Borderless (An Analog Novel Book 2)

by Eliot Peper

  Outside, the brisk night air refreshed her. She stepped off the path and onto the grass, relishing the feel of springy turf under her feet. She moved along the south side of the East Colonnade. There was a rectangular lawn here, surrounded by garden. Just enough light spilled out from the windows above for her to examine the horticulture. She reached out and rubbed the small leaves of the low line of sculpted bushes. Boxwood with some ageratum behind it. Magnolia and littleleaf lindens enjoying pride of place. A smattering of perennial flowers. Many of the same plants were massed together, with foliage plants filling the gaps. The organic structure reminded Diana of Beatrix Farrand’s seminal gardens. The overall impression it left was of something designed but not engineered, a marriage of botanical growth and human imagination.

  Diana yawned. Her adrenaline was receding and the stims with it. A migraine threatened. She lay in the middle of the lawn and looked at the sky. Only then did she realize how exhausted her body was. The cockpit of the P-38 had left her stiff and cramped everywhere, and she hadn’t even sat down since. Everything ached. But spinning above her tender flesh were thousands of stars.

  Besides the White House itself and a few other critical buildings, Washington was dark. The moon had set, and the absence of city glow left the Milky Way to shine in all its glory, stretching across the sky from horizon to horizon. She let her tired eyes follow the pinpricks of glittering light and the smudged nebulae that seemed so solid, so close that she could reach up and singe her hand on the cascading fusion explosions.

  Voyager was somewhere up there, arcing through the absolute stillness of interstellar space, bombarded by dust and cosmic rays, its equipment long dead, but its precious cargo still intact, humanity’s first offering to the greater universe. How many shepherdesses had lain on grass just like this over the centuries, stared at the stars, and sung of better days to come? How many daughters of the diaspora were looking up right now, humming Izlel je Delyo Hagdutin and remembering their grandmothers? This pale-blue dot was too small for small thinking. Let’s keep this Golden Record spinning.

  Diana awoke with a start.

  Her feed was back, messages and notifications and data flooding in, threatening to overwhelm her. The morning sun was hot on her face. Dew-wet grass scratched at her neck. The sky above was pale blue and blank as a Zen mind. But Diana’s mind was filled with cobwebs, the sticky tendrils of receding dream.

  A call was coming in from Dag. She accepted it.

  “You’re alive.” The relief in his voice melted something inside her. “What happened? Where are you? We’re still here at Analog. Rachel’s about to make the announcement.”

  “Thank heaven Helen wasn’t able to track you down during the night,” she said. “I’m here. I got in to see Lopez. He knows what’s going on, and I don’t think he’ll fight it.”

  “Holy shit,” said Dag. “I need to tell Hsu. He’s already on a call with Taipei.”

  “Do it,” said Diana. “I’ll fill you in on the details later.”

  “I—” said Dag. “I’m just so glad you’re all right.”

  “Me too.”

  After they signed off, Rachel began her announcement, the live stream sweeping across the entire global feed like wildfire. Press kits had been distributed, and journalists, pundits, and politicians were desperately trying to catch up and synthesize hot takes. The storm had begun in earnest and wouldn’t end anytime soon.

  Diana silenced the feed and sat up, rubbing the sleep from her eyes.

  The White House. She was sitting in the middle of the Kennedy Garden right in front of the White House. But where last night the building had been infused with a kind of sacred power, this morning it had shed its symbolic gravitas. It was just a house filled with scared, manic people doing their best to guide a world that was impossible to tame.

  And then the second call came, just as Diana had known it would.

  “Good morning, Helen,” she said, injecting a kick of jauntiness into her tone. “Beautiful day to be alive, wouldn’t you say?”

  “I don’t know what the fuck you did, Maria.” Helen’s voice was a drawn blade. “But I get it. We both know how this works. There are players and there are pawns. The only way to be a player is to be dangerous, so dangerous that other players can’t ignore or outmaneuver you. You’ve made your point. You’re dangerous. So what exactly is it that you want?”

