Cyberpunk (34 page)

thousand thousand times, but that war, it seems, will go on forever.

Chilling thought, innit?

Okay, here’s another left-handed inference. After six semesters of

looking at cultures and nations from all over time, my personal brain

kicked out this one utter core truth: Every successful human society has

a clear-defined adulthood ritual.

Oh, the age of the participant, the rites/ordeals undergone, and the

priveleges bestowed; these are all situational variables keyed off the

society structure. It could be simple as switching from shorts to long

pants or tough as adult circumcision (
ouch
!), but every human tribe

since the first ape chipped a flint has had some way for its youngers to

say, “Today, I am a man.” And forever after that, it wasn’t how old you

were that mattered, it was what you
did
.

Blur the line between child and adult—let your children take risks

like adults, let your adults be irresponsible like children—and you get

major-league trouble.

That’s why the Colonel went all the way back to the Bronze Age for

his adulthood ritual, I guess. He wanted to make sure we knew it wasn’t

a game anymore. You went through the ritual, forever after you played

for keeps.

So this is how I became a man.

By the start of August I had the NetSpines strung, the virtual

NetServer (actually, five computers) running, and about half the

applications implemented. I was real proud of my NetSpine design; it

was one of the few victories I’d won over Nuttbruster. Like most olders,

he was fixated on the central nervous system paradigm, with everything

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feeding into one monolithic core processor. My net was radially

symmetrical, like a starfish. (Left-handed inference, again! God, I

wished I’d studied anatomy back when I was a cyberpunk!) The

processing power was distributed out in the arms, meaning there was no

one piece that everything else depended on. Hack a starfish apart, and

each arm remains viable. Short of a camp-wide powerout, my net

couldn’t
crash! Nuttbruster really liked the sound of that.

‘Course, it helped even more when he found out my design was

cheaper, too.

So by the beginning of August I was feeling real good about the way

the net was going together. Then one day I got the quiet word that I was

expected to start attending the weekly Council Fires, and I just about

dropped a bit.

Okay, I know it sounds silly. Stupid, even; overgrown boyscout

stuff. But you put twenty-plus men around a camp fire, start the wind

rustling the aspens, cue the coyotes howling off in the distance—

And bring on the stars. Oh God, the stars! Turning in a big wheel

around Polaris: Deneb straight overhead, shining like a beacon, Altair

rising low and bright above the trees, Vega completing the third node of

the Summer Triangle—

It’s magic.
Powerful
magic. Around the Council Fire, men spoke in

low voices, not because they wanted to, but because the forest demanded

it. In the dark and shadows, everyone was equal. (Oh sure, rank still

mattered, but it was rank among equals. True rank flows from the

authority of the officer
and
the respect of the subords.) Someone—

anyone—would start to speak, and everyone would turn to listen, their

faces etched black in the flickery orange light.

The fire was our link. Everyone took a hand in feeding it, throwing

on a few twigs or a pine cone, not by orders but by silent, mutual

consent. The pine burned sweet, and crackled soft. Oak made slow, red

coals; birch burned down to hard white brilliance. Somewhere in the

back of my mind I always half expected to see a shaman come dancing

out in his mask and rattles, and somewhere behind me, just beyond the

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circle of light, I always
felt
the presence of the bear, the Great Bear

that’s been the enemy of my tribe ever since men first stood up on their

hind legs.

Like I said, Council Fire was real roots magic. It was also the

Academy’s adulthood ritual.

I hosed it the first few times, of course. Made the mistake of

thinking that freedom to talk was the same as freedom to bitch —and

boy, did I have a lot to bitch about! Nuttbruster killed my SatLink plans,

and fought every damned acquisition like the money was coming right

out of his veins!

Then I made the mistake of thinking that polite silence checked out

the same as appreciation of my brilliance, and spent twice as much time

as I should have arguing against Nuttbruster’s decision to buy
metal

EtherNet cabling (he got a great deal on it surplus somewhere) instead of

laser fiberoptics. Only later did I flag that I was trying to beat one of the

old Space War hardcodes:
Don’t waste energy reinforcing a lost

position.
Which, in a weird way, ties into my worst mistake of all.

I giggled when we all took turns pissing on the fire.

I still don’t understand this one. I may
never
understand why Real

Men always piss on campfires, when it’s time to put them out and turn

in. But I did learn real quick that it’s solemn biz, and giggling is

maximum bad form.

By the middle of August I’d made all the mistakes I was going to

make, and I’d got a firm lock on the protocol. On the Sunday after my

seventeenth birthday—pure coincidence, that— I finally took the big

walk through the invisible door and left my childhood behind.

