Resonance

Chapter 10. Killing Time

  I spent the rest of the afternoon at the library, which was really neat. You could browse the stacks virtually, from one of the comfortable chairs outside by the fireplace or one of the comfortable chairs inside in the main reading room, just by pressing a button in the chair arm. If you touched a virtual book, it would float off the virtual shelf and would open in front of you, and you could look into it and decide whether you wanted it. You just touched another button on the arm of the chair, and the book would come sliding out of a slot next to you. You could get any book in the world, I think, at least any book I was able to think of, and I had a great time looking through a lot of terrific old books that my Dad had, that had belonged to my grandfather—Ernest Thomson Seton, the Hardy Boys, Heinlein—it was great.

  The food was great too. When I got back to the common room, I saw another guy getting a tray out of like a pass-through or a dumbwaiter on the wall, so I went over to it, but it was just a featureless box. He saw me looking bewildered and came back and told me how it worked.

  "Just say what you want," he said. "It's like the replicators on Star Trek. Well, it isn't really, but it works the same way. Don't forget the beverage."

  He went away again, back to the table he'd put his tray on, I guess so as not to embarrass me by watching.

  I thought about what I felt like and finally said softly into the box, "Hamburger, medium rare, on a ciabatta roll, no, make it a cheeseburger with Monterey Jack. Ketchup, lettuce, tomato, pickles. Fries—medium fries. A beer—Sam Adams." I wondered if it would ask for ID. "And some oatmeal raisin cookies."

  I waited, and there it was. There was no transition—the box was empty, then in the blink of an eye the tray was sitting in it with the food I'd ordered. I took the tray and turned to look at the guy who'd helped me. He appeared to be absorbed in a book, and he hadn't asked me to join him, so I felt no obligation to do so.

  I carried my dinner over to a chair facing the plasma screen and unloaded the tray onto a little table.

  The guy looked up from his book. "You can put the tray with your dishes back into the slot when you're finished," he said. "There's a remote on that table if you want to watch a DVD. It won't bother me if you do."

  "Thanks," I said, and he turned back to his book. When I clicked Power on the remote, a large menu of films came up on the screen. I spent a very enjoyable couple of hours watching Gattaca again and then went up to bed. I was tired enough to fall asleep fast, without doing a whole lot of thinking.

  The next morning after I got up and showered and dressed, I had bacon and eggs and whole-grain toast. The bread was homemade, I think, like the ciabatta roll the night before, and was really almost as good as my mom's.

  Then I went back up to brush my teeth and dawdled as much as I could in the room, which had turned into a space a lot like the cabin at the lake only facing into the woods. Finally I decided it was time to go see Simon.

  I hesitated for a moment outside his door, but really I'd already made the decision to talk to him, so I went ahead and knocked. The door opened by itself, and I heard Simon's voice from the porch.

  "Come on in, get changed, and join me," he called, so I did. When I got out to the porch he was just finishing his breakfast, so I hadn't kept him waiting at all.

  "Do you drink coffee?" he asked, getting up, "and if so, would you like some, and if so, what do you put in it?"

  "Yes, yes, and just some milk," I said.

  He picked up an insulated pitcher and two mugs. "You bring the milk," he said. We went back down to the chairs on the beach and he poured coffee into the two mugs. The pitcher seemed to be full, although I was pretty sure he'd been drinking coffee with his breakfast. Maybe it was a magic coffee pot that could never run dry.

  He drank some coffee and looked over at me and raised his eyebrows.

  "Oh," I said. "Okay. Um, Uncle Will's dad died just before Cammie was born, so Shep and I and Cammie never knew him." I told him about the cabin, and then about Shep and me being up there. And then I told him.