He caught a transatlantic flight home. The Brazilian engagement had been postponed. Cathy had gone to Los Angeles—the Tunis trip had once more scuttled their rendezvous—with Suzette, who had a major skating competition. Charlie was on a nature hike in Yosemite with the commercial edu-group Mrs. Canning subscribed him to. The leased apartment in Aspen—no, Aspen had been cancelled, and anyway it was Oakland this month because of Suzette’s competition schedule—would be empty.
The little Tunisian robots had looked like rectangular suitcases, not cylindrical tin cans. Nonetheless, Allan called Skaka Gupta from the transatlantic flight. She was in Berne. Allan rerouted himself to Boston anyway. He didn’t like coming home to a new leased place with no one else there.
At Novation he was met by a flustered young man, no more than twenty-three, in jeans, leather sweater, and the ubiquitous sneakers set with tiny flashing mirrors. Allan recognized the type: a software expert. Awkward, bright as hell, and secretly scornful of “bean counters.” No, that wasn’t the term anymore: “cashware clods.” Allan smiled icily and looked slightly bored.
“Paul Sanderson? Allan Haller. You’re going to give me Skaka’s pitch, right?” Skaka had left no data for a new pitch, as far as Allan knew.
Paul Sanderson looked confused. “Yes… no, I mean, she didn’t… I was just going to show you what the bots can do now.”
“Fine, fine. But keep the jargon to a minimum.” A pre-emptive strike, with the force of an order. Sanderson would either get huffy or meek, unsure how his boss would want Allan treated.
He got meek. “Sure. Well, uh, this way.”
The robots in Prime-Eight One seemed to Allan slightly less uncoordinated, although they still, wandered hopelessly. Campbell’s Tomorrow Soup lunged at a chip but missed it. Sanderson dawdled past the enclosure, peering through the plastic, fidgeting. Why? To cover his own edginess, Allan flipped over his tie and checked his PID.
The icons all vibrated so fast he could barely see they were there.
“You’ve created a superstrength data field here!” he exclaimed, and as Sanderson turned toward him with a grin of embarrassment, Allan understood. “You have, haven’t you? You’ve made the whole facility into a microwave field that lets the Prime Eight Two bots interface directly with the Net. You retrofitted them with the communications software to do that.”
Sanderson nodded sheepishly. “I know regs say I should have warned you before you stepped into the field, but it’s not dangerous in such short exposure, really it’s not. And your own com devices will return to normal functioning just as soon as we—”
“I’m not concerned about either my devices or my health!” Allan snapped. “But Skaka promised to keep me abreast of any major changes in the research!”
“Well, there haven’t really been any,” Sanderson said. “Although we’d hoped… but so far, nothing has changed. The bots just go on anticipating the chip-release schedule and—”
“Is Prime-Eight One wired to the Net, too? Or aren’t you going to tell me that, either?”
Sanderson looked shocked. “No, of course it’s not wired. If we don’t do it at exactly the same point as we did this group, we’d compromise the research design!”
“As opposed to compromising your investors’ confidence,” Allan snapped. “Fine. Tell Ms. Gupta to call me when she returns. And please be advised that I retain the right to bring in my own evaluators here, since I’m obviously not being told everything voluntarily.”
“Mr. Haller, please don’t think that because—”
“That’s all,” Allan snapped, turned, and left.
Back in his car, he asked himself why he was so angry. He owned a piece of Novation, yes, but he owned pieces of a lot of outposts where the front shifted abruptly and unpredictably. That was the nature of fronts. So why was he so upset?
He didn’t know. And there was no time to think about it. His next flight left in forty-two minutes.
Just enough time study the information for tomorrow’s 6:30 breakfast meeting.
Cathy and Allan finally connected in New York; she had an unexpected re-route in her schedule. As he entered the elevator, Allan felt his chest tighten. Ten days since he’d last seen his wife! And oh, how he’d missed her… and how he loved the giddy excitement of their reunions. Surely couples who were together all the time couldn’t get this excited.
Nor was he disappointed. Afterward, lying together on the big hotel bed, dreamily watching the wall program shade from hectic red to cool soft blues (it must be keyed to their breathing), Allan felt utterly content.
Cathy, however, didn’t let him drift long. “Honey, there’s something we need to talk about. It’s Charlie.”
Immediately Allan’s mood changed. He hiked himself up against the pillows. “How did he seem in Los Angeles?”
“Strange.” Cathy hesitated. “I know he’s on the edge of adolescence, trying his wings, some hostility to be expected blah blah blah… but he wasn’t hostile. He was just as nice to Suzette as ever, really thrilled for her when she won. And he wasn’t at all secretive with me. It’s just that he’s gone off in such strange directions in his personal interests. For instance, he talked a lot about the Age of Reason and its social implications.”
“Just a sec,” Allan said. He reached for the meshNet, crumpled with the rest of his clothes on the floor by his bed, and did a Quik-Chek. Age of Reason: an eighteenth-century period of great intellectual awareness and activity, characterized by questioning of authority, emphasis on the experimental method in science, and creative self-determination in arts, culture, and politics.
“I could have told you what it was,” Cathy said, nettled.
“I know.” Cathy was a lawyer; she would have gone into far more well-organized particulars than Allan wanted. “But it’s just history, right? An interest in history doesn’t sound so bad. In fact, Charlie said something or other to me about Robert Fulton and the steamship. Maybe Mrs. Canning started a new school unit.”
“No, I checked. They’re still concentrating on earth sciences. But that’s not all. I accessed Charlie’s Twenty-Two—the personal-notes tablet, but only the unencrypted part, of course—and he—”
“He’s still using a Twenty-Two? Good Lord, that computer’s been obsolete for at least three months! I’ll send him a new one—there’s something much better coming out now.”
Cathy said acidly, “There’s always something much better coming out. But that’s not the point, Allan. What I found on Charlie’s tablet were lists of ‘ages.’ All the lists were subtly different, but there were dozens of them.”
“What do you mean, ‘ages’?”
“Stone Age. Iron Age. Age of Heroes. Age of Faith. Dark Ages. Age of Reason. Industrial Age. Space Age. Information Age. That one’s always last on every list, presumably because we’re in it now. Dozens of different lists!”
“Odd,” Allan said, because it was clear she expected him to say something. “But, frankly, Cath, it doesn’t sound dangerous. So he’s wondering about history. That’s good, isn’t it?”
“Exhibit Three: When I asked him about the lists, he didn’t get angry that I’d been snooping in his tablet. Instead, he looked at me in that intense way he has, not moving a single facial muscle—you know how he is—and said, ‘Mom, how do we know that our family is really information-front warriors, and not really just homeless people?’ ”