Futureland. Part 20

"If you didn't give her my protocols how did she follow me?"

"In your right-hand front pocket."

Folio reached into his pants and came out with a tiny sc.r.a.p of paper that had Tana Lynn's number on it.

"Micro-mitter?"

"No."

"Radioactive?"

"Nothing. Just what it appears to be, a simple piece of paper torn from a discarded instruction sheet."

"So? How do you track that?"

Real pleasure came into the madman's face. "We've made an amazing discovery, Folio. The most important discovery in the history of the world. Every atom, every electron, proton, and maybe all subatomic particles--they are all, each and every one of them, unique."

A small subsystem in Folio's eye began transcribing the doctor's words.

"Unique? You mean you can tell one atom of oxygen from another one?"

"By submyrral variance mathematics we could give every electron on this planet a name."

"She put this paper in my pocket . . ."

". . . and we tracked it."

"Usin' submyyral whatever?"

Kismet grinned broadly. Folio knew how rare this was and he was afraid.

"What's all this got to do with the kids?"

"Nothing, really. It's just that they mistakenly downloaded a series of files in a secret intercorporate database."

"What files?"

"My Dominar and certain investigative branches of Randac, Red Raven, and IBC had run across a gene-testing project that the IS has been conducting in preparation for their so-called race war. We had entered into negotiations with the Aryan branch of the organization to prepare, financially, for any situations that might arise."

"Prepare what?"

"For whatever, my friend. Of course, these negotiations needed to be private. And even though we knew these children would be unlikely to break our codes, we had to take steps."

"So you killed ten human beings just on the off chance that they might read a file?"

"Ten lives," Kismet said on a sigh. "If the IS gets their way, billions will die. Billions."

"So in order to stop them you had to kill the kids?"

"First we need to understand the viability of a genetically run race war. Then we'll consider actions, if indeed there are actions to be taken."

"Race war? Genes? Man, are you sick?"

"Hardly, Officer Johnson. Hardly." Kismet's long face became downcast. "I'm sorry about the girl."

"Tana?"

"She had to die, you know. By the time I realized that you and she had something the poison was already in her. Her and that adopted stepfather of hers, the one who transmitted the Azuma killing to your eye."

Folio resisted the urge to dive into the screen.

"You know I can't let this thing lie, Ivan."

"I know."

"You killed that woman. I owed her something. She was a killer but she saved my life. And I'll have to find these Itsies before they do something crazy."

"It will be a glorious time, won't it, old friend?"

"Why did you connect with me, Ivan?" Folio asked.

"It was fate, Folio. Kismet. Your name came up and I realized that this race war will be waged against you, your people. I included you to give you a chance to fight against the Aryan branch of the ISD. I'm giving you a chance to save your people."

"They're your people too, man," Folio sputtered. "Black people are your largest members.h.i.+p on three continents."

"One day everyone will be my devotee. You, Folio, you are one of my apostles. It is your job to save these people. It is my wish."

"You're crazy."

"Am I?"

Folio put his foot through the screen, then stormed out of the tabernacle and into the night.

Voices.

1.

Where am I? The words were clear but they had no sound, no voice to communicate timbre or gender. Where are my hands? What is that light? What's that? Why can't I look away? Where am I?

The voice had questions mainly. Sometimes, though, memories of strange feelings or half-formed images occurred in his mind. Foods that he never liked suddenly held the most wonderful flavor. He bought a bunch of carrots at a vegetable stand and ate them all in one sitting in the park.

The voice wasn't always there. There were days at a time when he heard nothing at all. Days where he was almost the man he had been before the Pulse addiction.

Pulse. Wonder drug and death sentence all in one. On the first night he used the drug Leon had lived a whole life span riding at the side of the conqueror Hannibal. He'd ridden fantastic blue elephants across the Alps. After a few years the hyper-real fantasies degraded to washed-out memories with little direction or content. But the addiction was still strong because Pulse was the only thing that kept his brain from collapsing.

"Are you using again?" Dr. Bel-Nan asked at the Neurological Inst.i.tute of Staten Island.

"No," said Professor Leon Jones, father of the congresswoman from the Bronx, the onetime UBA heavyweight champion of the world, Fera Jones. "I don't even want to hear that one voice. You think I want a crowd?"

Bel-Nan, a tall white man in his fifties, smiled. He was missing a lower front tooth. This one detail always disturbed Professor Jones, though there was much that could have disturbed him. Bel-Nan was one of the foremost brain specialists in the world. He was one of the founders of the mysterious Church of Life Everlasting. He had been sentenced to the MacroCode polar prison system for performing illegal brain transplantation operations. He had further developed his techniques in prison.

The operation that Bel-Nan had performed on Leon was a more sophisticated version of the experiments that had put him in prison. Taking living brain tissue from an anonymous donor, the surgeon replaced certain regenerative tissue in Jones's cortex and frontal lobe. These cells stimulated the atrophied portion of his brain, allowing the onetime history professor to survive without taking Pulse.

"Sometimes there are vestigial memories, pieces of thoughts that the donor once might have had," Bel-Nan explained as he pushed the long and greasy blond hair away from his eyes.

"But, Doctor," Jones complained. "It's not just a word or a patch of color, something like that. There's questions and sometimes I have yens, desires for things I never wanted before."

Bel-Nan smiled. His face was long and somehow crooked, as if maybe the man who knocked his tooth out had also broken his jaw. Jones had seen quite a few misshapen faces like that during the years he managed his daughter's boxing career.

