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They knocked a few minutes after she collapsed on the bed. She had hoped they
might hold off for a while. She was resigned. When she spun the door open the
person she least expected to see was Marq.
"You won't believe what's going on," he said, brushing past her.
"What? Where have you "
"The Meritocrats want us."
"For what?"
"Reading!"
"But the Voice "
"Keeps people out of touch and happy. Great idea but it turns out you can't
run everything with just the Voice." He blinked, the merest hesitation.
"Somebody's got to be able to access info at a higher level. That was our gut
feeling, remember that reading was different."
"Well, yes, but the Specters "
"They keep people damped down, is all." A slight pause. "Anybody who's got the
savvy to see the signs, the grit to learn to piece together words on their
own, to process it all those are the people the Merits want. Us!"
Klair blinked. This was too much to encompass. "But why did they take you
away, and Qent "
"Had to be sure." He gave his old familiar shrug. "Wanted to test our skills,
make sure we weren't just posing. People might catch on, only pretend to read,
y'know?"
"I... see." There was something about Marq that wasn't right. He had never had
these pauses before . . . because he wasn't listening to the Voice then?
She backed away from him. "That's marvelous news. When will Qent be back?"
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"Oh, soon, soon." He advanced and she backed out onto the balcony.
"So what job will you do? I mean, with reading in it?"
They were outside. She backed into the railing. The usual distant clatter and
chat of the air shaft gave her a momentary sense of security. Nothing could
happen here, could it?
"Oh, plenty. Looking up old stuff, comparing, y'know." He waved his hands
vaguely.
It wasn't much of a drop from here. Over the railing, legs set right...
"It's good work, really."
Could she could get away if she jumped? Marq wasn't the athletic type and she
knew that if she landed right on the mud below she wouldn't twist an ankle or
anything. She had on sensible shoes. She could elude him. If she landed right.
She gave him a quick, searching look. Had he come here alone? No, probably
there were Spectors outside her door, just waiting for him to talk her into
surrendering. Stall for time, yes.
"How bad is it?"
He grinned. "You won't mind. They just access that part of your mind for three
hours a day. Then they install a shutdown on that cerebral sector."
"Shutdown? I "
"So you don't need to read any more. Just during work, is all. You get all you
need that way. Then you're free!"
She thought it through. Jump, get away. Couldn't use the Voice for help
because they could undoubtedly track her if she had her receiver on. Could she
get by just reading the old signs?
Suppose she could. Then what? Find some friends she could trust. Stay
underground? How? Living off what?
"It's much better. Qent will be back soon and "
"Hold it. Don't move."
She looked down the air shaft. Was the jump worth it?
You spool out of the illusion and snap back into the tight cocoon. The
automatic sensory leads retract, giving your skin momentary pinprick goodbye
kisses. Once more you feel the cool clasping surfaces of the cocoon. Now you
turn and ask, "Hey, where's the rest?"
Myrph shrugs her shoulders, still busy undoing her leads. "That's all there
was, I
told you."
"Maybe it's just damaged?"
"No, that's the end of the cube. There must be another cube to finish the
story, but this was the only one I found back in that closet."
"But how does it end? What's she do?" You lean toward her, hoping maybe she's
just teasing.
"I dunno. What would you do? Jump?"
You blink, not ready for the question. "Uh, this reading thing. What is it,
really?"
Myrph frowns. "It felt like a kind of your own silent voice inside your head."
"Is it real? I mean, does reading exist?"
"Never heard of it."
"So this isn't an historical at all, right? It's a fantasy."
"Must be. I've never seen those things on walls."
"Signs, she called them." You think back. "They would have worn away a long
time ago, anyway."
"I guess. Felt kinda strange, didn't it, being able to find out things without
the
Voice?"
You bite your lip, thinking. Already the illusion of being that woman is
slipping away, hard to fix in memory. She did have a kind of power all on her
own with that reading thing. You liked that. "I wonder what she did?"
"Hey, it's just a story."
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"What would you do?"
"I don't have to decide. It's just a story."
"But why tell it then?"
Myrph says irritably, "It's just an old illusion, missing a cube."
"Maybe there was only one."
"Look, I want illusions to take me away, not stress me out."
You remember the power of it. "Can I have it, then?"
"The cube? Sure."
Myrph tosses it over. It is curiously heavy, translucent and chipped with
rounded corners. You cup it in your hand and like the weight of it.
That is how it starts. You know already that you will go and look for the
signs in the corridors and that for good or ill something new has come into
your world and will now never leave it.
-end-
About the author:
Gregory Benford is one of the chief spokesmen of hard SF of the last twenty
years, articulate and contentious, and he has produced some of the best
fiction of recent decades about scientists working, and about the riveting and
astonishing concepts of cosmology and the nature of the universe, for example,
Timescape, or
Great Sky
River.
For several years he has also been a science columnist for
Fantasy & Science
Fiction
(he is currently preparing a collection of his columns). His novel
Foundation's
Fear, continuing Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, was published in 1997. His
new novel, Cosm, is out this year in hardcover. He has had a story in each of
the two previous
Year's Best volumes in this series, each one quite different from the others
in tone and approach. This story appeared in
SF Age, and in a very different version in the original anthology
Future Histories.
It starts out in Isaac Asimov territory and wanders somehow into Ray Bradbury
country without losing its punch or its science.
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