5
Telford had the cab drop him off two blocks from the garage. He walked past twice before opening the door, and was relieved to find the Honda intact. Last summer some kids had broken in and vandalized it, forcing him to rent a set of wheels while it was fixed. That was something he hated to do; it left a trail in the circuits much too close to home.
He cleared away the snow and pulled out. As he drove through Billings, he was surprised at all the construction—a lot more than last time he’d been through. It had to be DP money. People were settling in, even though they were supposed to move back to the LA strip once the war damage was cleared.
A shadow fell across the road. Overhead a construction blimp passed with what seemed an entire story of an office building dangling from its belly.
The car beeped. He saw that he was drifting out of lane and turned his eyes back to the road. He’d rather not be pulled over or shut down by radar if he could possibly avoid it. Oh, his paperwork would hold up, he had no doubt about that. He’d run it himself, using one of the six identities he had cached in the government comps. The oblique programs made that possible: loaded in the beginning, still running hot and heavy, as they would be until every single unit in the country was shut down and cleared simultaneously, which would never happen.
Strange how that part of Nathan’s dream was still alive—or maybe not so strange. If the crusade had involved only software and machines, he wouldn’t have failed. Flesh and blood were what had let Nathan down.
Nathan Kahn had been called a lot of things—polymath, prophet, the reigning genius of the post-hardware era, and also renegade, maniac, and traitor. In Telford’s opinion he’d been a little of all of them, but above all, the most important fact, he’d been one of the finest human beings he had ever met.
Nathan had been a man of the 20th, with all that that implied. In school during the sixties he’d been involved with the drug culture of the time: Leary, the other guy with the dolphins, and the one who became some kind of monk. His guiding principle had taken form then: a belief in transcendence, in an unimaginable freedom utterly divorced from the everyday human condition.
Telford smiled, recalling the yoga exercises that had been part of the training at the estate. That had been weird, so old-fashioned, as if they’d been required to wear spats and carry walking sticks.
Nathan brought his convictions with him when he took up compsci in the hardware era of the eighties and nineties. He’d been the spokesman for those opposed to Gilder’s thesis that computers were the ultimate justification of capitalism, and by the end of the century he was acknowledged the greatest philosopher of cybernetics since Turing and Wiener.
Machines and software hadn’t meant that much to Nathan. They were tools only, secondary to the overriding goal. His theory was that the purpose of computers wasn’t to stabilize the economy or solve scientific problems or play virtual reality games. All that was trivia compared to their true role as the key to the next stage in human evolution. He looked forward to the mind/machine interface that would meld the microcosm with the world of men, preserving what was essential in human nature while purging all that was gross, bestial, and degraded. It would make all things possible: it would tear off the veil of maya, seal shut the gates of hell, and then raise the New Jerusalem on earth’s green and pleasant land.
The concept was far from new; the ideas had been floating around for decades. But it was Nathan who synthesized them, perfected them, and, in the end, made them seem inevitable.
But because he had no interest in hardware, he almost missed his shot at turning theory into fact. Nathan couldn’t be blamed much, as the opportunity came from an unlikely source: a third-rate think-tank vaguely attached to the University of Arizona. It was essentially used as a dump for the wilder adherents of Mauve Era physics. Jack Kogan ran the place, and he was a perfect example of what went on at the Bin, as the rest of the scientific world called it. A product of the Tao/Shiva/Buddha school of quantum physics, Kogan called himself a postrationalist, and that about summed it up. He believed in everything that crawled through the window: holistic healing, biofeedback, acupuncture (he’d patented an electronic version that the FDA made him take off the market), Velikovsky, the Dean Drive. His major obsession was ESP, which, he was firmly convinced, could be explained by quantum theory.
Kogan had spent years on his projects, years in the wilderness, his papers returned without comment, no attention paid to him outside of the supermarket press. He got his funding from Midwestern pork kings, Oriental mystical sects, New Age networks. To those people he was a prince, a real scientist who took them seriously, even if none of his ideas ever panned out.
