"Earth" - читать интересную книгу автора (Brin David)

• CRUST

“Watching, all the time watching… goggle-eye geeks. Soon as I get out, I’m gonna Patagonia, buy it? That’s where the youth growth is. More ripe fruit like us, Cuzz. And not so many barrel spoilers… rotten old apples that sit an’ stink and stare atcha…” Remi agreed with Crat’s assessment as the three of them strode side by side down a gravel path through the park. Roland also expressed approval, nudging Crat’s shoulder. “That’s staccato code, boy-oh.”

What brought on Crat’s sudden outburst was the sight of yet another babushka, glaring at them from a bench under one of the force-grown shade trees as Remrand Roland and Crat scrambled up a grassy bank from the culvert where they’d been smoking. The very moment they came into view, the old woman laid her wire-knitting aside and fixed them with the bug-eyed, opaque gape of her True-Vu lenses — staring as if they were freaks or aliens out of some space-fic vid, instead of three perfectly normal guys, just hanging around, doing nobody any harm.

“My, my!” Remi whined sarcastically. “Is it my breath? Maybe she smells… tobacco!

“No joke, bloke,” Roland replied. “Some of those new goggles’ve got sniffer sensors on ’em. I hear the geek lobby in Indianapolis wants to put even home-grown on the restrict list.”

“No shit? Tobacco? Even? Roll over, Raleigh! I just gotta move outta this state.”

“Settlers ho, Remi?”

“Settlers ho.”

The stare got worse as they approached. Remi couldn’t see the babushka’s eyes, of course. Her True-Vu’s burnished lenses didn’t really have to be aimed directly at them to get a good record. Still, she jutted out her chin and faced them square on, aggressively making the point that their likenesses, every move they made, were being transmitted to her home unit, blocks from here, in real time.

Why do they have to do that? To Remi it felt like a provocation. Certainly no one could mistake her tight-lipped expression as friendly.

Remi and his pals had promised their local tribes supervisor not to lose their tempers with “senior citizens on self-appointed neighborhood watch.” Remi did try, really. It’s just another geek. Ignore her.

But there were so gor-sucking many geeks! According to the Net census, one in five Americans were over 65 now. And it felt far worse in Bloomington — as if oldsters were a ruling majority, staking out every shady spot with their electronic sun hats and goggle-scanners, watching from porches, watching from benches, watching from lawn chairs…

It was Crat whose reserve broke as they approached that baleful inspection. Suddenly he capered. “Hey, granny!” Crat bowed with a courtly flourish. “Why don’t you record this!” Roland giggled as Crat swept off his straw cowboy hat to display a garish scalp tattoo.

Merriment redoubled when she actually reacted! A sudden moue of surprise and revulsion replaced that glassy stare. She rocked back and turned away.

“Astonishing!” Roland cried, mimicking their least favorite teen-behaviors teacher at J. D. Quayle High School. He continued in a snooty, midwestern drawl. “It should be noted that this small urban band’s totemistic innovation achieved its desired effect… which was? Anybody?”

“Shock value!” all three of them shouted in unison, clapping hands, celebrating a minor victory over their natural enemy.

Used to be, you could break a babushka’s stare with an obscene gesture or show of muscular bluster — both protected forms of self-expression. But the biddies and codgers were getting harder to shake. Any time nowadays you actually made one of them yank back that awful, silent scrutiny was a triumph worth savoring.

“Freon!” Crat cursed. “Just once I’d like to catch some goggle geek alone, with fritzed sensors and no come-go record. Then I’d teach ’em it’s not polite to stare.”

Crat emphasized his point with a fist, smacking his palm. Today, since it was cloudy, he had forsaken his normal Stetson for a plaid baseball cap, still acceptable attire for a Settler. His sunglasses, like Remi’s, were thin, wire framed, and strictly for eye protection. Nothing electronic about them. They were a statement, repudiating the rudeness of geriatric America.

“Some people just got too much free time,” Roland commented as the three of them sauntered near the babushka, barely skimming outside the twenty-centimeter limit that would violate her “personal space.” Some oldsters were gearing up with sonar, even radar, to catch the most innocent infraction. They went out of their way to tempt you, creating slow-moving bottlenecks across sidewalks whenever they saw young people hurrying to get somewhere. They hogged escalators, acting as if they hoped you’d bump them, giving them any excuse to squeeze that police-band beeper, or raise the hue and cry, or file a long list of nuisance charges.

These days, in Indiana, juries were composed mostly of TwenCen grads anyway. Fellow retirement geeks who seemed to think youth itself a crime. So naturally, a guy had to accept the endless dares, skirting the edge whenever challenged.

“Granny could be doin’ something useful,” Crat paused to snarl, bending to really scrape the zone. “She could be gardening or collectin’ litter. But no! She’s gotta stare!”

