"Yeah. I was supposed to be leading, remember? It's good you hung onto the spearstick, though. We'll make a real man of you yet."
"But he didn't just fall, did he? Your father."
teach me, take two
Though she hates to admit it, he could be right. The idea that she isn't equipped for this. Never mind. Hard times and trouble are merely her ticket to ride, Aeolia‐wise. Hah. How to build a scendent that flies. The bright side. Not.
Whatever. There's no way she can rely on him. She has to count on her own resources; she has to learn what she needs to survive.
•
Son is gawking at the sky.
"What are you looking at?" Dee Zu says.
"I'm reading the situation."
"No more satrays, I hope?"
"What?"
"Does your forecast include godbolts?"
"No. But it's funny. The clouds say no rain tonight, never mind the gullies disagree. They're shrugging up. Maybe there's a storm way up north somewhere. Though we should be able to see the lightning from here. Strange."
"Seriously," she says.
"What?"
"You've got to teach me the ken."
"Just like that. Everything I know in five easy steps."
"Why not?" But there's no way she can rely on him. She has to count on her own resources, and she needs the resources to survive. At least till she learns what has happened to Cisco, one way or the other.
"We don't have time."
"I need to know how to look after myself."
"I thought you already knew that. You and your friend."
"Not in your world."
"Plus you think the ken's a joke."
"Some of it works."
"Never mind. Between us, we've got enough to survive."
"Us? You're not listening. I need to be able to look after myself. By myself."
"Don't be stupid. Without a buddy to watch your back, you're dead."
"A buddy. And what if something happens to you?"
"Then nothing. End of story. So watch my back."
"Wow. My idea of perfect fun."
"You're still pissed off at me."
"This world isn't big enough for both of us."
"I'm not so bad. Anyway, even if I could teach you all I know fast enough," he says, "the signs don't always make sense, the way things are."
"So reassuring. The ken doesn't work."
"Don't worry. Just do what I tell you."
"If it's okay with you, O Great Hunter, I will worry a little."
"Go ahead. Maybe it'll help you stay alert. Though it's best you drop the 'Great Hunter' thing."
"You like Mr. Real Man better?"
"Get this." Son says. "Test pilot or not, you're basically a marshmallow mallster. A booby. Luckier than your marshmallow friend, so far. But living on borrowed time."
"You can spear a pig. Whoopee. Know any other tricks?"
"I'm pretty good at staying alive."
"And the point of that is?"
"For one, if I die, your expected lifespan shrinks to about diddly‐squat."
"Real men don't say 'diddly‐squat.'"
Son doesn't laugh.
crash course
"Just like that. The ken in five easy lessons."
"The fundamentals."
Basic survival for boobies. When the plan is to get from A to B as fast as possible while staying alive. They don't need unnecessary distractions, and all this palaver has no immediate survival value. If anything, it's going to get them killed.
Though he loves the way Dee Zu's brow pulls together when she needs to understand something. The crease between her eyes appears now.
•
Where does he start? She still has to learn something about the way things were only days ago, even if a lot of it is already out of date.
He looks around. Almost anything could serve as an introduction. "See that woogly patch up there?" he says.
"Yeah?"
"It's unusually dense, and medium altitude. Chances are we'll get cooler weather this evening."
"So we should break out the woolies?"
"No." Son has no idea what she's talking about. "That means dragons, if they don't have a lair at hand, will head for warmth. They'll go for low‐lying areas on the south side of slopes, bare rock if they can find it. Especially in the dark of the moon."
"Dragons are superstitious?"
Son doesn't get that either. "No," he says. "Because then they won't stand out so much."
Basics include how to recognize a bio‐blur even in the best of circumstances. So much depends on the situation. As long as it stays motionless, you might not spot it at all. If it moves, you may see nothing but the slightest ripple in anything from a two‐ to twenty‐square‐meter area of dust. Other times you might spot a few ripple‐patches heading in toward one place, likely where a larger bio‐blur, maybe a dragon, is trying to mind its own business. There are umpteen possible situations.
You also need to recognize color differences. Monkeyswarms, for example, have to sweat to keep cool, but it's a toss‐up between temperature control and losing moisture. So their blur mantles sometimes open up, and they become fluffier, lighter in color. You learn to recognize the lighter gray patch against the gray background. Dragons, on the other hand, want to retain heat and moisture. Their mantles darken, if anything, though Poppy always said that was only Son's imagination, and there wasn't any difference in color at all with the dragons.
Learning the ken surely has to include this elementary stuff. But things are changing so fast it's hard to know what's relevant any more. Reading swarms without their mantles, for example. That's a new ballgame. As is figuring out why and in what situations some bios still have mantles and others don't.
•
And so Son reviews the lore, marshaling his lessons for Dee Zu, when she says, "My God. What's happening there?"
A patch of dust fluffs up and turns lighter. Standard behavior. Then it turns darker as it fluffs up even bigger, lighter as it shrinks and then darker as it swells again. All of which makes no sense.
"Well?" she says. "What is it?"
"No idea."
"Great. My teacher."
"Get down lower and stay still. Let's just watch for a minute and see what's what."