Except one: charge clusters, what he called ECs. No one knew how he’d hit on the idea; he wasn’t speaking to his colleagues at the time. The financing came from some sausage baron, who had heard of Kogan from a channeler he knew. There weren’t any papers published until well after the devices hit the market. After that Jack Kogan—Doctor Kogan—didn’t have to wonder about funding ever again.
It was called a stopped-clock discovery, Kogan hitting the right hour for the first time in his personal twenty-four-hour sweep. Charge clusters, like the Dean Drive and ESP, weren’t supposed to exist. Electrons compressed to a point where they became a solid, hundreds of billions of them packed into a sphere a few Angstroms across. It couldn’t happen that way, not with particles of the same charge. But Kogan, working with the other outcasts in crank heaven, had figured out a way to do it: the Casimir effect, the electrons themselves shielding each other from the virtual energy that should push them apart, condensing into packets of pure charge. As it turned out, he’d been wrong about that—but the real explanation was far too complex for Telford to grasp.
It had worked all the same, and the result was pure-charge devices, microcomponents operating more efficiently and powerfully than old-style chips by an order of magnitude. They swept the industry, making the pork king a component emperor and Jack Kogan a figure to be reckoned with for the first time in his life.
Nathan knew Kogan well—they’d worked together as grad students. When the first components came off the line, Kogan called Nathan, thinking he’d be interested. He wasn’t. Another kind of chip, a little better than what was already around, was nothing to get excited about.
Nathan didn’t change his mind until a year later, when he heard from Allison Keyes, an ex-student who was involved in a project at Wright-Patterson investigating ways of controlling the next generation of tactical fighters, planes that maneuvered at speeds too fast for a pilot to handle. One approach had been to connect a Kogan EC microcomp to the frontal lobes, with bioplastic circuits developed for prostheses.
That idea was abandoned early, when it turned out that the implants could be blown by standard countermeasures, with unhealthy consequences for the pilot. Instead they went with a system using muscle cues read through flight suits. But Allison had been pulling a Von Braun: using the military, which she despised, to develop a technology which otherwise wouldn’t have seen a dime. When the project shut down, she headed west with a supply of surplus microcomps and the software to run them.
Telford often wondered how it had been when Nathan first saw those chips of doped silicon, small enough to balance on a finger. Had he envisioned his new world rising out of them; had he smiled or been solemn; had he felt a surge of triumph at the great lever being placed in his hands? Telford would have liked to have seen it.
From that point Nathan moved quickly. He resigned his university position, liquidated everything he owned, and essentially vanished. Within a few weeks he found and bought the estate, a villa at Big Sur that had been owned by a singer on the skids after too much booze and dope. Nathan remodeled, purchased med equipment, training gear, a 6th-gen ultracomp, and Japanese surgical robots for the implants. There was other money: Nathan’s version of the pork king, a multimillionaire who had read one of his books and been converted. Telford didn’t know his name. It had never been mentioned, and in any case he was killed by Stoner.
Then Nathan brought in his people: students, mostly, a few fellow scientists, individuals he believed he could trust. Zip Dubois, the kid who specialized in oblique programs. Elizabeth Stoner, a socioecologist from Nathan’s university. Ronnie Infield, his research assistant. Sarah Nieman, grad student.
The crusade kicked off. Nathan was the first, his own white mouse. The operation went well, and he was up and around in three days. It took him a month to master the technique, and while he was doing that, Zip traveled the country loading programs into whatever hardware he could get at—government, private, corporate. The software he’d written was oblique, using the structure of the host programs themselves and nearly impossible to detect. They could be accessed only through the codes carried in the implants—codes that changed over time as the programs did, adapting to the software they encountered.
Kogan wasn’t involved. He’d moved his entire operation north to BC as an independent institute. Nathan’s project didn’t impress him much—he had his own, an attempt to prove that charge clusters could exhibit quantum effects on a macrocosmic scale, explaining telepathy, holism, and so on. Nathan liked the idea and had plans to look into it—to use the implants to explore the quantum state, as he put it. He thought that “macro interaction,” in Kogan’s words, would prove to be part of the paradigm breakthrough, a method of opening up the reducing valve.
