CHAPTER 8
Angela Santorini bit her lip in concentration. All around her swam pretty colored spheres the size of tennis balls. But they were really atoms. Each different kind of atom had its own distinctive color. Hydrogen was red. Oxygen was blue. Nitrogen was yellow. Carbon was sooty black. Gold was—well, gold, of course. Then there were some strange ones: shimmery pink helium and bright green neon. And some others she couldn't remember. They all looked pretty, though, floating around in the deep blackness.
"What is water made of?" asked the instructor's voice in her headphones. "Can you put the atoms together to make a molecule of water?"
The voice was a recording and the whole chemistry simulation was an interactive VR program. Angela was actually sitting in one of the telephone-booth sized compartments in the rear of her classroom. She wore a helmet—with a visor that covered her eyes and instrumented data gloves on her hands. On the inside of the visor a pair of miniature TV screens played stereoscopic images into her eyes.
If Angela got things right the program automatically went on to a more difficult problem. When she stumbled, the program gently counseled her and helped her to correct her mistake.
"Water," Angela murmured to herself, "is made of one hydrogen and two oxygens."
"Is it?" said the voice. "Try it and see if you're right."
Angela reached out and grasped a hydrogen atom as it passed by. It felt slightly spongy in her fingers. "Stay there," she said, and the red sphere held its place in front of her. Then she grabbed a blue atom of oxygen. It was noticeably larger than the hydrogen. As she brought it close to the hydrogen atom the red sphere seemed to jump toward the blue and attach itself to it.
Now I need another oxygen, Angela thought. She picked one out of the stream flowing past, but it stubbornly refused to stick to her red-and-blue combination. Each time she tried to force them together they pushed back, rebounding away from one another.
For a few moments Angela sat there, frowning in puzzlement.
"What is the water molecule made of, Angela?" her instructor's voice asked. she noticed just the slightest difference in tone between the way her own name was pronounced and the rest of the question. Like her name had been stuck in at the last minute.
"Aitch-two-oh," Angela replied. Then she clapped her hands in sudden understanding. "One oxygen and two hydrogens!"
"Why don't you try it that way?" the voice prompted.
Angela did, and the water molecule fit together easily. She felt thrilled. Suddenly she was surrounded by water molecules that all merged together and became an ocean complete with beautifully colored fish swimming past.
But they disappeared quickly and she was back in the stream of flowing colored spheres. At the instructor's cues, Angela built molecules of carbon dioxide, methane and ammonia. All without a hitch.
"You've done so well," the instructor's voice said, "that you have time to play a game. Would you like to play?"
"Yes!" said Angela.
"Good." There was a moment's hesitation, barely long enough for Angela to notice it. But in that brief moment the VR program automatically sent a signal to the supercomputer in the ParaReality building to switch from the chemistry lesson to the game. It inserted Angela's name into the program and recorded her name, the date and time, and the name of the game in the central log kept in Victoria Bessel's files. It also alerted a satellite system in Kyle Muncrief's office; this was not recorded in anyone's files.
Angela found herself deep in the ocean, surrounded by beautifully colored fish that darted swiftly before her delighted eyes. Sunlight filtered down from the surface into a world of brilliant blue. A different voice, a man's, said, "This game is called "Neptune's Kingdom."
Angela thought she had heard that man's voice before. A gaily colored fish swam up to her and said, in the same man's voice: "Hello Angela. I'm an angel fish. I'm your guide to Neptune's Kingdom."
It sounded like Mr. Muncrief's voice, Angela thought. "Is that you, Mr. Muncrief?" she asked. Her daddy's boss had driven her to school several times over the past three weeks in his shining open convertible. He seemed to show up at their house at least once each week early in the morning before the school bus arrived, saying that he was on his way to the office and he thought Angela might like a ride.
"I'm an angel fish. My name is nearly the same as yours, isn't it?"
The fish was almost a foot long, its body flat and triangular in shape, like an arrowhead except for its prominent fins that fluttered before Angela's face. It was electric blue in color, with vivid stripes. Its big round eye seemed to look straight at Angela.
"Tolocanthus bermudensis is my official name," said Mr. Muncrief's voice. "But everyone knows me as an angel fish."
"You're too big to be an angel fish," Angela said. "I had angel fish in my aquarium back home in Dayton and they were a lot smaller than you. Prettier too."
