Bright's Light (17 page)

“Eeew,” said Fon.

Grassly’s mirrored dataglasses glittered at Bright. “You can do this,” he said. “After you turn on the lights, get back here as soon as you can.”

Then Grassly turned and began to run. He ran faster than anyone Bright had ever seen. His legs were a black blur. As he disappeared into the blackness of the Natural Experience, she thought she’d never seen anyone so graceful, not even on an advermercial. Still, she was glad that she hadn’t agreed to do what he said.

Grassly found the blond boy sitting cross-legged on a surfboard at the entrance to the
Sankalpa.
The outline of Earth’s moon was faintly visible overhead, and it bathed the boy in a soft glow. Grassly considered stepping around the boy without speaking and just going inside. He was exhausted by the Sending. Overwhelmed by the situation, which seemed to get more out of control every time he turned around. Now that he was standing in front of the ship, with its comforting doorway waiting to iris open and take him back inside, he wished he’d never seen the ancestors. Every one of his good intentions resulted in ten unintended consequences, more than even his tremendous brain could process.

His guilty feelings were absurd, given all he was doing for the ancestors—trying to protect them from each other and to rescue them in the least invasive, most natural way possible. So his first attempts at the lights hadn’t worked that well and a few barely functioning ancestors had died sooner than they would have otherwise. So the seal between his ship and the Store was about to cause a breach in the
skin. So there was some evidence that enlightenment hadn’t been the best way to achieve his goals. All that just made his mission more important than ever.

He was being too hard on himself. The idea behind enlightenment came from the ancestors themselves. He’d used their own historical documents to design their rescue! There were limits to how much responsibility one 51 should have to take.

He pulled himself together. He couldn’t leave the boy outside. After all, he’d worked hard to get the ancestors to come here willingly, and now one had. If the commander suddenly decided to send PS staff patrols to the Natural Experience and they ventured off the main path, the boy would be helpless. It wouldn’t do for the commander or any other PS staff to discover the ship’s entrance, which was not well disguised.

Before he could speak, the blond boy gave a great, heaving sigh.

“Are you okay?” Grassly asked.

“Oh,” said the boy, his rippling cords of muscle seeming to gleam in the dark. “I’m just super-glad to be here.”

“Right. That’s good. I’m going to go inside now. You may come along, but please don’t talk. I have some programming to do.”

“Seriously?” asked the boy, getting to his feet in one startlingly fast movement, like a cork popping to the surface after it had been submerged in liquid.

“It’s not difficult work, but it’s going to be time-consuming. I cannot be disturbed. Even though, to be quite honest with you, what I’d really like to do is nap.”

As he spoke, the ship’s gangway emerged and slid noiselessly to the sand. The doorway blinked open.

Grassly ignored the boy’s pained noise. He wasn’t sure how long the effect of the lights would last. He would solve that particular problem once he had the enlightened ancestors on board and the rescue flight under way.

“Hurry now,” he said. He held out a hand and the boy took it.

Grassly remembered that he had some food stored on the ship. How glorious it would be to eat something in solid form!

“Come on now,” he urged, pulling the boy into the vast expanse of the
Sankalpa
’s cargo bay. The lights inside flickered on, revealing the gleaming, featureless surfaces and comforting stillness.

The boy stopped dead, staring around him, confused. Well, more confused. It seemed to be the nature of favours to be permanently semi-addled.

“But …” he said.

“I know. It’s not what you’re used to. I’ll program in some music and see what I can do about getting some games and other entertainments in here. Don’t worry. You’re going to enjoy the trip. For most of it, you’ll be asleep. But right now I really must excuse myself.”

“I thought it would be different,” said the boy. “The light, I mean. More like outside.”

“Don’t worry. Soon you’ll have all the light you can handle,” said Grassly.

That seemed to satisfy the boy. He put his board on the
floor, fin side up, and sat down on top of it. Grassly went to the ship’s main computer and opened the messages that had been routed to his drowned link. While he tucked into a delicious meal of dried purple jagodas, he hacked deep into what remained of the feed and began programming. It was like operating on a dangerously ill patient.