The war began, Medrano’s Indio master race pushing a hundred miles into US territory the first day, three times that within a week, slaughtering and burning as they went. Nathan ignored the whole affair. It was unimportant, a small glitch compared to the task he had undertaken: to implant and train individuals and send them out across the country, placed in positions where they could manipulate events in favor of Nathan’s plan: government departments, beltway foundations, a few major corporations. First dozens, then hundreds, eventually thousands. A geometric progression, like algae in a pond: the first units would reproduce and spread, gaining the resources to implant and train others. In a short time the country would be saturated, and then would come the world.
The situation had begun to deteriorate by the time Telford arrived. The fiberoptic net, the key to Nathan’s plans, had been shut down by Medi sabotage. Stoner had vanished, taking her personal clique with her. Some of the imps—that was what they now called themselves—had dropped out of contact, and rumor had it they were dead. There was word of another group, using the same techniques, along with interesting variations such as assassination and terror. A few of the early subjects were having problems—the first symptoms of what turned out to be PS. The new dawn was revealing a pretty bleak landscape.
But it didn’t seem that way to Jason Telford. To him it was a thing akin to paradise, exactly what he’d been looking for: a cause he could lose himself in without a thought, everything a smartass kid could want—rebellion, disreputableness, and conspiracy, all wrapped in the bright sheen of high motives and ideals.
It was probably his background that explained the attraction. Jason’s mother—he’d never known his father—had been a doper during the last part of the late 20th drug plague, the days of the synthetics. Laura had kicked the habit by joining Domus Dei, one of the RC splinter groups, when Jason was about seven. That had saved her, but it had been a bitter thing for her son. The endless religious classes, the fasting, the beatings whenever he committed some sin against the harsh regimen they’d somehow extracted from the Gospels. He fled as soon as he could—a government scholarship to a voucher school when he was sixteen. The founder of the Domers, a rogue priest named Weber, excommunicated him, which would have meant absolutely nothing but for the fact that it cut him off from his mother. They kept in touch anyway, Laura calling him on supply trips to the upstate New York town nearest the Domer colony, but then one week she didn’t call, and the week after that, and the week after that.
He had to find out from the government that she was dead.
A stroke. Two, actually, one after the other, a legacy of the drugs she’d taken years before. There had been a week between the two attacks, enough time for him to get back, to be there with her, to help her let go. But nobody dared tell him.
He called Weber, knowing he’d get no decent answer. “You chose the path of the world,” the old fanatic told him. “You are no longer under God’s roof, and the blessed owe you nothing.”
Jason cursed him uselessly, and the priest—if he could still be called that, as Rome had ousted him years before—listened until he was finished, then said, “You’ll pay for that at Judgment, boy.”
Jason quit school and took to the road, headed west. In California he heard vague stories about the estate—nothing concrete, just that Nathan Kahn was up to something at Big Sur. He’d read two of Nathan’s books, Homo Praestamus and The Transcendent Mind, standard campus reading in much the same way that Camus, Rand, or Foucault had been in earlier decades.
He had to admit that they’d made no real impression on him at the time.
But in person it was different. By then Nathan Kahn was becoming Biblical, had grown a beard and was speaking more in parables than with the rigorous logic he’d used before. Looking back, Telford saw that this was the earliest sign of Pelton’s working on the old man, but at the time he’d been moved in a way unique to his experience: it was as if the estate were a saner, more worthy version of the Domers’ obsessions, and Nathan himself a true prophet.
They hit it off well, and Telford became the only one to go through the program without being cleared by someone Nathan knew. He had no idea what it was that attracted Nathan to him. He asked him once. “Enthusiasm,” Nathan said. “That and loyalty. I value loyalty above all things.”
That pleased Telford so much, he didn’t ask how Nathan saw loyalty in the punk kid he was. But it didn’t matter—Nathan possessed insight, an insight as deep as anyone ever achieved. Not deep enough, of course.
