So now Daeman was alone in the forest glade, leaning against the hull of the landed sonie and listening to leaves stirring and branches breaking in the dark woods and not liking it one bit. If an allosaurus appeared, he was ready to leap into the sonie—but what then? He didn’t even know how to access the holographic controls, much less how to activate the forcefield bubble or fly away. He’d be an hors d’oeuvre on a plate for the dino.
Daeman considered shouting into the woods, calling for Savi or any of the others to return, but immediately thought better of it. Were dinosaurs and other predators attracted to noise? He wasn’t going to experiment to find out. Meanwhile, he was acutely uncomfortable—not just from the anxiety, but from the need to go to the toilet. The others may have scampered off into the forest with the tissues Savi had provided, but Daeman was a civilized human being; he’d never gone to the toilet without . . . well . . . a toilet, and he wasn’t going to start now. Of course he didn’t know how many hours it would be until they got to Ardis Hall, and Savi was talking as if she wasn’t even going to stop there, just drop off Hannah, Ada, and the preposterous impostor calling himself Odysseus, and then head on to the Mediterranean Basin or wherever it was. Daeman knew he couldn’t wait that long.
He realized that he was discouraged more than frightened. Everyone had seemed surprised yesterday when he volunteered to go with the old woman and Harman on their preposterous expedition, but no one had guessed his real reason for choosing that alternative. First of all, he was afraid of the dinosaurs around Ardis Hall. He wasn’t going back there. Second, all that talk of faxing being a sort of destruction and rebuilding of people had made him extremely nervous. Well, who wouldn’t be, so shortly after waking up in the firmary and knowing that your real body had been destroyed? Daeman had faxed almost every day of his life, but the thought of stepping into a faxportal now, knowing that it was going to break down his muscles, bones, brain, and memory, and then just build a copy somewhere else—if the old woman was telling the truth—well, that idea bothered the hell out of him.
So he’d opted for traveling on the sonie for a few more days, facing neither Ardis dinosaurs nor fax destruction of his atoms or molecules or whatever.
Now he just wanted a toilet and a servitor or his mother to make him supper. Perhaps he would demand that the old woman drop him off at Paris Crater after Ardis. It wasn’t that far away, was it? Even though he’d got a glimpse of Harman’s scribbles—his “map”—Daeman had no concept of the world’s geography. Everything was as precisely as far away as everything else—a faxportal step.
The old woman stepped out of the forest, saw Daeman alone, leaning against the floating sonie, and said, “Where is everyone?”
“That’s what I was wondering. First the barbarian left. Then Hannah went after him. Then Ada and Harman walked off that way . . .” He gestured toward the tall trees on the opposite side of the glade.
“Why don’t you use your palm?” said Savi, and smiled as if something she’d said amused her.
“I already tried,” said Daeman. “On your ice-thingee. At the bridge. Here. It doesn’t work.” He raised his left palm, thought of the finder function, and showed her the blank rectangle of white floating there.
“That’s just the immediate locator function,” said Savi. “Just an arrow-guide once you’re close to something, like inside a library hunting for a volume but in the wrong aisle. Use farnet or proxnet.”
Daeman stared at her. From his first glimpse of the old woman, he had doubted her sanity.
“Ah, that’s right,” said Savi, still smiling that unamused smile. “You’ve all forgotten the functions. Generation after generation.”
“What are you talking about?” said Daeman. “The old functions like reading don’t work anymore. They went away when the post-humans left.” He pointed to the rings crossing in the patch of blue sky above.
“Nonsense,” said Savi. She walked over, leaned against the sonie next to him, and gripped his left arm, turning it palm toward her. “Think three red circles with blue squares in the center of each.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” She continued to hold his wrist.
Idiocy, thought Daeman, but he visualized three red circles with blue squares floating in the center of each.
Instead of the small rectangle of white-yellow light that the finder function generated, a large blue oval of light now floated six inches above his palm.
“Whoa!” cried Daeman, pulling his wrist from her grasp and flicking his hand wildly as if a huge insect had just landed in it. The blue oval flickered with it.
“Relax,” said Savi. “It’s blank. Just visualize someone.”
“Who?” Daeman actively did not like this sensation—his body doing something he did not know it could do.
“Anyone. Someone close to you.”
Daeman closed his eyes and visualized his mother’s face. When he opened his eyes again, the blue oval was busy with diagrams. Street grids, a river, words that he could not read—an aerial view of the black circle that could only be the crater in the heart of Paris Crater. The image zoomed and suddenly he was in a stylized structure, fifth floor, back domi near the crater—not his home. Two stylized human figures, cartoon characters but with real, human faces, were in bed, the female above the male, moving . . .
Daeman closed his hand into a fist, shutting off the oval.
“Sorry,” said Savi. “I forgot that no one’s using trace inhibitors these days. Your girlfriend?”
“My mother,” said Daeman, tasting bile. It had been Goman’s domi-complex across the crater—he knew the layout of the rooms from when he was a boy, playing in the inner rooms while his mother consorted with the tall, dark-skinned man with the wine-smooth voice. Daeman didn’t like Goman, and hadn’t known his mother was still seeing him. According to what Harman had said earlier, it was already night in Paris Crater.
“Let’s try to see where Hannah and Ada and the others are,” said Savi. She chuckled. “Although they may wish they’d activated farnet inhibitors as well.”
Daeman didn’t want to uncurl his fist.
“Recycle it,” said Savi.
“How?”
“How do you get rid of your arrow-finder?”
“I just think ‘off,’ “ said Daeman, mentally adding, “stupid .”
“Do it.”
Daeman thought, the blue oval winked off.
“You activate proxnet by thinking one yellow circle with a green triangle in it,” said Savi. She looked at her own palm and a bright yellow rectangle appeared above it.
Daeman did the same.
“Think of Hannah,” said Savi.
He did so. Both of their palms showed a continent—North America, but Daeman could not identify it—then a zoom to the south-central section, zoom north of the coastline, zoom to a complex series of unreadable words and topographic maps, zoom below stylized trees to a stylized female form with Hannah’s head on the cartoon body, walking alone—no, not alone, Daeman realized, for there was a question mark walking next to her.
Savi chuckled again. “Proxnet doesn’t know how to process Odysseus.”
“I don’t see Odysseus,” said Daeman.
Savi reached into his yellow holographic cube and touched the question mark. She pointed to two red figures at the edge of the cloud. “That’s us,” she said. “Ada and Harman must be off the grid to the north.”
“How do we know it’s Hannah?” asked Daeman, although he’d glimpsed the top of her head
“Think ‘close-up,’ “ said Savi. She showed him her palm cloud, which had zoomed lower, leveled out, and was watching the stylized Hannah with the real Hannah’s face walk between stylized trees, along a stylized stream.
He thought “close-up” and marveled at the clarity of the image. He could see the tree shadows on her features. She was speaking animatedly to the symbol—Savi had called it a question mark—floating next to her. Daeman was glad that he hadn’t found Hannah in the middle of sex.