“I still don’t understand.”
“Why your father wouldn’t take Glory into the world mind?”
“Yes. It’s been a great comfort to me knowing he’s there. Talking to him when I’m lost. When I don’t know what to do.”
“He has his reasons.” She sighed. “I know that doesn’t make it any easier.”
“No, it doesn’t.” It was hard enough knowing Glory’s body had been reclaimed in one of the dissolution pits. They had to come up with a better name for those. Her constituent parts were now a part of the world around them. There was no room to bury the dead. She was truly lost to him now.
He hadn’t spoken to Jackson since his mother had died, and every time he thought of it, it made him angry. Even Ana had been accepted into the mind—the woman whose actions had taken away Aaron’s father so many years before. So why not Glory?
“Let it go. Just for tonight.” Keera kissed him on the cheek.
He nodded. She was right. Keera was almost always right, but that didn’t make it any easier.
“Aaron, look!” She let go of his hand to run down toward the dock.
Hundreds of people were waiting by the water of Lake Jackson, each one holding one of the new candles Keera had made, the ones that burned clean without any smoke. The crowd parted as he approached, clearing a space for him along the wooden pier that jutted out into the lake. “Are you seeing this?” he whispered to Andy. His daughter had been riding his mind in respectful silence.
“It’s beautiful.” He could hear her tears.
He wiped his own eyes with the back of his hand. “It is.” His mother would have loved this.
People touched his arms and shoulders as he passed, whispering condolences.
“So sorry for your loss.”
“She was such a sweet woman.”
“You okay?”
“I will be,” he said to the last.
Aaron reached the end of the pier and turned to survey all the waiting faces. He checked his loop—he had about three minutes.
“I am happy to see all of you here. To realize how many of you my mother touched in her time at Transfer, and later on Forever.”
Keera handed him a candle. Aaron held it while she lit the wick with her own.
He held it up in the air. “Like her name, she was a bright light in the world. Mama, I miss you. God is waiting in heaven for you.” The last bit trailed off in a sob, but he didn’t care. He’d not been as religious as his parents, but right now he could use a little old-fashioned faith that she was in a better place.
Keera squeezed his arm. “May I?”
He nodded and stepped to the side.
“Later on, we’ll tell each other about our memories of Glory.” She held her candle high. “But nightfall is upon us. Each of your candles has an apparatus attached to a hinge. Please rotate the hinge like this.” She demonstrated. “This will make an air sail.”
Aaron looked down at his own candle in wonder and smiled gratefully. When had she had time to arrange this? He raised his own candle’s sail.
“Here comes nightfall!”
The light of the world dimmed all around them, the trees and grasses and cattails fading, and within thirty seconds it was dark. The jetty was lit only by a few lanterns and by more than a hundred candles.
Keera’s face shone with a golden glow. She lifted her candle again. “Love you, Glory,” she whispered so softly that only Jackson could hear.
Then she let the candle go. It floated into the air over the lake, drifting up into the darkness. Soon it was followed by another and another, then tens, hundreds of them.
Aaron held his up. “May God find you.” He let his go and looked up into the sky. It was filled with lights.
He pulled Keera close. “It’s so beautiful. How did you—”
She put a finger over his lips. “Leave me a few secrets.”
One of the lights flared, an incandescent supernova in the night, and then it was gone.
“What the heck?”
“Watch.”
There was another, then another, and suddenly the sky was full of flares.
Glory really would have loved this.
Aaron closed his eyes, remembering the last time he had seen her:
Glory held his hand.
“I’m here, Mama.”
“Jackson?”
A strange surge had run through him, and suddenly he was a bystander in his own body.
“Yes, Glory, I’m here.”
Aaron looked on as if over his own shoulder, feeling paralyzed and angry.
How had Jackson done it? And why? This was his time with his mother.
“I knew you’d come back to me.” Glory cupped his face with her hand.
“I wouldn’t let you go into the night alone.”
Jackson squeezed Glory’s hand and kissed her forehead. “I’ll see you soon.” Then everything had gone black.
When Aaron had come back to consciousness again, Jackson was gone from his head, leaving a bad taste in his mouth.
When Aaron looked down at his mother, he saw she had gone too.
His father had taken that final moment from him and then had vanished from his mind without a word.
Keera was right. He would let that go, for the night.
Tomorrow he was going to find his father and give him hell for it.
ANDY SAT back in her chair at the River Bend Café looking over the Rhyl, sipping a cup of morning brew, or embrew, as the locals had taken to calling it. Some folks still yearned for the days of coffee, but Andy had tried it once and thought the whole thing was wildly overrated.
She stared out over the river, visible in the darkness by the lanterns hung along the Riverwalk. People passed by in couples and small groups.
Glory’s ceremony had been beautiful, but she was uneasy about her father’s mental state.
Few people knew about this thing they could do, riding on each other’s perceptions. They’d discovered it by accident, about a year after the Collapse, when they’d been rock climbing in the Anatov Mountains.
Her father had been right below her.
She’d slipped on a rough footing, sliding past him, and he had reached for her….
