“Exactly,” Flint says…
If it took the rest of his life, Jay was going to get this guy. You could take that to the bank.
But it wasn’t going to happen today. He logged out.
26
The dead man’s guitar — his now, if Natadze’s dying wish was to be honored — was stowed in the luggage bin over Kent’s head. The commercial jet droned along, somewhere over the Midwest — Kansas, maybe. Once, there had been websites you could access that showed the progress of every commercial flight in the country. Log on, type in the flight number, and you’d get a nice visual of a little aircraft superimposed on a map, showing you exactly where it was, where it had been, and its projected flight path to where it was going.
Those days were long gone. After 9/11, a lot of such information had been shut down. Too risky. Even National Parks data was restricted. And if you started trying to run down where the nation’s water supplies were, or the exact geographic locations of military bases, nuclear power plants, or chemical factories, you might well hear a knock on your door with a curious federal agent behind it wanting to know just why you needed such information.
Interesting times, that was the Chinese curse, and certainly that’s what had come to pass in the United States. When he’d been a boy, you could catch a bus downtown, wander around alone all day, and your parents didn’t need to worry about you. You could walk onto a plane carrying a loaded pistol in your pocket and there weren’t any metal detectors between you and the aircraft because nobody ever considered hijacking the craft to Cuba, or flying it into a building and killing thousands. Things you might conceivably put into your mouth were not protected by security seals with instructions that, if broken, you shouldn’t eat it. Terrorists didn’t sit around planning ways to release poison gas, blow up bridges, or set off an atomic bomb in an American city, except in the movies or in books. And you didn’t need to stamp warnings on the barrels of guns that they were dangerous.
Of course, you could still get polio, and his mother had warned him against playing in ditches because she still thought that was how you caught it. The shadow of nuclear war loomed large, and they told schoolchildren to hide under their desks if the Russians dropped the bomb, as if that would help. And institutionalized racism and sexism were still the norm.
No men on the moon back in the 1950s — but also no AIDS.
A lot of things had changed during Kent’s lifetime, most for better, but some for worse. Things didn’t sit still, that was a given, and the good old days were always better in memory than they’d actually been, but still, now and then, Kent wondered if the new millennium really was much better than the one just past.
He got reflective like this after a battle. And even though it had been just him and Natadze in this one, it had ended with guns working. Yes, he had walked away, which was always better than the alternative, but he hadn’t won the victory he’d wanted. If he had been a little sharper, if he had really known what he was doing, it might have gone better.
He remembered his grandfather. Paw-Paw had been in the Second World War, had been on the islands in the South Pacific fighting against the Japanese — that’s where Kent had gotten the samurai sword and the interest in it. But Paw-Paw had also been a master craftsman when it came to building things.
When Kent had been a kid, his parents moved into the first house they ever owned. It was a small place, and his room had been converted from a den — it had no closets or shelves. His grandfather had come to the house with a yardstick — one of those cheap wooden things the paint companies used to give away if you bought a gallon of paint — and a pencil and spiral notebook.
Paw Paw talked to Kent’s mother, then went into the den and made some measurements with that old yardstick, jotted down some notes, then went back to his shop and started cutting plywood.
When he came back a week later, he put together a desk, two closets, and a bunch of shelves, using a screwdriver and a handful of wood screws. When he was finished, you couldn’t slip a piece of paper into any of the joints — everything fit together as tightly as a Swiss watch.
The man had known what he was doing. He had been an expert at it.
Going after Natadze alone had been a mistake. Kent hadn’t had the skill necessary to pull it off. An expert would have figured out a way to bring him back alive. Yeah, Kent had resolved his earlier mistakes, in that Natadze wasn’t running around loose anymore, but it was like burning down a barn to get rid of rats. It had cost a lot more than necessary.
Kent sighed. Well. There was nothing to be done for it now, save to go back to work and explain it to his commander. Who might decide to fire him for it, and if so, Kent wouldn’t blame him. He had screwed up. And if you can’t do the time, you don’t do the crime…
In China, the VR marathon races in which Chang ran were always run at night, and usually in the fog or rain, with the visibility never more than a few meters. It was a long race, a marathon, twenty-six miles, 385 yards, supposedly the distance a long-ago messenger had run in Greece on the plains of Marathon to deliver some important news, just before dropping dead from exhaustion. Over forty-two kilometers, and these days, crippled men, old women, and nine-year-old children ran it regularly, and few of them ever died.
When Chang ran here, he was faster than many, but still slower than some. Now and again, he would pass a runner close enough to see him in the gloom. Occasionally, one would pass him near enough for him to make out. There could be hundreds or even thousands of others in the race. Sometimes he felt them out there, but he didn’t see them, didn’t hear their footsteps. Now and again, Chang might stumble over something in the darkness — something he couldn’t detect until he was too close to stop.
Chang had equipped himself with a flashlight that could extend his vision a few more meters. It would be so much better were these contests held on bright and sunny days, but he had grown used to the fog and rain and moonless dark, and had learned to navigate it, albeit sometimes he was more tentative than he would have liked. It was hard to run full-out, knowing you might trip over something you couldn’t spot waiting in the road ahead. But, it was what it was, and there was little to be done about it.
So now, as he stood at the starting line, amidst a crowd of which he could see but a few close to him, he was familiar with the situation.
But: The American, Petrie, had added a wrinkle to the fabric of night. Now, in this scenario, Chang wore a special headset, with goggles that slipped over his eyes, a device that approximated sixth-gen spookeyes — starlight scopes that would gather the faintest light and intensify it, amplify it, transmit it to the lenses, and in doing so, also computer-augment colors to an approximation of normal.
That was the theory, anyway.
As he stood there, waiting for the signal to start, Chang touched a control on the headset…
Light flared brightly, causing him to blink against it. When his vision cleared, he beheld a miracle:
He could see!
It was as if he had stepped into a football stadium in the dark and someone had switched on the lights. The colors were perhaps a hair too intense, but before, where he had been able to see but a handful of those lined up with him to run, now he could see nearly all of them! The road ahead was visible for blocks, the buildings lining the street, the sky, everything was open to his gaze.