Infoquake

by David Louis Edelman

  Horvil was the first boy to run afoul of the black bears. He was tromping purposefully through the snow gathering firewood when he stumbled on one of the larger specimens. Two hundred-fifty kilograms of ursine horror lunged at Horvil with no warning, sending the boy darting back to the camp at a speed he wouldn't have believed himself capable of.

  "Bear!" he yelped as he stumbled down the hillside, shedding sticks of firewood the whole way. "Bear! Help! Bear!"

  The camp instantly descended into chaos. Before anyone could propose a coherent strategy, Brone rounded up a small contingent of boys and armed them with torches. Horvil and a number of others scampered into their cabins and barricaded the doors, assuming the bear would wander off on its own accord. Natch, meanwhile, was out on one of his aimless peregrinations around the woods.

  The initiates would debate what happened next for many years afterward.

  Brone and his comrades located the beast soon enough. He had headed straight for the storage silo containing their hard-earned stockpile of fruit. But the boys' bravado was quickly snuffed by the sight of a cornered bear rising up on hind legs with claws extended. Brone made a feint with his torch, which only succeeded in frightening the bear into a rage. He charged at one of Brone's companions, sliced him neatly across the chest, then tripped and fell directly onto another boy. A few of the remaining initiates managed to toss their bleeding comrades over their shoulders and make a break for the cabins, while the rest scattered in confusion.

  Natch, returning from his walk, observed all this from a distance. Fools, he thought. You can't accomplish anything without a strategy. He realized that if the camp were to survive this latest incursion, he would have to take control. It was a strange feeling, to be responsible for others and not just oneself. He tried to pretend that he was not accountable, that he could just run off and let the rest of the initiates fend for themselves. Then the image of poor hapless Horvil came unbidden to his head, Horvil standing and pleading with him, You'll take care of me, won't you, Natch? He cursed his friend's name and quickly devised a plan.

  Seeing that the bear was now pursuing the firebrands that had taunted him moments earlier, Natch rushed into the fray and ripped a torch from the hand of a campmate. The boy, stunned, put up no resistance. Natch instantly reversed course, waving his torch at the beast and leading him in the opposite direction, away from the camp.

  Natch's thoughts were jumbled, incoherent. Primal reflex took over and dispelled any more complex emotion. He could feel the pulse of blood rushing through his legs, the lash and sting of the branches across his face. The bear was constantly a few steps behind, growling, ready to pounce and devour him. Yet he knew these woods like nobody else in the camp did. He knew exactly where he was going.

  Until, as chance would have it, he spotted Brone.

  Natch whipped around and headed in his direction.

  Brone had made his way to a clearing on top of a low hill, hoping to gather his wits there. His torch had snuffed out in the snow somewhere during the frantic escape from the bear, and Brone was now busy scanning the area for a suitable branch to use as a cudgel.

  He had only a split-second to react when Natch came sprinting by at top speed, and then the black bear was upon him.

  The carnage that followed haunted Natch for many years to come. You should have listened to me, he would say to Brone during these midnight pantomimes. You should have realized we couldn't have made it in that camp. You should have recognized you were wrong. Then he would turn to the other initiates and uncage his fury on them. Why didn't you ask better questions? Why did you submit to Brone's leadership and not mine? He reserved the bulk of his wrath for himself. If only you had been a better politician. If only you had known how to cultivate friendships among the boys. If only you hadn't been so weak.

  Natch had to stare at him for several hours in the cramped cabin of a Falcon four-seater under the watchful eyes of a fat irritable pilot and a steely-eyed paramedic. Every few minutes, the paramedic would get up from her seat to examine the gnarled stump that had once been Brone's arm. She would bend down to his chest and listen for the faint wheezing sounds, then she would turn to Natch with a murderous look that seemed quite inappropriate for a healer. Natch was beyond emotion; he simply looked back, expressionless. Don't they have to take an oath of non-violence or something? he wondered.

  "Maybe we should just take him straight to a Preparation compound," suggested the pilot. "Cape Town's a long way away, and they got a Preparation compound right near here. I run back and forth to that place all the time."

