Shelter (32 page)

    Preston's image shook its head. "None of this will make any difference to the AI Project. None at all. The project is a process, not a building. There are copies of the research all over the Web. Other people are working on the same ideas, more people than the terrorists can possibly threaten. They cannot believe this will stop our work. They cannot be that stupid."

    The tall cop spoke up now. "We're hoping they are, Papa—Mr. Walford, Preston, sir."

    "What if they aren't?" Meredith said. No one answered her. "Well? What if they aren't? Say something! I'm not stupid, either! Don't try to lie to me!"

    "If they aren't," the short cop said, looking directly at Merry, "then there's something more to this. That's all. Then they're trying to do something else, and we aren't sure what it is." She smiled wanly. "Law enforcement types don't like not knowing things. So, Meredith, can we get started with that list now, please?"

    Forty-eight hours. She swallowed and started naming names, starting with Zephyr's. She realized that there must be other cops, a lot of cops, cops interviewing everyone on campus. "Is Zephyr on your list already?" she asked, and the short cop said, "It doesn't matter. Pretend we don't know anything. Give us every name you can think of. We'll weed out the duplicates. "

    She closed her eyes and recited names: everybody in her classes, in Raji's classes that she knew of, in either of their departments, in performance art, in computer science. She listed names for twenty-five minutes, the names of more people than she'd thought she even knew, stopping only when the cops asked her to spell a name, please, or to spell that again, they hadn't gotten that the first time. When she was done there was a pause; she realized that they were waiting for more names.

    "I'm finished," she said, her eyes still closed. "That's all the people I can think of. That's all."

    She heard a sigh. Constance said wearily, "Well, sounds like we'd better put the entire campus under a protective bubble."

    I'm contagious, Meredith thought. No one who's ever spent time with me is safe. It's worse than CV. She opened her eyes. The cops were watching her, sadly. When they saw her looking at them, they stood up.

    "Thank you, Meredith," the short one said. "Thank you very much. We'll let you know the minute we know anything."

    "Try to get some sleep," the tall one said. And then they were gone. Meredith sat there, her limbs suddenly immovable. The house was amazingly quiet. "Where are the bots?" she asked dully.

    "Sleeping," Constance said. "Under the circumstances, we thought you'd probably prefer not to see them."

    "Mom, it doesn't matter, Theo likes them, they're his toys."

    "You're upset enough as it is. Theo has other toys. Do you want something to eat? You need to eat."

    "No."

    "When Sonia and Ahmed called—they said—they said you mustn't-"

    "Blame myself," Meredith finished wearily. "Of course they'd say that. Do you think they believe it?"

    To Meredith's shock, Constance and Jack and Preston all began talking at once, vehemently, gesticulating, their voices rising and falling like the sound of waves on a beach. Terrorists they're terrorists they did this their fault you didn't terrorists you mustn't it's them criminals it's terrorists not your .... Their voices sounded a million miles away. Meredith blinked at them.

    Love, her father was saying. Her father was saying something different now. You love Raji. You would never hurt Raji. Raji loves you, Meredith. Raji would never blame you.

    "No," she said, and they all nodded.

    They all looked relieved. They thought they knew what she was saying.

    They thought she meant, "No, I wouldn't hurt him; no, he wouldn't blame me." But that wasn't what she'd meant.

    She'd meant, "No, he doesn't love me." She didn't know if he'd blame her or not; she supposed he wouldn't. Raji had always been eminently fair.

    * * *

    "Daddy, why can't they find him? I'm scared! I can't stop thinking about—about—"

    She couldn't even say it. She didn't even care if she sounded like she had OCD; who could expect her not to be having obsessive thoughts right now?

    It was three in the morning. Meredith, unable to sleep, had ordered Jack and Constance to go to bed and get rest, since she couldn't. But once they left, the silence of the house began to work on her nerves, and she finally switched on the monitor in her room and summoned her father. It was the first time she'd done so in—how long? In forever. Had she ever summoned him before?

    "I am scared too, Meredith. He is my friend too."

