was awash with strange lights, with an aurora borealis brought down to ground
level. Those sleazy streets had a certain mystery and cheap allure after dark,
in the fog, but not if you’d seen them in daylight first and remembered what you
had seen.
In the Mercedes, Einstein was waiting patiently.
“Couldn’t arrange to have you turned into a poodle, after all,” Nora told him as
she buckled her seat belt. “But we sure did ourselves up right. Einstein, say
hello to Sam Hyatt and Nora Aimes.”
The retriever put his head over the front seat, looked at her, looked at
Travis, and snorted once as if to say they could not fool him, that he knew who
they were.
To Travis, Nora said, “Your antiterrorist training . . . is that where you
learned about places like Hot Tips, people like Van Dyne? Is that where
terrorists get new ID once they slip into the country?”
“Yeah, some go to people like Van Dyne, though not usually. The Soviets supply
papers for most terrorists. Van Dyne services mostly ordinary illegal
immigrants, though not the poor ones, and criminal types looking to dodge arrest
warrants.”
As he started the car, she said, “But if you could find Van Dyne, maybe the
people looking for us can find him.”
“Maybe. It’ll take them a while, but maybe they can.”
“Then they’ll find out all about our new identities.”
“No,” Travis said. He turned on the defroster and the windshield wipers to clear
the condensation off the outside of the glass. “Van Dyne wouldn’t keep records.
He doesn’t want to be caught with proof of what he does. If the authorities ever
tumble to him and go in there with search warrants, they won’t find anything in
Van Dyne’s computers except the accounting and purchasing records for Hot Tips.”
As they drove through the city, heading for the Golden Gate Bridge, Nora stared
in fascination at the people in the streets and in other cars, not just in the
Tenderloin but in every neighborhood through which they passed. She wondered how
many of them were living under the names and identities with which they had been
born and how many were changelings like her and Travis.
“In less than three hours, we’ve been totally remade,” she said.
“Some world we live in, huh? More than anything else, that’s what high
technology means—maximum fluidity. The whole world is becoming ever more fluid,
malleable. Most financial transactions are now handled with electronic money
that flashes from New York to L.A.—or around the world— in seconds. Money
crosses borders in a blink; it no longer has to be smuggled out past the guards.
Most records are kept in the form of electrical charges that only computers
read. So everything’s fluid. Identities are fluid. The past is fluid.”
Nora said, “Even the genetic structure of a species is fluid these days.”
Einstein woofed agreement.
Nora said, “Scary, isn’t it?”
“A little,” Travis said as they approached the light-bedecked southern entrance
to the fog-mantled Golden Gate Bridge, which was all but invisible in the mist.
“But maximum fluidity is basically a good thing. Social and financial fluidity
guarantee freedom. I believe—and I hope—that we’re heading toward an age when
the role of governments will inevitably dwindle, when there’ll be no way to
regulate and control people as thoroughly as was possible in the past.
Totalitarian governments won’t be able to stay in power.”
“How so?”
“Well, how can a dictatorship control its citizens in a high-tech society of
maximum fluidity? The only way is to refuse to allow high tech to intrude,
seal the borders, and live entirely in an earlier age. But that’d be national
suicide for any country that tried it. They couldn’t compete. In a few decades,
they’d be modern aborigines, primitive by the standards of the civilized
high-tech world. Right now, for instance, the Soviets try to restrict computers
to their defense industry, which can’t last. They’ll have to computerize their
entire economy and teach their people to use computers—and then how can they
keep the screws tight when their citizens have been given the means to
manipulate the system and foil its controls on them?”