‘Is that what she’s doing? I wondered what the banging was.’
‘Aren’t you worried she’ll damage it?’
‘No,’ said Neil, pulling up a chair beside me. ‘It’s leased in your friend’s name. Michael whatsit. Any damage’ll come out of his bond.’
‘Oh,’ I said, wondering if I should feel guilty. ‘I suppose he just assumed I’d send it back on automatic. I wonder when he’ll realise.’
‘When he gets the bill,’ said Neil. ‘Are the muffins any good?’
‘Probably excellent for the digestion,’ I told him.
‘That bad?’
‘No, not really. Just slather them with jam. Neil, I’ve been thinking…’
‘Mmmm? Theo always said that when he decided to increase my chores when I was a kid. “You know, Neil, I’ve been thinking it’s time you had more responsibility around here,”’ he mimicked. The imitation was surprisingly good.
I smiled in spite of myself. ‘I’ve realised I need your help,’ I said.
‘Well, thank goodness for that,’ said Neil.
‘Why?’
‘I thought you were going to say: I’ve been thinking that you are no help whatsoever in this investigation, so I’m taking the floater and you can walk home. Something like that anyway.’
‘Neil, really. Be serious.’
‘I was. Sort of, anyway.’ He met my eyes.
‘I…I need access to some data,’ I said hurriedly. ‘I can’t get it myself any more.’
‘So you need me.’
‘Exactly.’
‘Ah, my daughter or my data!’
‘What?’
‘A parody on Merchant of Venice,’ explained Neil. ‘Theo loves that play. Not a very good parody I admit. This place is getting to me. How did the whole Shakespeare thing begin anyway?’
‘No one can remember,’ I said. ‘I asked Ophelia this morning. Look, what I need is to find out if there are any Outlander clinics.’
‘You don’t mean rip, tear and repair type clinics, do you?’ said Neil slowly.
I shook my head. ‘No. Ones that are capable of at least basic manipulation.’
Neil raised an eyebrow. ‘I don’t think you’ll find that in the databanks,’ he said. ‘Those things are usually word of mouth. The City tends to be pretty unfriendly to Outlander clinics, even innocent ones. They like to keep the expertise to themselves.’
‘I know we can’t just scroll it up. But there are ways. It means accessing more data than just doing a subject or name search. It’s the sort of stuff I used to specialise in.’
He looked at me expressionlessly. ‘Go on,’ he said.
‘Well, you can’t do what I used to do, of course. You don’t have the speed. But I can show you how to do a basic browse. That’s if you’ll do it.’
‘I’ll do it,’ said Neil.
‘It won’t be easy,’ I warned. ‘It never is the first time.’
‘I said I’ll do it,’ said Neil shortly. He met my eyes. ‘Look, I know this is frustrating for you. Having to make do with me must be like…like being the only eight tentacled octopus in a world of one armers. But…’
‘Neil, no, I don’t think that at all. It’s just…’
‘Got it!’ cried Ophelia triumphantly, holding a beaker of ground coffee aloft. ‘And it’s double distilled, extra strength, Realcoffee extract too. Now, as long as Juliet doesn’t decide to make one of his coffee cakes…Hope you don’t mind, I had to take the dispenser apart. But I’m sure they’ll be able to fit it back together in no time back in the City.’
‘No problem at all,’ said Neil.
‘I could ask Hippolyta to have a go,’ Ophelia offered dubiously. ‘She does all our electrical stuff. She’s not desperately good at it though. It’s that weed from Nearer To Heaven. She says it helps her concentrate. I reckon it burns out brain cells.’
She stuck a mug of water into the antique microwave, pressed the controls, then gave it a swift bang when nothing happened. The mechanism whirred slowly into life. ‘Hey, I forgot…would you like a cup too?’
‘No, thanks,’ said Neil. ‘You keep it all.’
‘There’s tea left in the floater if you’d rather that,’ said Ophelia. ‘It wouldn’t be any trouble at all to get it now that the front’s off the dispenser.’