"Those were fresh-water angel fish. I'm an ocean water angel fish. I can grow almost as big as you!"
Angela saw that the fish had a tiny mouth, but it was filled with sharp little teeth.
"Would you like to see Neptune's Kingdom and meet the mermaid princess?" it asked.
"Yes, I would."
"Then just follow me," said the fish. And it darted deeper into the darkening waters.
Angela did not feel as if she were moving. Instead, the undersea world seemed to flow past her, without her getting wet at all. All around her a wonderland of deep-sea life flowed, fish and coral and swaying green fronds of plants. The angel fish named each new form of living thing and even showed Angela the tiny coral polyps, almost microscopically small, when it stopped briefly to nibble on some.
"Delicious," said the fish.
"That's what you eat? Ugh!"
"To me they taste delicious, Angela. All animals have to eat something; I eat tiny little things. Some of the bigger fish like to eat fish like me. Life is a chain," said her guide, "and it all starts here in the sea."
Angela thought that maybe this wasn't a game at all, that somehow this fish was trying to teach her about—what did they call it? Biology. That was it. But it was fascinating to see all the different things in the ocean, all the different kinds of beautiful living creatures.
A shark glided by, sleek and deadly looking. Angela shivered, especially when it opened its wide mouth and showed rows and rows of sharp white teeth.
"There's nothing to be afraid of," said her angel fish. "Nothing can hurt you here in Neptune's Kingdom." But she thought her angel fish moved a lot closer to her as the shark swam past.
"Most sharks are predators, Angela. They eat other fish, We may not like that, but it's the way life is. Can you think of any predators that live on land?"
"Lions?" Angela replied.
"Very good! And tigers and wolves. Even dogs and house cats were once wild predators, before people tamed them and turned them into pets."
"I had a little cat but my baby brother was allergic to her and my mother gave her away."
"That's a shame," said the fish.
"I don't like sharks."
"They're part of nature, just like lions and tigers and wolves."
"I still don't like them," she said, quite firmly.
"You know, Angela, there's a kind of shark that is sometimes called an angel fish. It doesn't ever hurt people. Would you stop liking me if I were an angel shark?"
"I like you the way you are," Angela said.
"But suppose I was a big old ugly angel shark," asked Mr. Muncrief's voice. "Would you still like me, even though I looked different?"
"You wouldn't bite me?"
"I would never hurt you, Angela. I'm your friend, no matter what I look like."
"I suppose," said Angela. "But I like you better just the way you are. You're kind of pretty."
"Thank you."
And too small to scare anybody, she added silently.
Deeper and deeper into the ocean they moved. The water grew darker. Angela saw fish that had lights on their sides, long snake-like eels that glowed like an airplane at night. She was starting to get bored, though.
"Where is the mermaid princess?" she demanded. "You promised."
"Just a few moments more," said the angel fish, not showing the slightest displeasure or impatience. It still spoke with Mr. Muncrief's voice.
They seemed to swim past a flat-topped mountain and there, down on the very bottom of the sea, was a fairy city of golden spires and alabaster rooftops. It glowed softly in the deep dark water, pulsating almost like a thing alive.
"It's beautiful!" said Angela.
But as they flowed down onto the broad main avenue of the underwater city, the glowing light seemed to dim. One by one, the golden mansions that lined the avenue went dark until there was only a single light shining from the topmost tower of the great palace made of coral and pearl, up at the head of the long stately avenue.
"Where are the people?" Angela asked as she followed her guide along the dead and empty avenue.
"There is a great sadness in Neptune's Kingdom today, Angela," said the fish." A very great sadness."
"What is it? What happened?"
"You'll see."
The palace's silver gates were wide open and they swam right through. They could see no one in the courtyard, no one in the great halls or long corridors or lofty-ceilinged chambers as they made their way through the palace.
The palace seemed completely empty, but all through it Angela could hear a soft moaning sound, almost like someone sobbing. It frightened her.
Up into the tower they swam, up and up until they reached its topmost chamber.
"Here is the mermaid princess," said the angel fish, somberly.
The princess was sitting beside a long dark table, her emerald-green-scaled tail curled beneath her, her long golden hair swaying in the gentle currents of the water.
She was crying softly. The princess looked familiar. Almost like her mother. Yet—she looks like me, Angela realized.
There was a long black box atop the table. The mermaid princess ran her hand along its smooth edge. Angela swam up to it and looked inside.
