Authors: Bruce Bethke
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