Flattered at the invitation, Step had to decline. “We’re still unpacking, and I’m more into good old-fashioned American rock and roll. Bowie’s too disco for me.”
“Oh, he’s past disco now. He’s past glitter, too. He’s sort of in punk mode.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“I think of my D&D character, you know, Saladin Gallowglass, I think of him as looking like David Bowie. Or like Sting.”
“Sting?” asked Step.
“With the Police,” said the kid. When Step still showed no sign of comprehension, the kid shook his head and went on. “I understand you’re going to be doing kind of quality control for us.”
“From what Dicky said this morning,” said Step, “I have to get him to unzip my fly when I pee.”
The kid giggled. ‘That’s Dickhead for you. No, Ray told me that you’re a precious resource. The only way he could get Dickhead to accept the idea of hiring you was to promise that you’d have nothing to do with programming, but in fact he wants your fingers in everything. He thinks of you as the computer wizard of the universe.”
“Well, I’m not,” said Step. “I’m a historian who taught myself programming in my spare time.”
“All good programmers are self-taught, at least in the home computer business,” said the kid.
“Look, what do I actually call you?”
“Around here they call me Roland and you probably should, too,” said the kid.
“But what would you prefer?”
He grinned. “Like I said, I think of myself as Saladin Gallowglass.”
“So is Gallowglass all right, or Is that too formal?”
“Gallowglass is great, Mr. Fletcher.”
“Call me Step.”
“Hey, Step.”
“Mind if I ask, how old are you?”
“Twenty-two.”
“And if you’re just a common ordinary programmer, how come Ray Keene tells you stuff that he doesn’t tell Dicky?”
“Oh, I suppose because he’s known me longer. I used to hang around his house and I learned programming on his Commodore Pet when I was, like, sixteen.”
It dawned on Step: In all his interviews and meetings, no one had ever mentioned the existence of this wunderkind, and no one had ever told him who it was who actually coded the original software that had earned Ray Keene a Mercedes and a power office.
“You wrote Scribe 64, didn’t you?”
Gallowglass smiled shyly. “Every line of it,” he said.
“And I’ll bet you’re the one who keeps doing the upgrades.”
“I’m working on a sixty-character screen right now,” he said. “I have to use a sort of virtual screen memory and background character mapping, but it’s going pretty well. I have this idea of using character memory as the virtual screen memory, since that means that I’m not actually using up RAM for the mapping.”
“I don’t know enough about 64 architecture yet to know what you’re talking about,” said Step. “But I hope I’m not too nosy if I ask you, since you are the person who actually created Scribe 64, how come you aren’t vice-president of something?”
“Ray takes care of me,” said Gallowglass. “I kind of make more money than God. And I’m not exactly management material.”
“I’d be interested to know how much God makes, someday,” said Step.
“And someday maybe I’ll tell you.” Gallowglass grinned. “What about you? Got any kids?”
“Three, with a fourth on the way.”
“How old are they?”
“Stephen’s almost eight, Robert is nearly five, Elizabeth is two, and the new one is negative five months now.”
“I’ll tell you, I really get along great with kids,” said Gallowglass. “If you want me to tend the kids for you sometime, let me know.”
“Yeah, right. A programmer who makes more money than God, and I’m going to call him up to babysit for me.”
“I mean it, I really like kids, and I get kind of lonely sometimes.”
“You don’t live with your folks?”
“Dad hates me,” said Gallowglass. “I live by myself.”
“Hates you? Come on.”
“No, I mean it, he says it whenever I go home. I walk in the door, he says, ‘Damn but I hate you, do you have to keep coming back here?’ Mom’s OK though. Hey, we’re just a good old southern family.”
“Sorry. I wasn’t trying to pry or anything,” said Step.
Gallowglass laughed. “I haven’t seen a grown man blush in a long time,” he said.
This poor kid, thought Step. A sweet, brilliant, nice kid, and not only does his dad hate him, not only did his mom blow smoke in his face as a baby, but also he’s getting seriously ripped off by the very people that he trusts most in all the world. None of my business, 1 know, but this kid ought to at least know that something else is possible. “Let me tell you something,” said Step. “The difference between royalties and bonuses is that a royalty is yours by right, by law, even after you leave the company, while a bonus is a gift and if Ray ever feels like not giving it to you, then that’s just too bad for you.”
Gallowglass looked at him steadily through those bottle-bottom lenses.
“I just thought you ought to know that,” said Step. “In case you ever want to write another piece of software. Maybe on the next one, they’ll mention your name somewhere in the manual. It’s something we programmers don’t get much of—credit for what we do.”
“You had your name on Hacker Snack,” observed Gallowglass.
“I turned down two software publishers because they wouldn’t write that into the contract,” said Step. “That’s why you folks here at Eight Bits knew my name. But until this very moment, no one here ever mentioned your name. In fact, I kind of got the impression that Ray wrote Scribe 64 himself.”
“You did?” asked Gallowglass.
“Not that he ever said so,” said Step.
“Ray can’t program a computer to print his name on the screen,” said Gallowglass.
