve its batteries when not in active use: in fact, he never found out that it had batteries. But he did find an Xnet mail-order catalogue.
You could buy things over a wristnode! Amazingly, you could even buy another wristnode. Or a robotic Winnie-the-Pooh, a complete collection of the live concerts of the Lone Star Seven, or the services of a Sexy Schoolgirl Masseuse . . .
All you had to do was tell the 'node some numbers.
He tried that, making up whatever numbers came into his head, but nothing interesting happened.
Eventually he stumbled on the Mormon genealogical site in the Utah mountains. Elsewhere in Normerica, a computer noticed and obeyed an old instruction. "Iffy?"
The bored techie woke from a daydream about her latest boyfriend. Her 'node had said something. Message waiting, probably. She rubbed her eyes open and then absently wiped her hands on the green Carver Telecommunications slinksuit. "Groovy, Baby. Speak to me."
"You remember that standing order from eleven years ago?"
"No. Why should I?"
"You meatbrains, always forgetting things. It came down from the boss herself."
Iphigenia yawned. "Yeah, like a hundred others. Fill me in, Baby"
"The Odingo kid. First name: Moses. Disappeared from Africa. Believed dead, nothing ever confirmed. Mother—friend of the boss—could never accept it, so we set up a top-priority alert for any plausible signs. Instant response."
"Oh, yeah. That." She wondered if her hair would look better shaved close or braided with seashells . . . What would Mar-cello like best?
"Someone's been trying to access the kid's file in the Salt Lake database."
"So? That must happen once in a while . . . Probably some oik trying to trace a long-lost maiden aunt."
"Maybe. But the standing orders say that the duty telecoms monitor has to check out anything promising, and if it holds up under scrutiny, alert the boss immediately. I'll do that bit, but you have to authorize it."
"Shit. Why me. Baby? Why the bloody hell couldn't the old bitch have it piped through automatically to her own 'node?"
The computer parsed the sentence and took it literally. Baby wasn't hot at recognizing rhetorical questions. "Accord
ing to the help file, because she has too much else to do. Your job is to act as a filter."
"Damn," said Iphigenia. "Okay, then: forget it. It's almost certainly a false alarm."
"Is that an official authorization?"
"Yes." Flippantly
The computer was very hot indeed on verbal tone. "According to instructions, I'll have to inform your superior ..."
"Bloody smart-alec machine. Sure you're not pre-Pause? Okay okay, tell me what you've found, you useless piece of dog turd. Baby dear."
The machine told her. It showed her the would-be accessor's voiceprint and facial eigendecomposition . . . Still bored, she instructed the central router to dig up the child's medical records and compare. The result came back in less than a second.
She stared at it.
She swore, surprisingly mildly under the circumstances. All thought of that sexy hunk Marcello vanished. "Baby: top-priority authorization, confirmed and logged. Get me the Boss, now! There's a promotion in this.
A call from one of Angles personal staff woke Charity up in the small hours of the morning. "You what? What? Moses? You think you've found Moses? But he's—I mean, I thought he was— you really mean this, it isn't some sick joke, is—"
A new voice broke in: she recognized the face immediately. The 'node showed a user-ID guarantee icon—it really was her. It all came out in a rush. "Oh, Angle, is it true? Is he all right? Where is he? How long till—"
Angle calmed her down and explained exactly what was going to happen, what Charity's role would be, and why it was vital to succeed.
Charity found it hard to take in. Apparently Angle was worried that if she had located Moses, others would surely do the same. Others, it seemed, who might have motives for harming the boy. "I'll do anything," Charity said. "Anything at all."
"Good. We have no idea how he got where he is, but we're working flat out on it now that we have a place to start. We've sent him some Xmail, but so far he hasn't answered. It's okay, honey: nothing to worry about. His node-access profile shows that he only ever nodes up around midmorning."
Charity had always possessed an excellent grasp of terrestrial time zones. "Midmorning where?"
Angle told her.
"The Village? You mean he's been in the Village all along? But that's less than a thousand miles from here! Why didn't anyone tell me? Why didn't—oh, sorry, you've only just found out, you can't—"
"As far as the official records go, he was born in the Village. Obviously the records were hacked—I'm just getting notification suggesting it was done from Free China, but there's no proof, not any that officialdom would accept. Which means we'd have a terrible job convincing the authorities to release him to us. No, not even if all the physiological markers agree—they'd worry about hacking then, okay? And you know how strict they are about the Village—unless it stays isolated, it won't give valid results. I guess if we went through regular channels we might get a decision in six months . . . provided I greased the wheels. We can't wait that long, Charity. If we can find him, so can others. We've dug up some connection with Free Chinese gang warfare . . . Drugs, endangered species ... He may have enemies in Free China."
Charity's mind was in turmoil. She had long ago given up hope—or so she had thought, until now. "Angle! They—they might hurt him!"
They will almost certainly kill him, Angle thought. Unless we get there first. "Yes, honey, they might. So here's the plan. I'm sending an autogiro over straightaway from one of my gas fields in the Mozambique Channel, carrying trained paramilitaries. They'll go in and pick him up. But I can't risk landing in the Village itself—there'll be hell to pay. So as soon as Moses nodes on and listens to his Xmail, you are going to have to talk to him and persuade him to meet the 'giro at some suitable landmark, far enough away from the Village that nobody will see what happens."
