Rainbows End

by Vernor Vinge

  Wearable computers, what a concept. IBM PC meets Epiphany-brand high-fashion. In fact, Robert might have mistaken his new wardrobe for ordinary clothes. True, the shirts and pants were not a style he favored. There were embroidered patterns both inside and out. But the embroidery was more noticeable to the touch than the eye; Juan Orozco had to show him special views to reveal the net of microprocessors and lasers. The main problem was the damn contact lenses. He had to put them on every morning and then wear them all day. There were constant twinkles and flashes in his eyes. But with practice, he got control of that. He felt a moment of pure joy the first time he managed to type a query on a phantom keyboard and view the Google response floating in the air before him…There was a feeling of power in being able to draw answers out of thin air.

  And then there was what Juan Orozco called “ensemble coding.”

  A week passed. Robert was practicing with his beginner’s outfit, trying to repeat the coding tricks Juan had shown him. For the most part, even the simplest gestures didn’t work when he first tried them. But he would flail and flail—and when the command did work, the success gave him a pitiful spike of joy and he worked even harder. Like a boy with a new computer game. Or a trained rat.

  When the phone call came, he thought he was having a stroke. There were bright flashes before his eyes, and a faraway buzzing sound. The buzzing broke into words: “…very muzzzz like to…interview you zzzzir…”

  Aha! Spam, or some kind of reporter.

  “Why would I want to give an interview?”

  “Bzzzt a short int…view.”

  “Even a short one.” Robert’s reply was a reflex. It had been years since he’d had the opportunity to dump on a journalist.

  The light was still a glaring shapelessness, but when Robert straightened his collar, the voice became sharp and perfect. “Sir, my name is Sharif, Zulfikar Sharif. The interview would be for my Lit-in-English thesis.”

  Robert squinted and shrugged, squinted again. And then suddenly he got it right: his visitor was standing in the middle of the bedroom. I have to tell Juan about this! It was his first real three-dimensional success, and everything that the kid had claimed about retinal painting. Robert stood and stepped to the side, looking behind the visitor. The image was so solid, so complete. Hmm. And yet the visitor cast shadows contrary to the real lighting. I wonder whose fault that is?

  His dark-skinned visitor—Indian? Pakistani? his voice held a South Asian lilt—was still talking. “Please don’t say no, Sir! Interviewing you would be my great honor. You are a resource for all humanity.”

  Robert walked back and forth in front of the visitor. He was still boggled by the medium of the message.

  “Just a small amount of your precious time, Sir! That’s all I ask. And—” He looked around Robert’s room, probably seeing what was truly there. Robert had not had a chance to set up false backgrounds. Juan had been going to show him that yesterday, but they had gotten sidetracked by Robert’s side of the bargain—tutoring the kid in English. Poor, subliterate Juan. This Sharif fellow on the other hand: How bright are graduate students these days?

  This particular graduate student was looking more and more desperate. His gaze caught on something behind Robert. “Ah, books! You are one who still treasures the real thing.”

  Robert’s “bookcases” were made from plastic slats and cardboard boxes. But they held all the books he had rescued from the basement. Some of them—the Kipling—he would never have bothered with in the old days. But these were all he had now. He looked back at Sharif. “Indeed I do. Your point, Mr. Sharif?”

  “I just thought—it means we share the same values. By helping me, you’ll be advancing those noble passions.” He paused—listening to some inner voice? Since his lessons with Juan, Robert had become suspicious of people listening to their inner voices. “Perhaps we could strike a bargain, Sir. I would give almost anything for a few hours of your opinions and reminiscence. I would be happy to be your personal 411 agent. I’m an expert at such services; it’s how I pay my way at OSU. I can guide you through the contemporary world.”

  “I already have a tutor.” And when he considered the flippancy, he felt a twinge of surprise. In a sense it was true: he had Juan.

  Another significant silence. “Oh. Him.” Sharif—his image, perfect except for the misplaced shadows and the shoes that disappeared a quarter inch into the floor—walked around Robert. To get a closer look at the books? Suddenly, Robert had even more questions for Juan Orozco. But Sharif was talking again: “These are permanently printed? Not just-in-time chapbooks?”