The microwave pinged. Ophelia opened the door, grabbed the coffee and sipped ecstatically. ‘Oh, that’s good,’ she said, her eyes closed in bliss. ‘That’s really good.’
She opened her eyes again. ‘What do you two plan to do now?’ she asked. ‘Not that you’re not welcome to stay here, of course.’
‘I think we need to analyse some data,’ I said. ‘And then we’ll see.’
Chapter 25
They packed us a picnic.
I had never had a picnic before, except in Virtual as a kid. Victorian fantasies were popular, all white dresses and leghorn hats. (Correlation: leghorn hens. What connection? I always meant to check it out.) I had even gone on a Wind in the Willows picnic with my first creche in those early years before the Forest’s abilities became apparent.
Those picnics had been packed in wicker hampers, with veal pie and ham and egg pie and pickled eggs and pickled beetroot and lettuce and tomato and meringues and strawberries and cream. None of it real, of course, but the taste was real, and the sensation in your mouth seemed real too, though sometimes, as happens in Virtual, the scents went skew-whiff, and the cream smelt of tomatoes. But you got used to that.
This picnic was packed for us in the seat cover of the floater. Black Stump’s attitude to any object was to assume it was available for salvage and re-use. And anyway, as Ophelia said, it would be simple enough to fit it back on when we’d finished, with a few dabs of Plastibond to replace the broken tabs.
We halted the floater in a small bay down the coast, high cliffed and inaccessible at high tide except in a floater. The sea crashed against the rocks and sucked and dribbled on the sand, and above us seabirds yelled and soared, and I longed for just a fleeting connection to the Net to find out what they were.
Neil had been silent since we left Black Stump, except to suggest we park at the cove. Now he nodded at the Terminal. ‘When do I start?’
‘We need to go over some parameters first,’ I said slowly. ‘It’s not really the speed that makes a good retrievalist. It’s narrowing down the guidelines of where to look. So that way your search is focussed and efficient and turns up the information you’re looking for as opposed to a mountain of irrelevant and distracting dross.’
‘Go on,’ said Neil
‘All right, we want to find an illegal Outlands lab.’
‘Not illegal,’ said Neil. ‘City laws don’t apply in the Outlands unless the City decides that it affects them too, remember?’
‘Okay, a discreet lab. A surreptitious lab. One that doesn’t want to draw the City’s attention, or for that matter the attention of its neighbours who might object to some of its products. So where do we look first?’
‘Geneticists,’ said Neil promptly. ‘They’d have to be City qualified, because you can’t do advanced genetics on the Open Web. Which means they’d have to have City residency as well. If I look up the past, oh, thirty years of geneticists and find out which ones have left the City…’
I shook my head. ‘The City doesn’t let trained geneticists leave. If I’d shown any particular bent towards genetics I wouldn’t have been allowed to leave either.’
‘What would have happened to you?’
‘Choice of partial brain wipe, which is not what you would call an exact procedure, or permanent house detention.’
‘I see,’ said Neil slowly. ‘But if there can’t be any geneticists in the Outlands…’
‘I didn’t say that. I said there can’t be any trained geneticists in the Outlands, but it’s possible to acquire the knowledge some other way. A tech employed in a good lab, for instance, picks up a heck of a lot and has access to any of the restricted Web information too. T
hey may not be formally trained, but over a decade or two they can become just as expert.’
‘So look up lab technicians?’
I shook my head again. ‘That’s probably just one way someone can get hold of the information. I can’t think of other ways because I don’t know enough about the area. You might scroll for a week through every lab tech in the City’s history, and still come up blank. No, we need to tackle it from another angle.’
‘All right,’ said Neil. ‘What?’
‘Power,’ I said.
‘Power?’
‘Mmmm. A lab will need power. A lab needs freezers for tissue samples, blood products…’
‘Why don’t we just run a record of communities that order blood supplies?’
‘You don’t have to get blood from the City. In fact, the easiest way is just to take regular amounts from the prospective patient over a period of a month or so before the operation. And we’re not talking major surgery here anyway, just egg implants and harvesting.’
