“Where do you live?” the Indian princess asks as she continues to paddle.
“Washington, DC,” Dahl says, immediately regretting telling her the truth.
“Me too. There’s a rally this afternoon outside the American History Museum, on the Mall. You going?”
“I don’t know,” Dahl says. “I’ll be at work.”
“Oh.” The Indian keeps paddling. Her coppery skin glistens. The animals in the woods make their morning sounds. “Listen,” she says, “are we going to do it or what?”
“Actually, I’m kind of busy,” Dahl says. He holds up the visitor’s pass he wears around his virtual neck. “I think they’d cut me off after, like, ten minutes.” Without waiting for Pocahontas’s disappointed response, he hits the jump function, which vaults him from the canoe to the exit. In another moment, he’s returned to the physical world—sitting on the bunk bed in the Virginia apartment. He has carried back a link to The Tribune story. Like thousands of other visitors to the Hard to Miss an Artemis site, he intends to share the article, but with only one interested party.
Forty-five
3/14/72 9:16 a.m. Eastern Standard Time
Suzy Claiborne opens her eyes. It’s morning, and she’s curled up in the backseat of her Shar-pei.
“About time!” says the shorter of her two captors.
Suzy is famished and her head aches. She touches a painful bump on her forehead. She notices that her blouse is misbuttoned, and the strap of her bra is tangled. But she’s pretty sure—and relieved—that they left her leggings in place. Her bladder is so full it hurts.
“We need to borrow your irises to get this car moving,” says the short one. He introduces himself as Gerry and says his brother, much taller, is Al. He says she has slept for thirty-six hours.
Still feeling groggy, Suzy walks into the woods to pee. They must have given her a dose of something to make her sleep long. She returns to the car and sits in the front seat. She presses the Start button and the motor hums. Then she returns to the backseat and lies down.
The three of them take off heading east toward Vienna, Virginia. Suzy sees that the Flynns have eaten most of the provisions she and Stella packed for their trip. But one bag of vegetables remains. She devours it, turning it with her boost into a Caesar salad. Then she soothes her headache with a painkiller app.
Once the car gets them to Vienna, Gerry says, it will have to switch from auto pilot, since they don’t know the exact address of their destination. “We’re missing some signals,” he says with a chuckle, pointing to his boost-dead head. Without working boosts and with no maps, they soon get hopelessly lost. For more than an hour and a half, they circle a shopping district of Tyson’s Corner. Suzy’s Shar-pei is little help. It has no data on the secret facility.
Nonetheless, the brothers seem to enjoy themselves. They yell at each other and laugh endlessly at each other’s silly jokes. What Suzy cannot understand, from her position in the backseat, is how two brothers who have lost their boosts could be having so much fun. If this is how they act after an failed mission with disastrous long-term consequences, she thinks, they must be the life of the party when things go right.
Finally, Gerry, the more talkative of the two, turns around in his seat. “Okay,” he says, looking directly at her breasts. “This is a little embarrassing, but you’re going to have to help us a little. We have to take you to a place where you’ll undergo … a bit of interrogation. Nothing serious. Just a few questions. But we can’t find it. Could you do us a big favor and look for it in your boost?”
Suzy understands that resistance on her part might mean endless loops around Tyson’s Corner, so she agrees to help them. They tell her that the facility has a basketball court and a kidney-shaped pool in the back. She locates the shapes in her boost, and within minutes they’re pulling up in front of the black cube on a leafy cul-de-sac in Vienna.
Al knocks, and a short young man holding a bowl of breakfast protein opens the door. His hair stands up on one side, as if he went to bed after a shower and is missing a comb. Al tells Tyler Dahl that they picked up Suzy Claiborne, as instructed—he points to the fuzzy-headed Artemis standing between them. But in the course of the arrest, “her partner, now a fugitive, turned off our boosts. So,” he says with a smile, “we’re going to have to get those turned on again.”
Dahl shakes his head sadly. “I’m afraid that won’t be possible,” he says. He explains that the Chinese-made tool Stella apparently used did not turn off the boosts, but instead wiped them clean.
The two brothers gape at each other. “So,” says Gerry, “we have to learn everything over again, load a lot of data onto the boost, that sort of thing?”
Dahl shakes his head again and breaks the news that their boosts are dead: useless collections of carbon nanotubes lodged in their heads for the rest of their lives. He leaves them with a scrap of hope. In some places, he’s heard, people can get dead people’s boosts. “You might look into that.” He closes the door gently on the two brothers and guides Suzy inside. Suzy hears their keening high-pitched cries as she is led into the heart of John Vallinger’s private detention facility.
Forty-six
3/14/72 11:45 a.m. Central Standard Time
Stella wakes up and sees palms pass by. She opens the window and sultry air fills the Sheng-li. Do palms like this grow in Arkansas? Oklahoma? Texas? She has no idea where she is. When she was a child, in the pre-boost era, towns and roads had signs. Some still remain, but they’re relics. She doesn’t see any.
The sun looks high in the southern sky, which means it’s close to noon. If she left at five in the afternoon and it’s noon, the car has been traveling at 95 miles per hour for nineteen hours. She calculates that she’s about eighteen hundred miles from Washington. This has to be New Mexico, she thinks, or West Texas.
She stares out the window and thinks about her two sons in Ciudad Juárez. She wonders if Ralf will ever get used to being wild, and if Simon can make a living by running a tavern. She tries to picture Simon. Will he be fat now? He always had that tendency. Bald? At least he’d lose that ponytail. She wonders if Simon will ever forgive her for shooing away his father and then sending him to that horrid military academy. It occurs to her that Simon might have a boyfriend in El Paso. Maybe that’s why he moved there. It amazes her that this idea, so logical, has never entered her mind before. She considers the possibility that her boost may have stifled her curiosity.
What else did it stifle? It’s been decades since Stella tried to speak the Spanish she learned with her wet brain. The Spanish reminded her of Francisco, and of what she had lost. It also bothered her that so many people got by in life with advanced Spanish-language apps, without so much as learning the difference between ser and estar, not to mention the endless complexity of the subjunctive case.
As the green Sheng-li races through whichever state she’s in, Stella practices her Spanish subjunctive with sentences about her sons. Ojalá que mis hijos me reconozcan. Ojalá que me quieran. Ojalá que los encuentre, Ojalá que mi marido estuviera vivo.… What started out as a grammar exercise, she realizes, is turning into a wish list for her life. She hopes she can find her sons and that they will love her, and she wishes her husband were still alive.
She wipes tears from her eyes and pulls the cracked copy of Donkey Show from her purse. Soon she is with her grandfather, Tom Harley, roaming both sides of the Mexican border on bicycle. He’s making a silly mess out of his reporting. His love life with the woman who would become Stella’s grandmother is a comedy of misunderstandings. The story makes her laugh. When she looks up, she sees that the car is moving along a commercial street. People are riding on horseback. Brown mountains, the same ones her grandfather described, loom to her left. The car turns into a parking lot and stops.
Stella walks into the dark and nearly deserted Cavalry Club and says hello to the man behind the bar. He looks at her closely and says, “Don’t tell me: you’re Simon’s mother.”
&n
bsp; “How did you know?”
“I’m not getting anything from you,” Chui says, “I’m beginning to think it runs in the family.” He tells her that if all goes according to plan, Ralf should be coming by in the next day or so, maybe with Simon and Ellen. He’s not sure. “Want a beer while you wait?” he asks.
“I could use one,” Stella says, plopping onto a bar stool.
Forty-seven
3/13/72 1:47 p.m. Eastern Standard Time
Tyler Dahl, who considers himself scrupulously correct in his dealings with women, would never admit to anyone his disappointment when studying the stored memories of Suzy Claiborne. Dahl had secretly looked forward to experiencing life snippets featuring the domed Artemis, one of the most marvelous specimens he had ever seen. He had the anesthesiologist put Suzy to sleep and he placed her lovely head in the new boost-reading cradle. But once he fitted the experiential helmet onto his own head, he found himself disappointed. As he flipped through the stored scenes of her life, he realized that they featured everyone Suzy saw—but almost nothing of Suzy herself.