What happens next is boring. Because nothing happens. The fluffiness goes down and the patch of Boogoo reverts to standard anonymous gray.
"The Boogoo is getting harder to read," Son says. "Never mind. We don't have time to teach you the details of the ken. All we can hope for is you learn some habits of watching, some attitudes."
"So let's do it."
"We'll begin with the most basic reading skills. Just watch me."
•
Almost motionless, Son tells her he is nevertheless looking all around. Fixing the landscape in his mind, inhabiting his model.
"Stay as still as you can, and listen up.
"First, we need to build a picture of our surroundings and hold it in our minds. Then we keep checking that model for changes as we move forward. Of course it'll change as our point of view changes, but just keep revising the model as we go, rebuilding it to include the current POV.
"But in a real situation you need to know the difference between POV changes and other changes. Get it wrong, and you're probably dead."
"This isn't a real situation?"
"I mean a situation situation. A shit's hitting the fan situation."
"Oh."
"Watch me and listen."
He becomes aware of himself as distant, now, from atop that dune five hundred meters away, where a dragon lies hidden and watching him here, at the center. And now he watches himself from the far slope of the big ravine behind him, where that monkeyswarm, the one passing itself off as a dust hummock, is probably trying to decide whether Son is a dust hummock or a bio trying to remain so still he'll be mistaken for a dust hummock.
"Do you see that monkeyswarm?" he asks Dee Zu.
/>
"No."
"There." Hardly moving, he points. "See?"
"Maybe."
"And there. That bump in the dust? That's a dragon."
"If you say so."
"If it decides you and I are prey, it'll start to move down the slope. At this time of day, this long after the last rain, this should be enough to trigger singing dunes. Even if it doesn't, it's almost sure to alert one or more of the other dragons, who are facing the other way but will have to turn to look, since the air is too still for them to scent the speed and direction of the monkey movement."
"How many dragons are we talking about?"
"Three. But there's lots of other stuff. And you have to watch everything, everywhere, in three‐sixty degrees."
"Okay."
"Plus you have to stay alert to every change and how every change relates to every other one."
How to explain his and Poppy's practice of ever more surely reading their surroundings for potential dangers, food, and sources of water? Seeing their world as a sphere of ever‐changing elements shaped by topography, season, moon phase, weather, air columns, and biological and bio‐blur activity including approach‐avoidance movements stirred by urges specific to different animals and, maybe, to the Boogoo itself. You need to dwell at the center of a detailed 4D map of your world. You read development and progress from pasts and futures implied by these factors perceived as an organic totality of cues and clues.
"But that's not the hardest part." And polyangulation may be harder to explain than it is to apply.
While he's trying to think what to tell Dee Zu, Son transitions from location to location, polyangulating on and from every key point in his world. He moves from one POV to another, including the one he himself physically inhabits. Then he tries to explain what he's doing, and succeeds in confusing even himself.
•
"And so you watch," he tells Dee Zu. "Though it isn't something you can teach someone in an afternoon."
"Do tell."
"Poppy used to hammer one thing at me till I was sick of it: Your model eventually has to include POVs on yourself from every other key point in the landscape. This takes practice, a lot of experience. It's like you project yourself, in your imagination, to other places in the landscape and, from there, you look back at yourself. Do you follow?"
"Sure. I'm watching you from over there on top of that dune." She grins. "Though it's hard to hear what you're saying from that distance."
"I'm serious. You read yourself as prey through the eyes of potential predators. And the Boogoo is packed with eyes."
Few survive these lessons, Poppy always said, but there's no need to tell Dee Zu that.
And he doesn't need to tell her how badly he has misread the situation so far. More and more, he fears, his own mental models are falling apart. He did not expect to find this many bio‐blurs so far south of Eden, for one thing. Nor does he understand why they mostly remain fully mantled, while Dee Zu and himself are half naked. That makes no sense to him. Not to mention he walked them right into that roachtrap. That was embarrassing.
magic circles
Polyangulation? What Dee Zu doesn't tell the boy, that's child's play, standard mental exercises.
She's an alpha Worlds test pilot with 4D martial arts training in an ever‐changing and always surprising variety of GR environments. What Dee Zu learned, working for Worlds UnLtd, wasn't exactly what Son means by polyangulation, but it was close enough.
Generated realities, the Worlds among them, harbor real horrors for the unwary, not the least of these being that of engaging with the utterly unintelligible. This can be worse than the prospect of immediate death.
Smoothly functioning world processors, well tested by the likes of Dee Zu and Cisco, always kept the worlder within a safe sphere of familiar intelligibility. No matter how limited the available generating resources, it was essential that, whichever way visitors looked, whatever they did, they remained within a magic circle co‐extensive with the area—more accurately a sphere, commonly measured as a radius—within which it was both technically feasible and economical to maintain a generated reality (GR) from any given standpoint. Basic Test Pilot 101 gospel, straight from the Lode:
– xxxx
"Magic circle" refers to a sphere of narrative coherence, in its first sense the familiar universe historically and cognitively coextensive with the circle of light and companionable narrative thrown by the primordial campfire.
