Rainbows End (37 page)

“What are you laughing at, Gu?” Blount’s voice came from below. “Nothing!” Robert crawled off the cabinet and dropped to the floor. “I just figured out a little mystery.”

They continued on. Most of the cabinets were labeled
Dros MCog
now. They were making faster progress, mainly because Carlos and Robert had figured out the gymnastics of the operation. “That’s the last of them, guys!” Tommie’s gaze shifted from his laptop to the fluidics crystals. “You know, it’s really weird that all the node locations were so deep in the lab equipment,” he said.

The Mysterious Stranger slipped in front of Tommie and waggled greenish fingers at Robert and Carlos and Winnie Blount. “That’s not a mystery to follow up on. Why doesn’t someone suggest that we get on with Tommie’s great plan, eh?”

No one said anything for a moment, but Robert guessed two things about what they had just done: It was what they had really come here for. It was how the Stranger might make good on his promises. Maybe Carlos and Winnie realized something similar, because suddenly all of them were talking. Blount waved the others silent and turned to Parker. “Who knows, Tommie? You said this was subtle. It might take weeks to figure out just how everything fits together.”

“Yup, yup,” Tommie nodded, oblivious of the Stranger’s satisfied look. “Time for analysis later!” He glanced down at his laptop. “In any case this was the hard part. Now we have a clear run to where Huertas stores the shredda.”

They didn’t set down any more gadgets. Tommie’s laptop advised speed, and therefore so did Tommie. Whatever the Mysterious Stranger planned for GenGen no longer needed them. Robert glanced back. Winnie was out of breath, almost trotting. The Stranger must have given him some special encouragement. And behind Carlos, Tommie spun his prayer wheel, drifting the spider thread out behind them.

Suddenly the concrete floor gave way to something that bounced back against their feet. And the sound of their steps was like tapping on a vast and tightly fitted drum.

“When does a tunnel fly?” said Tommie. “When it’s really a tunnel in the sky!” And suddenly, Robert realized where they were. This was one of the enclosed walkways that came off the side of Rose Canyon, just north of campus. Right now they were standing in a tube seventy feet above the brush- and manzanita-covered hillside.

Then they were back on concrete. Ahead was another cavern, and this one was almost empty. Huertas country.

Miri ran, but a spotlight followed. No, that was just normal tunnel lighting. She slowed, stopped, slid up against the wall… and looked back. No human followed. The entrance hole was the only other light, and now it was some distance behind her.
Juan
!

She watched it and listened. If no one was coming after her, that might mean that UCSD security was still working down here.

She tried to probe the walls. She called 911. Again. Nothing. Maybe the Badguy had permanently zapped her Epiphany. She shrugged up some test routines. No, it wasn’t dead. She could see her files, but every local node was ignoring her. Then she noticed the pink flicker at the edge of the diagnostic, a wireless response that her Epiphany would normally have discarded as too distant, too erratic. A second passed, heaven knew how many retries, and she got an ID. It was Juan, his wearable.

Miri — > Juan: Please answer!

No reply came back, and she couldn’t check his medicals without more access rights. Abruptly Juan’s light flared, died. Miri sucked in a breath. Mr. Janitor/Professor was still up there. He had whacked poor Juan again. No, be precise: He had whacked Juan’s gear again, maybe just to prevent Miri from forwarding out through it. For a moment, Miri drew in on herself. It was not a good thing that all her planning and leadership could come to this. Alice never seemed to have these problems. She always knew what to do next. Bob… sometimes Bob made mistakes. He was the one who always seemed uneasy about certainty.
I wonder what Bob would think of all this
?… I
wonder what Juan would do
?

Miri looked down the tunnel, away from the entrance. It was dark, but it wasn’t perfectly quiet. There might be voices, chatting conversationally, never quite making words. Robert and his library friends were down here, surely being run as cat’s-paws by Mr. Janitor/Professor.
How can I wreck his plan
? Miri got to her feet and ran quietly up the tunnel, still trapped in her own private pool of light. No sign of Robert, and none of the mumbled voices sounded quite right. She passed occasional cross tunnels. Small things whizzed down transparent tubes.

Some minutes later, and still no sign of Robert.

Miri read as she ran along; she had cached plenty about UCSD and the biotechs. There was proprietary and security stuff she couldn’t know, but… the cross tunnels led off to particular labs. Three hundred acres in seventeen separate chambers!

