Rainbows End

The Miri Gang Is Born

For as long as Miri could remember, she'd had this problem with grandparents. Alice's parents — and Alice's grandparents, too — had all been living in Chicago; not one of them had survived. On Bob's side of the family, Robert had been almost dead, but then he came back! Now Miri was afraid she was losing him all over again. And then there was Lena…

Lena Gu was only dead on the record. Lena had persuaded Bob to set up that lie with the Friends of Privacy. Lena even ordered him to keep the details from Miri. But Bob had told Miri what he was doing. That was smart, because Miri would have figured it all out anyway. This way, Miri was imprisoned by her promises to Bob. She hadn't breathed a whisper of the truth to Robert, even when they were still talking and he had been so desperate.

But now Miri was getting desperate. She hadn't seen Lena in five months. Almost, she had called Lena after the Ezra Pound Incident. But that would have only confirmed Lena's opinions of Robert. Bob just wanted to ignore Robert's problems; coward. Alice was no coward, but she was deep in training these days and it wasn't going well. Okay, I can handle this on my own , Miri had told herself. She conceived a clever rehabilitation plan, working with Zulfi Sharif. At first, that had been great. Sharif's wearable had been easy to subvert; she had direct access to Robert. But after Robert's trip to UCSD, she realized that someone else was using Sharif, too.

It was definitely time to visit Lena.

Miri waited till the weekend and took a car down to Pyramid Hill. The place was really busy on Saturdays. Bob said it reminded him of the arcades of his childhood. You had to travel physically to the park, but once you got there you could do touchy-feely with all the best games. It was run by Baja Casinos, but for kids not old enough to legally gamble. The important thing for Miri was that the park had pretty good security. Even if Robert got curious about where she was going, it was unlikely he could follow her through to Lena.

She unhooked her bicycle from the rack on the back of the car, and imaged it as a small jackass. Her own persona was classic anime: big eyes, spiky hair, and tiny mouth. That should turn off anyone who might otherwise try to play with her.

Miri walked her jackass along a path that circled the hill. She overruled the anime imagery to view what was most popular today. Ugh. It was mostly Scooch-a-mouti nonsense. Salsipueds and baba llagas were everywhere. A year ago, no one had heard of the Scoochis, and now they were bigger than some of the corporate names. They had even dented the mega release of the latest Cretaceous Returns . There were hundreds of different types of Scoochi characters. Some were slyly stolen intellectual property. The rest were from folklores at the edge of the world. The imagery was very, very cheap, without any creative center. Maybe that's why little kids were the biggest fans.

Near the top of the hill, a Lesser Scooch-a-mout roared into the sky. That sound was not watts from some synthesizer. The departing Scooch-a-mout was how her view imaged the park's high ride. The ride capsule blasted from deep in the hill, hit four gees before it coasted into the sky, giving its passengers almost a minute of zero-gee before touching down in the park annex. It was the most spectacular ride in Southern California. Nowadays Miri's friends sniffed at it: "Might as well be a UP/Ex package." But when Miri was little, she had spent more than one afternoon bouncing back and forth across the sky.

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.

And then she was in the inner grove. There were occasional side paths, evidence of cabins hidden deeper in the forest. Her trees were very old here, their huge branches high above her head. Miri walked the bike along the ancient path. The people of the inner grove were higher rank — not in the category of Lena, but still powers to be respected. Miri kept her eyes on the ground and hoped that none of them would talk to her.

She made the final turn, walked another fifty feet, to a wide, timbered cabin. When she looked up, she could see breaks in the tree cover, but they didn't reveal sky. Instead she was looking up into sun-touched green. The highest crown of the forest canopy stood right above this place. The witchery of witches. The source of elder wisdom. She leaned her bike against the timbers and reached up to hit the massive brass knocker. The sound boomed loud in her ears. She ignored the junky twentieth-century melody that actually played; that was the old doorbell that Lena had brought from Palo Alto.

A moment passed. Miri heard footsteps from within. Footsteps? The huge door creaked inwards, and Miri's envisioning was confronted with a significant challenge: a woman, not much older-looking than the teachers at school. What are you doing here ! Miri stared for a moment, speechless. She rarely hit surprises this big. After a moment she recovered herself and nodded respectfully. "Xiu Xiang?"

"Yes. You're Miri, aren't you? Lena's granddaughter?" She stepped aside and gestured Miri in.

"um, I didn't know you'd recognize me." Miri stepped indoors, imagining madly. Xiu Xiang looked too young to be a real witch. Okay, I'll make her be Lena's apprentice, a watchamagoogle — a newbie witch !

Newbie Xiang smiled. "Lena has shown me pictures of you. We even saw you at school once. Lena told me you would come around, um, sooner or later."

"So… she'll see me?"

"I'll ask her."

Miri gave a little bow. "Thank you, ma'am."

Newbie Xiang led Miri to an upholstered chair next to a book-laden desk. "I'll be right back."