  “Of course!”

  “Wonderful. You know…I could show you around the UCSD library.”

  Millions of volumes.

  “I can go down there myself, anytime.” But so far he hadn’t quite dared. Robert looked at his little library. In the middle ages, a rich man might have so many books. Now people with books were rare once again. But at UCSD, there was a real, physical library. And going with his graduate student…that would be a little like the old days.

  He looked back at Sharif. “When?”

  “Why not now?”

  Robert would have to let Juan Orozco know this afternoon’s session was off. He felt an instant of uncharacteristic embarrassment. Juan was going to show him how to do glance searches, and Robert had promised Juan scansion. Robert pushed the regrets aside. “Let’s go, then,” he said.

  ROBERT TOOK A car down to campus. For some reason, he couldn’t get a clear image of Sharif inside the automobile. There was just his voice chattering away, asking Robert for his opinion of everything they saw, offering opinions and facts whenever Robert seemed even faintly puzzled.

  Robert had driven past the outskirts of campus before; today he would see what the place had finally become. Coming out of Fallbrook, there were the usual subdivisions, unexceptional and dull. But just north of campus, he drove past endless gray-green buildings. Here and there, windowless walkways stretched across the canyons.

  “Bioscience labs,” Sharif cheerfully explained. “They’re mostly underground.” He fed Robert’s Epiphany with pointers to images and details. Ah. So these doorless, windowless structures were not some twenty-first-century experiment in communal living. In fact, there weren’t more than a few dozen people inside them. The connecting corridors were for biosample transport.

  Monstrous things might gestate in these buildings and in the caverns below. But salvation, too. Robert gave them a little salute. Reed Weber’s heavenly minefield was created in places like these.

  These were the anterooms to UCSD. He braced himself for unintelligible futurism: the main campus. His car drove down Torrey Pines Road. The intersections were almost as he remembered, though there were no traffic lights and no stopping. Cross traffic interleaved with smooth and eerie grace. Someday I must write a lighthearted piece about the secret life of automobiles. He had never seen one stop for much longer than it took passengers to get off and on. Out in the desert, his car had departed almost immediately, stranding him. But by the time he got back to the road, another had pulled up. The devices were always moving. He imagined them circling the county, forever maneuvering so that no customer ever need wait more than a few moments. But what do they do at night, when business is scarce? That would be the topic of his poem. Were there hidden garages, hidden car parks? There had to be garages for repair work—or at least equipment swapouts. But maybe there was no other stopping. This was the stuff of both poetry and futurism: Maybe at night when demand fell and they otherwise would have to sleep without profit in some empty lot, maybe then they conspired to clump together like Japanese transformer toys…to become freight trucks hauling cargo that was too big for UP/Express.

  In any case, the old parking lots on the north side of campus were gone, replaced by gaming fields and house-of-cards-style office buildings. Robert had the car drop him at the edge of the old campus, near where Applied Physics and Math used to be.

  “Nothing looks
the same, even where there were buildings before.” In fact, there seemed to be more open space than he remembered from the seventies.

  “Don’t worry about it, Professor.” Sharif was still audio only. It sounded as if he were reading from a brochure: “UCSD is an unusual campus, less traditional than any other in the UC system. Most of the buildings were rebuilt after the Rose Canyon earthquake. Here’s the official view.” Suddenly the buildings were sturdy, reinforced concrete, much as he remembered.

  Robert waved the fakery away, a gesture Juan had showed him early on. “Hands off the main view, Mr. Sharif.”

  “Sorry.”

  Robert walked eastward across campus, sampling the ambience. On the gaming fields, there was just as much rushing around as in the 1970s, half a dozen separate games of touch football and soccer. Robert had never participated in those, but one thing he’d admired about UCSD was that the students played sports that were semi-pro spectator events at other schools.