Charity felt sick and impossibly happy, all at once. "Of course! But I want to he on that autogiro! I don't care how dangerous it is, I've got to be there!"
On the screen, Angle gave a humorless laugh. "I was wondering how to talk you into it," she said. "I don't think Moses could have survived what he must have been through without being a very shrewd young man. Unless he recognizes you, there's no way we will be able to convince him to let us pick him up. And unless you're there when we land, there's no way he'll ever get into that 'giro. So, sweetheart, you don't need to volunteer. You're conscripted."
Moses knew about autogiros . . . One had taken him away from everything he loved, to be cast into the anarchic world of the street children. Deng Po-zhou had saved him from that horror and been kind to him—but Deng had also banished him to the strangeness of the Village and abandoned him. There, he had grown up with what he now thought of as his second family, after Deng's household.
Suddenly his world had been turned upside down. There had been a family before Deng's ... He knew his mother was not Binshaba; he could see, as soon as he thought about it, that it could not be Jeweled Jade, either, for he was black and she was not. Two "mothers," both fake . . . Now the Hunter's wristnode had brought him face-to-face with his real mother.
At first he had failed to recognize her. Until she showed him the funny toy that turned into lots of animals—found by the police, returned, treasured. Oink! Then painful memories that he had previously buried came flooding back.
He remembered her.
He was not at all sure he wanted to meet her.
Yet here he was, sitting on a rock, ten miles away from the Village in a region that the Villagers seldom frequented . . . waiting for another 'giro. This one would be small, she had told him, and yellow . . . and he knew it would change his life yet again. Which, ultimately, was his reason for being here. The 'giro would return him to the Outside, save him from the deadend existence of the Village, let him rejoin a world in which you could obtain a wristnode just by quoting some numbers instead of killing a Hunter and stealing it from his rotting, dismembered corpse. The second procedure seemed to Moses to be much more straightforward, but he desperately wanted to know how to make the first one work. So he had done what the wristnode had told him and sneaked off to the place where two rocky pillars climbed toward the sky and a muddy stream ran between them. The only possessions he bothered to take with him were his shorts and the 'node.
The sky was almost cloudless and the sun was starting to cast sharp shadows. All around him was the natural beauty of the veldt. This might, for all he knew, be his last opportunity to submerge his being in the ebb and flow of animal life ... It was so beautiful. . .
He had been happy here.
A bee flew past. Moses put out his hand, and the tiny creature landed on it. A second joined it. Projecting their flight path backward, Moses' attention was drawn to a swarm of bees, suspended from a tall tree that grew beside the stream. The bees in his hands were scouts, workers that spied out the lay of the land for the main swarm. The swarm itself was a shapeless mass, hanging from a branch like an old animal fur slung from a pole. Its outlines were fuzzy, as bees on its surface flew off and others landed. He could hear them buzzing.
Two five-foot puff adders, thick as a man's calf, lay buried in the dirt a few yards to his left. Moses had watched them grow from hatchlings. He had never seen either of them feed, but he had watched their sand-buried outlines grow, mouthful by mouthful. A few hundred yards away a white rhinoceros bent its ponderous head to drink from the stream. Moses knew this rhino. It was a male, and from its body language it had been having a bad day . . . Moses recalled that the rhino was trying to maintain a harem of two females, and suspected that there had been competition between the nursing mothers for the best leaves. Moses doubted that both calves would be weaned successfully. But there was something else that had been bothering the beast . . . possibly a run-in with a crocodile. The crocs never learned.
Slowly making its way across open ground, maybe fifty yards away, was a star tortoise—an impressive representative of its kind, nearly two feet across, and (when aroused) cap
able of running for short periods at the speed of a human walk. A few days earlier Moses had come across the star tortoise Xpage and been fascinated. The beautiful yellow and black of the reptiles high-domed shell was again to be seen in wild Westafrica, thanks to releases from a breeding program.
Moses heard the roar of an engine, and a 'giro came into view, swinging in from behind concealing hillocks. As it came in to land, a second 'giro appeared.
The boy came instantly on the alert. Both autogiros were dark in color—one black, one dull green and buff. The black one had a sinister, angular appearance. Then, in the far distance, he saw a tiny speck high in the sky—a third giro. At that distance he couldn't pick out its color, but the other two certainly weren't yellow.
The black 'giro landed, and half a dozen men jumped out, all heavily armed. Chinese. In his mind's eye he saw once more the bloodbath when he was snatched from the world of the street children. He recognized that the Chinese were all carrying the weapon that the Villagers were not supposed to know about—and which he had seen before, in action. Hands clutching similar weapons poked from the side of the green and buff autogiro, and more Chinese faces.
The men on the ground ran toward him. One of them tripped over the star tortoise . . .
On board the yellow autogiro there was consternation. They had seen the other two 'giros, and they knew they were going to arrive too late.
Charity all but wrung her hands in despair. "It must be the Chinese! Angle was right, they know about the pickup! And they've got to him first! Oh, my poor, poor little Moses!"
The pilot glanced at his men. They, too, were armed, and now they readied their weapons for action. This was going to be very nasty indeed. He concentrated on getting the 'giro to its destination quickly.
Ahead, there was a huge explosion, a ball of flame, and a burgeoning plume of thick black smoke.