There, lying with his eyes closed and his arms folded over his chest, was the mermaid's father. He was dead. He looked just like Angela's own daddy.
She screamed and everything went black.
"Nothing at all is coming up on your screen?" Susan asked anxiously. She was sitting at her computer speaking into the pinhead microphone of the headset she had clamped over her red curls. Her display screen showed a long list of legal mumbo-jumbo scrolling by.
"Nothing at all," said her client, a lawyer in Cincinnati who had a phobia against using computers.
Susan thought swiftly. "Is your computer switched on?"
A pause, then the man answered, "Of course it is!" rather irritably.
"Is the screen on?"
"Uh—oh. For gosh sakes. That's a separate button, isn't it? Yep, here's your material coming through. My mistake, Susie. It's coming through fine now."
Susan did not like to be called Susie, but she kept her mouth shut. This lawyer was one of her oldest clients. As long as he paid so well to have Susan do the computer searches that he could have hired a raw student to do, she was not going to correct his misuse of her name.
Susan had been a reference librarian in the Dayton Public Library system when she had first met Damon Santorini, nearly fifteen years earlier. When Angela had been born and she took an extended maternity leave, Dan had helped her learn how to use a home computer to "plug into" the growing number of reference services that were available through the telephone lines. It took quite a bit of arguing and cajoling, but her boss at the library finally allowed Susan to work part-time from her home—after she hotly insisted that they either give her this opportunity or have the story blurted to the news media that the library was discriminating against motherhood.
She built up a clientele across much of Ohio, but still worked as a part-time employee of the library system. Gradually people from further afield heard of her service through friends or their local librarians. Gradually Susan became an entrepreneur, working on her own, charging fees directly for looking up anything from obscure book titles to arcane scientific references. She even helped Dan several times in his work; he got the Air Force lab to pay her a regular consulting fee. She settled bets over the telephone from late-night barroom arguers, although she soon enough learned to put the phone on an answering machine once they went to bed.
When Dan received the offer from ParaReality it meant that they would have to move to the Orlando region. "Doesn't matter much where you are," Dan told her when Susan worried about her business. "As long as you've got a telephone You'll be okay."
Then Dan learned that the house ParaReality's Vickie Kessel had helped them to find was being wired with fiber optic cables. The entire Pine Lake Gardens development was a "fiber optic community," as the advertising brochure put it.
"Is that good?" Susan had asked her husband.
"Better than good, honey. With fiber optic lines direct to the house you can plug straight into the NREN."
She was accustomed to his speaking in jargon. The National Research and Education Network linked thousands of universities and research laboratories with the Library of Congress and other data banks all across the country. It even had international branches, connected by fiber optic cables across the oceans or by satellites hovering in orbit. Susan could access the world's libraries without stirring from her new home.
So she sent notices to everyone whose address or phone number she had in her computerized database and left their new Florida number with Ohio Bell. Within a week of their arrival in their new home Susan was doing nearly as much business as she had in Dayton. Within three weeks her business had almost doubled.
Now she was sitting at her tiny desk in the alcove off the kitchen that had been designed to be a breakfast nook, sending a massive file of legal references to the lawyer back in Cincinnati who was too intimidated by computers to do his own searches.
"Is it coming through okay?" she asked into her head-set mike.
"Yep, fine. I just hope this danged machine is really storing all this material and not losing it like it did the last time."
The last time, Susan knew, he had dumped the file by turning off his computer before saving the incoming data in its hard disk memory. Susan had to get Dan to write an idiot-proof subprogram for him that automatically saved everything she sent to him.
The file was almost at its end, she saw from the notation on her screen. The data scrolled past almost too fast even for her trained eye to follow. Then the machine beeped twice and began transmitting facsimile pictures of actual patents, straight from the files of the US Patent Office in Washington.
"Wow," she heard the lawyer gasp in her earphone.
"The drawings and everything! Just like that! If I tried to get this stuff out of Washington by mail it'd take a month."
"Fiber optics," Susan murmured, knowing it would impress him. "I can send you faxes, photographs, even videos if you ever need it."
She heard him chuckle. "How about a picture of yourself, Susie? I have no idea what you look like."
Her chin went up a notch. "I'm not a photographer's model," she snapped, then immediately hoped it did not sound as harsh to him as it had to her.
