Traveling, Traveling
The boys squatted in a circle in the middle of the dusty, unpaved road. There were six or seven of them, all at that age when the body grows too fast for the controlling mind and straggly hair appears on still-baby-soft faces. Their dirty-blond hair, pale blue eyes and hulking bodies revealed a genetic uniformity that startled, in the middle of the Twenty-Second Century with the world getting smaller and smaller by the minute.
Around them, their village slumbered in the midday heat. Somewhere, in the surrounding hills, a cricket chirped noisily breaking the still, glassy silence.
They turned from whatever had been holding their attention to stare at me, as I walked up to them.
They would turn and they would gawk, pale eyebrows rising beneath the lank wheat-colored hair.
I was a woman alone, a stranger, traveling on foot. They undoubtedly had seen flyers zip by overhead, but strangers on foot were a different thing. Or at least they would be, here, where the mountains echoed only stillness, the roads were unpaved and rough amid scraggly grass and there were no shops, no museums, no restaurants in sight.
Also, they all looked like they wore homespun, while my suit was a shiny, metallic silver — pants and jacket threaded through with bio-fibers, to whisk away perspiration and mold the body.
The latest fashion from London to Canberra.
They stared, and stood up, and moved apart a little. The tallest one of them slipped something into the back pocket of his frayed black pants. It looked like a magnifying glass that I'd seen in a museum, once.
That was when I noticed, on the yellow sandy road, in front of them, a palm-sized beetle, curled, its tiny feet turned in. Burned.
The eldest boy pulled the magnifying glass out of his pocket, shoved it back again, then pulled it out.
I felt my stomach turn, though I couldn't say why. After over a hundred years of life, the mindless cruelties of early adolescence should not affect me.
But you'd think with all the holos oriented to non-violence, all the sensies preaching loving kindness to all the peoples of the world and every creature under the sun, people would be past this.
The taller boy fixed me with his slow, puzzled stare. "What do you want?"
If I'd been a bug he'd have fried me too. "My name is Traeena Schnell," I said. "I was on my way to an important conference in Paris, when the grid went down.” I gestured behind me. "My flyer is back there. I need a link."
The boy's brows knit. His boiled-gooseberry eyes took me in, from straight, platinum-blonde hair — my latest melanin change — to the curves — thank heavens for rejuv — displayed through the clingy suit.
His gaze had an almost physical presence. I felt myself blush.
"There are no links," he said. "In the village."
I sighed. Everyone had links. Everyone. Even religious fanatics and tribalist African sects.
Without a link, if you should have a medical emergency, you couldn't call for rescue. Without a link you wouldn't know of emergencies or disasters. Without a link, you might as well be living in the twentieth century, with all its isolationism. Without a link, you were screwed.
"Of course you have a link," I said. "You just might not be allowed to use it. Take me to your father.” My voice echoed, harsh, across the still hilltops.
The cricket stopped chirping.
The boy sighed, with superior fatigue. "All right," he said. "But my father don't have no link either."
He turned, nonetheless, and led the way up the narrow street, past a couple of dogs dozing in the sun, and into a back-yard gate to a small, whitewashed house.
The way to deal with petty pre-teen tyrants had always been intimidation. I remembered that much, whatever else I'd forgotten.
***
Minutes before I walked into the village, I'd been in my flyer, which was set up as a tiny business office.
My desk had been pulled out, the chair up to it, my fingers flying on the keyboard, while the hologram screen writhed and twisted in front of me, the symbols changing, the agenda for the meeting taking shape ahead of me.
I worked — had worked for years — for GuideNet, the principal of many national nets that kept the flyers in the air and guided them with micro waves along pre-programmed paths. It had taken over in the twenty first century, when the first flying cars had proven a nightmare of traffic control and well beyond the coordination of most mortals.
So the micro waves drove my flyer, while I worked on the program for a meeting that would change Guide Net and the world forever.
And then the power went out, the fail-safes of my flyer activated, and I was falling, falling gently like a leaf, onto a landscape of rolling green hills, with no civilization but a few stone buildings in sight.
I knew what had happened then, of course. This wasn't the first time.
The local Guide Net relay had got bombed by some nationalist group or another. And now I'd have a sweaty walk to the next link, to inform them of the problem.
Damn, I hated terrorists.
***
The tall boy opened a rusty metal gate, taller than both of us and painted green, but slowly losing its fight to rust.
