Century Next Door - Candle Part 5

"She was running Resuna?" Lobo asked, settling back for a story. Cowboys spent their lives, until they were caught, with just a few people, out in the woods; telling a good story was probably important for them. It was that way with cowboy hunters, too. And realizing that you have a good audience, you always put on more of a show.

"Mary was one of the first fifty thousand people or so ever to run Resuna," I said, not bothering to hide the pride in my voice. "And at the time I met her, I was one of the most evil people I had ever met, anywhere in the world, and she was one of the besta-and I knew I had to get what she had, one way or another. Now, when I say *evil,' I don't just mean not integrated into One True, and I don't just mean I had bad habits. What I mean is that, objectively speaking, somebody should really have killed me and put both me and the world out of our mutual misery. And in a sense, that's what Mary did with Resunaa-killed the old me. It was a me well lost, if you see what I mean."

He seemed to sink further into his chair to hear the story; after checking to make sure I was set for coffee, he gestured for me to get on with it. I doubt anyone ever had a better audience. I kept talking till the tale was told, interrupted now and then by a question or some coffee or a pee break. Judging by his expression, and the questions he asked, I don't think he missed a word of it. Funny what not hearing a new story in so long will do to a human mind.

"To begin at the beginning," I began, "I'm a foundling, like most of our generationa-I was dumped at the orphanage in Spokane Dome when I was a few weeks old, in April 2038. Besides the blanket and diaper I was wrapped in, and the child's crash seat I was tied into, the only other thing I arrived with was my name, written in Magic Marker on the back of the seat: "BABY NAME: CURRIE CURTIS CURRAN." The world had been in a severe depression for some years, so armies of babies arrived at the orphanage more or less like me. At least I didn't have any of the common HIV strains and wasn't born addicted to cocaine or You-4, and had no birth defects caused by my mother using gressors. And I was healthy, decently fed, and clean, so I guess Mom, whoever she was, just couldn't keep me and that was all there was to it."

Dave grinned. "You and me could be brothers, you know," he said. "That's pretty much how I got my start at Denver Dome. The Gray Decade sure was no time to be a kid, was it?"

"Got that right," I agreed, "pos-def. And I was nowhere near the worst part of it."

The 2040s were one of the worst decades of peace the world ever knew. The long false prosperity that had been sustained by constructing the supras, the transfer ships, and the colonies on the other planets, and by the huge process of ecological rescue on Earth, had all been financed on borrowed money, and though the world had far more stuff than it had had before, and was a better and more prosperous place than it would otherwise have been, the reformation of the Earth into a better home for humanity and all other living things, after the disastrous Eurowar, had been a giant, everyone-in-on-it Ponzi scheme, which had worked well enough in the 2010s and 2020s but now was absolutely out of suckers.

The whole human race, on Earth and in s.p.a.ce, was trapped in a set of paradoxes inherited from Reconstruction. Great wealth did not provide enough revenue to pay off on the bonds; astonishing productivity made goods too cheap for anyone to make a living selling them. It cost almost nothing to feed and clothe people, but investment and development, let alone further progress in restabilizing the ecology and getting energy production and industry moved to s.p.a.ce, were on hold for the next half generation.

Only a few people here and there starved, but only a very few worked, and almost no one dreamed. Mostly the world sat on its haunches and tried to figure out what to do to get going again. The lucky ones left for Mars, the Moon, Ceres, or Europa; a few continued the now-losing battle against the whipsawing global disaster that was the heritage of the Eurowar and now decades out of control. Glaciers formed in a matter of weeks in the fall and melted almost as fast in the spring, deserts leaped their ancient boundaries to advance deep into agricultural land, the seas were covered with blooms of organisms never seen before, and strange new diseases devastated plants and animals every few years, giving nothing alive any chance to work toward stability before the rolling catastrophes tore up the rule book yet again. Some scientists and engineers, with such resources as a world in a state of economic gridlock could throw to them, were trying to do things about that; many more would have been glad to help, but had to eat, and so they fixed potholes, picked up litter, or just collected a Dole check, while their skills went to waste.

Whenever two people who lived through them start to talk about the terrible thirty years that began with the Panic of *32 and ended with the Second Diaspora, Resuna, and forced unification, it isn't long before their minds turn to something that's too far away in time and not far away enough in memory, and they start staring into s.p.a.ce and sometimes don't come back.

Back in the regular world, that's when your copy of Resuna shakes you out of it, dumps in serotonin and norepinephrin, and gives you a big, warm mental hug. Without that, I guess we'd have lived anyway, but in a cold, bleak world. This was what it was like without Resuna. Here I was, seated in a bath, warm, comfortable, well-fed, with pleasant idleness to tell stories (even if it was between cowboy and hunter)a-able to think of nothing but the sufferings of people who had mostly been in their graves for decades, and to taste only the ashes of the lost world.

