Infoquake Part 7

Another contained a treatise on WHAT THE PROCTORS DIDN'T TELL YOU ABOUT INITIATION.

to which some anonymous wag had added (THOSE b.a.s.t.a.r.dS).

During the first few weeks, cooperation ran high among the boys. Even the most odious task was a novelty, and everyone was eager to take his turn pulling weeds and washing clothes. Many of the boys eyed Natch and Brone warily and took bets as to when the fighting would break out between them. But the two retreated to their wary fencers' dance, keeping their distance, looking out for sudden movements.

Spring pa.s.sed into summer without incident. The boys spent their leisure time improvising rustic versions of soccer and baseball and trying to guess how their favorite teams were performing right now in the civilized world. Horvil slimmed down and lost his irrational fear of the outdoors.

Natch began to take long walks in the woods by himself. He grew fond of the trees, especially the tall ones that stretched up to the edge of his vision. While he walked, Natch mentally played back the conversations with Serr Vigal and Figaro Fi, dissecting them like an occultist looking for clues to the future.

Brone is a vicious person headed for a vacuous career, Vigal had said. But you, Natch, you're better than that. You are not ready to run your own company. If you jump into the fiefcorp world too quickly, you will regret it.

Where is your direction? Figaro Fi had asked him. You have endless wants. But want without purpose destroys a person. Those who can't master their wants are loose cannons.

It was all a matter of direction, wasn't it? Natch spent days looking around the spare plains for hints. Which direction should he choose? And how would he know when he arrived at the right one? As far as he could see, the four points on the compa.s.s were featureless and drab. It seemed like he could wander the entire earth following one of those paths and not see a single distinguishing characteristic.

But the trees-the trees pointed majestically upward into the sky. Their leafy arms reached for the sun without shame or compromise. Even the little death of winter could only delay their aims, and it was only a matter of time before they were reaching upward once again.

Marcus Surina came to visit Natch one night towards the end of autumn. He drifted in the cabin door, tiptoed around a slumbering Horvil, and came to rest barely half a meter from Natch's face. In this ghostly apparition, the great scientist looked just as ruggedly handsome as he did in all the pictures and videos the boy had seen. Except the eyes, which had been wide and luminescent in life, were now cold and dim and utterly devoid of light.

Watch, said Surina.

Natch huddled into the corner of his bed with chattering teeth as dozens of specters paraded through the room, figures from history and legend frozen in grotesque positions of death: Julius Caesar, Tobi Jae Witt, Abraham Lincoln, Joan d'Arc, Tul Jabbor, his mother. Each figure wafted over to the boy in turn, mouth open as if to speak some horrible truth from beyond the tomb. Yet the ghostly figures remained stubbornly silent. Were they all withholding their secrets from him by tacit agreement? Or did they simply exhaust all their words in life, and now have nothing to say?

The parade continued for an eternity of midnight-time, despite multiple attempts by Natch to cover his eyes and will away his tormentors. He tried screaming, burying himself under the blankets, ignoring them, but the ghosts would not be denied. His efforts only succeeded in summoning more, until the room was thick with their gray, misty effluence.

Finally, after what must have been many hours, the shade of Marcus Surina floated up to Natch and hovered there, centimeters away.

Now, run! said Surina.

Too frightened to disobey, Natch arose and fled for the door. He stumbled outside into the deepening autumn and discovered that the entire camp was enveloped in the same stinging mist. Mist curling over his feet, wrapped around the wooden posts of the cabins, thick and sharp as smoke ... and full of voices.... The voices of his fellow initiates, yelling in confusion....

"Over here!" came a familiar nasal tw.a.n.g. Horvil. Natch felt a fleshy hand grab his shoulder and drag him outside the boundaries of CAMP 11 and up a nearby hill. Most of the hivemates had already a.s.sembled at a safe spot in the lee of the wind.

"What's happening?" said Natch sleepily. "What's that smell?"

"Smoke," replied Horvil with a groan. "The smell of initiation going up in flames."

The cabins themselves were not the worst casualty of the fire. Even frightened boys who had never spent a winter outdoors knew that trees could be chopped down and cabins could be rebuilt. Only six of sixteen cabins had burned down completely, while three had suffered minor damage. There was still plenty of room for all to find s.p.a.ce indoors.

No, the real calamity was the destruction to their tool sheds and food supply.

