The Face

Even the gray-shaded keys were in the state intended by the manufacturer. By comparison to the surroundings, the keyboard was a riot of color.
        Ethan called forth data exactly as he would have done for Lines 1 through 23, using the computer in his study. He wanted to know how many calls Line 24 had received in the past forty-eight hours.
        He had been told that five or six messages were received each week on Line 24. Most were wrong numbers or cold-call sales pitches.
        The list of Monday and Tuesday calls appeared with the latest count at the head of the column: fifty-six. Ten weeks’ worth had been received in two days.
        He’d been aware that Line 24 was carrying higher than usual traffic, but he hadn’t realized that it was being hit more than once per hour, on average.
        The temperature in this talk-to-the-dead zone was with great effort maintained always at sixty-eight degrees, a figure from Ming’s original dream. This evening, the air felt colder than sixty-eight.
        Scrolling through the phone log, Ethan saw that every one of the fifty-six entries lacked an incoming-caller number. This meant that none of them were from sales operations, which were now required by law to forego Caller ID blocking.
        Maybe some were wrong-number calls made by people who did have Caller ID blocking. Maybe. But he would have bet everything he owned against that proposition. These calls had come from a place where the phone company couldn’t offer service.
        At the bottom of the log, he highlighted the most recent entry, the call received while he had been downstairs in his study, trying to make sense of ladybugs, snails, and foreskins.
        Boxed options appeared in the upper right corner of the screen. He could receive a printout of the call transcript; he could read the transcript on the screen; or he could listen to the call.
        He chose to listen.
        If the call was like the one to which he’d bent his ear for nearly thirty [529] minutes the previous night, an open line full of hiss and pop woven through with a faint voice half-imagined and not at all understood, he would hear something better from this equipment. The computerized audio analyzer filtered out static, identified patterned sounds that fit the profile of speech, clarified and enhanced that speech, and finally eliminated gaps in order to condense the call to its essence before storing it.
        Caller 56 still sounded as though she cried out from a great distance, across an abyss. Her fragile voice made him lean forward in his chair, afraid that he would lose it. Nevertheless, because of the computer enhancement, he could hear every word spoken, though the message puzzled him.
        The voice was Hannah’s.

CHAPTER 85
        
        IN HIS MIND’S EAR, CORKY LAPUTA LISTENED TO Richard Wagner’s Die Walküre, particularly to the music meant to portray the flight of the Valkyries.
        Through the drizzle and fog, through the windless Bel Air, the mad Queeg’s miniblimp sailed as smoothly as one dream melting into another.
        The swish and sizzle of the rain entirely masked what noise the battery-powered propellers made, so that it seemed as though Corky and his sour-faced pilot journeyed in utter silence, without sough or bated billow. Neither the sun nor the moon could claim a quieter ascent and transit of the sky.
        Suspended under the airship, the open gondola was similar to a rowboat, but with rounded stern and prow. The two bench-style seats were capable of accommodating four.
        Facing forward, Trotter sat at the yoke on the bench nearer the stern. He was immediately in front of the engine, the helium feed, and the other controls.
        At first Corky faced Trotter, looking back the way they had come. Then he turned to look forward, frequently leaning out to one side or the other to spot landmarks through the misty murk.
        [531] Treetops slid by only a few feet below them. Casting no faintest shadow in the absence of the moon and stars, they progressed with such stealth and with such minimal disturbance to the air that birds in the highest branches, sheltering from the rain, were not once frightened into flight.
        This wealthy community had been built in a forest of oak and ficus and evergreen, of metrosideros and podocarpus and California pepper. More accurately, a forest had been imported to dress these hills, glens, and canyons, which