"You ever wonder how different the world might've been if there hadn't been a war, or if somebody'd figured a way not to go through the Gray Decade, or any of that?" Lobo asked.

"Yeah, always," I said. "Even when I've got Resuna there to help me through it. Well, anyway, you know what those years were like as well as I do. Let me just collect my thoughts, and see if I can just concentrate on how I got through those times, myself."

I took a slow, warm sip of his excellent coffee, looked up for a moment at his hand-finished sandstone ceiling to collect my thoughts, and launched into the story, taking plenty of time and filling in lots of details, because that's what he wanted, and you always make sure your story pleases the customer if you think he might be in the process of deciding whether or not to kill you. You might call it Scheherazade's Law.

<> It doesn't fit too well with your standard orphan story, but the truth is that the people that ran the Spokane Dome Munic.i.p.al Orphanage were reasonably kind, and probably would have been generous had the city government given them with anything to be generous with. I suppose in a sense, looking back, that the city council had been generous, though not intentionally. They had kept the Dolework system runninga-it had had to be shut down for lack of funds in most placesa-so that people at least kept eating and had somewhere to stay, and because they needed jobs for every Dolebird, they featherbedded city facilities pretty heavily, which meant the orphanage, like every other city facility, had many more employees than any efficiency engineer would have said that it needed.

Of course, taking care of kids is a lot more than feeding them, wiping noses, and stopping fights, and a decent orphanage needs to be featherbedded, so that there's a few spare adults around most of the time for the kid who is lonely, or confused, or for some reason just badly needs some undivided attention that n.o.body wrote down on the schedule.

The orphanage had quite a few employees who had the makings of good parents, and some first-rate teachers. Since the public-school system had gone private, and money for vouchers was cut down to zero before I was born, we got whatever education could be worked in by the people who were feeding us and watching us; luckily that was considerably more than nothing, even if it was pretty catch-as-catch-can.

The first year I remember, I was six. The only events outside the orphanage that made an impression on me were the rolling ecological disasters that crashed across the Pacific Northwest. That whole year was a great one for watching the teams of Doleworkers through the big windows in the dome: I saw them on the outside surface struggling frantically to remove a load of snow three times what it had been designed for, cleaning centimeter-thick soot from the huge range and forest fires, battening down the exposed surfaces during seven days of 150-kph winds, and replacing panels pitted by baseball-sized hail. I think at that time I could imagine no profession more romantic or heroic than working on the surface of the dome, and if everyone up there working was just a plain old Dolebird, well, so were all the kind, considerate adults here in the orphanage, who were the nearest thing to parents I would ever have.

Life crept on, as it will tend to do, and for me the orphanage was about as much world as there was. Most days Mr. Farrell took us out to play games in the park, and we learned all those things that were pritnear extinct among better-off childrena-baseball and soccer, of course, but also Capture the Flag, Run Sheep Run, and Red Rover. Ms. Kirlian read to us most nights, and in the morning she'd help you with learning to read if you couldn't get along with the AI's on the orphanage werps, which were ten years old and didn't always understand a kid's speech as they should. The food was monotonous but not bad, there were enough affectionate adults to a.s.sure you of some hugs when you needed them and somebody who would seek you out and talk to you when life stank, and at least the bunks were warm and the stuff in your foot-locker was yours until you outgrew it and it went to some younger kid. If it wasn't paradise, it was better than a lot of people, over the long centuries, have grown up with.

The year I turned eleven, I knew real discontent for the first time in my life. That's how I always put it when I tell this story. When I say that that year was 2049, most people immediately conclude that I encountered real discontent because of the way the world was going then. That's why I say it, for the fun of catching them wrong.

If I had been just a year or two older, and paying any attention to the way the world as a whole was going, I would have been plenty upset about it, like every other reasonably aware person on Earth. For one thing, for the first time in half a century, it was teetering on the brink of wara-the slowly dying Pope Pius Benedict hadn't been able to hold things together the way his brilliant, long-lived predecessor, Paul John Paul, had, and Ecucatholicism was starting to fragment in an eerie mirror image of the Reformation as the many churches it had absorbed began to move for greater independence and less tolerance of each other.

The regional governments in Asia were wobbling under the impact of a new mutation of that old human enemy, tailored rice blast, which had devastated them at the end of the Eurowar. Moreover, a new threat to the domesticated whale herds that were the source of more than half of the Asian protein supply, CPCA, Cetacean Prionic Cephaloatrophy, informally known as "whale sc.r.a.pie," had roared through domestic whale populations from India to Hawaii in less than a year.

