finally know who they were, a finality of awareness, their selves distinguished and etched more deeply, their spirits unified in sorrow and joy for what they had done.
Now was the best time to end but the smoothness was not there; he would best cut it short now and polish later not to interrupt the spontaneity.
He could not now become a cloud however. He would have to find another way to vanish. Disappearing, his name would become legend; he would be more famous than any poet, and in their dreams, people would think of him, wonder where he was, and then he would be inside of them and that would be just as good. Better. He walked his first mile away from the city, into the brown hills. He crossed scorched grassland
Not ending smoothly at all; refusing to end, in fact, and Richard needed to rest.
and felt the cold wind blowing through his clothes, on his flesh,
Richard closed his eyes, trying to force the ending, seeing instead a kind of continuing adventure. Goldsmith within him wanted to explore this new freedom. But suddenly Richard was exhausted and a black pall moved between him and the slate screen. Another purge coming on.
the puffs of smudge from a controlled burn rising about his legs, “I will burn this society to its roots
He could feel another manifesto coming on as well. “Please let me go,” he muttered, rolling on the bed, drawing up his legs.
and let the green new grass grow through, fresh and free
Rushed to the bathroom.
35
The individual differentiates from its world and its social group when it is able to observe all their elements as manipulable signs. In any individual, cultured or not, “consciousness” develops when all the portions of its mind agree on the nature and meaning of their various “message characters.” This integration results in a persona, an “overseer” of the mental agreement—the conscious personality.
Oceanport LAX lay four miles out from shore, serviced by VTOL shuttles and three highway bridges. Liftways branched to the west and north like the rays of a Navajo sun sign; to the south and east vast pinkish gray bodies of water edged by narrow seafence revealed oceangoing nano farms linked to the central oceanport platform.
The scramjet sat quietly idling its four huge engines on the liftway, sleek gray sharkshape seeming to fly even on the ground. The embarking passenger tube snaked slowly out and met its door. Waiting travelers boarded from one end as disembarking passengers exited via a rear tube. Arbeiters smoothly rolled from the plane across their own tube, carrying the detritus of the previous flight. Scramjets never rested; their engines burned hydrogen day and night automatic pilots never shutting down, human supervisors changing watch every eight hours or two round trips whichever came first.
Mary Choy settled into the seat. Straps curled around her, adapting to her shape. She looked out the broad window at a massive black bulbous nosed suborbital warming up for its launch farther out on the liftway. Fifty suborbitals a day launched from oceanport to cross the immense Pacific in less than an hour, each carrying upward of a thousand passengers or a hundred tons of cargo. Scramjets were for shorter hops or less traveled routes; they carried less than four hundred passengers and traveled at no more than three times the speed of sound. The flight to Santo Domingo HIS would take just under three hours. She could have traveled to China faster.
Low wisps of cloud lay in a ragged fringe to the west. The ocean beyond the liftways was bright blue under a noon pearlsun burning through high haze. Mary absorbed this all with a curious hunger. Eager to land in Hispaniola and perform her job, eager to get through the next few weeks.
Eager to get away from her failures.
In the terminal Reeve’s plain messenger had given her a box containing a metal comb a makeup kit and a hairbrush. The hairbrush’s handle unscrewed with a trick twist to show a gray paste that she recognized as some sort of nano. She had put the box into her luggage and checked it through. The messenger had also given her a disk containing instructions. She took out her slate now and played the disk. When finished she erased the disk tucked away the slate and looked out the window thoughtfully. As Reeve had said not exactly legal. But under the circumstances, very interesting. She wondered if it would work.
The seatback airline vid came on automatically before her and she shut it off with a languid finger flick. Closed her eyes. Looked back through the past two days at the comfortable physicality and affection of her time with Ernest, ending in schism. Duty over life. All she had was duty it seemed at times; her focus and reason for being. Keeping the forces of darkness at bay that others might live and love undisturbed; not her. No self pity.
The turbines of the liner’s engines ramped in subsonic mode to a high whistle. Outside the noise could be easily tolerated, chaos of turbulent air reduced by ducts constantly adjusting controlling diverting and funneling at three hundred trims per second, playing one rolling wave of sound off against another. Only in the center of the exhaust would noise crescend to the unbearable. She imagined herself sitting there invulnerable beaten by the string of fire cones, staring into the furnace.
Melodrama.
Pd’s duty was to quiet the noise of the human furnace.
She smiled as the plane began its forward roll. Briefly the exhaust was diverted for vertical lift and the engines gave their true enveloping bellow like a thousand hurricanes played backward, muffled only by the superior design of the gray shark’s skin. They rolled and rose and crossed with a transverse weave off liftway and over blue water, blowing concentric storms with the last wash of the vertical thrust; then the scramjet was at speed and smoothly cutting air ascending sharp forty-five, pressure rising within the cabin, balancing. Whisper quiet. Might as well be in a glider or soaring.
The plane was not full. Jitters in the tourist market; most of these passengers would be LA tourists on their way to stable Puerto Rico, transferring to VTOL shuttles in Hispaniola. People front and back talking unconcerned. Normal folks with real lives and real loves and balanced duty, internal pressure matching external.
Mary closed her eyes and reclined her seat. The scramjet bumped onto its own shockwave and surfed at forty two thousand feet quieter still ahead of its own noise. A single steward chaperoned a pair of arbeiters bearing drinks along a ceiling track, dropping food from hidden ducts running the spine length of this comfortable shark. Bellying up to second mach.
Mary could not sleep. She turned on the seatback vid and flipped through channels, found LA civic news, selected for comb tales, hoping to catch the public spin on Goldsmith. Surprisingly little furor in the commercial vids or the LitVids. Goldsmith’s murders were hardly an everyday occurrence but neither were they tuned to the particular frequency of today’s public passions.
The murders had been bumped by an exceeding interest in the unresolved discoveries of AXIS. Space did not interest her much. She felt a touch of irritation and switched channels to jag tales.
More Selector predation. A representative of sixth jag twenty eighth district Mario Pelletier by name longtime politico had been hellcrowned for alleged misappropriation of jag untherapied relief revenues. Twenty seconds in the clamp. Required minor glial balance therapy to recover from the trauma but refused any other treatment. “I took my licks. I can take whatever they dish out. Not so bad. Not so bad.” Haunted look; almost certainly would retire within a few weeks nest in with whatever family he had wrap nacre around his life and avoid any possible second encounter. Selectors would have triumphed yet again raising public image making the bent untherapied a little more wary a little more cautious, perhaps walk a little more the straight and narrow.