Doctor Who_ Blue Box - Kate Orman [99]
Maybe that’s how the story goes.
So where are they now?
Bob’s out there riding the new frontier. ‘Power,’ he explains, ‘is something you can borrow. The alchemists knew it. The first cavemen who stuck horns on their heads were trying to borrow the power of the animals.’ He knows from first-hand experience as sysop that the law isn’t interested in people breaking into computers; that’s fantasy land. They want real breakins to investigate. All that computing power is there for the taking.
So Bob skips from system to system inside the growing network. There’s a chart on the wall of his office; every few weeks he finds a new computer that’s been caught in that giant fisherman’s net. He’s still his dad’s good little boy, kind of: he never breaks anything and he never takes anything. He just travels, late at night when no-one’s using the machines, following the route traced out by the blinking cursor, mapping the human race’s brave new world. Like Dean Moriarty, he only steals cars to take joyrides. To him, the network is like a single, huge computer.
Somewhere in safekeeping – he wouldn’t tell me where –
he has the Eridani’s remote control device. The Doctor handed it over to him, he said, in case the Eridani ever decide to visit Earth again. One day Bob hopes to be a sysop for NASA.
Mondy is now working somewhere in the telco. Heaven help us.
You know where Swan eventually ended up. She vanished from the rest home about a month after the Doctor and I paid our visit. The contacts I now have at the theme restaurant helped me track her down at the Bainbridge Hospital. I’ve been officially denied permission to visit her three times. Luis managed to escape the CIA’s attentions and is being cared for by his family in Puebla. I’m told they both have lucid periods, as though waking up out of a long sleep; they can speak and write and seem quite normal, if a little slow and distant. On the anniversary of our last meeting, I ordered some flowers for both of them, over the net.
Peri had been ready to give up the ride and wade back to shore. But somewhere along the way, she changed her mind.
Maybe it happened all at once when she paced my apartment, knowing she ought to be by his side; maybe she got there in a lot of little steps. In any case, I reckon she’s going to keep holding on loosely.
The day she and the Doctor left, I visited them at the hotel.
For the first time, I got to see the Doctor in his ‘ordinary’
clothes. The black suit was gone. Instead, he was wearing the coat I had glimpsed in the hotel closet – an old-fashioned coat that came down to the tops of his calves, big lapels, big pockets. One lapel was orange and the other was pink, with a Bill the Cat badge pinned to it. All those patches – tartan, red, big blue and white checks – made it look as though it had been repaired over centuries by a dynasty of blind seamstresses.
Somehow I could imagine him trekking through the dust of Nepal or Morocco or even striding up Tottenham Court Road, looking utterly unselfconscious even as the natives stared. Customs officers and government ministers would take him seriously. No-one else could have got away with it. ‘What seems extraordinary in one place seems utterly ordinary in another,’ he pronounced. ‘What’s fashionable in one era seems ludicrous in another.’
‘Yeah, and disco’s gonna make a comeback,’ I said. He just raised an eyebrow at me.
I waited with him and Peri in the lobby, while the concierge ordered them a taxi to take them back to their boat.
They looked comfortable