Join (19 page)

Leap's drives, male and female, wear the identical, simple cotton shifts of mourners, modified with a heat-generating and -reflecting inner layer. Their shaven heads reinforce the image of unity among them. Each holds a bowl with a measure of ash from Leap Five's body. Chance Two stands on the right side of the line of Leap's drives, beside Leap Four. Leap's drives step into the river in unison. They walk four paces in unison, into knee-deep or thigh-deep water. They bend toward the water at the same time. Each lifts the cover off their vessel and leans forward to tip the cremated drive's ashes into the river.

Watching all of Leap's drives acting in the river in unison, Chance knows that Leap is experiencing the sensation of the cold water underneath the still surface moving against four pairs of legs, each pair feeling the same river differently. She knows Leap is watching the four streams of ash fall simultaneously, each drive placing a similar but unique signature on the moment and the memory. Leap is memorializing the drive in a way that will recall not just Leap Five but also this period of Leap's life. As Chance Two watches, she feels the loss of her own ritual, the proper ritual she neglected.

When the ashes are gone, the drives stand still in the river, cold water rolling slowly about them. Leap is very much in a “between” period. Josette's psyche has joined but has not yet fully separated from her body. Unlike a healthy retirement ceremony, in which a fully integrated join says goodbye to a beloved drive, Leap's trauma will have a surreal touch: the dream of attending one's own funeral.

A tremendous shudder passes suddenly through all of Leap's drives. Their muscles tense. Their backs arch. Leap One drops his bowl, which had held one-fourth of the ashes. It splashes softly into the water, tips, then rights itself and begins to float toward the center of the river, as it was designed to do. Leap's drives straighten from the spasm. Chance is surprised that none of them has fallen into the river.

A moment later, Leap's other drives purposefully release their bowls, gently setting them on the surface of the river and letting them go. As Leap and Chance watch, the bowls dissolve, drifting toward the central ripples where they roll, weakening, folding in on themselves, collapsing, and then thinning to nothing.

PART THREE

There is nothing special about humanity.

—Beal Fung,

Nobel Laureate in Economics

 

You have internal conversations and external conversations, and while the conditions are different in each, you are the common factor. Your awareness becomes the lens through which light passes between the two worlds.

—Advocate

Chance Three attended Advocate's famous
lens lecture when he was sixteen. Advocate's clarity and passion for Join spoke directly to him. Excited by Advocate's vision, his father, a corporate lawyer and poet, worked to integrate Advocate's ideas into an ethical framework that emphasized the struggle of individual life and the constant renewal fundamental to living systems. Chance appreciated his father's efforts but also saw that, as Advocate said, both of his parents and all solos were tied to the wheel of suffering. No previous technology offered a fundamentally alternative vision of what it meant to be alive.

Advocate said that, in centuries to come, humanity would create additional alternatives. Each join was a reimagining of life's basic assumptions. Each join had the potential to create a new universe, an internal dimension in which life meant something entirely different. The challenge of Join was to have the courage to try it, to cross the threshold. Everyone who crossed the threshold was a pioneer. The promise was infinite potential.

Since that time, Chance has come to believe that Advocate's metaphor fudges a crucial point. Joins live in the same physical world as solos, and depend on it. Chance's awareness has not become a lens between equivalent worlds. In fact, as Chance experiences it, the beefed-up, hyper-resourced awareness of a join just continues to do the same old job—help the mind order information and address priorities.

It's suddenly pouring rain. Quame
and Lisa are laughing. A freak downpour, out of nowhere. Torrential, drenching. As if they live in the tropics, and this is the rainy season. They run the last block to the pod. By the time they get there, there's an inch of rushing water on the street. On top of that, no matter how he presses, the gate pad isn't picking up Quame's handprint. The pod won't wake. Lisa shouts, “What's going on?” over the roar of the falling water. Lisa has no idea what Quame is doing, but whatever it is, it's funny. It's all funny—the rain, the inert pod, Quame's look of confusion as he swipes his palm over and over on the pad. The water's too thick for them to use their retinal projectors, and neither of them even has a hat. They're completely soaked through.

