Part 7 (1/2)

Nguyen watched him leave with a detached air of amus.e.m.e.nt. I turned on him. ”What's that smirk about. You look like you're hatching an egg.”

”He likes you, Liz.”

”Right.”

”Liz, when avatars are well done-and remember, it took some time to get yours exact-they're more than just mirrors or puppets. They're out there doing what people are normally too busy to do anymore-playing. Experimenting with possibilities. So these two fell in l.u.s.t with one another. You can ignore it completely, or you can take note of it-maybe your avatar is telling you something you ought to know. Personally, the chance that that might happen is what's kept me from having one. I'm sure there are some things about myself I would rather not discover.”

He took another sip of champagne. ”Now, a.s.suming this press conference gets the reporters off our necks for a while, what we need to talk about is how we are going to get Queen Jolly Freeze up and flying before the convergence happens.”

On the pix, ”Cobble” put her hand up to touch ”Wetherall” on the arm.

By that end of the day everybody in the world knew that the Chinese, Ethiopian, Chilean and Aussie s.h.i.+tdogs were tunneling to Stateline. Seismologists rushed equipment to Nevada to try to antic.i.p.ate their arrival. It was generally believed that Thorp's estimate for a simultaneous arrival in fifteen days was ludicrous; reasonable numbers ranged from eighteen to twenty-eight days.

There were calls in Congress to ban everyone from Stateline except for military, but the governor of Nevada-whose hand was, no doubt, deep in Wetherall's pocket-made fiery speech about states' rights. The reporters vowed to stay right where they were to cover what many claimed was the biggest story in history. Perversely, Wetherall found himself allied with the media against the government in the effort to maintain civilian access to the s.h.i.+tdog site.

Ten days after the convergence had begun, Nguyen had the house ready for flight. There would be no test: this was the official launch even though the mobile base wouldn't be ready for another week. Wetherall had insisted, over Nguyen's objections, that we use the makes.h.i.+ft base we had driven on our s.h.i.+tdog-wrangling test. Queen Jolly Freeze had to be up and running before the rest of the s.h.i.+tdogs arrived.

”When you're ready, Wetherall.” The pix softened Nguyen's voice to a whisper.

Overnight the crew had tested all systems and inflated the balloons with helium. In the dawn light, through the skylight, I had watched them swelling over us like huge tumors. Now Wetherall and I were in the control room of Queen Jolly Freeze. Below us, Nguyen in the base directed the ground crew as they worked the mooring lines that had kept the house stable through the inflation. Wetherall's liftmansion was a brobdignagian version of Laputa, an elongated octagon rather than a disk, with four levels, an encircling balcony (despite Wetherall's acrophobia), a small gym, sauna, even a hot tub. Every room had its own escape hatch and ladder.

Wetherall decided that none of the crew was necessary. He knew as much about his house as anyone. This was to be a test run for his elusive solitude as well as for Queen Jolly Freeze. I was surprised when he invited me along.

Wetherall was as bright and excited as a kid with seventy million dollars worth of balloons. ”I'm going to retract the boom now,” he said.

”Go,” Nguyen replied from the pix.

The stair boom detached from the base and retracted into the house. The mooring lines fell away. There was an initial jerk as the lifthouse broke free and found its equilibrium. It hovered, neither rising nor falling, ten meters above the base.

”Neutral ballast achieved,” Nguyen said. ”Electromagnetic tether engaged.”

”I'm going to take it up to half alt.i.tude,” Wetherall said. His hands moved over the controls. Through the observation floor I watched the base gradually shrink below us.

Wetherall stopped the house at sixty meters. In the light northerly breeze, it moved off thirty meters south of the base. The shadows of the big balloons, in the early morning light, were cast against the foot of Pile B a kilometer away.

”Let's have a look at the jewels,” Wetherall said.

”Up there you see jewels,” Nguyen grumbled. ”Down here all I see is s.h.i.+t.” He started the base crawling over the salt flats. As the wind was at its back, the house drifted into the lead. Wetherall peered intently at the piles ahead. I retreated to the observation deck on the opposite side of the house to watch for s.h.i.+tdogs.

It was almost over now, and looking down from the balcony, I thought about what the last months had meant. Since that night on the salt flats, Wetherall had treated me with punctilious correctness, retreating into formality like a hurt child. I didn't know why that should have bothered me. But it did.

It was a little chilly outside, and the wind blew back my hopeless hair.

Of course, the media had noticed the lifthouse taking off. They scrambled a dozen copters in pursuit. Wetherall's private little launch party was going to be live on the net, very shortly. But I didn't have the chance to tell him. Below, a pair of s.h.i.+tdogs appeared, loping after the base. Nguyen began to turn away from it and the piles but then two more s.h.i.+tdogs approached from the west. Nguyen spotted them, sped up and veered back left. As he did, the left side treads of the base skipped a little ahead, spinning faster than the right ones, though the crawler didn't seem to speed up when it did. The ma.s.s of the house, in occasional gusts of wind, was threatening to pull the base off the salt flats. Nguyen had been right; the base wasn't ma.s.sive enough for Queen Jolly Freeze.

