Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

  Robert Gu, Sr., was pacing the windowless room like a caged teenager. You’d never guess he’d recently had one leg crushed and the other fractured; the docs were good at fixing that kind of thing. As for the rest, well, his burns were hidden by medical pajamas.

  The old man’s gaze snapped up as Bob came in the room, but his words were more desperate than angry. “Son! Is Miri okay?”

  Eve --> Bob: Speak up, Colonel. You can tell him everything about your daughter.

  “…Miri is fine, Dad.” He waved at the plush chairs by the table at the side of the suite.

  But the old man just kept bouncing around the room. “Thank God, thank God. The last I remember was the heat and lava crawling toward her.” He looked down at his pajamas, and suddenly seemed very distracted by what he saw.

  “You’re at Crick’s in La Jolla, Dad. Miri wasn’t hurt in the fire. Your left arm was pretty much destroyed.” The flesh had burned down to the bone in places, burned all the way through the lower forearm.

  Robert Senior touched the loose sleeve. “Yes, the doctors told me.” He turned and dropped into one of the chairs. “That’s about all they’ve told me. You’re sure Miri’s okay? You saw her?”

  The old man never behaved like this. There was strain all around his eyes. Or maybe he’s just reacting to the look on my face. Bob sat down across from this father. “I’ve seen her. I’ll be talking to her later this afternoon. Her worst problem is some mental confusion about what happened in the labs.”

  “Oh.” Then more softly. “Oh.” He sat mulling the news, and then he was fidgeting again. “How long have I been out? There’s so much you need to know, Bob…Maybe you should get some of your law-enforcement buddies in here.”

  Eve --> Bob: So he doesn’t remember the debrief? I didn’t think we were that good.

  “There’s no need, Dad. There may be follow-up questioning about particular points, but we’ve dredged up all the dirty little secrets. You’ve been under interrogation for several days.”

  His father’s eyes widened slightly. After a moment, he gave a nod. “Yeah, all those weird dreams…So that means you know about, about my own problems?”

  “Yes.”

  Robert looked away. “There are strange bad guys out there, Bob. The Mysterious Stranger—the one who hijacked Zulfi Sharif—he was on my case all the time. I’ve never known anyone who could manipulate me as he did. Can you imagine someone riding on your shoulder all the time, telling you what to do?”

  Eve --> Bob: Just as well not to follow up on the Rabbit.

  Bob nodded. Rabbit—that was the name they had pried out of the Indo-Europeans—might be something new under the sun. Rabbit had compromised the SHE. Scenario-building within the DHS and USMC had actually been in support of Rabbit. The Indians and the Europeans and the Japanese had a lot to answer for, but Rabbit’s scam might never have been detected if they hadn’t launched their revocation attack against the creature. But how had Rabbit managed its trick? What else could it do?

  Those were burning questions, but not ones to discuss with your traitorous father. “We’re taking care of the loose ends, Dad. Meantime, you have results and consequences to catch up on.”

  “Yes. Consequences.” Robert’s right hand played nervously with the chair’s fine upholstery. “Prison?” The words came out softly, almost a request.

  Eve --> Bob: No way. We want this guy running loose.

  “No jail time, Dad. Officially, you and your pals were part of a campus demonstration that got wildly out of hand. Less officially—well, the rumor we’re peddling is that you helped stop terrorist lab sabotage.” That would be another job for the ever-useful Friends of Privacy.

  Robert shook his head. “Stopping the bad guys, that part was Miri’s idea.”

  “Yes, it was.” He gave his father a stony look. “I was Officer of the Watch that night.”

  Eve --> Bob: Careful, Colonel. But the warning was empty. The interrogation strategists had agreed that Robert should learn part of this. The only problem was how to tell Dad without putting a fist into his face.

  “Here? In San Diego?”

  Bob nodded. “For CONUS Southwest, but all our action was here. Alice was my top analyst that night.” He hesitated, trying to hold down his rage. “Did you ever guess that it was Alice who kept me from booting your ass out of the house?”

