“I wasn’t talking about UV damage to your retinas, dear Mr. Squint. I refer to the traditional penalty for self-abuse.”
Pay dirt! The Ra Boy flushed. Roland and Crat laughed uproariously, perhaps a little hysterically. “Got him, Rem!” Roland whispered. “Go!”
From the scowls on the Ra Boys’ patchy faces, Remi wondered if this was wise. Several of them were fingering their chains, with the gleaming, sharp-rayed amulets. If one or more had tempers like Crat’s …
The lead Ra Boy stepped closer. “That a slur on my stamina, oh physical lover of fresh mud?”
Remi shrugged, it was too late to do anything but go with it. “Fresh mud or fecund fem, they’re all out of reach to one like you, whose only wet licks come from his own sweaty palm.”
More appreciative laughter from Roland and Crat hardly made up for the lead Ra Boy’s seething wrath, turning him several shades darker. I didn’t know. I’d strike such a nerve with that one, Remi thought. Apparently this guy had a lousy sex life. Some victories aren’t worth the price.
“So you’re the manly man, Joe Settler?” Ra Boy sneered. “You must be Mister Testo. An Ag-back with a stacked stock, and whoremones for all Indiana.”
Here it comes. Remi foresaw no way to avoid exchanging Net codes with this character, which in turn would lead to a meeting in some dark place, with no neighborhood watch busybodies to interfere.
With a small part of his mind, Remi realized the encounter had built up momentum almost exactly along the positive feedback curve described in class by Professor Jameson … bluster and dare and counterbluff, reinforced by a desperate need to impress one’s own gang … all leading step by step to the inevitable showdown. It would be an interesting observation—if that knowledge had let Remi prevent anything, but it hadn’t. As it was, he wished he’d never even learned any of that shit.
He shrugged, accepting the Ra worshipper’s gambit. “Well, I’m already man-ugly enough, I don’t have to pray for more from a great big gasball in the sky. I admit, though, your prayers sure look like they’ve been—”
Remi realized, mid-insult, that both groups were turning toward a sound—a new set of interlopers had entered the hedge garden. He turned. Along the path at least a dozen figures in cowled white gowns approached, slim and graceful. Their pendants, unlike the Ra Boys’, were patterned in the womblike Orb of the Mother.
“NorA ChuGa,” one of the Ra Boys said in disgust. Still, Remi noticed the guys in both gangs stood up straighter, taking up masculine poses they must have thought subtle, rather than pretentious. Feminine laughter cut off as the newcomers suddenly noticed the male gathering ahead of them. But their rapid pace along the path scarcely tapered. The North American Church of Gaia hardly ever slowed for anybody.
“Good afternoon, gentlemen,” several girls in the front rank said, almost simultaneously. Even shaded by their cowls, Remi recognized several of them from the halls of Quayle High. “Can we interest you in donating to the Trillion Trees Campaign?” one of the dedicants asked, coming face to face with Remi. And he had to blink past a moment’s fluster—she was heartbreakingly beautiful.
In her palm she held out brightly colored leaflet chips for any of the boys who would take one. There was an outburst of derisive laughter from the other side of the trail. These were surely young, naive Gaians if they thought to hit up Ra Boys for reforestation money!
Settlers, on the other hand, weren’t as ideologically incompatible. More importantly, it struck Remi that this offered a possible out.
“Why yes, sisters!” he effused. “You can interest us. I was just saying to my Settler friends here that tree planting will have to be our very first priority when we get to Patagonia. Soon as it’s warmed up down there. Yup, planting trees …”
Crat was still exchanging glares with the craziest looking Ra Boy. Grabbing his arm, Remi helped Roland tow him amidst the gliding tide of white-garbed girls. All the way, Remi asked enthusiastic questions about current Gaian projects, ignoring the taunts and jeers that followed them from the harsh-faced young sun worshippers. The Ra Boys could say whatever they wanted. On the scale of coups in tribal warfare, scoring with girls beat winning an insult match, hands down. Not that actual scoring was likely here. Hardcore Gaian women tended to be hard to impress. This one, for example.
“… don’t you see that hardwood reforestation in Amazonia is far more important than planting conifers down in Tierra del Fuego or Antarctica? Those are new ecologies, still delicate and poorly understood. You Settlers are much too impatient. Why, by the time those new areas are well understood and ready for humans to move in, the main battle, to save the Earth, could be lost!”
“I see your point,” Remi agreed. Anxious to make good their getaway, he and Roland nodded attentively until the Ra Boys were out of sight. Then Remi kept on smiling and nodding because of the speaker’s heart-shaped face and beautiful complexion. Also, he liked what he could make out of her figure under the gown. At one point he made a show of depositing the trash from his pocket in a brown recycle bin, giving the impression that litter gathering was his routine habit, and winning a brief approving pause in her lecture.
When they passed a row of hooded cancer plague survivors in wheelchairs, he slipped some dollar coins into their donation cups, getting another smile in reward.
Encouraged, he wound up accepting a pile of chip brochures, until at last she began running low on breath as they passed near the superconducting rails of the cross-park rapitrans line. Then came a really lucky moment. A newly arriving train spilled youngsters in school uniforms onto the path, shouting and dashing about. The cascade of children broke apart the tight-knit squadron of Gaians. Remi and the young woman of his dreams were caught in the whirling eddies and pushed to one side under one of the rapitrans pillars. They looked at each other, and shared laughter. Her smile seemed much warmer when she was off her planet-saving pitch.
But Remi knew it would only be a moment. In seconds, the others would reclaim her. So, as casually as he could, he told her he would like to see her personally and asked for her net code to arrange a date.
She, in turn, met his gaze with soulful brown eyes and asked him sweetly to show his vasectomy certificate.
“Honestly,” she said with apparent sincerity. “I just couldn’t be interested in a man so egotistical he insists, in a world of ten billion people, that his genes are desperately needed. If you haven’t done the right thing, can you point to some great accomplishment or virtue, to justify clinging to …?”
Her words trailed off in perplexity, addressing his back as Remi seized his friends’ arms and rapidly departed.
“I’d show her somethin’ more important than genes!” Crat snarled when he heard the story. Roland was only slightly more forgiving. “Too damn much theory crammed into that pretty little head. Imagine, invading a guy’s privacy like that! Tell you one thing, that’s one bird who’d be happier, and a whole lot quieter as a farm wife.”
“Right!” Crat agreed. “Farm wife’s got what life’s about. There’s plenty room in Patagonia for lots of kids. Overpop’s just propa-crap—”
“Oh, shut up!” Remi snapped. His face still burned with shame, made worse by the fact that the girl obviously hadn’t even known what she was doing. “You think I care what a bleeding NorA ChuGa thinks? They only teach ’em how to be—what?”
Roland was holding his wristwatch in front of Remi’s face, tapping its tiny screen. Lights rippled and the machine sang a warning tone.
Remi blinked. They were being scanned again, and it wasn’t just someone’s True-Vu this time, but real eavesdropping. “Some tokomak’s got a big ear on us,” Roland reported irritably.
It was just one thing after another! Remi felt like a caged tiger. Hell, even tigers had more privacy nowadays, in the wildlife survival arks, than a young guy ever got here in Bloomington. The park used to be a place where you could get away, but not anymore!
He looked around quickly, searching for the vo
yeur. Over to the south citizens of many ages were busy tending high-yield vegetables in narrow strip gardens, leased by the city to those without convenient rooftops. Bean pole detectors watched for poachers, but those devices couldn’t have set off Roland’s alarm.
Nor could the children, running about in visors and sun-goggles, playing tag or beamy. Or the ragged men in their twenties and thirties, over by the reflecting pond, draped in saffron sheets, pretending to be meditating, but fooling no one as they used biofeedback techniques to supply their bottomless, self-stimulated addiction … dazing out on endorphin chemicals released by their own brains.
There were other teens around too … though none wore gang colors. The silent, boring majority then, who neither slip-shaded nor dazed—students dressed for fashion or conformity, with little on their minds—some even carrying pathetic banners for tonight’s B-ball contest between the Fighting Golfers and the Letterman High Hecklers.