We didn’t use words like that, of course. In the Von Schlager

scheme of things, you didn’t ever say things like that out loud. By the

time you were entitled to declare your adulthood, it was perfect obvious.

Or else you were boasting, and that was also bad form.

So I never said, “Today, I am a man.” Instead, the Colonel waited

until most of the week’s business was out of the way, then threw a

handful of pine cones into the fire, stared deep into the hissing red

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flames, and started to speak.

“As you know,” he said, in his deep, growly voice, “we’ve been

wiring the Academy for computers this summer. I’m told that the system

is now complete.” Von Schlager turned to me, his eyes two mysterious,

dark pits in the flickering orange firelight. “One man is responsible for

the system design. Cadet Harris, will you tell us how we can use the

network?”

I choked, sputtered, babbled a few nonsense things. He’d caught me

flatfooted and unprepped.

“Stand, Harris,” the Colonel ordered.

I stood, nervous, and all those faces turned to me. The near ones

were half-hid in shadow; the far ones blurred into shimmering orange

masks across the fire. And then it clicked.

To me. They were all looking to
me
. And they didn’t care how

sharp I was, or how much late-night time I’d put into debugging the

realtime interface. They didn’t want to hear me bitch about how

Nuttbruster argued over every damn nickel and dime, or know how

pissed I was that he’d bought slow and archaic IBM digital hardware for

most everything. (Wheezy old bean counters have their own #1 Rule, I

guess, which goes:
Nobody’s ever been fired for buying IBM
.

Nuttbruster was still holding a grudge against the Nipponese for the

Technology Embargo, like stuff that happened forty years ago still

mattered.)

They didn’t want to hear about how it took me three weeks to flag

that feeding praise and suggestions to my summer boy cable stringers

worked better than screaming at them when they hosed up (besides,

screaming at them was
Payne’s
job), and they didn’t need to know how

disappointed I was that we couldn’t afford the neural network coprocessor.

I mean,
I
knew that no neurals—and no high-speed parallel

analog data bus—meant no image recognition processing, and therefore

no true A.I.

But all of sudden that didn’t matter anymore. It was
my
problem, not

theirs. That’s the way it worked at the Council Fire. You didn’t boast;

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you didn’t make excuses. If it was a bug someone could help you nail,

you brought it up. Otherwise, if it was finished, you kept your problems

in your personal file and talked about what you’d done. Not what you

could have done, or wanted to do. Ex post facto what-ifs were no better

than wishes, and if wishes were horses beggars could ride.

(Corollary: If turnips were watches I’d wear one by my side,

whatever
that
means.)

I looked around that circle of solemn, fire-lit faces, and flagged they

wanted to know one thing, and one thing only: what my net could do for

them.

They wanted to know what I’d done for the tribe.

It was hard at first, but I told them. I talked about what the net could

do for the Academy, and they listened. To me. To little Mikey Harris.

Their teacher. For the first time in my life I wasn’t some kid trying to

deal with a crowd of ignorant, condescending olders.

I was an
equal
.

#

“Mail call!” The Grade One gopher stuck his face into my

improvised office. “Letter for you, sir!”

I didn’t look up from my terminal; I was deep in the heart of the

academic system, tracking down a truly nasty bug. A few weeks before

some idiot kid had buried a line in every program that said
if

student_id$=“Michael Harris” then grade_val$=“A”
, and he couldn’t

remember all the places where he’d hidden it.

The gopher was still standing there, waiting for me to take the

envelope.

“Is it important?” I asked, stealing a quick look up.

He stared at the envelope; I saw his lips move as he silent read

David & Martha Harris
off the return address label. “It’s from your

parents,” he said, making a major intellectual leap. I started to get out of

my chair, then checked the system date on my terminal instead.

Yup. August 28. Allowing for post office lag, Dad was right on

schedule. “Put it on the table,” I said, and went back to my work.

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There was a time when I used to get buzzed about letters from home.

That was before I remembered a little program I’d helped Dad install on

his personal computer: LetterRight! Input a name and six keywords,

select a style (business/formal, business/bootlicking, personal/friend,

personal/family, or service/complaint), and it kicked out one page of

generic verbal oatmeal for you. Tie in the optional LetterBase! module,

and it kept track of the names and keywords you used.

Link it to your clock/calendar, and it kicked out letters automatic.

Interface the OCR scanner, and it
read
your incoming mail, copped a

few keywords, stuck them in the LetterBase! file with an xref to the