by Vernor Vinge
But her other hand remained in Miri’s; the girl gave it a squeeze. “But couldn’t this be different? By the time they cured Grandfather, part of him had already died.” That had been Jin Li’s theory, not Miri’s. “I know he’s often angry now, but that’s because he’s lost a lot. Maybe the bad things you remember are gone too.”
Lena waved her free hand in the direction of Newbie Xiang. “Did you hear what Xiu just said about his new nobleness of character?”
Miri thought fast: It never worked with Alice, but sometimes a quick change of subject could distract Bob. She glanced at Newbie Xiang. “Lena, you’ve been living here since Grandfather’s been sick. You could have moved anywhere since you don’t visit us anymore, but you’re still just ten miles away.”
Lena’s chin came up. “I’ve lived in San Diego for years. I’m not going to give up seeing my friends, shopping the old stores, hiking—well I have given up the hiking. The point is that, even resurrected, You-Know-Who is not going to run my life!”
“But—” very thin ice here! “—did you know Dr. Xiang before?”
The senior witch’s lips thinned. “No. And now you’re going to point out, or let plaintive silence imply, that since there are twenty-five hundred oldfolks here at Rainbows End, this matchup couldn’t be coincidence.”
Miri was silent.
Finally Newbie Xiang spoke up. “It was my choice. I moved down here this summer, about the time I got my get-up-and-go back. I’m one of the older people living at Rainbows End, but I’m so bright and bubbly—” a strange sad smile “—they don’t know what to do with me. So I volunteered to be a roommate. It’s worked out well. Your grandma is ten years younger than I am, but that doesn’t mean so much at our age.” She gave Lena’s shoulder a pat.
Miri remembered that Lena Llewelyn Gu had done years of psychiatric consulting here at Rainbows End. If anyone could arrange a match up with Xiu Xiang, it was her. She opened her mouth to remark on this—and noticed the warning glare in Lena’s eyes, as clear as any silent messaging could ever be.
After a moment, Lena shifted in her chair. “See, my girl? Pure coincidence. But I do admit it’s been useful. Xiu keeps me advised of You-Know-Who’s adventures in modern education.” She gave a nasty witchy smile that needed no help from Miri’s special effects.
“Yes,” said Xiang. “We, we have our collective eyes on him.”
“The monster is not going catch up with me this time around.”
Miri rocked back. “You’re running a joint entity!” She hadn’t dreamed the two witches could be so truly, modernly magical.
“A what?” said Newbie Xiang.
“A joint entity. Partners with complementary strengths and weaknesses. In public you are one, represented by the mobile partner. But what you can do and understand is the best of each of you.”
Xiang stared at her without comprehension.
Oh. Miri pinged both women. Except for Lena’s medicals, they were fully offline. Miri had been too distracted by her own imagining. “You aren’t wearing, are you?”
Xiu gestured at her desk. “I have my view-page and these books. I’m trying to learn so many serious things, Miri. I don’t have time to bother with wearing.”
Miri almost forgot her mission. “Dr. Xiang, you’re so wrong about wearables. I mean, hasn’t Ms. Chumlig talked about that? Some analysis packages don’t have traction if you run them with static video.”
Newbie Xiang gave a reluctant nod. “She showed me BLAST9. But that just seems to be molecular design dressed up in game toy nonsense.”
“But you’ve only run them on your view-page!”
The younger witch hunched down. “I have so much to learn, Miri. I’m working through the simpler things, what I can run on the view-page.”
Lena watched the other woman for a second and then she seemed to wilt back into her wheelchair. She looked down at her granddaughter. “Poor Miri. You don’t understand. You live in a time that thinks it can ignore the human condition.” She cocked her head. “You never read Secrets of the Ages, did you?”
“Of course I’ve read it!”
“I’m sorry, Miri, I’m sure you have. After all, it’s my beloathed ex-husband’s most famous achievement. And I’ll give him this; those poems are a work of genius. Their ‘implacable weight’ is all his hurtfulness turned to support great truths. But you can’t see that, can you, Miri? You are surrounded by medical promises and halfway cures. It distracts you from the bedrock of reality.” She paused and her head bobbed. It was almost like her old palsy, but maybe this was simply indecision, wondering whether to say more. “Miri, the truth is, if we are careful and lucky we live to be old, and weak, and very very tired. There comes an end to striving.”
“No! You’ll get better, Lena. You’ve just had bad luck. It’s just a matter of time.”
There was a whisper of a witchly cackle, and Miri remembered that “It’s just a matter of time” was the mantra of Robert’s poem cycle.
For a moment, grandmother and granddaughter glared certainty at each other. Then Lena said, “And this is about where I figured our chat would come. I’m sorry, Miri.”
Miri bowed her head. But I just want to help! Strange. That had been the Orozco kid’s whine. To Miri. Okay, maybe he wasn’t a complete jerk. And maybe he could help. But there was something else he’d said, and right now it was much more important…Yes! Suddenly Miri saw how she could turn defeat into victory. She looked up into her grandmother’s face and smiled innocently. “Did you know, Lena…that You-Know-Who is learning to wear?”
14
THE MYSTERIOUS STRANGER
Even after three weeks, Robert and Juan still did most of their studying in person, right after classes let out. They would walk out to the bleachers and one ignoramus would endeavor to teach the other.
Occasionally Fred and Jerry Radner would tag along, unofficial third and fourth ignoramuses. The twins had teamed with each other in Chumlig’s composition class, but they seemed to take innocent pleasure in following Robert’s progress, offering advice that was more colorful than Juan’s, but rarely as useful.
Then there was the fifth ignoramus. Xiu Xiang had chickened out of Creative Composition, but she was still taking her other courses at Fairmont. And like Robert, she was learning to wear; nowadays she wore a frilly, beaded blouse—another kind of Epiphany beginner’s outfit. She was there the afternoon when Robert and Juan ran into the Chileans. This was out on the track that circled the athletics field. No one else seemed to be around; the varsity teams wouldn’t be here for a while yet.
Miri --> Juan:
Juan --> Miri:
Miri --> Juan:
Juan --> Miri:
“Hey,” Juan said abruptly, “Dr. Gu, Xiu. Look!” He shipped an enum capability to Robert’s Epiphany. It was just like the targets they’d been working with the last few days. The kid claimed that if you practiced, this kind of interaction was as natural as looking at where another person was pointing. It wasn’t that easy for Robert Gu. He stopped and squinted at the icon. By default that should force access. Nothing. He tapped on his phantom keypad. He noticed Xiang, a few feet away, doing the same.
…And then suddenly there were a half-dozen students in evidence, all jabbering in Spanish.
Miri --> Juan, Lena, Xiu:
Lena --> Juan, Miri, Xiu:
Xiu --> Juan, Lena, Miri:
Miri --> Juan, Lena, Xiu:
Xiang was silent for a moment, her fingers still tapping. She was even worse at wearing than he was. But then she said, “
Yes, I do see them!” She glanced at Juan Orozco. “Who are they?”
“Friends of Fred and Jerry, from way south. Chile.”
Miri --> Juan:
Juan --> Miri:
Juan rattled Spanish at the visitors, almost too fast for Robert to understand. Something about helping beginners with a monster.
The others’ Spanish was even less intelligible. But maybe that didn’t matter. The visitors stepped back, and the space was filled with a shambling purple something.
Xiang laughed. “I see that too. But the creature…it’s not even pretending to be real.”
Robert leaned close to the lopsided vision. “It’s pretending to be a stuffed animal,” with crudely stitched seams and tufts of stuffing peeking from between the joints. But the vision was almost seven feet tall, and when Robert approached, it shambled back from him.
Robert laughed, “I’ve read about these things.”
Lena --> Juan, Miri, Xiu:
“Oh.” Xiu Xiang stepped forward, blocking the creature’s retreat. Its rear legs stopped but the front kept pushing, and it almost tipped over.
Miri --> Juan:
Juan said, “The goal is we all cooperate to make it move. Dance around it, Xiu.”
She did. Music followed her motion. The creature’s rear legs reengaged, and its butt end seemed to track her march. The children from Chile thought that was hilarious.
When Robert cocked his wrist and wiggled a beat, the music came up. Juan began clapping, and the beast’s shoulders twitched to the music. The children from the Far South watched silently for a moment. They looked as solid as the real Juan and Xiu Xiang, but they were no more expert than most San Diego users. Their shadows went the wrong way, and their feet had only a casual acquaintance with the surface of the lawn. But after an instant, the Chileans seemed to hear the music and began clapping too. And now the critter’s tail—their domain in this game?—began pumping up and down.
Robert expanded on his gestures, grabbing control of the creature’s floppy claws. For a moment, the monster danced in synch with the music, each gesture consistent. But the network delay was about half a second, and worse, it varied randomly from a tiny fraction of a second to well over a second. The dance got wilder as errors were corrected and overcorrected, until the tail was whacking at the heel claws. The creature rotated onto its back and its legs flailed in random directions.
Lena --> Juan, Miri, Xiu:
“Damn!” said Robert.
But everybody was laughing, and not at any particular victim. One by one, the faraway children disappeared, till only the real people were left, Robert and Juan and Xiu Xiang.
“We could have done better, Juan!”
Lena --> Xiu:
Juan was still laughing. “I know, I know. But the network link was basura más odiosa. There are game companies who give you cheapnet for free, because it makes everyone so mad they upgrade to paying status.”
“Well then why did we try?”
“Hey, to practice. For fun.”
Robert remembered the inept international choir down at UCSD. “We should have used a metronome. Can you bring these kids back?”
“Nah, we were just…like waving to each other. You know, in passing.”
In passing. “I didn’t see them at all until you showed them to me. How busy is the aether?” Robert slashed the air with his hand. How many realities burbled immanent?
“Out here in public, it’s lots too busy to view all at once. There’s probably three or four hundred nodes in line of sight of your Epiphany. Each of those could manage dozens of overlays. In a crowd there’d be hundreds of active realities, and bazillions potentially—”
Miri --> Juan:
Juan --> Miri:
The boy seemed to lose his train of thought. “Of course, when there are just two or three people around, the laser traffic is mostly just a potential.”
They walked farther along the track, the boy demonstrating how to surf through the public views. Robert and Xiu Xiang practiced at his direction, sometimes achieving a consensus view. Xiang seemed more relaxed than at the beginning of the walk; at least she was walking a bit closer to Juan and Robert.
But Xiu didn’t respond when Robert joked, “I’d say we’re getting to be truly awful.”
Lena --> Xiu:
Robert wondered at what a weird duck this Xiang woman was.
XIU XIANG WAS weird in other ways. Though she had dropped the composition class because she was too shy to perform in front of others, she loved the shop class. Every day she seemed to be playing with something new from the class inventory. That was the only time she was clearly happy, smiling and humming to herself. Some of her projects were obvious to the new Robert, some he could make good guesses about. She was happy to explain them. “Maybe there aren’t any ‘user-serviceable parts’ inside,” she said, “but what I’ve built, I understand!” She was doing the equivalent of a student semester project every day, and enjoying every minute of it.
Xiu wasn’t entirely crazy; normally she didn’t show up when Robert Gu was teaching Juan. Robert had never taught children, and he didn’t like incompetents. For all Juan’s good intentions, he was both. And now Robert was pretending to teach him to write.
“It’s easy, Juan,” Robert heard himself say. Lies on top of pretense! Well, maybe not: writing crap was easy. Twenty years of teaching graduate poetry seminars had shown him that. Writing well was a different thing. Writing beauty that sings was something that no amount of schooling could teach. The geniuses must take care of themselves. Juan Orozco was distinctly less able than the students of Robert’s experience. By twentieth-century standards he was subliterate…except where he needed words to access data or understand results. Okay, perhaps he was not subliterate. Maybe there was some other word for these crippled children. Paraliterate? And I bet I can teach him to write crap, too.
So they sat high in the bleachers, pounding words across the sky, Juan Orozco oblivious of the runners below and the games far away. There came a time when he didn’t play with his fonts anymore.
There came a day when he wrote something that had affect and image. It was not utter crap. It was almost up to the standards of muddled cliché. The boy stared into the sky for half a minute, his jaw slack. “That is so…bitchin’. The words, they make me see things.” His gaze flickered sideways, to Robert. A smile spread across his face. “You with wearing, me with writing. We’re getting really good!”
“Perhaps equally so.” But Robert couldn’t help smiling back.
A WEEK PASSED. Most evenings, Robert had interviews with Zulfi Sharif. After school and sometimes on weekends, he and Juan worked together. Much of that was remote now. They were still flailing around for a semester project. More and more, Robert was intrigued with the problem of far coordination. Games, music, sports, it all got jittery beyond a few thousand miles and a couple dozen routers. The boy had bizarre plans for how they might put everything together. “We could do something with music, manual music. That’s lots easier than game synchronization.” Robert went for hours at a time without thinking about his demented, maimed condition.
These school projects were more interesting to the new Robert Gu than Sharif’s admiring interviews—and far more interesting than his occasional visits to UCSD. The library shredding had been temporarily suspended, apparently due to the demonstration and his own unintendedly dramatic a
ppearance there. But without the demonstrators, the library was a dead place. Modern students didn’t have much use for it. There was just Winnie’s “Elder Cabal” up on the sixth floor, rebels whose cause was suddenly on hold.
Robert and Xiu Xiang had mastered most of the Epiphany defaults. Now when he looked at a real object in “just that way,” explanations would pop up. With the proper squint or stare at attendant icons, he got the added detail he wanted. Look at the object a different way, and he often could see through and beyond it! Xiu wasn’t as good as Robert with the visuals. On the other hand, if she didn’t get flustered, she was better at audio searches: when you heard a word you didn’t know, if you could tag it, then search results would appear automatically. That explained the marvelous vocabulary—and equally marvelous screwups—he noticed in the children’s language.
Miri --> Juan:
Juan --> Miri:
“You know, Dr. Gu, you and Xiu are, um, really good with the defaults. But we should work on the nondefaults, too.”
Xiang nodded. She was remote today, too, though not as realistically as Juan Orozco. Her image was perfectly solid, but her feet were melted into the bleacher bench in front of her, and occasionally he got glimpses of—background? Her apartment? He kidded her about that, but as usual when he made a joke, it just made her even more quiet.
Lena --> Juan, Miri, Xiu:
Miri --> Juan, Lena, Xiu:
Robert turned back to Juan. “So what are the most useful nondefaults?”
“Well, there’s silent messaging. The bit rate is so low, it works when nothing else does.”
“Yes! I’ve read about sming. It’s like the old instant messaging, except no one can see you’re communicating.”
Juan nodded. “That’s how most people format it.”
Lena --> Juan, Miri, Xiu:
