The old woman stepped out of the forest, saw Daeman alone, leaning against the floating sonie, and said, “Where is everyone?”
“That’s what I was wondering. First the barbarian left. Then Hannah went after him. Then Ada and Harman walked off that way . . .” He gestured toward the tall trees on the opposite side of the glade.
“Why don’t you use your palm?” said Savi, and smiled as if something she’d said amused her.
“I already tried,” said Daeman. “On your ice-thingee. At the bridge. Here. It doesn’t work.” He raised his left palm, thought of the finder function, and showed her the blank rectangle of white floating there.
“That’s just the immediate locator function,” said Savi. “Just an arrow-guide once you’re close to something, like inside a library hunting for a volume but in the wrong aisle. Use farnet or proxnet.”
Daeman stared at her. From his first glimpse of the old woman, he had doubted her sanity.
“Ah, that’s right,” said Savi, still smiling that unamused smile. “You’ve all forgotten the functions. Generation after generation.”
“What are you talking about?” said Daeman. “The old functions like reading don’t work anymore. They went away when the post-humans left.” He pointed to the rings crossing in the patch of blue sky above.
“Nonsense,” said Savi. She walked over, leaned against the sonie next to him, and gripped his left arm, turning it palm toward her. “Think three red circles with blue squares in the center of each.”
“What?”
“You heard me.” She continued to hold his wrist.
Idiocy, thought Daeman, but he visualized three red circles with blue squares floating in the center of each.
Instead of the small rectangle of white-yellow light that the finder function generated, a large blue oval of light now floated six inches above his palm.
“Whoa!” cried Daeman, pulling his wrist from her grasp and flicking his hand wildly as if a huge insect had just landed in it. The blue oval flickered with it.
“Relax,” said Savi. “It’s blank. Just visualize someone.”
“Who?” Daeman actively did not like this sensation—his body doing something he did not know it could do.
“Anyone. Someone close to you.”
Daeman closed his eyes and visualized his mother’s face. When he opened his eyes again, the blue oval was busy with diagrams. Street grids, a river, words that he could not read—an aerial view of the black circle that could only be the crater in the heart of Paris Crater. The image zoomed and suddenly he was in a stylized structure, fifth floor, back domi near the crater—not his home. Two stylized human figures, cartoon characters but with real, human faces, were in bed, the female above the male, moving . . .
Daeman closed his hand into a fist, shutting off the oval.
“Sorry,” said Savi. “I forgot that no one’s using trace inhibitors these days. Your girlfriend?”
“My mother,” said Daeman, tasting bile. It had been Goman’s domi-complex across the crater—he knew the layout of the rooms from when he was a boy, playing in the inner rooms while his mother consorted with the tall, dark-skinned man with the wine-smooth voice. Daeman didn’t like Goman, and hadn’t known his mother was still seeing him. According to what Harman had said earlier, it was already night in Paris Crater.
“Let’s try to see where Hannah and Ada and the others are,” said Savi. She chuckled. “Although they may wish they’d activated farnet inhibitors as well.”
Daeman didn’t want to uncurl his fist.
“Recycle it,” said Savi.
“How?”
“How do you get rid of your arrow-finder?”
“I just think ‘off,’ “ said Daeman, mentally adding, “stupid .”
“Do it.”
Daeman thought, the blue oval winked off.
“You activate proxnet by thinking one yellow circle with a green triangle in it,” said Savi. She looked at her own palm and a bright yellow rectangle appeared above it.
Daeman did the same.
“Think of Hannah,” said Savi.
He did so. Both of their palms showed a continent—North America, but Daeman could not identify it—then a zoom to the south-central section, zoom north of the coastline, zoom to a complex series of unreadable words and topographic maps, zoom below stylized trees to a stylized female form with Hannah’s head on the cartoon body, walking alone—no, not alone, Daeman realized, for there was a question mark walking next to her.
Savi chuckled again. “Proxnet doesn’t know how to process Odysseus.”
“I don’t see Odysseus,” said Daeman.
Savi reached into his yellow holographic cube and touched the question mark. She pointed to two red figures at the edge of the cloud. “That’s us,” she said. “Ada and Harman must be off the grid to the north.”
“How do we know it’s Hannah?” asked Daeman, although he’d glimpsed the top of her head
“Think ‘close-up,’ “ said Savi. She showed him her palm cloud, which had zoomed lower, leveled out, and was watching the stylized Hannah with the real Hannah’s face walk between stylized trees, along a stylized stream.
He thought “close-up” and marveled at the clarity of the image. He could see the tree shadows on her features. She was speaking animatedly to the symbol—Savi had called it a question mark—floating next to her. Daeman was glad that he hadn’t found Hannah in the middle of sex.
Savi must have visualized Ada and Harman, for her yellow palm cloud shifted and showed two figures walking on topographic symbols somewhere north of the stationary red dots that she’d said were Savi and Daeman.
“Everybody’s alive, nobody eaten by dinosaurs,” said Savi. “But I wish to hell they’d get back so we could leave. It’s getting late. If this were the old days, I’d just call them on their palms and tell them to get their butts back here.”
“You can use this to communicate?” said Daeman, holding up his bare palm.
“Of course.”
“Why don’t we know that?” His voice came out sounding almost angry.
Savi shrugged. “You don’t know much of anything anymore, you so-called old-style humans.”
“What do you mean, ‘so-called old-style’?” demanded Daeman. He was angry now.
“Do you really think the lost-age humans, the old-styles, had all this genetically tweaked nano-machinery in their cells and bodies?” asked Savi.
“Yes,” said Daeman, although he realized that he knew absolutely nothing about the Lost Age old-styles, and cared less.
Savi said nothing for a minute. She looked tired to Daeman’s eye, but perhaps all ancient, pre-firmary humans looked this bad—he didn’t know.
“We should go fetch them,” she said at last. “ I’ll take Hannah and Odysseus, you get Ada and Harman. Set your palm on proxnet, activate your finder the usual way, and that’ll lead you to them. Tell them that the bus is leaving.”
Daeman had no idea what “bus” meant, but that wasn’t important. “Are there other functions?” he asked before she could walk off.
“Hundreds,” said Savi.
“Show me one,” challenged Daeman. He didn’t believe her—not hundreds—but even one or two more would make him popular at parties, of interest to young women.
Savi sighed and leaned back against the sonie. A wind had come up and stirred the sequoia branches far above them. “I can show you the function that finally drove the post-humans off the Earth,” she said softly. “The allnet.”