Remi worried Crat might spit again. Even a miss would be a four-hundred-dollar fifth offense, and despite Granny’s averted gaze those sensors were still active.

Fortunately, Crat let Remi and Roland drag him out of sight into the formal hedge garden. Then he leaped, fist raised, and shouted, “Yow, tomodachis!” pumped by nicotine and a sweet, if minor, victory. “Patagonia, yeah!” Crat gushed. “Would that be dumpit great? Kits like us run it all there.”

“Not like here, in the land o’ the old and the home of the grave,” agreed Remi.

“Huh, say it! Why, I hear it’s better’n even Alaska, or Tasmania.”

“Better for Settlers!” Roland and Remi chanted in unison.

“And the music? Fuego-fire’s the only beat that Yakuti Bongo-Cream can’t meet.”

Remi didn’t care much about that. He liked the idea of emigrating for other reasons.

“Naw, cuzz. Patagonia’s only the first step. It’s a staging area, see? When they open up Antarctica, settlers from Patagonia’ll have the jump. Just a hop across the water.” He sighed. “We’ll have new tribes, real tribes when the ice melts enough. Set it up our way. Real freedom. Real people.”

Roland glanced at him sidelong. Months ago they had qualified as a youth gang, which meant mandatory tribal behaviors classes. That was okay, but Remi’s friends sometimes worried he might actually be listening to what the profs were saying. And sometimes he did have to fight that temptation… the temptation to be interested.

No matter. It was a good afternoon to be with pals, drooping out in the park. It was well past the sweltering heat of midday — when those without air-conditioning sought shade in the hedge garden for their siestas — so right now people were scarce in this section of the garden. Just a couple of seedy ragman types, slumped and snoring under the fragrant oleanders. Whether they were dozers or dazers, Remi couldn’t tell from here. As if the difference mattered.

“Real privacy, maybe,” Roland agreed. “You just make sure that’s in the constitution, Rem, if they nom you to write it.”

Remi nodded vigorously. “Dumpit A-okay! Privacy! No gor-suckers watchin’ your every move. Why, I hear back in TwenCen… aw, shit.”

Sure enough, bored with just talking, Crat had gone over the top again. With no one in sight from this hedge-lined gravel path, he started drum-hopping down a line of multicolored trash bins, rattling their plastic sides with a stick, leaping up to dance on their flexing rims.

“Sweet perspiration… Sweat inspiration …” Crat chanted, skipping to the latest jingle by Phere-o-Moan.

“Sniffin’ it stiffens it… ” Roland countertimed, catching the excitement. He clapped, keeping time.

Remi winced, expecting one of the bins to collapse at any moment. “Crat!” he called.

“Damn what, damn who?” His friend crooned from on high, dance-walking the green container, shaking its contents of grass cuttings and mulch organics.

“U-break it — U-buy it,” Remi reminded.

Crat gave a mock shiver of fear. “Look around, droogie. No civic-minded geepers, boy-chik. And cops need warrants.” He hopped across to the blue bin for metals, making cans and other junk rattle.

True, no goggle-faces were in sight. And the police were limited in ways that didn’t apply to citizens… or else even the aphids on the nearby bushes could be transmitting this misdemeanor to Crat’s local youth officer, in real time.

“An aroma for home-a, and a reek for the street …”

Remi tried to relax. Anyway, what harm was Crat doing? Just having a little fun, was all. Still, he reached his limit when Crat started kicking wrappers and cellu-mags out of the paper-recycle bin. Misdemeanor fines were almost badges of honor, but mandatory-correction felonies were another matter!

Remi hurried to pick up the litter. “Get him down, Rollie,” he called over his shoulder as he chased a flapping page of newsprint.

“Aw petrol! Lemme ’lone!” Crat bitched as Roland grabbed him around the knees and hauled him out of the last container. “You two aren’t sports. You just—”

The complaint cut short suddenly, as if choked off. Picking up the last shred of paper, Remi heard rhythmic clapping from the path ahead. He looked up and saw they were no longer alone.

Bleeding sores, he cursed inwardly. All we needed were Ra Boys.

Six of them slouched by the curving hedge, not five meters away, grinning and watching this tableau — Remi clutching his flapping load of paper, and Roland holding Crat high like some really homely ballerina.

Remi groaned. This could be really bad.

Each Ra Boy wore from a thick chain round his neck the gleaming symbol of his cult — a sun-sigil with bright metal rays as sharp is needles. Those overlay open-mesh shirts exposing darkly tanned torsos. The youths wore no head coverings at all, of course, which would “insult Ra by blocking the fierce love of his rays.” Their rough, patchy complexions showed where anti-one creams had sloughed precancerous lesions. Sunglasses were their only allowance for the sleeting ultraviolet, though Remi had heard of fanatics who preferred going slowly blind to even that concession.