Parts of the task were simply tedious, so after a few hours he decided it wouldn’t hurt to ask the boy a few questions as he worked.

“What’s your name?” The boy’s data wasn’t registering on his dataglasses.

“Slater,” said the boy.

“And you’re from …?”

“House of Boards.”

That made sense, given the boy’s choice of seating.

“Bright used the light on you?”

Slater shook his head. “I don’t remember. I think I might have done it to myself.”

Grassly looked up from his programming. “You did?”

“I was high. I saw her bag and looked inside, and the helmet was right there. I just wanted to touch something of hers, even though I’m not normally a stuff-toucher. You know?”

To his astonishment, Grassly did know. He thought of how Bright’s face had lost its artifice when he’d told her the truth about releasing. She’d looked like a completely different person. “I see,” said Grassly.

“I know, I know—it’s not like she’s the top favour or anything. But I gotta tell you, ever since I saw the light, I
have these desires, and dude, they are fierce. Like I just want to …” Slater made a low growling noise in his throat.

“Rrrrr?” repeated Grassly, simultaneously offended on Bright’s behalf and fascinated by the effect of the lights.

“Yeah, it’s like I want … something, but I’m not sure what it is. I thought I found it when Bright and Fon brought me here.” Abruptly, Slater changed the subject. “I always talked to Bright because she’s easier, you know. She’s amazing and funny and everything, but she’s no Fon. Whoa. No words to describe that one.”

Grassly thought back through the hours he’d spent watching the two favours since he’d chosen Fon to receive the light and Bright had taken the initiative to steal it. He’d chosen Fon for her credit rating, and Fon was the more immediately impressive of the two, at least in terms of her ability to create large edifices with her hair and put together complicated outfits. But as he’d watched them both, he’d seen something much more interesting in Bright. She had a certain unpredictability.

As he considered this, a sick realization swept over him. Bright had never actually agreed to do what he’d asked! All she said was that she didn’t trust him and that she was confused. That wasn’t a yes at all!

“Snick!” he shouted, startling himself and the boy with his sudden use of a common and quite foul swear word from H51.

“Sorry, bro,” Slater said. “You just do what you’ve got to do and I’ll wait. I’ve got so much going on in my mind right now, you know? And I never really had anything in there before. Just some dance moves or whatever.”

“Exactly,” said Grassly. He had made a good start on reprogramming the lights, but now worry was slowing him down. Would Bright and Fon go to the Headquarters and turn the lights back on?

After he turned out the lights on the ancestors, all bets were off. The PS staff were running amok. The seal was failing. And here he was wasting time talking to a boy without enough brain power to communicate effectively.

“No more talking,” said Grassly.

“Dude, have you seen the new shorts for Kiteboard look?” asked Slater. “They’re choice.”

Like many favours, Slater had a limited store of adjectives. Grassly, while trying to ignore Slater and concentrate on his task, nevertheless decided that after the ship had cleared the Earth’s toxic atmosphere and he’d engaged the energy-thermo-nova drive and had a nice long sleep, he would sit down and teach the ancestors some new words. Even Sally Lancaster, who’d been a limited communicator at best, had had a more extensive vocabulary, including words such as “angelic,” “beautiful,” “powerful,” “divine,” and “holy.” Of course, none of those words was suitable for a discussion of shorts.

“I wanted to order some,” continued Slater. “But I’m like getting on, even though I’m at my total peak, muscularity-wise. So I didn’t have the credits. Brutal. Because I would have looked rad in those shorts.”

“Yes,” said Grassly. “Rad.” He reached for another flake of dried szpinak. He’d eaten three packages since arriving at the ship.

“Is that stuff good for your teeth?”

Grassly allowed himself to be distracted, yet again.

“What?”

“Chewing stuff the way you keep doing. Isn’t it a little … wearing?”

Grassly was sure that part of the reason the ancestors had a greatly reduced lifespan was their practice of not chewing anything because they worried about staining and chipping their teeth. By the age of fifteen, few of them had any real teeth left because of party impacts, but their irrational fear persisted.

“I assure you, my teeth are fine.”

