"What does that mean?"
"The information network that defines the Joined is large, and growing all the time. It's probably indestructible, like an Internet of minds."
He frowned, obscurely irritated. "Have you heard of attachment theory? It describes our need, psychologically, to form close relationships, to reach out to intimates. We need such relationships to conceal the awful truth, which we confront as we grow up, that each of us is alone. The greatest battle of human existence is to come to terms with that fact. And that is why to be Joined is so appealing.
"But the chip in your head will not help you," he said brutally. "Not in the end. For you must die alone, just as I must."
She smiled, coldly forgiving, and he felt ashamed.
"But that may not be true," she said. "Perhaps I will be able to live on, survive the death of my body—of Mary's body. But I, my consciousness and memories, will not be resident in one member's body or another, but—distributed. Shared amongst them all. Wouldn't that be wonderful?"
He whispered, "And would it be you? Could you truly avoid death that way? Or would this distributed self be a copy?"
She sighed. "I don't know. And besides the technology is some way away from realizing that. Until it does, we will still suffer illness, accident, death. And we will always grieve."
"The wiser you are, the more it hurts."
"Yes. The human condition is tragic, David. The greater the Joined becomes, the more clearly I can see that. And the more I feel it." Her face, still young, seemed overlaid by a ghostly mask of much greater age. "Come with me," he said. "There's something I want to show you."
Kate couldn't help but jump, snatch her hand away.
She finessed her involuntary gasp into a cough, extended the motion of her hand to cover her mouth. Then, delicately, she returned her hand to where it had been, resting on the top sheet of her bed.
And that gentle touch came again, the fingers warm, strong, unmistakable despite the SmartShroud glove which must cover them. She felt the fingers squirm into her palm, and she tried to stay still, eating the peach.
Sorry shocked you. No way warn.
She leaned back a little, seeking to conceal her own handspelling behind her back. Bobby?
Who else??? Nice prison.
In Wormworks right?
Yes. DNA trace. David helped. Refugee methods. Mary helped. All family together.
Shouldn't have come, she signed quickly. What Hiram wants. Get you. Bait in trap.
Not abandon you. Need you. Be ready.
Tried once. Guards smart, sharp...
She risked a glimpse to her side. She could see no sign of his presence, not so much as a false shadow, an indentation in the bedcover, a hint of distortion. Evidently SmartShroud technology was improving as rapidly as the WormCam itself.
I might not get another chance, she thought. I must tell him.
Bobby. I saw David. Had news. About you.
His signing now was slower, hesitant. Me what me?
Your family... I can't do it, she thought. Ask Hiram, she signed back, feeling bitter.
Asking you.
Birth. Your birth.
Asking you. Asking you.
Kate took a deep breath.
Not what you believe. Think it through. Hiram wanted dynasty. David big disappointment, out of control. Mother a big inconvenience. So, have boy without mother.
Don't understand. I have mother. Heather mother.
She hesitated. No she isn't. Bobby, you're a clone.
David settled back and fixed the cold metal Mind'sEye hoop over his head. As he sank into virtual reality the world turned dark and silent, and for a brief moment he had no sense of his own body, couldn't even feel Mary's soft, warm hand wrapped around his own.
Then, all around them, the stars came out. Mary gasped and grabbed at his arm.
He was suspended in a three-dimensional diorama of stars, stars spread over a velvet black sky, stars more crowded than the darkest desert night—and yet there was structure, he saw slowly. A great river of light—stars crammed so close they merged into glowing, pale clouds—ran around the equator of the sky. It was the Milky Way, of course: the great disc of stars in which he was still embedded.
He glanced down. Here was his body, familiar and comfortable, clearly visible in the complex, multiply sourced light that fell on him. But he was floating in the starlight without enclosure or support.
Mary drifted beside him, still holding on to his arm. Her touch was comforting. Odd, he thought. We can cast our minds more than two thousand light years from Earth, and yet we must still grasp at each other, our primate heritage never far from the doors of our souls.
