Generosity: An Enhancement (33 page)

The preprint sits on a cleared edge of the cluttered coffee table, waiting for him. It looks like something that might come in a registered envelope: injunction, medical notification, summons. He glances at Candace. She’s already read it, and her face shows.

“You promised,” Gabe accosts him. “You said you would, back when I was at your house.”

“Go,” Candace instructs the mystified Stone. Discovery can wait. “We’re busy in the kitchen anyway.”

Thassa, too, shoos them off. “Don’t worry. But get ready for the amazing!” It takes Stone a moment to realize: she means the meal. Only then does he smell the travelogue aromas issuing from down the hall.

“They’re making something foreign,” Gabe warns. “Zero stars.” With the right male ally, he might be emboldened to make a break for it.

He pulls Stone into a back room that’s a cross between a Hindu temple and NORAD’s facility under Cheyenne Mountain. If some newly mutated virus were to decimate the race tomorrow, a fair chunk of civilization’s id from the Paleolithic to the Nanotech Age could be re-created out of this room’s strewn treasures. The overflowing dragon’s hoard of Wi-Fi medieval castles, interstellar Monopoly sets, speech-recognizing ant colonies, and GPS-ready counterterrorist dolls seems to contain a total of three books. Stone picks up one:
Danny Dunn and the International Clone Cartel.
“Don’t you read?”

Gabriel is already booting up Darth Sauron’s Personal Quantum Rearrangement Center. “Uh . . .
ye
-ah? Like . . .
all the time
? Hey! Put that down and come over here.”

Stone does as ordered. On the screen is something like the animated Saturday-morning adventures he and Robert used to watch back in the day, only sharper, richer, and much more deeply realized. Also, there’s the little matter of Gabriel actually moving around in the animated universe and leaving behind footprints.

“I’m sorry about the quality,” Gabe says, mostly to the screen. “The frame rates on this piece of junk are pretty much down the toilet. You should come see it on my dad’s machine sometime.”

“Sure,” Russell says. What they move through on-screen is as smooth and textured as waking life.

“This is Chaoseeker. The character I was telling you about?”

Only then does Stone realize: they’re in Futopia, the persistent, massively multiplayer world that Candace’s son and millions of others around the globe find far more rewarding than anything the less persistent real world has to offer.

Gabe in Futopia looks much as he does in Edgewater, aside from the steroidal body mass and the wings. He circles in the air, a lazy spiral over a megalopolis that—unknown to either boy—is modeled on the most futuristic wards of Tokyo.

“Where do you want to go?” the flying child asks.

Omnipotence-induced nausea washes over Stone. He shrugs, paralyzed, but the angel doesn’t wait for an answer. It peels over the cityscape, banking across a harbor filled with frenetic activity. Alter-Gabe heads over an ocean of deepening blues. Small craft toss on the stormy waters. The horizon offers a spectrum of available weather from sunburst to squalls.

The boy flies in a trance, beyond speech. They skim over monstrous islands, mashups of ancient cultural memories and historical nostalgia—medieval bestiaries, frontier romances, Victorian steam-punk, and recombinant hybrids of everything from spell-casting spacemen to Panzer-driving elves.

Gabe mistakes his visitor’s vertigo for thrill. “Can you believe my mother doesn’t get this?”

“How big is this place?”

“Which? The
whole
 . . . ? Endless! You can even create new lands, if you gather enough power.”

Stone nods, for no one. When we run out of resources, we can always move here.

He breathes easier when the flying boy touches down in a desolate landscape. The coast, a plain of ocher rocks, a stone farmhouse. “One of my homes,” Chaoseeker explains. The only moving things are birds and the occasional large mammals, off on the rim of olive-riddled mountains.

“Where are we?”

But the reward centers in the boy’s brain spark so fiercely it degrades his power of speech. “I built this here . . . I’m a quest . . . There’s a relic from the Old Ways I have to . . .”

He trots up into the foothills, ducking into hidden canyons, fending off the occasional assaults of hungry creatures under the remorseless sun. Now and then he finds a sparkling artifact, which he pockets. “We can trade this for great stuff, back in the village.”

It’s something out of colonialist fantasy literature. The boy’s real jaw hangs panting and his eyes dart in heightened alert. Futopia taps into more of the child’s legacy nervous system than Chicago ever will. Candace’s boy is a junkie, addicted to something that can match any narcotic floating around the public school system.

Futopia spreads before Stone. He, too, might wander forever in mysterious mountains in search of hidden relics, driven by a pleasure as much in need of constant renewal as sex. After each momentary injection of success, always another goal. A little repeated exposure and Russell could easily become as enslaved as this child.

Years ago, in a different desert, under a rock face filled with petroglyphs, Grace cut him his first line of cocaine on a pocket mirror. It terrified him, but she offered up the rite in such innocence—an exploratory lark required of all aspiring writers—that he gave himself over to her and breathed in the dust. It did almost nothing. It made his two front teeth glow and numbed his gums. Yes, the afternoon was glorious; yes, he felt full and funny and grateful and even powerful. But that’s what an afternoon with Grace always made him feel.

A week later, he asked, offhand,
How hard is it to get that stuff?
She laughed so long at his casual pretense that he realized: he would do this chemical never again, or he would do it forever. Something in his cells had come into life pre-addicted, as it had for his father and uncle and great-aunt and probably his brother. And the only cure for him was never to take the first taste.

“She hates this,” the boy says. “She thinks it’s fake. But it’s no faker than her phone life.”

Russell doesn’t even want to ask. “Take me somewhere else,” he tells Gabe.