There were times now when Telford nearly hated Nathan, as he made his way through the wreckage of all that the old man had conceived. But the hatred didn’t last long, and it only came when he was exhausted, or dealing with a particularly sad case, like Briggs. Nathan had been a good man attempting a great thing, and the worst that could be said about him was that he had failed.
He recalled the last time they truly spoke, just before the raid. Nathan had been falling apart for months, ever since that blond girl—Telford could never remember her name—shot herself. He spent his days wandering the estate, talking mildly about his plans as if nothing had gone wrong, as if the whole scheme were progressing exactly the way he’d foreseen. His main topic the last few days was the breakthrough, what he called the ascendant threshold. He’d picked that up from Kogan’s papers—they were printing his stuff now. Kogan claimed that his charge clusters could act as a bridge between the microcosm and the great world, and Nathan liked that idea. Contact between the realm of quanta and the human mind; the total identification of Man and the universe. He said he felt it coming, that it would occur any time now, and that things would be fine.
Telford never knew how much Nathan understood of what had happened over the previous months: the terror campaign by Stoner’s people, the rape of Desert Oaks by the Cybernistas, the actions of a government alerted to a threat and hardened by war. But perhaps he’d grasped it all, and the talk of a breakthrough was simply self-delusion, the last scrap of comfort for a dying man. But he understood at the end, came back to himself long enough to see clearly and confront, as if this were necessary, the depth of his failure.
At dawn that day, Telford went in to help him get up, as he’d been doing all that summer. He found Nathan sitting at the edge of the bed, one arm in his bathrobe, gazing out at the ocean just visible over the pines that ringed the estate: a Moses awakened to the fact that his promised land was in truth Sheol. Telford knew immediately what the next moments would bring, and forced himself to walk into the room.
The old man remained unaware of him until he reached the bed. He turned, a glint of fear in his eyes that vanished when he saw who it was. He gave Telford a look of despair beyond anything a man should have to endure, and then spoke: “You’ll take care of them, won’t you, son? All the ones I did this thing to?”
Telford nodded, not trusting himself to speak, looking away as Nathan began weeping, pressing his face into Telford’s hands and begging forgiveness from them all.
After a while Telford got him dressed and led him downstairs. By the time Nathan reached the dining room, he was a cheerful old man again, telling jokes and asking after people who had fled or been buried weeks before.
Two days later the raid came. Just before sunrise, helicopters and lifters fell out of the sky, loaded with men trained for death.
They barely escaped—Telford, Nathan, Sarah, a handful of others, leaving behind six dead. The truck Telford had hidden took them over an old logging road invisible from the air to the highway, then north to Oregon. Nathan died that night, and they buried him, father of the aborted new age, in an unmarked grave in the piney woods.
No, he couldn’t hate Nathan.
He often wondered whether Nathan might not be proven right someday, as Kogan had. Not about the new consciousness—that was simply mysticism—but the rest of it, the hard-edged ideas on how to run a cybernetic society. If they could beat Pelton’s, it just might come to pass, and Nathan would be vindicated.
But that was far down the line. Decades, if not longer. Telford wouldn’t live to see it.
The exit for Ironwood was just ahead. Easing off on the throttle, he drove up the ramp. He gazed across the landscape, dead white except for the dark green of the trees on the mountains. Another twenty minutes, if the roads were good.
About a mile on, he saw a roadblock ahead. Slowing down, he felt a chill. It was manned by vigs. Worse than cops, that bunch. They never played by the rules.
A feeling of relief washed over him when he saw that the block was set up past the turnoff to high country. Keeping his speed constant, he made the turn and drove uphill. The vigilantes watched silently as he went out of sight.
###
Naomi was waiting when he reached the lodge. He had trouble getting up the driveway; it hadn’t been plowed since the last snowfall, and he kept skidding before he found the right gear program.
As he pulled up, a curtain fluttered. He looked around the small clearing ringed by ancient pines. The only vehicles in sight were the station trucks, a pickup and an off-roader, both with Ecology Department seals painted on the sides.
The door of the lodge opened as he got out, and Naomi came onto the porch. She smiled, but the smile vanished when he reached the steps.