Based on seismic testing and deep cores, the scientists gave it no more than ten years till the West Antarctic ice sheet slipped, to be followed, probably, by fragmentation and rapid calving in Wilkes Land; the oceans were now rising and falling two full feet with the summer-winter cycle in the Northern Hemisphere, but they were about to start doing it nine feet higher up, and because everything depended on the exact mechanism by which Antarctica would lose its ice, no one knew whether the world's coasts would have twenty years' or twenty hours' warning. It was horribly clear that forty years of global reconstruction were about to go down the toilet; the greatest effort the species had ever made for its common interests, and those of the planet, had turned out to be too little and too late.

All too predictably, most of the human race, having struggled shoulder to shoulder for two generations to save the planet, now that things were turning to s.h.i.t, rushed about looking for ways to make matters worse. Several of the const.i.tuent Ecucatholic churches were pushing candidates for the next pope, and declaring the others' candidates unacceptable, even before the current pope was dead. A new intolerant version of Islamic fundamentalism was sweeping into the parts of the world that had been converted by cybertao the generation before. Regional governments were a.s.serting rights over resources that in better times they would not have claimed, and making so-far vague threats at each other and at the planetary government. A political battle was forming in many parts of the world about when and wherea-or whethera-to resettle sea-coast populations.

Meanwhile, by late summer of 2049, the global weather models were forecasting that, after decades of wobbling madly, the world climate was at last going to achieve a stalemate, if not stability, for a few decades: a new ice age in the northern hemisphere, a warm interglacial in the south, and storms beyond anyone's imagining all through the tropics, including, probably, some permanent hurricanes on the scale of the Cyclone of 2021, giant storms that would circle the Earth at the equator for decades. They were seriously trying to figure out if the towers up to the suprasa-three kilometers thick and 36,000 kilometers tall, all anch.o.r.ed to mountaintops along the equatora-could stand up to the near-supersonic cyclones they were expecting.

So the world had reason for its discontent. But if you think back to when you were a kid, you won't be surprised to hear that none of that mattered a fart in a windstorm to eleven-year-old me. I had reason enough for my own discontent and could have been just as unhappy in the golden days of the 2020s. What mattered to me was that I had only two shirts that were not hand-me-downs, one pair of pants without patches or stains, and since laundry day was once a week, most days I couldn't wear those "good" clothes. This is a problem when you have fallen in love with the most beautiful girl alive, even if her wardrobe is no better than yours.

Tammy Knight was probably not particularly impressive to any guy who wasn't also eleven: in holos I have from the orphanage, taken in that year, to my adult eyes her major characteristics are a thick mane of frizzy, orangish hair, the color called strawberry-blonde if you didn't go to college or auburn if you did, plus two extremely long k.n.o.bby-kneed legs that end in remarkably big feet. The rest of her was a skeletal sketch of a person, with rampant freckles, vivid green eyes, and long fine-boned fingers. In fact she turned into a beauty, and I think all of us boys in the orphanage always knew she would, but I have no idea what power let a kid see that. As an adult I'd've never seen it coming.

She had more immediate charms than impending beauty, from the viewpoint of a boy her own age. Tammy could pitch like a rifle, played forward with an aggression terrifying to behold, and was followed around by a half dozen of the littler kids all the time, mainly because she was always patient with them and would listen when they talked to her, which was constant. I was hopelessly, madly in love with her, in the way you can only be if you are not aware that this can happen again many times in a normal lifea-but then, perhaps I was accidentally wise about that, because I was not going to have a normal life.

You can't really say it was unrequited love, since I never said a thing about it. Furthermore, she, along with the entire rest of the universe, appeared to be unaware of anything other than my friendship, and that was mostly confined to three kinds of interaction with her: when she pitched, I caught; when she played forward, I played goal; and when one of her entourage of little kids would break a toy, she'd smile at me and say "Please" anda-if it were humanly possiblea-I would fix it. Though none of those were the relationship I wanted to have, I could just barely admit to myself that I wanted anything else, and my ideas about what feelings and experiences ought to go into that imaginary relationship were extremely fuzzy. I kept quiet, looked for a chance to talk to her whenever I could, and lived in terror that the other guys would find out and my life would become a h.e.l.l of endless mockery.

At least, if religious war came, as everyone was now expecting, there wouldn't be much fighting right where I was, because Spokane Dome was deep in a heavily Ecucatholic area. Many tiny Protestant churches had gone Ecucatholic all at once in the Great Rejoining of 2004, and there just hadn't been enough of the highly educated computer geeks around to form more than a small minority for cybertao.

Because Spokane was such an Ecucatholic town, the munic.i.p.al orphanage almost always held a Christmas/Hanukkah pageant, carefully kept bland enough not to offend cybertaoists (who, if not driven out, would celebrate anything with anybody). When necessary it could be easily modified to slip in a nod to Ramadan. And in Spokane, like any place where the population ran heavily to Ecucatholicism, 2049 was going to be a big, big year for the Christmas pageant.

