Chapter 27 #2
She led me to the wall opposite the image of the bubbling brook.
She pressed her palm to a flat pad raised a quarter of an inch from the wall.
The wall split along a seam not visible before and slid apart, revealing a small closet.
Hanging, neatly pressed, were a few variations on the sleeved toga Anjari wore. She picked one and held it out.
“Right,” I said. I took the toga. We stood there for a few seconds. “Could I, you know, put this on?”
“Yes, of course.” She made no move to turn around.
“Um. Privately?”
“Ah, of course. Propriety. I’m sorry, I had forgotten my studies.
I will turn my back.” She walked to the bed, picked up her tablet, and faced away from me.
I took a breath and pulled off the gown.
I stood there, naked, and tried to figure out the toga.
Eventually I worked it out. The cloth, silky smooth against my skin, fell into place as if tailored specifically to fit me.
“There are sandals for you as well,” Anjari said without turning. “In the closet.”
I found the sandals and spent the next few minutes trying to get the leather straps to work. Anjari came to help me. “Have you never used these?” she asked as she tied the straps around my calves.
“Never.”
“Interesting. Please, come with me. I will show you around.”
“Do we need to tell the doctors?”
“I have already done so.” She held up the tablet and I realized she was taller than I was. “My implants are restricted, but I can still use a handheld for basic terminal access.”
“Implants?”
“I am sorry, it is so easy to forget these things. Almost everyone has neural implants, now. Computers in the brain. That is the closest analogy in your terminology.”
“So, you have them, too?” I asked, groping for something to say.
“Of course. I have since I was a child. The implants grew with me. They are a part of me. But one of the requirements to be accepted to Bergeman is to disable most of the functions of the implants. Net terminal access, visual and auditory recording, memory augmentation. Anything giving us an advantage over a human such as yourself.”
“Seems pretty rough, if you grew up with all that.”
“It is one of the reasons Bergeman is a world-renowned institution of higher learning. I knew the price when I applied, and one I pay willingly. Once I graduate, all my implant functionality will be restored.” She smiled.
“And, I will have my degree. Come.” She palmed open the door and led me into a brightly lit corridor lined on one side with doors identical to my own.
The other side was glass: a single giant pane running the length of the corridor in either direction.
The view over the city stopped me. “Oh, wow.”
The hospital sat on a hillside. The ground sloped from the window toward the flat Los Angeles valley below.
The city filled the valley to the ocean.
The air was clear, without any hint of haze or smog.
Skyscrapers stood and glittered in the sunlight, towering monuments of spectacular, sweeping architecture, many with broad sections of green parkland on their roofs or on platforms held out to the sides like arms holding dinner plates.
Hundreds of dots moved in the sky around the city, and it wasn’t until one swept close by that I realized it was a vehicle. An aircar.
“It is beautiful,” Anjari said. “I sometimes forget to observe and appreciate. It is of significant scale, is it not?”
“How many people live here?”
“In the city proper? I think twenty-two million. I could get the exact figure for you—”
“No, no, it’s not important.”
“Come, I will show you more.” She took my arm and walked me to the end of the corridor.
We emerged into a large, open area, like a lobby.
The ceiling was a dome of glass, letting the sun in, lighting up ferns and palm trees in naturalistic planters.
There was a waterfall—a real one—along one wall.
We walked by a broad desk, a digital sign across its front showing text in a language I didn’t recognize.
The man behind it nodded and smiled as we passed.
“What would you like to see?” Anjari asked.
“I have no idea.”
“Then I will take you to my favorite place.” We walked a few more steps, then I stopped. Anjari halted next to me. “Are you okay?”
“I, um…” I trailed off, looking around at the enormous, opulent room. “I don’t know.”
“Do you need to return to your room?”
“No, no, I mean … it’s just—this is a lot to take in.”
“It is overwhelming.”
“Yes. Overwhelming. Anjari…”
“Yes?”
“Please don’t take this the wrong way. But what do you want from me?”
“What do you mean?”
“The last few places I’ve been—the last times, eras, I mean—things didn’t go so well. You know? I got people killed, just for being me. Being the Traveler.” I looked away. I wasn’t even sure what I meant.
An image came to me. The barrel of my own gun pressed against my forehead.
Just—just fucking do it.
