"What"s the matter with you tonight, Jer?"
His wife always called him Jer. She was the only one he allowed to do that.
"Nothing."
"Jer, I know there"s something wrong. Whenever you got something on your mind, you stare out of the window. Like you"re the guardian of the city."
Dani Lane moved up behind him and draped her arms around his neck; her fingers followed a lazy circle over his chest.
"Not really," he insisted.
"Is it something at work?"
Lane knew she wouldn"t give up, so he turned around to face her. He slipped his arms around her waist and drew her closer into him saying, "Okay, okay. There was this citizen pickup a couple of days back. We talked on the way into the facility."
Dani smiled.
"And?"
"He was frightened to go back into the program."
"So what? I bet there are citizens out there in the same situation.
What makes him any different?"
"He couldn"t remember his date of birth."
She shrugged.
"So?"
"Well, it"s not the type of thing you forget, is it?"
"Suppose not." She kissed him on the mouth and broke free of his embrace. She moved across to a small table and helped herself to a cup of tea. It smelted of lemon.
Lane followed her and retrieved his drink, "Or about the Year of the Storm. The year that changed all our lives when solar storms shut down all the computers.
It knocked the Millennium bug into a c.o.c.ked-hat."
Dani lifted the cup to her lips, eyeing him above the rim. She knew all this and didn"t need a lecture.
"You"re going somewhere with this?"
Now it was his turn to smile.
"And he knew nothing about the City."
"What about it?"
"Why the walls went back up after hundreds of years." Lane crossed to an easy chair and lowered himself into it.
"In fact, he was quite ignorant about a lot of things that you and I take for granted."
"Why has this affected you? What"s so special about the boy?"
Lane said, "He"s perhaps the fifth or sixth citizen I"ve picked up in the last eight weeks who seems to have trouble with his memory."
"A coincidence?" Dani suggested.
Lane shook his head.
"Then what?"
*"I don"t know," he replied honestly.
"It might be something, or it might be nothing."
"That"s the old policeman in you coming out, Jer," she said softly.
"You"re not in that line of work anymore.
You"re with BIC, remember?"
"Yeah, no need to remind me."
"You"re still not bitter that I got Dad to get you out of that dead-end job, are you?"
Ah, not the same old argument, he thought. She always threw that up into his face at every opportunity.
It was Burke Foster, his father-in-law, who had been instrumental in getting him out of the police force and landing him the job at BIC.
"No," he said.
"Perhaps curiosity gets the better of me sometimes."
"You know what curiosity did, don"t you?"
"Yeah, but I"ve got a feeling in my bones about this." He crossed over to the window again but leaned against the gla.s.s, his back to the City.
"What if someone, somewhere, is monkeying around with us?"
"In what way?" Dani sat upright, paying attention.
"Say that they could adjust people"s memories. Like they can do with our own biometrics."
She blinked and looked at him.
"That"s a touch melodramatic, isn"t it?"
"Is it? Just think about it for a minute. If we can put our own DNA, eye-dentification, fingerprints, geometry, and whatever else into a computer system, what"s stopping the computer putting something into our biological system?"
She said, "So that they can control our thoughts, you reckon?"
"No, not control--more like deselect them."
"Okay, but what does whoever get out of this?"
Lane shrugged.
"I don"t know- Don"t know even if I"m right."