‘All right, sorry I interrupted.’
‘So we’re talking major power supply—about the same amount as your community has, for example, for cool rooms for the apples, not just the microwave and lighting and Terminal supply of a place like Black Stump.’
‘But lots of places have a supply like that—any major orchard. Meat suppliers too.’
‘Yes. But any orchard or meat supplier of that size will probably be selling stuff to the City. And the place we’re looking for won’t be sending anything…’
I see,’ said Neil slowly. ‘Find the power supplies—’
‘By tracking the last, say, thirty years of battery shipments from the City—’
‘Then see if they are selling stuff to the City?’
‘Not just stuff. Large amounts of stuff. Do you think you can do it?’
‘Of course I can do it,’ said Neil irritably. ‘It’s not exactly complicated.’
‘I’m sorry. I…’
‘It is possible for a Tree to search the Web,’ said Neil.
‘Look, I apologise.’
Neil waved a hand dismissively. ‘No, forget it. I’m sorry too. I’m probably still hung-over from that stuff last night. I’d better get started then…it shouldn’t be too hard. I can do a General Search command for a lot of it. And I’ll recognise most of the orchards anyway.’
‘All right,’ I said. I would have liked to give him further instructions, some hints on how to narrow the search further, but I was afraid of offending him even more.
Neil shut his eyes. His lips began to move as he began to interface. I watched him for a few seconds, then slipped out of the floater and walked across the sand to the waves.
The sand was hot under my toes, and squidgy, both sensations familiar from a dozen beach Virtuals. But no one had ever programmed in the slight squeak with every footstep, or the way my heart seemed to melt into my bones. I breathed in, and smelt a complexity of which salt and seaweed were only part.
When I was ten I shared a beach Virtual with Mel, a long one on a Saturday afternoon. We climbed a hill and saw mermaids playing in the water far below, and when we had climbed down they let us play with them in the spray. It’s funny though…I hardly remember the mermaids, but I remember Mel’s laughter. We finally left the mermaids splashing and played jump the waves together, giggling when the other got dumped.
I glanced at the rocks at the edge of the bay. If I scrambled over them, would I find mermaids sunning themselves in the shallows? Or even Mel? If I were still in the City, I realised, if I were still Linked, I’d be able to create a Virtual of Mel. We could even swim with the same mermaids again, together. But of course it wouldn’t be the same, and besides, if I were able to Link, Mel would still be whole.
A wave bit my toe, then slid back across the sand. It felt warmer than I’d expected. I wondered if it was safe to swim. It looked safe, and I’d swum often enough in Virtuals, but maybe there were hidden dangers…
‘Danielle,’ said Neil
I jumped, and turned around. He was standing just behind me, an absurdly short dark shadow attached to his long body. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to startle you.’
‘It’s all right,’ I said. ‘I was kloms away. You haven’t got something already have you?’
Neil shook his head. ‘No. Not nearly. I just had an idea, that’s all. Maybe we’re tackling this from the wrong end?’
‘How?’ I was vaguely annoyed. Research was my specialty, after all.
‘We’re looking at the suppliers, not the customers,’ said Neil.
‘Go on,’ I said. Another wave lapped at my ankles. I moved up the beach. Neil followed me.
‘There must be hundreds of places that would fit your parameters…and, anyway, a place that was really trying to keep itself secret would probably get some other community to order its batteries and stuff, like Nearer to Heaven gets Black Stump to sell their cannabis crop. We need to be looking for the people who would use a clinic like that instead.’
‘How do we do that? It’s not something you put on the Net. Wanted: illegal clinic—’
‘Well, what do people most use clinics for?’ He didn’t give me time to answer. ‘Regeneration!’ he said triumphantly.
‘True,’ I said.
‘So all we have to do is find a group of people who have been recently regenerated. Who have the credit necessary for regeneration.’ He looked at me expectantly.
‘Nearer to Heaven,’ I said slowly.
