by Rusty Coats
I stared at her, amazed at the raw intelligence behind her eyes, and thought of Rita in Shiloh, where her genius only labeled her as a heretic. Sunny had that genius, a birthright too stubborn to bend its knee. And I knew that someday Sunny would outgrow Marigolde, needing more than its rituals could offer.
"How old are you, Sunny?"
She held up five fingers. "This many. And I'm not really the chief nurse. Poppa just lets me pretend." She put her hand in her lap and let it squirm. "Why did you catch yourself on fire? Momma says it's 'cause you're unstable."
"Sunny!"
Gretchen's voice surprised Sunny so much she fell off the bed. She scrambled to her feet, yanking the rings off her fingers behind her back. Gretchen stood in the door joining our rooms, her hair pulled back and her body wrapped in a soft robe. The ROM hung around her neck, stained dark by smoke. Her arms and neck were covered with splotches the color of Ephedria wine, and white mummy wraps bound her fingers.
I sat up and pain seared across my chest as the sheet tugged loose and I saw the burns, the edges black and ragged. The jelly was curing the scorches; some of them had already begun peeling away, exposing tender pink skin.
"It's OK, Gretch. Sunny has a good bedside manner."
"It's not OK because she's not your child." She glared at Sunny. "Come here."
Sunny started walking, then abruptly turned and kissed me. "More news at eleven," she whispered. "Stay tuned."
"Tune Swoon June," I whispered, and Sunny stifled a giggle as she walked away. Gretchen herded Sunny into the adjoining room and latched the door.
I met her dark green eyes. "Thanks for doing what you did. You saved my life."
"Stop it," she snapped. "I did that for Marigolde. A death at a Binding Ceremony is a terrible omen. It would have haunted our harvests for years."
"Christ, Gretchen. Can't I even be grateful?"
"No. You owe me nothing." Her eyes blazed. "Nothing."
I tried to sit up, but the burns pulled tight, like tearing fiber apart, and I crashed back, staring at the acoustic ceiling. "Aren't you tired of running yet?"
I could hear the sharp inhale. Then: "You weren't there near the end, Jack. You don't know what it was like. The shame of it."
"Suppose you tell me."
She looked away, gripping the belt of her robe in her white lobster hands. Then the words tumbled out. "I'll say this once, and then never again. They were crazy, Jack. Mother was convinced that the programmer's disease had been fabricated to justify dismantling the Project. Our neighbors, the Darlings? They'd just lost their son to SDS. Doctor Cassady had set up New Hope and was feeding data to the Centers for Disease Control. Mother broke into the Darlings' apartment and tore up Kenny's room. The Darlings found her on the floor with Kenny's treasure chest -- he kept trinkets in there, worthless stuff -- and when they confronted her, she demanded his autopsy records. And then they were in the hall, screaming. Campus police had to break them up. They dragged Mother away and she kept screaming that Kenny was murdered."
Tears fell into Gretchen's robe. "They were working all day and all night. Father was moving everything in the Library into safe storage and Mother was putting together a counter proposal to the 28th International Amendment. They both failed."
She opened the orange curtains, flooding the room with light, and stared at Mount Shasta. "They were outcasts, even among the programmers. Most of my friends stopped talking to me. I needed them, then, Jack. Everyone had turned against us. But they were too busy, trying to keep the Project alive, and they left me behind."
She turned. "They just couldn't accept facts. And the facts were that Avalon was killing people. Period. Now you say it's gone and I say good riddance. Now I never have to worry about seeing another junkie or bracelet. You're the only thing alive to remind me of that. And when you walk out of here, that will be the end."
"Just like that."
Her eyes were as hard as marbles. "Just like that."
I stared at her a long time and let my eyes go blurry so I could shave the years off her face and put things back together the way they were. But that was a kid's game. It was too late to patch it up. Genetics are forever. Families are not.
"I'm sorry I came here, Gretchen. I'll leave as soon as the quorum meets."
She nodded. "Thank you."
"When do they arrive?"