    That was true. How often had she thought, bitterly, that Raji had more in common with Preston than Meredith ever had? How many conversations like this had Preston and Raji had, late at night? "What about the woman talking on the tape? Have they done a voiceprint?"

    "Of course. That is the first thing the police did, and as we all suspected, it was a digital voice, not a human one."

    Of course. They wouldn't be that stupid. "But they must have left some trace! There must be something on camera somewhere, there must be sales records of the equipment they used to make the vid, there must—"

    "It is very common equipment, and without serial numbers there is no way to track specific sales. And the police have found nothing helpful in the campus security records for that evening. We must assume that this group is extremely skilled not only at using technology but at avoiding it—that being, after all, their stated goal."

    Meredith got up and started pacing. "Have people threatened MacroCorp before? There must be lists of Lud groups!" All those Lud bumper stickers on Telegraph Avenue: oh, Goddess. The cops were going to be pulling over all those cars, and most of those kids were just posing, just playing at rebellion. She knew people with those bumper stickers. They weren't criminals. "There must be lists of terrorists—"

    "MacroCorp has never been a target of terrorist activity in this country. And the overseas incidents were years ago, and have no evident bearing on the current case."

    "But the lists—you could compare—"

    "The police are comparing the lists, Meredith. I do not have access to them."

    "You could have access to them if you wanted to!"

    "No." Preston's voice was very quiet. "I could not, Meredith, truly. I could, if I chose, use MacroCorp resources to break certain encryption codes, but that would be illegal trespass, and would subject me to serious penalties, including possible erasure."

    Meredith shook her head. "There has to be something we can do! Daddy, please! When's the last time I asked you for help?"

    "I am helping MacroCorp comply with the kidnappers' demands, which is the safest way to find Raji."

    Rage blocked her throat. "Do you trust them? You said yourself this can't stop the research! You said yourself that they have to know that too! So do you really think he'll be—that he'll be—"

    "I do not trust them, no. But noncompliance would be far more dangerous. We do not know if compliance will win Raji's safety. We do know that noncompliance will endanger it."

    She kept pacing, the thick carpet soft under her feet. So different from her dorm room, either at school or at Temple. It wasn't right for her to be walking on soft carpet. She should be walking on coals, or on nails. "He has to be okay. He has to be okay. If he'snot okay—"

    "If he is not okay, Meredith—"

    "Don't tell me it won't be my fault! I'm tired of hearing it!"

    "It would not be my fault, either. And it would not be the fault of the police. It would be the fault of the terrorists."

    Meredith felt a scream beginning to bubble in her throat. Preston continued, relentless and implacable. "But all the people whose fault it was not would feel the pain far more than the people whose fault it was. That is why this is so horrible. He is in the hands of people who do not care about him, and those who care can do nothing. And you care most of all, second only to Sonia and Ahmed. You are the three people who love him the most. And I am his friend. And we are the four at whom the video clip struck. The clip wants us to believe that Raji is in danger because he was born to certain people, and because he loved and befriended others."

    What was he talking about? "The clip was a lie! A lie! None of those things ever happened! Daddy, he hasn't loved me for three years, not that way! They know it's a lie! They don't care! They don't care if he loves me or not."

    "He does love you. I know he does. He has told me so."

    "Well, you're my father! He's not going to—"

    "The clip is indeed a lie, but not because of that. It is a lie because Raji is in danger from the people who hate the people he loves. The hate makes the danger, not the love. The people who hate us, the people who kidnapped him, do not even know us."

    "What's the difference? The danger's the same! It doesn't make any difference to Raji, does it?"

    "You must not let this make you afraid to love, Meredith."

    "Oh, Goddess! Do you really think that's entirely under my control?"

    "Yes. I think it is. I think it can be."

    Merry shook her head so wildly that her hair blinded her, obscuring the earnest image on the screen. "That's because you don't know anything, Daddy. You don't know jackshit about me or anybody else who's still alive. You're a machine, and you've forgotten anything you ever knew about being human."