The second complication, far more serious for his intelligence-gathering mission, is the vastness of Suzy Claiborne’s database. She has her entire life recorded on that chip. It would take at least twenty-six years to inspect it all. So how can Dahl, operating on a tight deadline, unearth the crucial five or ten minutes when she is talking to her superiors at the DM, or conspiring with Stella Kellogg to disrupt the national software update? One conversation in a life is like a single grain of sand on a long beach. “I can’t find anything,” he mutters to himself. The new cradle is useless, he concludes, without better search.
Deep down, Dahl is fairly certain that these two women—the Artemis with her fuzzy head in the cradle and the older one who has disappeared from the Alexandria clinic—are not the sources for The Tribune articles. Dahl knows this because he suspects that he himself, with only the best intentions, provided the information.
He never meant to. However, as he called down to El Paso every day for The Tribune headlines, he developed quite a rapport with Chui, the source in El Paso. They conversed, boost to boost. Dahl had a feeling that they saw things the same way. In the course of these discussions, some of them lasting an hour or two, Chui apparently learned quite a bit about the coming update. Dahl has enough self-awareness to detect the absurdity in the current situation. The leaker is plundering the memories of another person looking for evidence of leaks.
He isn’t going to find any. So instead he surfs Suzy Claiborne’s chip looking for interesting scenes in her life. He first sees a man who must be her father, his angry face right up to hers, barking at her to eat her protein. With the helmet providing stored data from all the senses, Dahl smells alcohol on the man’s breath and feels the warm heavy air of the South in summer. He gets a glimpse in the mirror and sees a lovely young face, with green eyes and freckles, red hair spilling down her forehead. Why did she become an Artemis? he wonders. He flips forward. He’s in a lecture hall at a university, listening to a professor talk about Proust’s madeleine, and how memory was different in the era before the boost. Dahl is interested in the subject, but Suzy Claiborne apparently nodded off. The memory goes dark. He flips far ahead. He’s in a coffee shop. A young man is sitting across the table blowing onto his cold fingers. Suzy is telling him to look at a gate, 318 Blue.
Ralf Alvare, Dahl thinks. He recognizes him from images he’s seen. He watches the rest of the conversation. At one point, Suzy looks to the right, at an Asian man drinking tea at the next table. It’s Bao-Zhi, looking just like the image Vallinger showed him. He must have been following either Ralf or Suzy. Dahl wonders where he might be now. Could he be in El Paso? Or Juárez? He’ll raise that question with Vallinger. The Bao-Zhi spotting is the closest Dahl has come to a discovery in the Claiborne memory cache. Other than that, it’s been a waste of time.
He flips forward once more. That same Asian face, twisted with passion, is rocking an inch above Suzy Claiborne’s. At first, Dahl feels physically invaded and then, once he gets used to it, he experiences waves of intense pleasure. Breathing heavily, he yanks the helmet from his head.
He looks into the cradle and sees Suzy Claiborne making writhing motions. Could she be experiencing the same scenes he has been living? It stands to reason, he thinks.
A message pops into his boost. It’s from Vallinger and is typically succinct: “?”
He messages back that without a decent search function, boost hunting is a waste of time. He adds that he saw a key Claiborne scene with Ralf Alvare, and that Bao-Zhi was following them.
“Who is the leaker?” Vallinger asks. “Who is her boss at the DM? Details, please.”
Dahl tells him that he’s missing this information, and Vallinger messages that they’ll have to move to the next step: an analysis of the connections among the billions of neurons—the connectome—in Suzy Claiborne’s brain. This will provide the memories from the wet side of her cognition, what Vallinger calls “the missing piece.”
Dahl, who understands both the science behind the connectome and the logistics involved, responds: “Won’t work. The wet brain is long on emotions, short on data. Plus, you cannot analyze the connectome of a live person.”
“Correct,” Vallinger responds. “Prepare to euthanize.”
