"Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said.
I flicked a key to freeze the playback while I scrutinized her image. There were dark circles under her eyes. Those eyes had once seemed to flash with the sheer joy of being alive. Now they reminded me of documentary footage I'd seen of solthers shipped back from the insanity of the EuroWars. Her cheeks were slightly hollow, and I guessed that she was still almost ten kilos undermass.
But there were also noticeable improvements. Her eyes were still shell-shocked, but at least they didn't look quite so wounded. Her lips were quirked in a tentative half smile-a long way from the old days, when her smile would have brightened up the whole of my dark, dingy doss, but still a vast improvement from just a few months ago. The pain was still there-the pain that had prompted the choices that, in turn, had directed the course of her life. And the pain that those choices had caused her. That pain would probably always be there, I realized sadly. But there was a major change for the better. Now she felt pain; before, she had been pain… and there's one frag of a big difference. These days, I could look into her eyes without wincing.
She was bouncing back-finally I could perceive it, and trust that perception. It had taken almost four years- eighteen solid months of detox, analysis, psycho rehab, chemo and electro therapy, followed by twenty-eight months learning how to relate to the real world again. But it was finally starting to pay off. I shook my head. It was absolutely staggering what the human body-and, more important, the human mind-could endure without collapsing.
I backed up the replay a couple of seconds and keyed Play.
"Hoi, bro," my sister Theresa said. "Greetings from the Front Range Free Zone. Sorry I missed you, but I'll try again in a couple of days.
"Denver's a wiz place, even more schizo than Seattle, if you can believe it. Have you ever made it down here? I can't remember.
"Anyway, next stop's San Fran, I think, if I can get the datawork cleared. Then maybe I'll swing back through Cheyenne and you can take me out for dinner."
Her tentative smile broadened, and for a moment I could see the old Theresa Montgomery. My mind filled with echoes of sudden enthusiasms and innocent laughter. "I'm still having a blast out here, bro," she continued. "It's a big, wonderful world. Oh, and in case you're wondering…" With a slender hand, she brushed back a blond bang to display her datajack. The jackstopper plug was still Firmly in place, the polymer seal unbroken and showing the logo of the detox hospital.
"Still clean," she boasted. "Forty-plus months and counting.
"Catcha ya, Derek." Her image reached toward the screen to break the connection.
Again I paused the playback. I reached out with my left hand, and touched my sister's face-synthetic flesh touching synthesized image.
She was making it, she was really making that long trek back. When the therapists at the medical center had told me she'd been talking about taking a wanderjahr-a protracted traveling vacation-I'd been drek-scared. She was too vulnerable, I'd worried, not yet far enough from the precipice of drugs and chips (and worse!) that had almost claimed her. She wouldn't have the strength to resist the thousands of temptations that the real world represented.
They'd known what they were doing, those therapists-I had to admit that now. They'd known what my reaction would be to the news. Instead of letting me have it out with my sister, instead of letting me browbeat her into abandoning the plan, they hadn't even let me speak to her until I'd undergone a little therapy of my own. I hadn't been an easy subject, but I'd eventually come to understand. I couldn't have stopped Theresa from going on her wanderjahr, if that was what she wanted. Sure, it represented a risk-the therapists and detox doctors recognized that. But the damage to her self-esteem if I, or they, had forbidden her to follow her own truth would have been much more devastating, and absolutely certain. It had been a hard sell, but I'd finally accepted that this was the final therapy for Theresa: final confirmation that she had control over her own life, and her own direction.
It had been a gamble, but the wager was won. Forty-some months clean and sober. Coming up on four years of experiencing the world as it was, without the anodyne of simsense, BTL, or 2XS. My sister was on her way back from the brink.
And I couldn't put off viewing the second message any longer. I cleared Theresa's image from the screen and pulled up the other entry in my inbox.
Another woman's face, almost as familiar as my sister's. Short, straight, coppery hair. Gray eyes. Class and refinement by the bucketload. Jocasta Yzerman, sister to the dead Lolita Yzerman-I'd known her as Lolly-and a major player in the… the events… that had precipitated my relocation to Cheyenne. Beautiful Jocasta. There was a pain in the middle of my chest that I wished I could write off as indigestion.
Sometimes you want to experience emotional pain in all its fullness; other times you want it over with as fast as humanly possible. I flipped the telecom into double-speed playback.
Even overspeed. her voice was the perfectly modulated velvet of a trained professional. (I wondered momentarily if she still had her trid show on Seattle's KCPS?) I blotted out the words she was speaking-not difficult; the message wasn't anything but a verbal postcard, "long time, how's it rolling," that sort of thing-and I concentrated on that voice. I remembered the first time I'd met her those four years ago, wound up as tight as the string of a compound bow in her tailored smoke gray learners, a tall and slender figure with a pistol aimed steadily between my eyes…
The message played out, ending with the usual empty benedictions and wishes for my good health, and Jocasta was gone. I stared at the blank telecom screen for a long moment. She'd weathered the storm incredibly well, had Ms. Jocasta Yzerman-no, Mrs. Jocasta Brock, wasn't it, these days? No physical scars, and if there were any emotional ones she kept them well hidden. Was she really that strong, that resilient? Or had she learned something from me during our brief time together-the skill of lying to herself, of totally suppressing emotional pain-ironically, at the same time that I was un-learning the same thing? What were her dreams like, in those lonely hours of the night when one's defenses are at low ebb? I supposed I'd never know, not now.
For a few moments I considered sending her a reply- right now, spontaneously, without mentally scripting it all out beforehand. It didn't take me long to flag that as a bad idea. Not now, when I was emotionally open and vulnerable after thinking about Theresa. Hell, I might go so far as to actually talk about what I was really, feeling, and who knew where that might lead…?
My left arm started to hum softly. I hated when it did that, dropping into some kind of self-diagnostic routine when its central processor figured it had the time. (The spirits alone knew what it did while I was asleep at night.) The sound was very soft, probably inaudible from two meters away, but I always reacted to it the way I would to an alarm clock going off next to my ear. I clenched my left fist strongly a couple of times, and the whirring sound shut itself off.
Silently, I gave thanks to the fine people at Wiremaster Incorporated. That whirring sound from my arm-they might call it a diagnostic routine; I called it a wake-up call, a reminder that I was living in the real world. I sighed.
Well, since I had the telecom all powered up, I might as well get some work done. I pulled out the datachip Sharon Young had given me in The Buffalo Jump, slipped it into the telecom's socket, and pulled up the data.
Lots of data, I realized, as it scrolled rapidly off the top of the screen. I cut off the flow of text, specified a more reasonable scroll rate, and repunched the display command.