'How frequently must they undergo this ritual?'
'As frequently as their name comes up at random, perhaps once every couple of years,' Hackworth said. 'It's a way of creating mutual dependency. These people know they can trust each other. In a tribe such as the F.D.R., whose view of the universe contains no absolutes, this ritual creates an artificial absolute.'
The woman finished her hot drink, shook hands with the proctor, then began to ascend a polymer ladder, fixed to the rock, that took her back toward her horse. Hackworth spurred Kidnapper into movement, following a path that ran parallel to the base of the cliff, and rode for half a kilometer or so until it was joined by another path angling down from above. A few minutes later, the woman approached, riding her horse, an old-fashioned biological model.
She was a healthy, open-faced, apple-cheeked woman, still invigorated by her leap into the unknown, and she greeted them from some distance away, without any of the reserve of neo-Victorians.
'How do you do,' Hackworth said, removing his bowler.
The woman barely glanced at Fiona. She reined her horse to a gentle stop, eyes fixed on Hackworth's face. She was wearing a distracted look. 'I know you,' she said. 'But I don't know your name.'
'Hackworth, John Percival, at your service. This is my daughter Fiona.'
'I'm sure I've never heard that name,' the woman said.
'I'm sure I've never heard yours,' Hackworth said cheerfully.
'Maggie,' the woman said. 'This is driving me crazy. Where have we met?'
'This may sound rather odd,' Hackworth said gently, 'but if you and I could both remember all of our dreams- which we can't, of course– and if we compared notes long enough, we would probably find that we had shared a few over the years.'
'A lot of people have similar dreams,' Maggie said.
'Excuse me, but that's not what I mean,' Hackworth said. 'I refer to a situation in which each of us would retain his or her own personal point of view. I would see you. You would see me. We might then share certain experiences together-each of us seeing it from our own perspective.
'Like a ractive?'
'Yes,' Hackworth said, 'but you don't have to pay for it. Not with money, anyway.'
The local climate lent itself to hot drinks. Maggie did not even take off her jacket before going into her kitchen and putting a kettle on to boil. The place was a log cabin, airier than it looked from the outside, and Maggie apparently shared it with several other people who were not there at the moment. Fiona, walking to and from the bathroom, was fascinated to see evidence of men and women living and sleeping and bathing together.
As they sat around having their tea, Hackworth persuaded Maggie to poke her finger into a thimble-size device. When he took this object from his pocket, Fiona was struck by a powerful sense of dйjа vu. She had seen it before, and it was significant. She knew that her father had designed it; it bore all the earmarks of his style. Then they all sat around making small talk for a few minutes; Fiona had many questions about the workings of the R.D.R., which Maggie, a true believer, was pleased to answer. Hackworth had spread a sheet of blank paper out on the table, and as the minutes went by, words and pictures began to appear on it and to scroll up the page after it had filled itself up. The thimble, he explained, had placed some reconnaissance mites into Maggie's bloodstream, which had been gathering information, flying out through her pores when their tape drives were full, and offloading the data into the paper.
'It seems that you and I have a mutual acquaintance, Maggie,' he said after a few minutes. 'We are carrying many of the same tuples in our bloodstreams. They can only be spread through certain forms of contact.'
'You mean, like, exchange of bodily fluids?' Maggie said blankly.
Fiona thought briefly of old-fashioned transfusions and probably would not have worked out the real meaning of this phrase had her father not flushed and glanced at her momentarily.
'I believe we understand each other, yes,' Hackworth said.
Maggie thought about it for a moment and seemed to get irked, or as irked as someone with her generous and contented nature was ever likely to get. She addressed Hackworth but watched Fiona as she tried to construct her next sentence. 'Despite what you Atlantans might think of us, I don't sleep ... I mean, I don't have s ... I don't have that many partners.'
'I am sorry to have given you the mistaken impression that I had formed any untoward preconceptions about your moral standards,' Hackworth said. 'Please be assured that I do not regard myself as being in any position to judge others in this regard. However, if you could be so forthcoming as to tell me who, or with whom, in the last year or so . . .'
'Just one,' Maggie said. 'It's been a slow year.' Then she set her tea mug down on the table (Fiona had been startled by the unavailability of saucers) and leaned back in her chair, looking at Hackworth alertly. 'Funny that I'm telling you this stuff– you, a stranger.'
'Please allow me to recommend that you trust your instincts and treat me not as a stranger.'
'I had a fling. Months and months ago. That's been it.'
'Where?'
'London.' A trace of a smile came onto Maggie's face. 'You'd think living here, I'd go someplace warm and sunny. But I went to London. I guess there's a little Victorian in all of us.
'It was a guy,' Maggie went on. 'I had gone to London with a couple of girlfriends of mine. One of them was another R.D.R. citizen and the other, Trish, left the R.D.R. about three years ago and co-founded a local CryptNet node. They've got a little point of presence down in Seattle, near the market.'
'Please pardon me for interrupting,' Fiona said, 'but would you be so kind as to explain the nature of CryptNet? One of my old school friends seems to have joined it.'
'A synthetic phyle. Elusive in the extreme,' Hackworth said.
'Each node is independent and self-governing,' Maggie said.
'You could found a node tomorrow if you wanted. Nodes are defined by contracts. You sign a contract in which you agree to provide certain services when called upon to do so.'
'What sorts of services?'
'Typically, data is delivered into your system. You process the data and pass it on to other nodes. It seemed like a natural to Trish because she was a coder, like me and my housemates and most other people around here.'
'Nodes have computers then?'
'The people themselves have computers, typically embedded systems,' Maggie said, unconsciously rubbing the mastoid bone behind her ear.
'Is the node synonymous with the person, then?'
'In many cases,' Maggie said, 'but sometimes it's several persons with embedded systems that are contained within the same trust boundary.'
'May I ask what level your friend Trish's node has attained?' Hackworth said.
Maggie looked uncertain. 'Eight or nine, maybe. Anyway, we went to London. While we were there, we decided to take in some shows. I wanted to see the big productions. Those were nice-we saw a nice
'Marlowe's?'
'Yes. But Trish had a knack for finding all of these little, scruffy, out-of-the-way theatres that I never would have found in a million years– they weren't marked, and they didn't really advertise, as far as I could tell. We saw some radical stuff– really radical.'
'I don't imagine you are using that adjective in a political sense,' Hackworth said.
'No, I mean how they were staged. In one of them, we walked into this bombed-out old building in Whitechapel, full of people milling around, and all this weird stuff started happening, and after a while I realized that some of the people were actors and some were audience and that all of us were both, in a way. It was cool– I suppose you can get stuff like that on the net anytime, in a ractive, but it was so much better to be there with real, warm bodies around. I felt happy. Anyway, this guy was going to the bar for a pint, and he offered to get me one. We started talking. One thing led to another. He was really intelligent, really sexy. An African guy who knew a lot about the theatre. This place had back rooms. Some of them had beds.'
'After you were finished,' Hackworth said, 'did you experience any unusual sensations?'