Anjari touched my arm, bringing me back to the present. “Scott Treder. I am a scholar of the Word, it is true. But I am not interested in exploiting you. I would like to learn from you, yes. But I would also like to know you and help you.”
“I’m sorry. I don’t know what I—I … I don’t know.”
“It is okay. I will not make you do anything you do not wish to do.”
“All right.”
“Now, would you like to see my favorite place? We can continue to converse as well, of course, if you wish.”
I met her eyes and found myself searching. For what, I wasn’t sure. But I could only make out concern and care. “Okay. Let’s go.”
Anjari brought me to a garage-like structure on top of the hospital, open to the air.
There, lined up in neat, gleaming rows, were sleek, ovoid vehicles.
Aircars. None had tires. Instead, they sat flat on the smooth concrete.
Anjari took out her tablet and tapped for a few seconds, frowning, before she brightened and nodded toward a nearby aircar.
It was dark red, although as we walked closer the color shifted with the change in perspective, becoming deep blue, then back to maroon.
“Holinstead, nice enough. Go ahead and get in.”
“How?”
She smiled and tapped on the tablet again. Hidden seams along either side of the ovoid appeared and split with a soft hiss, and doors flanged open.
“Okay.” I got in what would have been the passenger side of a car from my time, sinking into a bucket seat.
I noticed there was no steering wheel. Anjari sat in the opposite seat and tapped on the tablet.
The doors shut and sealed us in. For a moment there was no view—the windows, or whatever they were, were opaque, and the same flat gray as the rest of the interior.
Then Anjari tapped a few more commands and the vehicle hummed to life.
Instruments lit the front panel. The windows cleared.
“This is nice.” I ran a hand along the wooden paneling under the instruments.
“I prefer my Polarni.”
I remembered her mentioning her car was in for sterilization. To take care of any germs I’d brought along with me. “Whose car is this?”
“Courtesy, from the service department.” She tapped on the tablet. “Sorry, this would be a lot quicker with my implants. I have to interface this mobile terminal to the aircar’s computer.”
“It’s fine.”
She tapped some more. “Here we go.”
The car lifted off the ground, buttery smooth. It was disconcerting to see the landing pad fall away below us. Anjari looked at me as the car banked and accelerated in the direction of the city. “It all must be terribly strange.”
We joined a stream of cars, part of some invisibly defined midair highway. A cloud went by, briefly obscuring my view of the landscape. “It’s a little weird, yes.”
“You have only been making your travels for eighteen days, and yet you have traveled so far.”
“It feels like a lot longer than that.”
There was a moment’s silence.
“Scott Treder,” Anjari said. Something in her tone made me turn and look at her. “I wish to ask you something. But you do not have to feel requirement to answer.”
“All right.” For a heart-stopping moment I thought she was going to ask me about the jail cell, about being tortured. About how I’d come into her time broken and bloody and nearly unconscious.
“What do you believe is happening to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“There is the obvious. You are traveling. Being transported forward through time by unknown means. The Word has its dogma for what is happening to you. But you are the real Traveler. What do you believe?” She held my eyes. Passionate, with genuine interest.
I wanted to give her an answer. I opened my mouth. Shut it. “I don’t know.”
“Hmm,” she murmured. And she waited, as if she knew I had more to say.
I stared out the window and watched the sun-dappled Los Angeles valley crawl beneath us.
There was no sound of air going by, only the soft hum of the engine.
I wondered what kind of technology it used, if it was gravity manipulation like Lyle had guessed he and others might learn from my jumps forward through time.
It could be some technology the scientists of my time could never have imagined.
These people were advanced. They’d healed me in hours from wounds that should’ve taken weeks or months of recovery.
They flew in personal aircars and had neural implants in their heads to link them to the Net.
But even with all that, three words Anjari said stood out.
By unknown means.
She didn’t know how it was happening, any more than I did.
“My son wrote the Word,” I said. “He did it against my wishes. I asked him to live his life, and not try to save mine. He didn’t listen.
When he couldn’t figure out how to stop it, stop the leaps forward in time, he turned to trying to protect me.
He wrote the Word to keep me safe.” I looked over.
Anjari watched me. So far, at least, she didn’t seem disappointed. But still, I hesitated. “Anjari.”
“Yes?”