'So it becomes balkanized.'
'Precisely. These people,' Hackworth said, pointing to the man and the woman at the base of the cliff, 'are R.D.R., Reformed Distributed Republic. Very similar to F.D.R., with one key difference.'
'The ritual we just witnessed?'
'Ritual is a good description,' Hackworth said. 'Earlier today, that man and that woman were both visited by messengers who gave them a place and time-nothing else. In this case, the woman's job was to jump off that cliff at the given time. The man's job was to tie the end of the rope before she jumped. A very simple job-'
'But if he had failed to do it, she'd be dead,' Fiona said.
'Precisely. The names are pulled out of a hat. The participants have only a few hours' warning. Here, the ritual is done with a cliff and a rope, because there happened to be a cliff in the vicinity. In other R.D.R. nodes, the mechanism might be different. For example, person A might go into a room, take a pistol out of a box, load it with live ammunition, put it back in the box, and then leave the room for ten minutes. During that time, person B is supposed to enter the room and replace the live ammunition with a dummy clip having the same weight. Then person A comes back into the room, puts the gun to his head, and pulls the trigger.'
'But person A has no way of knowing whether person B has done his job?'
'Exactly.'
'What is the role of the third person?'
'A proctor. An official of the R.D.R. who sees to it that the two participants don't try to communicate.'
'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 deja 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.
