David Brin - Earth

Claire narrowed her eyes and briefly saw the same flat parish roiling under hectare after kilohectare of foamy brown water, a mighty river hauling a continent’s silt down this shortcut to the sea — along with every farm and house and living soul in its path.

But Daisy won’t move. Hell, nobody listens to me, and I’m tired of being called “Cassandra” by all my friends.

In a matter of months she’d be gone from here anyway. Maybe people would pay better attention after she won a reputation elsewhere. After making a name for herself…

“Here, hand me the end.”

She gave a start as Tony tapped her shoulder from the concrete bank. Straining, she dragged the line nearer. It took both of them, hauling together, to pull it taut and tie it off.

“Thanks, Claire,” Tony said. “Here, let me help you out.”

To her astonishment, he didn’t wait for her to slosh over to the ladder. Tony grabbed her shoulder straps and hauled her onto the apron by strength alone. Dripping, she sat there while he hosed off her waders, grinning.

Showoff , she thought. Still, she couldn’t help being impressed. At seventeen Tony was in full growth, changing every day and proud of it. She remembered when he had first surged past her in height, only a short time ago, and she had felt a passing, irrational wave of envy toward her childhood friend. Even in a world leveled for women by technology, there were times when sheer size and power still had their advantages.

Testosterone has its drawbacks, too , Claire reminded herself as she hung the rubber overalls to dry. Her remote-school in Oregon included a curriculum about the many reasons why women could count their blessings that they weren’t male, after all. Still, lately she’d been surprised to catch Tony gazing at her with looks of bashful admiration. Surprising, that is, till she realized.

Oh. It’s sex.

Or something nicer, actually, but closely related. Anyway, whatever it was, Claire wasn’t ready to deal with it right now. Since puberty she had avoided girls her own age, because of their precocious, single-minded, one-topic focus. At fourteen and fifteen, boys seemed more interested in doing things — in projects on the World Net or neat stuff in the real world. Now though, inevitably, her male friends were catching up and starting to go goofy too.

“I’ve got to stay for the harvester truck,” Tony told her, looking down. “Want to wait with me? We could head over to White Castle, after. Maybe join Judy and Paul…”

Judy and Paul were a long-standing couple. To hang out with them in public would make a statement, turning Claire and Tony into “Tony-and-Claire.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to become half of such a four-legged creature, quite yet. Far safer the amorphous throngs of teenagers who gathered at the dry-skating rink, or the Holo-Sim Club…

“I’m sorry, Tony. I really have to go. Daisy—”

“Yeah, I know.” He cut her off quickly, making a show of nonchalance. “You gotta deal with Daisy, poor kid. Well, good luck. Let me know if you can get away later.”

She clambered down slippery steps to the duckboard walkway. “Yeah, I’ll buzz. Or maybe tomorrow we’ll go out with the team after your lacrosse game.”

“Yeah.” He brightened, shouting after her. “Just watch. We’ll turn those guys into holey swiss cheese, full of rads and rems!”

Claire waved one last time and then turned to hurry home under the shadow of towering canebrakes, across tiny bridges where retirees idled with fishing poles, smiling at her with lazy familiarity, and finally past the long-abandoned refinery, now stripped of everything but crumbling, worthless concrete.-

Why does being a teenager make you so impatient ? she pondered as she neared Six Oaks, her mother’s tiny autarchy on the bayou. Claire knew she couldn’t put Tony off much longer without hurting him. The profiler at school says I’m just a gradual type. No cause for worry if I’m slower than other kids, or more cautious .

But what if the tests missed something? What if there’s something wrong with me?

Abstractly, Claire knew these were typical thoughts for her age. Every adolescent wonders if he or she’s the vanguard of the latest wave of mutants, made unhuman by some rare, fundamental flaw. Each quirk or idiosyncrasy gets magnified out of all proportion. A zit is the first stage of leprosy. A rebuff means banishment to the Sahara.

Knowing all that helped a little… though only a little.

I just hope that when I’m finally ready, Tony or someone like him will be ready for me .

She turned away from the refinery towers — slowly decomposing into gravelly sediment — without even seeing them, and took one last turn between an aisle of willows to hurry the rest of the way home.

Many houses in the area had columns and porticos more reminiscent of old movies than real history, but the effect was particularly anachronistic at Six Oaks. At first squint you might think you were looking at a miniature version of Tara, but satellite dishes and a forest of bristling antennas quickly dispelled any sense of antebellum charm. And while other families maintained rooftop photocells and supplementary water heaters, few kept enough to dispense entirely with the parish power grid.

After all, though, this was Daisy McClennon’s “island,” where self-sufficiency meant more than a trendy fad or even good citizenship, but had over the years become a militant faith. And Claire was fast turning into an apostate.

Unlike the neighbors, chez McClennon had no account with any of the local food-testing services. Why bother, when you grew amaranth and pejibaye palm fruit and marama beans and lentils in your own little horticultural paradise… a glassed-in wonder of nutritional productivity that Claire’s mother had designed herself? It had been purchased with inherited money, but of late Daisy seemed to expect Claire to maintain it single-handedly.

Not much longer though, Daisy. Six months more and I’m gone.

Probably, her mother would barely notice when she left. Daisy’d just hire on some oath-pledged refugee, or one of those Han or Nihonese college kids who kept passing through these days, taking a year off working their way around the world from zep passage to zep passage in the latest Asian fad. If so, Daisy was due for a surprise. No modern, self-indulgent Nihonese kid- would work as hard as Daisy expected for just room and board and electric.

“Aw, hell,” Claire sighed on catching sight of the wind generator. Speaking of electric, those limp vanes meant current would be rationed again. And guess who had top priority around here?

Claire made her rounds with rapid efficiency, starting at the methane pit, where she checked fluid levels in the crap digester. It was supposed to be “zero maintenance,” but that guarantee was by now a bitter joke. I’ll bet my rich cousins never have to do chores , she thought with halfhearted crankiness. Alas, even Logan agreed with her mother on one thing: that “hard work builds character.” So even if she had been able to live with her father, it wouldn’t have been that much easier. And to be honest, she had met her relatives in the McClennon clan. Horrible, stuck-up creatures, living off wealth neither they nor their parents ever had a hand in creating. None of them would be hurt by a little honest labor, for sure.

Still, there’s got to be a middle ground . Claire grunted as she fought to clear a drip-irrigator in the main greenhouse, blowing down one nozzle till spots swam before her eyes. Maybe I just wish Daisy’d do her share around here .

At least the bee zapper was working. For years their hives had been under seige by Africanized swarms, seeking to take over as they had everywhere else in the area, ruining all the once-profitable apiaries in the parish. Chemicals and spray parasites did no good. But a few weeks ago Claire had found a net reference by a fellow in Egypt, who’d discovered that the African strain beat their wings faster than the tame European variety. Burrowing into archaic TwenCen military technology, he had adapted sensor-scanner designs from an old, defunct project called “Star Wars.” Now Claire and a few thousand others were testing his design and reporting weekly results to a network solutions SIG.