Infoquake (15 page)

From liftoff to touchdown, the trip took only a few hours. They were
not headed to some remote orbital colony after all, but to a nature preserve southwest of the Twin Cities. The initiation compound sat on a
few hundred square kilometers of undeveloped country, completely
walled off from the outside world. The hoverbird landed on a
makeshift platform atop a dusty, windswept hill.

Natch saw the dust and instinctively reached out with his mind for
a sinus-clearing program. He discovered that there was nothing to
reach for.

They had been cut off from the Data Sea.

Most of the other boys had already realized this fact. They disembarked with grim looks on their faces, shouldering their packs and
wondering what would happen next. The lone proctor who accompanied them on the hoverbird trudged behind a large boulder that served
as a podium and began to speak. His words had the air of a speech honed and refined over many years of repetition.

"Two billion people died in the Autonomous Revolt," thundered
the proctor, thumping his fist on the boulder. "Two billion! Approximately one-fifth of the world's population at the time. Entire cities and
cultures and ethnicities wiped out forever."

He paused for dramatic effect. None of the boys so much as
breathed.

"Why? They died because they had forgotten about this." The
proctor swept his arm expansively at their surroundings. A thousand
trees waved in the breeze like some rapturous congregation, while a
small encampment down the hill served as the lone Doubting Thomas
on the horizon.

"What you see around you is nature as your ancestors once lived
it," continued the proctor. "Your ancestors did not have access to the
Data Sea. They could not activate bio/logic programs to keep themselves warm in the winter, or fetch ten different weather forecasts with
a thought. They did not have OCHRE machines working inside their
bodies to shield them from injury and disease. Your ancestors learned
to live this way during a hundred thousand years of trial and error.

"But when humanity decided to ignore its heritage-to place its
trust in living machines instead of in themselves-the race nearly perished. And because humanity had forgotten the lessons of its ancestors,
billions more were doomed to starve in the horrible decades that followed.

"We must never forget our heritage again.

"And so, during the next year, you will become acquainted with
nature in a way you never have before. You will experience pain and
frustration and injury. The things you see as entitlements will become
hard-earned luxuries. Because of this, some of you will decide that
nature is your enemy. Others will see nature as an impersonal and
uncaring force.

"But if you lose hope, remember this: Our bodies were built to sur vive the harshest punishments nature can give. Over a hundred thousand years, we conquered nature. So will you again.

"You have many advantages over your ancestors. You have generations of genetic engineering that has broadened your minds and
strengthened your bodies. You have all the accumulated knowledge fifteen years of hive education has given you. You have your comrades.
And when all else fails, you have the certainty that a hoverbird pilot
will be back on this very spot in twelve months to take you back to
civilization.

"So when someone asks why your parents sent you to initiation,
why you spent a year of your life out in the woods instead of practicing
your bio/logic programming skills, you tell them this: I came to initiation to fulfill my responsibility to humanity. I came here to ensure the
continuation of the human race.

"The Proud Eagle wishes to thank you for your many years with
us. When you emerge from this last test, you will no longer be hive
boys. You will be young men.

"As Sheldon Surina liked to say, May you always move towards perfection. "

The proctor gave a polite bow to the assembled boys, who were too
overwhelmed to do anything but respond in kind. Then he tramped
onboard his vehicle and gave a nod to the hoverbird pilot. Within minutes, the ship was noiselessly whizzing southwards, back towards Cape
Town.

Sixty-four boys stood at the top of the hill, looking sheepishly at
one another and the encampment below. Then, moving as one, they
began the hike towards their home for the next twelve months.

The accommodations were not as primitive as everyone had expected.
Four rows of wood cabins lined four dusty streets, watched over by a large metal sign labeled CAMP 11. Of course, these houses didn't
behave like the ones they were used to-they couldn't prepare food or
obey mental commands or compress themselves to save space-but
they were a far cry from the hovels the boys had feared.

The initiates split off into groups of four and chose cabins. Brone
and Natch drifted to opposite corners of the camp like enemy kings of
chess. Horvil stayed by Natch.

The proctors had provided plenty of clothing, reasonably comfortable beds, and even a rudimentary form of indoor plumbing. Few of
the boys had ever seen a real toilet before, and they spent hours
flushing them in a symphony of adolescent glee. A scouting party
quickly discovered large and well-tended gardens on the east side of
the camp, with enough food for all. There were storage rooms stocked
with old-fashioned pens and stacks of treepaper, gardening tools,
parkas, and pocket knives. It seemed like the only hardship the boys
would face out here was boredom.

For the first few weeks, it was all a wonderful adventure. The
microscopic OCHREs clinging to their insides stopped working. Hair
and pimples sprouted without provocation. Digestive systems resumed
their ancient dance with food as if the past two hundred years of gastric engineering had never happened. The boys learned how to clean
themselves in the nearby stream, how to groom themselves with knives
and scissors, how to use spades to dig tubers from the rock-hard
ground.

Everyone experienced at least one morning of disorientation when
he groggily tried to summon the morning news or his favorite channel
off the Jamm. But all in all, the boys did not have enough time to miss
the civilized world. Their days were filled with chores that needed to
be done by hand, without the aid of bio/logics or modern machinery.
Often, they found themselves without the necessary tools to accomplish a task and had to improvise. All of this took time, and it was not
unusual for a boy to look up from the field he had started weeding that morning, only to discover a setting sun.

"It's amazing that our ancestors got anything done," Horvil groused
to Natch one night. They both lay prostrate on their beds, sweaty and
exhausted from a day fending off gophers in the fields. "After gardening, bathing, grooming, shitting and cleaning, I'm too tired to do
anything else."

The pressure on the boys was most intense during the first month;
they knew that any missteps now would have drastic repercussions
come wintertime. The Twin Cities soil was hard and unforgiving, but
the hive had provided efficient tools for prying into its skin and
tending the perennial crops. Even more useful were the gardening
manuals the proctors had left behind. The tips on plowing and crop
rotation were nice, but the comments previous initiates had scribbled
in the margins proved invaluable. Over the years, tenants of CAMP 11
had covered every blank centimeter of treepaper with hints about the
best places to forage for wild game, what to do in case of rain, dirty
stories, impenetrable in-jokes, and gossip many years gone stale. One
book had a list on the inside cover titled

Another contained a treatise on

to which some anonymous wag had added

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 passed 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 compass 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 twang. 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
assembled at a safe spot in the lee of the wind.