the oceans-and they were too small to hide in. Where was Sean?
She’d missed him somehow, and the other six passengers were staring at her. She sat down next to an old Hispanic woman. Now only a chubby late-teen in loose creased pants, white shirt, and a vest sweater was still looking at her. She waited for the 38th Street platform.
The train hummed along in near silence. The dim light fluttered a little when the car reached its first switch point. The train slowed. The cars decoupled, and rearranged with cars from other lines, clicking back together and heading down new lines.
There was an odd bulge in the boy’s sweater, like a small left breast. The kid was soft, undermuscled, overpadded. His eyes flicked toward her every few moments. Wearily she thought, Again?
The car dropped. Jillian stifled a scream of surprise. There was a soft pop. They’d passed a seal, into vacuum. The car was still falling, still accelerating. But this was a local line! They shouldn’t have—
Alarmed, she glanced at the other passengers.
They were taking it very well, suspiciously well. None of them had moved. In fact… — they were fewer.
They were disappearing whenever she turned her head!
Now only the kid in the sweater was left.
The car was still falling through the Earth.
Jillian made herself relax as Abner had taught her. If They wanted to kill her, there were a thousand easier ways… and her fear of death, she discovered, was gone. Clean gone.
She asked, “Are you a hologram, too?” He had to be. She was getting her first good look. Wrinkles in his pants. Buttons, zippers, glasses— He must be as old as the subways.
The kid smiled back at her. “I’m the Old Bastard,” he said.
Chapter i6
She asked, “What’s that on your chest?”
Of the myriad questions whirling through her head, she’d found one to surprise him. His smile flickered. Then he pulled his sweater over his head. There was a pocket in his rumpled shirt, and a clear plastic envelope in the pocket, and a dozen colored sticks in that.
“Shirt protector.”
“What’s in it?”
“Things for writing and drawing. These days I’d have a wrist link, or just use the neural net. Ever see one of these?” He pulled, from a pants pocket that couldn’t have been deep enough, a flat wooden stick painted white with fine black markings. “My father had one. Slide rule.”
She remembered: a slide rule came somewhere between an abacus and a pocket calculator. “That must be worth a fortune.”
Almost unconsciously, her hand had drifted out toward it. Her “ghost” snatched it out of reach in a gesture reminiscent of a ten-year-old protecting a sheaf of trading chits. A sheepish smile. “Let’s save some time, Jillian. The Council doesn’t know about this interview and never will. The car is headed for Denver. So’s your luggage. The records will show you arranged it all yourself. Half the passengers in another car are listed as traveling on this car. So we’ve got plenty of time to solve any little mysteries that are still bothering you, but let’s not abuse it, okay? I need some of my attention for the rest of the planet.”
Jillian examined the Old Bastard, seeing too much weakness. The thin shoulders, the baggy body, the eager, friendly eyes. This was the monster who controlled the Council? She felt disorientation, savage disappointment, and an almost morbid distaste.
She said, “You arranged for my gold, didn’t you?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve killed Osa.”
“Osa bribed her way in. Not likely to pass her genes on, either. She’ll try again in four years.”
“And Abner.”
“Because of our research, Abner lived long enough to coach you.”
She paused. “And my mother?”
“She was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
“Accident?”
“Jillian, it’s the kind of accident that happens when things aren’t running right. Mining and Agricorp were dancing. Certain machines didn’t get serviced. A program picked up some noise. A waldo claw picked up just the top of a habitat when… sorry.” The boy flickered and was in a different position, palms raised in supplication. “Calm down, Jillian. Maybe I’m giving you this too fast—”
Her voice trembled, rose to a half-scream. “Just tell me why.”
“I can’t do that short.”
“Long, then.”
He nodded once. “It’s been an even century since I looked like this. Computer nerds, they called us. We didn’t get along well with people, but we got along fine with computers.
“Computers don’t deal in nuances. If I type, ‘Is there no friend to rid me of this pestilential priest?’ my computer doesn’t kill Thomas a Becket for me. It says, ‘Bad command or file name’ and waits for me to say what I mean. Sanskrit was one of the few spoken languages with no ambiguity. Using it produced a useful clarity of thought, and birthed a body of philosophy. Computer programmers speak a language of mathematics. When that language became integrated into our natural thought patterns, it was the beginning of an entirely new human culture, Jillian.”
“Capable of mastering the world?”
“Capable, with the eventual development of Linkage, of mastering our own nervous systems.”
Jillian wanted to laugh. “It doesn’t seem to have helped Donny. You still have wars.”
He brushed it off. “I’ll get to that. You still listening?”
He waited for her nod.
“We learned computers,” he said. “We made computers and programs. Some of us used computer power to keep track of the stock market He saw her eyebrows arch. “It tracked the worldwide flow of wealth. Often you can move wealth to where it’s worth more. Some of us got rich. Some played politics. Around nine hundred of us took major risks, played with our brains and bodies, linked ourselves directly to infrared and UV sensors, satellite broadcasts, digital telescopes and microscopes, computer memory, data sources like the stock exchange and traffic monitors and police bands, and of course we developed our own.”
“And you turn geniuses into weaklings. You kill innocent people.”
This time he ignored her. “Some died. Some went Feral. Eighty of us had control of most of the world’s wealth before we came into serious conflict. Eleven of us are left, and another eighteen who came later, and we constitute the Council. But as for war, it’s more like a quarrel at a bridge club—”
“You must have killed thousands of people by now!”
“You’re misusing the word, but it’s not your fault. We’ve altered the records.” For an instant he looked haggard. “After you’re Linked, spend an hour reading about war. You’ll have access to the reality. The death rate could be millions.”
She didn’t want to think about that at all. She said, “You don’t really call yourself the Old Bastard.”
“I call myself Saturn. You could hunt up my original name, but it wouldn’t tell you much.”
Saturn? Leave it. “What do you look like now?”
Then she jumped. There was a great oval bed in the car with them; its far edge was beyond where the tramcar’s wall should have been. Its surface rolled in slow shallow waves, a sluggish ocean, as if the bed were more alive than the patient. Machinery hovered above the bed, fading above the tramcar’s roof, extending thick umbilicals that bifurcated repeatedly to cover the patient in a fur of silver spiderweb.
That impossibly ancient figure seemed to be part man, part machine. Just as she decided that the thing must be dead, its head popped up and slurred, “Did you ever see a movie called Two-Thousand-One? Eh, eh,” and fell back.
