There are hundreds, thousands of things he has never heard of before. People, cities, objects, events. There are areas of expertise whose names he can hardly pronounce. Areology, chaoticism, fractal modeling, paraneurology. And don’t forget history, that bottomless well atop which the present moment is but a scrim of bubbles. Stone is, perhaps, most shocked by his discovery of history. He cannot recall ever having considered life as extending backward in time beyond his birth. The revelation of decades, centuries. millennia nearly pushes him into a mental abyss. How can one hope to comprehend the present without knowing all that has gone before?
Hopeless, insane, suicidal to persist.
Yet Stone persists.
He closets himself with his magic window on the world, a terminal that interfaces with the central computer in the Citrine Tower—itself a vast, unintelligible hive of activity—and through that machine to almost every other in the world. For hours on end, images and words flash by him, like knives thrown by a circus performer—knives that he, the loyal but dumb assistant, must catch to survive.
Stone’s memory is excellent, trained in a cruel school, and he assimilates much. But each path he follows has a branch every few steps, and each branch splits at frequent points, and those tertiary branches also sprout new ones, no less rich than the primaries....
Once Stone nearly drowned, when a gang left him unconscious in a gutter and it began to rain. He recalls the sensation now.
June brings him three meals faithfully each day. Her presence still thrills him. Each night, as he lies abed, he replays stored images of her to lull him asleep. June bending, sitting, laughing, her Asian eyes aglow. The subtle curves of her breasts and hips. But the knowledge-fever is stronger, and he tends to ignore her as the days go by.
One afternoon Stone notices a pill on his lunch tray. He asks June its nature.
“Its a mnemotropin—promotes the encoding of long-term memories,” she replies. “I thought it might help you.”
Stone swallows it greedily, and returns to the droning screen.
Each day he finds a pill at lunch. His brain seems to expand to a larger volume soon after he takes them. The effect is potent, allowing him to imagine he can ingest the world. But still, each night when he finally forces himself to stop, he feels he has not done enough.
Weeks pass. He has not prepared a single sentence for Alice Citrine. What does he understand? Nothing. How can he pass judgment on the world? It’s hubris, folly. How long will she wait before she kicks his ass out onto the cold street?
Stone drops his head in his hands. The mocking machine before him torments him with a steady diarrhea of useless facts.
A hand falls lightly on his quivering shoulder. Stone imbibes June’s sweet scent.
Stone smashes the terminal’s power stud with the base of his palm so fiercely it hurts. Blessed silenee. He looks up at June.
“I’m no damn good at this. Why’d she pick me? I don’t even know where to start.”
June sits on a cushion beside him. “Stone, I haven’t said anything, because I was ordered not to direct you. But I don’t think sharing a little of my experience will count as interference. You’ve got to limit your topic, Stone. The world’s too big. Alice doesn’t expect you to comprehend it all, distill it into a masterpiece of concision and sense.
“The world doesn’t lend itself to such summations, anyway. I think you unconsciously know what she wants. She gave you a clue when you talked to her.”
Stone summons up that day, plays back a view he filed of the stern old woman. Her features occult June’s. The visual cue drags along a phrase.
“—whether what I have built is bad or good.”
It is as if Stone’s eyes have overloaded. Insight floods him with relief. Of course, the vain and powerful woman sees her life as the dominant theme of the modern era, a radiant thread passing through time, with critical nodes of action strung on it like beads. How much easier to understand a single human life than that of the whole world. (Or so he believes at the moment.) That much he thinks he can do. Chart Citrine’s personal history, the ramifications of her long career, the ripples spreading from her throne. Who knows? It might indeed prove archetypal.
Stone wraps his arms around June in exultation, gives a wordless shout. She doesn’t resist his embrace, and they fall back upon the couch.
Her lips are warm and complaisant under his. Her nipples seem to burn through her shirt and into his chest. His left leg is trapped between her thighs.
Suddenly he pulls back. He has seen himself too vividly: scrawny castoff from the sewer of the city, with eyes not even human.
“No,” he says bitterly. “You can’t want me.”
“Quiet,” she says, “quiet.” Her hands are on his face; she kisses his neck; his spine melts; and he falls atop her again, too hungry to stop.
“You’re so foolish for someone so smart,” she murmurs to him afterwards. “Just like Alice.”
He does not consider her meaning.
* * * *
The roof of the Citrine Tower is a landing facility for phaetons, the suborbital vehicles of companies and their executives. He feels he has learned all he can of Alice Citrine’s life, while cooped up in the tower. Now he wants the heft and feel of actual places and people to judge her by.
But before they may leave, June tells Stone, they must speak to Jerrold Scarfe.
In a small departure lounge, all soft white corrugated walls and molded chairs, the three meet.
Scarfe is head of security for Citrine Technologies. A compact, wiry man, exhibiting a minimum of facial expressions, he strikes Stone as eminently competent, from the top of his permanently depilated and tattooed skull to his booted feet. On his chest he wears the CT emblem: a red spiral with an arrowhead on its outer terminus, pointing up.
June greets Scarfe with some familiarity, and asks, “Are we cleared?”
Scarfe waggles a sheet of flimsy in the air. “Your flight plan is quite extensive. Is it really necessary, for instance, to visit a place like Mexico City, with Mr. Stone aboard?”
Stone wonders at Scarfe’s solicitude for him, an unimportant stranger. June interprets Stone’s puzzled look and explains. “Jerrold is one of the few people that know you represent Miz Citrine. Naturally, he’s worried that if we run into trouble of some kind, the fallout will descend on Citrine Technologies.”
“I’m not looking for trouble, Mr. Scarfe. I just want to do my job.”
Scarfe scans Stone as intentlv as the devices outside Alice Citrine’s sanctum. The favorable result is eventually expressed as a mild grunt, and the announcement, “Your pilot’s waiting. Go ahead.”
Higher off the grasping earth than he has ever been before, his right hand atop June’s left knee, feeling wild and rich and free, Stone ruminates over his life of Alice Citrine, and the sense he is beginning to make of it.
Alice Citrine is 159 years old. When she was born, America was still com prised of states, rather than FEZ and ARCadias. Man had barely begun to fly. When she was in her sixties, she headed a firm called Citrine Biotics. This was the time of the Trade Wars, wars as deadly and decisive as military ones, yet fought with tarriffs and five-year plans, automated assembly lines and fifth-generation decisionmaking constructs. This was also the time of the Second Constitutional Convention, that revamping of America for the state of war.
During the years when the country was being divided into Free Enterprise Zones—urban, hi-tek, autonomous regions, where the only laws were those imposed