This alien sky was populated.
There was a sun, planet and moon here, suspended around him, like the trinity of bodies that had always dominated the human environment. But it was a strange enough sun—in fact, not a single star like Earth's sun, but a binary.
The principal was an orange giant, dim and cool. Centered on a glowing yellow core, it was a mass of orange gas, growing steadily more tenuous. There was much detail in that sullen disc: a tracery of yellow-white light that danced at the poles, the ugly scars of gray-black spots around the equator.
But the giant star was visibly flattened. It had a companion star, small and bluish, little more than a point of light, orbiting so close to its parent it was almost within the giant's scattered outer atmosphere. In fact, David saw, a thin streamer of gas, torn from the parent and still glowing, had wrapped itself around the companion and was falling to its surface, a thin, hellish rain of fusing hydrogen.
David looked down to the planet that hovered beneath his feet. It was a sphere the apparent size of a beachball, half-illuminated by the complex red and white light of its parent stars. But it. was obviously airless, its surface a complex mesh of impact craters and mountain chains. Perhaps it had once had an atmosphere, even oceans; or it might have been the rocky or metallic core of a gas giant, an erstwhile Neptune or Uranus. It was even possible, he supposed, that it had harbored life. If so, that life was now destroyed or fled, every trace of its passing scorched from the surface by the dying sun.
But this dead, blasted world still had a moon. Though much smaller than its parent, the moon glowed more brightly, reflecting more of the complex mixed light of the twin stars. And its surface appeared, at first glance, utterly smooth, so that the little worldlet looked like a cue ball, machined in some great lathe. When David looked more closely, however, he could see there was a network of fine cracks and ridges, some of them evidently hundreds of kilometers long, all across the surface. The moon looked rather like a hard-boiled egg, he thought, whose shell had been assiduously if gently cracked with a spoon.
This moon was a ball of water ice. Its smoothed surface was a sign of recent global melting, presumably caused by the grotesque expansion of the parent star, and the ridges were seams between plates of ice. And perhaps, like Jupiter's moon Europa, there was still a layer of liquid water somewhere beneath this deep-frozen surface, an ancient ocean that might serve as a harbor, even now, for retreating life...
He sighed. Nobody knew. And right now, nobody had the time or resources to find out. There was simply too much to do, too many places to go.
But it wasn't the rocky world, or its ice moon—not even the strange double star itself—but something much grander, beyond this little stellar system, which had drawn him here.
He turned now, and looked beyond the stars.
The nebula spanned half the sky.
It was a wash of colors, ranging from bright blue-white at its center, through green and orange, to somber purples and reds at its periphery. It was like a giant watercolor painting, he thought, the colors smoothly flowing, one into another. He could see layers in the cloud—the texture, the strata of shadows made it look surprisingly three-dimensional—with finer structure deeper in its heart.
The most striking aspect of the larger structure was a pattern of dark clo
uds, rich with dust, set out in a startlingly clear V-shape before the glowing mass, like an immense bird raising black wings before a flame. And before the bird shape, like a sprinkling of sparks from that bonfire behind, there was a thin veil of stars, separating him from the cloud. The great river of light that was the Galaxy flowed around the nebula, passing behind it as if encircling it.
Even as he turned his head from side to side, it was impossible to grasp the full scale of the structure. At times it seemed close enough to touch, like a giant dynamic wall-sculpture he might reach into and explore. And then it would recede, apparently to infinity. He knew his imagination, evolved to the thousand-kilometer scale of Earth, was inadequate to the task of grasping the immense distances involved here.
For if the sun was moved to the center of the nebula, humans could build an interstellar empire without reaching the edge of the cloud.
Wonder surged in him, sudden, unexpected. I am privileged, he thought anew, to live in such a time. One day, he supposed, some WormCam explorer would sail beneath the icy crust of the moon and seek out whatever lay at its core; and perhaps teams of investigators would scour the surface of the planet below, seeking out relics of the past.