“Yeah, well, I didn’t know that,” said Step. “He never told me. Hey, not his fault if I got the wrong impression. The main thing is that I think it’s important for programmers to get credit for what we do. Like an author getting his name on his own book.”
“You weren’t the first to get your name above the title, you know,” said Gallowglass. “Doug Duncan got his name on Russian Front even before you.”
“Yeah,” said Step. “I already had my contract signed before Russian Front came out, but he was the first to get his game out that way.”
“I met him at CES last year,” said Gallowglass.
“Yeah?”
“I did him like I did you—told him it was a great game but then I laid into one of the flaws in the game.”
“Oh, is this something you do to everybody?” asked Step.
“Sure.”
“Where’d you team that technique, from How to Win Friends and Influence People?”
Gallowglass giggled. “I just like to see how people react to it. You took it just fine. In fact, best ever. You actually listened to a kid with glasses and a pocket protector and you didn’t know me from shit on the sidewalk.”
“What did Duncan do?”
“Well, let’s just say that Doug Duncan is the kind of guy who never, ever forgives anybody who dares to suggest that anything he ever did was somewhat less than perfect. He actually got me kicked off a panel at a conference six months later. Said he’d leave and not do his thing there if I was given a microphone at the conference. He never forgives and he never forgets.”
“Maybe that would have taught you not to criticize strangers.”
“Hey, it’s my flaming-asshole test, and Duncan leaves a trail of ashes wherever he goes.”
Step had to laugh. He liked this kid. Maybe a lot. Though if Dicky had overheard their conversation about royalties and credit for programmers, both of them would probably be in trouble. “Hey, uh, how soundproof is this offic
e?” asked Step.
“How the hell should I know?” asked Gallowglass. “But with all these games on, who do you think can hear us?”
Step thought, but did not say, that the games in the room made them talk louder, while the noise they made wouldn’t interfere half as much with someone outside the room who wanted to listen in.
Someone knocked on the door.
“Come in!” yelled Gallowglass.
It was Dicky, and for a moment Step felt that rush of guilt that comes when you’ve just been caught. Dicky had been listening.
“So there you are,” said Dicky. “I’ve been looking all over for you.”
“Me?” said Step.
“I wondered if you wanted to go for lunch with me.”
“He can’t,” said Gallowglass immediately. “He’s going to lunch with me, so I can get him up to speed on the new features in Scribe 64.”
“And I have to get him up to speed on everything else,” said Dicky, looking a bit stern.
“Hey, leave me out of this,” said Step. “This is my first day, I’ll go wherever I’m told.”
But Dicky and Gallowglass gazed at each other for a few long moments more, until at last Dicky said, “Come see me after lunch.”
“Sure,” said Step. “But you’re my supervisor, Mr. Northanger, so my schedule is yours to command.”
“Call me Dicky,” said Dicky.
“Not Richard?” asked Step.
“Is there something wrong with Dicky?” asked Dicky.
“No,” said Step. “I just thought—”
“Dicky is not a nickname for Richard,” said Dicky. “It’s the name I was christened with.”
“I’m sorry,” said Step.
“And meeting with you after lunch is what I prefer.” Dicky closed the door behind him.
“Man, you’re a champion suck-up,” said Gallowglass.
Step turned on him. “What are you trying to do, get my supervisor permanently pissed off at me on my first day on the job?”
“Don’t take Dicky so seriously,” said Gallowglass. “He can’t touch a program without introducing a bug into it. The guy’s worthless.”
Apparently Gallowglass had no concept of the kind of trouble that Dicky could make for a man in Step’s position. This kid’s relationship was with the owner, and he was the programmer of the bread-and-butter program that was paying everybody’s salaries, so he really could treat Dicky however he liked. But that didn’t mean Dicky liked it. In fact, if this had gone on very long, by now Dicky probably seethed at anything Gallowglass did or said. And he’d take it out on whoever was closest to Gallowglass who actually needed his job.
Step.
“Do me a favor,” said Step. “Don’t do anything to get Dicky any more ticked off at me than he is.”
“Sure,” said Gallowglass. “Don’t get mad. It’s really OK, I promise you. You’re in like Flynn around here, everybody’s really excited you’re actually here. You’ll see, it’ll be great.”
“No sweat then,” said Step, though Gallowglass was probably wrong.
“And I really would be glad to tend your kids for you.”
“Thanks,” said Step.
“I’m really good at it. And I’m not afraid to change diapers.”
“Sure,” said Step. “I’ll talk to DeAnne about it.”
“OK. Squeet.”
“What?”
“Squeet. It’s just a word we use around here. It means Let’s go eat, only the way you say it when you say it real fast. Squeet.”
“Sure, fine,” said Step. “Squeet.”
4
YUCKY HOLES
This is why DeAnne, a westerner all her life, was unpacking boxes in the family room of a house in Steuben, North Carolina: Her earliest memories were of growing up in Los Angeles, in a poorer part of town back in the fifties, when gangs did not yet rule and blacks were still colored people who were just starting to march and had not yet rioted. Her neighborhood and school friends were of an array of races and nationalities. She barely noticed this until she left.
