Coming of Age: Volume 2: Endless Conflict (23 page)

2. Running on Empty

Callie Praxis looked down at the young man lying beside her in bed. She knew he had a chronological age of forty-seven years, and that like everyone else, he had the option of appearing younger through diet, exercise, and cosmetic surgery. But Kenneth wisely chose to look his age, for now, letting his face go slightly craggy, with squint lines around his eyes and laugh lines around his mouth. He had let his dark hair show just a hint of gray at the sides. That sense of maturity was attractive in a man. She also knew that when he opened those eyes, they would be a sober brown and hold his father’s level gaze. And those lips would curl slightly with his mother’s ready sense of humor.

At her own advanced age—although no one could ever guess it by looking at her—Callie had found love again. It would be hard to find a man who was her equal for experience, knowledge, and power, because she was in the forefront of a cohort of extended-lifers. Perhaps in years to come, when the rest of the world caught up, people at her age would have more selection among the generations of ever-young antiquarians that followed. But Callie and her father—and Antigone Wells, now that her sister had died—were the last of the elder generation, at least among the people she knew personally. They would always lead the wave. Which meant that Callie would always be searching for companionship among men she had once known as babies and then as boys.

And that was the problem.

She had watched her grand-nephew Kenneth grow up in Brandon’s house, and Brandon was the nephew she had barely known before he demobilized from his ten-year hitch in the service and came looking for a job at Praxis Engineering & Construction. Kenny had still been a boy when Brandon died and she and the Patriarch had sent him to live with his uncle, Leonard’s other son Paul. She had watched him grow up there, developing an interest in politics and debate at the Praxis Family Association meetings, occasionally opposing her decisions and those of her father, and sometimes swaying other family members toward new and untried directions.

Kenny had shown an early interest in the law, and Antigone Wells had pulled him into her own orbit. She had guided his studies in statecraft and political science at the University of California, where he attended private lectures at the cloistered, almost medieval, walled campus in Berkeley. After he took his baccalaureate degree, Antigone entered him into the select apprenticeship at Boalt Hall. Later, she made him at first a clerk and then an associate in the freelance law firm she still ran, fielding online questions and reporting judicial precedents from around the country—or what was left of it.

Callie hadn’t always understood why the world still needed lawyers. In the fragmentation of social, economic, and national interests that had followed the Hunger Winter and Chinese Incursion, it seemed to her that power mattered more. And power came from management of private resources, maintenance of alliances, and combat readiness. But Callie was also a creature of the old times, with a latent belief in the greater good and the rule of law, if it could be found. The City of San Francisco, the State of California, and the Federated Republic—although on the West Coast people were starting to call it the “United States” again—still existed on paper if not always in actual projections of the law and its mysterious power. Their jurisdictions could still be found on maps and in old documents, and some sense of organization had been building over the years as politicians turned had the war bands first into militia and then into police forces.

The Praxis Family Association had always tried to be a good citizen and obey the law, wherever it was written down and made public. They tried to work through the courts, wherever their reach and influence were growing and becoming accepted by more than one party in any dispute. Then armed force was not always necessary, Callie knew. And the PFA Defense Force had standing orders not to shoot when challenged by properly badged police who could show allegiance to some local authority.

Callie had first become aware of Kenneth Praxis as a mature man, and then as a sexual object, when he had helped his sister Anastasia draft a trade agreement with Greater China for the family. The three of them made a formal visit to the cantonments around Seattle, and Callie had been captivated by Kenneth’s dry wit and easy confidence. He had seemed older than his years. They had their first physical encounter on that trip, and he proved to be experienced in more ways than one. The two had continued seeing each other, on and off, for most of the past year.

Their affair had to be kept a secret, of course. For one thing, it was bad for family politics, because it would place her leadership in doubt and reduce her authority with the younger generations. For another, it would shock her father John, who still held to traditional, twentieth-century values. And it would outrage her daughter Rafaella, whom Callie had chided over the years for her casual affairs and her choices in men.