He envied those future explorers the depth of their knowledge. And yet, he knew, they would surely envy his generation most of all. For, as he sailed outward with the expanding front of WormCam exploration, David was here first, and nobody else in all of history would be able to say that.
Long story. Japanese lab. The place he used to clone tigers for witch doctors. Heather just a surrogate. David WormCammed it all. Then all that mind control. Hiram didn't want more mistakes...
Heather. I felt no bond. Know why now. How sad.
She thought she could feel his pulse in the invisible touch at her palm. Yes sad sad.
And then, without warning, the door crashed open. Mae Wilson walked in holding a pistol. Without hesitation she fired once, twice, to either side of Kate. The gun was silenced, the shots mere pops.
There was a cry, a patch of blood hovering in the air, another like a small explosion where the bullet exited Bobby's body.
Kate tried to stand. But the nozzle of Wilson's rifle was at the back of her head. "Don't even think about it."
Bobby's 'Shroud was failing, is great concentric circles of distortion and shadow that spread around his wounds. Kate could see he was trying to get to the door.
But there were more of Hiram's goons there; he would have no way through. Now Hiram himself arrived at the door. His face twisted with unrecognizable emotion as he looked al
Kate, at Bobby's body. "I knew you couldn't resist it. Gotcha, you little shit."
Kate hadn't been out of her boxy cell for—how long? Thirty, forty days? Now, out in the cavernous dimly lit spaces of the Wormworks, she felt exposed, ill at ease.
The shot turned out to have passed straight through Bobby's upper shoulder, ripping muscle and shattering bone, but—through pure chance—his life was not in danger. Hiram's medics had wanted to give Bobby a general anaesthetic as they treated him, but, staring at Hiram, he refused, and suffered the pain of the treatment in full awareness. Hiram led the way across a floor empty of people past quiescent, hulking machinery. Wilson and the other goons circled Bobby and Kate, some of them walking backward so they could watch their captives making it obvious there was no way to escape.
Hiram, immersed in whatever project he was progressing now, looked hunted, ratlike. His mannerisms were strange, repetitive, obsessive: he was a man who had spent too much time alone. He's the subject of an experiment himself, Kate thought sourly: a human being deprived of companionship, afraid of the darkness—subject to constant, more or less hostile glares from the rest of the planet's population, their invisible eyes surrounding him. He was being steadily destroyed by a machine he had never imagined, never intended, whose implications he probably didn't understand even now. With a pang of pity, she realized there was no human in history who had more right to feel paranoid.
But she could never forgive him for what he had done to her—and to Bobby. And, she realized, she had absolutely no idea what Hiram intended for them, now that he had trapped his son.
Bobby held Kate's hand tight, making sure her body was never out of contact with his, that they were inseparable. And even as he protected her he was able subtly to lean on her without allowing the others to see, drawing strength she was glad to give him.
They reached a part of the Wormworks Kate had not seen before. A kind of bunker had been constructed, a massive cube half-set into the floor. Its interior was brightly lit. A door was set in its side, operated by a heavy wheel as if this was a submarine bulkhead.
Bobby stepped forward cautiously, still clutching Kate. "What is this, Hiram? Why have you brought us here?"
"Quite a place, isn't it?" Hiram grinned, and slapped the wall confidently. "We borrowed some engineering from the old NORAD base they dug into the Colorado mountains. This whole damn bunker is mounted on huge shock-absorbent springs."
"Is that what this is for? To ride out a nuclear attack?"
"No. These walls aren't to keep out an explosion. They're supposed to contain one."
Bobby frowned. "What are you talking about?"
"The future. The future of OurWorld, Our future, son."
Bobby said, "There are others who knew I was coming here. David, Mary, Special Agent Mavens of the FBI. They will be here soon. And then I'll be walking out of here. With her."
Kate watched Hiram's eyes, glancing from one to the other of them, scheming. He said, "You're right, of course. I can't keep you here. Although I could have fun trying. Just give me five minutes. Let me make my case, Bobby." He forced a smile.
