Springboard

Jay shook his head. He knew what those were, at least: There is suffering in the world. The cause of that suffering is attachment to things that will all ultimately pass. There is a way to stop this suffering. The way to that attainment lies in the Eightfold Path. Simple. Not easy, but simple.

Part of what had drawn him to Saji in the first place was her Buddhist philosophy. It wasn’t really a religion, in that the existence of a God wasn’t necessary to the precepts. You could believe in a deity or not, but Buddhism was about morality and ethics in the here and now, not whatever afterlife there might be. But this was their son!

“Saji—”

She cut him off, gently. “I know what you’re going to say. This is Mark, our baby, our child. How can we not be attached to him?”

“Took the words right out of my mouth.”

“Nonattachment does not mean that we don’t love and cherish Mark as much as humanly possible. I would step in front of a bus to save him, and I know you would, too. But unless we can let go of that craving, that clinging, we’ll always be in fear for our son. All things must pass.”

Jay shook his head again. “With any luck, we’ll pass before he does. That’s how it is supposed to work.”

She reached out and took his hand. “But sometimes it doesn’t work that way. What if Mark had died?”

“I don’t want to go there.” That thought on top of the rest of his day made him feel ill.

“Nor do I,” she said. “I was never so terrified in my life as when I saw our baby convulsing and I thought he might leave. And he didn’t go. But it is possible. And if that moment had come — if it comes within our lifetimes…”

“No,” Jay said. “I couldn’t deal with it.”

“You could. You would have to. You wouldn’t be the first parent who had to deal with it.”

“And you believe the Eightfold Path will provide the tools.”

“Yes.”

Jay stared into space. He had learned those ideas from her, too. They weren’t complicated — the parade of rights, he thought of them: right view, intention, speech, action, livelihood, effort, mindfulness, concentration. They were supposed to help you develop in turn a blend of wisdom, conduct, and spiritual development. Not as simple as “Just do it” in application, of course. There were all kinds of exercises — meditation, not harming people or animals, not drinking or screwing around, and dozens of others. Over time, you would develop a strength that would shield you from desire and attachment, and thus free you from suffering. The idea was that you hurt because you don’t get what you want. If you don’t want anything that bad, it doesn’t hurt if you don’t get it.

That was the theory as Jay understood it. But he couldn’t see it applying to his son. If Saji could, she was far and away superior to him along the path to serenity.

Of course, he already knew that. Even as upset as she had been before, she had recovered faster, and done better about it than he had. Still, it was a big leap. He didn’t see how he could ever manage it. He wasn’t at all sure he wanted to manage it. If your son dies, how could you just… shrug it off? You ought to feel grief, pain, suffering…

“Let it sit,” she said. “You can come back to it later.”

He nodded. “Yeah.”

“So, how was your day?”

He smiled. To jump from dealing with the possible loss of your child to how-was-your-day? Funny.

He decided that the meeting with Kent didn’t need to be mentioned. He could talk about other stuff. No point in worrying her — it was history.

“Terrible,” he said. “The Chinese hacker is a ghost. No tracks, no shadows, nothing. We haven’t been able to figure out how he’s doing it, much less who he is.”

“You will. I have faith in you.”

He laughed. “I want this guy, bad. Which, I know, is a not-good desire and all, but I am definitely attached to getting him.”

She laughed. “You don’t say.”

“Bretton and I have come at this from every which way we can think of, and still zip.”

“Not really. You know he is Chinese.”

“I believe that. I don’t have any proof. My latest foray into CyberNation confirms it, in a bass-ackward way — something I didn’t see as much as something I saw — but it doesn’t seem to have helped overall. I don’t know what to do from here.”

“Just keep on truckin’,” she said.

He smiled again. He was a fan of the great underground cartoonist R. Crumb, and he had managed to buy a vintage poster with that funny walk by the man. He also had a small statue of Crumb’s Catholic School Girl, which had set him back a week’s pay ten years ago. She was right. Sometimes that’s what you had to do — just keep on truckin’…

Only, from now on, he would do it more carefully. He wanted his son to have a father when he grew up.

In that moment, Jay remembered that he had an appointment with Chang at Net Force HQ that afternoon.

He pulled his virgil from his belt. He had Chang’s number; he probably wouldn’t have left for the meeting yet. He could call and cancel it. No, wait, Chang was in the District — why not meet him somewhere? Or even have him come here?

“Babe? I was supposed to meet the Chinese guy at the office this afternoon, and I forgot. Would it be okay if he came by here? We could stay in my office and do some VR there.”

“The place is pretty messy,” she said.

Jay looked around. “Looks fine to me.”

She laughed. “You wouldn’t notice a dust bunny until it was big enough to trip over. But, okay, bring him by. I’ll run the vacuum cleaner.”

“You don’t have to do that.”

“You must have never been a housekeeper in any past incarnation,” she said. “Of course I have to do that.”

Jay shook his head. “Call Chang,” he told the virgil.

28

Palace of Prosperity

Macao, China

Jack Locke walked out of the casino, slightly lighter in the wallet than when he had arrived two hours earlier. He had played blackjack, small bets, winning for a time, then losing. It didn’t matter. Gambling was not the point, familiarizing himself with the place was. Knowing where things were, how many steps it took from the front doors to the men’s toilets, where the gift shop was, the number of stools at the bar, all these were minor details.

Locke had been around long enough to know it was in the minor details where the devil lived, and if you didn’t pay him proper attention, he would mess up your plans. Today, it was the Palace of Prosperity; tomorrow, he might stop by the Golden Wheel, or the Diamond, or the Sands, the Kam Pek, the Lisboa. He could lose at baccarat or boule or fan-tan, or play the slots. And if he dropped a few thousand MOP or HKD? Nothing.

Locke’s cell phone rang. Although they weren’t supposed to, some of the casinos, and that included the Palace of Prosperity, used phone jammers. Nothing like a big base station that would be easy to spot, but guys walking around with tiny ones disguised as pagers or pens or calculators that would kill digital phone signals coming or going within twenty or thirty meters.

There were a couple of reasons the casinos did this. First, they didn’t want customers thinking about the outside world as long as they still had money to lose. That was why there were no clocks in casinos. If a man on a losing streak gets a call from his wife, he might decide to cut his losses and go home if she got demanding enough. But if his phone didn’t ring, that possibility wasn’t there.