“Wait! We’re really close. Let’s try over there.”

There’s no more talking to him. Stone leans back on his stool and watches his guide, the child of the future. Happy citizen of the place
that cultural evolution has finally created to shelter the brain, after its long exile.

Just when Russell is about to flee, the door opens, framing Thassa against the blazing hallway. Two steps and she’s kneeling between them, one arm around each of their shoulders. “Jibreel. Mister Stone. What are you men doing?”

Gabe says, “What did you call me?”

She studies the screen and her eyes narrow. “Hey! Where is that?”

“It’s . . .” the smaller addict starts. “It’s hard to, I can’t really . . .”

“It’s
Kabylie
!”

Gabriel snaps up, clutching the mouse. “No it’s not.”

“It is! That’s Gouraya mountain, there. My grandfather came from not far away. Sidi Touati is just over
there
.”

The boy’s alarm confirms an invisible village just over the distant crest.

“Poor Algeria. Invaded by everyone.”

Candace stands in the doorway, testing a smile. “What’s going on?”

Thassa wheels toward her. “They’re occupying my homeland. Again!”

“We aren’t!” Gabe cries.

Thassa turns back to wag a finger at the plunderers, but Gabe’s bewilderment is so complete that she hugs his head to her chest and coos a stream of Tamazight that seems to comfort him. “You want
Kabylie
? Come with me!”

The boy wants nothing but to be left alone to solitary marauding. But he follows the adults into the dining room and a table so generous that both males stop and stare. Thassa orbits the spread, naming everything. There’s a small volcano of
couscous bel osbane
, pools of clabbered milk, a mountain lake of
shorba
with
frik
and coriander, stacked-up wedges of
brik
dripping with lemon. “And for dessert, if you are good . . .” She motions toward a mound of sacrificial almond cookies. “
Dziriettes
. ‘Little Algerians.’ ”

Gabe stands stunned. “It’s exactly what they eat . . .” He points back toward his remade shadow world.

Thassa grabs his head to her chest again. “Of course it is! Maybe you’re a little Algerian, in your other life.”

She sits next to the boy. All meal long she teaches him table words
in Arabic. He revels in the gutturals while his mother crows, astonished at his appetite.

Checking out of her Centre Ville hotel, Tonia Schiff will ask the concierge how to catch the bus to El Kef. The concierge draws a map to the big station at Bab Alioua. Schiff will find the station without a problem—a cushy place, as world bus stations go. But something about Bab Alioua is a glimpse of things to come: a state-controlled, adlibbed exercise in indirection and concealment. Take a number and pitch a tent.

She asks about the Kef bus at three guichets and gets five different answers. She boards the wrong bus but disembarks just before it takes off for the subterranean world of Tataouine. She gets sent to another waiting area, but a handmade Arabic sign on the door she’s supposed to leave from announces a further unreadable change in plans. She asks around. And around. The bus threatens to leave. Then a semiofficial-looking man declares it’s going to be badly delayed. When Schiff asks again half an hour later, she learns it left twenty minutes ago.

Tonia Schiff begins to think that her French—so secure her whole life—is nothing but a private hallucination. Finally, a kindly man with a flowing Old Testament beard takes pity on her. He tells Schiff that someone in her situation (one he doesn’t bother spelling out) is better off getting to Kef by
louage
. He directs her to a nearby carrefour and tells her to ask for the
samsar
—the go-between—at the Café de l’Avenir.

The
samsar
can arrange everything. No worries. But the thing that takes the most arranging is how to divvy up Schiff’s dinars between the potential driver, the samsar, and the
samsar’s samsar
. A
louage
is coming soon, the man tells Tonia. But it’s a crowded one, and yesterday, it overheated, two hours into the mountains. That
louage
, he ventures, is not the
louage
for her. One epic Arabic cell call later, he announces a much better one that he could probably get her into, if it’s worth his while.

Schiff sits at a café table for a long time, in a mental fugue state straight out of postwar existentialist fiction. Waiting, she considers how much more fun it is to read such scenes than to live them. But
the sun is mild, there is still coffee, and nothing on the horizon suggests that humanity can’t hold out until she records her final interview with it.

Just as she begins to imagine that it might indeed be possible for even Sisyphus to be happy, a white Peugeot wagon with its rear-left quarter punched in pulls up to the terrace with four others already in it. Tonia hands over one final stack of dinars, gets in the front seat, and buckles in for the three-hour ride.

The
louage
passes through the salt flats west of the city, Tunis’s only obvious shantytown. The driver catches Schiff looking and hints ominously that the slum owes its continued existence to World Bank master derivatives. The car bears south a little, then west again, through a plain that graduates—in another advance taste of things to come—imperceptibly from arable to arid.

Schiff’s guidebook says to keep watch off the right side of the road, at about one hundred kilometers. The Peugeot crests a hill, and down a wide expanse spread the ruins of Dougga. Tonia cries out in admiration. One of the passengers—the one she has dubbed the Tunisian Robert De Niro—leans forward and says, “The best Roman town in North Africa. Edge of the empire.”

The woman next to him objects with her whole body. Not Roman, she says. Numidian. Then Libyco-Punic.

Her other seatmate, who had spent the entire trip writing columns of figures into pocket ledgers, claims that the Numidians stole it from the Berbers. The driver plunges into the fray, and the debate turns violent in three languages, only one of which Tonia can follow. The argument over who built the city turns into a fight over who killed it—the Byzantines, the Vandals, the Ottomans, the French, or the UN World Heritage folks.