One thing the Ra Boys had in common with Remi and his friends. Except for wristwatches, they strode stylishly and proudly unencumbered by electronic gimcrackery… spurning the kilos of tech-crutches everyone over twenty-five seemed to love carrying around. What man, after all, relied on crap like that?

Alas, Remi didn’t need Tribal Studies 1 to tell him that was as far as teen solidarity went in the year 2038.

“Such a lovely song and dance,” the tallest Ra Boy said with a simper. “Are we rehearsing for a new amateur show to put on the Net? Do please tell us so we can tune in. Where will it be playing? On Gong channel four thousand and three?”

Roland dropped Crat so hurriedly, the Ra Boys broke up again. As for Remi, he was torn between a dread of felonies and the burning shame of being caught picking up litter like a citizen. To walk just three steps and put it in the bin would cost him too much in pride, so he crumpled the mass and stuffed it in his pocket — as if he had plans for the garbage, later.

Another one joined the leader, sauntering forward. “Naw, what we have here… see… are some neo-fem girlie-girls… dressed up as Settlers. Only we caught them being girlie when… when they thought no one was looking!” This Ra Boy seemed short of breath and a bit droopy eyed. Remi knew he was a dozer when he lifted an inhaler and took a long hit of pure oxygen from a hip flask.

“Hmm,” the tall one nodded, considering the proposition. “Only problem with that hypothesis is, why would anyone want to dress up like a gor-sucking Settler in the first place?”

Remi saw Roland seize the growling Crat, holding him back. Clearly the Ra Boys would love to have a little physical humor with them. And just as clearly, Crat didn’t give a damn about the odds.

But even though no geeps were watching now, dozens must have recorded both parties converging on this spot… chronicles they’d happily zap-fax to police investigating a brawl after the fact.

Not that fighting was strictly illegal. Some gangs with good lawyer programs had found loopholes and tricks. Ra Boys, in particular, were brutal with sarcasm… pushing a guy so hard he’d lose his temper and accept a nighttime battle rendezvous or some suicidal dare, just to prove he wasn’t a sissy.

The tall one swept off his sunglasses and sighed. He minced several delicate steps and simpered. “Perhaps they are Gaians, dressing up as Settlers in order to portray yet another endangered species. Ooh. I really must watch their show!” His comrades giggled at the foppish act. Remi worried how much longer Roland could restrain Crat.

“Funny,” he retaliated in desperation. “I wouldn’t figure you could even see a holo show, with eyes like those.”

The tall one sniffed. Accepting Remi’s weak gambit, he replied in Posh Speech. “And what, sweet child of Mother Dirt, do you imagine is wrong with my eyes?”

“You mean besides mutant ugliness? Well it’s obvious you’re going blind, oh thou noonday mad dog.”

Sarcasm gave way to direct retort. “The Sun’s rays are to be appreciated, Earthworm. Momma’s pet. Even at risk.”

“I wasn’t talking about UV damage to your retinas, dear Mr. Squint. I refer to the traditional penalty for self-abuse.”

Paydirt! The Ra Boy flushed. Roland and Crat laughed uproariously, perhaps a little hysterically. “Got him, Rem!” Roland whispered. “Go!”

From the scowls on the Ra Boys’ patchy faces, Remi wondered if this was wise. Several of them were fingering their chains, with the gleaming, sharp-rayed amulets. If one or more had tempers like Crat’s…

The lead Ra Boy stepped closer. “That a slur on my stamina, oh physical lover of fresh mud?”

Remi shrugged, it was too late to do anything but go with it. “Fresh mud or fecund fern, they’re all out of reach to one like you, whose only wet licks come from his own sweaty palm.”

More appreciative laughter from Roland and Crat hardly made up for the lead Ra Boy’s seething wrath, turning him several shades darker. I didn’t know I’d strike such a nerve with that one, Remi thought. Apparently this guy had a lousy sex life. Some victories aren’t worth the price.

“So you’re the manly man, Joe Settler?” Ra Boy sneered. “You must be Mister Testo. An Ag-back with a stacked stock, and whoremones for all Indiana.”

Here it comes. Remi foresaw no way to avoid exchanging Net codes with this character, which in turn would lead to a meeting in some dark place, with no neighborhood watch busybodies to interfere.

With a small part of his mind, Remi realized the encounter had built up momentum almost exactly along the positive feedback curve described in class by Professor Jameson… bluster and dare and counterbluff, reinforced by a desperate need to impress one’s own gang… all leading step by step to the inevitable showdown. It would be an interesting observation — if that knowledge had let Remi prevent anything, but it hadn’t. As it was, he wished he’d never even learned any of that shit.

