Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

Today, she got halfway to the east exit without choosing a particular game. She was careful not to touch, much less ride, the mechs. She especially avoided the furry cuddly critters. Except at the exits, "You touch, you pay" was the rule at Pyramid Hill. Maybe she should buy into a game just to shed some of the marketing pressure.

She paused, looked across the hillside. There was lots of noise and action, but if you listened carefully, you could tell that the kids in the bushes were actually playing in other universes, all choreographed so neither players nor equipment would get in each other's way. She had picked the right cover; classical anime was just too highbrow for these dorks.

"How about Twin Spirits? You only need two physicals for that."

" Eep !" Miri almost tripped over her jackass. She twisted around, putting the bike between her and the voice. There was a real person, also tricked out in anime costume. Miri dropped down into the true view: Juan Orozco . Talk about bad luck. She had never imagined he would be into classic anime.

She found her voice, a trilly high-pitched English thing that Annette Russell had given her. "Not today, I'm afraid. I'm looking for something grander."

Orozco — and the spiky-haired critter he presented — cocked his head questioningly. "You're Miri Gu, aren't you?"

This was majorly bad etiquette, but what do you expect from an fourteen-year-old loser? "So? I still don't want to play." She turned away and pushed her bike along the path. Orozco followed right along. He had a fold-up bike that didn't get in his way at all.

"You know I've teamed with your grandpa in Ms. Chumlig's composition class?"

"I knew that." Boogers ! If Juan learned what Miri was up to, then Robert might too. "Have you been tracking me?"

"That's not against the law!"

"It's not polite." She didn't look at him, just stomped along very quickly.

"I haven't been watching second-by-second. I just was hoping to run into you, and then I saw you coming in the west gate…" So maybe he had just set up proximity alerts. "You know, your grandpa is trying to help me. Like with my writing. I think I'm getting better at it. And I'm teaching him to wear. But… I feel sorry for him. He seems to be angry all the time."

Miri kept walking.

"Anyway, I was thinking… if he could get some of his old friends… maybe he would feel better."

Miri whirled on him. "Are you recruiting?"

"No! I mean, I have an affiliance that could benefit seniors, but that's not what this is about. Your grandpa is helping me at school, and I want to help him."

They were coming down the Hill, approaching the east gate. This was the last chance for Pyramid Hill to make money. The closer you got to the gate, the harder the sell, across all park-supported realities. Furries danced playfully around them, begging to be picked up. The critters were real mechanicals; if you reached out to touch them, you'd find plush, deep fur under your hands, and real heft to their bodies. Near the gate, management wanted to sell these little robots, and a free feel goodbye had swayed thousands of otherwise resistant children. When Miri was younger, she'd bought about one doll a month. Her favorites still played in her bedroom.

She rolled her poor jackass through the crowd, avoiding the talking bears and the miniature Scooch-a-mouts, and the real children. Then they were out the gate. For a moment, Miri fumbled and lost her imagery. Now she was a plain fat girl, and her bike was a dumb machine. Orozco just looked skinny and nervous. He had a shiny new bike, but he couldn't seem to get it unfolded.

I don't want him to find out about Lena .

She jabbed a finger at the boy's chest. "My grandfather is fine. He doesn't need to be recruited into some payoff scheme. Outside of school, you stay away from him." She flashed imagery that Annette had created for their Avengers clique. The boy flinched.

"But I just want to help!"

"And furthermore, if I catch you tracking me…" She switched to a deniable mode, a delayed delivery he wouldn't see for several hours. Anonymous — > Juan Orozco: If you really anger me, your school transcripts will look like you tried to scam them.

Juan's eyes widened slightly at the sudden silence. He would have some time to stew over what was coming.

It was all empty threat of course; Miri believed in obeying the law, even if she might pretend otherwise.

She ran her bike a couple of steps and hopped on, and almost fell off. Then she recovered and coasted down the hill, away from Orozco.

The Rainbows End retirement community was in a valley northeast of Pyramid Hill. The place was very old and famous. It had been founded sixty years ago, ages before the suburbs ever got out this far. It hit its peak in the early twenty-first century, when a wave of newly rich old people had arrived here.

Miri pedaled along the bike path, doing her best to stay out of everybody's way. Her guest pass was still valid, but kids were mostly second-class citizens at Rainbows End. When she was young, visiting Lena here, she had thought the village was magical. The real lawns were as beautiful as the fake ones in West Fallbrook. There were real bronze statues. The colonnades and brickwork were real too, finer than all but the most expensive of the shopping malls.

Since then, she had studied senior issues in school — and there was no way to avoid certain cynical conclusions: There was still some real money in Rainbows End, but it was money spent by people who couldn't do any better. Most of those who remained were living on vapor and biotech promises, unlucky in investment and/or medicine.

Orozco had not tried to follow or cover his tracks; she had traced him eastward. He'd finally gotten his bike unfolded and was pedaling toward the Mesitas subdivision. She watched with narrowed eyes. Could Juan Orozco be the punk who'd briefly hijacked Sharif at UCSD? No way. That had been a loud smart-aleck who insisted on bragging. More important, Mr. Smart-Aleck really was competent, maybe as sharp as Miri herself.

Okay. There were more important things to think about. Lena's house was at the far end of the second street up. It was time to image and imagine. She had thought a lot about this meeting, thinking all the things she might say, all the sad things she might see. Miri had constructed a special vision. It was based on things she had been working on in some form since the second grade, when she learned the personal significance of "variant-12 intractable osteoporosis."

First, she made the trees along her path taller and wider, nothing like palms. As she climbed the hill, their high leafiness was replaced by overarching boughs of long-needled evergreens. Of course, Miri didn't have any physical support for this. She didn't have game stripes in her shirt; she didn't have micro-cooling. The sun still beat on her, even if she made the sky overcast and the trees bend low. Maybe she should think of the heat as some sort of spell. She had thought of doing that before, but there were always other improvements that seemed more important. After all the months of daydreaming, this vision was not beholden to any commercial art. It borrowed from a hundred fantasies, but the effect was Miri's very own, for her concept of Lena. She had not put any of it public. Most visions were much more fun when they were shared, but not this one.

Finally, she lurched to a stop and got off the bike. The last couple hundred feet had to be on foot. There were a few other people around, but in her vision they were unremarkable peasants. She saw the sidewalks and wheelchair ramps as forest paths and mossy, timeworn steps. She stumbled more than once on the inconsistencies, but that seemed only fair for a humble petitioner such as herself.