Neurolink (41 page)

One more thing the ’quans would do. After one year, they would dissolve and wash away in his bloodstream. One year, that was the length of his merger contract. The NP had made that concession. In the end, the genie decided a friendly takeover would serve its interests better than a hostile one. Or maybe the NP was already learning how to revise itself. For one year, it would ride along inside Dominic’s head, observe his every thought and act, and try to discover what process he used to invent himself from one moment to the next. One year, and then Dominic would be a free man again. Would the genie honor its promise? It was up to Dominic to teach it how.

For now, he turned to Ane Zaki, who’d been quietly watching him play with Benito. A faint pink blush had returned to her cheeks, along with her air of benevolent calm. The cell hygiene had restored her health, and somewhere deep below them, her power plant whirred with renewed vigor, pumping currents of energy to illuminate the mining town spreading beneath the sea. Ane Zaki tilted her head and smiled.

“The major still won’t see me,” he said.

A touch of melancholy softened Ane Zaki’s smile, and she slowly shook her head. “Qi is busy with her duties in the hospital.”

“She despises me,” Dominic said.

“No,” said Ane Zaki.

“Aw, not this sentimental crap again.” The NP sighed. “I’m too old for this shit. I’m loggin’ out for a while.”

Dominic felt an acute physical drain when the NP withdrew its presence. He was chagrined to find how accustomed he’d grown in just a few weeks to the genie’s constant companionship. For once he had privacy—and he felt abandoned. Those nanoquans were feeding him some addictive drug, surely. Or maybe he was just weak—the kind of man who would always need someone.

“What if I go to the hospital and demand to see her?” he asked Ane Zaki.

The lady electrician shook her head again. As she gazed at him, her mild Asian eyes caught the light. They were like Qi’s eyes, but not the same. “You’ve said good-bye, Nick. Don’t disturb her again.”

He nodded, knowing she was right and at the same time wanting one more chance to explain himself.

“Juanita Inez needs a word with you.”

“Juanita?” Dominic wondered what the old grandmother could want. He’d given her enough money to set up her grandchildren for life.

“She’s waiting for you in the bathysphere.”

Through the window, Dominic saw the rusty, dented shuttle bobbing in the waves beside the sleek ZahlenBank car the NP had sent for him. The bathysphere’s small round hatch gaped open, and a rickety ladder had been lowered into the water.

One more leave-taking. Juanita probably wanted to thank him again. This final trip to the colony saddened him more man he had expected. He’d already said his good-byes to Tooksook and the council, and he’d given Massoud ample advice about how to organize the new bank. They’d structured it along the lines of a mutual credit union, and Dominic even helped design the new nickel-plated coins. He also helped Massoud place ads on the Net. Naturally, the new bank would invite everyone.

The NP didn’t take the new bank seriously, but Dominic did—because he’d seen the energy of the matching hall. He’d witnessed the colonists building their town from the castoff rubbish of North America, and he’d recognized the promise. Once he had dreamed of being part of it.

Now the old grandmother wanted to thank him again and embarrass him with hugs and kisses. He scowled at the bathysphere, then rolled his aching neck. Best to get it over with. Best to leave quickly and go back to his own world, the world that seemed blank now by comparison.

One last time, he bowed to Ane Zaki and ruffled Benito’s hair. Then, before emotion could overtake him, he rushed through the van’s airlock, dove into the sea and swam to the bathysphere. Juanita was waiting alone inside. She’d dyed her sack dress an earthy red and tied her long gray hair with a strip of the same rough cloth. Her new plastic boots shouted green. Otherwise, she wore no adornments, but she studied him with a self-assurance he hadn’t noticed before.

“Let’s take a trip,” she said, closing the hatch.

Dominic glanced at his wrist node. “I don’t have much time. I’m expected elsewhere.”

“Indulge me, banker.” Juanita shifted the old-fashioned levers, and the bathysphere sank into the ocean.

She handled the controls with skill. Even though she was the same gray-haired grandmother, she looked like a different person. Dominic tried to analyze what changed her. Posture maybe, or the way she held her head. The way her eyes twinkled.

“Watch the view,” she said, pointing to the small round screen.

