She barely survived early cut on the shock tests—electrical, thermal, chemical, light, noise, high gees on the centrifuge, spatial disorientation in the bird cage—extreme stresses that consumed all her energy in her silent, secret defense of her delicate neural structures. She struggled through the obstacle courses, the heavy weapons courses, the team contact sports where the brute strength of the other players often overwhelmed her grace and quickness.
Exhausted, bruised, her muscles afire and her nerves ragged, she would stumble into the magneplane, glide smoothly through the fires and smoke of Purgatory, arrive late at her NoHo home and climb into her bed in the condo-apt she shared with three strangers she rarely saw.
Her loneliness and discouragement would get the better of her sometimes, and then she would cry herself to sleep— wondering why she was doing it, how long she could keep doing it. The second question was dependent on the first.
If she wavered in her belief that earning credentials as a Space Board investigator would give her the access, the freedom she needed to know what she needed to, her resolve would quickly crumble.
At night there were the dreams. In a year she had not found a sure way to control them. They would begin innocently enough with some fragment of the distant past, her mother’s face—or with the immediate past, some boy she’d met that very day, or a classroom lecture she’d not been prepared for, or been overprepared for—and then they’d segue´ into the dark corridors of an endless building, a vague goal to be achieved if only she could find her way through the maze, the sense that her friends were with her but that she was utterly alone, that it made no difference whether or not she found what she needed but that if she didn’t she would die—and then the colored lights came wheeling in, gently, from the edges, and the riot of smells overcame her.
Trainees had Sundays off. Sparta habitually spent hers walking Manhattan, from one side to the other, from the Battery to the Bronx, even in rain, snow, sleet, and wind.
Although she was not strong, she was tough. Twenty-five miles in a day was not unusual for her. She walked to free her mind of focused thought, of the need to detect and plan and store data. Periodic mental rest was essential to avoid overload and breakdown.
As originally conceived, the SPARTA project would never have used artificial brain implants. But when government agencies came in, the project changed; suddenly there were many more students, and new and larger facilities.
Sparta was a teenager then, and it didn’t seem strange at first that she saw less of her busy parents, and less of the others, most of them younger children, of whom only one or two were near her own age. One day her father called her into his office and explained that she was to be sent away to Maryland for a series of government evaluations.
He promised that he and her mother would visit as often as they could manage. Her father seemed under great strain; before she left the room he hugged her tightly, almost desperately, but he said nothing beyond a murmured “Good-bye” and “We love you.” A man with orange hair had been there in the office the entire time, watching.
Of what came next her memory was still fragmented.
Down in Maryland they had done far more than test her, but much of what they had done to her brain she had only recently deduced. What they had done to her body she was still learning.
Sparta walked up the airy length of Park Avenue, toward the Grand Central Conservatory. It was early spring; the day was sunny and warm. Along the avenue the rows of decorative cherry trees were in full bloom, their fragrant pink petals drifting like perfumed confetti onto the glittering esplanade. Shining glass and steel, scrubbed concrete and polished granite rose all about her; helicopters threshed the lanes of air among their tops. Omnibuses and an occasional police cruiser whispered past on the smooth pavement. Magneplanes hummed in swift assurance along thin steel tracks held aloft on high pylons, while quaint old electric subway cars, painted in cheerful colors, clattered and screeched beneath Sparta’s feet, visible through blocks of glass paving.
Early in the century, when the mid-Atlantic states had been merged for administrative convenience, Manhattan had been designated a federal demonstration center— “Skyscraper National Park,” as cynics would have it. Although the island was ringed with stinking industries and fetid suburbs, the streets of the model city were crowded, and most people in the crowd were sleek, colorfully and expensively dressed, happy-faced. In federal demonstration centers poverty was a crime, punishable by resettlement.
Sparta was not among the cheerful. Pass/fail in her training program was two months away. After that the physical stress would lift a bit and the academic side would take over, but just now she trembled on the brink of quitting. Sixty exhausting days to go. At this moment she felt she couldn’t make it.
As she approached the formal gardens of the 42nd Street mall she noticed a man following her. She wondered how long he’d been at it; she’d been deliberately tuned out, walking in a semi-trance, or she would have seen him instantly. He could be someone in the training division checking up on her. He could be someone else.
She roused herself to maximum alertness. Stopping at a flower stand, she raised a bunch of yellow daffodils to her nose. The flowers had no perfume, but their heady vegetable odor exploded in her brain. She peered through them, closing one eye, her macrozoom gaze zeroing in . . .
He was young, with thick auburn hair chopped in the fashion of the day, and he wore a stylish, shiny black polymer jacket. He was a handsome young man of obvious Chinese and Black Irish ancestry, with high cheekbones, soft dark eyes, and a sprinkle of freckles; at present he seemed oddly uncomfortable and uncertain.
As soon as she’d stopped at the flower stand he had hesitated, and for a moment she thought he was going to come forward, say something. Instead he turned and pretended to study a display in the nearest store win- dow. To his evident dismay, it was a clothing store displaying expensive women’s underwear. When he realized what he was looking at, his skin brightened under his freckles.
She had identified him instantly, although the last time she’d seen him he’d looked quite different; he’d only been sixteen years old. He’d had even more freckles then, and his crewcut hair had been redder. His name was Blake Redfield. He was a year younger than she was, and he was the closest to her age of all the other students in the original SPARTA.
But she could see that he wasn’t yet sure he recognized her. Unlike the girl she reminded him of, whose hair had been long and brown, Ellen Troy was a dishwater blond; she wore her unremarkable medium light hair in a practical cut, straight and short. Her eyes were blue and her lips were full. But despite these superficial alterations, Ellen’s facial bone structure had not been altered, could not have been safely altered, so to a great extent Ellen still resembled the girl whose name had been Linda.
Luckily Blake Redfield was as bashful as ever, too shy to walk up to a strange woman on the street.
Sparta handed the flower vendor her sliver, took the daffodils, and walked on. She tuned her hearing to Blake’s footsteps, selectively amplifying the distinctive click, click of his heels from the hundreds of other slaps and taps and shuffles that rolled around her. It was essential that she lose him, but in a way that kept him from realizing he’d been seen. Strolling as aimlessly as before, she passed under the arches of the Grand Central Conservatory.
The last time she’d visited the conservatory the scenery was sand and rocks and spiny things, with twisted desert peaks rising in the distance, but the theme this month was tropical. On every side palms and hardwoods reached for the lofty ceiling and lacy draperies of vines and orchids descended. Eastman Kodak’s panoramic hologram extended the jungle view to a distant landscape of mist and waterfalls.
There were a lot of people in the conservatory, but most of them were on the mezzanine looking into the forest galleries from above, or strolling the broad paths that surrounded the central forest. She paused, then walked casually into the trees. The thick mat of leaves on the floor muffled the hoots of monkeys and the screeches of parrots overhead. She’d gone a few steps into the green shadows and then, even without amplification, she could plainly hear Blake’s footsteps on the path behind her.
Another casual turn here, into a narrow path behind a screen of vines as fat and tangled as the tentacles of a giant squid . . . Blake’s footsteps hesitated, but he made the turn and stayed on her trail.