by Vernor Vinge
Today, she got halfway to the east exit without choosing a particular game. She was careful not to touch, much less ride, the mechs. She especially avoided the furry cuddly critters. Except at the exits, “You touch, you pay” was the rule at Pyramid Hill. Maybe she should buy into a game just to shed some of the marketing pressure.
She paused, looked across the hillside. There was lots of noise and action, but if you listened carefully, you could tell that the kids in the bushes were actually playing in other universes, all choreographed so neither players nor equipment would get in each other’s way. She had picked the right cover; classical anime was just too highbrow for these dorks.
“How about Twin Spirits? You only need two physicals for that.”
“Eep!” Miri almost tripped over her jackass. She twisted around, putting the bike between her and the voice. There was a real person, also tricked out in anime costume. Miri dropped down into the true view: Juan Orozco. Talk about bad luck. She had never imagined he would be into classic anime.
She found her voice, a trilly high-pitched English thing that Annette Russell had given her. “Not today, I’m afraid. I’m looking for something grander.”
Orozco—and the spiky-haired critter he presented—cocked his head questioningly. “You’re Miri Gu, aren’t you?”
This was majorly bad etiquette, but what do you expect from a fourteen-year-old loser? “So? I still don’t want to play.” She turned away and pushed her bike along the path. Orozco followed right along. He had a fold-up bike that didn’t get in his way at all.
“You know I’ve teamed with your grandpa in Ms. Chumlig’s Composition class?”
“I knew that.” Boogers! If Juan learned what Miri was up to, then Robert might too. “Have you been tracking me?”
“That’s not against the law!”
“It’s not polite.” She didn’t look at him, just stomped along very quickly.
“I haven’t been watching second-by-second. I just was hoping to run into you, and then I saw you coming in the west gate…” So maybe he had just set up proximity alerts. “You know, your grandpa is trying to help me. Like with my writing. I think I’m getting better at it. And I’m teaching him to wear. But…I feel sorry for him. He seems to be angry all the time.”
Miri kept walking.
“Anyway, I was thinking…if he could get some of his old friends…maybe he would feel better.”
Miri whirled on him. “Are you recruiting?”
“No! I mean, I have an affiliance that could benefit seniors, but that’s not what this is about. Your grandpa is helping me at school, and I want to help him.”
They were coming down the Hill, approaching the east gate. This was the last chance for Pyramid Hill to make money. The closer you got to the gate, the harder the sell, across all Park-supported realities. Furries danced playfully around them, begging to be picked up. The critters were real mechanicals; if you reached out to touch them, you’d find plush, deep fur under your hands, and real heft to their bodies. Near the gate, management wanted to sell these little robots, and a free feel goodbye had swayed thousands of otherwise resistant children. When Miri was younger, she’d bought about one doll a month. Her favorites still played in her bedroom.
She rolled her poor jackass through the crowd, avoiding the talking bears and the miniature Scooch-a-mouts, and the real children. Then they were out the gate. For a moment, Miri fumbled and lost her imagery. Now she was a plain fat girl, and her bike was a dumb machine. Orozco just looked skinny and nervous. He had a shiny new bike, but he couldn’t seem to get it unfolded.
I don’t want him to find out about Lena.
She jabbed a finger at the boy’s chest. “My grandfather is fine. He doesn’t need to be recruited into some payoff scheme. Outside of school, you stay away from him.” She flashed imagery that Annette had created for their Avengers clique. The boy flinched.
“But I just want to help!”
“And furthermore, if I catch you tracking me…” she switched to a deniable mode, a delayed delivery he wouldn’t see for several hours. Anonymous --> Juan Orozco:
Juan’s eyes widened slightly at the sudden silence. He would have some time to stew over what was coming.
It was all empty threat of course; Miri believed in obeying the law, even if she might pretend otherwise.
She ran her bike a couple of steps and hopped on, and almost fell off. Then she recovered and coasted down the hill, away from Orozco.
