Geosynchron (65 page)

"Do you think the world is going to forget who I am once Natch activates the rollback?"

"I doubt it. Grand Reunification really doesn't have much to do
with MultiReal. Did you even mention MultiReal in that manifesto
you wrote?"

"I can't remember. I might have."

"Well, even if the manifesto gets completely wiped off the Data
Sea, one look at that nose of yours and the world will figure out who
your mother is soon enough."

"If I stay in the public eye. I've been thinking, Da-this could be an
opportunity for a failsafe of my own. If the world forgets that there's another
Surina, then I could slip back into relative anonymity in the Islands. I
could go back to just being the elected representative of ward four."

"Is that what you want?"

"I don't-I don't know."

Laughter. "You get that uncertainty from me. It's not something I
would have chosen to pass on to the next generation. Do what you
want, of course. But you're too much like your mother to stay out of
politics. And once Natch activates this failsafe-well, you'll have a
freedom that she never had."

"What do you mean?"

"You've got all the advantages of being a Surina, but you're not
tied down to Andra Pradesh. You've got four hundred years of history
behind you, but you're not burdened with the weight of the past. It's
a gift, in a way. Whether the world remembers you or not, you'll be
free to follow your own path like Margaret never was."

"And you? What are you going to do?"

"I'm going to go back into that room and try one more time to
break Natch out of that infernal black code. I think I'm close to a
breakthrough."

"Can't you leave that to Horvil and Benyamin?"

"No, I kicked them out. Horvil wasn't much help, honestly, so I
sent him to go take care of Jara. Benyamin's just going to hunker down
here in the Van Jarmack building."

"What I really meant to ask was, what are you going to do after
that? After this MultiReal crisis is over."

Pause. "After that, I have no idea."

"I'm not the only one with an opportunity here, Da. You'll have
that opportunity too. You don't have to flit back and forth between
Manila and Andra Pradesh anymore. You can start over."

"At my age, Josiah, you don't start over. Especially if you've been
through what I've been through. You just keep on going and try to
make peace with where you've been.... Don't worry about me. I'll
survive. I always do."

Romping on the Sigh for half an hour seemed like a monumentally
irresponsible thing to do at a time like this. But Jara didn't take too
much convincing. She knew as well as Horvil did that this could literally be their last moment of intimacy before Margaret's failsafe
snatched the entire relationship from their memories. They might
wake up tomorrow bickering at one another as if the intervening five
months had never happened.

Love is stronger than memory, Kristella Krodor had once written. Love
is the greatest certainty.

It was a pretty sentiment, but Jara didn't really want to entrust her
romantic life to the treacly platitudes of a third-rate drudge, and one
whose column featured a weekly roundup of popular lipstick colors at
that. No, as far as Jara was concerned, love was fragile, something that
needed to be nurtured and protected from the cruel vicissitudes of the
world. Something that needed to be fought for, tooth and claw.

So they made love slowly, tenderly, with a minimum of accoutrements and virtual embellishments. Horvil was Horvil, complete
with massive belly and a propensity for excessive sweat. Jara was Jara,
complete with narrow hips and untamed thicket of hair that liked to
snarl stray fingers and creep into nostrils at the wrong moments.

As soon as they had logged off the Sigh and returned to their
Earthbound selves, panic set in.

"What if we forget the whole relationship?" inquired Horvil, lying
on the bed and twisting the ends of the hotel comforter. "What if you
hate me all over again?"

"Come on, Horvil, I never hated you," replied Jara. "It just took a
while for me to appreciate you properly. But I learned eventually. If I
learned once, I'm sure I'll learn again."

"But what if you don't? Jara, the only reason I had the courage to admit my feelings for you in the first place was because we got thrown
into a crisis together. Two crises, in fact. The Council marching on
Andra Pradesh, and the chaos at the Tul Jabbor Complex. What if
nothing like that happens to us again? What if I never get the courage
to talk to you about my feelings again?"

"Those weren't accidents. Put the two of us together again and
we'll end up the same way."

Horvil propped himself up on one elbow and took one of Jara's
hands in his. "Are you kidding? After all we've seen? For process'
preservation, don't you remember that MultiReal experiment I did in
London? All I had to do was twitch my nose a different way, and that
street vendor was giving me a big discount on my lunch. No, I'm sorry,
but the world we live in isn't preordained. It's just one of a trillion
equally likely possibilities."

Jara frowned. The engineer was right, and she knew it. There were
alternate realities out there where Horvil and Jara ended up bitter enemies, where Jara ended up with Natch, where she never recovered from
the molestation by her childhood proctor and wound up in a selfdestructive pattern. "So what can we do to prevent this from going
away?" said Jara quietly. "Can we just summarize the whole relationship in a message and send it to each other?"

Horvil shook his head. "No, I don't think so. If the failsafe knows
how to wipe out our memories about MultiReal, it's going to know
how to wipe out our messages too."

"So we'll post it on the Data Sea somewhere. A public message
board."

"No good. It'll get wiped there as well."

"This really shouldn't be that hard, Horv ... We'll write the messages in code. We'll use some kind of cipher that we can decode after
the failsafe has run its course."

The engineer was starting to get intrigued by the challenge, in
spite of himself. "I don't think you appreciate the problem here. If I'm understanding what Natch told me about the failsafe correctly-and I
think I do-the failsafe code is already tracking our memories and
keeping a list of what might need to be deleted later. So before we
encode the message, the failsafe already has tagged it as something that
needs to be deleted."

