Vernor Vinge - Rainbows End

"We have been noticed," someone said.

"Of course. We're all over. There are s'nice and got-a-runs coming from the Lit Building."

"There's fweks and liba-loos flying from our basement at the library!"

And every appearance sent a tiny fraction of a penny winging back up the Scoochi tree of creation. For once, Tim didn't mind the rip-off. The Scooch-a-mout affiliance was as broad as any. Even hardware illegals at the edge of the world would benefit from the royalties.

Hanson — > Night Crew; Keep our gear out of sight, long as you can. The real view from local cams would show that some of the Scoochi images wrapped real critters. So for the moment, Sheila wanted all the privacy she could get on that. What the Hacekeans learned would have to come from public viewpoints and their own naked eyes. Huynh let Rick Smale and the others handle that. He concentrated on running the critters: all the lab bots with enough range and flexibility to walk to the library. These gadgets did routine cleaning and module swapouts. They weren't designed for running around in the wild out-of-doors.

But GenGen had cleared them to go, and Timothy Huynh was having a ball. First, he laid down a consensus for the robots' appearance. There were queeps and chirps, spitting and shooting in all directions. In reality, these were his four hundred mobile manipulators — known as "tweezer bots" in the business. They were barely fast enough to keep up with the humans. But he also had mapped megamunches and xoroshows and salsipueds — these onto his cleaner bots and sample carriers. Behind them lurked the two largest mechs in Huynh's lab, combination forklifts and heavy-equipment installers; for now, they were tricked out as gray-masted blue ionipods. He had supplied the physical specs two weeks ago, when the prospect of this adventure had first floated around the labs. The resulting visual designs were spectacular, and meshed with the reality of the underlying robots and the touchy-feely gear that Huynh had attached to the bots' hulls. If you patted the xoroshow on its haunches, you'd feel muscle sliding lithely under silky fur, just what your eyes were telling you. As long as they were confronted by only a few pairs of human hands, the haptics were fast enough to maintain the illusion. They were better than anything he'd ever touched on Pyramid Hill. Of course, the remote audience would benefit very little from that, but it would boost the morale of the Scoochis here in person, and undermine their opposite numbers among the Hacekeans.

And that enemy was already forming up. Five Knights Guardian stood on the library's east terrace, and a Librarian lurked by the Snake Path.

"That's all they have?"

"So far," said Sheila the shima-ping. "I'm just hoping we aren't too fragmented."

"Yeah." That was the virtue and the weakness of the Scoochi worldview. Scooch-a-mout was distributed in bits and pieces. It was customized to the wishes of children, not just in the Great Powers, but also in the failed states at the edge of the world. The Scoochis had so many different creations. The Hacekeans had the notion of knowledge conquering outward, a vision that claimed consistency over everything. And just now that fit their near-total control of the library.

The shima-ping bounced up and down on its three feet. Sheila was shouting at the enemy with what must have been an external speaker, since Huynh could feel the loudness all over. "Get out of our way!"

"We want our floor space!"

"We want our Library!"

"And most of all, we want our REAL books!" That last demand made for a good chant, even if it didn't quite fit with Scoochi's edge-of-the-world background.

Sheila's gang raced forward with the battle cries. But now dozens of Hacekeans joined the five Knights Guardian. Surely most were virtual, but the blending was perfection. No surprise; both sides knew this was coming. This was a collision of belief circles. The point was to convince the wider world by belief and images that Scooch-a-mout's was the greater vision.

Both sides thought they knew what was coming. In fact, Tim's had something special planned:

The Hacekeans roared their threats at the Scoochi army, at the chirps and queeps, and the larger, vaguely seen things that lumbered along behind them. They thought it was all clever imagery and human players. Then the first of the gray-masted blue ionipods crunched onto asphalt, and the Hacek people realized that the sound it made was real . At the same time one of the salsipueds — a sample carrier — raced out and bit a Knight on the ankle. It was just a small electric shock really, but the Hacekeans recoiled, wailing, "Cheaters! Cheaters!"

And it was cheating, really, but Huynh saw from the network stats that support for his side had doubled. Besides, we're doing it for a good cause . Timothy Huynh never used the physical library that much, but what had happened there rankled.

The terrace was clear for the moment, but Sheila hesitated.

Hanson — > Night Crew: I don't like the straight run in. I think they have something planned.

"Yes! See!" Smale shouted aloud, and pointed them to views from above the library's entrance. Those cams showed spiderlike somethings guarding the final approach to the library doors. The creatures were so thick they almost hid the stone mosaic. Then the views went offline.

"Jeez, were those critters real?"

"… I think some of them were," said Sheila.

"Can't be. Even Electrical Engineering doesn't have that many robots. In this contest, we are the ones with mechanical superiority!"

But what if the enemy had bought a mob of hobby bots? If even half of those mechs were real —

Sheila paused, listening to advice that might be coming from anywhere on earth. Then she roared, "Into the trees!"

They gave a ragged shout. What came out of the synthetics was an answering roar, loud and baroque and totally Scoochi. They pounded off into the bushes southeast of the library. Virtual imagery faded into an artful blur that disguised the patchy network coverage.

The smaller mechs, the cleaners and sample carriers and tweezer bots, had little trouble with the mulchy ground cover. It was the forklifts that were the problem. They sank into the softness. Huynh ran around them, giving a push here and moving a stone there. The monsters slowly shuffled forward. It was not so different from some of the work he had to do down in the lab. But now was the time for some out-of-band complaining:

Huynh — > Hanson: This doesn't help, Sheila. The spider bots will just follow us here.

Hanson — > Huynh: Bear with me. This detour will work. Watch what I

A little yip of surprise came from Sheila's lips, and her sentence hung uncompleted. The virtual Scoochis blundered on for a pace or two, depending on their various latencies, but the GenGen night crew stumbled to an abrupt stop. Everybody milled around for a moment, images coalescing as they threaded routes out of the thicket.

But that was not the reason for the sudden stop. They were all staring at — a man and a rabbit. The first real, the second virtual. The two weren't exactly hiding; they were standing in a clearing. But there was brush all around, and until the Scoochis came stumbling in, there had been no camera viewpoint on this spot.

The rabbit was nothing special, a toonish chimera. It had a nicely impudent leer, you had to give it that.

Sheila the shima-ping hesitated a second, then took a couple of threatening steps toward the rabbit. "You're out of place."

The critter took a chomp out of its carrot and waggled an ear. "What's it to ya, Doc?"

"I'm not a doctor — yet," said the shima-ping.

The rabbit laughed. "In your dreams, then. I'm here to remind you that it's not just you and Hacek in collision tonight. There are other, greater powers at work." It wailed the last words and swept a carrot-clutching white-furred paw at the sky.