He shrugged, accepting the Ra worshipper’s gambit. “Well, I’m already man-ugly enough, I don’t have to pray for more from a great big gasball in the sky. I admit, though, your prayers sure look like they’ve been—”

Remi realized, mid-insult, that both groups were turning toward a sound — a new set of interlopers had entered the hedge garden. He turned. Along the path at least a dozen figures in cowled white gowns approached, slim and graceful. Their pendants, unlike the Ra Boys’, were patterned in the womblike Orb of the Mother.

“NorA ChuGa,” one of the Ra Boys said in disgust. Still, Remi noticed the guys in both gangs stood up straighter, taking up masculine poses they must have thought subtle, rather than pretentious. Feminine laughter cut off as the newcomers suddenly noticed the male gathering ahead of them. But their rapid pace along the path scarcely tapered. The North American Church of Gaia hardly ever slowed for anybody.

“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” several girls in the front rank said, almost simultaneously. Even shaded by their cowls, Remi recognized several of them from the halls of Quayle High. “Can we interest you in donating to the Trillion Trees Campaign?” one of the dedicants asked, coming face to face with Remi. And he had to blink past a moment’s fluster — she was heartbreakingly beautiful.

In her palm she held out brightly colored leaflet chips for any of the boys who would take one. There was an outburst of derisive laughter from the other side of the trail. These were surely young, naive Gaians if they thought to hit up Ra Boys for reforestation money!

Settlers, on the other hand, weren’t as ideologically incompatible. More importantly, it struck Remi that this offered a possible out.

“Why yes, sisters!” he effused. “You can interest us. I was just saying to my Settler friends here that tree planting will have to be our very first priority when we get to Patagonia. Soon as it’s warmed up down there. Yup, planting trees…”

Crat was still exchanging glares with the craziest looking Ra Boy. Grabbing his arm, Remi helped Roland tow him amidst the gliding tide of white-garbed girls. All the way, Remi asked enthusiastic questions about current Gaian projects, ignoring the taunts and jeers that followed them from the harsh-faced young sun worshippers. The Ra Boys could say whatever they wanted. On the scale of coups in tribal warfare, scoring with girls beat winning an insult match, hands down. Not that actual scoring was likely here. Hardcore Gaian women tended to be hard to impress. This one, for example.

“… don’t you see that hardwood reforestation in Amazonia is far more important than planting conifers down in Tierra del Fuego or Antarctica? Those are new ecologies, still delicate and poorly understood. You Settlers are much too impatient. Why, by the time those new areas are well understood and ready for humans to move in, the main battle, to save the Earth, could be lost!”

“I see your point,” Remi agreed. Anxious to make good their getaway, he and Roland nodded attentively until the Ra Boys were out of sight. Then Remi kept on smiling and nodding because of the speaker’s heart-shaped face and beautiful complexion. Also, he liked what he could make out of her figure under the gown. At one point he made a show of depositing the trash from his pocket in a brown recycle bin, giving the impression that litter gathering was his routine habit, and winning a brief approving pause in her lecture.

When they passed a row of hooded cancer plague survivors in wheelchairs, he slipped some dollar coins into their donation cups, getting another smile in reward.

Encouraged, he wound up accepting a pile of chip brochures, until at last she began running low on breath as they passed near the superconducting rails of the cross-park rapi-trans line. Then came a really lucky moment. A newly arriving train spilled youngsters in school uniforms onto the path, shouting and dashing about. The cascade of children broke apart the tight-knit squadron of Gaians. Remi and the young woman of his dreams were caught in the whirling eddies and pushed to one side under one of the rapitrans pillars. They looked at each other, and shared laughter. Her smile seemed much warmer when she was off her planet-saving pitch.

But Remi knew it would only be a moment. In seconds, the others would reclaim her. So, as casually as he could, he told her he would like to see her personally and asked for her net code to arrange a date.

She, in turn, met his gaze with soulful brown eyes and asked him sweetly to show his vasectomy certificate.

“Honestly,” she said with apparent sincerity. “I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical he insists, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue, to justify clinging to… ?”

Her words trailed off in perplexity, addressing his back as Remi seized his friends’ arms and rapidly departed.

“I’d show her somethin’ more important than genes!” Crat snarled when he heard the story. Roland was only slightly more forgiving. “Too damn much theory crammed into that pretty little head. Imagine, invading a guy’s privacy like that! Tell you one thing, that’s one bird who’d be happier, and a whole lot quieter as a farm wife.”

“Right!” Crat agreed. “Farm wife’s got what life’s about. There’s plenty room in Patagonia for lots of kids. Overpop’s just propa-crap—”

“Oh, shut up!” Remi snapped. His face still burned with shame, made worse by the fact that the girl obviously hadn’t even known what she was doing. “You think I care what a bleeding NorA ChuGa thinks? They only teach ’em how to be — what?.”