  “Wow,” said Diana. “No small talk? Not even a smidgen? I must say, I thought you’d fall from grace with more grace.”

  “What do you want?”

  Diana rolled the question around in her mind like a marble.

  “I’m not sure,” said Diana, plucking a leaf from behind her ear. “But I’m looking forward to finding out.”

  CHAPTER 43

  Diana turned over soil with her trowel. She relished the ache in her knees, the dirt smeared across her face, and the sweaty feeling of her hands inside the garden gloves. It had been a month since the “disruption,” as the media had dubbed it, and there was more work to do than could ever be done.

  Lopez had called off the raid, had quietly initiated an investigation on Helen, and had enlisted Kendrick’s help in attempting a firm but moderate engagement with Commonwealth as it took its place on the world stage. Wall Street was up in arms over the forced buyback, and lawsuits were multiplying like litigious rabbits. Although governments were issuing dystopian pronouncements, Hsu’s influence had solidified enough support in exchange for favors that at least they’d have a chance of making good on the gambit. Knowing that without the feed their countries would grind to a halt, most world leaders were playing ball. For now, at least.

  Commonwealth had already elevated their Taipei, Paris, Singapore, Colombo, Addis Ababa, Santiago, Tokyo, Kumasi, Vancouver, and Amsterdam offices to the status of coequal headquarters and begun to shuffle key staff between them. Five locations had been granted embassy status. Frantic negotiations were underway at the UN. At the same time, Commonwealth started to roll out direct benefits, each algorithmically targeted at the level of individual feed users and funded by a portion of global profits. If you were diagnosed with cancer and your community failed to provide adequate public health care, your feed might automatically deliver a personal stipend for a private clinic. If your child was struggling with geometry, your feed could supply a plethora of teaching materials optimized for their learning style. If your home was swept away in a monsoon flood, your feed would direct you to a relief center where you would be provided with food and shelter. Overseen by Javier, these preliminary efforts had already earned friendly media coverage that helped to offset the flood of rhetoric from establishment politicians and financiers.

  Diana still had no idea if any of it would work, or even what it “working” meant. But she had her hands more than full in the meantime. Ever since that fateful meeting in Analog, she had been acting as Commonwealth’s chief intelligence officer, and Rachel had soon made the de facto designation a real title. They all had titles now, one way or another. Diana, Haruki, and Dag had all been roped into this all-consuming effort and had been sleeping at Analog or in the Commonwealth offices in whatever time they could snatch.

  This was the first day Diana had been able to sneak away, and she knew precisely how she wanted to spend the few precious hours. She had gone straight to the nursery. Now she was kneeling in the dirt, replanting her barren greenhouse.

  She twitched, nearly crushing the fragile root system of the fern in her hand, as she heard the door to the cottage open behind her. She pivoted on her heels, tightening her grip on the trowel. It wasn’t sharp, but it was the closest thing to a weapon within reach.

  “Hey,” said Dag, somewhat sheepishly. “I didn’t realize you were here. I just—I hadn’t been back since, and I don’t know, I figured—”

  She remembered Dag coming out of the kitchen balancing plates of pancakes and grinning like a maniac, the smell of frying bacon wafting down, the lush greenery around them, the intimacy of the little
table, her surgically deployed sexual innuendo. She had tuned him out so quickly in that conversation, retreating into the virtual universe of the feed, resenting the pressure of his affection and his inescapable presence in their home, seeking solace in finding a mission, a goal more worthy of her attention than the people closest to her.

  Leeches and ghosts. Ghosts and leeches. Whenever there’s a chance to get real, you run for your life. I guess it must be easier to cling to God and country or whatever it is that makes spies tick. She had kept the gates to her soul locked up tight, forgetting they were made of glass. Dag had seen the ugliness at her core from the beginning. Now he was probably here to collect his things and move out.

  Diana dropped the trowel and snatched up the bag from the nursery. She needed to try. It might be hopeless, but she wouldn’t be able to live with herself if she didn’t at least try.