Bobby struggled to speak. "That's all you want? To convince me of something? That's what this is all about?"
"Let me show you." And he nodded his head to the goons, indicating that Bobby and Kate should be brought into the bunker.
The walls were of thick steel. The bunker was cramped, with room only for Hiram, Kate, Bobby and Wilson.
Kate looked around, tense, alert, overloaded. This was obviously a live experimental lab: there were whiteboards, pin boards, SoftScreens, flip charts, fold-up chairs and desks fixed to the walls. At the center of the room was the equipment which, presumably, was the focus of interest here: what looked like a heat exchanger and a small turbine, and other pieces of equipment, white, anonymous boxes. On one of the desks there was a coffee, half-drunk and still steaming.
Hiram walked to the middle of the bunker. "We lost the monopoly on the WormCam quicker than I wanted. But we made a pile of money. And we're making more; the Wormworks is still far ahead of any similar facility around the world. But we're heading for a plateau, Bobby. In another few years the WormCams are going to be able to reach across the universe. And already, now that every punk kid has her own private WormCam, the market for generators is becoming saturated. We'll be in the business of replacement and upgrade, where the profit margins are low and the competition ferocious."
"But you," said Kate, "have a better idea. Right?"
Hiram glared. "Not that it will concern you." He walked to the machinery and stroked it. "We've gotten bloody good at plucking wormholes out of the quantum foam and expanding them. Up to now we've been using them to transmit information. Right? But your smart brother David will tell you that it takes a finite piece of energy to record even a single bit of information. So if we're transmitting data we must be transmitting energy as well. Right now it's just a trickle—not enough to make a light-bulb glow."
Bobby nodded, stiffly, obviously in pain. "But you're going to change all that."
Hiram pointed to the pieces of equipment. "That's a wormhole generator. It's squeezed-vacuum technology, but far in advance of anything you'll find on the market. I want to make wormholes bigger and more stable—much more, more than anything anybody's achieved so far. Wide enough to act as conduits for significant amounts of energy.
"And th
e energy we mine will be passed through this equipment, the heat exchanger and the turbine, to extract usable electrical energy. Simple, nineteenth-century technology—but that's all I need as long as I have the energy flow. This is just a test rig, but enough to prove the point of principle, and to solve the problems—mainly the stability of the wormholes."
"And where," Bobby said slowly, "will you mine the energy from?"
Hiram grinned and pointed to his feet. "From down there. The core of the Earth, son. A ball of solid nickel-iron the size of the Moon, glowing as hot as the surface of the sun. All that energy trapped in there since the Earth formed, the engine that powers the volcanoes and earthquakes and the circulation of the crust plates... That's what I'm planning to tap. You see the beauty of it? The energy we humans burn up, here on the surface, is a candle compared to that furnace. As soon as the technical guys solve the wormhole stability problem, every extant power-generating business will be obsolete overnight. Nuclear fusion, my hairy arse. And it won't stop there. Maybe some day we'll learn how to tap the stars themselves. Don't you see, Bobby? Even the WormCam was nothing compared to this. We'll change the world. We'll become rich."
"Beyond the dreams of avarice," Bobby murmured.
"Here's the dream, boy. This is what I want us to work on together. You and me. Building a future, building OurWorld."
"Dad." Bobby spread his free hand. "I admire you. I admire what you're building. I'm not going to stop you. But I don't want this. None of this is real—your money and your power—all that's real is me. Kate and me. I have your genes, Hiram. But I'm not you. And I never will be, no matter how you try to make it so..."
And as Bobby said that, links began to form in Kate's mind, as they used to as she neared the kernel of truth that lay at the heart of the most complex story.
I'm not you, Bobby had said.
But, she saw now, that was the whole point.
As she drifted in space, Mary's mouth was open wide. Smiling, David reached out, touched her chin and closed her jaw. "I can't believe it," she said.