“Hiya, love,” he said, taking her arm and walking her into the house. She dropped her head and said nothing.
Naomi Buckner was the last of the breed, the final implant made at the estate. There hadn’t been time to put her through training, which was all to the good. She’d never tapped, had no desire to, so Pelton’s couldn’t touch her.
She was a big woman, at nearly six feet, taller than he, but on the skinny side by current standards. Her features were a touch masculine, strong chin and aquiline nose. She’d run the lodge and the station that went with it for nearly two years with never one complaint. They’d slept together a few times, more for companionship than anything else. Aside from Sarah, she was probably the closest person he had in the world, and he couldn’t have gone on without her.
“Everything okay?” he said, shutting the door. She nodded wordlessly.
He glanced around the place. It was a private lodge used for vacations and hunting, and had been taken over by the Feds after the war. They’d turned it into an environmental station for measuring rainfall, temperature variations, pollution levels, and the like. Most of the equipment, aside from the comp that ran everything, was outside, in a pair of metal sheds.
The lodge itself was meant for the staff, and it was by no means a cheap government prefab. Whoever built it had had deep pockets and spent his money well. The building was essentially a log cabin, but bore as much resemblance to old Abe Lincoln’s as a Starlifter did to the Wright Brothers’ plane. The interior was nicely paneled and insulated. The enormous living room was separated from the kitchen by a low divider. There was a bedroom on the first floor, which Naomi used, and two more upstairs.
Against the wall to his left, on a table by itself, sat the station comp. It was standard government issue, a PC-derived work system that ran the station equipment as well as the lodge functions. Telford had made a few minor hardware mods and loaded the comp up with Zip’s defensive software.
He had heard about the stations just after the war and immediately decided to put it to use. It was perfect: a network of outposts in remote areas to collect environmental data, paid for by the government itself, with no supervision, and inspections only once a year. He’d constructed a legend for Naomi in the Fed databanks with as much care as he’d ever done anything. A degree in environmental statistics from the U of Texas at Austin—demolished during the war, along with all records—and certification from organizations that had been soft-bombed. An average personal history, one that wouldn’t stand out in any important way.
So Naomi became Moriah Carter, doctor of environmental science, with a husband named Greg, a war vet who was still getting over engagement anxiety, and a mildly retarded sister whom she’d taken care of since their mother died.
He’d had some notion of doing the same for the other survivors, but gave it up; the station project was just too small, and there was only one Naomi.
He walked to the wood stove at the far end of the room, relishing the blast of heat as he raised his hands to it. They stung from the cold; he needed to pick up a pair of gloves.
“Cora and Gene okay?”
He heard a sigh. “I guess,” she said. “Cora’s upstairs with her birds. She’s upset. Gene . . .” She added a sneer to the name. “I haven’t been able to get a word out of him. Did I tell you he’s sleeping in the cabin now?”
“No.” The cabin was an old shack atop the hill next to the clearing, apparently what the original owner had used before he built this place. “Since when?”
“Since that . . . son of a bitch was here.”
“Uh-huh. Any . . . episodes?”
“No, he’s been fine except for that.”
Telford nodded. Gene had trouble staying away from comps. It was like that with some imps, as if they yearned for the oblivion that interfacing brought. It had been that way for Briggs. He’d told Telford it was a high, an addiction he couldn’t kick. Telford didn’t understand that; for him tapping had always been an agony.
He turned to face her. “Tell me exactly what happened.”
Naomi regarded him quizzically. “Aren’t you going to take your coat off?”
He looked down at himself and laughed, then unbuttoned the coat and shucked it off.
Smiling, she dropped her eyes to the rug, kicking the edge with the toe of her shoe. “Are you hungry?”
“No, I ate what they called breakfast on the plane. Could use some coffee, though.”
He watched as she went to the kitchen. Damn shame, a woman her age caught in a situation like this: caring for two badly damaged people alone in the great woods. He couldn’t blame her if it got to her after a while.
She came back with two cups and a full pot, and sat next to him on the couch. She told him about Page. Just after twelve yesterday, he’d sailed in as she opened the door. He strolled around the place, inspecting it without a word. She said nothing herself; something about him silenced her.