And test pilots had to adopt a range of POVs, routinely projecting themselves into any number of "magic circles" that mallster worlders might come to occupy. The uninitiated, on the other hand, remained cognitively safe and sane only within a single magic circle at any given time.
Aside from keeping him alive, this boy's ken has served a similar purpose. But now it's failing. As a result, Dee Zu suspects, he also shows early signs of falling apart. So add this to their agenda: re‐establishing the intelligibility of his world. Maybe even move it to the top of the list, given how important his continued sanity is for their prospects of survival.
So she has to offer the boy what support she can at the same time she learns as much survival lore as she's able to as quickly as possible.
figments
The more the Boogoo comes alive with everything that's happening, the harder it is to read things. And the harder the reading, the easier it is to start imagining things.
More and more, for one thing, he believes the entire Boogoo might be evolving as a single living creature. Not only that, he feels himself becoming allied to this thing, whatever it might be, in ways that remain largely mysterious.
These imaginings themselves encourage a chronic nagging from the Poppy in his head, itself only an imagining, but an especially persistent and aggravating one. Fancy that, as Gran‐Gran might say. One of his own imaginings riding him about his imaginings. No wonder he's finding it harder to adopt the stillness of mind that used to come with skilful watching.
And there's this vague sense that something's following them. Even though his mental models include no clear signs of it. He gets no more than smudges of foreboding, the suggestion, once or twice, of a dark, vaguely humanoid figure all but invisible against the Boogoo. It's possible, of course, that their pursuer is no more than a figment of his polyangulations, an imagined POV becoming flesh.
Maybe. Still, it's hard to shake the notion that Poppy somehow survived. Though that's got to be pure bushwa. He saw him go down the roachtrap. Poppy was tough, but nobody's that tough.
Meanwhile, Son has been paying more attention to where they've been than to where they're going. It doesn't help that they've got the Sky earworm urging them to travel so fast he can't do a proper job of watching.
Just now, looking back the way they've come, he finds no inkling of a pursuer.
"Son!" Dee Zu screams his name.
those damned toes
Like magic the slowjoe emerges from a pocket of dust, lunges at Dee Zu.
Just as fast, she staggers the thing with a kick to the inside of a knee. Son is yelling "No!" as she spins and launches her whole body into a straight kick to what could be the thing's solar plexus.
In fact this is no slowjoe, what Son calls a boogooman. Neither is it a GameBoy. It's like ramming her foot into a bowl of potato chips. That's her first impression. There's none of the sharp contact of the Worlds. She nearly loses her balance going forward as her kick encounters something crisp and bristly, like compacted insects. This second impression passes in an instant. Now she's entangled with a bare high‐voltage cable inside a white‐hot furnace, waiting for the awful jolting agony to consume her.
She wastes no more than a few milliseconds looking for the bail button. Yanking her leg free, she hops back out of Son's way.
Deadly intent, he comes whirling the ball in its sling. His mace smashes the thing's head to bits. Still it persists, waving stumpy arms that erupt in dusty explosions of weirdly fluttery clumps as it tries to advance on Son. Then
it has neither arms to wave nor legs upon which to advance. Son stands over the writhing trunk of its body, thrashing it into crispy mush with his hemmelite sling‐ball. Big flat insects scurry out from ground zero in all directions, every roach for itself. Dee Zu brushes a couple of them off her good foot. More thrashing leaves the thing's remains indistinguishable from the dust underfoot. Son steps back to glare at the now‐anonymous patch of ground, daring its resurrection. Big drops of sweat roll down off his arms to go splat in the dust. Also drops of blood. There's something wrong with one of his hands.
Shaking and clumsy, he unweaves the basket. He wipes the ball off on his thigh and puts it back in his bag. "What the hell did you think you were doing?" He addresses this remark to Dee Zu.
"What did it look like I was doing?" She checks again to confirm that, yes, her right foot is gone, and she subdues an overwhelming urge to scratch the electric buzzing at the stump of her ankle. She wipes at her face, flicks at something on her lower lip.
redeeming qualities
One‐legged, she descends into a squat, blood running down over the hand with which she holds her other leg. Her right foot is gone.
"Let me see," Son says.
He starts to wrap his cord around her calf, just below the knee.
"No!" Dee Zu says. "What are you doing?"
"You want to bleed to death?"
Uncle Benny Bob, an ex‐speckops survivalist and tough as they came, tried to scream as the blurs took him. But this mallster, no marshmallow, merely hissed between her teeth and said, "It took my foot." Afterwards she said "fuck." Only once, she said it. Now she won't even let him see the wound. She has folded the wounded leg under the good one, bearing down on both with crossed arms.
"That thing," she says. "It's gone."
Yeah. Lucky she isn't gone as well. When the blurs take to dissing something, they don't generally say whoa, that'll teach you, and then stop. They're much like Gran‐Gran with a can of peaches. Except they won't leave you the can.
Now he's got Poppy there in the back of his mind going, "You're the patrol leader, boy. Fix yourself first. What good will you be to the skank if you're all bled out and dead?" Yeah, yeah. Son notes in passing that his own bleeding has stopped. Never mind it felt like he'd punched a food processor, one that sliced, diced, and served electric shocks all at the same time.
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