  Up close…well, the people he passed looked ordinary enough. There were the familiar backpacks, with the handles of tennis rackets sticking out the top like assault rifles.

  Many people were talking to themselves, sometimes gesturing into the empty air, or jabbing fingers at unseen antagonists. Nothing new in that; cell phone addicts had always been one of Robert’s pet peeves. But these folks were more blatant about it than the kids at Fairmont High. There was something foolish about a fellow walking along, suddenly stopping to tap at his belt, and then talking to the air.

  The new, numerate Robert couldn’t resist keeping count of what he saw—and he soon noticed something the old Robert might not have: There were many college-age kids running around, but there were too many old people. One person in ten looked really old, old as Robert truly was. One in three were lean and spry, the twentieth-century cliché of “active senior citizens.” And some…it took him a while to spot the few where modern medicine was all on target. Their skin was firm and their stride was strong; they almost looked young.

  Then the most encouraging sight of all: a pair of old duffers coming his way—and both of them carrying books! Robert felt like grabbing their free hands and dancing a jig. Instead he gave them a broad grin as they walked by.

  SHARIF AGREED THAT stepping into an ordinary building—or even the campus bookstore—wouldn’t be an effective way to find real books. “The University library is your best bet, Professor.”

  Robert walked down a gentle slope. The eucalyptus grove was more overgrown than he remembered. The dry crowns rustled in the breeze above. The debris of bark and twigs and branches crunched under his feet. Somewhere ahead of him, a choir sang.

  Then, through the trees, he saw the Geisel Library. Unchanged after all the years! Well, the pillared supports were covered with ivy—but there was nothing virtual about it. He walked out from under the trees and stared.

  Sharif’s voice popped up, “Professor, if you’ll bear to the right, the sidewalk goes to the main—”

  That was the way Robert remembered, but he hesitated when the other’s voice dropped away. “Yes?”

  “Oops, heh. Just detour around to the left. There’s a mob of singers blocking the main entrance.”

  “Okay. What is all the singing about, anyway?”

  Sharif made no reply.

  Robert shrugged and followed his invisible guide’s suggestion, walking around the north side of the building, down to what had been a lower-level parking lot. From here the library towered above him. He remembered when it was built, the criticisms: “It’s an expensive white elephant,” “We’ve been hijacked by space cadets.” In fact, it did look like something brought down from outer space: the six aboveground stories formed a huge octahedron, touching ground on one vertex and clasped by fifty-foot pillars. In Robert’s time, the structure had been concrete and sweeping glass. Now the vines extended past the fifth story, obscuring the concrete. The library still looked like it came from heaven, but now it was an ancient gem-mountain, and the clasp was the green of a supporting earth.

  The singers were louder. It sounded as if they were singing “La Marseillaise.” But there were also chants that sounded like a good old-fashioned student protest.

  He was well under the overhang now. He had to look straight up to see the undersides of the fourth, fifth, and sixth floors, to see where the concrete finally emerged from the ivy.

  Strange. The edges of each floor were straight as ever, but the concrete was laced with irregular lighter lines. In the sunlight those lines glinted like silver wedged in stonework.

  “Sharif?”

  No answer. I should look up the explanation. Juan Orozco could do such searches almost without thinking. Then he smiled: the silvery crack lines were a kind of playful mystery—and that might be their explanation. UCSD had a tradition of weird and wonderful campus art.

  Robert started toward the short stairway that led to a loading dock. This looked like the most direct way into the library. There was a faded AUTHORIZED STAFF ONLY sign painted on the wall. The freight door was rolled down shut, but a second, smaller door was ajar. From within he could hear some kind of power saw—carpentry? He remembered what Juan had said about getting Epiphany’s default local views. He waggled his hand tentatively. Nothing. He gestured again, a little differently: Oops. The loading dock was plastered with KEEP OUT signs. He glanced up the hillside; somewhere beyond the crest would be the main entrance. Epiphany showed him a mauve nimbus pulsating in time with the singing. Words floated above the music “À bas la Bibléotome!”—“Down with the Librareome Project!” Now that he was hearing both real and remote voices, the music was close to cacophony.