I wondered about the way the four s.h.i.+tdogs had come at us from opposite directions. It was almost as if they were acting in concert. But that didn't make sense, because the effect of their actions was not to chase us away but to steer us toward the piles. Just then I noticed a cloud of dust being kicked up off toward the press encampment. Several vehicles had crossed the property line and were closing on us.

”Wetherall, we've got company,” I said.

”I know. There's nothing I can do about the copters, but I'm having security turn those buses around.”

”They better. You realize that if we make any sudden turns, your house is going to yank the base off the ground like Piglet in a windstorm.”

”What about that, Nguyen?”

He sounded calm. ”I told you the ma.s.s of this base was inadequate. Of course, a collision with either a s.h.i.+tdog or a bus voids your warranty. However, the s.h.i.+tdogs seem to be dropping back. As long as the wind doesn't pick up, we should be all right. But no heavy breathing, you two.”

Copters hovered around Queen Jolly Freeze like gulls around a beached whale. I could see a commentator talking excitedly into his throat mike. I ran out to the rec room and turned on the pix. ” . . . Floating pleasure-palace drifts toward the largest of the alien piles . . . ” A telephoto close-up showed Wetherall at the controls; it made him looked goofier than he really was. ”. . . ident.i.ty of the woman is still unknown. We have unconfirmed reports that it's pix flame Daphne Overdone, spirited away from the set of the interactive spectacular Madonna by special black operatives of Allweather Security, Wetherall's Jolly Freeze subsidiary. . . .”

”Whoa, Nguyen!” said Wetherall. ”This is close enough.”

The base skidded slowly to a halt. I ran back to Wetherall. We floated alongside pile B. The air was thick with the smell of strawberries and chocolate. Outside the window of the observation deck, twenty meters away, were the jewels that crowned the s.h.i.+tpile.

I hadn't been this close to a cl.u.s.ter since we had decapitated Pile A four years ago. Since there's no way to quantify beauty, scientists are supposed to ignore it. But the view of the jewels took my breath away.

There were three main groups. Each consisted of hexagonal rhombohedrons, the largest over three meters in length and almost half a meter in diameter. But the surface of each of the larger jewels was fixed with a myriad of smaller rhombohedrons, and each of those with still smaller ones, in a kind of fractal dance. The colors ranged from the liquid red of garnet, through a fiery gold, to azure, tourmaline and indigo. The morning sunlight reflecting off and refracting through them threw a thousand brilliant highlights.

”This is why I built this house,” Wetherall said quietly. ”I'm sorry I had to push you around to do it.”

”They're beautiful,” I said.

Wetherall was silent for a long time. I sat beside him and the two of us watched the jewels bloom as the sun rose. I wondered whether they had any intelligible purpose at all, or were just some chance production of a heap of alien s.h.i.+t. It would be a good joke on all of us-but no more than the beauty of a spiral galaxy, or of the pattern of seeds in a sunflower. Was all this sound and fury, my career in the university, Thorp's career in the media, Nguyen's architectural commission and Wetherall's billions put in service of it, justified by a calm ten minutes at the apex of Pile B? In the end, Wetherall was a pretty sad character. And if he was sad, then what was I, with my academic infighting, the ”s.h.i.+tdogs studies community” and coffee for Saintjohn Matthewson?

The light seemed to dance in the corner of my eye and I started to feel that odd feeling again, like I was standing next to myself. As I looked at Liz Cobble, I saw a woman who was very plain indeed-n.o.body special. It made me ashamed to realize that I had spent my life tarnis.h.i.+ng the brilliance I'd been born with. I did not s.h.i.+ne. Who would ever be dazzled by me?

Of course, I knew exactly when it had all begun. At the nurse's station in the ICU of St. Anne's hospital. The smiley nurse with the hair thick as rubber bands wanted to give me a lollipop. I didn't want a lollipop. I was eight years old and my mother was dying and I was going to have to live the rest of my life with my two aunts, who dressed strange and smelled funny and never had anything to eat in their house.

”Here, take it honey,” the nurse said. It was purple. Of course she didn't know that I hated purple lollipops. ”We only give them to special little girls.”

”I don't want to be special,” little Lizzy Cobble had said. ”I want to go home.”

She was such a stubborn little girl.

”Liz, does it seem to you that they're glowing?”

Wetherall's words roused me from my orgy of self-reproach. At first I thought it was just the angle of the sun, then I realized that Wetherall was right. The jewels were beginning to glow.

”Has anyone spotted this phenomenon before?” Wetherall asked.

”It's not in the literature,” I said. ”We need to get closer. This could be a breakthrough.”

”You think it's some sort of radioactivity?”

”I doubt it. There's nothing in their chemical composition that . . .”