He went silent. The computer finished its run, beeped once, and then automatically transmitted the bill: the telephone time charges plus Susan's fee. The lawyer had not paid for the earlier transmission that he had lost, even though it had been his own fault.
Almost every cent Susan had made all year had gone into buying a nifty teal blue Subaru Legacy wagon. In Dayton, with her mother and her sisters nearby, she had always had a lift when she needed one. Babysitters; too. But here in this new housing tract of Pine Lake Gardens, surrounded by strangers, she needed a car of her own.
Proudly, Susan emptied her bank account to buy the neat little station wagon that could carry all of the kids' paraphernalia and still give her good gas mileage. And its teal blue color went well with her hair.
Little Philip was sitting in his playpen by the big sunny windows. Thank God his asthma hasn't bothered him so much here, Susan thought. So far, that was the one unequivocally good thing to come from this move to the humid heat of Florida: the baby would escape a winter of asthma and bronchitis. Her neighbors all seemed friendly, maybe too friendly. They liked to pop in for coffee and gossip at any time of the day. Susan had explained firmly that she was a working lady and could not be bothered with chit-chat during business hours. The neighbors had become quite frosty after the first week or so.
So what? Susan asked herself. Who needs a bunch of hens clucking around? Half of them are old enough to be my grandmother; they've got nothing to talk about except their golf games and their husbands' heart ailments. But she knew she was kidding herself. She was lonely. She missed her mother and her sisters, all back in Dayton, all safely tucked in the old neighborhood that they had known since childhood.
Dan has his work; as long as he can tinker sixty or seventy hours a week with his machines and work with Jace he's happy. What happens here at home he barely notices. Angela's started having periods and he's more embarrassed than interested. He loves us, but all he really comes home for is food and sleep. Then she smiled to herself: and sex, of course.
But her smile faded quickly. Something's bothering Angie. She hasn't been the same since we moved here. She seems to be doing okay at school but she's not adjusting to the new environment very well at all. Maybe it's Just her period, on top of the move and the new neighborhood and all that. But what if it's something else?
Susan had phoned her mother about Angela's sulky unhappiness. Mother had laughed. "I raised the four of you girls and all four of you cried every day from the time you were twelve until seventeen or so."
"I don't remember—"
"I do!" Mother had said cheerily. "Cried every day, each one of you. I think it's puberty. It hits your tear glands along with all the other glands."
"But Angela seems really unhappy and she won't tell me what's wrong."
"Just like her father."
"Well, yes, I suppose," Susan said.
During those terrible weeks when their marriage had nearly broken up, Susan had told her mother how uncommunicative Dan could be. When. he had a problem that troubled him, he would keep it bottled up inside him until he nearly shattered. Sex helped to release his tensions, but he could never tell Susan what the problem was. Air Force security, he would claim. He would fret and frown and gnaw on his lip with the pressure building every day until he'd explode with an outburst of anger over some trivial thing at home. He was always sorry afterward, apologetic, ashamed. But the tension was still there twisting inside him until he found the solution to whatever it was that had been bothering him. Then he was fine. Until the next problem arose.
"Dear little Angie probably doesn't even know what's bothering her," Susan's mother said. "All she knows is that she's unhappy."
"There must be something bothering her."
Mother said, "Why don't you send her up here over the Thanksgiving holiday? We'd love to have her. Love to have all of you. This will be the first Thanksgiving without all four of my babies sitting around the table."
That had turned the conversation into a long apology for leaving Ohio and an explanation of how expensive it is to travel with two children for just a few days and besides the weather might not be so good for Phil and Dan probably would be working right through the holiday anyway and—
The wall phone rang. Startled, Susan saw that the computer screen showed her bill and the words TRANSMISSION FINISHED blinking at her. Pulling off the headset, she turned in her little swivel chair and reached for the telephone on the wall above the kitchen counter. The computer hummed to itself and continued to blink.
"Hello," Susan said.
"Mrs. Santorini?"
"Yes."
"This is Eleanor O'Connell—Angela's teacher."
Susan went rigid. "What's happened?"
"Nothing serious, Mrs. Santorini. please don't be alarmed. But if you can, I'd appreciate it if you could drive over here and pick Angela up."
"What's happened?" Susan fairly screamed into the phone.
"She's had a little fainting spell, that's all. She's in the doctor's office now. She seems perfectly all right, but she did faint in class a few minutes ago."