    "Meredith—"

    "Shut up," she said, and hit the off button so hard that her monitor rocked on its stand.

    * * *

    Exhausted, Meredith fell into an uneasy doze near dawn; her mother woke her at ten to say that Matt and Gwyn were waiting for her downstairs.

    "Mommy, I don't want to see them."

    "Well, they want to see you. They're upset too, Merry. You can't help Raji by pushing all your other friends away."

    Biting back her rage—Constance and Preston must have been conferring—she threw on a robe and went sullenly downstairs, to find Theo holding court. In just the past few weeks, he'd leaped from simple sentences to complex thought. "Merry yelled," he was telling Matt and Gwyn. "I was scared. I got into bed with Mommy and Daddy."

    Merry, unseen, stood stricken at the entrance to the den. Theo must have heard her shouting at Preston. He was rigged: he'd have access to that lovely memory in perpetuity. How could Constance and Jack stand knowing that any cross word they uttered was etched in silicon? "Theo," she said, ''I'm sorry I scared you. I was upset, but I wasn't upset at you."

    He turned and regarded her gravely. "It's not nice to yell."

    "I know it isn't." She knelt. ''I'm sorry, honey. Can you come here and give me a hug?"

    He did; his willingness to forgive amazed her. Then he and Constance went upstairs to build with blocks, and Merry was alone with Gwyn and Matt. They both looked gaunt, drained; it occurred to her that they'd known Raji longer than she had, and been rejected more thoroughly. He hadn't even been back to visit the Temple since he left. He hadn't even gone to Hortense's funeral; he'd been in Hawaii that weekend. He'd sent flowers instead.

    "Your father's right," Matt said, when she told them about the conversation with Preston, and Gwyn nodded. "You have to keep loving, Merry. You can't put yourself back in isolation, and you can't hate. If you do that, the terrorists will have won."

    "If I do that? This isn't about me! If I do that it will be because those thugs have—have done something to Raji." What was she saying? They'd already done something to Raji: they'd kidnapped him. "And if they do that, they've won no matter what I do!"

    "No," Gwyn said. "Merry, whatever happens, the way to keep them from winning for good is to keep being a decent person."

    "I don't think my decency or lack of it makes any difference. Not to them. Not to people like them."

    "It matters to us," Matt said. "And it matters to you. This is about saving your own life, whatever happens to Raji. Merry, stop staring at me like that; I'm not speaking a foreign language." Yes. You are. "Please listen to me. You've gone through more than anyone your age should have to bear; you've gone through more than most people have to bear in a lifetime. You've survived CV and you've survived celebrity and you've survived your father's translation, which has to be damned weird, and now your best friend's been kidnapped. That's an appalling string of stuff It's not even remotely fair that all that should happen to one person. That kind of misfortune doesn't make any sense, and it never will—not unless you use it to make your own sense, not unless you consciously refuse to let it harden or break you, not unless you very deliberately transform it into something useful. I'm not claiming for a second that's easy. It's the hardest thing any of us ever has to do. It's also the most important."

    She squinted at him. Didn't he understand what might happen? "Why are you even talking about me? Why aren't you talking about Raji?"

    "We are talking about Raji," Gwyn said, very gently. "Merry, we can't help him right now. We don't know where he is. Neither does anybody else. We're doing what we can do. We've prayed, and we've talked to Ahmed and Sonia, and now we're talking to you."

    Merry swallowed. "Did you lecture Sonia and Ahmed, too? Did you tell them they have to use lemons to make lemonade, even if their son's killed?"

    "We didn't have to," Matt said, more gently yet. She'd been trying to hurt or at least shame him, but it hadn't worked. "They already knew. They've already lost one child, you know. They had a little girl who died of SIDS before Raji was born. They went ahead and had Raji anyway."

    Raji had never told her he'd had a sister. And her parents had lost all those people in Africa, to the pandemics. Meredith got up and went to the window, standing with her back to Matt and Gwyn as she looked down at e Bay. The Bay was very blue today. How could it be blue? How could the sun be out?