“We’ll be married by then. You’ll protect me.”
Mary chewed and watched him closely, looked away looked back with a slow blink. “All right,” she said.
Ernest’s mouth opened.
“Eat,” she suggested. “I’m anxious to see.”
“You’ll marry me?”
She smiled. “Eat.”
The day outside was clear and warm, winter clouds restrained to the east, beach fog breaking up to the far west. Ernest wore a formal suit, long hair in braids, clutching his slate and a portable nano controller. He escorted her down the cracked sidewalk to the curb where a long black limo waited.
“You can afford this?” Mary asked while sliding into the broad interior.
“For you, anything.”
“I’m not fond of drama,” Mary warned.
“My dear, this whole day is going to be drama. You asked to see.”
“Well…”
He touched his finger to her lips silencing protest and gave the limo controller an address in the old city center shadows. “Bunker Hill,” he told Mary. “One of my favorite neighborhoods.”
The limo accelerated smoothly across the unslaved street, found an old three deck freeway rolled into a slaved lane and took them through the shadows to the old downtown. Ernest named the ancient buildings of Los Angeles, many of them all too familiar to Mary. She had spent much time in this large jag in the second semester of being an officer candidate.
“The Pasadena freeway used to go through here,” Ernest said. “They dug it up when I was a kid and put in eight deck slaveways.” Ernest was four years older than Mary. “That’s when the whole hill area ramped down. It’s your oddfolks and shade tech artists that are bringing it back…Not that we’ll ever match the combs.”
“You’re not even going to try?”
“We’re trying,” he said, nodding. “At least allow me a crude attempt at humility.”
The limo debouched them before a high red hotel awning. “Bonaventure” clung in patchy gold letters to the awning’s sides. Beyond the awning there was no longer a door, however; it had been replaced or perhaps eaten by a slab of something that resembled stone but which Mary recognized as activated architectural nano.
“My consortium bought the towers two years ago,” Ernest said. “I have a fortieth share. We designed the nano and contracted a supply firm to feed it. It’s turning the whole building inside out. In the end, it’ll dissolve the old steel and leave pure nanoworks in its place…The fanciest studio-gallery complex in all of shade LA.”
Mary stepped from the limo, Ernest lending a courtly hand. “I would have shown it to you when it was finished,” he said, “but maybe it’s more interesting this way.”
She stepped from beneath the awning and looked up at two great cylinders of gray and black nano silent and motionless beneath the blue sky.
“The old glass is already gone. We had to wait six months to get destructure permits. Now it’s just old steel, composites and nano prochines. Would you like to see the prochines? We have safe walkways and some of the upper interior is already finished.”
“Lead on,” Mary said.
Ernest pointed his control at the blank slab and a small hole formed, quickly expanding to make a rough doorway. The edges of the doorway vibrated at eye-blurring speed. “Don’t touch,” Ernest warned. He preceded her down a narrow tunnel. The walls hummed like a nest of bees. “It’s hot enough to burn. We had to license for factory water use, then it turned out the best nano for the job wasn’t fond of water. We found a way for it to self cool. We’ll cache the water for later varieties of nano, later refinements.”
Mary nodded but she knew very little about nano and its ways. The tunnel opened onto a warm glass tube some three meters in diameter that stretched thirty meters across an open pit filled with lumbering gray cubes cylinders centipedes, crablike shapes carrying more cubes and cylinders. Mary sniffed yeasty sea-smell. Sunlight filtered down through alternating mists of red and blue. The mists flowed with eerie self motivation around and through the giant prochines. Below, some of the moving cubes left behind the deposited frameworks of walls; other cubes sliding several meters behind filled these frameworks with the proper optical cabling and field and fluid guides. Between the walls lurked gray coated hulks of antique air conditioners and ducts already being removed by destructor and recycling nano. “They’ll be done on this level in a couple of days,” Ernest said.
“What is this going to be?”
“Where we are now, a ground floor showroom for the comb citizens. Anyone with sufficient money. Poor wretches of the shade produce tech art, patrons from the combs revel in the ‘primitive ambience.’“
“Sounds servile,” she said.
“Never underestimate us, my comb sweet,” Ernest warned. “We’ve got a number of top comb artists coming here just for the extra attention.” He seemed disappointed she was less than enthusiastic. In reality the activity made her nervous. She had not witnessed her own restructuring conducted by Dr. Sumpler’s infinitely more subtle nano servants; seeing this grand old hotel being refleshed and reboned gave Mary a twinge. She glanced at the nano scars on Ernest’s fingers. Catching her glance he lifted his hands and shook his head, saying, “This doesn’t happen anymore. I’m on to them, Mary. No need for you to worry.”
“Apologies.” She kissed him, cringing slightly as a nano slurry spouted up over the walkway tube and fastened itself to an opposite buttress, congealing into a limp cylinder. “This isn’t entirely your project,” she said. “What are you working on for yourself?”
“That’s the climax,” he said. “We have all day?”
“I hope so.”
“Then let me unveil at leisure. And promise one thing. You’ll tell nobody.”
“Ernest.” Mary tried to sound peeved but another spurt of nano broke her tone and she ducked under the rushing shadow. He touched her in reassurance then ran on waving his hand. “Follow me, much to see!”
She caught up with him in another length of tube deep in the heart of the old hotel, now a great hollow stacked with slumbering mega prochines. “The atrium,” he said. “This used to be a beautiful hotel. Glass and steel, like a spaceship. But the money tide flowed to the combs and it couldn’t survive on locals and foreign students. It was turned into a religious retreat in 2024, but the religion went bankrupt and it’s been going from hand to hand ever since. Nobody thought of making it into an artists’ retreat—artists could never have that much money!”
The tube ended at the battered brass doors of an old elevator. “It’s safe,” he said. “The last thing to go, or maybe we’ll keep it…Committee hasn’t decided yet.” He punched an age whitened heat sensitive plastic button and the doors opened with a clunk. “Going up.” Ernest stepped in after her. He paced back and forth on the worn carpeted floor grinning and clenching his hands. “You must promise not to tell.”
“I’m not a snitch or a wedge,” she said.
He looked at her earnestly. “It’s extreme, Mary. It’s truly extreme and secrecy is high utmost. Please promise.” The smile had gone from his face and he wet his lips with his tongue.
“I promise,” she said. The man she planned to lawbond. Inner tug of the lone wish. One is fortress only when one. Two is breached.
He took her hands and squeezed them smiling again. “My studio is at the top. Everything’s finished up there, has been for two weeks. I moved my stuff in before the space was finished. It’s still a little warm—waste heat from nano. Not uncomfortable.”
“Lead on,” she said, trying to recover the morning’s flush of affection. She asked herself if what she felt was a nonneutral flaw. She had felt it before around Ernest yet could still wrap it in a warm affection and forget it: caution.