THE RAINBOWS END retirement community was in a valley northeast of Pyramid Hill. The place was very old and famous. It had been founded sixty years ago, ages before the suburbs ever got out this far. It hit its peak in the early twenty-first century, when a wave of newly rich old people had arrived here.
Miri pedaled along the bike path, doing her best to stay out of everybody’s way. Her guest pass was still valid, but kids were mostly second-class citizens at Rainbows End. When she was young, visiting Lena here, she had thought the village was magical. The real lawns were as beautiful as the fake ones in West Fallbrook. There were real bronze statues. The colonnades and brickwork were real too, finer than all but the most expensive of the shopping malls.
Since then, she had studied senior issues in school—and there was no way to avoid certain cynical conclusions: There was still some real money in Rainbows End, but it was money spent by people who couldn’t do any better. Most of those who remained were living on vapor and biotech promises, unlucky in investment and/or medicine.
Orozco had not tried to follow or cover his tracks; she had traced him eastward. He’d finally gotten his bike unfolded and was pedaling toward the Mesitas subdivision. She watched with narrowed eyes. Could Juan Orozco be the punk who’d briefly hijacked Sharif at UCSD? No way. That had been a loud smart-aleck who insisted on bragging. More important, Mr. Smart-Aleck really was competent, maybe as sharp as Miri herself.
Okay. There were more important things to think about. Lena’s house was at the far end of the second street up. It was time to image and imagine. She had thought a lot about this meeting, thinking all the things she might say, all the sad things she might see. Miri had constructed a special vision. It was based on things she had been working on in some form since the second grade, when she learned the personal significance of “variant-12 intractable osteoporosis.”
First, she made the trees along her path taller and wider, nothing like palms. As she climbed the hill, their high leafiness was replaced by overarching boughs of long-needled evergreens. Of course, Miri didn’t have any physical support for this. She didn’t have game stripes in her shirt; she didn’t have micro-cooling. The sun still beat on her, even if she made the sky overcast and the trees bend low. Maybe she should think of the heat as some sort of spell. She had thought of doing that before, but there were always other improvements that seemed more important. After all the months of daydreaming, this vision was not beholden to any commercial art. It borrowed from a hundred fantasies, but the effect was Miri’s very own, for her concept of Lena. She had not put any of it public. Most visions were much more fun when they were shared, but not this one.
Finally, she lurched to a stop and got off the bike. The last couple hundred feet had to be on foot. There were a few other people around, but in her vision they were unremarkable peasants. She saw the sidewalks and wheelchair ramps as forest paths and mossy, timeworn steps. She stumbled more than once on the inconsistencies, but that seemed only fair for a humble petitioner such as herself.
And then she was in the inner grove. There were occasional side paths, evidence of cabins hidden deeper in the forest. Her trees were very old here, their huge branches high above her head. Miri walked the bike along the ancient path. The people of the inner grove were higher rank—not in the category of Lena, but still powers to be respected. Miri kept her eyes on the ground and hoped that none of them would talk to her.
She
made the final turn, walked another fifty feet, to a wide, timbered cabin. When she looked up, she could see breaks in the tree cover, but they didn’t reveal sky. Instead she was looking up into sun-touched green. The highest crown of the forest canopy stood right above this place. The witchery of witches. The source of elder wisdom. She leaned her bike against the timbers and reached up to hit the massive brass knocker. The sound boomed loud in her ears. She ignored the junky twentieth-century melody that actually played; that was the old doorbell that Lena had brought from Palo Alto.
A moment passed. Miri heard footsteps from within. Footsteps? The huge door creaked inwards, and Miri’s envisioning was confronted with a significant challenge: a woman, not much older-looking than the teachers at school. What are you doing here! Miri stared for a moment, speechless. She rarely hit surprises this big. After a moment she recovered herself and nodded respectfully. “Xiu Xiang?”
“Yes. You’re Miri, aren’t you? Lena’s granddaughter?” She stepped aside and gestured Miri in.
“Um, I didn’t know you’d recognize me.” Miri stepped indoors, imagining madly. Xiu Xiang looked too young to be a real witch. Okay, I’ll make her be Lena’s apprentice, a whatchamagoogle—a newbie witch!