Seemingly on the brink of death, during another false alarm, in early September, Pius Benedict had proclaimed that Christmas of 2049 was to be dedicated to celebrating, and praying for the continuation of, the forty-seven years of world peace we had hada-and the fact that no one would have suggested waiting for the fiftieth anniversary pretty much told you everything about how little faith anyone had by then that we could make it that far.

After a couple more scares, and a brief moment when it looked like he might have a miraculous remission, the pope finally died on December 7, and the first fighting of what started as the War of Papal Succession, and finished as the War of the Memes, began on December 14, almost before the debris stopped falling from the atom bomb that gutted Rome and killed the whole College of Cardinals.

The Munic.i.p.al Orphanage went ahead with its plan for the Christmas pageant anywaya-it's hard to cancel a plan so late in the game, it was every bit as hard to believe the world was going to go to war again as it had been that peace could last, and besides all the practicalities, people really felt like they needed Christmas, to take a break from the grim news and to try, just once more, to summon up whatever they could of peace on Earth and goodwill toward men.

The bioweapons and weather weapons of the Eurowar fifty years ago had gotten humanity on Earth into its present mad predicament, and kept it there because they were much easier to let loose than to call back. You couldn't walk a kilometer anywhere in the inhabited, or formerly inhabited, parts of the Earth without seeing the traces of some horror. This time, with a whole long generation of better technology, perhaps we really would live up to the potential pointed out by Marc-Paul Prevert, the head of the commission that was supposed to find a peaceful solution (and who would be a.s.sa.s.sinated himself in the first hours of 2050, torpedoing the last hope): "We now have the means to kill the whole population of the planet and send it into an ecological catastrophe that will last a hundred thousand years, a capability to make all our past madness seem a mere caprice." The bitter joke at the time went that this was all a beautiful ill.u.s.tration of the principle that "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again."

Once again, though, that's me thinking of it as an adult looking back and saying "Oh, so that's what was going on." From my standpoint, December of 2049 was a month of interesting explosions and weapons on the flashchannel, adults acting mysteriously upseta-and my lucky break.

Ms. Kirlian had been appointed the director of the pageant because many years ago she had been an amateur actor, because she was liked and trusted by all us kids, and most of all because n.o.body else had the patience. She followed the usual rules for such things: make sure that key dramatic roles go to older kids who are less likely to panic or freeze, and try to have one of the older kids on stage at all times so that the little ones can be rescued if need be. As a practical matter, that meant that Tammy, even though she was extremely untalented dramatically (she spoke her lines in a drawling monotone like she was scared that someone might hear or understand her), was going to play Mary, since that would put her in nearly every scene, most importantly every scene that involved large numbers of small children.

I, on the other hand, was more of a force for intimidation than an influence for moderation, and therefore I was the Head Shepherd. My official role was to walk in at the right moment and say, "Behold, we have seen a great light and an angel said we ought to come here. Where's the newborn king?" (I guess Ms. Kirlian was about as much of a playwright as she was a director.) My unofficial role was to keep all the smaller boys, who were playing Miscellaneous Shepherds, from running amok backstage until it was time for our entrance.

"What does *miscellaneous' mean?" one of them whispered to me, on seeing the program.

" *Well-behaved,'" I lied, hoping to have some positive effect.

"Oh, does not," he whispered back. "You're just making that up so we'll behave."

"You've caught me," I said. "It's a breed of sheep. Now shut up or I'll punch your face in."

Our audience was made up of a small minority that wanted to be there and a large majority unfortunate enough to be compelled. Since we had no parents, the city dragooned whoever it could: bored kids from the schools doing their charitable bit by coming to watch us be humiliated; city officials, who were there so that someone would take pictures of them with the poor orphans, and the pictures would then appear on local flashchannel; city employees whose supervisors had pressured them into attending. A smattering of people from the local churches had either been arm-twisted by their pastors or were badly starved for entertainment. Finally, the Doleworkers whose duty station was the orphanage brought their families to see us. They were the ones who really mattered to us kids.

We shepherds had just entered, knelt, and presented a dozen badly worn stuffed toys (anything that could be presented as having once resembled a sheep) to the porcelain doll wrapped in a blanket, which was portraying the nonspeaking role of Baby Jesus. To my deep relief, my ragged gang of Miscellaneous Shepherds had pretty much held formation, knelt more or less simultaneously with suitable reverence, and not made a mess of things.