One by one, the boys limped out to the fields, where most of their perennial crops now lay under a shroud of ash. Somehow, they had always known there was something unnatural about the variety of nutritious grains and vegetables that sprouted every spring, despite the harsh winters of the midwest and generations of inept teenage farming. Their ancestors had never had such a bounty of genetically engineered supercrops to sustain them. But now, staring at the remains of their harvest-not to mention the twisted ruins of two of the tool sheds and the charred silo containing most of their stored grain-the initiates knew that this game was no longer tilted in their favor.

The origins of the fire were a mystery. Most likely it had been the product of carelessness, someone forgetting to smother the dying embers of a torch. Perhaps back in the civilized world they could have scavenged for evidence and mounted an investigation, but here all they had was vague conjecture. Before long, whispers pa.s.sed through Brone's side of the camp laying the blame on Natch's shoulders.

"Why would he do something like that?" exclaimed Horvil the first time he heard the rumor. "Do you even have the slightest bit of evidence?"

"The fire started near Brone's side of the camp," one of the boys told him. "Everyone knows those two hate each other. Natch was one of the last ones out, and his cabin is fine."

"That's totally ridiculous. That's not evidence at all."

The other boy admitted his theory had little in the way of factual support. "But come on, Horv-you're his best friend, right? Doesn't he scare you?"

Horvil bristled. "All I know is that Natch's test scores were higher than half the cla.s.s combined. That means he's smarter than you. And that means he knows setting fire to the camp would hurt him just as much as Brone." The conversation came to an abrupt halt soon after.

There was much to do. The boys went to work right away, picking every edible seed, berry and root on the horizon, repairing and filling the well, making defensive preparations against unknown enemies. The boys of CAMP 11 spent their spare time in an engineering frenzy, attempting to coax the last bit of practicality out of the everyday items around them. A frayed rope strand and several bottles could be converted into a makeshift dumbwaiter. Broken gla.s.s could be spread along the roads as an early intruder alert system. Spare rolls of plastic could be conscripted to channel excess rainwater to the well.

After a week of trying to pick up the pieces and sh.o.r.e up the damaged cabins, it became clear to the initiates that all their preparations might not be sufficient for them to survive the winter. An argument sprang up about how closely the proctors were monitoring their situation here in the wilderness. If the situation grew too precarious, would the proctors come and rescue them? The Proud Eagle wouldn't just let dozens of its pupils starve to death out here, would it?

And then, without warning, winter descended upon them.

The snow marched into CAMP 11 under an imperious wind, eager to pound and break any human habitation in its path. Within days of the winter solstice, the boys had abandoned all non-essential duties to concentrate on the snow. But there was much more snow than hands to shovel it. Milky precipitation smothered the plants and killed off the remaining vegetation. The initiates soon discovered that, unlike the geosynchron-regulated snow to which they were accustomed, natural snow could sting and burn. Insulation against the cold became their biggest worry.

A debilitating flu hopped from boy to boy and gave the initiates their first taste of real illness. Back in the civilized world, OCHREs diagnosed all their ailments, and bio/logic programs automatically dealt with them by consulting the Dr. Plugenpatch databases. No more. "I remember reading that you're supposed to blow your nose when it gets clogged up like this," Horvil announced earnestly one day. "Does anybody know how to do that?" No one did.

The boys were startled to discover that even without OCHREs and bio/logic programming and Dr. Plugenpatch, the human body had a remarkable ability to heal itself. They came to realize that all the bio/logic technology society relied on for its survival had not been constructed out of whole cloth; it was patterned after cruder motifs pa.s.sed down through millions of years of genetic heritage. Natch, Horvil and most of the other boys quickly bounced back from the flu and resumed their duties.

But a few of the boys lingered on in their illnesses, their bodies unable to fully repel the alien microbes wreaking havoc in their systems. The argument about proctor intervention flared up again. But if anyone expected the proctors to suddenly swoop down from the clouds and rescue them from their misery, they were disappointed.

And so, under a chill wind, the initiates all huddled in the center of the camp one afternoon and tried to hammer out a strategy.

Now, under the pressure of starvation and with the added encouragement of the arson rumors, the much-discussed antagonism between Brone and Natch surfaced with a vengeance. Natch declared that CAMP 11 was ruined, and their only chance for survival lay in finding one of the other encampments out in the wilderness. Some of these other camps had to have some stored food available, he argued, as theirs had upon their arrival. But Brone immediately raised objections to this strategy, his opposition all the more intense because Natch proposed it.