I hadn't seen a metal gate in ages. Most of them had been replaced by cheap dimatough or ceramite, which neither rusted nor needed painting.
On the other side of the gate, the bucolic look continued, an exhibition of anachronisms in everyday use. An ox cart, such as I'd seen only in pictures, sat in the middle of a yard paved in broad stones. No oxen were coupled to it, but straw piled high in the back.
A young man looking like an older, pimply version of my guide had been unloading the straw with a pitchfork. When he saw us, he stopped, and stared, slowly wiping the sweat from his forehead on his tattered homespun sleeve.
A dog tied to a garden stake barked at me, pulling on his leash.
He stared at me, and blushed, then glared at the tall boy. "Gerald?" he asked.
The tall boy sulked. "She wants to see father. She wants to use our link."
The older youth frowned, earnest bewilderment in his pale blue eyes. "But--" he said.
We didn't stick around to hear his objection. Gerald — or at least I assumed this was Gerald — led me away from the yard, and across a narrow, vine-covered passage, past slipshod-looking wooden chicken coops, to the back door of a house.
The back door was open to a broad kitchen which, like the patio outside, was flagged in broad stones.
The kitchen had a table, a stove, and a tall refrigerator that hummed noisily. At one of six chairs around the table, a man sat. He was reading... I had to blink to believe it -- a paper book with moldering leather covers. A cat dozed in his lap.
It transported me to my earliest memories, at the end of the twentieth century — my grandmother's farm kitchen, the door standing open to the vineyard and the flagged threshing yard. Chickens and dogs and cats.
But the man set his book down and looked at me, hands crossed on lap. He looked spare and lean and dry, like a saint carved, long ago, in wood that had since lain in a cold, dry place. His features had the sheen of long dried wood, impenetrable and hard as rock. His fine white hair stood on end and with his whiskers, it surrounded his face like a nimbus.
"She wants to use our link," Gerald said.
His father nodded once, gravelly, then stared at me, and asked, as if his son hadn't spoken. "What do you want?"
"My flyer went down," I said. "About a mile away. The net went down. If I may use your link, I can ask for a pick up."
He blinked. In the spare coldness of his face, every movement was exaggerated, so that something as simple as blinking his eyelids became as pronounced, as meaningful, as another man's broad wave. At length, the too-straight lips, in the narrow face, moved. "We have no link," he said. And, having spoken, looked back at his book.
I had been dismissed.
"Of course you have a link," I said. "Of course you have a link. Everyone has a link. How would you deal with a medical emergency, for instance, without one?"
He didn't raise his eyes from the book. He did not acknowledge my presence. Behind me, in the kitchen, flies swarmed and buzzed.
The dog barked outside in the yard.
***
I walked back out to the yard, where the older boy continued loading straw, in a desultory fashion.
He paused in his work, and stared after me, as I walked out the rusty gate, into the hot midday street.
Walking down it, I couldn't help thinking that people watched me from behind the closed curtains of their silent houses. Houses closed like that were like half-shut eyes, with an intelligence lurking behind.
Friendly or unfriendly? I couldn't tell.
Was this community truly as isolationist as it seemed to be? Would there be links in the other houses?
The silence of the hills reflected back at me, vacant, silent, as it had been for centuries.
It made the possibility of links, the possibility of anything as vital as current civilization a distant possibility.
I passed a small cemetery, marked with half-fallen tombstones, slumbering as firmly under a canopy of trees as the living, hid in their silent houses.
As for me, and my desire to return to the crowded, busy modern world, I'd have to do it on my own.
***
I was halfway to my fly car, on my sore feet, amid the silent hills, when the taller boy caught up with me.
"Lady," he said. "Lady."
I turned back and saw him approach, long legs working over the uneven terrain with the assurance and practice of a mountain goat.
"We really do not have a link," he said, as he followed me.
If he really didn't have a link, why was he following me? I nodded at him, but turned my back and walked away.
My fly glimmered in the distance, like a metallic egg, laid by a gigantic, mutated bird amid this bucolic landscape. I felt hot. My suit was supposed to adjust to temperature and keep me cool or warm no matter what.
But something about this unfiltered air, this strange place, must be interfering with the controls, because I felt hot, sweaty and prickly.
The steps behind me didn't slow down. The youth caught up with me. "It's only that--" he stopped, and swallowed, making his prominent Adam's apple bob, while he ran to keep up with me. "It's just that I can't have you thinking that.... I mean, my grandfather and a friend of his founded this village. Or perhaps I should say, returned to it, and they decided they would live as in the late twentieth century, because .... Well, they thought things were getting too fast for them. But — you must understand, we aren't being inhospitable, or anything, it's just that we don't have a link, or any of the conveniences of modern— Well, of your type of life."
