this week he did not look good. His body was bloated, his face round and heavy, his fingers swollen to puffy cylinders; they had been giving him heavy steroid treatments. But she would have known he'd had a bad week anyway, because usually Harv didn't go in for immersive ractives. He liked the kind you held in your lap on a sheet of smart paper.
Nell tried to send Harv a letter every day, simply written in mediaglyphics, and for a while he had tried to respond in kind. Last year he had even given up on this, though she wrote him faithfully anyway.
'Nell!' he said when he had peeled the goggles away from his eyes. 'Sorry, I was chasing some rich Vickys.'
'You were?'
'Yeah. Or Burly Scudd was, I mean. In the ractive. See, Burly's bitch gets pregnant, and she's got to buy herself a Freedom Machine to get rid of it, so she gets a job as a maid-of-all-work for some snotty Vickys and rips off some of their nice old stuff, figuring that's a faster way to get the money. So the bitch is running away and they're chasing her on their chevs, and then Burly Scudd shows up in his big truck and turns the tables and starts chasing them. If you do it right, you can get the Vickys to fall into a big pit of manure! It's great! You should try it,' Harv said, then, exhausted by this effort, grabbed his oxygen tube and pulled on it for a while.
'It sounds entertaining,' Nell said.
Harv, temporarily gagged by the oxygen tube, watched her face carefully and was not convinced. 'Sorry,' he blurted between breaths, 'forgot you don't care for my kind of ractive. Don't they have Burly Scudd in that Primer of yours?'
Nell made herself smile at the joke, which Harv had been making every week. She handed him the basket of cookies and fresh fruit that she had brought down from Dovetail and sat with him for an hour, talking about the things he enjoyed talking about, until she could see his attention wandering back toward the goggles. Then she said good-bye until next week and kissed him good-bye.
She turned her veil to its highest level of opacity and made her way toward the door. Harv impulsively grabbed his oxygen tube and sucked on it mightily a few times, then called her name just as she was about to leave.
'Yes?' she said, turning toward him.
'Nell, I want to tell you how fine you look,' he said, 'just like the finest Vicky lady in all of Atlantis. I can't believe you're my same Nell that I used to bring things to in the old flat-remember those days? I know that you and I have gone different ways, ever since that morning in Dovetail, and I know it's got a lot to do with that Primer. I just want to tell you, sister, that even though I say bad stuff about Vickys sometimes, I'm as proud of you as I could be, and I hope when you read that Primer-so full of stuff I could never understand or even read-you'll think back on your brother Harv, who saw it lying in the gutter years ago and took it into -his mind to bring it to his kid sister. Will you remember that, Nell?' With that he plugged the oxygen tube back into his mouth, and his ribs began to heave.
'Of course I will, Harv,' Nell said, her eyes filling with tears, and blundered her way back across the room until she could sweep Harv's bloated body up in her strong arms. The veil swirled like a sheet of water thrown into Harv's face, all the little umbrellas drawing themselves out of the way as she brought his face up to hers and planted a kiss on his cheek.
The veil congealed again as he sank back down onto the foam mattress– just like the mattresses he had taught her to get from the M.C., long ago-and she turned and ran out of the room sobbing.
Hackworth is brought up-to-date by the great Napier.
'Have you had the opportunity to speak with your family?' Colonel Napier said, speaking out of a mediatronic tabletop from his office in Atlantis/Shanghai. Hackworth was sitting in a pub in Atlantis/Vancouver.
Napier looked good now that he was deeper into middle age– somewhat more imposing. He'd been working on his bearing.
Hackworth had been temporarily impressed when Napier's image had first materialized on the mediatron, then he remembered his own image in the mirror. Once he'd gotten himself cleaned up and trimmed his beard, which he'd decided to keep, he realized that he had a new bearing of his own. Even if he was desperately confused about how he got it.
'Thought I'd find out what the hell happened first. Besides-' He stopped talking for a while. He was having trouble getting his conversational rhythm back.
'Yes?' Napier said in a labored display of patience.
'I just spoke to Fiona this morning.'
'After you left the tunnels?'
'No. Before. Before I-woke up, or whatever.'
Napier was slightly taken aback and only popped his jaw muscles a couple of times, reached for his tea, looked irrelevantly out the window at whatever view he had out his office window in New Chusan. Hackworth, on the other side of the Pacific, contented himself with staring into the inky depths of a pint of stout.
A dream-image surfaced in Hackworth's mind, like a piece of debris rising to the surface after a shipwreck, inexorably muscling tons of green murk out of its path. He saw a glistening blue projectile shoot into the Doctor's beige-gloved hands, trailing a thick cord, watched it unfold, nay bloom into a baby.
'Why did I think of that?' he said.
Napier seemed puzzled by this remark. 'Fiona and Gwendolyn are in Atlantis/Seattle now-half an hour from your present location by tube,' he said.
'Of course! They live– we live– in Seattle now. I knew that.' He was remembering Fiona hiking around in the caldera of some snow-covered volcano.
'If you are under the impression that you've been in contact with her recently-which is quite out of the question, I'm afraid– then it must have been mediated through the Primer. We were not able to break the encryption on the signals passing out of the Drummers' cave, but traffic analysis suggests that you've spent a lot of time racting in the last ten years.'
'Yes. But surely you must have suspected that, from evidence.'
'It feels like ten years. I sense that ten years of things have happened to me. But the engineer hemisphere has a bit of trouble coming to grips.'
'We are at a loss to understand why Dr. X would choose to have you serve out your sentence among the Drummers,' Napier said. 'It would seem to us that your engineer hemisphere, as you put it, is your most desirable feature as far as he is concerned-you know that the Celestials are still terribly short of engineers.'
'I've been working on something,' Hackworth said. Images of a nanotechnological system, something admirably compact and elegant, were flashing over his mind's eye. It seemed to be very nice work, the kind of thing he could produce only when he was concentrating very hard for a long time. As, for example, a prisoner might do.
'What sort of thing exactly?' Napier asked, suddenly sounding rather tense.
'Can't get a grip on it,' Hackworth finally said, shaking his head helplessly. The detailed images of atoms and bonds had been replaced, in his mind's eye, by a fat brown seed hanging in space, like something in a Magritte painting. A lush bifurcated curve on one end, like buttocks, converging to a nipplelike point on the other.
'What the hell happened?'
'Before you left Shanghai, Dr. X hooked you up to a matter compiler, no?'
'Yes.'
'Did he tell you what he was putting into your system?'
'I guessed it was hжmocules of some description.'
'We took blood samples before you left Shanghai.'
'You did?'
'We have ways,' Colonel Napier said. 'We also did a full workup on one of your friends from the cave and found several million nanosites in her brain.'
'Several million?'
'Very small ones,' Napier said reassuringly. 'They are introduced through the blood, of course-the hжmocules circulate through the bloodstream until they find themselves passing through capillaries in the brain, at which point they cut through the blood/brain barrier and fasten themselves to a nearby axon. They can monitor activity in the axon or trigger it. These 'sites all talk to each other with visible light.'
