Part 38 (1/2)
”Oops, my boss is chiming hysterically at me. Bye!”
”Um-wait.” He turned to glance at the dull silvery bubble, already bouncing back from its minimum size, but when he turned back, Manda Solomon was gone and it was only the snowy sunset again. ”s.h.i.+t.”
He went to the bubble and kicked it angrily. He couldn't feel anything but ”stop,” with his sneaker on. It wasn't like kicking an object, it was like something stopped you, turned you back toward your own time flow. Just ”stopness.” It was saying ”no” with the stuff of forever itself.
There was no way to look inside it: Once someone crawled in through a pocket's navel, it sealed up all over.
He turned away, heard something-and when he looked back the pocket was gone and his dad, stinking and retching and raggedly bearded, was crawling toward him across the carpet.
Next morning, it seemed to Wendel that his dad sucked the soup down more noisily, more sloppily, than ever before. His hands shook and he spilled soup on the blankets.
His dad was supposedly forty-but he looked fifty-five. He'd spent maybe fifteen years in the pockets-adding up to only a few weeks in outside time, ten minutes here and two hours there and so on.
Dad sat up in his bed, staring out to the bay, sloppily drinking the soup from a bowl, and Wendel had to look away. Sitting at the breakfast bar that divided the kitchenette from the rest of the room, he found himself staring at the pile of dirty clothes in the corner. They needed some kind of hamper, and he could go to some Martinez garage sale and find one next to free.
But that was something Dad ought to do; Wendel sensed that if he started doing that sort of thing, parental things, his dad would give a silent gasp of relief and lean on him, more and more; and paradoxically fall away from him, into the pockets.
”I was gone like-ten minutes world-time?” said Dad. ”I don't suppose I missed anything here in this . . . this teeming hive of activity.”
”Ten minutes?” said Wendel. He snorted. ”You're still gone, Dad. And, yes, there was a call for you. A woman from Endless Media. Manda Solomon. She left her number and a picture.”
”Manda?” said Dad. ”That flake? Did you tell her I was in a pocket?”
”Right,” said Wendel contemptuously. ”Like I told her my dad's a pocket-slug.”
Dad opened his mouth like he was going to protest the disrespect- then thought better of it.
He shrugged, with as much cool as he could manage. ”Manda's down with pockets, Wendel.
Half the guys programming virtual physics for MetaMeta were using them when I was there.
Pockets are a great way to make a deadline. The MetaMeta crunch-room was like a little glen of chrome puffb.a.l.l.s. Green carpeting, you wave? Manda used to walk around setting sodas and pizzas down outside the pockets. We'd work in there for days, when it was minutes on theoutside-get a real edge on the other programmers. She was just a support tech then. We called her Fairy Princess and we crunchers were the Toads of the Short Forest, popping out all loaded on the bubble-rush. Manda's gone down in the world, what I heard, in terms of who she works for-”
”She's a project manager. Better than a support tech.”
”Nice of her to think of me.” Dad made a little grimace. ”Endless Media's about one step past being a virtu-p.o.r.n Webble. Where's the picture she sent?”
”I saved it in the iTV,” said Wendel, and pushed the b.u.t.tons to show it.
Dad made a groaning sound. ”Turn it off, Wendel. Put it away.”
”Tell me what it is, first,” said Wendel, pressing the controller b.u.t.tons to zoom in on the faces. It was definitely- ”Mom and me,” said Dad shakily. ”I took that photo the week before she died.” His voice became almost inaudible. ”Yeah. You can see . . . some of the images are different further into the lattice . . . because our pocket had a tunnel leading to other pockets. That happens sometimes, you know. It's not a good idea to go down the tunnels. It was the time after this one that. . . Mom didn't come back.” He looked at the picture for a moment; like its own pocket, the moment seemed to stretch out to a gray forever. Then he looked away. ”Turn it off, will you? It brings me down.”
Wendel stared at his mother's young face a moment longer, then turned off the image.
”You never told me much about the time she didn't come back.”
”I don't need to replay the experience, kid.”
”Dad. I... look, just do it. Tell me.”
Dad stared at him. Looked away. Wendel thought he was going to refuse again. Then he shrugged and began, his voice weary. ”It was a much bigger pocket than usual,” said Dad, almost inaudible. ”MetaMeta . . . they'd scored a s.h.i.+tload of them from DeGroot, and we were merging them together so whole teams could fit in. Using fundamental s.p.a.ce-time geometry weirdness to meet the marketing honcho's deadlines, can you believe? I was an idiot to buy into it. And this last time Jena was mad at me, and she flew away from me while we were in there.
And then I couldn't tell which of the lattice-nodes was really her. Like a mirror maze in a funhouse. And meanwhile I'm all tweaked out of my mind on bubble-rush. But I had my laptop harness, and there was all that code-hacking to be done, and I got into it for sure, glancing over at all the Jenas now and then, and they're programming, too, so I thought it was OK, but then ...” He swallowed, turning to look out the window, as if he might see her out there in the sky.
”When the pocket flattened back out, I was alone. The same s.h.i.+t was coming down everywhere all of a sudden, and then there was the Big Bubble disaster at the DeGroot plant and all the pocket-bubbles were declared government property and if you want to use them anymore . . .
people, you know ...” His voice trailed into a whisper: ”. . . they act like you're a junkie.”
