Infoquake (17 page)

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. Nobody 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 bloody, 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 nobody would dare assault 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 assigned 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 surreptitious looks as the headmaster's charade quickly col lapsed. She forwarded the documents 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?"

"Practical things, now things." The boy leaned back against the
window and traced a finger over the fiefcorp industry pie charts he had
put there. "I'm seventeen, Vigal. I should be looking at apartments and
shopping for a bio/logic workbench. Picking out L-PRACGs. But
instead, I've got no future, no prospects, nothing. I'm the most hated
person in the world right now, and all because ... because ..." He
couldn't find the words to finish his sentence, and bashed his fist
against the window.

Serr Vigal pursed his lips into a frown. "Surely it can't be that bad. What about all those recruiters who were hounding you before initiation?"

"Nothing," Natch sighed bitterly. "The capitalmen won't even
acknowledge my existence. Oh, a few of the fiefcorp masters will talk
to me, but their offers are just laughable. People want me to apprentice for them on spec, not even for room and board. Everyone else just
prives me out the instant they find out who I am."