They squint at each other, both of them standing in the torrent—the falling, flashing water—and laugh. And they struggle with it and then see that they shouldn't laugh too hard because—well, Lisa laughs too hard and chokes on the heavy rain. With her sputtering and laughing, torn between enjoyment and coughing, Quame completely loses it and is bent over with uncontrollable laughter. He's pointing at her weakly. When she stops her choking and laughing, she bats his hand away, and they look at each other and start another uncontrollable fit of laughter.

Rope remembers spreading the cremated remains of both of those drives into the River of Reflection in New Denver. New Yorkers, both of them. Both possessed of the hardened realism of the remaining denizens of that now-ramshackle lagoon of drowned personal ambition. Getting past all of that and into hilarity is no mean feat. Rope relishes those memories. Rope has so many memories like that, from so many lives.

Rope remembers the sudden downpour clearly from the perspective of each of them, and within their memories, the storm is suffused with wistful, earnest longing; a slightly fearful anticipation that at that moment they may be on the verge of actually doing something that will be meaningful to them, that will make a difference in the struggles they care about, that will make things better in the world. That sudden, unexpected storm was a symbol for both of them that they may have finally broken open the floodgates of hope. That's what they wanted it to mean. That's what Rope wanted it to mean. Every time.

The difference they were making—that was their decision to join Rope. So now, Rope is each of them. Just as Rope is each of the other souls who have joined to create it. And each one of those souls has grown older with Rope. And at this remove, with the intervention of time and events, Rope can clearly see the truth they willfully and uncharacteristically turned away from at those moments. The truth they knew, but chose to avoid. It was really just another freak storm. Another savage, inarticulate spasm of the rapidly changing world.

Leap Two is taking a
long vacation from work. The death of Leap Five and her cremation, combined with the irregular licensing, has created some potential issues for Leap's civilization ID. Leap will talk her supervisor at the airline through what happened after she sorts out what happened.

Chance Two is on leave and has time to accompany Leap One to a meeting with Mark Pearsun about Leap's ID. When the door to Pearsun's office opens, he stands impassively behind it, waiting for something from them.

Chance says, “Hello, I'm Chance.” She extends her hand, but he ignores it.

“You're the murderer,” he says.

“No, Mark,” Leap One says. “No one's dead. I'm right here.”

“Oh, I didn't mean you, Ian. I was referring to Josette, your dead mother. And by the way”—Mark motions toward Leap One's shaved head—“the skinned look suits you. There's less of your natural weirdness.”

Leap is calm. “No, Mark. This is me. Though in a way, you're right. I'm not only Josette. Not anymore. I've changed my name. My name is Leap. And I am Ian, as I am Josette. And I am Aurora. And I am Brian. And I am also Himiko. So yes, today, right now, this is actually me. And in, what, a month? With your help, this will be me legally.”

Mark turns his back on them. He waves them into the office as he walks around his desk and sits down.

They sit in guest chairs in front of his desk, Mark slouched in his chair, watching them both.

“You know what I want,” Leap says.

“Sure,” Mark says. He sits forward, puts his elbows on the desk. “We have all the technical means we need to require perfect adherence to sensible and ordered laws around Join licensing.” He smiles sourly and leans back again in his chair. “So to avoid that enlightened, functional, and overly regulated state of affairs, we've had to use the law to generate a more appropriate situation, one with a more appropriate measure of confusion. Within that appropriate confusion resides the flexibility that is sometimes required by people of means. You, whoever you are at this point, are still a person of means.”

“Thank you, Mark,” says Leap.

“I think this can be managed. The whole thing,” Mark says it as if the fact that he can manage it upsets him.

“The licensing?” Leap asks.

“Yes.”

“The forward dating on the samples?”