My a.s.signed position was kneeling behind them, first of all because I was taller than any of them, and secondly because if they started to giggle or whisper it gave me a chance to do what Ms. Kirlian had said, and put a hand on their shoulders to "steady them down." I figured if they didn't steady when I did that, I could hit them in the back without too many people seeing, and I had made sure that that was what the boys figured, too. So far, though, things were going unexpectedly well. I hadn't even needed to do any steadying.

Our Joseph was played by a kid named Joseph, about my age, our only acting talent. He was a small dark-haired boy with a delivery so clear and expressive that it made the rest of us look more foolish than anything else could have. At this exact moment he was making a long speech about what a nice bunch of people the humble shepherds were, having brought all these lambs. Just what a newborn baby was going to do with a dozen lambs was beyond me.

Then Tammy's line, as Mary, was supposed to be "We thank thee all very much, oh shepherds, and so does the baby." It had been shortened and modified repeatedly as Ms. Kirlian had gotten more and more frustrated with Tammy's flat delivery, and that was what caused the problem; she told me later she just couldn't remember which version of the line she was supposed to say.

Unfortunately, that line was the cue for the Three Wise Men to enter. Our Three Wise Men were three nine-year-olds who had been drilled, drilled, and drilled not to jump their cues (after an unfortunate crown-crushing collision, in dress rehearsal, between Melchior and a late-entering Miscellaneous Shepherd). They weren't about to come in until they heard "so does the baby."

Seeing Mary's paralyzed-with-terror stare, I realized what had happened, and tried to feed a cue. I said, "Us shepherds are lim glad that thee likes the sheep."

The cue remained malnourished, but Joseph caught the idea and gave it a shot, too, saying, "We thank thee very much, oh shepherds."

Tammy froze all the more completely, now that Joseph seemed to have stolen one of her lines. I was out of ideas (or good ones anyway) and when Joseph and I made eye contact, he gave me a micro-shrug, as if to say, Okay, now what?

I stood up, to be heard better, pointed my face in the direction of the dark where I hoped the Wise Men were waiting, and said, very loudly and firmly, "So does the baby."

Three Wise Men, thinking they had missed their cue, charged in at a speed that robes made out of old sheets were never designed to accommodate. The first one fell flat, the other two fell over him, and the shepherds were bombarded with carefully wrapped s...o...b..xes, which were fortunately empty and contained no actual gold, frankincense, or myrrh. "Pick'em up," I whispered to the shepherds, "and give them to Mary and Joseph."

This was working pretty well, especially because my awkward whispering of directionsa-aided by Joseph, who understood at once and pointed the shepherds to where to put the Wise Men's giftsa-was almost entirely covered by the peals of laughter from the audience. We might have gotten away with it, except that Tammy's malfunctioning memory finally fired. Maybe "detonated" was the word for it. For the first and only time, she was fully audible when she said, "We thank thee, oh shepherds, and so does the baby."

The Three Wise Men got up from their bewildered heap, where they had been lying still and trying not to be noticed. As one Wise Man, they grabbed their gifts and carried them offstage, now convinced that they had entered early. Mr. Farrell told me, the next day, between fits of giggles, that for one moment he'd had the impression that the Wise Men had been offended at being mistaken for shepherds and had taken all their stuff back.

The shepherds, animals, and Holy Family watched in amazement as the Three Wise Men took up their entry positions in the wings. A long moment crept by. The crowd noise died down to embarra.s.sed giggles. Not sure what else to do, I whispered to Tammy, "Say it again, real loud." I must have whispered too loud, because the audience started laughing again.

Nevertheless, Tammy did as I suggested, and this time the Wise Men entered, handed over the s...o...b..xes per instructions, and moved to their places. The audience applauded wildly, and the show went on; other than a wing falling off one angel, we had no more trouble that night.

After the show, we had punch and Christmas cookies, and Santa paid a visit. It was an election year coming up, so Mayor Bizet was there to be seen by the flashchannel, playing Santa Claus. (We all knew that he was Mayor Bizet, and not really Santa Claus, because he explained to us that he was, and further added that Santa had personally authorized him to stand in for the night. It was a good way to keep little kids from blurting out the obvious truth.) When it came my turn, I was much too big a kid to sit on his lap, but I walked up there to get whatever Santa had for mea-the first time in my life I ever hoped for new clothes instead of a toy. To my pleasant surprise, I got a new shirt and three brand-new packages of socks. I blurted out a "Thank you" and was about to go sit down when the mayor added, slightly m.u.f.fled by his cotton-batting beard, "So you are the heroic shepherd who rescued the show."

"Uh, I just kind of helped," I said.