  “What’s going on, Sharif?”

  This time there was an answer: “It’s just another student protest. You’d never get in through the front door.”

  He stood still for a moment, filled with mild curiosity about what students demonstrated against nowadays. No matter. He could look that up later. He stepped nearer the half-opened door, looked down a dimly lit hallway. Despite the phantasmic storm of warnings and rules, he saw no obstacle to free passage. But now the strange sound was louder than the choir: rough, tearing growls spaced by silence.

  Robert stepped through the doorway.

  12

  GUARDIANS OF THE PAST, HANDMAIDENS OF THE FUTURE

  From its beginning, the Elder Cabal had met on the sixth floor of the Geisel Library. Winston Blount, calling in favors from his years at Arts and Letters, had made that possible. For a while, he had even had a nice clubroom in the staff lounge up here. That had been after the Rose Canyon Quake, when the bright young future freaks had been briefly leery of their own technological fixes and floor space was available to those willing to risk the heights.

  In the first years, there were almost thirty regulars. The membership had changed from year to year, but they were mostly faculty and staff from the turn of the century, almost all retired or laid off.

  Time passed and the cabal dwindled. Blount himself had drifted away from the group, discovering that there weren’t many more favors left for him to call in. His plans for a resumed career had centered on the Fairmont Adult Ed program. Then the Orozco boy had unintentionally pointed him at a magnificent shortcut: the Librareome protest movement. And the inner circle of the cabal was perfect for that. Perhaps it was just as well that the inner circle was exactly the cabal’s entire remaining membership.

  Tom Parker was sitting right beside the window wall. He and Blount peered down upon the protesters. Parker chuckled. “So, Dean, are you going to preach to the choir?”

  Blount grunted. “No. But they can see us up here. Give the folks a wave, Tommie.” Blount followed his own advice, raising his arms in a kind of blessing upon the singers at the main entrance and the slightly smaller mob on the terrace by the Snake Path. In fact, he had offered to speak at the demonstration. In the old days he would have been a featured speaker. Now he was still a critical player, but of zero publicity value. He flickered thr
ough some of the images that glowed above the crowd. “My, this event is big. Layered in fact.” But some of the layers were counterdemonstrations, obscene ghosts that capered through the crowd to mock them. Damn them. He turned off all enhancements, and noticed that Parker was grinning at him.

  “Still trying to use those contact lenses, aren’t you Dean?” He patted his laptop computer lovingly. “It just goes to show, you can’t beat the genius of a mouse-and-windows environment.” Parker’s hands slid across the keyboard. He was working through the layers of enhancement that Blount had been seeing directly with his contacts. Tom Parker might be the sharpest fellow left in the cabal, but he was hopelessly fixated on old ways. “I’ve customized my laptop to pick out what’s really important.” Images flickered on his tiny screen. There were things Winston Blount had not noticed in his contacts: someone had set a kind of nimbus over the demonstrators. Impressive.

  Tommie was still chuckling. “I can’t tell about that purple halo. Is it supposed to be pro- or anti-Librareome?”

  On the other side of Parker, Carlos Rivera leaned back from the window and stretched. “Anti, according to the journalists. They say the halo is to bless the guardians of the past.” The three watched silently for a moment. The sound of the choir came through the high glass windows, but also from protesters around the world. The combined effect was more symbolic than beautiful, since the voices were so far out of synch.

  After a moment, Carlos Rivera spoke again. “Almost a third of the physical visitors are from out of town!”

  Blount grinned back at him. Carlos Rivera was a strange young fellow, a disabled veteran. He hardly met the cabal’s informal age requirements, but in some ways he was almost as old-fashioned as Tommie Parker. He wore small thick glasses, the kind that had been popular in the early teens. He had typer rings on all his fingers and both thumbs. His shirt was one of the old displayables. Right now it showed white letters on black: “Librarians: Guardians of the Past, Handmaidens of the Future.” But the most important thing about Carlos Rivera was that he was on the Library staff.