But none of that was any use to me. I left my systems trying to make the call to Tom, while I set off more search agents to book a flight.

The cost of a plane ticket to Siberia, even one way, was frightening. In 2047 nobody flew, nobody but the very rich and very important, or if you really had to. It was cheaper to orbit the Earth in a tourist-bucket spaceplane than to fly the Atlantic. Tom, working for his genetic-legacy agency, had traveled out by cruise ship, taking weeks to crawl around the polar ocean, a way of traveling with a much smaller environmental footprint. But that would be too slow for me. The flight to Florida had already cleaned me out, but what else could I do?

Of course booking the ticket was only half the battle. Actually being deemed worthy of a seat came next. The booking system referred me to the airline’s counseling service, a man’s voice sounding older than me, fatherly, stern. “Let’s work out why you really want to fly.”

“My son is hurt!”

“Flying is a generational aspiration, you know. In your youth you probably flew many times, as did your parents. But then you indulged in many unhealthy pursuits in those days. That doesn’t mean you should carry on now.”

“I don’t want to fly. I just want to get there.”

“Is it possible that what you really want is a flight, not to Siberia, but to your past? Is it possible it is not a destination you seek but an escape, a release from the responsibilities of the present?…” And so on.

My phone was implanted; you couldn’t muffle over the handset and say what you really thought. So I let off steam by pacing around the room as this virtual Freud lectured me about the necessity for the “hidden extras” I would be paying for, in terms of environmental-damage costs, and compensation for communities I would disrupt with the noise of the plane, and even clean-up taxes relating to the disposal of the aircraft itself a few years down the line. It was all part of the social-responsibility package the airlines had had to accept years before, to keep flying at all. But it was difficult to wade through.

“I don’t have to justify anything about my relationship with my son to you,” I snapped back.

“Not to me,” the empathist said. “Not to the airline, or even your son. To yourself, Michael.”

“No,” I insisted. “There are times when we need to be with people. It’s a deep primate thing.” I was having trouble keeping my voice steady. “It’s part of my programming, I guess. You ought to understand that.”

“But your son has stated, on record, that he doesn’t need to be with you. ”

Tom had said that, and it wasn’t helping my application. “A child’s whole life after about the age of ten is devoted to establishing his independence from his parents. And in our case our relationship has been particularly strained ever since the death of his mother, in childbirth. Even you must have figured that out.”

“Yes, I—”

You don’t interrupt airline psychoanalytical machines, but I interrupted. “But we need each other. We’re all we’ve got. Tom’s words are only the surface. It’s what we feel underneath that counts. And if you aren’t a complete waste of memory you’ll understand that…” You aren’t supposed to insult the shrink machines either. But I meant everything I said.

I had been with Morag when she died, on that grisly hospital table. And at that instant I had wanted nothing else in the world, nothing, but to be with Tom; it had been as if a steel cable had been lodged in my gut and was dragging me to him. But of course everything quickly became complicated. Tom was only eight; he was too young to deal with his own grief, let alone my own. And in the months that followed, as he watched me sinking into myself, some particle of his mixed-up feelings transmuted into resentment. That awful time had shaped our relationship ever since.

“But that deep feeling remains,” I told the airline machine. “The tie. And I believe that’s true for Tom, too, even if he doesn’t want to admit it. To every action there’s an equal and opposite reaction. Newton’s third law.”

“But, you see, Mr. Poole, that overanalytical remark merely illustrates what I have been saying…”

John came to the door. He leaned against the frame, hands in pockets, watching me pacing. “I wouldn’t do that,” he said. “The counselor can probably detect your motion. A dissonance between your body posture and your words is a real giveaway.”

“I feel like I’m wading through cotton wool.”

He shrugged. “That’s the modern world. Energy-deprived. Constrained.” He stepped forward. “Let me help.” He reached out his finger toward my ear, my implant.

I flinched; I couldn’t help it.

For once John seemed to understand. “What’s more important, sibling rivalry, or getting through to Tom? Let me win this one.”

I nodded. He touched my face, just in front of my ear, and I felt a slight electric shock as his systems interfaced with mine. He took over my calls, and with a few soft words transferred them to his company in New York.

It took only five minutes or so for his company’s systems to come back with a reply. John, standing easily in the corner of my bedroom, turned to me regretfully. Not even John’s powerful reach could cut through the mush into which a sector of the global communications net had melted, so he couldn’t put me in touch with Tom, and he hadn’t had much more joy with the flights. “No availability until the middle of next week.”

“Next week? Jesus. But—”

He held up his hand. “I can get you a VR projection in twenty-four hours. I think it’s the best we can do, Michael.”

I thought that over. “OK. How much?”

“Let me cover it.”

“No,” I snapped reflexively.

He seemed to suppress a sigh. “Come on, Michael. He’s my nephew as well as your son. Lethe, I can afford it. And you don’t know what you might need your money for in the future.”

I conceded this second defeat. “OK,” I said. “But, John, I still don’t know if he’s alive or dead. I don’t even know that much.” I hated to ask him for more help like this. But he was right. Better to let him win; what did it matter?

He nodded. “I’ll keep trying to get through. Leave it with me.” He walked out to his own room, talking quietly to his own implant.

It was still only ten P.M., too early to try to sleep. I wandered downstairs, where my mother was sitting with the children, watching VR images of a mountainous landscape. “Non-immersive, you’ll notice,” my mother said to me. “Immersion’s bad for them so close to bedtime.”

I told them the news, or nonnews, about Tom. When my mother heard that John was helping me out, she wrapped her thin bird’s-talons fingers around her cup of tea, and raised it to her lips for a cautious sip. She looked satisfied, though she was too smart to say so openly. After we left home she had always tried to encourage her sons to have a close relationship, to keep in touch; she had even tried to engineer ways for that to happen. And even now, even in this awful time when it was possible that her grandson lay dying somewhere, she was calculating how to exploit this latest shift in our relationship.

I watched the VR images with the kids for a while. They were holiday pictures, of a trip the kids had taken with their father, up into the Rockies. It was a beautiful place where whitewater rapids that tumbled into limpid pools, and doll-like VR manifestations of the kids clambered past sheer rocky walls. I remembered some spectacular vacations we had had as kids, when my parents had taken us to the Galapagos Islands, Australia, the African game parks — places full of exotic life-forms that had astounded and excited me. But nobody went in search of wildlife anymore, because it wasn’t there to be found. There were still beautiful places in the world, where rich people went to vacation, but they were inanimate, like this, landscapes of rock and water.