Juan certainly couldn't argue against that. But then he suddenly realized: "You two are alike in some ways."
"What!"
"Well, you're both as pushy as all get out."
Miri stared at him open-mouthed, and Juan waited for an explosion. But he noticed that William was watching her with a strange smile on his face. She shut her mouth and glared at Juan. "Yeah. Well. You're right. Alice says it may be my strongest talent, if I can ever put a cork in it. In the meantime, I guess I can be pretty unpleasant." She looked away for a moment. "But besides us both being up-and-coming dictators, I don't see any similarities between me and Bertie. I'm loud. I'm a loner. Bertie Toad is sneaky and mean. He has his warty hands into everything. And no one knows what he really is."
"That's not true. I've known Bertie since sixth grade; I've known him well for almost two semesters. He's a remote student, is all. He lives in Evanston."
She hesitated, maybe looking up "Evanston". "So have you ever been to Chicago? Have you ever met Bertie in person?"
"Well, not exactly. But last Thanksgiving I visited him for almost a week." That had been right after the pills really started giving Juan results. "He showed me around the museums piggyback, like a 411 tour. I also met his parents, saw their house. Faking all that would be next to impossible. Bertie's a kid just like us." Though it was true that Bertie hadn't introduced Juan to many of his friends. Sometimes it seemed like Bertie was afraid that if his friends got together, they might cut him out of things. Bertie's great talent was making connections, but he seemed to think of those connections as property that could be stolen from him. That was sad.
Miri wasn't buying any it: "Bertie is not like us, Juan. You know about Annette. I know he's wormed into a lot of groups at school. He's everything to everyone, a regular Mr. Fixit." Her face settled into a look of brooding contemplation, and she was silent for a moment.
They were off Reche now, and on the southbound. The true view was of rolling hills covered by endless streets and houses and malls. If you accepted the roadway's free enhancements, you got placid wilderness, splashed with advertising. Here and there were subtle defacements, the largest boulders morphing into trollishness; that was probably the work of some Pratchett belief circle. Their car passed the Pala off-ramp and started up the first of several miles-long ridges that separated them from Escondido and the cut across to the coast.
"Last fall," Miri said, "Bertram Todd was just another too-smart kid in my language class. But this semester, he's caused me lots of inconvenience, lots of little humiliations. Now he has Attracted My Attention." That did not sound like a healthy thing to do. "I'm gonna figure out his secret. One slip is all it takes."
That was the old saying: Once your secret is outed anywhere, however briefly, it is outed forever. "Oh, I don't know," said Juan. "The way to cover a slip is to embellish it, hide it in all sorts of fake secrets."
"Hah. Maybe he is something weird. Maybe he's a corporate team."
Juan laughed. "Or maybe he's something really weird!" Over the next few miles, he and Miri hit on all the cinema clichés: Maybe Bertie was an artificial boy, or a superbrain stuck in a bottle under Fort Meade. Maybe Bertie was a front for alien invaders, even now taking over the worldwide net. Maybe he was an old Chinese war program, suddenly growing to sentience, or the worldwide net itself that had finally awakened with superhuman—and certainly malignant—powers.
Or maybe Bertie was a subconscious creation of Juan's imagination, and Juan was—all unknowing—the monster. This one was Miri's idea. In a way it was the funniest all, though there was something a little unsettling about it, at least for Juan.
The car had turned onto Highway 56, and they were going back toward the coast. There was more real open space here, and the hills were green with a gold-edging of spring flowers. The subdivisions were gone, replaced by mile after mile of industrial parks: the automated genomics and proteomics labs spread like gray-green lithops, soaking up the last of the sunlight. People could live and work anywhere in the world. But some things have to happen in a single real place, close enough together that superspeed data paths can connect their parts. These low buildings drove San Diego's physical economy; inside, the genius of humans, machines, and biological nature collided to make magic.
The sun sank back behind coastal fog as they entered the lagoon area north of Torrey Pines Park. Off the expressway, they turned south along the beach. The pale cliffs of the main part of the park rose ahead of them, the hilltops shrouded by the incoming fog.
The Goofus had remained silent through all their laughter and silly talk. But when Miri got back into her speculation about how this all fit with the fact that Bertie was bothering her so much, he suddenly interrupted. "I think part of it is very simple. Why is Bertie bothering you, Miriam? It seems to me there's one possibility so fantastic that neither of you have even imagined it."
William delivered this opinion with that faintly amused tone adults sometimes use with little kids. But Miri didn't make a flip response. "Oh." She looked at William as though he were hinting at some great insight. "I'll think about this some more."
The road wound upwards through the fog. Miri had the car drop them off at the far side of the driveway circle at the top. "Let's scope things out as we walk toward the ranger station."
Juan stepped down onto weedy asphalt. The sun had finally, truly, set. Geez, the air was cold. He flapped his arms in discomfort. He noticed that William had worn a jacket.
"You two should think ahead a little more," said the Goofus.
Juan pulled a face. "I can stand a little evening cool." Ma was often onto him like this, too. Plan-ahead addons were cheap, but he had convinced her that they made stupid mistakes of their own. He grabbed his sensor "gun" out of the car and slid it into the long pocket in the back of his vest—and tried to ignore his shivering.
"Here, Miriam." William handed the girl an adult-sized jacket, big enough to fit over her equipment vest.
"Oh, thank you!" She snugged it on, making Juan feel even more chilly and stupid.
"One for you, too, champ." William tossed a second jacket at Juan.
It was bizarre to feel so irritated and so grateful at the same time. He took off the probe holster, and slipped on the jacket. Suddenly the evening felt a whole lot more pleasant. This would block about half his high-rate data ports, but hey, in a few minutes we'll be back in the fog anyway.
The car departed as they started off in the direction of the ranger station. And Juan realized that some of his park information was very out of date. There were the restrooms behind him, but the parking lot in the pictures was all gone except at the edges, where it had become this driveway circle. He groped around for more recent information.
Of course, no one was parked up here. There were no cars dropping people off, either. Late April was not the height of the physical tourist season—and for Torrey Pines Park, that was the only kind of tourist season there was.
They were just barely above the fog layer. The tops of the clouds fluffed out below them, into the west. On a clear day, there would have been a great direct view of the ocean. Now there were just misty shapes tossed up from the fog and above that, a sky of deepening twilight blue. There was still a special brightness at the horizon, where the sun had set. Venus hung above that glow, along with Sirius and the brighter stars of Orion.
Juan hesitated. "That's strange."
"What?"
"I've got mail." He set a pointer in the sky for the others to see: a ballistic FedEx package with a Cambridge return address. It was coming straight down, and from very high up.