Miri settled in the chair. Oops. It was hard plastic. As for the desk… well those were real books, the kind some people used for just-in-time reading. The pages were whatever you wanted, but they were real pages. Of course these were not the thick and hoary things of Miri's imaging, but they were piled deep. There was a view-page on top, very much out of place, and a confession of ineptitude. Miri quickly morphed it into a glowing grimoire. She edged forward in her chair and looked at the books. Mechanics and electrical engineering. These would be Newbie Xiang's; Miri had studied the background of all the students in Robert's classes. The box of toys under the desk must be things she had built in shop class. Miri recognized the warped transport tray from the news.

What an incredible coincidence that Xiu Xiang was rooming with Lena…

There were sounds behind her. The inner door was opening. It was Newbie Xiang, with the senior witch right behind her. Miri was ready with imagery for this. Lena's real chair had six small wheels on articulated axles, very practical and dull. But Mistress Gu's chair had tall wooden wheels, sheathed in silver, and canted outward. Little blue sparks chased each other around the rims as it moved. And Miri imaged Lena dressed in heavy black, a black that absorbed the room's light in the classical magical way. A black that obscured the details of what it clothed. Lena's pointy, brimmed hat was hung jauntily from the chair's high backpost. And that was where Miri's special effects ended. The rest she always kept the way that Lena really was. In fact, all her vision was to give her grandmother the proper frame, one that would reveal how wonderful she truly was.

The senior witch looked Miri up and down and then said, "Didn't Bob tell you to let me be?" But she didn't sound as angry as Miri had feared. "Yes. But I miss you so much."

"Oh." She leaned forward slightly. "How is your mom, Miri? Is she okay?"

"Alice is fine." Lena knew way too much about Alice, but she had no need-to-know. Besides, she couldn't help Alice. "I wanted to talk to you about some other things."

Mistress Gu sighed, and closed her deep-set eyes. When she opened them, she might have been smiling. "Well, I'm glad to see you, kiddo. It's just that I don't want to argue with you or Bob. And most of all, I don't want You-Know-Who to know that I'm still around."

"I'll only argue a little bit, Lena." As much as will make positive headway and still leave me welcome to come visit again . "You don't have to worry about You-Know-Who." Mistress Gu's own wording was straight out of fantasy tradition, though it was sad that Robert should be cast as ultimate evil. "I promise I won't reveal you to him." At least, not without your permission . "I took precautions coming here. Besides, You-Know-Who is no good at snooping."

Lena shook her head. "That's what you think."

Newbie Xiang sat down beside the wheelchair and watched them silently. Maybe she could help. "You see You-Know-Who every day, don't you, ma'am?" Miri said.

"Yes," said Xiang, "in shop class and Louise Chumlig's Search and Analysis."

"Ms. Chumlig's not so bad" — at least for the bonehead classes . Miri was fast enough to squelch the additional comment, but she felt herself blush even so.

Newbie Xiang didn't seem to notice. "In fact, she's quite good. I've been telling Lena." She glanced at the senior witch. "Louise knows things about asking questions that took me a lifetime to understand. And more than anyone, she's shown me the importance of analysis packages." She pointed at the old grimoire. Miri was a little taken aback. Yes, Ms. Chumlig was a nice person, but she was full of cliches, and she droned .

But even a junior witch is not someone you contradict, and Miri was very anxious to be congenial. She dipped her head, "Yes, ma'am. Anyway, you see a lot of You-Know-Who. Is he really such a terrible person?"

Xiu Xiang shook her head. "He is strange. He looks so young . Robert — I mean 'You-Know-Who' — can be very gracious, and then suddenly cut you dead. I've seen him do that to several children. The old people steer clear of him. I think Winston Blount hates him."

Yes. Miri had watched Winston Blount in the UCSD library last Saturday. Most of her attention had been absorbed in the battle for the persona of Zulfikar Sharif, but she had not missed Blount's hostility.

Newbie Xiang glanced at the frail lady in the wheelchair. "I'm afraid Lena is right about him. He uses people. He admired my shop project and then walked off with it."

Lena cackled. That was something an elderly person could do well. In Miri's opinion it was the only positive thing about old age. "Xiu, Xiu. You told me you were thrilled to see him chop that car."

Newbie Xiang looked embarrassed. "Well, yes. I got into science with model rockets and homemade RF controllers. I'd have been nothing without hands-on experience. Nowadays, our access to real things is muffled by layers of automated bureaucracy — and I guess my own SHE is partly to blame. So both Robert and I wanted to break something, and I cheered him for acting . But what I wanted was of no concern to him. I was just a convenient tool."

Lena laughed again. "You're so lucky. You learned in days what took me years." She raised a clawed hand to wipe at her hair. Modern medicine had not completely failed Lena Gu. Five years ago she'd had Parkinson's. Miri remembered the tremors. Modern medicine had reversed her Parkinson's, kept her mind sharp, stopped various ills large and small. But her abnormal osteoporosis was still beyond cure. As far back as the second grade, Miri had been able to understand the technical "why" of that. The moral "why" was something even Alice couldn't explain.