"The brain is a mysterious thing, Professor Jones," Bel-Nan said. "It is the most volatile and creative material in the world, maybe even the universe. It can evolve without dying. It can conceive of itself. Its concepts are beyond the living cells that comprise it, so that life for us is defined by the faculty of thought rather than the ability to breathe. Breath, as magical as it is, is nothing compared to the reality of personality."

The ugly scientist smiled, unashamed of the crooked grin and missing tooth.

"What does that have to do with this voice in my head?" Jones asked.

"Your brain has discovered new material," Bel-Nan explained patiently. "It's making up this voice to explain it. The shock of the new cells becomes a question in your conscious mind. Where am I? That's the feeling of the new cells. They are displaced and that feeling of displacement becomes a question. This strangeness of the new cells seeks out a new answer, therefore you try new things. A different taste. A walk in the park. Tell me, do you have headaches before you hear this voice?"

"Yes, I do. I get a headache that lasts for hours, and then, when it subsides, the voice comes out. Not a voice, really, but ideas. Some come across as words, and others, others are images. Why? What does a headache mean?"

"The cells are integrating. As they come together there's friction and maybe a little heat. That particular phase of the integration is successful, the pain subsides, and a new member is added to the collective of brain cells. There must be something old in those cells and a confusion arises. But all of that will pa.s.s. Maybe if you take vitamin E3 or, even better, hedroprofin, the swelling will be contained. But I wouldn't if I were you."

"Why not?"

"This is a moment of discovery that very few humans have ever undergone. You are experiencing the reintegration of your mind. You are absorbing the life and the soul of another. Feel it, Professor Jones. Record it. It could be one of the most valuable self-examinations since Freud."

"You think somebody'd pay for it?"

"I'd read it, Professor. I've done a dozen of these operations since they were legalized. But this was the deepest and most extensive transplant of living tissue. I replaced a rather large portion of the cortical stem and interior with various materials from a single donor. We were relying on the similarity of the neuronal material, hoping that the new elements would adapt to the function required of them."

Leon had been on life support, he was told, for eighteen months after the operation. Machines the size of a brownstone maintaining basic functions that his brain had to relearn.

"You are the first to survive this long," Bel-Nan said.

"Well," Leon said. "I guess a few echoes aren't so bad compared to death."

"Not so bad at all, Professor."

Professor Jones had spent all of the money he made in boxing on the operation. His daughter had helped only insofar as she used her influence to get him well placed on the waiting list for the highly experimental procedure. But even with her help he was lucky to have been chosen.

It had been three months since his release from the hospital, and so far Leon's health was fair. He still felt weak after very little exertion, and sometimes when he woke up in the morning he was a little disoriented. He'd look around the room searching for something familiar. Once he thought he saw a small dog sitting patiently in the corner. But one blink and the dog was gone.

2.

When Leon took the hedroprofin the voice disappeared. He was happy not to feel that he was going crazy, but he discovered that he missed the voice. It had been an anchor after years of Pulse addiction. With no obsession left he found himself drifting.

His daughter was in D.C. testing the waters for a greater political career. As a onetime drug addict, he was an embarra.s.sment to her. The newspapers that backed Fera Jones's political ambitions blamed the elder Jones for forcing his daughter into the ring to pay for his drugs. It wasn't true. As a child Fera had begged to fight. She was overactive, and boxing was the one thing that calmed her down.

They talked every day for a few minutes. But she was busy and he had nothing but time.

Professor Jones lived in two small rooms on Middle One twenty-fifth Street near Adam Clayton Powell. When he was a child Harlem was an entirely black neighborhood, one of the centers of African-American culture. But now it was as faceless and multicultured as any other neighborhood in Manhattan. The Schomburg Residence Hotel was happy to take a congresswoman's father for a tenant. The rent was $2,000 a week, 60 percent of his disability insurance.

He read and reread books about history. Not histories, but books that spoke of the art of recording the past. Collingwood and Hegel and Ahn Min. That's what intrigued Jones: the intangibility of what was. The pa.s.sage of time and the forgetfulness of humanity. Even his talk with the unsightly Dr. Bel-Nan. Did he say that the cells of the donor remembered details from the previous life? No, not exactly. He hadn't exactly said anything.

"The best history is a shopping list," one of his professors at Howard had said. "Three bananas, two lengths of copper wire, and a broad-brimmed hat. Now that's something to sink your teeth into."

Bel-Nan wasn't even his real name. He'd changed it hoping, like the rulers of a new dynasty in China who rewrote history, to be seen in a new light. From many years of study Jones had decided that nothing anyone ever said was true; at best it was what they believed.

On a temperate December morning Professor Jones decided to go down to Morningside Park, a green valley between towering buildings. In his childhood his Aunt Bing would tell him that the park was a dangerous place where drug dealers and gang members met. And so when his Uncle Bly took the short cut through the park little Leon would turn his head every which way to see where the killers were hiding.

"It's okay in the daytime," Bly would a.s.sure him.

But Leon never stopped his vigil until they were back on the regular streets, safe from harm.

"Mister?" a child's voice asked.

At first he thought it was the voice in his head. The question was not a lament, however. Professor Jones looked down and saw a blond-haired child, no more than five, standing at the far end of the park bench.

He blinked once, expecting the child to disappear.

"Are you cold, mister?" the girl asked instead of dissipating.

"No. Why do you ask?"

"I'm cold," she said.

Leon had worn a corduroy jacket over a plaid woolen s.h.i.+rt. He also had a cashmere scarf that Fera had given him wrapped around his neck. The scarf was making him too warm but he hadn't thought to take it off yet.

"Here," he said. "Try this."

The little girl threw the wrap around her shoulders with the grace of a somewhat older child. She s.h.i.+vered and then smiled.

"Thanks," she said.