"We can salvage what's left," stated Brone. His voice boomed with the strong and vibrant tones of a born politician. "We can survive here. But if we leave, there's no telling what we're going to find out in the wilderness."

"And what are we going to live on?" yelled Natch. His voice was a crow's squawk, the sound of metal grating on metal. "The stores we have are almost gone."

"There are deer running around. We can hunt."

Natch let out a dismissive snort. "You're saying we should start eating real meat? Those aren't synthetic deer out there. We'll all get sick again, right when we can't afford to lose any time."

"But we'll survive."

The conflict raged through the afternoon, and gradually the boys began to polarize into two separate groups. Occasionally, someone would manage to insert a fact or an opinion into the discussion, but by and large it remained a conflict between Natch and Brone, the two stubborn boys at the top of their cla.s.s. When the sun finally slunk down over the horizon, someone suggested the question be put to a vote. Should they abandon their adopted home and search for other encampments, or soldier on here at CAMP 11 and hunt for food?

Natch lost.

The boy sat in the center of the ruined camp for several hours, oblivious to the whispers of the rest. All his frustration and humiliation from the Figaro Fi episode rushed over him in a black rage that clouded over his senses. Eventually, the rest of the boys abandoned the convocation and went off to find sleep.

Natch sat and sulked, his mind whirling. The stench of death lay over Brone's plan, as obvious to Natch as the wind or the rain. He couldn't just follow Brone to his grave, could he?

Horvil put a hand on his shoulder. "You know what Sheldon Surina said?" he remarked to Natch quietly. "He said, The man who doesn't know how to compromise only has himself to blame. "

"I'd rather think about what Lucco Primo said," rasped Natch in reply.

"What's that?"

"Never bet on the optimist. "

The boys had seen little of the local wildlife during their eight months at CAMP 11, but that didn't mean the predators weren't out there. Generations of black bears and wolves prowled the woods nearby, living out their own dramas of survival with nary a thought to the humans in their midst. They were not p.r.o.ne to violence, but the Autonomous Revolt had decimated their natural habitats and taught them to be less forgiving. The miserable winter drew them closer and closer to the human encampments in search of food.

Horvil was the first boy to run afoul of the black bears. He was tromping purposefully through the snow gathering firewood when he stumbled on one of the larger specimens. Two hundred-fifty kilograms of ursine horror lunged at Horvil with no warning, sending the boy darting back to the camp at a speed he wouldn't have believed himself capable of.

"Bear!" he yelped as he stumbled down the hillside, shedding sticks of firewood the whole way. "Bear! Help! Bear!"

The camp instantly descended into chaos. Before anyone could propose a coherent strategy, Brone rounded up a small contingent of boys and armed them with torches. Horvil and a number of others scampered into their cabins and barricaded the doors, a.s.suming the bear would wander off on its own accord. Natch, meanwhile, was out on one of his aimless peregrinations around the woods.

The initiates would debate what happened next for many years afterward.

Brone and his comrades located the beast soon enough. He had headed straight for the storage silo containing their hard-earned stockpile of fruit. But the boys' bravado was quickly snuffed by the sight of a cornered bear rising up on hind legs with claws extended. Brone made a feint with his torch, which only succeeded in frightening the bear into a rage. He charged at one of Brone's companions, sliced him neatly across the chest, then tripped and fell directly onto another boy. A few of the remaining initiates managed to toss their bleeding comrades over their shoulders and make a break for the cabins, while the rest scattered in confusion.

Natch, returning from his walk, observed all this from a distance. Fools, he thought. You can't accomplish anything without a strategy. He realized that if the camp were to survive this latest incursion, he would have to take control. It was a strange feeling, to be responsible for others and not just oneself. He tried to pretend that he was not accountable, that he could just run off and let the rest of the initiates fend for themselves. Then the image of poor hapless Horvil came unbidden to his head, Horvil standing and pleading with him, You'll take care of me, won't you, Natch? He cursed his friend's name and quickly devised a plan.

Seeing that the bear was now pursuing the firebrands that had taunted him moments earlier, Natch rushed into the fray and ripped a torch from the hand of a campmate. The boy, stunned, put up no resistance. Natch instantly reversed course, waving his torch at the beast and leading him in the opposite direction, away from the camp.