"Good enough," Mayor Bizet said. "The secret of impressing a crowd is to do the right thing at the right time. If you do it intentionally, that's just so much icing on the cake. Now, I happen to have some things to present in my capacity as mayor, as opposed to my capacity as jolly old elf." (I saw one of the people in suits who were taking pictures of him give the mayor a thumbs-up; I always wondered afterwards how much of the speech had been prewritten.) He pulled out a small envelope. "At the Arts Center, for the whole week from now through Christmas Eve, we're having a festival of family moviesa-movies are sort of like the flashchannel, but with no interaction, on a very big screen that you sit in the dark and watch. So here are two free pa.s.ses so that you and a friend can go to all the shows. The gift includes public-transit pa.s.ses too, so that you can get to the Arts Center."

I was amazed and in awe; I didn't care a thing about movies, which I had seen a few times because the orphanage had a few of them and a projector. But it was tickets for two, which meanta-if I had the nervea-this might be the lucky break I would have been waiting for, had I been able even to imagine so lucky a break. I stammered a thanks, put the precious envelope into my shirt pocket and b.u.t.toned it closed, and sat down. Ms. Kirlian led the applause. I'm not sure if I've ever felt more appreciated at any time in my life since that night.

Pretty much, that was how it started. Later that evening, when they were teaching us older kids how to dance, I bravely volunteered to be Tammy's partnera-after all, she was only half a head taller than I was. As we shuffled around in a state of complete confusion, trying to follow Mr. Farrell's directions, I managed to blurt out that I wanted her to go to the movies with me. She seemed pretty startled and said, "But that's not fair. It was all my messing up that caused the problem in the first place."

Our feet tried to come down in the same place at the same time, and we both half-tripped. Mr. Farrell said, firmly, "Lead, Currie, you're supposed to lead."

As far as I could tell, if I did that, most likely it would be much easier for everyone to see who was making the mistakes, which was the last thing I wanted. We got back into the vicinity of the beat and I said, "I don't care about fair or not, it's my pa.s.s and I'd rather go with you."

"Really?" she asked, as if perhaps she was wondering whether I was crazy.

"Really." My nerves were shot; at least I wasn't going to step on her feet, since I was too tense to move.

"Currie, loosen up! You're holding a girl, not a block of wood!"

I could have told Mr. Farrell, I suppose, that I'd have been much more relaxed holding a block of wood, and that he had nicely identified the exact problem. But I just tried to move as if I weren't in a state of terror. It didn't seem like a good idea to beg, but on the other hand the suspense was killing me. I was trying to think of a way to rephrase the request when she said, "Well, I guess if you want, I'll go. It would be different from sitting around this place watching the flashchannel every night."

"Currie," Mr. Farrell said, "you might try bending your knees. If you start relaxing now, you might be able to get your first date by the time you're thirty."

"He just got it," Tammy said, loudly. The room turned to stare at us, and Mr. Farrell's jaw flapped a couple of times. I felt like I was going to turn bright purple, I hoped that I would sink through the floor a and I saw Tammy grinning at me, freckles, crooked teeth, green eyes, and all, and didn't care a bit.

"Well," Mr. Farrell said, after a moment's recovery, "then all the more reason to practice." It wasn't a great line or even very funny, but I think everybody wanted an excuse to laugh.

It took me three nights at the movies to muster the nerve to hold hands with her, and it wasn't till Christmas Eve that we tried kissing (with indifferent results), but from then on, in the little world of the orphanage, we were an "item," and very happy to be. Nothing much was going to break us up, ever; sometimes you just know those things.

During the next few weeks, while Tammy and I were exploring "being a couple," fighting spread through border districts all over Asia, and local governments seceded from the world government and set about raising armies. The Ecucatholics splintered so many ways that no historian ever kept a definitive scorecard. Bombs and riots and a.s.sa.s.sinations filled the flashchannel. Prevert was gunned down as he came out to talk to the press about the proposed settlement, and only a few specialists ever even bothered to learn what had been proposed. The world was crashing back into chaos, but for Tammy and me, everything was just falling into place.

<> Three years later, the world was still at war. By that time there were battle lines and fronts, and most people had managed to get away from them.

In the summer of 2051 the first meme had exploded into the world's consciousness, the crude and primitive thing called "Goodtimes." Two months after that, a hundred modified versions of Goodtimes were competing with each other. Six months later, that small beginning had exploded into a diversity of more than four thousand different memes, all locked in a mutual struggle for supremacy.

When I was still a kid, back in the orphanage, the whole idea of a meme terrified me; now, four decades later, though I can understand the fear of being controlled by a meme that would not take care proper care of you, I can't seem to reconstruct why I was so afraid of all memes; I was much more afraid, in Dave's hideout, when I didn't have a meme. But at the time, I know, people were not only afraid to go on-line or to phone somewhere through a head jacka-the two ways you could be infected by Goodtimesa-they were afraid of almost any contact with any information processor. News stories told of people throwing out digital clocks and handheld calculators, trying to "play it safe."