Miri’s run slowed to a walk, then came to a miserable stop. Robert could be anywhere. How much control did the Badguys have down here?
Maybe I should just start shouting
.

Faintly, behind her, there came a new kind of sound. Soft hammers pounding on a metal drum. But the cadence was like footsteps. And suddenly she had a very good idea of where the others were. Now if only she could match that to where
she
was. Miri turned and headed back.

The Library Chooses

Sheila Hanson’s night crew came out of the forest on the path of the great snake of knowledge, just east of the library. The Hacek spiders were already there, and they had the high ground. Tim Huynh rolled and walked his bottish army right to the edge of the enemy force.

Huynh — > Night Crew: Jeez. They’re all real! The spiders, that is. Most of the humans were real, too. Hacekean Knights and Libarians were thick behind their robots.

Round the north side of the library came more Scoochi reinforcements, supporters from the Oceanography Library at Scripps Institute. But the Hacekeans had their own reinforcements. From cameras flying above the library, Huynh could see those latest arrivals chasing the Scripps people. So far there had been little property damage. The mechs looked sinister enough, and the humans were mostly milling and shouting. Sheila was still doing pretty well with her “We want our REAL books!” chant.

Something big and virtual came rushing out of the Hacekean side and onto the bottish no-man’s-land. It was twelve feet tall, the best Dangerous Knowledge that Timothy Huynh had ever seen. Half Librarian, half Knight Guardian, the creature was Hacek’s central paradox. Now it capered almost to the edge of the Scoochi lines and made a grotesque face, tongue long and pointy like a Maori daemon. And when it shouted, every Scoochi heard, but the message was customized to the listener:

“Hoy, Timothy Huynh, you think you’s a Lesser Scooch-a-mout. Lesser indeed! All you Scoochi moppets be trashy children’s things, shallow and unworthy before our Depth!” Dangerous Knowledge waved at the Hacek critters around and behind it.

That was the usual slur against the Scooch-a-mout mythos, and it always made the Scoochis mad, since naive outsiders might be deceived by the claim. There were counterchants from the Scoochi ranks: “Hacek is just counterfeit Pratchett!” And that set the
Hacek
people into a rage, since of course it was only the simple truth.

Huynh pushed past Sheila and Smale and the rest of the night crew, till he stood at the forward edge of his army. Up close, this Dangerous Knowledge was even more spectacularly detailed. Its taloned boots were artfully sunk in the muck beside the serpent’s path. Spider bots hummed and hopped around their patron.

The spider bots were real. Where had the Hacekeans gotten such clever things, and on such short notice? He pinged them; not surprisingly, nothing came back. There was an almost living suppleness about the way they scrambled over one another, surging and retreating. The gadgets looked like custom melds of the latest Intel and Legend models. GenGen regu-lomics was upgrading to something like this. He pinged them again, this time with his GenGen technician’s authority.

Holy shit!

“Hey!” Huynh shouted. “The Hacek bums have stolen GenGen equipment!” And now that he looked closely at the other side, he recognized fellow employees! There was Katie Rosenbaum. She waved her battle axe and leered at him.

Rosenbaum — > Huynh: We just borrowed them, dearie!

He’d had lunch with Katie and her friends only yesterday. He knew there were Hacek sympathizers in regulomics, so of course his crew had kept their plans under wraps. And all the while the treacherous Hacekeans had been doing the same!

Dangerous Knowledge continued its merry dance through the spider troops, mocking the Scoochis’ surprise. It shouted, “Indignant, be ye now, wee Huynhling? Could it be ye just cheated with too little imagination? What ye brought is old and slow, well matched to the petty concept of your imagery!”

The art behind Dangerous Knowledge was astoundingly good, without precursors. But whoever was pulling the strings was even more impressive, certainly a world-class professional actor. For a moment the Scoochi ranks wavered and their mob of virtual supporters began to melt away. In the view from above, Huynh saw still more Hacekeans piling up around the other sides of the library. If the balance shifted too far, the Scoochis would end in humiliation and defeat.

Then Sheila Hanson’s voice came loud on the public venue, audible across the entire participating world. “Look! The Greater Scooch-a-mout!”