  “Hey,” she said, walking up to him, trying to wipe the dirt from her forehead but succeeding only in smearing it further. “Want to help? I could really use a hand.” Reaching into the bag, she pulled out a second pair of gloves and a trowel. “I got you these.” She smiled tentatively. “I’m on the market for an assistant, someone to coach in the magical arts of horticulture. I can’t very well replant this greenhouse on my own. And, well, I hoped your offer might still be open?”

  Dag looked down at the gloves, up at her, down at the gloves, up at her.

  “Sure,” he said at last, pulling them on, and a burst of light filled Diana, so bright that she swore it must be shining from her eyes. “But I’m warning you, no green thumbs on these hands.”

  Diana had to swallow away the lump in her throat before responding.

  “Don’t worry,” she said. “There’s no such thing as a green thumb. Gardening is all about learning how plants think, how they feel, what they need. It’s about loving them for who they are, not who you wish they were. It’s about trusting them.” She shrugged apologetically. “I’ve been trying for years, and I can’t say I’m very good at it.”

  “And here I was hoping it was just a lot of digging.”

  Even though it wasn’t that funny, she couldn’t suppress the laugh bubbling up from deep inside her. Dag grinned. She led him down and showed him how to dig a hole and plant a seedling, how soft the soil should be, how to loosen the root bundle and moisten the waiting earth. She shared her philosophy of gardening, how to envision the ways the garden would change as plants reached maturity, the differences between perennials and annuals, the personalities exhibited by various subspecies of mushroom, and how Darwin had become obsessed with orchids toward the end of his life, believing them to be the perfect botanical example of evolution. Finally she explained what gardening meant to her, how it was a sacred refuge, this greenhouse chapel, a bulwark against the chaos of the outside world. She came here to feel safe, to connect with something older and larger and more profound than herself, to kindle a sense of wonder and feed her soul. And in halting sentences, she told him how rare that feeling of safety was in the life she’d lived, the life she’d chosen, how precious these fleeting moments were to her, and how easily she could overreact if she imagined they were under threat, holding them so tight, they might shatter.

  “I feel the same way about drawing,” said Dag. “It’s this door I can open inside myself. I go there when I can’t go anywhere else. Only sometimes, I can’t get out.”

  Diana looked at him, so intently focused as he gently placed a small fern into the hole he’d prepared. And she was suddenly overwhelmed by a shapeless emotion that crashed through her like storm swell. While she was out on missions these past few years, Dag had been holed up in the cottage, drawing. Diana had always imagined it almost like some kind of retirement. That after the carbon-tax affair, Dag had thought he deserved to just do something he enjoyed for the sake of it. That seemed fair enough to her after what he’d been through. But he hadn’t been happily immersing himself in a favorite hobby. She recalled the violence, the horror, the tragedy woven through his illustration of postapocalyptic La Jolla. For Dag, drawing was an act of self-recrimination, an apology for sins he could never fully redeem, an expression of guilt so deep, it curdled any attempt at true happiness. Every stroke of his pencil was a razor laid prospectively on the wrist. Here was a man who hated himself almost as much as she hated herself. But he didn’t deserve it. If there was one thing she was sure of, it was that he didn’t deserve it.

  Diana squeezed her eyes shut. Maybe she didn’t deserve it either. But in order to change her destiny, she had to reclaim her past.

  “Let’s play two truths, one lie,” she said, silent tears streaming down her face.

  “Ahh, okay,” said Dag.

  “All right. I’ll go first,” she said. “I’ve killed a US president, I lost my virginity to an Olympic swimmer, and my real name is Maria.”

  “An Olympic swimmer?”

  “I cheated, they’re all true.”

  “No shit, did he have a nice bod?”

  “Who?”

  “The swimmer.”

  She giggled. “Huge pecks, small pecker.”

  “Eeesh, that must have been disappointing.”

  “Only in retrospect. At the time I didn’t have anything to compare it with.”

  Her giggle morphed into a choked sob and then back into a giggle. Dag placed a steadying hand on her shoulder. Maybe in learning to hate themselves a little less, they could learn to love each other a little better. Love if you can’t help it. But trust? Never. That was dead wrong, like so many of Helen’s manipulative maxims. Lopez wouldn’t have thrown off Helen’s yoke if Diana hadn’t confided in him. Nell wouldn’t have offered up her treasured P-38 if she didn’t truly care for Diana. Rachel wouldn’t have changed Commonwealth’s direction if Diana hadn’t shared her deeper motivations. Kendrick wouldn’t have warned them of the impending attack if they hadn’t built a real friendship over the years. Dag wouldn’t have helped develop the desperate plan on their flight from the Arctic if Diana hadn’t finally told him what was really going on.

  Espionage might require sacrifice, but trust was the currency of life. Spies were humans just like everyone else. They were just humans who loved chasing secrets. Secrets. Those gems of privileged intel that she had dedicated so much energy to collecting, whose possession made her feel special. But the superiority of omniscience was an empty sort of pleasure. It was a way to detach herself from the life she was too scared to live. Diana had spent long enough living by Helen’s rules. Time to start figuring out some of her own.

  “So, Maria,” said Dag as he patted the soil around the newly planted fern. “How’s this little guy looking?”

  Diana removed her gloves and ran a finger up the stem of the plant and all the way along the edge of an exquisitely delicate frond.

  “Beautiful,” she said. “Just beautiful.”

  The future was wound up in the fiddlehead, ready to unfurl.

  AFTERWORD

  Unlike any other book I’ve written, Borderless had a title before I sat down to draft chapter 1. The dismantling of borders is a powerful theme in my life, and I began to recognize it beneath the surface of the headlines. The characters, plot, and world gravitated around this core idea before falling into place as I made my way through the manuscript.

  I am a child of immigrants.

  My father is from Amsterdam. My Jewish paternal grandfather was one of the only members of his family to survive World War II. He hid in a secret compartment while Nazi patrols searched their cramped apartment. Meanwhile, my paternal grandmother, a Protestant, became a secret agent of the Dutch resistance, ferrying information, supplies, and people out of the camps, even as she raised and protected her family. They fled to the United States when they worried that the Cold War might devolve into a third world war.

  My mother is from Vancouver. Her family immigrated to Canada from the Orkney Islands north of Scotland, and for them, British Columbia must have felt tropical. I have many fond memories of scramblin
g over rocks and sneaking through forests on Vancouver Island with my cousins. And, of course, huddling around the monitor’s glow to play Final Fantasy VII while our parents shook their heads in bewilderment.

  My wife is from Colombia, and her family escaped the drug violence that plagued Cali by moving to Connecticut. Just before I embarked on Borderless, we volunteered with a local resettlement agency to host a Ugandan refugee in our home in Oakland. The initial commitment was for three months, but Marvin ended up staying for nine months and became a dear friend. We’ve learned an enormous amount from each other, and he continues to find it quite odd that my “job” is writing books.

  As I prepared to write this particular book, I couldn’t help but notice how different our world today is from the one my grandparents inhabited. Baby pictures from friends living in a far-off Austrian village greet me when I go online after my morning coffee. A momentary uptick in Sri Lankan tea prices zips through global markets at the impossible speed of high-frequency trading. We can fly halfway around the world only to board an on-demand car service and stay in a stranger’s apartment complete with an unfamiliar toilet and a friendly list of local tips taped to the fridge.

  While I worked my way through the rough draft, more modern oddities presented themselves. I used Google Maps to track the trajectory of Diana’s flight to and from the Arctic. I played around with a research tool that projects the impacts of sea-level rise on specific urban areas. I discovered the beautiful true story of the Golden Record via Maria Popova’s peerless blog, Brainpickings. Just for fun, I backed a Swedish artist’s Kickstarter project and began a collaboration with a designer living in Argentina and an illustrator living in New Zealand. My grandfather spoke Esperanto, but he would never have recognized this weird dimension we insist on calling “reality.”