Then he saw the geek—a codger this time—leaning against one of the slender stalks of a sunshade-photocell collector, looking directly at the three of them. And sure enough, amid the bushy gray curls spilling under his white sun hat, Remi saw a thin wire, leading from an earpiece to a vest made of some sonomagnetic fabric.
Wheeling almost in step, the boys reacted to this new provocation by striding straight toward the geezer. As they neared, Remi made out the ribbons of a Helvetian War veteran on his chest, with radiation and pathogen clusters. Shit, he thought. Veterans are the worst. It would be hard winning any points over this one.
Then Remi realized the coot wasn’t even wearing goggles! Of course he could still be transmitting, using smaller sensors, but it broke the expected image, especially when the gremper removed even his sunglasses as they approached, and actually smiled!
“Hello, boys,” he said, amiably. “I guess you caught me snooping. Owe you an apology.”
Out of habit, Crat squeezed the fellow’s personal zone, even swaying over a bit as he flashed his scalp tattoo. But the geek didn’t respond in the usual manner, by flourishing his police beeper. Rather, he laughed aloud. “Beautiful! Y’know, I once had a messmate … a Russkie commando he was. Died in the drop on Liechtenstein, I think. He had a tattoo like that one, only it was on his butt! Could make it dance, too.”
Remi grabbed Crat’s arm when the idiot seemed about to spit. “You know using a big ear’s illegal without wearing a sign, tellin’ people you’ve got one. We could cite you, man.”
The oldster nodded. “Fair enough. I violated your privacy, and will accept in situ judgment if you wish.”
Remi and his friends looked at each other. Geriatrics—especially those who had suffered in the war—hardly ever used the word “privacy” except as an epithet, when accusing someone of hiding foul schemes. Certainly Remi had never heard of a codger willing to settle a dispute as gang members would, man to man, away from the all-intrusive eye of the Net.
“Shit no, gremper! We got you—”
“Crat!” Roland snapped. He glanced at Remi, and Remi nodded back. “All right,” he agreed. “Over by that tree. You pitch, we’ll swing.”
That brought another smile. “I used that expression when I was your age. Haven’t heard it since. Did you know slang phrases often come and go in cycles?”
Still chatting amiably about the vagaries of language fashion since his day, the geep led them toward their designated open-air courtroom, leaving a puzzled Remi trailing behind, suddenly struck by the unasked-for exercise of visualizing this wrinkled, ancient remnant as a youth, once as brimming as they were now with hormones and anger.
Logically, Remi supposed it might be possible. Perhaps a few grempers even remembered what it had been like, with some vague nostalgia. But it couldn’t have been as bad to be young back then, he thought bitterly. There was stuff for guys like me to do. Old farts didn’t control everything.
Hell, at least you had a war to fight!
After the Helvetian holocaust, the frightened international community finally acted to prevent any more big ones, putting muscle into the inspection treaties. But that didn’t seem like much of a solution to Remi. The world was going straight to hell anyway, no detours. So why not do it in a way that was at least honorable and interesting?
Do not go gentle into that good night … Poetry class was just about the only one Remi really liked. Yeah. Back in TwenCen there were some guys who had it right.
From a grassy step they could look out over much of downtown Bloomington, a skyline still dominated by preserved TwenCen towers, though several of the more recent, slablike ’topias canted like ski slopes to the north. From somewhere beyond the park boundaries could be heard the ubiquitous sound of jackhammers as the city waged its endless, unwinnable war against decay, renovating crumbling sidewalks and sewer pipes originally designed to last a hundred years … back more than a century ago, when a hundred years must have sounded like forever. Bloomington looked and felt seedy, like almost any town, anywhere.
“I like listening to people, watching people,” the codger explained as he sat cross-legged before them, displaying a surprising limberness.
“So what?” Roland shrugged. “All you geeks listen and watch. All the time.”
The old man shook his head. “No, they stare and record. That’s different. They were raised in a narcissistic age, thinking they’d live forever. Now they compensate for their failing bodies by waging a war of intimidation against youth.