Roland was holding his wristwatch in front of Remi’s face, tapping its tiny screen. Lights rippled and the machine sang a warning tone.

Remi blinked. They were being scanned again, and it wasn’t just someone’s True-Vu this time, but real eavesdropping. “Some tokomak’s got a big ear on us,” Roland reported irritably.

It was just one thing after another! Remi felt like a caged tiger. Hell, even tigers had more privacy nowadays, in the wildlife survival arks, than a young guy ever got here in Bloomington. The park used to be a place where you could get away, but not anymore!

He looked around quickly, searching for the voyeur. Over to the south citizens of many ages were busy tending high-yield vegetables in narrow strip gardens, leased by the city to those without convenient rooftops. Bean pole detectors watched for poachers, but those devices couldn’t have set off Roland’s alarm.

Nor could the children, running about in visors and sun-goggles, playing tag or beamy. Or the ragged men in their twenties and thirties, over by the reflecting pond, draped in saffron sheets, pretending to be meditating, but fooling no one as they used biofeedback techniques to supply their bottomless, self-stimulated addiction… dazing out on endorphin chemicals released by their own brains.

There were other teens around too… though none wore gang colors. The silent, boring majority then, who neither slip-shaded nor dazed — students dressed for fashion or conformity, with little on their minds — some even carrying pathetic banners for tonight’s B-ball contest between the Fighting Golfers and the Letterman High Hecklers.

Then he saw the geek — a codger this time — leaning against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector, looking directly at the three of them. And sure enough, amid the bushy gray curls spilling under his white sun hat, Remi saw a thin wire, leading from an earpiece to a vest made of some sonomagnetic fabric.

Wheeling almost in step, the boys reacted to this new provocation by striding straight toward the geezer. As they neared, Remi made out the ribbons of a Helvetian War veteran on his chest, with radiation and pathogen clusters. Shit, he thought. Veterans are the worst. It would be hard winning any points over this one.

Then Remi realized the coot wasn’t even wearing goggles! Of course he could still be transmitting, using smaller sensors, but it broke the expected image, especially when the gremper removed even his sunglasses as they approached, and actually smiled!

“Hello, boys,” he said, amiably. “I guess you caught me snooping. Owe you an apology.”

Out of habit, Crat squeezed the fellow’s personal zone, even swaying over a bit as he flashed his scalp tattoo. But the geek didn’t respond in the usual manner, by flourishing his police beeper. Rather, he laughed aloud. “Beautiful! Y’know, I once had a messmate… a Russkie commando he was. Died in the drop on Liechtenstein, I think. He had a tattoo like that one, only it was on his butt! Could make it dance, too.”

Remi grabbed Crat’s arm when the idiot seemed about to spit. “You know using a big ear’s illegal without wearing a sign, tellin’ people you’ve got one. We could cite you, man.”

The oldster nodded. “Fair enough. I violated your privacy, and will accept in situ judgment if you wish.”

Remi and his friends looked at each other. Geriatrics — especially those who had suffered in the war — hardly ever used the word “privacy” except as an epithet, when accusing someone of hiding foul schemes. Certainly Remi had never heard of a codger willing to settle a dispute as gang members would, man to man, away from the all-intrusive eye of the Net.

“Shit no, gremper! We got you—”

“Crat!” Roland snapped. He glanced at Remi, and Remi nodded back. “All right,” he agreed. “Over by that tree. You pitch, we’ll swing.”

That brought another smile. “I used that expression when I was your age. Haven’t heard it since.*Did you know slang phrases often come and go in cycles?”

Still chatting amiably about the vagaries of language fashion since his day, the geep led them toward their designated open-air courtroom, leaving a puzzled Remi trailing behind, suddenly struck by the unasked-for exercise of visualizing this wrinkled, ancient remnant as a youth, once as brimming as they were now with hormones and anger.

Logically, Remi supposed it might be possible. Perhaps a few grempers even remembered what it had been like, with some vague nostalgia. But it couldn’t have been as bad to be young back then, he thought bitterly. There was stuff for guys like me to do. Old farts didn’t control everything.

Hell, at least you had a war to fight!

After the Helvetian holocaust, the frightened international community finally acted to prevent any more big ones, putting muscle into the inspection treaties. But that didn’t seem like much of a solution to Remi. The world was going straight to hell anyway, no detours. So why not do it in a way that was at least honorable and interesting?

Do not go gentle into that good night… Poetry class was just about the only one Remi really liked. Yeah. Back in TwenCen there were some guys who had it right.