And then he’d been in her head, grasping at a handhold and bringing her slide to a stop.
She’d never known if she would have survived without his help—but in that moment, they’d discovered a new way to connect with each other.
Her father was so upset by her grandmother’s death, and by her grandfather’s response to it. Normally he didn’t let her see what was going on behind the curtain when she rode with him. But he’d clearly been distracted and had forgotten she was there.
When the ceremony had ended, she’d backed out of his mind quietly.
Why wouldn’t Jackson want Glory to be part of the world mind?
It puzzled her. Her father hadn’t spoken a word about it to her over the last few weeks, but clearly it was something that had been eating at him.
She closed her eyes and sought a connection. Jackson?
She never really called him Grandpa. He’d only been a ghost to her, an online companion, and his name had always seemed a more natural way to address him.
There was no answer. Maybe he needed his space too.
Andy resolved to talk with her father about the whole mess when she got back to Micavery.
She finished her embrew and sandwich and made her way back to the little house where she was staying while she worked on her art project.
The McHenrys, her hosts, were a nice couple who had come up as refugees and now ran a small laundromat out of their home on the outskirts of Darlith.
She had promised to improve the place in exchange for lodging and breakfast, but she had her work cut out for her. It was gonna be a long night.
Chapter Three: Ghosts and Marauders
ANA WAS deep in consultation with Keera about improvements to be made to some of the feed crops in the next release whe
n she felt someone else’s presence in her lab.
“Those are all great ideas.” She wrapped up her notes and flicked them back into her archive, and they popped and vanished. “We’re in rendezvous mode, so things are hectic now. But I’ll see what I can do when I have a moment.” Keeping an ecosystem in balance—especially a small closed one like Forever—required constant small changes to keep the trend line running straight down the middle. If things got too far out of whack, they could rapidly spiral out of control.
“Thanks. Will we feel the effects of the rendezvous here?” Keera’s disembodied voice floated through the air.
“Maybe a slight bump. If all goes smoothly, the disruption will be minimal, but there are always risks when you bring together two large objects in space. We’ll do the best we can to warn you ahead of time.”
“Thanks.”
Ana paused. “It was a beautiful ceremony.”
“You saw it?”
“Yes. Through one of the other colonist’s eyes.”
“Did Jackson see it?”
“I don’t know.” Keera was one of the few people who knew about the split identity of the world mind.
“Tell him hello for me.” Keera was a peacemaker, always trying to bridge the gap when the people in her life were at odds. Ana admired that about her.
“Will do.” Ana cut the connection. “You’re lurking,” she said without looking up.
Lex emerged from the shadows at the edge of the lab. “I didn’t want to intrude.”
“Appreciated. What do you need?” She turned to give Lex her full attention.
“He’s gone.” Her face looked tired and drawn. After the first year, Ana had long since stopped wondering at how well the virtual world mirrored the real one.
“Who?”
“Jackson.” Lex created a chair for herself out of the white floor and sat down, worry lines at the edges of her lips giving away her anxiety. “There was a ghost in the system.”
Ana frowned. “What kind of ghost?” Lex wasn’t prone to superstition or error.
“Glory.”
“Ah.” Probably a memory slip. Of late, there’d been an increasing amount of bleed-through between the three of them. One of the consequences of sharing a mind. “Maybe Jackson’s?”
“Maybe.” Lex looked up, her eyes bright. “She said she couldn’t find Jackson, and then she was gone. I checked everywhere. I can’t find him either.”
Ana covered her mouth with her hand. “Do you think he…?” She couldn’t say it. Self-deleted, they called it. An option they had become aware of a few years before—the ultimate death for those who otherwise could live for centuries.
“I don’t know. He’s still drawing processing power, but I can’t find him anywhere.” She looked dejected. Lex and Jackson had grown close—big brother–little sister close. AIs really were human, in their own way.
Ana pulled Lex in for a hug, aware of the absurdity of what she was doing, offering a virtual hug to an artificial life-form. But somehow that didn’t matter. “We’ll find him.”
Lex nodded. “I hope so.”
EDDY WOKE to a perfect Forever morning. The air was comfortable on his skin, and the morning light had already crept by, brightening up every blade of grass and every “wild” flower that dotted the meadow where he’d stopped for the night.
Cassie grazed contentedly off to one side of the camp.
He climbed out of his sleeping bag and wandered over to the creek that ran alongside the campsite. The watercourse brought fresh, clean water out of the mountains whose foothills he was climbing. The water was warm, having run down from the heights where the rising heat provided an almost tropical atmosphere. It would cool as it ran down toward Lake Jackson.
Eddy knelt beside a shallow pool in his underwear, dipping his hands into the water to splash some on his face and over his arms, giving himself a rudimentary cleaning.
Then he sat back, looking around at the paradise he’d struggled so hard to reach six years before. That crazy ride in the Moonjumper in the last days of Earth seemed simultaneously so fresh and so long ago.
He wondered for the hundredth time what had become of Davian, his partner on the long, hot, claustrophobic trip up from Earth.