Natch's thoughts were jumbled, incoherent. Primal reflex took over and dispelled any more complex emotion. He could feel the pulse of blood rushing through his legs, the lash and sting of the branches across his face. The bear was constantly a few steps behind, growling, ready to pounce and devour him. Yet he knew these woods like n.o.body else in the camp did. He knew exactly where he was going.

Until, as chance would have it, he spotted Brone.

Natch whipped around and headed in his direction.

Brone had made his way to a clearing on top of a low hill, hoping to gather his wits there. His torch had snuffed out in the snow somewhere during the frantic escape from the bear, and Brone was now busy scanning the area for a suitable branch to use as a cudgel.

He had only a split-second to react when Natch came sprinting by at top speed, and then the black bear was upon him.

The carnage that followed haunted Natch for many years to come. You should have listened to me, he would say to Brone during these midnight pantomimes. You should have realized we couldn't have made it in that camp. You should have recognized you were wrong. Then he would turn to the other initiates and uncage his fury on them. Why didn't you ask better questions? Why did you submit to Brone's leadership and not mine? He reserved the bulk of his wrath for himself. If only you had been a better politician. If only you had known how to cultivate friendships among the boys. If only you hadn't been so weak.

Natch had to stare at him for several hours in the cramped cabin of a Falcon four-seater under the watchful eyes of a fat irritable pilot and a steely-eyed paramedic. Every few minutes, the paramedic would get up from her seat to examine the gnarled stump that had once been Brone's arm. She would bend down to his chest and listen for the faint wheezing sounds, then she would turn to Natch with a murderous look that seemed quite inappropriate for a healer. Natch was beyond emotion; he simply looked back, expressionless. Don't they have to take an oath of non-violence or something? he wondered.

"Maybe we should just take him straight to a Preparation compound," suggested the pilot. "Cape Town's a long way away, and they got a Preparation compound right near here. I run back and forth to that place all the time."

The paramedic nodded absently. "That won't be necessary."

"You sure? He's suffering, I can see that. They'll take care of him down there, make sure he goes easy-"

"I know what happens in those compounds, Clar," the woman said with a tone of finality. "This one doesn't need to join the ranks of the Prepared-not yet, anyway. He's going to pull through."

For the first time, Natch noticed that the pilot and the paramedic both wore dartguns. He gazed at the cartridges of OCHRE-tipped darts hanging low on the guns' underbellies and tried to imagine what kind of code they contained. A paralysis program, maybe, or a routine to cause temporary blindness? He couldn't quite figure out why the two were armed in the first place. Were they looking after his safety, or Brone's?

Eventually, Natch decided it was pointless to search for routine in a trip that was anything but. n.o.body had given him a chance to gather his belongings or say goodbye to Horvil; they did not even tell him whether he would be returning to finish his last few months of initiation. The pilot had simply yanked him out of his cabin and thrown him into the Falcon next to the b.l.o.o.d.y, twitching Brone without a word of explanation. The whole operation smelled of sweat and desperate improvisation.

As they began their descent into Cape Town, Natch craned his neck to catch a glimpse out the front windows. He could see a small squad of Defense and Wellness Council officers in crisp white robes standing at attention on the runway. Their presence kept a crowd of fifty at bay while the Falcon completed its vertical landing sequence. Natch could see a pack of drudges and Brone's anxious parents among the throng and was suddenly glad the hive had enlisted the Council's protection. The mob might or might not be daunted by the shuttle crew's dartguns, but n.o.body would dare a.s.sault him in plain view of Len Borda's troops. The code in a Council officer's darts could very well be lethal.

Only after Natch had been hustled indoors did he realize that the Council squad was not there to ensure his safety. No, they were still out on the runway waiting for the second Falcon, which had been following close behind.

They were waiting to unload the bodies.

It wasn't the first time Serr Vigal had to duck out of a fundraising pitch at a moment's notice because of Natch. It wouldn't be the last. When the news arrived this time, he was talking to a consortium of LPRACGs a hundred million kilometers away on Mars about spinal cord bandwidth. Vigal thought about hopping on the next Earthbound shuttle, but decided he couldn't afford the delay and headed for the public multi facilities instead. Two days later, he was still waiting for a long-distance multi connection to open up. Finally, he grew impatient and decided to blow his entire Vault account on a teleportation instead.