  The paramedic nodded absently. "That won't be necessary."

  "You sure? He's suffering, I can see that. They'll take care of him down there, make sure he goes easy-"

  "I know what happens in those compounds, Clar," the woman said with a tone of finality. "This one doesn't need to join the ranks of the Prepared-not yet, anyway. He's going to pull through."

  For the first time, Natch noticed that the pilot and the paramedic both wore dartguns. He gazed at the cartridges of OCHRE-tipped darts hanging low on the guns' underbellies and tried to imagine what kind of code they contained. A paralysis program, maybe, or a routine to cause temporary blindness? He couldn't quite figure out why the two were armed in the first place. Were they looking after his safety, or Brone's?

  Eventually, Natch decided it was pointless to search for routine in a trip that was anything but. Nobody had given him a chance to gather his belongings or say goodbye to Horvil; they did not even tell him whether he would be returning to finish his last few months of initiation. The pilot had simply yanked him out of his cabin and thrown him into the Falcon next to the bloody, twitching Brone without a word of explanation. The whole operation smelled of sweat and desperate improvisation.

  As they began their descent into Cape Town, Natch craned his neck to catch a glimpse out the front windows. He could see a small squad of Defense and Wellness Council officers in crisp white robes standing at attention on the runway. Their presence kept a crowd of fifty at bay while the Falcon completed its vertical landing sequence. Natch could see a pack of drudges and Brone's anxious parents among the throng and was suddenly glad the hive had enlisted the Council's protection. The mob might or might not be daunted by the shuttle crew's dartguns, but nobody would dare assault him in plain view of Len Borda's troops. The code in a Council officer's darts could very well be lethal.

  Only after Natch had been hustled indoors did he realize that the Council squad was not there to ensure his safety. No, they were still out on the runway waiting for the second Falcon, which had been following close behind.

  They were waiting to unload the bodies.

  It wasn't the first time Serr Vigal had to duck out of a fundraising pitch at a moment's notice because of Natch. It wouldn't be the last. When the news arrived this time, he was talking to a consortium of LPRACGs a hundred million kilometers away on Mars about spinal cord bandwidth. Vigal thought about hopping on the next Earthbound shuttle, but decided he couldn't afford the delay and headed for the public multi facilities instead. Two days later, he was still waiting for a long-distance multi connection to open up. Finally, he grew impatient and decided to blow his entire Vault account on a teleportation instead.

  By the time Serr Vigal arrived at the Cape Town TeleCo station, groggy and ill-tempered from the four-and-a-half-hour transfer process, Natch's name had permeated the Data Sea like a foul odor.

  His experience became known to the public as "the Shortest Initiation." The term came from the drudges, whose coverage of the affair showcased their ability to reduce a complex set of human events to the common denominators of Good and Evil. Vigal was saddened to discover that Natch had been assigned the latter role. GREED AND SOLIPSISM: THE LAST LESSONS OF THE HIVE? read one of the story headlines. OUR ANCESTORS MAY NOT HAVE HAD OCHRES, BUT THEY HAD ETHICS, opined another. CIVILITY IS DEAD, claimed a third. The Proud Eagle tried to convince the public that accidental deaths happened every year durin
g initiation, but the people were not placated. Yes, occasionally there were mishapsbrawls and knife fights, flu outbreaks, once even an avalanche-but three boys from one hive mauled by a bear? Unprecedented. Inexcusable. Governmentalists and libertarians alike took to the floors of their L-PRACGs to denounce Natch and the Proud Eagle.

  The headmaster and three of the senior proctors met Serr Vigal at the foot of the TeleCo station platform. They bowed before him in a very poor impression of humility.

  "So Natch knows I'm on my way to get him?" said the neural programmer.

  "I'm afraid we can't permit him to go anywhere yet," replied the headmaster gravely. "Natch is still fighting off the infections he contracted in the wild. I'm sorry, but rules are rules."

  Vigal was in no mood for games. "Nonsense," he sighed. "Show me these medical reports that say he's still infected." The proctors exchanged surreptitious looks as the headmaster's charade quickly col lapsed. She forwarded the documents to Vigal, who projected them at arm's length for anybody to see. "It's quite obvious the boy doesn't have anything," he said at length, pointing to the array of charts floating in the air between them. "Blood pressure, heart rate, OCHRE functions-all normal. I'm afraid you have no legal right to keep the boy isolated here any longer."

  The headmaster slumped visibly. Her eyes darted sidewise at the proctors with a silent accusation: You said he wouldn't give us any trouble. "Please understand-we can't let Natch go until the hive finishes its official inquiry. The board of directors might still decide to prosecute him."

  "Prosecute him?" said Vigal with furrowed brow. "What would they prosecute him for?"

  "Believe me, there are things they can do. Most of the other boys say that Natch led that bear right towards them, that he knew what he was doing the whole time.... Now we've got angry parents threatening all kinds of legal action. Natch should count himself lucky that the initiation compound falls under the jurisdiction of our L-PRACG and not one of theirs." The headmaster combed her stringy gray hair with the fingers on one hand and peered nervously at the pedestrians surging past on the platform. Who knew which of them would turn out to be a disgruntled investor or a muckraking drudge?

  "Between you and me," she continued over Confidential Whisper, "I think we'll be able to come to some agreement with the parents and make this whole thing go away. We really are doing the best we can. But until we can get everything straightened out, Natch is better off at the hive. There are lunatics making death threats against him, drudges sending multi requests at all hours, politicians calling on him to testify ..

  "But no capitalmen."

  "No," the headmaster replied with distaste. "No capitalmen or fiefcorp masters or recruiters at all, thankfully."

  Vigal had changed little since Natch had last seen him. He still wore the same impeccable gray goatee and the unostentatious ocher robe that signaled a hopeless lack of fashion. Vigal was a monument against time, like the cabins in the initiation compound-something that stood unchanged through the vicissitudes of the seasons.

  He had certainly not lost his gift for understatement. "Things are not going so well for you, it seems," said the neural programmer.

  Natch sat on his bed and sulked in silence. The hive dorm, which had been unimaginably vast when he was eight, now felt small and constricting.

  "Do you want to talk about what happened out there?" prodded Vigal gently.

  "No," said Natch. He had spent the past few days staring at the ceiling, trying to recount those panicked few minutes in the woods, trying to decide what had happened. Had he purposefully led that bear into Brone's path? Or had it just been a gut instinct, a subconscious split-second decision? Could he have yelled out some warning, waved his arms, something? "I don't want to talk about it. Not while so many things are unsettled."

  "What things?"

  "Practical things, now things." The boy leaned back against the window and traced a finger over the fiefcorp industry pie charts he had put there. "I'm seventeen, Vigal. I should be looking at apartments and shopping for a bio/logic workbench. Picking out L-PRACGs. But instead, I've got no future, no prospects, nothing. I'm the most hated person in the world right now, and all because ... because ..." He couldn't find the words to finish his sentence, and bashed his fist against the window.

  Serr Vigal pursed his lips into a frown. "Surely it can't be that bad. What about all those recruiters who were hounding you before initiation?"

  "Nothing," Natch sighed bitterly. "The capitalmen won't even acknowledge my existence. Oh, a few of the fiefcorp masters will talk to me, but their offers are just laughable. People want me to apprentice for them on spec, not even for room and board. Everyone else just prives me out the instant they find out who I am."

  "The whole incident is still in the news, Natch. Maybe you need to give the fiefcorps some time."

  "It won't matter."

  "You know, you can do so many things other than bio/logics. Maybe-"

  "No." Natch pressed his forehead against the window, covering a histogram of fiefcorp share prices. "It has to be bio/logics. There's nothing else out there for me."

  The neural programmer cleared his throat and began to say something, then stopped. A statement was slowly coalescing in his mind. At one time, Natch would have lacked the patience to listen to what his guardian had to say, but after nine months in the wilderness surrounded by the impetuosity of teenage boys, Serr Vigal's deliberate manner no longer seemed so irritating. "Do you remember," Vigal stammered, "what I told you before initiation about taking an apprenticeship somewhere close by?"

  The boy nodded yes.

  "Well, it seems I have some space-I mean, there is an openingat my memecorp. Brainstem programming. The pay isn't much. But, well, I just thought ..." He let the sentence waft away.

  What a difference nine months can make, Natch thought. Before initiation, his main concern had been finding an appropriate excuse to take an apprenticeship over Vigal's objections. Even after the debacle with Figaro Fi, Natch had never seriously considered taking an apprenticeship with the neural programmer. But after all that had happened with Brone and the Shortest Initiation, did he have any choice?

  Vigal smiled. "I can see the struggle in your face, Natch. You don't want to apprentice with me because you think the work will be dull and unchallenging. Even worse, you're afraid I'm going to lecture you about what happened at initiation. You think I'll try to guilt you into signing up with my memecorp."

  Natch's silence indicated his agreement.

  "You also know that one day you will be beyond my tutelage," continued Vigal. "Yet you worry that I might try to keep you around by reminding you how I lent a helping hand when nobody else would. Plus-and this may be the most crucial thing-you doubt that you'll be able to find a decent woman in a company like mine to save your life."

  The young outcast tried hard not to crack a smile, but he failed.

  Vigal chuckled and rose from his chair. He took a seat on the bed next to the boy and put his hand on Natch's shoulder. A rare and yet not unwelcome moment of physical contact between them. "You know that life in the memecorps is much different than life in the fiefcorps, don't you?"

  Natch nodded. " Fiefcorps make money," he quoted slyly. "Memecorps cost money."

  The neural programmer snorted. "Well, that's what those fools at Creed Thassel say. Maybe that was true back when Kordez Thassel and Lucco Primo were alive. But today.... Today, I think even a hard-core libertarian would be surprised at how much of our funding comes from the marketplace. If you ask me, every bio/logic programmer could use a grounding in the fundamentals of the memecorp world."

  The two silently watched the undulations in the Primo's histogram for a few minutes. Vigal's hand communicated an unspoken message of comfort and understanding. Natch could briefly see a widening of vistas, a broadening of horizons.

  He tried to picture what life in Vigal's memecorp would be like. Heated debates over brainstem engineering techniques, collaborations with faceless co-worker
s, long hours fine-tuning bio/logic programs. There were worse ways to spend two years of his life. The money would be a pittance compared to the sums he had been discussing with the capitalmen nine months ago. But all the same, he would be working in bio/logics. And once he had proven his ability in the memecorp world, wouldn't the fiefcorps become that much more attainable?

  "So what are your terms?" Natch asked.

  Vigal couldn't hold back his delight. He named the terms: Room and board in Omaha. A modest stipend, with the promise of a bonus after two years. Access to the run-of-the-mill bio/logic programming equipment.

  "And what about ... all the bad publicity?" said Natch.

  His guardian shrugged his shoulders dismissively. "The publicity will pass. You will discover that one of the benefits of working in the memecorp sector is that we are well-protected from that sort of nonsense."

  Natch stood back and let the phantom letters of Vigal's contract replace the histogram on the window. He called up Shyster 95.3c to help him negotiate the details. Within minutes, the two were sitting across the small round table in the corner of the room dickering over minor contractual differences. By the end of the hour, they had worked out an agreement. Natch affirmed it without hesitation.

  He was now officially Serr Vigal's apprentice.

  After a few moments of relaxed celebration, Vigal once again struck a serious note.

  "I know you worry about your future, Natch," said the neural programmer in a low voice. "And I am sorry I have always been so preoccupied with all these ... distractions." He wiggled his fingers up towards the ceiling and let them linger there a moment, as if he could only keep them from drifting into the stratosphere by a colossal act of willpower. "But-but when you came to me, I promised myself I would always be there for you. And I intend to keep that promise no matter what the future brings."