Forty-eight
3/14/72 1:53 p.m. Mountain Standard Time
Ellen walks from the kitchen through the playa to her bedroom with a glass of brown fruit juice—agua de tamarindo—when she glances into the newsroom and sees her pursuer, the hulking man with the flattened nose. The sight startles her, and she spills some of the juice on the floor. Francisco seems to be showing the news operation to two newcomers, the big man and a much smaller, slighter one who’s wearing a beige exercise suit and a dirty Panama hat.
Oscar Espinoza spots Ellen and waves. Ellen ducks into the bedroom, leaving the puddle of juice untouched, and shuts the door.
She sees Ralf still pacing in front of the bed, and whispers, “The guy who chased me through El Paso?” She points toward the door. “He’s out there with your dad, getting a tour.”
Ralf nods. He explains that the other man, Smedley, used to work for John Vallinger and is now publishing Tribune articles on his sex site.
Ellen laughs. “You think they spice up the articles for the site? I can’t imagine their horny customers taking time to read the newspaper.”
Ralf doesn’t bother to argue the point. He shrugs and sits down on the bed. He has dark bags under his eyes, and he has run his fingers back through his hair so much that it’s standing on end.
For hours, Ralf has been waiting for word about an appointment in El Paso. Francisco, working with Simon, is arranging with military sources there to give Ralf limited access to the chip-reading technology in a facility just across the road from Bowie High School. It would be a half hour walk away—if the border didn’t get in the way. Letting an outsider into the building, of course, is a sensitive matter. The people providing the access are demanding rich payments and security guarantees for themselves and their families. Simon, working from a hot spot he located on the west side of Juárez, is arranging the logistics, and Chui, from his office at the tavern, is lining up the financing. Ralf knows that when the word comes, he might have only an hour to cross the border and make his way to the facility, on East Paisano Drive. Once there, he’ll have a maximum of two hours to work on the code on his chip.
Every detail seems daunting. At first, Ralf assumed that he would return to El Paso through the Santa Teresa tunnel, and take Ellen’s Sheng-li—presumably still parked there—straight to East Paisano Drive. But Simon has told him that that route is far too slow. “It would be a thirty-mile circle, and the place we’re going is only about a mile and a half east of here.” So Francisco’s allies in El Paso will plant their own people on the border patrol. They’ll look the other way when Ralf and Simon squeeze through the same hole in the fence that Ellen used, and then race up
on horseback to the facility.
“Horses again?” Ralf said.
“Much safer. They don’t track them,” Simon said.
Ralf also faces family issues. On Saturday he was shocked to hear that his mother and Suzy Claiborne were driving down to El Paso. At first, Ralf focused on the intense awkwardness of the visit. The meeting between his parents, twenty-nine years after Francisco’s disappearance, was bound to be an ordeal. He imagined them screaming at each other, or crying, or maybe falling into each other’s arms and starting over again. He didn’t know which would be worst.
Ralf also dreaded dealing with his mother without the escape hatch of the boost. It would just be the two of them, looking at each other and talking, maybe for the first time ever. He shared this worry with Simon, who had little patience for it.
“Hey Ralf,” he said. “It’s not that hard. You look at her. You talk. You listen. You talk some more. Your problem is that you think way too much about this stuff. You obsess.”
Ralf spent most of Sunday walking back and forth between the newspaper offices and the Kentucky Club. He called Chui every half hour or so to ask if his mother and Suzy had arrived. The answer, invariably, was no.
Ralf sits on a corner of the bed, looking sick. It was bad enough that John Vallinger was after the two women. The fact that they’re still not here forty-eight hours later spells likely disaster.
“You’re worried about your mom,” Ellen says.
He nods as he runs his fingers again through his hair.
“Let’s go over to the Kentucky Club,” she says, opening the bedroom door. She gestures toward the visitors in the newsroom. “I’ve got to get away from them, and you can have a drink.”
Ralf nods. He grabs the chip, housed in the blue snuff bottle, and jams it into his jacket pocket. On the way out, he slips on a puddle, rights himself, and trots after her. “No drinking for me until I do the work on the chip,” Ralf says.
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