“Yes, but we won't know for sure for a couple of months.”

“Thank you.”

Mark seems ready to say something but then appears to change his mind. He says, “So, you flipped.”

Leap sighs. “Yes.”

“It's unfortunate. I'm sorry for you. But I'm not surprised. Josette would never have wanted this.”

“Mark, I am Josette.”

“Well, okay. Shit! Okay. I'll talk with your son as if he's you, Josette!” Mark's face is red, but his voice softens again, and he continues, “You told me you didn't want to join.”

“Yes,” says Leap.

“So you changed your mind.”

Leap can't look at Mark. “Yes, I . . . the arthritis, the pain. I never, never imagined it could be that difficult. That painful.”

“You didn't talk to me again. You didn't ask me.”

“I wasn't thinking. The pain was terrible. My body was going to die. I needed a join with more drives.”

“And then you flipped.”

“Yes.”

“I wouldn't have had doubts.”

“I don't think”—Leap glances over at Chance—“with you I don't think I would have either. And it may not have been Josette who flipped.”

“What, you then? Ian? Or . . . Leap?”

Leap doesn't respond.

Mark turns away dismissively, looks out the window. “And killing her slowed it down,” he says.

“I didn't kill her.”

“No,” Mark says. “She did.”

“No, I am still here, Mark.
Goddammit
, you bloodsucking twit!”

Mark is surprised into silence. After a moment he laughs lightly. “I'm gonna miss you,” he says.

“Mark, I am going to keep working with you,” Leap says. “I'm right here. I haven't gone anywhere, and I'm going to keep working with you.”

“It's not the same,” Mark says.

Leap is tight-lipped. He nods.

“One of my contacts mentioned the flip as a possibility, early on,” Mark says. “The potential for complications of any sort was one of the reasons we chose that particular adviser. She took some legal precautions. She did a few things that will help me.”

“I'm glad to hear that,” says Leap, her voice prickly. “I was beginning to think she was just incompetent.”

“It was your choice,” Mark says.

“Yes, it was.”

The anger rekindles in Mark's eyes as he says slowly, “You're here telling me we're going to work together, as if this is something you can just get through. But you, one of you, flipped. And now you're going to be torn apart, very, very slowly, at a subatomic level. Your body tissues will disintegrate. Your mind will erode. You'll experience unimaginable pain, full-blown insanity, and then the whole join, all of Leap, will die.”

“Yes,” says Leap, coolly meeting his gaze. “I am almost literally going to melt. Like ice cream.”

The pod passes smoothly and
quickly over the greensward, between spires. They've just lifted off from Pearsun's office and are flying back toward Leap's home.

A paid subscription covers the use of the whole, unified fleet of pods. Even at rest, the vehicles are impressive—ovoids whose gyroscopic stabilizers maintain their equilibrium despite minimal contact with the ground. The bottom half of the pod is typically a single color with a smooth metallic finish. The top half is most often transparent, but passengers can use controls inside the cabin to increase opacity on any portion of the dome, turning it a glassy, bluish color. When they're traveling, pods are pure, distilled technical wizardry—from the beauty of the shape in motion to the torturously abstruse theory that explains their flight.

As Chance understands it, a pod moves by creating a rip in space and then allowing space to pull it forward to fill the rip. That apparently requires absolute bilateral symmetry in the distribution of the vehicle's mass. As passengers move in the top half, a “shadow mass”—managed by a mass calculator that manipulates a spongy gelatin, compressed air, and force generators—compensates with shifts beneath, keeping the vehicle balanced. The bilateral symmetry also enables the vehicle's energy translators. No one has figured out how to scale the flying cars up beyond a device capable of carrying a few hundred kilograms.

Leap One gazes out of the transparent upper dome, idly running his hand over the stubble that's emerging on his recently shaved pate. Chance Two, settled into her sofa seat, watches the faint cirrostratus above them, unmoving as they float along beneath.