“Oh, it started as a way to fight street crime—retired people staking out the streets with video cameras and crude beepers. And the seniors’ posse really worked, to the point where perps couldn’t steal anything or hurt anybody in public anymore without getting caught on tape.
“But after the crime rate plummeted, did that stop the paranoia?” He shook his gray head. “You see, it’s all relative. That’s how human psych works. Nowadays seniors—you call us geeks—imagine threats where there aren’t any anymore. It’s become a tradition, see. They’re so busy warning off potential trouble, challenging threats before they materialize, they almost dare young men like you—”
Roland interrupted. “Hey, gremper. We get all this in Tribes. What’s your point?”
The old man shrugged. “Maybe pretending there’s still a need for neighborhood watch makes them feel useful. There’s a saying I heard … geeks find their own uses for technology.”
“I wish nobody ever invented all this tech shit,” Remi muttered.
The war veteran shook his head. “The world would be dead, dead now, my young friend, if it weren’t for tech stuff. Want to go back to the farm? Send ten billion people back to subsistence farming? Feeding the world’s a job for trained experts now, boy. You’d only screw things up worse than they already are.
“Tech eventually solved the worst problems of cities, too: violence and boredom. It helps people have a million zillion low-impact hobbies—”
“Yeah, and helps ’em spy on each other, too! That’s one of the biggest hobbies, isn’t it? Gossip and snooping!”
The old man shrugged. “You might not complain so much if you’d lived through the alternative. Anyway, I wasn’t trying to catch you fellows in some infraction. I was just listening. I like listening to people. I like you guys.”
Crat and Roland laughed out loud at the absurdity of the remark. But Remi felt a queer chill. The geezer really seemed to mean it.
Of course Professor Jameson kept saying it was wrong to overgeneralize. “… because you are gang members, that will color your views of everything. Young males do that when engaged in us-versus-them group bonding. They have to stereotype their enemies, dehumanize them. The problem’s really bad here in this part of the city, where the young-old conflict has deteriorated …”
Everybody hated Jameson, all the girlie gangs and dudie gangs—staying in his class only because a pass was required for any hope of earning a self-reliance card … as if half the kids were ever going to qualify. Shit.
“I like you because
I remember the way it was for me,” gremper went on, unperturbed. “I remember when I felt I could bend steel, topple empires, screw harems, burn cities …” He closed his wrinkled eyelids for a moment, and when he reopened them, Remi felt a sudden thrill tickle his spine. The old guy seemed to be looking faraway into space and time.
“I did burn cities, y’know,” he told them in a low, very distant voice. And Remi somehow knew he had to be remembering things far more vivid than anything to be found in his own paltry store of recollections. Suddenly, he felt awash in envy.
“But then, each generation’s got to have a cause, right?” the oldster continued, shaking free of reminiscence. “Ours was ending secrecy. It’s why we fought the bankers and the bureaucrats and mobsters, and all the damned socialists to bring everything out into the open, once and for all, to stop all the underhanded dealing and giga-cheating.
“Only now our solution’s causing other problems. That’s the way things go with revolutions. When I overheard you guys dreaming aloud of privacy—like it was something holy—Jesus, that took me back. Reminded me of my own dad! People used to talk that way back at the end of TwenCen, till my generation saw through the scam—”
“Privacy’s no scam!” Roland snapped. “It’s simple human dignity!”
“Yeah!” Crat added. “You got no right to follow guys’ every move …”
But the old man lifted one hand placatingly. “Hey, I agree! At least partly. What I’m trying to say is, I think my generation went too far. We overthrew the evils of secrecy—of numbered bank accounts and insider deals—but now you guys are rejecting our excesses, replacing them with some of your own.
“Seriously though, what would you boys do if you had your way? You can’t just ban True-Vu and other tech-stuff. You can’t rebottle the genie. The world had a choice. Let governments control surveillance tech … and therefore give a snooping monopoly to the rich and powerful … or let everybody have it. Let everyone snoop everyone else, including snooping the government! I mean it, fellows. That was the choice. There just weren’t any other options.”