ridden on one. She sure did now. The mag-lev train—the whole vehicle levitated over a narrow ribbon of track by the force of electromagnetism—looked like a gigantic black bullet, each end a streamlined wedge. The EM-Trans reached speeds of over a thousand miles an hour in tubes cut through the global curvature. The ride lasted the morning, the trek up to the surface another hour.
And then--San Francisco!
Zhu had heard that Hong Kong surpasses San Francisco in management of the coastal encroachment that threatened seaside cities two hundred years ago. That Tokyo surpasses San Francisco in modernity, New York City in sheer upward thrust.
But Zhu had never seen Hong Kong or Tokyo or New York City. Now she glimpsed San Francisco’s entertainment districts glittering along the offshore dikes, the containment canals, the iceberg barriers, the gardens planted over ancient traffic corridors, the magnificent cosmicist dome over New Golden Gate Preserve, the central megalopolis, the private domed estates of the wealthy, the spectacular skyscrapers literally touching the clouds.
Wonderful! And intimidating.
How isolated Zhu had been her whole life. How provincial. The countryside around Changchi where she and the Daughters of Compassion had focused their campaign was burdened with crumbling concrete, polluting ground traffic, the daily detritus of way too many people. But San Francisco, this megalopolis of five million souls, had managed to hide away everything ugly. Zhu thought of China as prostrate, huge and sprawling and horizontal, only too plain to see. San Francisco was dizzyingly vertical, its gleaming surfaces concealing modern arcana.
If San Francisco was intimidating, the Luxon Institute for Superluminal Applications was formidable. Once topside, the copbots escorted her to the waterfront. From there she boarded a catamaran that sped her to a silver monolith rising up out of the north bay waters. Zhu had heard about hydroplexes--marine-based skyscrapers modeled on the ancient oil drilling platforms that had bobbed offshore in the days when the technopolistic plutocracy held a stranglehold on a world economy fueled by petroleum. South Honshu was mostly hydroplexes these days. South Cork, too.
Zhu had heard about them. Now she stepped into a hydroplex, feeling every inch the country bumpkin, especially in her prison jumpsuit. The hydroplex perched high above a polished gridwork into which the catamaran navigated and docked. If the meticulously groomed denizens of this modern platinum palace were troubled by the ceaseless rocking and swaying caused by bay tides, they gave no sign but hurried silently through hushed corridors on what surely must have been urgent business.
Gah. Bay tides. Rocking and swaying. Uff! Zhu felt as if she was about to spill her guts.
When the red-haired man stepped out to greet her, suddenly she was spilling her guts. Or at least, the spare contents of her stomach. “I. . . .long ride. . . .detox maybe,” she muttered and, to her embarrassment, keeled over. How could she explain the vertigo that seized her at that moment?
When she woke, she felt a little better, but her head was still woozy, her stomach still sour. She opened her eyes and found herself lying on a chrome-and-leather divan in a room swathed in a gauzy pale fabric like the inside of a cloud.
The red-haired man sat watching her.
He gestured to a viewer perched in a corner like a predatory bird. “We’re holoiding the instructions I’m giving you today. The file, called Zhu.doc, is thirty-five GB and will go in your monitor’s Archive, so you’ll be able to view it anytime you need to.” He gave her a Classic Coke, which tasted delicious and settled her stomach. “I’m the one who offered your lawyer the deal.” He fell silent then, watching her as if she were a specimen in a petri dish.
She should have been flattered that a man of his stature took any notice of her at all. She should have been grateful, should have been cordial, should have been eager to please.
But she didn’t feel flattered or grateful or cordial or eager to please. Instead, sharp resentment gripped her chest. She instantly disliked the red-haired man. She puzzled at her unruly emotions, then felt guilty. There was no rational reason for disliking him.
He’d done nothing to her. She’d never met him before.
But there it was and wouldn’t go away--resentment, even anger. As if she knew something bad about him, but couldn’t say what. Had she met him before? But where? She swallowed her confusion as best she could, silently scolding herself. She wasn’t wearing the black patch for the first time in months, that was all.