Behind Huynh, one of the forklift mechs stirred to life. Ah! That was just the thing Huynh should have thought to do. Thank goodness Sheila was on the ball.
The forklift stepped forward as delicately as could be imagined for a machine that was twelve feet tall, with a center of gravity that now was over six feet up. It certainly wasn’t running autonomously, but he hadn’t thought Sheila could drive it this well.

Its foot-platters descended slowly, giving humans and chirps and sal-sipueds plenty of time to clear out of the way. It was impressive, but it was just a forklift. Then Huynh realized he was still watching it with his driver’s view. Meshing with the belief-circle view it was —

Sheila had morphed the blue ioniped into something even more spectacular than Dangerous Knowledge. Now it was the Greater Scooch-a-mout, the most popular of the Scoochi critters. In its short career, the Greater Scooch had been the subject of refurbishments, spinoffs, spinups, mergers, and attempted government takeovers. It was the maximum hero to millions of schoolchildren across the poorest lands of Africa and South America, the champion of little people improving their place in the world. And this vision of it, tonight, topped everything in sight.

What’s more, this vision, tonight, had four tons of haptic truth clunking along inside.

The Greater Scooch-a-mout reached the edge of the Scoochi lines, and advanced into spider-bot territory. Now it moved
fast
, as fast as its stabilizers and motors would carry it.
Whoa, who is driving that thing
? It danced through the Hacek robots and bellowed insults at Dangerous Knowledge.

Knights and Librarians, pofu-longs and dwelbs and baba llagas — everybody on both sides went wild. Special effects blossomed in the air above them. And then the shouting got even louder. The robots surged into combat. Huynh looked at the melee of robotic special effects. Mega-munches and xoroshows were coming out from the bushes; Sheila was throwing their reserves into the maw of battle.

This mech battle was real! When the Greater Scooch-a-mout tap-danced on the backs of spider bots, fragments of carapace and leg flew into the air. In his technician’s view he could see damage reports. Twenty regu-lomics spiders were listed as “nonresponsive” on the lab’s real-time roster. Dozens of his tweezer bots were destroyed. Three of the sample carriers had lost mobility.

Huynh — > Hanson: Borrowing robots is one thing, Sheila. But lots of these are going back as junk.

Sheila was at the other end of the front. It looked like she was trying to get the robots to advance into the Knights and Librarians. On Tim’s end, the Greater Scooch-a-mout had already accomplished some of that by dancing toward the edge of the real human players.

Hanson — > Huynh: Not to worry! Management is happy! Take a look at the publicity, Tim.

His coworkers and the virtual thousands pushed forward. In the network view… jeez, GenGen was getting coverage like you couldn’t pay for, better than in the twentieth century when millions were forced to watch just what the few had decided was Important. There were backbone routers in the UCSD area that had run out of capacity! That wouldn’t last long, since there were endless ad hoc routers and dark fiber everywhere. But the whole world was here tonight.

Step by step, the Scoochis advanced.
“We want our floor space!”
“We want our library!”
“And most of all, we want our REAL books!”

Belief circles normally competed from within, based on their own popularity. Here, tonight, was a grand exception: belief circles fighting each other directly for attention and respect. In minutes they might burn up months of creativity, but reach an audience beyond all their earlier dreams.

And whoever was driving the Greater Scooch-a-mout chatted with Huynh directly: Greater Scooch-a-mout — > Lesser Scooch-a-mout: Your mechs are the thing, my man! Bring them on!

Okay! Huynh fired up the other forklift. He often dreamed of kicking ass with one of these monsters. He walked carefully through friendly lines, drawing the smaller robots along behind him. From somewhere across the world, Scoochi artists draped the forklift every bit as brilliantly as the Greater Scooch-a-mout. But this vision was mercurial as smoke: Huynh’s forklift was tricked out as Mind Sum, the ambiguous spirit that sometimes helped Scooch-a-mout when enemies were at their wiliest. Its vapors both lagged and led the real device. Dozens of helpers and helper programs made sure that the effect was always in place. The forklift’s hull was dark composite plastic. Unless you looked carefully in the real view, you couldn’t be sure just where the robot might really be.

Tim Huynh took advantage of all this, stomping like a steel mist across the bottish battle zone, high-fiving the Greater Scooch-a-mout… and treading with ambiguous location toward the Knights and Librarians. The Scoochi chant boomed from the forklift’s speakers: