Gateways (5 page)

No wonder the Chinese often turned their backs to the sea . . . and seem to be doing so again.

Already, several neighbors had given up, abandoning their shoresteads to the jellies and rising waters. Just a week ago, Wer and Ling joined a crowd of scavengers converging on one forsaken site, grabbing metlon poles and nanofiber webbing for use on their own stead, leaving little more than a stubble of rotting wood, concrete, and stucco. A brief boost to their prospects, benefiting from the misfortune of others—

—that is, until it’s our own turn to face the inevitable. Forsaking all our hard work and dreams of ownership. Returning to beg our old jobs back in that stifling hospice, wiping spittle from the chins of little emperors.
With each reproachful look from Ling, Wer grew more desperate. Then, during his third trip to town, carrying samples from the trove, he saw something that gave him both a thrill and a chill.

He was passing along Boulevard of the Sky Martyrs and about to cross the Street of October the Seventeenth, when the surrounding crowd seemed to halt, abruptly, all around him.

Well, not everybody, but enough people to bring the rhythmic bustle to a dead stall. Wer stumbled into the back of a well-padded pedestrian, who looked briefly as confused as he was. They turned to see that about a third of those around them were suddenly staring, as if into space, murmuring to themselves, some of them with jaws ajar, half open in some kind of surprise.

Swiftly he realized, these were people who had been linked-in with goggles, specs, tru-vus, or contacts, each person moving through some virtual overlay—perhaps following guide arrows to a destination, or doing business as they walked, while others simply liked their city overlain with flowers, or jungle foliage, or fairy-tale colors. It also made them receptive to a high-priority alert. Soon, half the people in sight were shuffling aside, half consciously moving toward the nearest wall or window in order to get away from traffic, while their minds soared far away.

Seeing so many others dive into a newstrance, the overweight gentleman muttered an oath and reached into his pocket to pull out some wraparound glasses. He, too, pressed close to the nearest building, emitting short grunts of interest while his aiware started filling him in.

Wer briefly wondered if he should be afraid. City life had many hazards, not all of them on the scale of Awfulday. But . . . the people clumping along the edges of the sidewalk didn’t seem worried, as much as engrossed. Surely that meant there was no immediate danger.

Meanwhile, many of those who lacked gear were pestering their companions, demanding verbal updates. He overheard a few snippets.

“The artifact has spoken . . . ,” and “The aliens have begun explaining their invitation, at last . . .”

Aliens. Artifact.
Of course those words had been foaming around for a couple of weeks, part of life’s background, just like the soapy tidal spume. It sounded like a silly thing, unworthy of the small amount of free time that he shared with Ling, each exhausted evening. A fad, surely, or hoax. Or, at best, none of his concern. Only now Wer blinked in surprise over how many people seemed to care.
Maybe we should scan for a free-access show about it tonight.
Instead of the usual medieval romance stories that Ling demanded.

Despite all the people who had stepped aside, into virtual newspace, that still left hundreds of pedestrians who didn’t care, or who felt they could wait. They took advantage of the cleared sidewalks to hurry about their business.
As should I,
he thought, stepping quickly across the street while ai-piloted vehicles worked their way past, evading those with human drivers who had pulled aside.

Aliens. From outer space. Could it possibly be true?
Wer had to admit, this was stirring his long-dormant imagination.

He turned onto the Avenue of Fragrant Hydroponics and suddenly came to a halt. People were beginning to stir from the mass newstrance, muttering to one another—in real life and across the mesh—while stepping back into the sidewalk and resuming their journeys. Only, now it was his turn to be distracted, to stop and stare, to push unapologetically past others and press close to the nearest building, bringing his face close to the window of a store selling visualization tools.

One of the new SEF ThreeVee displays sparkled within, offering that unique sense of ghostly semitransparency—and it showed three demons.

Or at least that’s how Wer first thought of them. They looked like made-up characters in one of those cheap fantasy dramas that Ling loved—one like an imp, with flamelike fur, one horselike with nostrils that flared like
caves, and another whose tentacles evoked some monster of the sea. A disturbing trio, in their own right.

Only, it wasn’t the creatures that had Wer transfixed. It was their home. The context. The object framing, containing, perhaps imprisoning them. He recognized it, at once. Cleaner and more pristine—less pitted and scarred—nevertheless, it was clearly a cousin to the thing he had left behind this morning, in the surf-battered home that he shared with his wife and little son.

Wer swallowed hard.

I thought I was being careful, seeking information about that thing.

But
careful
was a relative word.

He left the bag of stones lying there, like an offering, in front of the image in the ThreeVee tank. It would only weigh him down now, as he ran for home.

Despite his hurry to get home, Wer avoided the main gate through the massive seawall. For one thing, the giant doors were closed right now, for high tide. Even when they opened, that place would throng with fishermen, hawking their catch, and citydwellers visiting the last remaining beach of imported sand. So many eyes—and ais—and who knew how many were already sifting every passing face, searching for his unique biosignature?

I should never have posted queries about an egglike stone that glows mysteriously, after sitting in sunlight.

I should have left it in that hole under the sea.

His fear—ever since glimpsing the famous alien “artifact” on TV—was that somebody high and mighty wanted desperately to have whatever Wer discovered in a hidden basement cache, underneath a drowned mansion—and wanted it in secret. The former owner had been powerful and well connected, yet he wound up being hauled away and—according to legend—tortured, then brain-sifted, and finally silenced forever. Wer suspected now that it was because of an oval stone, very much like the one causing such fuss, around the world. Governments and megorps and reff-consortia would all seek one of their own.

If so, what would they do with the likes of me? When an object is merely valuable, a poor man who recovers it may ask for a finder’s fee. But if it is a thing that might shake civilization?

In that case, all I could expect is death, just for knowing about it!

Yet, as some of the initial panic ebbed, Wer felt another part of his inner self rise up. The portion of his character that had dared to ask Ling to join him at the wild frontier, shoresteading a place of their own.
If there were a way to offer it up for bidding . . . a way to keep us safe . . . True, the former owner must have tried, and failed, to make a deal. But nobody knew about this kind of “artifact” then . . . at least not the public. Everything has changed, now that the Americans are showing theirs to the world. . . .

None of which would matter, if he failed to make it home in time to hide the thing. Or to make some basic preparations. Above all, sending Ling and Xie Xie somewhere safe.

Hurrying through crowded streets, Wer carefully kept his pace short of a run. It wouldn’t do to draw attention. Beyond the public-order cams on every ledge and lamppost, the state could tap into the lenses and private-ais worn by any pedestrian nearby. His long hair, now falling over his face, might stymie a routine or casual face-search, but not if the system really took an interest.

Veering away from the main gate, he sped through a shabbier section of town, where multistory residence blocks had gone through ramshackle evolution, ignoring every zoning ordinance. Laundry-laden clotheslines jostled solar collectors that shoved against semi-illegal rectennas, siphoning mesh-access and a little beamed power from the shiny towers of nearby Pudong.

Facing a dense crowd ahead, Wer tried pushing ahead for a while, then took a stab at a shortcut, worming past a delivery cart that wedged open a pair of giant doors. He found himself inside a vast cavity, where the lower floors had been gutted in order to host a great maze of glassy pipes and stainless steel reactor vessels, all linked in twisty patterns, frothing with multicolored concoctions. He chose a direction by dead reckoning, where there ought to be an exit on the other side. Wer meant to bluff his way clear, if anyone stopped him.

That didn’t seem likely, amid the hubbub. At least a hundred laborers—many of them dressed little better than he was—patrolled creaky catwalks or clambered over lattice struts, meticulously cleaning and replacing tubes by hand. At ground level, inspectors wearing bulky, enhanced aiware, checked a continuous shower of some product—objects roughly the size and shape of a human thumb—waving laser pincers to grab a few of them before they fell into a waiting bin.

It’s a nanofactory,
Wer realized, after he passed halfway through. It was his first time seeing one up close, but he and Ling once saw a virtshow
tour of a vast workshop like this one (though far cleaner) where basic ingredients were piped in and sophisticated parts shipped out—electroptic components, neuraugments, and organoplaques, whatever those were. And shape-to-order diamonds, as big as his fist. All produced by stacking atoms and molecules, one at a time, under programmed control.

People still played a part, of course. No robot could scramble or crawl about like humonkeys, or clean up after the machines with such dexterity. Or so cheaply.

Weren’t they supposed to shrink these factories to the size of a toaster and sell them to everybody? Magic boxes that would let even poor folk make anything they wanted from raw materials. From seawater, even. No more work. No more want.

He felt like snorting, but instead Wer mostly held his breath the rest of the way, hurrying toward a loading dock, where sweltering workers filled maglev lorries at the other end. One heard rumors of nano-machines that got loose, that embedded in the lungs and then got busy trying to make copies of themselves. . . . Probably just tall tales. But Wer still had plans for his lungs. They mattered a lot, to a shoresteader.

He spilled out of gritty industry into a world of street-level commerce, where gaily decorated shops crowded this avenue. Sucking air, his nostrils filled with food aromas, wafting around innumerable grills, woks, and steam cookers, preparing everything from delicate skewered scorpions to vat-grown chickenmeat, stretched and streaked to look like the real thing. Wer’s stomach growled, but he pushed ahead, then turned a corner and headed straight for the nearest section of massive wall separating Shanghai East from the rising ocean.

There were smugglers’ routes. One used a building that formerly offered appealing panoramas overlooking the Hunangpu Estuary—till such views became unfashionable. Now, a lower class of urbanites occupied the tower.

The lobby’s former coating of travertine and marble had been stripped and sold off years ago, replaced by spray-on corrugations that lay covered with long beards of damp algae. A good use of space—the three-story atrium probably grew enough to feed half the occupants a basic, gene-crafted diet. But the dank smell made Wer miss his little tent-home amid the waves.

We can’t go back to living like this,
he thought, glancing at the spindly bamboo scaffolding that crisscrossed the vast foyer, while bony, sweat-stained workers tended the crop, doing work unfit for robots.
I swore I would not raise our son on algae paste.

The creaky elevator was staffed by a crone who flicked switches on a makeshift circuit board to set it in motion. The building must never have had its electronics repaired since the Crash.
It’s been what, fifteen, sixteen years? Yes, people are cheap and people need work. But even I could fix this pile of junk.

The car jerked and rattled while the operator glared at Wer. Clearly, she knew he did not work or live here. In turn, he gave the old lady a smile and ingratiating bow—no sense in antagonizing someone who might call up a face-query. But within, Wer muttered to himself about sour-minded “little emperors”—a generation raised as chubby only children, doted on by two parents, four grandparents and a nation that seemed filled with limitless potential. Boundless dreams and an ambition to rise infinitely high—until the Crash. Till the twenty-first century didn’t turn out quite as promised.

Disappointment didn’t sit well with little emperors—half a billion of them—so many that even the mysterious oligarchs in the Palace of Terrestrial Harmony had to cater to the vast population bulge. And they could be grouchy. Pinning the blame on Wer’s outnumbered generation had become a national pastime.

The eleventh floor once boasted a ledge-top restaurant, overlooking a marina filled with opulent yachts, bordering a beach of brilliant, whitened sand. Now, stepping past rusty tables and chairs, Wer gazed beyond the nearby seawall, upon stubby remnants and broken masts, protruding from a brownish carpet of seaweed and sewage.

I remember it was right about here . . .

Leaning over, he groped over the balcony railing and along the building’s fluted side, till he found a hidden pulley, attached to a slender rope leading downward. Near the bottom, it draped idly over the seawall and into the old marina, appearing to be nothing more than a pair of fallen wires.

Wer had never done anything like this before, trusting a slender line with his weight and his life. Though, on one occasion he had helped Quang Lu ferry mysterious cargo to the bottom end, holding Quang’s boat steady while the smuggler attached dark bags, then hauled away. High overhead, shadowy figures claimed the load of contraband, and that was that. Wer never knew if it was drugs, or tech, or untaxed luxuries, nor did he care, so long as he was paid.