Wonders of the Invisible World Read Free Page B

man, Durham. You should have your unconscious scanned.”
    “I like it the way it is: a bubbling little morass of unpredictable metaphors.”
    “They aren’t unpredictable,” I said. “They’re completely predictable. Everything imaginable is accessible, and everything accessible has been imagined by the Virtual computer, which has already researched every kind of imaginative thought since the first bison got painted on a rock. That way nothing like what happened in Cotton Mather’s time can happen to us. So—”
    “Wonders of the Invisible World,” Durham interrupted. He hadn’t heard a word. “It’s a book by Mather. He was talking about angels and demons. We would think of the invisible in terms of atomic particles. Both are unseen yet named, and immensely powerful—”
    “Oh, stop. You’re mixing atoms and angels. One exists, the other doesn’t.”
    “That’s what I’m trying to get at, Nici—the point where existence is totally immaterial, where the passion, the belief in something creates a situation completely ruled by the will to believe.”
    “That’s insanity.”
    He smiled again, cheerfully. He tended to change his appearance according to what he was researching; he wore a shimmering bodysuit that showed all his muscles, and milk-white hair. Except for the bulky build of his face and the irreverence in his eyes, he might have been Mather’s angel. My more androgynous face worked better. “Maybe,” he said. “But I find the desire, the passion, coupled with the accompanying imagery, fascinating.”
    “You are a throwback,” I muttered. “You belong to some barbaric age when people imagined things to kill each other for.” The computer flashed a light; I breathed a sigh of relief. Durham got his tape, and the computer’s analysis; I retrieved my license.
    “Next time—” Durham began.
    “There won’t be a next time.” I headed for the door. “I’m sick of appearing as twisted pieces of people’s imagination. And one of these days I’m going to find myself in court.”
    “But you do it so well,” he said softly. “You even convince the Terminus computer.”
    I glared at him. “Just leave me alone.”
    “All right,” he said imperturbedly. “Don’t call me, I’ll call you.”
    I was tired, but I took the tube-walk home, to get the blood moving in my feet, and to see some light and color after that bleak, dangerous world. The moving walkway, encased in its clear tube, wound up into the air, balanced on its centipede escalator and station legs. I could see the gleaming city domes stretch like a long cluster of soap bubbles toward the afternoon sun, and I wondered that somewhere within the layers of time in this place there was a small port town on the edge of a vast, unexplored continent where Mather had flung himself down on his floorboards and prayed an angel out of himself.
    He could see an angel here without praying for it. He could be an angel. He could soar into the eye of God if he wanted, on wings of gold and light. He could reach out, even in the tube-walk, punch in a credit number, plug into his implant or his wrist controls, and activate the screen above his head. He could have any reality on the menu, or any reality he could dream up, since everything imagined and imaginable and every combination of it had been programmed into the Virtual computer. And then he could walk out of the station into his living room and change the world all over again.
    I had to unplug Brock when I got home; he had fallen asleep at the terminal. He opened heavy eyelids and yawned.
    “Hi, Matrix.”
    “Don’t call me that,” I said mechanically. He grinned fleetingly and nestled deeper into the bubble-chair. I sat down on the couch and pulled my boots off again. It was warm, in this time; I finally felt it. Brock asked,
    “What were you?”
    Even he knew Durham that well. “An angel.”
    “What’s that?”
    “Look it up.”
    He touched the controls on his wrist absently. He