And now, sadly but predictably, it was coming to an end. Callie knew of no nice way to explain to him what was coming. She might opt just to disappear from his life, refuse to answer his messages, make herself unavailable at the meetings he might attend, retreat into her office when he came around. But that seemed like cowardice, like weakness. And Callie Praxis had always believed in facing threats and dealing with them. So disposing of the sulks and threats from a little boy and his wounded pride ought to be a snap.

* * *

Kenny Praxis came awake with the feeling of someone staring at him. It was a gentle psychic pressure, like the beam of morning sunlight from a badly drawn curtain. He opened his eyes and found Aunt Callie sitting up in bed, leaning against pillows propped against the headboard. The shoulder strap of her black satin negligee, which she hadn’t been wearing the night before, fell casually over her left arm. She was staring down at him with a deep frown.

He lifted his head, rubbed his eyes, rubbed his mouth, and asked, “What?”

Then he realized his cortical array was pulsing gently inside his skull. The cut had been optional in his case—unlike the military cuts that Uncle Paul and Cousin John Junior had taken, or the language cut of his sister Stacy—and Antigone Wells had spoken out against him taking it. She had managed just fine dealing with the court system and the legal databases without having her brains “stir fried,” as she put it. But Kenny valued the efficiency of working without paper or hardware, just pure thought. He closed his eyes briefly in the reflex that brought up his messages, blinked through them with a flutter of his eyelids, and determined that none was new or urgent. Which still left Callie staring at him. “What?” he asked again, giving her his full attention this time.

“Do you use that little tic to clear your brain?” she asked.

“It takes care of business—faster than with a phone or notepad.”

“I ask because I wonder how much of your mind I’m actually getting.”

“When we’re together—doing what we did last night—all of me,” he said.

“But not just a moment ago,” she said. “You wake up and the first thing you say to me is not ‘Hello there!’ or ‘How did you sleep?’ or ‘I love you,’ but you growl ‘What?’ and then go off to answer the terminal inside your brain.”

“Should I put my head down and start over?”

“I’m just getting bored with this whole routine. You come over, we make love, and then you’re off inside your own electronic squirrel cage. We never talk about anything but family business, and half of what you’re thinking is invisible to me.”

“Do you really want to pick a fight first thing in the morning?”

“Maybe you should go find someone your own age to play with. You can buzz each other’s electrodes, or whatever it is you kids do.”

So it was the age thing, again. The difference in their ages only bothered Kenny because he knew it bothered her. More than their technical incest, which neither of them cared about, because their relationship would never lead to children. No one who saw them together, outside of family, could detect any age difference, because his aunt remained a beautiful woman who presented as someone in her mid-thirties. She had a slender and well toned body, smooth and elegantly made-up face—permanently made up, thanks to microsurgery—with arched brows over clear green eyes, straight nose, full carmine-red lips, and a cloud of raven-black hair that cascaded artlessly over her shoulders. She was without flaw. She might easily have been fifteen years his junior, instead of his elder by more than half a century.

Except, he added, when she opened her mouth. For all her youthful beauty, Callie remained his great-aunt and head of the family empire—after Great-Grandfather John, of course. It took no more than an instant of frustration for her to become coldly superior, demanding, controlling, and dismissive of Kenny as a member of the younger generation. The question now was, did this argument about his brain cut and the invitation to “find someone your own age” come from a fit of pique? Or was she dismissing him for real this time?

Well … did it matter? Kenny had experienced his own share of love affairs, although this was his first one inside the family. They always started with physical attraction, moved on to include affection and emotional communication, descended into pure physical sensation, and ended with doubt and recrimination. The process was always exciting at first. Then it was a whirl of discovery and daring. And finally, it was empty.

He sighed.

He pushed himself up on his palms, climbed backward off the bed, and searched for his clothing in the little piles they’d left behind on the floor.

“Aren’t you going to answer me?” Callie demanded.