They descended steadily, and in a few moments, the miner’s town loomed up out of the murk. Divers had strung necklaces of underwater floodlights, and the lamps cast cloudy glows through the green ocean. Dominic bent closer to study the blurred images forming on the screen. There was the
Pressure of Light
, now rooted to the seafloor by jerry-built annexes, enclosed walkways and tethered diving bells. Juanita brought the shuttle about, and he saw the old crawler from a different angle, its belt-driven treads mired deep in the silt. Not far away, the
Dominic Jedes
rocked very slightly on its moorings. Shipshape and fully occupied, its windows glowed a warm inviting yellow. Next to it lay the
Zygote
, listing a few degrees starboard. Blue-white flashes from a dozen welding rigs showered down its rusty flank, and shiny new patch-welds covered a third of its hull. Juanita steered toward the garbage mountains, where more wrecks lurked in the gloom, waiting for repair.

“Take me closer,” he said suddenly. The mountains were moving. Every hillock and bluff of accumulated junk swarmed with activity. What was going on?

Juanita took the shuttle low. Frustrated with the screen’s poor resolution, Dominic rushed to the tiny portal, cupped his hands around his eyes and peered through the thick, distorting glass. The mountains were covered with divers. They were picking through the waste, salvaging scrap, and he saw them piloting motorized sleds of reclaimed metal and plastic along the littered valley floors. The sleds held other things, too. Bales of cable. Machine parts. Electronic components. Dominic could only imagine the riches they were finding. These mountains held enough material to build Trondheim ten times over.

“Your money made this possible,” Juanita said

He pressed his face closer to the glass. “How many people are here now?”

“That’s confidential. I just thought you’d like to see your investment paying off.” Juanita rested a hand lightly on his shoulder. “There’s something else you should see. Come back to the screen.”

She punched keys, and the screen dissolved into whirling rainbow colors. Some kind of graphic took shape, with surprising definition considering the shuttle’s obsolete screen. Dominic tried to make sense of the colored patterns. Weather map? Satellite view of the upper atmosphere? Whatever it represented, it was beautiful. Bright green-and-blue masses streamed in whorls, condensed into white lumps, then exploded and re-formed. Perhaps it was an artist’s rendition Of the early universe.

“What is it?” he asked.

Juanita answered, “It’s the marketplace.”

Dominic shot her a quick glance. The marketplace? He bent over the screen and studied the ceaseless movement, the shifting spectrum of colors, the massing and dissolution of bright spots. It mesmerized him. The flow seemed to pulse in a rhythmic reiteration, yet he couldn’t quite pin it down. No movement ever exactly repeated.

“If this is an econometric model, it’s the most sophisticated I’ve ever seen,” he said. “Where did you get this, Juanita?”

“From my superiors.” Juanita smiled. “Your Major Qi wasn’t the only Org operative here.”

Dominic stepped back and stared at her. She held herself erect and calmly returned his gaze.

“That’s right. I’m a WTO agent. Gig asked me to show you this.” She tapped the screen, where wine-colored masses were transitioning into darker, deeper violets. “The Orgs created this model to observe the tides of entropy in the marketplace. The program factors every market swing from order to disorder and back again. This is how the Orgs predict outcomes.”

Dominic turned back to the entrancing screen. Pockets of light and darkness formed. “So what are you telling me, Juanita? The Orgs see the future?”

“No, not mat.” Juanita sat on the pilot’s stool and made herself comfortable, then patted another stool beside her. “Join me, coin giver. We need to talk.”

Dominic was too curious to refuse. He sat beside her, and as the bathysphere drifted between two soaring peaks of wreckage, Juanita told him what the Orgs had forecast. Richter Jedes, she said, was a true visionary. ZahlenBank’s iron-fisted monetary control had kept the markets teetering in steady state for almost two centuries, ensuring full employment—and delaying the onset of radical change.

“But change is inevitable, Dominic. You’ve seen the reports. Temperatures are still rising, resources are failing, and technology’s not keeping up.” Juanita picked at the folds of her dress. “I don’t have to tell you about the queues down in the tunnels.”

“The tail end of things,” Dominic muttered.

“Not at all,” she said. “More like a pressure cooker without a vent.”

Dominic watched the screen as she talked. Greens, yellows and fuchsias coiled together and blossomed. Sometimes linear shapes emerged, chains and spirals of faceted crystals. Sometimes the colors branched like veins. He said, “The miners made a vent.”

