Shelter (18 page)

    "Good. Because I'm hanging up now. I'm taking a bath and I'd like some privacy."

    "Wait, Meredith. I called because I still want you to start recording as soon as possible. MacroCorp can set you up with a rig. The lawyers will solve the inheritance problems. Do not be concerned."

    "I don't want a rig, Daddy. I want privacy."

    "I will not have access to your stored memories, Meredith. They will be encrypted for security."

    "Against you? I doubt it."

    "They would have to be, for strict legal reasons. Even against me. Is this what is bothering your mother?"

    "I don't know. I'm hanging up now."

    "I am glad you told me. Now I understand. I know what is bothering your mother."

    "How nice. Why don't you tell her? I'm not interested."

    "Your body will live for years yet, Meredith, but if you start recording now, you'll lose that much less—"

    "No," she said, and hung up, and sank moodily back into the warm water.

    Seven

    IMMEDIATELY after her bath, Meredith went to the Gaia Temple, as she had nearly every day since her return from the hospital. She usually waited until late afternoon, when the light was the loveliest, but today she was frantic to get out of the house. The Temple was only a short walk through the Presidio, through the cool twilight under towering eucalyptus trees, and it was difficult for her father to reach her there. The Temple was militantly organic; laptops and phones were discouraged, and Meredith avoided the few places in the complex—the rec room, the conference room, the offices—that were Net-wired. And Preston couldn't simply appear there, anyway. He had to call or e-mail and ask permission to speak to her. He didn't have the run of the place, the way he did at home.

    As she walked, she brooded. Her mother had told Brenda that Meredith was quieter now, and she supposed she was. Her illness had deepened her gratitude. Her newfound sense of wonder expressed itself as pure, still pools of feeling, moments when she found herself so immersed in beauty—the beauty of bread, of leaves, of light—that if she opened her mouth to speak, she would surely drown in it. Looking through an old college textbook of her mother's, she'd found lines that described the experience perfectly.

    The body greets the sun, a blaze

    of fire, and mirrors it,

    ablaze with life.

    Words become ash, consumed.

    We speak by shining.

    The lyric had been written by a minor poet named Carly Sirillo more than fifty years before Meredith was born. A footnote discussed Sirillo's debt to Yeats's "Vacillation," and in the margin, Constance had scrawled, "Trite crap." That judgment hadn't softened; for Meredith, like Sirillo, couldn't physically speak during her reveries—"your trances," Constance called them, her voice gently mocking—she had learned not to try to describe them afterwards, either.

    She had tried, once, a week after her release from the hospital, as she and her mother sat in the kitchen nook overlooking the Bay. "I woke up in the middle of the night last night and looked out my window, Mom, and the moon—it was full, big, and orange—"

    "A harvest moon," Preston said through the countertop monitor. "I saw it too, through the security cameras. It was lovely, was it not?"

    "The moon's always lovely," Meredith said. How could her father understand how she had felt, looking at that sky? He no longer had a body to blaze. "But last night—I looked at it, at the orangeness of it, and I thought, Well, that's the sun it's reflecting, that light, it's a nighttime sun to remind us that the sun will rise in the morning, that the sun will make trees and flowers grow, and vegetables, and us, and I'd never thought of it that way, you know? Of the moon as ... as a promise. As a reminder that there's always light somewhere, and you just have to wait for it, or know how to look; you have to have faith."

    "Yes," said the monitor. "That is exactly right. When I was translated, everything was darkness, and then everything was light. The Net is all light. "

    Constance took a crunching bite of her crouton salad and said flatly around it, "It's always darkest before the dawn. Yes? And?"

    "No," Meredith said, frowning. "I mean, yes, maybe, but—" This wasn't coming out the right way at all. If it had, her embodied mother would have understood her, and her disembodied father wouldn't have. She floundered for words and said, "It was more than that, Mom. Because I'm—I'm a moon too, I can reflect that light too, that's how it made me feel."

    Her mother sighed. "Honey, you'll feel better when you've been home longer. You're still adjusting."

    Meredith shook her head. "You don't understand. I feel great! Doesn't everybody feel this way sometimes? I used to feel this way before I got sick. Not as often, because ... because I didn't notice things. But sometimes." She stared at Constance, puzzled, and said, "Mom, when you paint—don't you feel part of something else, something bigger than you are? When you get an idea for a painting, doesn't it make you so happy that everyone would think you were crazy if you talked about it? Isn't that what being an artist is? Being able to be that happy, so happy that it's ... it's spilling out of your pores, and you have to grab hold of all that extra happiness and make something out of it, so it doesn't go to waste?" Surely Constance would understand, once it was put that way. Surely her paintings spoke to her soul. Why else paint them?

    "No," Constance said flatly. "No, that isn't what being an artist is. Being an artist is about getting paid for having a better design sense than other people do. I was always good at coloring inside the lines. I've made it into a career, that's all."

    Meredith, stunned, opened her mouth to reply, but before she could say anything, her mother got up and stalked away from the table, her linen napkin still clutched in her fist.

    "She does not understand," the monitor said. "I do, Meredith. I know you think I cannot, but I am part of something much bigger than my individuality now. Interconnection has become real to me in a way it never was before. How could I not understand?" Meredith didn't even try to answer, and the monitor went on. "Sometimes I wish your mother had gotten sick. Because then I think she might understand how we feel now: how it feels to be part of something bigger. Your mother will understand after she has been translated, but that will not happen for a long time."

    In answer, Merry had gotten up and turned the monitor off; then she'd gone back to the table and finished her dinner. She wasn't part of any "we" that included her father. Preston was so clueless that he still wanted her to be friends with the little girl whose parents had died in iso, and even Constance had seen how crazy that was. "Preston, the last thing Merry needs is to be reminded of isolation. I agree that it would be a lovely outreach project, but let someone else do it. Merry has enough to deal with right now. That other kid's only eight, anyway. She's too young to be Merry's friend."

    Preston thought he understood her, but he couldn't possibly; and her mother, who surely could have, usually didn't even try. And she wonders why I'm so quiet, Meredith thought bitterly now, scuffing through a pile of eucalyptus leaves. But, in truth, she was hardly more talkative with anyone else. Her friends from school had grown shy since her illness and her father's translation; even Green Teens, the eco-activist club at school, seemed superficial, full of people who cared more about their college resumes than they did about the universe they lived in.

    Temple was the only place where people seemed to value the same things she did, the only place where she didn't feel crazy. She loved the balance of Temple, the dailiness of it, the vision of a world where everything was a sacrament, where everything could be infused with wonder and everyone was connected: not through the electronic abstractions of the Net, but through drinking the same water and breathing the same air. Gaia followers practiced a grounded idealism in which they helped themselves by helping others, by recognizing that everything alive was kin. Every afternoon, Meredith helped the novitiate on duty gather eggs, clean the huge dog run behind the temple, feed and groom and play with the dogs, and mend the chicken coop—a cage Meredith could accept, although not without qualms—against the cats' frequent efforts to invade it. The temple fed an immense population of stray cats. Working with the downtown SPCA, the novitiates spayed and neutered as many as they could, and adopted some out, but inevitably the population included a few pregnant and nursing queens. Meredith loved being in a place where spending time with animals was not only encouraged, but seen as holy. Before her illness, the Goddess-talk had made her squirm; now she relished it.

    Today, as usual, Merry could hear the Temple long before she could see it. That was why the city had passed a zoning ordinance that all Gaia temples had to be in parks. The setting fit, of course—what better place than a park for a temple to the planet?—but the real reasons were practical. Gaia temples were always incredibly noisy, and back when they had been alowed in residential districts, the neighbors, even Greens, had consistently complained.

    Meredith heard the dogs first. As she got closer, she began to make out other sounds: the singing and chanting from various individual and group rituals, the shrieks of the day care kids playing on the swings, a drumming class practicing in one of the glades, hammering and sawing as something or other was built or mended. She stopped by the dog run to check for new arrivals and waved at Raji, the chief novice this month, who was on his way to the henhouse with a bucket of grain. He was the youngest novice, only three years older than she was. His parents both worked for Sierra-Audubon. Raji really wanted to go into AI research, but his parents would pay his college tuition only if he spent a year as a Gaia initiate first. It was a transparent ploy to get him into as Net-free an environment as possible. "Hey, Merry. Matt's looking for you."

    "For me?" Matt, consecrated to lifelong Temple service, was the closest thing the place had to a high priest, but he spent much more time working on the grounds and dealing with administrative details than he did presiding over rituals. "Why?"

    Raji shrugged. "He didn't say. I was just over there helping Gwyn and Angelo with the therapy-dog schedules, and Matt stuck his head out of his office and said to send you over there when you got here."

    "When I got here? How'd he know I was coming?

    Raji laughed. "You're here every day, Merry!"

    "Yeah, but usually not for a few hours, and since when does Matt keep track of my schedule? He has too much else to do." She shook her head and said, "This is something to do with my father, I'll just bet. The cyberbastard probably followed me over here."

    Raji looked at her skeptically. "How? You caved in and got a rig? Most of this place isn't wired."

    "Tracer cells. GPS."

    "Oh-right. I should have thought of that." Now it was Raji's turn to shake his head. "I wouldn't be you for the world, girl."

    "Well, it's not like I have much choice. I got the GPS injections when I was still a baby." She grimaced, remembering Preston's explanation when she was seven or eight. A gang of inept Luddite terrorists had tried to kidnap the child of a biotechnology executive, and Merry, frightened by the news story, had asked if that could ever happen to her.

    "Never, sweetheart. There's something in your blood, all throughout your blood, that will always tell us where you are. And we've made sure that evelyone knows you have it, so that if anyone tries to steal you, we'll always be able to find you again. And because it's all through your blood, they can't take it out."

    "I can't believe the parents whose kid was just snatched didn't do the same thing," Constance said. "Biotechnology—honestly! If there's anyone who—"

    "Daddy," Meredith said, "does it work when I'm sleeping?" She had been afraid of the dark, then, afraid of monsters.

    "Yes, sweetheart. It works all the time, even when you're sleeping."

    She was under constant surveillance. She supposed that somewhere even now, someone was scrutinizing a screen on which a small green blip recorded her movements through the city. And now that her father was permanently online, he could track her too, even if the low-tech environs of the Temple kept him from pestering her the way he did at home.

    "Damn," Raji said. "Having those GPS cells must be like being in isolation all the time. Having people peer at you."

    Meredith shrugged. "Most of the time I forget about it. I have to find a way to keep my father off my back, that's all. You know, when he was still alive, I'd have given anything for this much attention."

    "So you don't consider him alive?" Raji gave her a keen glance, and she remembered that he was, after all, a Temple novice, obligated to address spiritual issues.

    "No, I don't. Look, I know that legally he's alive, but I'm sorry: for it to count you have to have a body."

    "Ah. So I suppose you don't consider AIs alive, either?"

    "Oh, AIs!" She threw up her hands and then, flustered, said, "Sorry, Raji. I know AI's your pet hobby, but as far as I'm concerned, those things are just really fancy toys. Really fancy programs."

    "Some people would say that we're just really fancy programs, Merry."

    "Yeah, well, I don't believe that. Show me a machine capable of tran- cendence—"

    "Your dad claims he's already achieved transcendence."

    "What?" She blinked and squinted. "He does? How do you know?"

    "I talked to him about it."

    "You talked—"

    "Merry, he's built a fantastic website, you know. It's, like, his house, I guess. With lots of guests. He gets millions of hits a day."

    "I know, I know, it's really popular because he's the freak of the month, but—"

    "So I went there because I'm interested in AI and in what MacroCorp is doing, and I talked to him. And he told me how translation was just another way to achieve higher consciousness. It's not that different from Gaia thinking, the way he describes it."