Kenny was sitting on his side of the bed, his back to her. He held up his briefs for inspection and slipped them on. He followed with his pants and shirt. Only when he had found his second sock did he speak: “I would think this obviously
is
an answer. I’m due in court in an hour. I need to get ready.”

“Well! Is that all you have to say?”

“Just one more thing. Good-bye.”

* * *

Jeffrey Praxis flew over the vastness of the Stanislaus Forest just before dawn. It was the time of day when the ground was at its coldest, so thermal imaging worked best down among the dense tree formations. He was scanning for intruders, using equipment sensitive enough to distinguish a human being’s normal thirty-seven centigrade from the slightly higher body temperatures of the white-tailed deer and black bears—the only mammals with enough body mass to be mistaken from the air for men. And, of course, any campfires or electric generators would blaze as white-hot points in the imaging.

He and an armed technical sergeant flew in one of the family Defense Force’s new ariflects, the ARF-III, a hover design that used multiple rotors composed of short, broad vanes to pull on the air, rather than long blades that beat at it. The design, perfected by artificial intelligence through stochastic evolution, was stronger, more robust, and also quieter than an old-style helicopter. What Jeffrey was going for this morning was the quiet part.

Over the past thirty years, he and Grandfather John had slowly bought up all the special-use permits and leaseholds to campsites, hunting lodges, stores, homes, and villages in the former Stanislaus National Forest. Acquiring them had been easiest in the early years, when the hunger and winter-like conditions persisted throughout the summer—because the Yellowstone Ash Fall still hung in the stratosphere—and drove people out of the mountains. But then, when climatic conditions improved and people wanted to return to their former holdings, whether legally held or not, the Praxis Family Association had to be firm.

That was also the time when the Chinese Incursion fell apart and war bands were taking to the hills. To preserve the forest and maintain the PFA’s hold on it, the Defense Force had established an automated perimeter of monitoring stations run by high- and medium-level intelligences snooping with low-altitude Floaters. The intelligences also managed teams of Rovers that had the sure-footedness of mountain goats, the reflexes of big hunting cats, and the latest 1.299-kilowatt XR lasers from the PFA arms factory.

And yet Grandfather John insisted that human eyes fly over the forest at least once a month on irregular schedules and patterns to scope out any encampments that the automata might have missed.

“Nice and clear,” said the sergeant assigned to this ’flect. He’d said that ten minutes ago—in fact, every ten minutes for the past hour. It was his polite way of saying he was bored, nothing to see here, and let’s go home.

Maybe he was right, and Jeffrey and Grandfather John should just trust their automated defenses. But still …

In the years right after the Yellowstone Eruption, the family drew a fortune in cellulose and other biomass out of the forest due to the accelerated die-off of trees caused by the winter conditions. Their robot beavers and squirrels had a boom year, and then they themselves died off—or went inactive and were cannibalized by other machines for parts and materials—while the forest was in recovery mode and the family wanted to preserve its biomass to fertilize new sprouts and seedlings.

Those were the years, too, when Jeffrey was tasked with revitalizing the other, non-human forest inhabitants. He arranged for the importation, or genetic reconstruction, of mice, rabbits, deer, and moose—if those big herbivores would flourish and take hold in the Sierra foothills, so far south of their natural habitat—as well as all kinds of fish and birds. He also brought in their predators, the owls, hawks, cougars, and bears. He did this, not because Grandfather John or the other family members wanted to create a hunting preserve, but because a healthy ecosystem supported all kinds of life at all levels.

That meant he had to defend the forest against poachers as well as warlords.

But the sergeant was right. Aside from the negative thermal sweep, Jeffrey’s office at Fort Apache in Fremont had received no irregular indications during the past month—in fact, for the last couple of months. All of the automata were electronically monitored and reported their status to the Big and Little Brothers on a daily basis. All of the imported and genetically engineered animals were tagged and tracked by those same intelligences. If any humans had strayed into the woods, they would likely try to subsist by hunting the live creatures—and perish by exchanging target practice with the mechanical ones. But the forest below was quiet on all levels.