  “I—” He swept his hand through unruly hair. “She always seems so remote.”

  “Do you know what JITT stick is, Dad?”

  An abrupt nod: “Yes. Carlos Rivera gets stuck in Chinese. Is he okay?” The old man looked up and his face turned ashen. “Alice?”

  “Alice collapsed right in the middle of your adventure. We have good evidence that the—”

  Eve --> Bob: No details, please.

  Bob continued with barely a hesitation, “She’s still stuck.”

  “Bob…I never meant her any harm. I was just so desperate. But maybe, maybe I set her up.” He looked into Bob’s eyes and then away.

  “We know, Dad. It came out in your debrief. And yes, you did set her up.” DHS had investigated the Gu home and personal logs as much as they had anything at UCSD; they even had pictures of the bot Dad had used in the front bathroom. But we still don’t know exactly what it did. India and Japan and Europe blamed Rabbit, and Rabbit had been reduced to rumors and unreadable chunks of stale cache.

  Eve --> Bob: Heh. We’ll figure it out. A network attack on a bio-prepped victim—that’s a technology that’s way too interesting to ignore.

  Dad’s head was bowed. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

  Bob stood up abruptly. It was something of an achievement that his voice came out calm and steady. “You’ll be out of here later today. Meantime, get something to wear and catch up with the outside world. For a while, you’ll still live with us in Fallbrook. We want you to take up…right where you left off. I’ll tell Miri about Alice—”

  “Bob, it won’t work. Miri could never forgive—”

  “That’s probably true. But she’s going to get the abbreviated version. After all, your part in the attack on Alice is circumstantial. And it’s hidden behind security that even Miri Gu is unlikely to penetrate. I…strongly suggest…that you don’t spell things out for her.”

  And so Lieutenant Colonel Robert Gu, Jr., had performed the duty that he’d been assigned here. And now he could get out. He walked across the room, reached for the door. Something made him turn and look back.

  Robert Gu, Sr., was watching with anguish in his eyes. It was a look Bob had seen before, on other faces. There had been times over the years, when youngsters in his command had fucked totally up. Young people get desperate. Young people do terrible, foolish, selfish things—sometimes with terrible consequences.

  But this is my old man! There was no desperation, no inexperience that could excuse him.

  And yet…Bob had watched the CDC team’s video as they followed Sharif’s direction down into the labs. He had seen his father and daughter lying on the floor, just beyond the UP/Ex crater. He had seen the way Robert’s arm was extended, how it dammed the curdling stone just inches from Miri’s face. And so, despite the old man’s monstrous fuckup, there was still something left to say:

  “Thanks for saving her, Dad.”

  “TAKE UP JUST where you left off,” Bob had said. At Fairmont High, that was almost feasible. Juan and Robert had already taken their written final exams, then been out of action through Christmas and New Year’s. Now they were back, and just in time for what most students considered the scariest part of the semester: the Parents’ Night demonstration of their team projects. Problems of life and death and horrid guilt devolved to worrying about making a fool of oneself in front of some children and their parents.

  Amazingly, Juan Orozco was still talking to him. Juan didn’t know quite what had happened at UCSD. His memories had been gutted even more systematically than Miri’s. Now he was piecing t
hings together from the news, trying his best to separate the truth from Friends of Privacy lies.

  “I don’t remember anything after Miri and I got to campus. And the police are still holding what I wore. I can’t even see the last few minutes of my diary!” The kid waved his arms with the same desperation Robert had seen in him the first day they met.

  Robert patted his shoulder. “They still have Miri’s log, too.”

  “I know! I asked her.” Tears welled up in the boy’s eyes. “She doesn’t remember either. We were getting to be friends, Robert. We wouldn’t have gone after you together if she couldn’t trust me.”

  “Sure.”

  “Well, now she treats me like when we first met—pushing me away. She thinks I must have chickened out and that’s why she had to find you by herself. And maybe I was chicken. I don’t remember!”

  Lena --> Juan, Xiu: Give her time, Juan. Miri’s distracted by what’s happened, especially to her mother. I think she blames herself for that, and maybe all of us. I know you wouldn’t chicken out.

  Lena --> Xiu: But why he’s asking the SOB for comfort is beyond me.

  Juan looked away from Robert for a moment, gradually seemed to get himself back together.

  Robert gave the boy an awkward pat on the back. Comforting others was definitely not part of his former résumé. “She’ll come around, Juan. She didn’t call you a coward when we were underground. She was very worried about you. Just give her some time.” He cast around for some distraction. “Meantime, do you want to waste all the work we put in this semester? What about the kids in Boston and down South? We have to catch up on our demo preparation.”

  Lena --> Xiu: Can you believe this jerk? All he wants is to trick some more help out of the boy.

  Robert’s attempt at humor was feeble, but Juan looked up at Robert and gave a creditable smile. “Yes. Gotta keep track of the important things!”

  BOB AND MIRI didn’t come to Fairmont High for the vocational-track demos. At least they weren’t physically visible—and Robert could tell that Juan Orozco was searching hard.

  “Miri’s at Crick’s Clinic tonight, Juan. Her mother should be coming home from the hospital.” Bob had seemed just as happy that Robert had another commitment this evening.

  The boy brightened. “But maybe she’ll peek in here, right?”

  In fact this was rather a big deal for Fairmont, but not for good reasons. The popular press had built an enormous pile of speculation around the events at UCSD, and Friends of Privacy lies surrounded and embedded those speculations in conspiracies unending. The rumors contaminated everything and everyone associated with that night. Robert had dredged the public record—first to try to discover what had happened to him that night under UCSD, and then to see what people thought had happened. Robert and the cabal showed up in most of the theories, often as the picaresque heroes Bob had mentioned. But there were other theories. Robert had never heard of Timothy Huynh, but there were journalists who claimed that Huynh and Robert had engineered everything that happened in the riot and the underground!

  Robert had become very good at blocking paparazzi mail, but the notoriety was blowing over; his ratings were declining with a half-life of about five days. Nevertheless, he spent a lot of time at Fairmont High, where the school rules banned the most intrusive visibles.

  Tonight, at the demos, that ban was in force. The bleachers were jammed with ticketed visitors—families of students and their guests, including virtual presences. Most of these people had no interest in Robert Gu. But if you looked at the network stats, a lot of people were invisibly watching.

  The vocational program was not the gem of Fairmont High. Most of these kids could not master the latest, cutting-edge applications (and most of the retread students were even less competent). On the other hand, Chumlig had asserted in an unguarded moment that parents preferred the vocational demos, mainly because they made more sense to them than what other children were doing.

  The teams were duos and trios, but they were allowed to use solutions dredged from all over the world. Demo night didn’t begin until after sunset, so meshing overlays with reality would be relatively easy. Chumlig wouldn’t have given the regular students such a crutch. Those demos lasted two days—and would not begin until a week after the vocational-track students had done their best. That was a kindly interval, a week for the vocational students to bask in their achievements.

  Tonight, the audience sat on the west side of the soccer field, leaving the east free for whatever grandiose imagery might be created.

  Robert sat with Juan Orozco right down on the sidelines, with the other performers. They all knew the order of their execution, er, performance. Their private views hung little signs over the field showing how much time remained in the current demo and who was up next. There had been no democratic choosing of the performance order. Louise Chumlig and the other teachers had their own ideas, and they ruled. Robert smiled to himself. In this, his old people-sense hadn’t deserted him. Even without knowing the details of each project, he knew who had a strong project and who did not. He knew who was the most frightened of getting out in public and in person…So did Chumlig. Her play order was an orchestration, exercising each kid to his or her limits.

  Amazingly, that ordering also produced a pretty good show.

  The Radner twins started out. For these two, the east side of the campus was not enough. They had some kind of wacky suspension bridge—it looked like the Firth of Forth Railway Bridge, but scaled up—that put down steel caissons on each side of the bleachers, and then climbed higher and higher into the northeast till it broke into the departing daylight. Seconds passed—and the construction reappeared out of the southwest, their nineteenth-century masterpiece making a virtual orbit of the Earth. The climax was the roaring passage of vast, steam-powered trains across the sky. The bleachers shook with the apparent power of the locomotives.

  “Hey!” said Juan, and gave Robert a nudge. “That’s new. They must have figured out some of the building maintenance protocols.” If the Radners had not been targeted by the Library Riot rumor mill before, they were now. Robert guessed that would please the twins just fine.

  Most of the demos were arty, visual things. But there were also students who had built gadgets. Doris Schley and Mahmoud Kwon had built a ground-effect vehicle that could walk up the steps of the bleachers. They tipped it over the top; there was an explosion of sound, and then it touched down without breaking anything. Juan stood up from his place at the bottom of the bleachers to turn and watch with his own eyes. He cheered Schley and Kwon, then plunked himself back down. “Wow, a ground-effect parachute. But I bet Ms. Chumlig doesn’t give’m more than a B.” His voice rose into a standard Louise Chumlig imitation: “‘What you did was scarcely more than off-the-shelf engineering.’” But he was still grinning. They both knew that a B was better than what most of the image plays were going to get.

  There were even kids who tried for the cutting edge, projects that seemed a little like what Miri said her friends did. There were two new-materials demos, an extreme elastic band, and some kind of water filter. The elastic was not spectacular—until you realized there was no trick imagery. Two boys that Robert hardly knew did the demo. They stood twenty feet apart, swinging a large doll between them. The mannikin was suspended from a strand of their magical glop. The strand wasn’t simply a strong composite. Somehow the boys could change its physical characteristics by the way they squeezed the ends. Sometimes if behaved like a giant spring, whipping the doll back to the center line. Other times, it stretched like taffy, and they swung the dummy in wide arcs. Their demo got the biggest cheers of all.

  On the other hand, the water-filter demo was just a magnified image of a garden hose feeding into the filter. Above them, the students had floated an enormous graphic that showed just how their programmable zeolite could search for user-specified impurities. There were no sound effects, and the graphics were slow-moving and crude. Robert
looked up into the sky and then back at the girls. “They’re going to get an A, aren’t they?”

  Juan rocked back on his elbows. He was smiling, but enviously. “Yeah. It’s the sort of thing Chumlig likes.” And then his basic honesty forced him to add, “Lisa and Sandi never bother to polish their graphics, but I heard they’ve got a buyer for that water filter. I bet they’re the only vocational kids who make real money off their demo.”

  “WE’RE NEXT, KIDDO,” said Robert.

  The only evidence that Juan understood was the way his gaze fixed on their private clock.

  Xiu --> Juan: You’ll do fine, Juan.

  Juan --> Xiu: Is Miri watching?

  Juan and Robert were last, the only part of the schedule that was really beyond Chumlig’s control. That had not been due to any Juan/Robert cleverness. It had been a consequence of the fact that their demo involved outside groups who had their own scheduling problems.

  Juan hesitated a second more. Then he was running out onto the soccer field, waving up a phantom stage parallel to and facing the bleachers. Their performers filed in from both sides of the stage. The imagery was subdued, with no impossibilities. These were real people and real musical instruments, as Juan’s magnified voice explained to the audience.

  “Hello, hello, hello!” Juan was huckster enthusiastic, and—to Robert’s ears—clearly panicked out of his mind. Robert could have handled the emcee role, or they could have recorded this spiel, maybe have had Juan lip-synch it—but that was just another way to lose points with Chumlig. So Juan made do with his live, cracking voice and words that came out with awkward pauses and forced bravado. “Ladies and gentlemen! Meet the Orchestra of the Americas, created especially for you this evening from the Charles River High School orchestra and chorus, cheapnet live from Boston and—” he waved to his left “—the Gimnasio Clásico de Magallanes, also cheapnet live but from Punta Arenas, Chile!”