Finally he turned to her and smiled—she closed her eyes as she told Telford this—and said, “Name’s Page. You’ve heard of me.”
She asked him what he wanted while he admired the computer, peered into her bedroom, and walked into the kitchen. Ignoring her, he opened the fridge and helped himself to a hunk of cheese, then leaned on the counter with his gaze fixed on her.
She was at the point of panic when Gene came downstairs and caught sight of him.
“His eyes just lit up,” Naomi said. “He didn’t say a word to me. He just went to . . . Page and shook his hand like he was his long lost brother or something.”
Telford frowned. As far as he knew, they’d never met. But a lot of things he didn’t know about had happened between the raid and the setting up of the network.
Naomi went on. The equipment outside wasn’t due for servicing, but she did it anyway—at that point nothing could have kept her in the house. She spent three hours at it, replacing parts, calibrating and recalibrating everything, hoping that Page would leave while she was outside. It was growing dark by the time she steeled herself to go back in. They were still talking, and Page stared at her as she went past him to the stairs. On the second floor she found Cora sitting on the bed, arms wrapped around her knees, refusing to speak. Naomi was convinced that Cora had seen Page. She stayed with her, listening, afraid she’d hear footsteps on the stairs. Finally she could stand it no longer and went down to find them in the kitchen, talking over an open wine bottle. “Are you moving in or what?” she said, her voice almost a shriek.
Page set his glass down and came out of the kitchen. His pace was slow, and he stopped only a foot away. Although she was taller than he, it seemed that he was examining her from a great height.
“I was just leaving, ma’am,” he said, and walked out without another word.
“ . . . Gene gave me a dirty look and went upstairs. I called you after I calmed down a little.” She stopped speaking for a second. “I finished the rest of the wine myself.”
“Don’t blame you.” He asked her a few more questions; a description of Page, how he’d been dressed. It was he all right, although Telford had never really doubted that.
“He show any signs of dementia—facial expressions, the way he talked, anything like that?”
“No, he was totally calm.”
Telford got up and went to the window. He’d always assumed that Page was from one of the groups who went in for tapping in a big way, who virtually made a ritual out of it. That being the case, Page should be wasted by now, but who knew? He might not be interfacing at all, or wasn’t as susceptible as most. Pelton’s didn’t affect everybody at the same rate; it was even possible that some people were immune.
Telford shook his head, thinking of a man like Page having free access to the comps of the world, as shielded as they were.
There was movement outside. He glanced up at the hill beyond the trucks and saw Gene looking back at him. Gene was wearing a lumberjack shirt and jeans, and Telford could see that he hadn’t shaved. He was about to raise his hand when Gene’s face hardened and he turned away, vanishing into the trees.
Telford stared after him. For a moment, as Gene had swung around, he could have sworn he saw something jutting from under his jacket, something a lot like a gun.
“What is it?” Naomi asked behind him. She was massaging her throat.
“Nothing,” he said.
“Jase,” Naomi said in a small voice.
He couldn’t be sure, but it seemed that her eyes had grown brighter in the dim afternoon light.
She took a deep breath before speaking. “Is it going to happen again? What happened on the Coast? Is he going to bring that here?” Her voice broke, and she closed her eyes. “Because if it is, I can’t stay. I couldn’t take it, Jason, I just couldn’t . . .”
He was going to go to her, to put his arms around her, but was sure somehow that wasn’t what she needed. “No,” he said. “It won’t happen here. I promise you that.”
She rubbed her face. “What are you going to do?”
Find out what he wants, what he’s here for, whatever the hell it is he thinks he’s doing. Telford turned back to the window. It was getting on to dusk, bright snow highlighting the shadows of the trees. Footprints stood out next to his car. Gene made those, he thought. He wondered what he was doing up there, whether he was alone, whether it would be worthwhile to go talk to him.
He watched the shadows lengthen, aware of Naomi’s eyes on his back. There was probably only one thing to do, and he wasn’t the man to do it. “I’ll think of something,” he said quietly.