Rainbows End (9 page)

“Oh.” In a few moments she was playing with the possibilities, had downloaded half a dozen component gadgets. “This is like being a child. Doing, without understanding.” But then she started putting Buildlt parts together, doing pretty well after Juan showed her how to find the interface specs. She laughed at some of the descriptions. “Sorters and shifters. Solid-state robots. I bet I could make a cutter out of this.”

“I don’t see it.” Cutter? “Don’t worry, you can’t hurt anything.” That wasn’t quite true, but close enough. He sat and watched, made a few suggestions, even though he wasn’t really sure what she was up to. Enough of establishing rapport; he marked that box in his diplomacy checklist and moved on to the next stage. “So, Dr. Xiang, do you keep in touch with your friends at Intel?”

“That was a long time ago. I retired in 2010. And during the war, I couldn’t even get consulting jobs. I could just feel my skills rusting out.”

 

“Alzheimer’s?” He knew she was
much
older than she looked, even older than Winston Blount.

Xiang hesitated, and for a moment Juan was afraid he had made the lady really angry. But then she gave a sad little laugh. “No Alzheimer’s, no dementia. You — people nowadays don’t know what it was like to be old.”

“I do so! All my grandparents are still alive. And I have a great-grandpa in Puebla. He plays a lot of golf. Great-Grandma, she does have dementia — you know, a kind they still can’t fix.” In fact, Great-Grandma had looked as young as Dr. Xiang. Everyone thought she had really lucked out. But in the end that only meant she lived long enough to run into something they
couldn’t
cure.

Dr. Xiang just shook her head. “Even in my day, not everyone went senile, not the way you mean. I just got behind in my skills. My girlfriend died. After a while I just didn’t care too much. I didn’t have the energy to care.” She looked at the gadget she was building. “Now, I have at least the energy I had when I was sixty. Maybe I even have the same native intelligence.” She slapped the table. “And all I’m good for is playing with jacked-up Lego blocks!”

It almost looked like she was going to start crying, right in the middle of shop class. Juan scanned around; no one seemed to be watching. He reached out to touch Xiang’s hand. He didn’t have the answer. Ms. Chumlig would say he didn’t have the right question.

There were still a few others to check out: Winston Blount, for instance. Not a jackpot case, but he ought to be worth something to the Lizard. In shop class, Blount just sat in the shade of the tent, staring off into space. The guy was wearing, but he didn’t respond to messages. Juan waited until Williams went off for one of his coffee breaks. Then he sidled over and sat beside Blount. Jeez, the guy really
looked
old. Juan couldn’t tell exactly where he was surfing, but it had nothing to do with shop class. Juan had noticed that when Blount wasn’t interested in a class, he just blew it off. After a few minutes’ silence, Juan realized that he wasn’t interested in socializing either.

So talk to him! It’s just another kind of monster whacking
. Juan mor-phed a buffoon image onto the guy, and suddenly it wasn’t so hard to cold-start the encounter. “So, Dean Blount, what do you think of shop class?”
Ancient eyes turned to look at him. “I couldn’t care less, Mr. Orozco.”

O-kay
! Hmm. There was lots about Winston Blount that was public record, even some legacy newsgroup correspondence. That was always good for getting a grown-up’s, um, attention. Fortunately, Blount continued talking on his own. “I’m not like some of the people here. I’ve never been senile. By rights, I shouldn’t be here.”

 

“By rights?” Maybe he could score points just by imitating an old-time shrink program. “Yes. I was Dean of Arts and Letters through 2012. I was on track to be UCSD Chancellor. Instead I was pushed into academic retirement.”

 

Juan knew all that. “But you… you never learned to wear.”

Blount’s eyes narrowed. “I made it a point never to wear. I thought wearing was a demeaning fad.” He shrugged. “I was wrong. I paid a heavy price for that. But things have changed.” His eyes glittered with deliberate iridescence. “I’ve taken four semesters of this ‘Adult Education.’ Now my resume is out there in the ether.”

“You must know a lot of important people.”
“Indeed. Success is just a matter of time.”

“Y-You know, Dean, I may be able to help. No wait — I don’t mean by myself. I have an affiliance you might be interested in.”

 

“Oh?”