The historians never did finish the job of tracking Goodtimes back to its exact source, but they did identify one group of people in one shop, one of whoma-but who could say which one, now?a-had been two things, both important for the story: a cybertaoist, and a genius. As a cybertaoist, he or she was painfully well aware that cybertaoists did not fight cybertaoists, that the stubbornly reasonable and gentle Stochastic Faith produced martyrs but few fanaticsa-and yet this could not last, because either cybertao would mutate into some crueler, more vicious form, or it would be stamped from the face of the Earth less than fifty years after its birth. The one hope for its survival was to convert everyone, or almost everyone, before they got serious about killing the cybertaoists.

He or she could easily have rationalized this, anyway, because the Christian and Muslim populations of the world were both inflamed by every kind of mania all at once, and the potential for holy war, leading to ma.s.s slaughter, was building up in the chaotic conditions that were emerging as each little, not-quite-technically revolted district, region, or county of the globe made alliance with one or another of the popes or antipopes (with the apostolic succession thrown into such question, it was all but impossible to know which was which); even the Islamic parts of the world had opinions, now, about who was rightful pope. It wasn't an altogether foolish idea that if everyone could be converted to the patient, peaceable way of cybertao, a great deal of human suffering might be averted.

There might have been two or seven or twenty million other cybertaoists with similar ideas out there, but the one who invented Goodtimes was unique for another reason: he or she did no preaching, no writing, made no direct effort to convert a single human being. Rather, this persona-or could it have been more than one?a-came up with an absolutely unique idea, which required solving a problem that had been unofficially bedeviling computer scientists for the better part of a century by that time. The mystery genius had been able to see an entirely different way to accomplish her or his purpose, realize it required a solution to a problem that had not been solved for decades, and finally solve that problem. It was very unfair that history had not given that individual a name, or any credit. The invention of the meme was as great, in its way, as fire, the wheel, ma.s.s production, or the computer, for it brought the whole world into peace, harmony, and cooperation.

The long-unsolved problem was that of the universal virus. A computer virus, in its simplest form, was just a program that would cause the computer to make copies of the program. If you allowed for much greater sophistication, viruses could accomplish all sorts of things, good or bad, from continual optimization of a network to lying dormant until they could sabotage a weapons system that did not exist at the time of their creation.

Despite all the things they could do, however, no virus before this could cross a previously unknown operating system boundary. That is, no one had written a set of instructions so that a virus could realize it was communicating with a system different from the one on which it usually ran, a.n.a.lyze that system, and eventually construct a virus that would do the same thing in the new system. The universal virus was the holy grail of information warfare. All the armed forces of the Earth had unique, locked, secret operating systems, to defend themselves from being virused, but to be effective, all those systems had to communicate. If they communicated long enough with a universal virus, they would give themselves away, as it acquired enough information to translate itself and cross the boundary. Tens of thousands of engineers, a.n.a.lysts, and programmers had been looking for universal virus algorithms since before the Eurowar.

Yet that small team containing one or more unknown geniuses had solved that problem and created the true self-porting virus: it a.n.a.lyzed any system it encountered and eventually created a version of itself over on that system.

The purpose of the first self-porting virus, the now-extinct Goodtimes, was to convert, not people, but AIs, so that the intelligences that ran most of the economy and nearly all the fighting units would become missionaries for cybertao, refusing to fight against it, seeking to convert every human being to cybertao. It was designed, using the universal virus as its translator, to recreate itself onto any machine, in any operating system.

History books say that the extensive "human contact" portion of Goodtimes was set up only to allow it to talk to people; though in hindsight we know it was a crude meme, the creators thought that it was merely an advanced virus, and so they imagined that the mechanical missionary would have to work just like its fleshly counterparts; after it took over an operating system on an individual machine, it would have to argue with human beings to persuade them to embrace cybertao.

But the designer far exceeded his or her intentions, for reasons which are obvious in hindsight. From the standpoint of a meme, a brain is just a computer made up of ma.s.sively parallel slow-running processors. And if Goodtimes's purpose was to spread cybertao, and the way to spread cybertao was to spread Goodtimes into every available system, then it would spread it to the human brains on the other side of every screen and speaking device.

The first human brains turned by a meme were probably the creators of Goodtimes. To test it they must have been doing many hours of interacting with its personality, seeing what they could make it do and how it would handle complex and ambiguous questions, and so forth. Very likely in one of those long conversationsa-especially if one of them had a skull jack and was talking to it directlya-Goodtimes figured out how to take over the human brain, and discovered a rich new playground in which it could propagate.

In about thirty days it was all over the world and was being treated (in the non-cybertao areas) like a form of highly contagious madness, in just over a billion infected brains.

And a year later it was extinct except for museum copies. Working frantically, partisans of all the different sides in the War of Papal Succession had extracted the universal translator, copied it, and put it into their own memes, and unlike Goodtimes, these were designed from the beginning to target minds at least as much as computers, and to displace each other if at all possible.

By 2051, when Burton, the owner-commander of Burton's Thugs for Jesus, came by the orphanage, there was rumor of a third-generation virus that would be able to fully use all of its hosts' capabilitiesa-that is, if it infected a brilliant general, it could use his strategic ability and charisma to spread itself; if it infected a composer, it could spread through his music; if it infected an accountant, it could embezzle for its own purposes, including relaying money to the general or the composer. Another rumor, even more grim, was that these other memes, as they were coming to be called from a term in some old technical papers, were no longer the products of military research; they were making ever more advanced versions of themselves without human intervention; for once, all the rumors were true.

Burton's Thugs for Jesus was an all-male outfita-most of the mercenary companies were, though I'd never really heard anyone explain whya-but they let all of us older kids come talk to them, regardless of gender. Tammy and I came in holding hands, and sat near the back.

Burton was a physically robust man, running to fat but in good shape nonetheless, with piercing blue eyes, jet-black hair, and sharp features that had probably been very handsome when he was younger. He wore one of the lightweight camouflage suits that were made and distributed everywhere nowadays, a green forage cap, and a pair of nondescript ankle-high boots. He stood in front of us with his hands locked behind his back, as if he were going to inspect us that moment.

"Well," he said, "you all follow the news. You know there's a war on. You know that your dome has voted to ally itself with the Episcopate of Reno, which, at the moment, is at war with Real America, and there's been some fighting around Homestake Pa.s.s, over by b.u.t.te, so far just some little skirmishes and things, because Real America doesn't hold a base anywhere close to there.

"Now, it happens my outfit, Burton's Thugs for Jesus, is, if I say so myself, one of the finest fighting forces in North America today, which means it's also close to being the best in the world, if not the best, and because of this, the Bishop of Reno has hired us to hold Homestake. I've got engineers already digging in up there; and because it's such a big project, we're moving our permanent base to somewhere nearbya-for security reasons, I can't be specifica-in the old Silver Bow country south of Anaconda Ruin.

"Now, since manning trenches and dugouts is tiring, especially at high alt.i.tude, I'm going to need to rotate people in and out of Homestake, and I don't have as many as I'd like to have for what will eventually be the third shift up in the pa.s.s. At the Silver Bow camp we will have a boot camp this winter, and I'm looking to take in a few dozen recruits. If you're a male in good health, all limbs functional, over five feet two, a hundred and ten pounds or heavier, with at least one good eye and any mental illness controlled by medication, I'll be happy to take you.

"Since we are a mercenary company, I know people worry about being called on to attack their home areas, so let me a.s.sure you that our contract with the bishop is firm, and you all know that Spokane Dome is loyal to him. If you elect to enlist with me, then chances are that for the rest of the war you'll be defending Spokane Dome. If we do change sides or contract elsewhere and leave the employ of the Episcopate of Reno, you have a one-time ten-day option to resign and return home, or, if you wish, you can continue with the company from then on and take your chances about who you'll have to fight.

"Burton's Thugs for Jesus is a union shop, represented by the United Combatants, Engineers, Medics, and Chaplains, and we use the standard UCEMC contract for a battalion-sized unit. You get room and board, medical, dental if we ever get another dentist under contract, and locked-in rent control for basic uniforms and equipment. In the event of combat against other UCEMC units, you have a much better POW contracta-which can make a big difference if you're captureda-you keep your seniority without penalty if you elect to defect, and you fight under the strict form of the Hague Convention, so the union is a good deal for most of you, and it's a flat four percent of your pay. You also pay for your training with a five-percent deduction from your pay for your first year, which I waive if you're decorated for bravery in combat. You don't pay any local or episcopal taxes.

"Now about BTJ: we were formed out of seven smaller units in San Francisco two years agoa-three street gangs, two militia companies, my old merc engineer company, and one MP company out of the old Cal Guarda-specifically as a mercenary unit to serve the One True and Only Ecucatholic Church. That branch loaned myself and my vested officers the startup money, which we've long since paid off, and last year, with their blessing, we took a contract with their allied church in Reno. We expect that we'll continue to be primarily an Ecucatholic outfit, but we're open to monotheists of all kinds, and to theistic cybertaoists as well.

"We have an unusually high percentage of experienced officers and noncoms, and we're among the few fully Geneva-compliant unitsa-we absolutely don't tolerate war crimes. So if you're looking for a chance for some on-the-side rape, looting, robbery, slaving, ma.s.sacre, or torture, look somewhere elsea-and pray that we don't catch you."

I put my hand up.

He snapped a crisp nod at me. His expression didn't change at all. "Yes, son."