Jara pulled herself up from the bed and began clutching frizzy
strands of hair in frustration. "We don't have time for this," she
moaned. "We need to figure this out now. In the next twenty minutes.
Brone is releasing the program, as we speak."

"What we need is a low-tech solution," said Horvil, perking up.
"How did the ancients keep permanent records?"

"With ink and treepaper," replied Jara without thinking.

"Exactly!"

They began frantically tearing the hotel room apart in search of
paper and ink. Drawers, tables, cubbyholes, dressers-no sign of paper
and ink in any of them. I thought these people were Luddites! thought Jara.
Isn't there supposed to be stationery sitting on the desks of old-fashioned hotels?

Finally Horvil had an inspiration and dashed into the hallway of
the hotel. Funny how quickly the plump engineer could move when
he was motivated. He reemerged in the doorway seconds later bearing
an antique book that Jara had seen sitting on the hall table near the
elevator. A kitschy bit of decoration that some interior designer
decided would lend the establishment some cachet. Jara flipped
through it. The print was indecipherable Chinese script, the topic was
unknown, and the middle contained a number of full-color plates that
must have been glossy at some point in time. Ancient Chinese
seascapes, verdant pastures with placid peasants tending the land. She
turned the book to its blank inside cover.

"We've got a problem," said Jara.

"What?"

"How do we write in it?"

Horvil scratched his head. "You don't have a pen?"

"Horv, I don't think I've ever even seen a pen before. Not outside of
a viewscreen. Have you?"

"Not since initiation. But this is ridiculous. We're in the Islands.
The city of Manila's been around since ancient times. There's got to be
somewhere that we can buy ink and treepaper around here. An ink and
paper store."

Jara flung her mind wildly across the Data Sea. "There is-but it's
on the other side of the city. We'd never make it in time."

They tore through the hotel room once more in search of some
kind of writing utensil, momentarily swept away by the tide of fear.
Horvil scurried down to the hotel lobby and returned back five minutes later empty-handed. Jara had resorted to getting down on hands
and knees to see if some writing implement might have rolled under
the bed at some point. No luck.

Then the engineer came up with a brilliant solution: they would
write in blood. Jara doubted they'd be able to scrawl more than a dozen
words or two by this method, but even a dozen words would be better
than nothing. They wasted several minutes trying to prick their fingers
and come up with a usable bead of blood to write with, only to find
themselves thwarted by the miracles of modern medical technology.
The OCHREs in their bio/logic systems would stanch the flow of
blood within seconds, leaving them with only a few half-formed
smears on the pulped wood fiber.

"This is pathetic," lamented Jara. "I can't believe we can project a
virtual body millions of kilometers through space to Mars, but we can't
figure out how to write something down on a piece of paper."

But Horvil was persistent. He grabbed the kitchen knife Jara had
used to prick their fingertips and tried to carve a message onto the walls.
But the flexible stone was almost completely impervious to their blade.
Horvil and Jara threw away another five minutes experimenting on a
wide variety of building materials, but floor, carpet, furniture, and dishes
were all immune to permanent scarring by any method they possessed.

Dejected, they came close to giving up when Horvil was struck by
a sudden remembrance. "I can't believe I forgot about this!" he
shouted. "Aunt Berilla has an old quill pen sitting on her desk with a
big pot of ink."

"What on Earth would she have something like that for?" asked
Jara.

Horvil shrugged. "If I understood anything about Aunt Berilla,
the world would be a much different place. I think she dabbles in
calligraphy."

"Well, don't just stand there. Send her a Confidential Whisper already."

It took some convincing to persuade Berilla to leave the gathering
of Creed Elan functionaries who had gathered in her estate to discuss
philanthropic endeavors for striking TubeCo workers. But after a
minute of increasingly alarming and unrealistic promises on Horvil's
behalf, Berilla apparently decided that her nephew was in a serious
enough bind to pay attention to. The engineer quickly brought Jara
into the conversation.

"Horvil, I don't even know if that old quill pen still works," said
the matriarch in a final effort to keep her afternoon intact.

"Don't try to pull that," said Horvil, head tilted back and fingers
pinching a gumdrop of flesh between creased eyebrows until it turned
cherry red. "I've seen you use it for that dumb calligraphy you do with
your friends."

"Well, if you're going to behave that way ..."

After another agonizing couple minutes of cajoling, they managed
to persuade Berilla to retreat to her office and get out her quill pen and
parchment. Horvil began dictating a long series of nonsensical letters
and numbers that must have had his aunt pounding the table in irritation. He made Berilla repeat them back to him several times in a row
to make sure she had transcribed his words correctly. "It's a rotating
cipher," Horvil told Jara. "When I decode it, I'll get a few keywords to
assure myself that it was genuinely me who sent the message."

"Yeah, but what does it say?"

"Pretty much the whole thing in a nutshell. You and me, the
memory erasure, the relationship, a few private things about you so I
can assure you that this all happened."

Jara didn't want to know what those few private things were, and she
hoped she never had to find out. She felt an inexplicable tug from
someplace inside of her, a desire to just let everything that had happened in the past few months get sucked down the drain of vanished
memory and never come back. How many times had she yearned for
the ability to just up and walk away from her life and start anew? She
wondered how many people out there would use this memory apocalypse as a convenient excuse to abscond from their responsibilities.

Berilla's impatient harrutnph interrupted her from her reverie.
"What did you say?" asked Jara.

"I said, what do you want me to write down?"

And then it hit Jara: what did she want Berilla to write down?