“No, we only carry about fifty millivolts and a handful of microamps for a fiftieth of a second. Look, let me do it again. Over…yeah, this one.”
Hu punched more figures into the keyboard. Hit the return key again. Another blob of snot vanished from the gray surface.
“What’s this meant to show me?” Eric asked impatiently.
“Huh?” Hu gaped at him. “Uh, JAUNT BLUE? Hello, remember that code phrase? The, the folks who do that world-walking thing? This is how it works.”
“Hang on. Wait.” Eric scratched his head. “You didn’t just vaporize that, that—” Neuron, he realized, understanding dawning. “Wow.”
“We figured out that the mechanosomes respond to the intracellular cyclic-AMP signaling pathway,” Hu offered timidly. “That’s what preparation fourteen is about. They’re also sensitive to dopamine. We’re looking for modulators, now, but it’s on track. If we could get the nerve cells to grow dendrites and connect, we hope eventually to be able to build a system that works—that can move stuff about. If we can get a neural stem-cell line going, we may even be able to mass-produce them—but that’s years away. It’s early days right now: all we can do is make an infected cell go bye-bye and sneak away into some other universe—explaining how that part of it works is what the quant group are working on. What do you think?”
Eric shook his head, suddenly struck by a weird sense of historical significance: it was like standing in that baseball court at the University of Chicago in 1942, when they finished adding graphite blocks to the heap in the middle of the court and Professor Fermi told his assistant to start twisting the control rod. A Nobel Prize or a nuclear war? James isn’t wrong about that. “I’d give my left nut to know where this is all going to end,” he said slowly. “You’re doing good work. I just hope we don’t all live to regret the consequences.”
Maneuvers
As forms of transport went, horse-drawn carriages tended to lack modern amenities—from cup holders and seat-back TV screens on down to shock absorbers and ventilation nozzles. On the other hand, they came with some fittings that took Mike by surprise. He gestured feebly at the raised seat cushion as he glanced at the geriatric gruppenfuhrer in the mound of rugs on the other side of the compartment: “If you think I’m going to use that—”
“You’ll use it when you need to, boy.” She cackled for a moment. The younger woman, Olga, rolled her eyes and sent him a look that seemed to say, humor her. “We’ll not be stopping for bed and bath for at least a day.”
“Damn,” he said faintly. “What are you going to do?”
Iris said nothing for a moment, while one wheel crunched across a rut in the path with a bone-shaking crash that sent a wave of heat through his leg. She seemed to be considering the question. “We’ll be pausing to change teams in another hour or so. Don’t want to flog the horses; you never know when you’ll need a fresh team. Anyway, you can’t stick your nose outside: you wouldn’t fool anyone. So the story is, you’re unconscious and injured and we need to get you across to a hospital in upstate New York as soon as possible. If they’re still using the old emergency routes—” she looked at Olga, who nodded “—there should be a postal station we can divert to tomorrow evening. If it’s running, we’ll ship you across and you can be home in forty-eight hours. If it’s not running…well, we’ll play it by ear; you’ve been hit on the head and you’re having trouble with language, or something. Until we can get you out of here.”
Mike tried to gather his thoughts. “I don’t understand. What do you expect me to do…?”
Miriam’s mother leaned forward, her expression intent. “I expect you to tell me your home address and zip code.” A small note pad and pencil appeared from somewhere under her blankets. “Yes?”
“But—”
She snorted. “You’re working with spies, boy. Modern spies with lots of gizmos for bugging phone conversations and tapping e-mail. First rule when going up against the NSA: use no communications technology invented in the last half-century. I want to be able to send you mail. If you want to contact me, write a letter, stick it in an envelope, and put it in your trash can on top of the refuse sacks.”
“Aren’t you scared I’ll just pass everything to my superiors? Or they’ll mount a watch on the trash?”
“No.” Eyes twinkled in the darkness. “Because first, you didn’t make a move on my daughter when you had the chance. And second, have you any idea how many warm bodies it takes to mount a twenty-four/seven watch on a trash can? One that’s capable of grabbing a dumpster-diving world-walker without killing them?”
“I’ve got to admit, I hadn’t thought about it.”
Olga cleared her throat. “It takes two watchers per team, minimum. Five teams, each working just under thirty hours a week, in rotation. They’ll need a blind, plus perimeter alarms, plus coordination with the refuse companies so they know when to expect a legitimate collection, and that’s just the watchers. You need at least three spare bodies, too, in case of sickness or accidents. To be able to make a snatch, you need at least four per team. Do you have thirty agents ready to watch your back stoop, mister? Just in case her grace wishes to receive a letter from you, rather than sending a messenger to pay a local wino to pick it up?”
“Jeez, you sound like you’ve done this a lot.”
Mrs. Beckstein rapped a knuckle on the wooden window frame of the carriage: “Fifty years ago there were three times as many world-walkers as there are now, and they didn’t all die out because they forgot how to make babies.”
“Huh?”
Olga glanced down. “Civil war,” she said very quietly. “And now, your government.”
“Civil—” Mike paused. Didn’t Matthias say something about internal feuds? “Hold on. It killed two thirds of you?”
“You wouldn’t believe how lethal a war between world-walkers can be, boy.” Mrs. Beckstein frowned. “You should hope the Clan Council never decides they’re at war with the United States.”
“We’d wipe you out. Eventually.” He realized he was gritting his teeth, from anger as much as from the pain in his leg: he tried to force himself to relax.
She nodded thoughtfully. “Yes, probably. But right now? You think you have a problem with terrorism? You have seen nothing, boy. And we are not religious fanatics, no. We just want to live our lives. But the logic of power—” she stopped.
“What do you want me to do?”
“I want my daughter out of this mess and home safe, Mr. Fleming. She had a sheltered upbringing: she’s in danger and her own ignorance of it is her worst enemy. Second…when she came over she raised a shit storm among our relatives. In particular, she aired some very dirty family linens in public half a year ago. Called for a complete rethink of the Clan’s business model, in fact: she pointed out that the emperor has no clothes, and that basing one’s income on an enemy’s weakness—in this case, the continuing illegality of certain substances, combined with the continuing difficulty your own organization and others face in stopping the trade—is foolish. This made her a lot of enemies at the time, but it set minds a-thinking. The current upheavals are largely a consequence of her upsetting that apple cart. The Clan will change in due course, and switch to a line of work more profitable than smuggling, but as long as she remains among them, her presence will act as a reminder of the source of the change to the conservative faction, and will provoke them, and that will make her a target. So I want her out of the game.”