He seemed to know what affiliance was. Juan explained Big Lizard’s deal. “So there could be some real money in this.” He showed him the payoff certificates, and wondered how much his recruit would see there.

Blount squinted his eyes, no doubt trying to parse the certificates into a form that Bank of America could validate. After a moment he nodded, without granting Juan numerical enlightenment. “But money isn’t everything, especially in my situation.”

“Well, um, I bet whoever’s behind these certs would have a lot of angles. Maybe you could get a conversion to help-in-kind. I mean, to something
you
need.”

“True.” They talked a few minutes, till the place got busy. Some of the shop projects were finally showing results. At least two teams had made mobile nodes, swarm devices. Tiny paper wings fluttered all around. The other swarmer crawled in the grass and up the legs of the furniture and chairs. It stayed out of clothes, but it was awfully close to being intrusive. Juan zapped a few of them, but the others kept coming.

Orozco — > Blount: Can you read me?
“Of course I can,” replied the old man.

So despite Blount’s claims of withittude, he couldn’t manage silent messaging, not even the finger tapping most grown-ups used.

The class period was almost over anyway. Juan looked up at the billowing tent fabric. He was a little discouraged. He had covered almost everyone on the list, and Winston Blount was the best he’d found: someone who couldn’t even sming. “Okay. Well, keep my offer in mind, Dean Blount. And remember, there are only a limited number of people I’m allowed to take in.” Blount rewarded this sales jabber with a thin smile. “Meantime, I-I have other possibilities.” Juan nodded in the direction of the weird new guy, Robert Gu.

Winston Blount didn’t follow Juan’s gaze, but you could tell he was sneaking a peek sideways. For a moment the skin on his face seemed to tighten. Then the smile returned. “May God have mercy on your soul, Mr. Orozco.”

Juan didn’t get his chance at Robert Gu till Friday, right after Ms. Chumlig’s
other
class. Creative Composition was almost always the low point of Juan’s school week. Chumlig was flexible as to media, but students had to stand up and perform their own work. That was bad enough when you had to watch some other kid mess up, but unbearable when
you
were the performer. Order of appearance was decided at Ms. Chumlig’s whim. Normally worrying about that would have occupied most of Juan’s attention. Today, he had other concerns that mercifully blotted out the usual panic.

Juan skulked to the back of the class and slumped down, covertly watching the others. Winston Blount was here, which was a surprise. He blew off this class almost as often as he did shop.
But he took me up on my offer
. The Lizard’s account showed that the old man had taken his first step toward signing on.

On the far side of the room, Robert Gu was surfing with his view-page. Even that looked like a struggle for the guy. But it turned out that Gu was part of a particular Marine Corps family — and when Juan had reviewed all of the affiliation instructions he had found that
that
was a big plus. If he could just interest Robert Gu in affiliation, he’d hit the top bonus level.

Chumlig’s voice cut across his thought. “No volunteers for first up? Well — ” she looked off into the air, and then turned to Juan.

 

¡Caray!
So Much Technology, So Little Talent

Chumlig’s “Creative Composition” class was shaping up to be the low point of Robert Gu’s first week at Fairmont High. Robert remembered his own high-school years very well. In 1965, school had been easy, except for math and science, which he didn’t care about anyway. Basically, he never did homework in anything. But the poems he wrote, almost without conscious effort, were already in a different world from what his poor teachers normally encountered. They considered themselves blessed to be in his presence — and rightly so.

But in this brave new world he could see only a fraction of the “compositions” the students allegedly created, and he had no doubt they could appreciate very little about his work.

Robert sat at the edge of the class, doodling on his view-page. As usual, the children were on the left side of the room, and the Adult Ed students were on the right. Losers. He had learned a few names, even talked to the Xiang woman. She said she was going to have to drop Chumlig’s composition class. She just didn’t have the courage to perform in front of others. The only talent she had was in obsolete engineering, but at least she was smart enough to know she was a loser. Not like Winston Blount, the biggest loser of all. Occasionally he caught Winnie looking his way, and Robert would smile to himself.

At the front of the class, Ms. Chumlig was coaxing today’s first performer. “I know you’ve been practicing, Juan. Show us what you can do.”