From a grassy step they could look out over much of downtown Bloomington, a skyline still dominated by preserved TwenCen towers, though several of the more recent, slablike ’topias canted like ski slopes to the north. From somewhere beyond the park boundaries could be heard the ubiquitous sound of jackhammers as the city waged its endless, unwinnable war against decay, renovating crumbling sidewalks and sewer pipes originally designed to last a hundred years… back more than a century ago, when a hundred years must have sounded like forever. Bloomington looked and felt seedy, like almost any town, anywhere.

“I like listening to people, watching people,” the codger explained as he sat cross-legged before them, displaying a surprising limberness.

“So what?” Roland shrugged. “All you geeks listen and watch. All the time.”

The old man shook his head. “No, they stare and record. That’s different. They were raised in a narcissistic age, thinking they’d live forever. Now they compensate for their failing bodies by waging a war of intimidation against youth.

“Oh, it started as a way to fight street crime — retired people staking out the streets with video cameras and crude beepers. And the seniors’ posse really worked, to the point where perps couldn’t steal anything or hurt anybody in public anymore without getting caught on tape.

“But after the crime rate plummeted, did that stop the paranoia?” He shook his gray head. “You see, it’s all relative. That’s how human psych works. Nowadays seniors — you call us geeks — imagine threats where there aren’t any anymore. It’s become a tradition, see. They’re so busy warning off potential trouble, challenging threats before they materialize, they almost dare young men like you—”

Roland interrupted. “Hey, gremper. We get all this in Tribes. What’s your point?”

The old man shrugged. “Maybe pretending there’s still a need for neighborhood watch makes them feel useful. There’s a saying I heard… geeks find their own uses for technology.”

“I wish nobody ever invented all this tech shit,” Remi muttered.

The war veteran shook his head. “The world would be dead, dead now, my young friend, if it weren’t for tech stuff. Want to go back to the farm? Send ten billion people back to subsistence farming? Feeding the world’s a job for trained experts now, boy. You’d only screw things up worse than they already are.

“Tech eventually solved the worst problems of cities, too: violence and boredom. It helps people have a million zillion low-impact hobbies—”

“Yeah, and helps ’em spy on each other, too! That’s one of the biggest hobbies, isn’t it? Gossip and snooping!”

The old man shrugged. “You might not complain so much if you’d lived through the alternative. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to catch you fellows in some infraction. I was just listening. I like listening to people. I like you guys.”

Crat and Roland laughed out loud at the absurdity of the remark. But Remi felt a queer chill. The geezer really seemed to mean it.

Of course Professor Jameson kept saying it was wrong to overgeneralize. “… because you are gang members, that will color your views of everything. Young males do that when engaged in us-versus-them group bonding. They have to stereotype their enemies, dehumanize them. The problem’s really bad here in this part of the city, where the young-old conflict has deteriorated …”

Everybody hated Jameson, all the girlie gangs and dudie gangs — staying in his class only because a pass was required for any hope of earning a self-reliance card… as if half the kids were ever going to qualify. Shit.

“I like you because I remember the way it was for me,” gremper went on, unperturbed. “I remember when I felt I could bend steel, topple empires, screw harems, burn cities…” He closed his wrinkled eyelids for a moment, and when he reopened them, Remi felt a sudden thrill tickle his spine. The old guy seemed to be looking faraway into space and time.

“I did burn cities, y’know,” he told them in a low, very distant voice. And Remi somehow knew he had to be remembering things far more vivid than anything to be found in his own paltry store of recollections. Suddenly, he felt awash in envy.

“But then, each generation’s got to have a cause, right?” the oldster continued, shaking free of reminiscence. “Ours was ending secrecy. It’s why we fought the bankers and the bureaucrats and mobsters, and all the damned socialists to bring everything out into the open, once and for all, to stop all the underhanded dealing and giga-cheating.

“Only now our solution’s causing other problems. That’s the way things go with revolutions. When I overheard you guys dreaming aloud of privacy — like it was something holy — Jesus, that took me back. Reminded me of my own dad! People used to talk that way back at the end of TwenCen, till my generation saw through the scam—”

“Privacy’s no scam!” Roland snapped. “It’s simple human dignity!”

“Yeah!” Crat added. “You got no right to follow guys’ every move…”

But the old man lifted one hand placatingly. “Hey, I agree! At least partly. What I’m trying to say is, I think my generation went too far. We overthrew the evils of secrecy — of numbered bank accounts and insider deals — but now you guys are rejecting our excesses, replacing them with some of your own.

“Seriously though, what would you boys do if you had your way? You can’t just ban True-Vu and other tech-stuff. You can’t rebottle the genie. The world had a choice. Let governments control surveillance tech… and therefore give a snooping monopoly to the rich and powerful… or let everybody have it. Let everyone snoop everyone else, including snooping the government! I mean it, fellows. That was the choice. There just weren’t any other options.”