‘It’s been staring us in the face all the time! And even if the place they use isn’t the one that produced whoever killed Doris, I bet they know the whereabouts of any other Outlands clinics.’
I glanced at my watch. ‘Oh goodie. If we go now, we’ll be just in time for lunch.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Neil firmly, ‘we could have a picnic here first.’
‘Brother Cydore and Sister Tracey will be so disappointed,’ I said. ‘All right, let’s get the basket.’
Chapter 26
Black Stump’s idea of a picnic was crumbly cornbread muffins with a vaguely reddish jam and red cordial in the flask that had once held the floater’s coffee and apples.
‘Fruitfly,’ said Neil.
‘What?’ I asked.
‘Fruitfly.’ He pointed to small brownish flecks in the white of the apple. ‘The immature apple must have been struck about a month ago. If it had been struck more recently we’d be able to see the live larvae.’
‘Fascinating,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘You’ve never eaten a wormy apple, have you?’
‘Frankly no,’ I said.
‘Ah, the boring life of a City girl.’
‘New experiences every day now,’ I said lightly. ‘Speaking of new experiences, can you drive the floater on manual?’
‘Yeah, sure. Why?’
‘I’d like to follow the coast up to Nearer to Heaven instead of just pulsing in the coordinates.’
‘To admire the scenery?’
‘No. I’d like to get a look at their cannabis fields if I can. Maybe talk to some of the “devotees”, too.’
‘Can do,’ said Neil. He stretched lazily on the sand. ‘I used to think I might join a coastal Utopia when I was younger.’
‘Why didn’t you?’
‘Too much light. No, really, I’m serious. It’s all magic for a day or two, the way the light flashes from the water and that great blue glowing sky all the time. Then suddenly you realise you’re longing for shadows again and forest dapples…’
‘So you came home,’ I said.
‘Well, not quite like that. Faith Hope and Charity has good facilities for research. Besides, I missed everyone.’ He stretched again and yawned. ‘I could go to sleep here,’ he said.
‘Why don’t you? Nearer to Heaven will still be there in an hour or so.’
‘Maybe for five minutes then.’ He shut his eyes. A moment later he gave a snuffled snore.
I watched him sleep.
Most people seem younger when they sleep, but he looked older. The puppyish eagerness left his face and was replaced with…what? I wasn’t sure. Something stronger, at any rate. There were lines of experience you never noticed when he was awake.
I leant back against the floater and shut my eyes too. The only other male I’d ever seen asleep was Michael.
‘Let’s try something,’ Michael had said when we were sixteen, and of course I’d said yes, because I always said yes to Michael.
The ‘something’ had been sex with full band channelling, locked into three levels of Virtual as well as each other, so as I watched Michael’s face above me it had flickered into half a dozen others and my orgasm had echoed seven others too.
Afterwards, Michael had frowned.
‘What’s wrong?’ I’d asked lazily.
‘It’s still too narrow. If we put ourselves on random associated float we could triple the channel effect and…’
It had been wildly exciting of course. Extraordinarily exciting. Incredible…and if just occasionally I wondered what sex confined to our two bodies would be like, I had always dismissed the thought. It would be boring. It would have to be boring.
And now it was all I’d ever have. Even if…
‘Have I been asleep long?’ asked Neil.
I opened my eyes. ‘Just a few minutes, I think.’ I said.
Neil sat up and began to brush the sand off. ‘I thought you might have been asleep too.’
‘No. Just thinking.’
‘What about?’
‘About Michael,’ I said slowly. ‘It just occurred to me that the first time I ever said “no” to him was when I refused to have the mind slice. I suppose that’s one of the reasons he’s so angry now.’
‘Could you change your mind?’ asked Neil carefully.
‘What? Oh, I suppose so. I suppose I could just call up Michael and say, “Hey, send a floater, I’m going to turn human.” But I won’t.’
‘Why not?’
‘Not sure really. Partly because the whole mind wipe idea gives me the shivers. Irrational, I suppose. The technology’s over twenty years old now. Do you know much about it?’
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