Newbie Xiang smiled. “Lena has shown me pictures of you. We even saw you at school once. Lena told me you would come around, um, sooner or later.”
“So…she’ll see me?”
“I’ll ask her.”
Miri gave a little bow. “Thank you, ma’am.”
Newbie Xiang led Miri to an upholstered chair next to a book-laden desk. “I’ll be right back.”
Miri settled in the chair. Oops. It was hard plastic. As for the desk…well those were real books, the kind some people used for just-in-time reading. The pages were whatever you wanted, but they were real pages. Of course these were not the thick and hoary things of Miri’s imaging, but they were piled deep. There was a view-page on top, very much out of place, and a confession of ineptitude. Miri quickly morphed it into a glowing grimoire. She edged forward in her chair and looked at the books. Mechanics and electrical engineering. These would be Newbie Xiang’s; Miri had studied the background of all the students in Robert’s classes. The box of toys under the desk must be things she had built in shop class. Miri recognized the warped transport tray from the news.
What an incredible coincidence that Xiu Xiang was rooming with Lena…
There were sounds behind her. The inner door was opening. It was Newbie Xiang, with the senior witch right behind her. Miri was ready with imagery for this. Lena’s real chair had six small wheels on articulated axles, very practical and dull. But Mistress Gu’s chair had tall wooden wheels, sheathed in silver, and canted outward. Little blue sparks chased each other around the rims as it moved. And Miri imaged Lena dressed in heavy black, a black that absorbed the room’s light in the classical magical way. A black that obscured the details of what it clothed. Lena’s pointy, brimmed hat was hung jauntily from the chair’s high backpost. And that was where Miri’s special effects ended. The rest she always kept the way that Lena really was. In fact, all her vision was to give her grandmother the proper frame, one that would reveal how wonderful she truly was.
The senior witch looked Miri up and down and then said, “Didn’t Bob tell you to let me be?” But she didn’t sound as angry as Miri had feared.
“Yes. But I miss you so much.”
“Oh.” She leaned forward slightly. “How is your mom, Miri? Is she okay?”
“Alice is fine.” Lena knew way too much about Alice, but she had no need-to-know. Besides, she couldn’t help Alice. “I wanted to talk to you about some other things.”
Mistress Gu sighed, and closed her deep-set eyes. When she opened them, she might have been smiling. “Well, I’m glad to see you, kiddo. It’s just that I don’t want to argue with you or Bob. And most of all, I don’t want You-Know-Who to know that I’m still around.”
“I’ll only argue a little bit, Lena.” As much as will make positive headway and still leave me welcome to come visit again. “You don’t have to worry about You-Know-Who.” Mistress Gu’s own wording was straight out of fantasy tradition, though it was sad that Robert should be cast as ultimate evil. “I promise I won’t reveal you to him.” At least, not without your permission. “I took precautions coming here. Besides, You-Know-Who is no good at snooping.”
Lena shook her head. “That’s what you think.”
Newbie Xiang sat down beside the wheelchair and watched them silently. Maybe she could help. “You see You-Know-Who every day, don’t you, ma’am?” Miri said.
“Yes,” said Xiang, “in shop class and Louise Chumlig’s Search and Analysis.”
“Ms. Chumlig’s not so bad”—at least for the bonehead classes. Miri was fast enough to squelch the additional comment, but she felt herself blush even so.
Newbie Xiang didn’t seem to notice. “In fact, she’s quite good. I’ve been telling Lena.” She glanced at the senior witch. “Louise knows things about asking questions that took me a lifetime to understand. And more than anyone, she’s shown me the importance of analysis packages.” She pointed at the old grimoire. Miri was a little taken aback. Yes, Ms. Chumlig was a nice person, but she was full of clichés, and she droned.
But even a junior witch is not someone you contradict, and Miri was very anxious to be congenial. She dipped her head, “Yes, ma’am. Anyway, you see a lot of You-Know-Who. Is he really such a terrible person?”