I nodded. "You don't need to explain," I said, coldly. "Retro communities are nothing new. There are communities that live as anything from the seventeenth century onwards.” And all, but a few maintained for show, with the comforts of modernity available behind the scenes. And the real ones, the domain of zanies and crazies, often led by charismatic, insane leaders. But I couldn't tell this to the young man, since the leader was likely his father. He smelled faintly of sweat, a smell I almost didn't remember in this time of temperature controlling suits and super deodorizers.
His feet hopped and skipped over the uneven ground, as he kept up with me.
"You can tell me how to get to the next village," I said. "One that might have a link."
He swallowed. "It's miles and miles away," he said. "And we don't have cars. We don't have cars because father— because it has been agreed it would make the possibility of contamination from the outside too great."
"Oh," I said. "Then you may go. You've told me you're not inhospitable. What else can you do? You may go back.” We were now steps from my flyer. It would stultifying inside, what without the air conditioning functioning and all systems at minimal, power-saving levels.
But there was nothing for it. I might as well sit beside the fly and wait for it to come to life.
Unfortunately, if only the net in this part of the world had gone down, unpopulated and rural as it looked, it could be days before the controllers noticed the failure and corrected it.
"I came to tell you," he said. "That my father says you can spend the night at our farm. It's likely to be cold out here.” He looked at my flyer and blinked. "Is this your link?" he asked.
I had to laugh. "No. It's my flyer. The link is inside. It's a communications device. What drives it."
In my mind, I was figuring out that I might as well take the semi-hospitality of the farm as stay out here, in the cold, at night. They flyer was dead, and was likely to remain so for days. And, if it should come to life, I'd already missed my important meeting in Paris.
I might as well be a couple more hours late.
The company would have got the announcement of new technology, whatever it was, and would already be making what adjustments it could to the improved capacities without me.
To be honest, they didn't need me for it. I'd picked capable subordinates.
They would know what to do and, provided they knew I would be looking over their choices later, they weren't likely to do anything too foolish.
I hoped.
I turned to the youth, with his bad case of acne, and his too-long legs. "All right," I said. "I will spend the night at the farm."
He had his hand on the smooth, silvery side of my flyer, and it took him a few moments to realize I had accepted his invitation.
***
It was less unpleasant than I expected. Not to say it was pleasant. It wasn't that.
But the meal had been good and clean — of course, neither vegetables nor the sparse portion of meat would have been radiated for disease, nor examined for the necessary nutrients, so I might very well die of it. The conversation hadn't been lively, but it had been polite.
Well, I hadn't been allowed to say much of my life, and the world outside. I was cut off at every turn by the pater familias. But when he started talking about Alexander Dumas, I was able to join in, bolstered by the knowledge of novels I had read for the first time, almost a hundred years ago.
It occurred to me, long after, while I lay in the comfortable bed upstairs, in the dark, staring at the naked bulb hanging from the cracked plaster ceiling, that the father of this family was probably no older than I.
When the flyers had been introduced, when life extension technology emerged, I'd been twenty, and I'd embraced it wholeheartedly.
Others had run away from it.
I got up, restless. The lady of the house had offered to lend me a nightshirt, which I'd refused as politely as I could, afraid that if I let go of my suit they would burn it as part of the heretical outside culture, or something like that.
Standing by the window, I could feel the cool evening breeze on my hands and face, but not on the rest of my body. The temperature adjustors were working again.
It was very late at night, and the village slept.
The smell of the night was sweet — flowers and fruit and growing things. The village was very quiet, except for singing voice of a man in the distance. He sounded much the worse for the wear. The wind rustled in the trees. Crickets chirped, and things scurried not far away. An howl hooted.
And then, into all this calm, the strangest sound poured — a grating, popping sound.
It had been so many years since I'd heard it, that it took me the longest time to identify it.
A combustion engine. A car. An honest-to-goodness, pre-flyer car.
I tiptoed out of my room and into the night, in search of my possible salvation.
***
The barn was a good distance from the property. Anyone who'd not been fully awake and alert likely wouldn't have heard the motor.
The engine was set in a shiny red tractor of uncertain twentieth-century vintage.