“Juan” stood and walked to center stage. This was the kid who had been chatting up the Adult Ed students in shop class. Robert remembered his earnest sales-rep behavior. At a guess, the boy was on the low side of average, the kind that high schools of Robert’s time graduated pro forma. But here, in the twenty-first century, incompetence was no excuse: Chumlig seemed to have serious expectations. The boy hesitated and then began waving his arms. Without any visible effect. “I don’ know, Ms. Chumlig, it’s still not, um, fully ready.”

Ms. Chumlig just nodded patiently, and gestured for him to continue.

“Okay.” The boy squinted his eyes and his armwaving became even more chaotic. It wasn’t dance, and the boy wasn’t speaking. But Chumlig leaned back against her desk, and nodded. Much of the class watched the random mime with similar attention, and Robert noticed that they were nodding their heads as if in time to music.

Crap
. More invisible nonsense. Robert looked down at his magic foolscap and played with the local browser selections. Internet Explorer was much as he remembered, but there were dropdowns that allowed him to “Select View.” Yes, the fantasy overlays. He tapped on “Juan Orozco Performs.” The first overlay looked like graffiti, rude commentary on Juan’s performance. It was the sort of thing you might see on a note passed furtively from child to child. He tapped the second view selection. Ah. Here the boy stood on a concert stage. The classroom windows behind him opened onto a vast city as seen from a high tower. Robert held his hand along the margin of the page, and there was sound. It was tinny and faint compared with the room audio back in the house, but… yes, it was music. It was almost Wagner, but then it rambled off into something that might have been a marching song. In the window on Robert’s view-page, rainbows formed around the boy’s image. Fluffy white —
ferrets
? — hopped into existence at every jerk of his hands. Now all the other kids were laughing. Juan was laughing too, but his handwaving became desperate. Ferrets covered the floor, shoulder-to-shoulder, and the music was frenetic. The creatures misted together into snow and lifted on miniature tornadoes. The boy slowed his rhythm, and the sound became something like lullaby music. The snow glistened, sublimating into invisibility as the music faded. And now Robert’s browser window showed the same unmagical child who stood in reality at the front of the room.

Juan’s peers applauded politely. One or two yawned.
“Very good, Juan!” said Ms. Chumlig.

It was as impressive as any advertising video that Robert had seen in the twentieth century. At the same time it was essentially incoherent, a garbage dump of special effects. So much technology, so little talent.

Chumlig talked the class through the components of Orozco’s effort, gently asking the boy where he was going to take his work, suggesting that he collaborate (collaborate!) with other students in putting words to the composition.

Robert looked surreptitiously about the room. The windows were opened onto the brown and sere hillsides of North County autumn. Out there, sunlight was everywhere, and a slow breeze brought in the smell of honeysuckle. He could hear kids playing on the far side of the lawn. Inside, the classroom was a cheap plastic construction, utterly without esthetic sensibility. Yes, school was easy, but it could also be mind-numbingly boring; he’d have to reread his own poems about that. The forced confinement. The endless days of sitting still and listening to witless talk, while the whole world waited outside.

Most of the students were actually looking in Chumlig’s general direction. Was that just an artful scam? But when the woman asked a random child a snap question, she got relevant — if halting — answers. And then, much sooner than he had imagined:

“… quitting early today, so we have time for only one more presentation,” said Ms. Chumlig.
What has she been saying? Damn
. Chumlig was looking directly at him now. “Please show us your composition, Professor Gu.”

Juan slunk back to his seat, barely listening to Chumlig’s analysis. She was always gentle in these public critiques, but the bad news was obvious all around him. Only the Radner twins had posted something nice. Someone who looked like a rabbit was grinning at him from the peanut gallery.
Who was that
? He turned and plunked himself down in his chair.

“… so we have time for only one more presentation,” finished Ms. Chumlig. “Please show us your composition, Professor Gu.”

 

Juan looked back at where Gu was sitting. What sort of presentation could he make? Robert Gu seemed to wonder the same thing: “I really don’t have anything that the class would… appreciate. I don’t do audiovisuals.”

 

Chumlig smiled brightly. When she smiled like that at Juan, he knew his excuses would count for nothing. “Nonsense, Professor Gu. You were — you are a poet.”