"Two weeks. Levi said you'll be ready by then. They've wrapped you in an aloe gel to salve the burns. You were lucky, Jack. You'll have some permanent scars on your arms and legs. Nothing horrible." She gave a half-hearted smile. "At least the fever's broken. You were hallucinating pretty badly there in the fire pit."
I shrugged. "I thought you people called them visions."
Gretchen moved out of the clinic two days later and Rita moved in; the Council wasn't taking any chances with its quarantine. The nightmares dimmed as the fever drained away, leaving nothing but a jangle of images: A vacant Jasper, the shadows of ghosts, Janak's laughter, all of them tumbling into the shape of a skeleton key. A memory of the future, a nonsense paradox, a side-effect of Levi's healing herbs.
Rita arrived with a huge canvas bag full of glossy magazines that were warped by water and age. She kissed my cheek, then wiped goo off her lips. "You scared the hell out of me, you know that?"
"Don't ever take me to one of those ceremonies again."
She laughed. "After your performance, you'll be lucky to get a seat at a solstice party. These people think you're bad magic."
"They should have seen me in my prime."
"Levi says your burns will be healed up good enough for you to leave the clinic by the end of the week." She pulled back the sheet and gave me a playful grin. "Of course, he said I'd have to salve you every night with this aloe goop."
"Life just keeps getting better." I smiled. "And you? You holding up?"
"Aside from boyfriends trying to kill themselves?" She forced a laugh. "I keep telling myself this is only temporary and that we'll be moving on. But the Binding scared me. I thought I'd left all this stuff behind, but it was right there. It was like I'd never been away." She wove her fingers between mine. "They're good people, Jack. I'd like to remember them as monsters, but they're not. They're a little crazy about the Nature thing, but they've built communities that give people hope. Is that so bad?"
"No," I said, remembering the Campus. "Not at all."
"I guess it took running away for me to realize that." Her hand grew hot in mine. "And it took staying here two weeks to realize I still don't fit. Shiloh was perfect for my Dad. It validated him. But it robbed me of everything I was. I'm a programmer. Code is as poetic to me as Yeats or Thoreau, and that will never be accepted dialect."
"No," I said. "But with Avalon gone, we might not find a place where it is."
"We'll find it. The world hasn't run out of uses for us yet, old man."
Then she salved my burns with aloe, humming the swing tune we'd danced to at Club Trocadero. And when I closed my eyes, we were back there, gliding across the transparent floor on Avalon's last night.
After a while, I glanced at the magazines and said, "What's this?"
She combed her black hair with her fingernails. "This library is unbelievable, Jack. We're talking serious chaos. Yesterday? I found a six-hundred-page tax ledger for some German named Szel. Why? No reason; one of their missionaries just picked it up. Want the repair manual for a 1966 Volkswagen microbus? Or a how-to book on -- you're going to love this -- programming something called DOS? Got it."
I nodded at the wavy stack of slicks. "And these?"
She picked one up, shielded the cover with her arm and said, "Contraband."
Then she turned it around so I could see the title: FIRST STEPS.
"You've got to be kidding." My eyes slid across the neon teasers on the Campus magazine cover. The top story was a profile of Danny Marrs and the limits of Merlin, arguing against giving Avalon's operating system a personality. The second story was a feature on the Booth Boys, the crews scattered a
cross the country to install WPA depots.
"Isn't it great?" She salved my neck with cool strokes. "They must have picked up this satchel and dumped it in the library without opening it. There's at least four years' worth of these magazines, but I thought you'd be interested in these."
I checked the date. She was right. These had come out while I was in Jasper. I leafed through the pages I'd read growing up. FIRST STEPS. They printed it up behind Echo Wharf and handed it out free, a glossy biweekly full of news, gossip and hope.
"Thanks," I said. "It's a great gift."
"Gift nothing," she said. "Do you know what these are worth in an antique store?"
"You really know how to cheer me up."
The magazines smoothed out the days with a balm better than any herb from Levi's garden. For years I'd felt the hole in my memory, a gap dug by Jasper. I'd been there for the birth of the Campus and shared puberty with the Project but sat out the last dance. The contraband copies of FIRST STEPS helped. I sat in Marigolde's hospital covered in slime and read names I'd known for a decade, WPA brats who scattered like pollen after the hammer fell.
"Dioxide Bubbles: Already Obsolete?"
"18 Corporations Sign Lease for Avalon's First Commercial Phase"
"Encryption Ghosts 'Spook' President Geddes' Speech"
On the third day I saw my mother's name.
"Denys, Cassady Suspend Partnership"
The photo showed my mother in a severe French braid, her Mediterranean eyes glistening like onyx. Beside her was Doc Cassady, before plague made him famous.
Project Librarian Ramona Denys and WPA psychologist Dr. Paul Cassady announced Tuesday that they have suspended their work to archive consciousness.
"Our partnership was based on trust, and frankly, I can't trust Paul anymore," Denys said. "The entire Project is in jeopardy, and Paul has sided with the enemy."
Cassady recently published a report in the New Berkeley Journal of Medicine claiming the so-called "programmer's disease" is both factual and fatal. The article details conditions Cassady calls Septal Decay Syndrome and Chronic Neurotransmitter Imbalance. It has triggered an inquiry that could result in a suspension of the Project.
Cassady dismissed Denys' accusation. "If she thinks trying to save lives is working for the enemy,” he said, “I wouldn't want to work for the allies."
Denys and Cassady had been collaborating on a project enabling Merlin to store total or partial consciousness in the Avalon Library. The pair reported breakthroughs earlier this year, when Denys successfully uploaded 400 gigabytes of memory directly from her brain to Merlin's matrix, geared with a ROM of prototype code.
The code, written by Denys, was slotted for beta testing when the duo announced their breakup. Cassady said he plans to sue Denys for the code.
Said Denys: "I'll see him in hell first."
I read it three times. The inset keys for my mother and Freud were bios -- Project work and personal details, such as my mother's pre-Project work in Idaho and a reference to her son, Jack, recently convicted of treason. The links for SDS and CNI dated the magazine; the diseases were so new they had to be explained. The jump on "prototype code" gave a vague definition of how my mother coded a Neurocalibrater to interpret chemical and electrical reactions, beginning with basic vocabulary and color concepts. It was her hobby long before the Project, somewhere between voodoo and science, the way some physicists tinker with perpetual motion.
The most intriguing jump was for enemy. It read: "Prior to the publication of Cassady's report, the Neuromantic Party was a financial supporter of the Project, but recently revoked its support and reversed its stance. The Neuromantics and the Sons of David have both endorsed Cassady's report, sparking rumors of Cassady's agenda."
I set the magazine aside. I'd forgotten that the Neuromantics once supported the Project, back when the Party was smaller, before it erected a skyscraper to dwarf the Scopes and Genedyne buildings, before it unofficially annexed every WPA project except Avalon. Its involvement in the virtual city was a part of history the Party had nearly succeeded in rewriting. Its billboards and campaign speeches made it seem like the Neuromantics were anti-Avalon before we hot-wired Merlin, but back in the early days, the Party included Avalon in the outlines of its Tomorrow Crusade.
Just as Cassady preached about how we were the architects of immortality, the Neuromantics once sang praises to our City of Light, calling Avalon "the address of our destiny." Avalon fit the original outline for the Crusade because it offered a binary downtown where our minds broke free of physical limitations. Their goal had always been a unified global state where intellectual morality ruled, where need was abolished and the spirit of the human race was encouraged to soar. I could pull sentences from the WPA charter that said almost exactly the same thing about Avalon.
For a while, some of our best programmers were Neuromantics, and while they beat the Tomorrow drum a little too loudly, they were good workers. Then they started drifting away. When SDS and CNI prompted the Party to officially condemn the Project, the Neuromantic programmers who'd shared shots of Ephedria at Echo Wharf left for good. One day they were working Continuity on the Hall of Nations; the next day they were wearing Neuromantic jumpsuits and writing billboards for Zamora.
And in making Avalon the enemy of human evolution, the Neuromantics found the lever it needed to move the world.
I skimmed ahead several weeks, searching for my mother's name. Finally, in the last published issue of First Steps, I found it under the headline, "Denys Arrested." It was the story Gretchen had told me.
Campus Police arrested Ramona Denys Friday, charged with assaulting an officer who tried breaking up a fight. Denys was allegedly arguing with Douglas and Sylvia Darling, whose son, Kenneth, died last week of SDS. According to Campus Police, the Darlings caught Denys searching for Darling's autopsy records.
Denys told police she believes the boy's illness had been fabricated.
Denys, who was scheduled to appear before the United Nations next week to argue against the proposed 28th International Amendment, will instead be admitted to New Hope Clinic for psychiatric evaluation. New Hope administrator and Campus psychologist Dr. Paul Cassady said he fears Denys -- a one-time partner of Cassady's -- is in the late stages of the programmer's disease.
Two days later, my parents walked into the Avalon Library and never walked out. The United Nations subcommittee met without my mother and passed Prohibition, then immediately -- under Neuromantic request -- ordered Wrecking Ball to be unleashed. There was no death notice in FIRST STEPS. The magazine died with the Project, and my parents were cremated without ceremony.
No wonder Gretchen hadn't stopped running.
It was almost noon now. I heard Sunny outside the room, bringing my lunch, and realized I'd read through the night and most of the morning, but instead of filling the gaps I'd only noosed myself with more loose ends. Cassady and my mother had finally enjoyed some success, and then they split. She thought Kenny Darling's disease was a smokescreen and was ready to go before the U.N. but never made it. She must have had evidence; she was a programmer and didn't peep unless she'd debugged her data.
The anomalies spun in my head like broken lines of code.
Jasper was empty, but full of spirits -- the unseen inhabiting my past. Merlin saw movement in clubs after they'd been destroyed by fusion bombs -- the unseen inhabiting the present. The key is a memory of the future. SDS and CNI had turned our best programmers into the walking dead, crippling the Project long before Prohibition pulled out the rug. Cassady still kept a Neurocalibrater in his office. Janak killed the Surgeon General who questioned the programmer's disease. Mother had nearly perfected a program for archiving consciousness. Van Meter was involved in some kind of takeover attempt but needed McFee, meaning McFee was his liaison to someone else, meaning the Digerati was already on the outs before Club Troc melted down. Here there be dragons. Hummed out. Avalon is nearly ours. So said David.
"Lunch Bunch Munch."<
br />
Sunny came in and showed off her new bracelet, a blackened copper band with a microchip jewel, another trinket from the fires. She tried to make up rhymes for bracelet, but I barely heard her. I was staring past her, the lines of this code linking and breaking apart, fitting and retrofitting, forming something just below the horizon.
"Jewelry Foolery Schoolery."
But instead of her voice I heard my first Mensa, remembering the sound of the microchip chirping as it scoured my first encryption code for bugs. Now it was scanning the raw data of this new program, one that contained so many hidden things. A memory of the future. The paradox. Just like Icarus, just like Mohican -- the code made you believe the room was empty when you were surrounded by enemies. The crack in the armor was in the past -- in memory. The solution wasn't in the present. It wasn't here.
"Woozy."
I waited for her to rhyme it, but heard nothing. I shook my head, frustrated, and turned to give Sunny my smile and my attention. And then I felt a protective instinct swell inside me, because Sunny looked very sick.
She swayed, her equilibrium ruined. A line of drool connected her lip to her chest. And now she was mumbling, bowing her head, cowering from me.
"Sunny?" I said, reaching out. "You all right? Come here."
"See my momma. Grass-boy. Mmm-hmm. Lots of trouble."
She fell and I caught her in my sticky arms. I turned her gently until she stared at the ceiling and I called for Rita, telling her to get Levi, get him now. Sunny's eyes fluttered and then opened to melancholy slits, and when I saw that familiar milky film, I felt an ear-splitting crash in my brain as the past and future slammed together.
My niece had programmer's disease.
AVALON XXVI: A Memory of the Future
"Let her go, Jack!"
Gretchen flashed a knife that gleamed like chrome, panting hard enough to make the ROM around her neck flash codes of light, ready to play Cain. I cradled Sunny with arms glommed with aloe goo. She shivered like a reed, her brain paddling upstream as waves of serotonin flooded her system.