Eddy splashed some water over his hair and massaged it into shape with his fingers, smiling as he remembered how much time he used to put into his appearance when he’d been Evelyne. He caressed his flat, firm chest absently, comfortable in his current form. That had been a long time ago too.
He returned to the camp, shaking out his shirt and pants and pulling them on. Some of the estates outside Darlith were growing a new hybrid cotton, and Forever was finally gaining its first homemade fashion—if you could call lumpy shirts and baggy pants fashion.
Eddy packed up the camp and put Cassie’s saddle on her. He turned to stare up at the sky. It would rain later in the day—he could feel it in the air.
Eddy ate a roll and some cave cheese, along with a bit of dried fruit. Some entrepreneurial spirit had discovered the curdling powers of the glowing mold that filled Forever’s caverns. It made a tart, light-bodied cheese that was delicious despite the off-putting bright green marbling the fungus left behind.
He fed Cassie a couple of sugar cubes, patting her neck gently. Then he tied down his pack and his sleeping bag and climbed onto the saddle, guiding her to follow the path of trampled grass. It was already starting to recover—another day and the way would be almost impossible to see amid the general glow of the hillsides.
Ahead, the Anatov Mountains were arrayed around the circle of the world like a gap-toothed dragon’s grin, the inspiration for their original name. Legend said that Ana Anatov had died there, but it had happened twenty years before Eddy had arrived on Forever.
He followed the trail up and over the rolling hills, crowned with glowing copses. Whoever had slaughtered the sheep didn’t seem to have made any attempt to conceal their trail. It made a straight path through the grassy hills toward the mountains. If anything, it was as if they wanted it to be followed.
That thought gave Eddy pause. He could be walking into a trap.
The land ahead had many places where marauders could hide, hills and folds and stands of trees, hedges of wild red berry bushes that might conceal three or ten or more.
His old instincts from his dark time in the Hong Kong battle zone kicked in.
EDDY BACKED up against the smooth wall of the old temple, a two-story building in the heart of a land of superscrapers. He beckoned his squad to come up behind him. One by one, they crossed the street and slipped up against the same wall.
A carved green dragon with a red tongue stared at him from the corner of the temple roof.
Crap, he missed the NAU.
It was quiet on the street. Too quiet. In Eddy’s war experience, quiet was almost always bad.
When all his men were with him, he poked his head around the corner. The street seemed empty, but two-hundred-story buildings lined both sides of it, with lots of windows and a fair share of gaping holes staring down on the street.
It could be a death trap.
This mission stank to high heaven—sneaking through the edge of Hong Kong to find some Chinese dissident who supposedly had information critical to the war effort.
Eddy was a soldier. Soldiers followed orders.
He signaled his men to follow and slipped around the corner.
That’s when all hell broke loose.
EDDY GRIMACED. He’d witnessed the best and the worst of behavior during the war—the depths of human depravity and the reactions of decent people in the face of it.
In the end, of course, depravity had won. The world he’d known was gone.
Eddy slowed down, taking care to search out each potential hiding spot as he followed the trail. He fingered the leather whip at his waist uneasily.
Toward midafternoon, the sky started to darken as clouds slipped along the spindle. He pulled Cassie to a halt and stared at the storm clo
uds for a few minutes, still fascinated at how tempests formed in Forever.
It started as a thin gray line, which threaded its way along the spindle, following the world’s trade winds. The line expanded into a series of billowing clouds, darkening as they spread out toward the ground.
Eddy continued on, hurrying to beat the storm. He crested another hill, and the trail he was following went… strange. It led down to a dry gully that ran along a gray rock wall. All the grass at the base of the hill was trampled, as if the party had stopped there for a few minutes to rest. Then the trail just ended.
Eddy pulled Cassie to a halt, slipping off her saddle and tying her to an alifir tree on the hillside.
His instincts told him to stop. Something was wrong here. Something bad was about to happen, like that day in Hong Kong when he’d lost half of his men.
He slipped down the hill cautiously, looking for any sign of where the bandits might have gone. On the hillside above, Cassie neighed nervously.
The rain started, just a few drops at first. The storm had reduced the light by half.
Eddy reached the base of the hill, scrambling to review the scene before the rain washed any evidence away. There had been at least five or six people here, from the various shoe treads he found. They seemed to all lead up to the rock face.
It made no sense.
Eddy ran his hand along the rock. It was rough for a stretch, and then it smoothed out. He traced the smooth patch. It was about six feet high and four feet wide. He stood back, unsure what to make of it.
The rain grew stronger, pelting the disturbed earth.
Eddy turned to head back up the hill and stepped on something hard. He knelt to pull it out of the mud.
It was a knife. A black stone knife, beautifully crafted as if it had been molded instead of chiseled. He touched the edge. It was wickedly sharp and stained with blood.
Eddy guessed the world mind could have made it, but he hadn’t seen its like before.
He tucked it into his belt next to his long knife and decided he needed to get out of the gully before the water from the storm started flowing down the watercourse.
The Rising Tide Page 3