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 by corporations and the only goal was profits and dominance—and Areas of Restrictive Control—rural, mainly agricultural enclaves, where older values were strictly enforced—Citrine Biotics refined and perfected the work of their reseachers and others in the field of carbon chips: microbiological assemblies, blood-borne programmed repair units. The final product, marketed by Citrine to those who could afford it, was near-total rejuvenation, the cell-slough—or, simply, the sluff.
Citrine Biotics headed the Fortune 500 within six years.
By then it was Citrine Technologies.
And Alice Citrince sat atop it all.
But not forever.
Entropy will not be cheated. The information-degradation that DNA undergoes with age is not totally reversible. Errors accumulate despite the hardworking carbon chips. The body dutiful gives out the end.
Alice Citrine is nearing the theoretical close of her extended life. Despite her youthful looks, one day a vital organ will fail, the result of a million bad transcriptions.
She needs Stone, of all people, to justify her existence.
Stone squeezes June’s knee and relishes the sense of importance. For the first time in his sad and dingy life, he can make a difference. His words, his perceptions matter. He is determined to do a good job, to tell the truth as he perceives it.
“June,” Stone says emphatically, “I have to see everything.”
She smiles. “You will, Stone. You will indeed.”
* * * *
And the phaeton comes down—
—in Mexico City, which crashed last year at population 35 million. Citrine Technologies is funding a relief effort there, operating out of their Houston and Dallas locations. Stone is suspicious of the motives behind the campaign. Why didn’t they step in before the point of collapse? Can it be that they are worried now only about refugees flooding across the border? Whatever the reasons, though, Stone cannot deny that the CT workers are a force for good, ministering to the sick and hungry, reestablishing electrical power and communications, propping up (acting as?) the city government. He boards the phaeton with his head spinning, and soon fmds himself—
—in the Antarctic, where he and June are choppered out from the CT domes to a krill-processing ship, source of so much of the world’s protein. June finds the frack stench offensive, but Stone breathes deeply, exhilarated at being afloat in these strange and icy latitudes, watching the capable men and woman work. June is happy to be soon aloft, and then—
—in Peking, where CT heuristic specialists are working on the first Artificial Organic Intelligence. Stone listens with amusement to a debate over whether the AOI should be named K’ung Fu-tzu or Mao.
The week is a kaleidoscopic whirl of impressions. Stone feels like a sponge, soaking up the sights and sounds so long denied him. At one point he finds himself leaving a restaurant with June, in a city whose name he has forgotten. In his hand is his ID card, with which he had just paid for their meal. A holoportrait stares up from his palm. The face is cadaverous, filthy, with two empty, crusted sockets for eyes. Stone remembers the warm laser fingers taking his holo in the Immigration Office. Was that really he? The day seems like an event from someone else’s life. He pockets his card, unsure whether to have the holo updated or to keep it as a token of where he has come from.
And where he might end up?
(What will she do with him after he reports?)
When Stone asks one day to see orbital installations, June calls a halt. “I think we’ve done enough for one trip, Stone. Let’s get back, so you can start to put it all together.”
With her words, a deep boneweariness suddenly overtakes Stone, and his manic high evaporates. He silently assents.
*