I wasn't really surprised to see the older son of my hosts bending over the tractor's open front, staring at the popping, whirring engine with something like maternal love.
When I opened the door and came in, he jumped, and slammed the front cavity of the tractor shut, then blinked at me, in confusion.
"It is old," he said. "It was here. I painted it. I've been trying to make it work.” He swallowed, looking guilty. "It seems a shame to use animals and.... and our own sweat to till the fields, when we have this, right here. Course, there's not much gas, just a dozen cans or so I found outback, but I think it might be able to work with alcohol and there's plenty of that."
I smiled at him. "It's all right," I said, softly. The boy didn't seem to know when to be and when not to be afraid. "It's all right. I won't tell anyone. But if, please, you could take me to the next village, where I might use a link. There's this really important meeting that happened a few hours ago, and for all I know my office might be falling apart because of it."
He looked at me a long time, "My father wouldn't want me to use this. He wouldn't want me to go to the next village. We only go there if it's life or death and even then not every time."
"But you have the tractor running so well," I said, and batted my eyelashes at him, shamelessly. "You could take me there in no time at all, and be back before your father knew it."
***
Ultimately, it was his pride in his mechanical prowess, more than my meager attractions that lured him onto that road.
He spent the first half of the hour-long trip — through roads that had long since ceased being roads and were now well on the way to being absorbed by tall, sparse pine forest — telling me all about filters and batteries and who knew what else.
Even in the good old twentieth century, I'd never cared much for cars and motors. Now, they had become a bewilderment, even the terms a blur.
Then, halfway to the next village, he started asking questions: about healing drugs, rejuv, how fast you could get from there to a place halfway across the world.
I answered honestly, neither trying to lure him to our world, nor to scare him into staying in his. I told him of the wars, of religions that became fanatical cults when faced with competition coming near — at their doorstep. Of people so scared of technology that they were willing to bomb wave transmission towers to bring flyers down for a few moments, a few hours, a few days.
The tractor bounced us gently across the uneven road.
"And what do you do?" he asked.
Lights of the next village — obviously better lit, more modern, than his native one — shone in the distance through the brambly trees.
"I mean, the meeting you missed, your office.... What is it all about?"
"I work for GuideNet," I said. "The people who maintain the microwave net that guides every flyer.” I explained why flyers couldn't be driven by each user. "I'm the ... I supervise the integration of new technology. And there was something new, in the pipeline. We've bought the rights to it, but I still am not sure what it is. I only got the hype of the interoffice memos and it's supposed to revolutionize travel forever. But I've heard this before. It could be anything from a flyer with a more efficient bathroom, or an improved method of wave transmission."
He nodded gravely, his eyes worried. "My father would have been upset if he knew you worked for GuideNet. He says it's an abomination that will destroy the world. Everything that matters about the world. He says it's like a blender, and we're the peas being mashed in it."
This statement put a damper on the conversation until we got into the village.
There, under the lights, he extended his hand. "I'll go now, before anyone sees me. My name is Edward," he said. "And I'm pleased to have met you. I might.... I mean, you.... The world these days sounds fascinating. But I don't know if I'll ever leave the village. There is a lot to be said for it, you know. All the things you talk about, religious wars, fear of terrorism... we have none of that. But then, you live longer and....” He grinned. "I guess I might leave the village some day. But I'm glad the village exists. I mean, I'm glad some people have the option of living differently."
I thought of the night perfumed with flowers, the silence interrupted only by crickets and owls. In a way, I was glad too.
***
A few hours later, the alarm about the net having been sent and a fly having picked me up and taken me to my downed vehicle, I was on my way to Paris, and calling my assistant, Dewar, on the link.
"So, what's the new technology?" I asked him. "A new method to flush johns in flyers?"
But Dewar, whose holographic image smiled at me above my keyboard, shook his head, looking flushed, shocked, like a man who has taken a blow to the head and hasn't fully recovered. "No," he said. "No. Wait till you hear this. It's a teleportation device. One place to the other, with the coordinates. No net, no waves, no flyers. Instantaneous. And we have the rights.” He rustled the papers in front of him. "It's probably going to start being used by the end of the year. And, guess what? You can go anywhere, anywhere at all instantly. People will be able to live in Australia, work in New York. Or vice versa. Or.... anywhere at all. We are no longer bound by geographical coordinates. The world has become one large city."
I heard my own voice give instructions for how to proceed with the project. But in the back of my mind, I saw the village, with its secure, segregated calm.
They weren't safe anymore.