Slater shuddered. Then he climbed to his feet. Grassly couldn’t help watching. How did the boy have so many muscles when all he did was sit on his board, talking about the things he was going to buy?

“So the girls will be back here soon?” asked Slater, yawning and displaying brilliantly white square teeth. Grassly envied the boy his relaxation. He felt on the verge of panic himself, and had to dig deep to remain focused.

“I hope so,” said Grassly.

“Well, then, I guess I better get pumped. Normally a bot keeps me tight, but I guess I’ll have to deal by myself.”

Slater dropped to the floor and lay on his stomach. He began using his arms to push his rigid torso up and down.

“What are you doing?” asked Grassly, afraid the boy was having an attack of some kind, perhaps a late-breaking reaction to the lights.

“Push-ups,” grunted Slater. “If you can’t get the muscles
ripped through electro-stim, you got to get down and grind it out.”

“Oh my,” said Grassly, worried about his ability to work with such noises going on in the background. “Will it take long?”

“Hour. Maybe two,” said Slater. He’d begun to thrust his body up so high that he could take his hands off the floor, clap them together, then catch himself and lower back down until his chest nearly touched the floor. The activity looked exhausting.

“You were so quiet before,” said Grassly, as much to himself as to Slater. Not half an hour before, the boy could barely speak. Now he sounded more or less normal, for a party favour. He was pushing up and clapping and talking nonstop. Grassly was happy to see that the effects of the light didn’t last long. But what would it be like to have a whole ship full of enlightened ancestors who very quickly became unenlightened again? Would they all starting pushing up and clapping and talking about shorts and other garments?

It did not bear contemplation.

He turned back to his programming and summoned all his powers of concentration to tune Slater out. Time flew by, and before he knew it, he was finished. He’d reprogrammed the main lights in the Store. All the overheads and light fixtures that were controlled by the feed would now act as enlighteners when they were turned off and turned back on. He had gotten rid of the glitch that had caused the helmet light to flicker when first turned on, rendering Fon and Bright immune to its effects. This time, the lights
should come on in a burst, instantly activating the ancestors’ ancient impulse to migrate toward natural light, which in their world was visible only overhead in the Natural Experience.

When the lights were turned back on—if the lights were turned back on—his Sending would succeed or it would fail. He would rescue the ancestors or they would perish.

He was as ready as he would ever be. Whether the ancestors were ready was another question.

In the ship behind him, a single favour continued to push himself up and down like a shorted-out piece of electronics.

Bright and Fon ducked into a doorway across the street from the House of Pretty Olds. The scene in front of them was so bizarre, Bright forgot that her feet hurt. They hadn’t been able to cut a hole in the membrane, which turned out to be self-sealing, big enough to drive the cart through, so she and Fon had walked all the way from the Natural Experience through Mind Alter and Gaming, until they reached the edge of the Partytainment District, where the House of Pretty Olds stood. Grassly had said to avoid Partytainment, but they had to go there to get the bots and their disguises. Anyway, Bright longed to be in a familiar situation, even for a few minutes.

At the edge of the district, the streets were peculiarly empty and the music had a lonesome, sawing quality to it.

Normally, Pretty Olds drew the smallest crowd. On this day it was fully surrounded, but not by clients. Instead, at least a hundred PS staff swarmed around the building.

“What are they doing?” asked Fon. “Why do the old ones need to be watched by so many PS officers? It’s not like they’re that popular or anything.”

Bright held a finger to her lips.

None of the officers had noticed Bright and Fon; they were all focused on the front door of the House of Pretty Olds. Two PS officers sat in a badly dented cart and others crowded behind it, pushing it ineffectually into the unyielding surface of the door.

“Now there’s a dumb idea,” said Fon.

“Shhhh,” said Bright.

A lone PS officer stood at the rear of the crowd. He kept his right hand tucked into the waist of his pants. “Again,” he shouted, when the cart bounced off the door. “And again!”

Bright propelled Fon forward. The few other people on the streets scurried, heads down, as though afraid to be noticed.

A pair of brown-jumpsuited productives walked past Fon and Bright and didn’t pause to look at them admiringly. Fon stared after them, her perfect face registering shock and hurt feelings.