Xiu Xiang shook her head. “He is strange. He looks so young. Robert—I mean ‘You-Know-Who’—can be very gracious, and then suddenly cut you dead. I’ve seen him do that to several children. The old people steer clear of him. I think Winston Blount hates him.”
Yes. Miri had watched Winston Blount in the UCSD library last Saturday. Most of her attention had been absorbed in the battle for the persona of Zulfikar Sharif, but she had not missed Blount’s hostility.
Newbie Xiang glanced at the frail lady in the wheelchair. “I’m afraid Lena is right about him. He uses people. He admired my shop project and then walked off with it.”
Lena cackled. That was something an elderly person could do well. In Miri’s opinion it was the only positive thing about old age. “Xiu, Xiu. You told me you were thrilled to see him chop that car.”
Newbie Xiang looked embarrassed. “Well, yes. I got into science with model rockets and homemade RF controllers. I’d have been nothing without hands-on experience. Nowadays, our access to real things is muffled by layers of automated bureaucracy—and I guess my own SHE is partly to blame. So both Robert and I wanted to break something, and I cheered him for acting. But what I wanted was of no concern to him. I was just a convenient tool.”
Lena laughed again. “You’re so lucky. You learned in days what took me years.” She raised a clawed hand to wipe at her hair. Modern medicine had not completely failed Lena Gu. Five years ago she’d had Parkinson’s. Miri remembered the tremors. Modern medicine had reversed her Parkinson’s, kept her mind sharp, stopped various ills large and small. But her abnormal osteoporosis was still beyond cure. As far back as the second grade, Miri had been able to understand the technical “why” of that. The moral “why” was something even Alice couldn’t explain.
Miri looked into the wizened face of the senior witch. “I-I’m glad it took you years to see through You-Know-Who. Otherwise you two would never have had Bob and raised him to marry Alice…and I would never be.”
Lena looked away. “Yes,” she grumped. “Bobby was the only reason I stayed with your grandfather. We gave Bobby a good home. And he was halfway human with the boy, at least till it was clear he couldn’t run Bob’s adult life. By that time, Bob had escaped to the Marine Corps.” Her gaze flickered back to Miri. “I congratulate myself on that. I made a terrible mistake marrying your grandfather, but it brought two lovely lives into existence—and it only cost me twenty years.”
“Don’t you ever miss him?”
Mistress Gu’s eyes
narrowed. “That’s coming perilously close to arguing with me, young lady.”
“Sorry.” Miri came over to kneel on the floor beside Lena’s wheelchair. She reached out to hold Lena’s hand. The old woman smiled. She knew what was coming, but she didn’t have completely effective defenses. “You had all those years apart from him. I remember you visiting, back when You-Know-Who was well and never visited.” Even then, Lena had been a little old lady, a busy doctor who smiled the most when she was talking to Miri. “Were you happy then?”
“Of course! After all those years, I was free of the monster!”
“But when You-Know-Who began to lose his mind, then you helped him.”
Lena rolled her eyes and looked at Newbie Xiang. “When I say the word, you kick this brat back on the street.”
Xiang looked uncertain. “Um, okay.”
“But that’s not…just yet.” Lena looked back at Miri. “We’ve been over this ground before, Miri. Bob came here to Rainbows End and begged me to help. Remember? He brought you along with him. Bob has never understood how things were between Robert and me. God bless him, he doesn’t realize that all the affection he saw was just for him. But between his pleading and your cute little face, I agreed to help out with the monster’s final years…And you know, sometimes dementia softens a person up. There was a year or so, when Robert was nearly helpless, but he could still recognize people and remember our years together—there was a time when he was tractable. We actually got along for a while!”
Miri nodded.
“And then they figured how to cure Robert’s brand of dementia. By then your grandfather had declined from tractability into a kind of veggie state. Miri, I would have stuck with him through the end if there hadn’t been the miracle cure. But I could see what was coming. The monster would be back.” Lena punched a crooked finger in her granddaughter’s direction. “Burn me once, shame on him. Burn me twice, shame on me. So I stay out of the picture. Understand?”