Her father got his doctorate and went to teach at Brigham Young University—the “Y.” She was eight years old when she first went to school in Orem, Utah. All the children in her class were white, all of them were Mormon, and many of them were the same children she saw at church on Sunday. This was the fall of 1962, and the conversation among the children turned, eventually, to civil rights and Martin Luther King. Deeny was stunned to hear some of the other children speak of “niggers,” a word she had thought was like any other word written on walls—one knew it existed but never said it where God could hear.
When they saw how upset Deeny was, they laughed, and some said things that were even nastier—that all colored people stank and were stupid, that they all stole and carried razor blades. She furiously told them that it wasn’t true, that her best friend Debbie in Los Angeles was colored and she was as smart as anybody and she didn’t stink and the only kid who ever stole anything from them was a white boy. This made them angry. They said terrible things to her and shoved her and poked her and pinched her, and she came home from school in tears. Her parents reassured her that she was right, but she never forgot the ugly face of bigotry, and how angry the other children got when someone stood up against them.
It was no accident that when Step decided to go on for a doctorate in history, they didn’t even apply to a school west of the Mississippi. DeAnne was determined that her children would not grow up in Utah, where everyone they knew would be Mormon and white, and where children could come to believe terrible lies about anyone who wasn’t just like them. Step agreed with her—as he put it, they didn’t want to raise their kids where Mormons were too thick on the ground.
That was fine in theory, but the reality was this depressingly dark family room in this shabby house in Steuben, North Carolina. And Stevie had to walk into class today as a complete stranger, with no sense of connection.
In Utah, Stevie would have known all these children already, from the neighborhood, from church. He would share in the same pattern of life, would know what to expect from them. We’ve given our children a wonderful variety of strangeness, just as we planned, thought DeAnne, but at the same time we’ve deprived them of a sense of belonging where they live. They’re foreigners here. We are foreigners here.
I am a stranger, and this is a strange, strange land.
Robbie and Elizabeth were down for their naps. For Elizabeth that meant serious hard sleeping; for Robbie, it meant lying in bed reading the jokes and puzzles in his favorite volume of Childcraft. Enough, that they were pinned down and quiet. It gave her a chance to be alone, to empty the boxes, one by one . . . to brood about her life and whether she was a good mother and a good wife and a good Mormon and even a good person,, which she secretly knew she was not and never could be, no matter how she seemed to others, because none of them, not even Step, knew what she was really like inside. How weak she was, how frightened, how uncertain of everything in her life except the Church—that was the thing that did not change, the foundation of her life. Everything else was changeable. Even Step—she knew that she didn’t really know him, that always there was the chance that someday he would surprise her, that she would turn to face her husband and find a stranger in his place, a stranger who didn’t approve of her and didn’t want her in his life anymore. DeAnne knew that to hold on to any good thing in her life—her husband, her children—she had to do the right thing, every time. It was the selvage of the fabric of her life. If only she could be sure, from day to day, from hour to hour, what the right thing was.
The doorbell rang.
It was a thirtyish woman, slender as Jane Fonda, a bit shorter than DeAnne. She had three kids in tow, the oldest a boy about Robbie’s age, and somehow—perhaps because of the kids, perhaps because of her practical cover-everything clothing, perhaps just because of her confident, cheerful face with hardly a speck of makeup on it—DeAnne knew that this woman was a Mormon. Or, if s
he wasn’t, should be.
“Sister Fletcher?” said the woman.
She was Mormon. “Yes,” said DeAnne.
“I’m Jenny Cooper, spelled with a w as if it was cow-per, only it isn’t.”
“Like the poet,” said DeAnne.
Jenny grinned. “I knew it! I’ve lived here six years, and now when I’ve only got three-and-a-half months left before we move to Arizona, now somebody finally moves in who’s actually heard of William Cowper.”
Wouldn’t you know it, thought DeAnne. I’m already starting to like her, and she’s moving away. “Come in, please. My kids are napping, but as long as we stay in the family room—”
“Your kids nap? Let’s trade,” said Jenny as she strode in. She gave no sign of noticing or caring whether her kids followed her inside or not. “I know you’re busy moving in but I brought a razor knife and I fed and watered my herd before we came, so show me where the boxes are.”
“I’m doing books today,” said DeAnne, leading her into the family room. “But you don’t really have to help.”
“Alphabetical order?”
“Eventually,” said DeAnne. “But it’s enough if you sort of group them together. Jenny, how in the world did you know my name? We didn’t even go to church on Sunday.”
“I noticed that,” said Jenny. “A few weeks ago the bishop says that he got a call from Brother Something-or-other from Vigor, Indiana, who was going to move into a house in the ward on the first weekend in March. I figure, they’ll need help moving in, so I waited for you to show up at Church, only you didn’t come. So, this is what I thought: If they were inactive, Brother Something wouldn’t have called. So either they didn’t actually move on schedule, or they’re the kind of proud, stubborn, self-willed, stuck-up people who wouldn’t dream of asking for help and so they skipped their first Sunday and plan to show up next week, with everything all unpacked and put away, and when people offer to help, they’ll say, Already done, thanks just the same.’”
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