“Come on,” Roland said.

“All right, tell me. Would you go back to the illusion of so-called privacy laws, which only gave the rich and powerful a monopoly on secrecy?”

Crat glowered. “Maybe. At least when they had a…

monopoly, they weren’t so dumpit rude! People could at least pretend they were being left alone.”

Remi nodded, impressed with Crat’s brief eloquence. “There’s something to that. Who was it said life’s just an illusion, anyway?”

The gremper smiled and answered dryly. “Only every transcendental philosopher in history.”

Remi lifted his shoulders. “Oh, yeah, him. It was on the tip of my tongue.”

The old man burst out laughing and slapped Remi on the knee. In an odd way, Remi felt warmed by the gesture, as if it didn’t matter that they disagreed in countless ways or that a gap of half a century yawned between them.

“Damn,” the gremper said. “I wish I could take you back to those days. The guys in my outfit… the guys would’ve liked you. We could’ve shown you some times.”

To his amazement, Remi believed him. After a momentary pause, he asked, “Tell us… tell us about the guys.”

The three of them deliberated later, some distance from the tree, as dusk shadows began stretching across the park. Of course the old man left his big-ear unplugged while they passed judgment. He looked up when they returned to squat before him.

“We decided on a penalty for the way you invaded our privacy,” Roland said, speaking for all.

“I’ll accept your justice, sirs,” he said, inclining his head.

Even Crat grinned as Roland passed sentence. “You gotta come back here again next week, same time, and tell us more about the war.”

The old man nodded — in acceptance and obvious pleasure. “My name is Joseph,” he said, holding out his hand. “And I’ll be here.”

Over the next few weeks he kept his promise. Joseph told them tales they had never imagined, even after watching a thousand hypervideos. About climbing the steep flanks of the Pennine Alps, for instance, and then the Bernese Oberland — slogging through gas and bugs and radioactive mud. He described digging out booby traps nearly every meter of the way, and prying out the bankers’ mercenaries every ten or so. And he told them of his comrades, dying beside him, choking in their own sputum as they coughed their lungs out, still begging to be allowed to press on though, to help bring the Last War to an end.

He told them about the fall of Berne and the last gasp of the Gnomes, whose threat to “take the world down” with them turned out to be backed by three hundred cobalt-thorium bombs… which were defused only when Swiss draftees finally turned their rifles on their own officers and emerged from their shattered warrens, hands high over their heads, into a new day.

As spring headed toward summer, Joseph commiserated over the futility of high school, even under a “new education plan” that forced on students lots of supposedly “practical” information, but never did a guy any good anyway. He held them transfixed talking about the way girls used to be, back before they were taught all that modern crap about psychology and “sexual choice criteria.”

“Boy crazy, that’s what they were, my young tomodachis. No girlie wanted to be caught for even a minute without a boyfriend. It was where they got their sense of worth, see? Their alpha to omega. They’d do anything for you, believe most anything you said, so long as you promised you loved ’em.”

Remi suspected Joseph was exaggerating. But that didn’t matter. Even if it was all a load of bull semen, it was great bull semen. For the first time in his life, he contemplated the prospect of getting older — actually living beyond twenty-five — with anything but a vague sense of horror. The idea of someday being like Joseph didn’t seem so bad… as long as it took a long time happening, and providing he got to do as much as Joseph had along the way.

It was the profession of soldiering that fascinated Roland. Its camaradarie and traditions. Crat loved hearing about faraway places and escape from the tight strictures of urban life.

But as for Remi, he felt he was getting something more… the beginnings of a trust in time.

Joseph was a great source of practical advice, too — subtle verbal put-downs nobody here in Indiana had heard in years, but which would burrow like smart bombs dropped among the gang’s foes, only to blow up minutes, even hours, later with devastating effect. One day they met the same group of Ra Boys in the park and left them all scratching their heads in confusion, reluctant even to think of tackling Settlers anytime soon.

Roland talked about joining the Guard, maybe trying for one of the peacekeeping units.

Remi began tapping history texts from the Net.

Even Crat seemed to grow more reflective, as if every time he was about to lose his temper, he’d stop and think what Joseph would say.

No one worried overmuch when Joseph failed to show up one Saturday. On the second unexplained absence though, Remi and the others grew concerned. At home, sitting at his desk comp, Remi wrote a quick ferret program and sent it into the Net.

The ferret returned two seconds later with the old man’s obituary.

The mulching ceremony was peaceful. A few detached-looking adult grandchildren showed up, looking eager to be elsewhere. If they had been the sort to cry, Remi, Roland, and Crat would have been the only ones shedding tears.

Still, he had been old. “If any man’s led a full life, it was me,” Joseph once said. And Remi believed him.

I only hope I do half as well, he thought.