By the time Serr Vigal arrived at the Cape Town TeleCo station, groggy and ill-tempered from the four-and-a-half-hour transfer process, Natch's name had permeated the Data Sea like a foul odor.

His experience became known to the public as "the Shortest Initiation." The term came from the drudges, whose coverage of the affair showcased their ability to reduce a complex set of human events to the common denominators of Good and Evil. Vigal was saddened to discover that Natch had been a.s.signed the latter role. GREED AND SOLIPSISM: THE LAST LESSONS OF THE HIVE? read one of the story headlines. OUR ANCESTORS MAY NOT HAVE HAD OCHRES, BUT THEY HAD ETHICS, opined another. CIVILITY IS DEAD, claimed a third. The Proud Eagle tried to convince the public that accidental deaths happened every year during initiation, but the people were not placated. Yes, occasionally there were mishapsbrawls and knife fights, flu outbreaks, once even an avalanche-but three boys from one hive mauled by a bear? Unprecedented. Inexcusable. Governmentalists and libertarians alike took to the floors of their L-PRACGs to denounce Natch and the Proud Eagle.

The headmaster and three of the senior proctors met Serr Vigal at the foot of the TeleCo station platform. They bowed before him in a very poor impression of humility.

"So Natch knows I'm on my way to get him?" said the neural programmer.

"I'm afraid we can't permit him to go anywhere yet," replied the headmaster gravely. "Natch is still fighting off the infections he contracted in the wild. I'm sorry, but rules are rules."

Vigal was in no mood for games. "Nonsense," he sighed. "Show me these medical reports that say he's still infected." The proctors exchanged surrept.i.tious looks as the headmaster's charade quickly col lapsed. She forwarded the doc.u.ments to Vigal, who projected them at arm's length for anybody to see. "It's quite obvious the boy doesn't have anything," he said at length, pointing to the array of charts floating in the air between them. "Blood pressure, heart rate, OCHRE functions-all normal. I'm afraid you have no legal right to keep the boy isolated here any longer."

The headmaster slumped visibly. Her eyes darted sidewise at the proctors with a silent accusation: You said he wouldn't give us any trouble. "Please understand-we can't let Natch go until the hive finishes its official inquiry. The board of directors might still decide to prosecute him."

"Prosecute him?" said Vigal with furrowed brow. "What would they prosecute him for?"

"Believe me, there are things they can do. Most of the other boys say that Natch led that bear right towards them, that he knew what he was doing the whole time.... Now we've got angry parents threatening all kinds of legal action. Natch should count himself lucky that the initiation compound falls under the jurisdiction of our L-PRACG and not one of theirs." The headmaster combed her stringy gray hair with the fingers on one hand and peered nervously at the pedestrians surging past on the platform. Who knew which of them would turn out to be a disgruntled investor or a muckraking drudge?

"Between you and me," she continued over Confidential Whisper, "I think we'll be able to come to some agreement with the parents and make this whole thing go away. We really are doing the best we can. But until we can get everything straightened out, Natch is better off at the hive. There are lunatics making death threats against him, drudges sending multi requests at all hours, politicians calling on him to testify ..

"But no capitalmen."

"No," the headmaster replied with distaste. "No capitalmen or fiefcorp masters or recruiters at all, thankfully."

Vigal had changed little since Natch had last seen him. He still wore the same impeccable gray goatee and the unostentatious ocher robe that signaled a hopeless lack of fashion. Vigal was a monument against time, like the cabins in the initiation compound-something that stood unchanged through the vicissitudes of the seasons.

He had certainly not lost his gift for understatement. "Things are not going so well for you, it seems," said the neural programmer.

Natch sat on his bed and sulked in silence. The hive dorm, which had been unimaginably vast when he was eight, now felt small and constricting.

"Do you want to talk about what happened out there?" prodded Vigal gently.

"No," said Natch. He had spent the past few days staring at the ceiling, trying to recount those panicked few minutes in the woods, trying to decide what had happened. Had he purposefully led that bear into Brone's path? Or had it just been a gut instinct, a subconscious split-second decision? Could he have yelled out some warning, waved his arms, something? "I don't want to talk about it. Not while so many things are unsettled."

"What things?"