“Precisely.” Juanita took his hand between hers and patted it. “A condition of intolerable pressure was building. The colony became necessary, so the marketplace created it.”

“Incredible,” Dominic said. “The Orgs predicted that?”

“We foresaw that the marketplace would self-correct.”

“You knew I would help the miners, even before I knew it myself?”

Juanita demurred. “We had reason to trust your instincts.”

“And you knew about Qi.” Dominic jerked his hand free and pulled away from her. “You deliberately threw us together.”

“Dominic, the Orgs can’t measure the position of every particle in the system. We deal in probabilities. Certain incidents act as fulcrums around which the streams of causality bend and change direction. That’s what we look for. Sometimes we assist—carefully. Remember, the WTO is inside the system, too.”

Juanita-got up and squinted through the tiny portal. “Banker, this is not the tail end of anything. The markets are swinging back to order again. Production is up. Prices are holding. Every condition is temporary.”

“And the colony? What about that?”

Juanita shook her head. “It’s stabilizing, for a while. When the miners first sent their broadcast, an initial flood of runaways burst out of their overcrowded Coms and came here. But now the pressure has eased, and the flow is trickling off.”

Dominic rose and joined her at the portal. They watched a team of divers unearthing an old surface vehicle, half crushed and rotted with rust. Inside its sealed trunk were boxes of plastic toys. “People will always come here,” Dominic murmured.

“Yes, they will.” Juanita smiled at his reflection in the glass. “But only a few. The journey’s hazardous. Most workers would rather stay in protected jobs. The colony is already becoming a myth. A necessary myth. You see that?”

“I think so.”

“That’s why Gig shielded the miners and disguised their broadcast.”

“Gig inserted that office maintenance account into the Ark, too. Didn’t he?” Dominic set his jaw. “Gig’s fingerprints were all over it.”

“Um-hm. And that’s why we dropped the court case.” Juanita winked. “Let your genie believe we’re blowing circuits and eating court costs. The Orgs lost nothing.”

Dominic gazed out the portal and chewed over this information. One of the divers had found some kind of paddle-shaped device in the box of toys. The paddle had a ball attached with an elastic string, and the diver was attempting to bat the ball around underwater. After a moment, Dominic laughed.

“So what’s next, Juanita? What does the mighty Gig predict for my future?”

Juanita laughed, too. “When we return to the surface, your genie will be furious with both of us. It’ll want to know why this old bathysphere is clad in stealth shielding. You can tell it anything you like. I’ll go back to the colony and raise my grandchildren. I trust you won’t betray me.”

“The NP reads my mind, Juanita. I can’t hide anything.”

“Then I’d better do something to make you forget for a while.” She pinched his cheeks affectionately. Already, she was slumping, sagging, visibly changing back into the arthritic old woman he’d first met in the raft. She operated the levers, and the craft began to rise.

“But—you can’t see what’s ahead for me?” he asked.

Juanita chuckled gaily. “You’ll lead an interesting life, coin giver.”

“I wanted to stay here and help start up the new bank and—other things.”

Juanita worked the levers and watched the dials. “You have a lot of hard choices ahead. Like everyone.”

“I’ll come back in a year,” he said. “I will.”

“Tooky thinks you will.”

“He does?”

“Right now, you have an appointment to keep elsewhere. Go, Dominic. Go where you belong.” Juanita stood on her tiptoes and kissed his cheek, and he felt a tiny spark of static electricity.

At that moment, the bathysphere broke through the surface and tilted violently on a rolling wave. Bright sunlight streamed through the portal. And like a power surge, the NP’s presence charged into his artificial eye.

“Where’ve you been? You belong in Nome, boy. We’re about to seal the deal of the century. You gotta sign the documents. I need you, boy.”

“I’m coming.”

Dominic offered Juanita a handshake, but the old woman hugged him to her fleshy bosom. Blushing, he made a quick transfer from the bathysphere to the ZahlenBank aircar.

“You’re soaking wet,” the NP ranted. “Get cleaned up. I packed you a suit. What did that old hag want anyway?”

“Nothing important. I can’t even remember.”

“Huh. That’s freakin’ strange,” the NP said. “I’ll figure it out”