”Yeah,” said Wendel. ”I know.” He looked out the window for a while. It was a sunny day, but the foulness in the water made the sea a dingy gray, as if it were brooding on dark memories. He spotted a couple of little pocket-bubbles floating in on the brackish waves. Dad had been buying them from beachcombers, merging them together till he got one big enough to crawl into again.
They'd talked about pockets in Wendel's health cla.s.s at school last term. In terms of dangerous things the grown-ups wanted to warn you away from, pockets were right up therewith needles, drunk driving, and doing it bareback. You could stay inside too long and come out a couple of years older than your friends. You could lose your youth inside a pocket. Oddly enough, you didn't eat or breathe in any conventional way while you were inside there-those parts of your metabolism went into suspension. The pocket-slugs dug this aspect of the high-for after all, weren't eating and breathing just another wearisome world-drag? There were even rock songs about pockets setting you free from ”feeding the pig,” as the 'slugs liked to call normal life. You didn't eat or breathe inside a pocket but even so were still getting older, often a lot faster than you realized. Some people came out, like, middle-aged.
And, of course, some people never came out at all. They died in there of old age, or got killed by a bubble-psychotic pocket-slug coming through a tunnel, or-though this last one sounded like government propaganda-you might tunnel right off into some kind of alien h.e.l.l world. If you found a pocket-bubble, you were supposed to take it straight to the police. As opposed to selling it to a 'slug, or, worse, trying to acc.u.mulate enough of them to get a pocket big enough to go into yourself. The word was that it felt really good, better than drugs or s.e.x or booze. Sometimes Wendel wanted to try it-because then, maybe, he'd understand his dad. Other times the thought terrified him.
He looked at his shaky, strung-out father, wis.h.i.+ng he could respect him. ”Do you keep doing it because you think you might find Mom in there someday?” asked Wendel, his voice plaintive in his own ears.
”It would sound more heroic, wouldn't it?” said Dad, rubbing his face. ”That I keep doing it because I'm on a quest. Better than saying I do it for the high. The escape.” He rubbed his face for a minute and got out of bed, a little shaky, but with a determined look on his face. ”It's get-it-together time, huh, Wendel? Get me a vita-patch from the bathroom, w.i.l.l.ya? I'll call Manda and go see her today. We need this gig. You ready to catch the light rail to San Jose?”
In person, Manda Solomon was shorter, plainer, and less well-dressed than the processed image she sent out on iTV. She was a friendly ditz, with the disillusioned aura of a Valley-vet who's seen a number of her employers go down the tubes. When Dad calmly claimed that Wendel was a master programmer and his chief a.s.sistant, Manda didn't bat an eye, just took out an extra sheaf of nondisclosure and safety-waiver agreements for Wendel to sign.
”I've never had such a synchronistic staffing process before,” she said with a breathless smile. ”Easy, but weird. Two of our team were waiting in my office when I came into work one morning. Said I'd left it unlocked. Karma, I guess.”
They followed her into a windowless conference room with whiteboards and projection screens. One of the screens showed Dad's old photo of him and Mom scattered over the nodes of a pocket's s.p.a.ce-lattice. Wendel's dad glanced at it and looked away.
Manda introduced them to the other three at the table: a cute, smiling woman named Xiao-Xiao just now busy talking Chinese on her cell phone. She had Bettie Page bangs and the faddish full-eye mirror-contacts; her eyes were like pale lavender Christmas-tree ornaments. Next was a bright-eyed sharp-nosed Sikh guy from India, named Puneet; he wore a turban. He had rea.s.suringly normal eyes and spoke in a high voice. The third was a puffy white kid only a few years older than Wendel. His name was Barley, and he wore a stoner-rock T-s.h.i.+rt. He didn't smile; with his silver mirror-contacts his face was quite unreadable. He wore an uwy computer interface on the back of his neck. Barley asked Wendelsomething about programming, but Wendel couldn't even understand the question.
”Ummm . . . well, you know. I just-”
”So what's the pitch, Manda?” Dad interrupted, to get Wendel off the spot.
”Pocket-Max,” said Manda. ”Safe and stable. Five hundred people in there at a time, strapped into ... I dunno, some kind of mobile pocket-seats. Make downtown San Jose a destination theme park. Harmless, ethical pleasure. We've got some senators who can push it through a loophole for us.”
”Safe?” said Dad. ”Harmless?”
”Manda says you've logged more time in the pockets than anyone she knows,” said Xiao-Xiao. ”You have some kind of... intuition about them? You must know some tricks for making it safe.”
”Well ... if we had the hardware that created it . . .” Dad's voice trailed off, which meant he was thinking hard, and Manda let him do it for a moment.
And then she dropped her bomb. ”We do have the hardware. Show him Flatland, Barley.”
Barley did something with his uwy, and something like a soap film appeared above the generic white plastic of the conference table. ”This is a two-dimensional-world mockup,”
mumbled Barley. ”We call it Flat-land. The nanomatrix mat for making the real pockets is offsite. Flat-land's a piece of visualization software that we got as part of our license. It's a lift.”
”Offsite would be the DeGroot Center?” said Dad, his voice rising. ”You've got full access?”
”Yaaar,” said Barley, his fat face expressionless. He was leaning over Flatland, using his uwy link to tweak it with his blank s.h.i.+ning eyes.
”Why was DeGroot making pockets in the first place?” asked Wen-del. No one had ever explained the pockets to him. It was like Dad was ashamed to talk about them much.