Read Online Slant by Greg Bear - Free Book Online Page A

Taiwan, fully half the Affected--those who are politically active, who bother to work and vote and believe they can change things, and who are tied in to temp agencies and employed in the hot and open marketplace--are transforms. In Los Angeles,
    nearly a third... And in San Francisco, almost two thirds.
    Here, a mere five percent.
    She reaches the gaping entrance of the Tillicum Tower. Winds swirl and Mary clutches her small gray hat as she passes into the orange and yellow and jungled warmth of the tower court. Several sunlike globes hang over the broad indoor plaza. Tailored birds twitter and screech in the massive tropical trees that entwine the inner buttresses. She might be in a corporate vision of Amazon heaven, with glassed-in rivers to right and left, graceful plant-cabled bridges arching between the floors overhead, and everywhere the adwalls targeting their paid consumers, their messages barely aglimmer on the edge of Mary's senses. She has never subscribed to adwalls, considers their presence an invitation to subtle slavery to those economic forces she has long since learned never to trust.
    The paid consumers, however, thrive, feel connected, bathed in information about everything they can imagine. They stand transfixed as new ads lock on and deluge them.
    Mary guesses at what one couple is experiencing, in the shadow of a huge spreading banyan. They are in their mid-twenties, pure comb sweethearts, contracted for pre-nups but definitely not life bonders, playing for the moment while they take LitVid eds and gain status with their temp agency. Both are likely clients to the same organization--Workers Inc, she judges from the cut of their frills. They are being hit by sophisticated material, dense and frenetic, catering to all the accepted vividities--sex within relationships, domesticity, corporate adventure, insider thrills. These they will admit to enjoying, and discuss, in public. The male of the pair, Mary specks, will secretly tune in to the massive TouchFlow SexYule celebration next week--and the female will likely stew in whole-life hormoaners for hours each day.
    Yox siphons twenty percent of the total economy, even here in her beloved Corridor. LitVid (more often in the last few years divided into Lit and Vid), older and more traditional, takes a mere and declining seventeen.
    She is up a helix lift, the broad steps resembling solid marble but reshaping with the fluidity of water; she climbs through the quaint delights of the farmers' market on 4, spiraling up through the stacked circular substructures of the clubs and social circles of 5 and 6, above the tallest trees of the courtyard, and all around, coming in dizzying sweeps, the hundred-acre open spaces of the comb--a lake to the north, where children boat and swim, and adolescents
    / SLANT 45
    V[ry admires the architecture and feels her familiar protective warmth for the comb players, but she is not of them; she was not born of them, would not be considered acceptable social or sexual fodder, and is even handicapped by being new in the Corridor. That is the Corridor's greatest failing: a deep and abiding suspicion of the outsiders who come to live and work here. This is not racism or even classism; it is pure provincialism, remarkable where so much data and rney flows. The helix takes her above the open spaces, and she is within the inmost heart of the tower. Free community art here dances from the walls, lively and colorful, conservative enough that it appeals to Mary. Collages of flight, birds and free-form aerodynes, and on the opposite side, hundreds of smiling faces of children, all surrounding an astonishingly moving ideal of a Mother, with eyes half-closed in tender motherly ecstasy... She remembers E. Hassida's portraits of women, equally moving but in different ways. Glassed-in floors pass, pierced by interior residential blocks, the cheapest of a very expensive selection, like milky rhomboid crystals glued to the walls of the shafts and