“Well, how often do you really need to divert a database search? How many queries do you get when you sit there in a trance for hours and hours?”
Rikki absently scratched the side of the keyboard. “Not very many. I could—yes, I will try to find Julia for you.” He took it as a personal challenge.
“Should I get someone else? Or you can do it when you’re not on guardian duty.”
“No. I want to do this.” Rikki lowered his eyes, then spoke more quietly. “But don’t let Gregor know about this. He won’t approve, I’m sure of it.”
“What’s there to approve?”
“Reliving your past.”
Trying to avoid Rikki’s gaze, Danal glanced up at one of the fuzzy green patches of holographic grass far above. Actual sunlight filtered through the image. Before he could look back to Rikki again, a transparent plastic beverage bottle, nearly empty, fell through the hologram, bouncing and pinging on the girders.
“Listen, and I’ll tell you everything about her.”
Then Danal spilled the story, all he could remember, every facet of Julia’s personality, every eccentricity, every unusual detail. Rikki sat back, transfixed, absorbing it, not needing to write anything down. Danal told how he had once communicated with her under the identity of Randolph Carter through electronic mail; he described where she had lived, what she had done. He tunneled backward to find every offshoot of information that Rikki might be able to use.
Danal described her physically in intimate detail. He described her business dealings, described all the things they had done together. Nathans had probably set up a cumulative Delete program, a virus function to track down and destroy all interconnected paths of the person Julia. But Danal hoped feverishly that some line of information had not connected with the others.
Taking a different tack, he described when she would have been killed, which implied the time frame for her resurrection. He carefully described everything he could recall of the Guildsman who had been escorting her down the street when he’d seen her recently—the indigo-dyed lines of crow’s-feet around his eyes, the square-cut graying hair.
Rikki’s eyes were bright but distant, already contemplating ways to attack the problem. “I’ll do what I can. I might have to give up a couple days of guardian duty. But I’ll find her.”
“Don’t jeopardize the Wakers for me,” Danal cautioned and continued, to himself, “I need to see her again, either to bring her back or to say goodbye.”
Danal sat alone down by the edge of the water while the structures holding up the Metroplex loomed above him like a cosmic cathedral. Listlessly, he ate a handful of vegetables grown in a hydroponic garden the Wakers tended under a long bank of sunlamps. Three days he had sat in an agitated patience, avoiding Rikki, letting the young Waker work in peace.
Now someone slipped up to him quietly, startling Danal in his distraction. He turned and saw Rikki clad in a tight-fitting Servant jumpsuit; the boy Waker would never grow, and his twelve-year-old Servant body would remain locked in its appearance of youth.
Danal swallowed his mouthful so quickly that he nearly choked. “Shouldn’t you be on guardian duty?”
Danal knew, before the freckle-faced Waker said anything, but still the response sent his synHeart pounding.
“I found her!”
A whirlwind of rose-tinted images flooded past his mind’s eye—the first meeting in the cafeteria, the hovercopter trip to Point Reyes, making love on the beach, tearing down the stone gargoyles, drinking iced tea in the sauna.
Julia.
“Now what are you going to do?” Rikki said.
Danal stood up and grasped the rope ladder leading upward, more to steady himself than to go anywhere.
“I’m going to go take her back.”
32
“Are you commanding me not to do this?” Danal challenged Gregor. They had not called an actual gathering, but Rikki had made certain that a good many Wakers—mostly the impatient ones—came forward to watch.
Taken by surprise, Gregor looked uncomfortable and awkward, but Danal pressed him before he could respond. “Remember when you said you weren’t really a leader here, that we can follow your advice as we see fit? Were you just kidding, or what? All the time you wrestle with your morals and your questions, but your questions aren’t any more valid than mine!”
“That’s not what I said, Danal. I want you to think about what you’re going to do. Is it wise? Answer that yourself.” His eyes were wide and dark. Gregor folded his hands clumsily together, as if he didn’t know what to do with them.
Danal tried to be more compassionate. He didn’t like acting a showman in front of a crowd, but he needed to clear the air between Gregor and himself before he could do anything else. “I have to know, Gregor. If she’s there, or if she’s gone forever. I have to find her again.”
The leader mumbled under his breath. “It’s no secret what you intend to do afterwards.”
Rikki interrupted, and the other Wakers stood by the boy, eager, expectant. “Gregor, we’ve got to start answering all those questions about… us. No one’s going to give away the answers. We don’t get a prize for just standing around.”
In the pause that followed, Danal bent closer to Gregor. From above, the sounds of creaking and settling emanated from the girders and pilings. “Francois Nathans murdered her, Gregor,” he said, feeling pain. “I may have changed a great deal because of you, but I still need to know whether to hate him or not.”
Gregor looked defeated, and Danal was the only one who saw his slight nod. “Just remember Danal, we’re not the same anymore. She won’t be the same, not after what we’ve experienced. Even if Julia remembers her past, things can never be as they were.”
“That doesn’t mean I have to be satisfied with the way they are,” he whispered in reply.
“I’m Guildsman Drex, you blasted thing!” he shouted at the doorway voice-receiver. “Drex! I live here. Do a voiceprint check. How the hell was I supposed to know a glitch would change my own password?”
Reluctantly, it seemed, The Net allowed him to enter, and as he scramble-sealed the entrance, Drex considered himself safe and protected in his own rooms, mercifully away from the pressures of the Guild for another day. Tension headaches and gastric disorders—fringe benefits of a management-level salary.
The work ran over and over again in his mind, muddled together in columns of names and numbers. Instant statistics, keeping track of the locations and assignments of over a hundred Enforcers, making sure that his section of the Metroplex was given its quota of protection. Drex would not last as Guildsman very long if his sector showed either a particularly bad crime month or a notably clean tally. Deviate from the norm? Never!
Meetings that went on and on with plenty of rhetoric, ‘etting goals,’ ‘initiating studies,’ ‘interfacing’ with all his counterparts. It devoured his time and kept him from answering the long queue of electronic-mail memos waiting for him. Though he remained endlessly busy, Drex never seemed to get anything accomplished—always so many little things that made him scurry back and forth, talking to people, keeping this person happy, meeting that person’s demands.
But in the comforting womb of his private suite, Drex was on his own time now. He wished he could lift the job from his shoulders and store it away in a closet someplace.
He increased the wall illumination slowly; he liked the warm dimness, and he didn’t think he’d be doing any reading anyway.
The Servant sat where he had left her in the morning. “Ah, Julia! Aren’t you going to welcome me home?”