So it came as a shot from the sky when Remi answered the message light on his home comp one evening, and found logged there a terse note from Roland.

OUR NAMES LISTED IN PROGRAM GUIDE FOR A NET SHOW…

“Right!” Remi laughed. The law said whenever anyone was depicted, anywhere in the Net, it had to go into the listings. That made each weekly worldwide directory bigger than all the world’s libraries before 1910.

“Probably some Quayle High senior’s doing a Net version of the yearbook…”

But his laughter trailed off as he read the rest.

IT’S ON A REMINISCENCE DATABASE FOR WAR VETS, AND GUESS WHO’S LISTED AS AUTHOR

Remi read the name and felt cold.

Now, don’t jump to conclusions, he told himself. He might’ve just mentioned us… a nice note about getting to know three young guys before he died.

But his heart raced as he sought the correct Net address, sifting through layer after layer, from general to specific to superspecified, until at last he arrived at the file, dated less than a month ago.

THE REMEMBRANCES OF JOSEPH MOYERS: EPILOGUE: MY LAST WEEKS — ENCOUNTERS WITH THREE CONFUSED YOUNG MEN.

This was followed by full sight and sound, plus narration, beginning on that afternoon when they had met and held impromptu court where an elm tree shaded them from the glaring sky.

Perhaps someone neutral would have called the account compassionate, friendly. Someone neutral might even have described Joseph’s commentary as warm and loving.

But Remi wasn’t neutral. He watched, horrified, as his image, Roland’s, and Crat’s were depicted in turn, talking about private things, things spoken as if to a confessor, but picked up anyway by some hidden, hi-fidelity camera.

He listened, numbed, as Joseph’s editorial voice described the youths who shared his final weeks.

“… had I the heart to tell them they were never going to Patagonia or Antarctica? That the New Lands are reserved for refugees from catastrophe nations? And even so there isn’t enough thawed tundra to go around?

“These poor boys dream of emigrating to some promised land, but Indiana is their destiny, now and tomorrow…”

I knew that, Remi thought, bitterly. But did you have to tell the world I was dumb enough to have a dream? Dumpit, Joseph! Did you have to bare it all to everybody?

A neutral party might have reassured Remi. The old man hadn’t told very many people. It was in the nature of the Net, that vast ocean of information, that most published missives were read by only one or two others besides the author himself. Maybe one percent were accessed by a hundred or more. And fewer than one piece in ten thousand ever had enough viewers, worldwide, to fill even a good size meeting hall.

Perhaps all that had gone through Joseph’s mind when he made this last testament… that it would be seen by only a few old men like himself and never come to his young friends’ attention. Perhaps he never understood how far ferret-tech had come, or that others, who had grown up with the system, might use the directories better than he.

Remi knew it wasn’t very likely Joseph’s memoirs would work their way up, through good reviews and word of mouth, to best-seller status. But that hardly mattered. It could happen. For all the old man knew, Remi’s nonchalant ramblings and dreams could be sifted by a million voyeurs or more!

“Why, Joseph?” he asked, hoarsely. “Why?”

Then another face came on screen. Delicate features framed in white. It was a voice Remi had managed to purge from memory, until now.

“I’m sorry, but I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical as to insist, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue… ?”

Remi screamed as he threw the unit through his bedroom window.

Strangely, Roland and Crat didn’t seem to grasp what he was so upset about. Perhaps, for all their stylish talk, they didn’t really understand privacy. Not really.

They worried, though, over his listlessness and learned not to speak of Joseph when each of them received small royalty checks in their accounts, for their parts in what was fast becoming a small-time social-documentary classic. They spent their shares on their diverging interests, while Remi took his out in cash and gave it to the next NorAChuGa he met… for the Trillion Trees.

And so there came a day when he encountered, once again, a small band of Ra Boys in the park, this time without his friends, without any company but his loneliness.

This time the odds mattered not at all. He tore them up, top to bottom, using sarcasm like a slug rifle, assaulting them as he might have taken on Gnome mercenaries, had he been born in a time when there was honorable work for brave men to do and an evil that could be grappled with.

To the Ra Boys’ amazement it was he who demanded to exchange net codes. It was he who challenged them to a rendezvous.

By the time Remi actually met them later, in the darkness behind the monorail tracks, however, they’d done their own net research, and understood.

Understanding made their greeting solemn, respectful. Their champion exchanged bows with Remi across the makeshift arena, and even held back for a while, letting his clumsy opponent draw honorable blood before it was time at last to end it. Then, dutifully, one tribesman to another, he gave Remi what he desired most in the world.

For weeks afterward, then, the Ra Boys spoke his name in honor under the Sun.

The Sun, they said, was where at last he had settled.

The Sun was the final home of warriors.