Miri looked into the wizened face of the senior witch. "I-I'm glad it took you years to see through You-Know-Who. Otherwise you two would never have had Bob and raised him to marry Alice… and I would never be."

Lena looked away. "Yes," she grumped. "Bobby was the only reason I stayed with your grandfather. We gave Bobby a good home. And he was halfway human with the boy, at least till it was clear he couldn't run Bob's adult life. By that time, Bob had escaped to the Marine Corps." Her gaze flickered back to Miri. "I congratulate myself on that. I made a terrible mistake marrying your grandfather, but it brought two lovely lives into existence — and it only cost me twenty years."

"Don't you ever miss him?"

Mistress Gu's eyes narrowed. "That's coming perilously close to arguing with me, young lady."

"Sorry." Miri came over to kneel on the floor beside Lena's wheelchair. She reached out to hold Lena's hand. The old woman smiled. She knew what was coming, but she didn't have completely effective defenses. "You had all those years apart from him. I remember you visiting, back when You-Know-Who was well and never visited." Even then, Lena had been a little old lady, a busy doctor who smiled the most when she was talking to Miri. "Were you happy then?"

"Of course! After all those years, I was free of the monster!"

"But when You-Know-Who began to lose his mind, then you helped him."

Lena rolled her eyes and looked at Newbie Xiang. "When I say the word, you kick this brat back on the street."

Xiang looked uncertain. "Um, okay."

"But that's not… just yet." Lena looked back at Miri. "We've been over this ground before, Miri. Bob came here to Rainbows End and begged me to help. Remember? He brought you along with him. Bob has never under-stood how things were between Robert and me. God bless him, he doesn't realize that all the affection he saw was just for him. But between his pleading and your cute little face, I agreed to help out with the monster's final years…. And you know, sometimes dementia softens a person up. There was a year or so, when Robert was nearly helpless, but he could still recognize people and remember our years together — there was a time when he was tractable. We actually got along for a while!"

Miri nodded.

"And then they figured how to cure Robert's brand of dementia. By then your grandfather had declined from tractability into a kind of veggie state. Miri, I would have stuck with him through the end if there hadn't been the miracle cure. But I could see what was coming. The monster would be back." Lena punched a crooked finger in her granddaughter's direction. "Burn me once, shame on him. Burn me twice, shame on me. So I stay out of the picture. Understand?"

But her other hand remained in Miri's; the girl gave it a squeeze. "But couldn't this be different? By the time they cured Grandfather, part of him had already died." That had been Jin Li's theory, not Miri's. "I know he's often angry now, but that's because he's lost a lot. Maybe the bad things you remember are gone too."

Lena waved her free hand in the direction of Newbie Xiang. "Did you hear what Xiu just said about his new nobleness of character?"

Miri thought fast: It never worked with Alice, but sometimes a quick change of subject could distract Bob. She glanced at Newbie Xiang. "Lena, you've been living here since Grandfather's been sick. You could have moved anywhere since you don't visit us anymore, but you're still just ten miles away."

Lena's chin came up. "I've lived in San Diego for years. I'm not going to give up seeing my friends, shopping the old stores, hiking — well I have given up the hiking. The point is that, even resurrected, You-Know-Who is not going to run my life!"

"But — " very thin ice here !" — did you know Dr. Xiang before?"

The senior witch's lips thinned. "No. And now you're going to point out, or let plaintive silence imply, that since there are twenty-five hundred oldfolks here at Rainbows End, this matchup couldn't be coincidence."

Miri was silent.

Finally Newbie Xiang spoke up. "It was my choice. I moved down here this summer, about the time I got my get-up-and-go back. I'm one of the older people living at Rainbows End, but I'm so bright and bubbly — " a strange sad smile " — they don't know what to do with me. So I volunteered to be a roommate. It's worked out well. Your grandma is ten years younger than I am, but that doesn't mean so much at our age." She gave Lena's shoulder a pat.

Miri remembered that Lena Llewelyn Gu had done years of psychiatric consulting here at Rainbows End. If anyone could arrange a matchup with Xiu Xiang, it was her. She opened her mouth to remark on this — and noticed the warning glare in Lena's eyes, as clear as any silent messaging could ever be.

After a moment, Lena shifted in her chair. "See, my girl? Pure coincidence. But I do admit it's been useful. Xiu keeps me advised of You-Know-Who's adventures in modern education." She gave a nasty witchy smile that needed no help from Miri's special effects.

"Yes," said Xiang. "We, we have our collective eyes on him."

"The monster is not going catch up with me this time around." Miri rocked back. "You're running a joint entity!" She hadn't dreamed the two witches could be so truly, modernly magical. "A what?" said Newbie Xiang.

"A joint entity. Partners with complementary strengths and weaknesses. In public you are one, represented by the mobile partner. But what you can do and understand is the best of each of you." Xiang stared at her without comprehension.

Oh . Miri pinged both women. Except for Lena's medicals, they were fully offline. Miri had been too distracted by her own imagining. "You aren't wearing, are you?"

Xiu gestured at her desk. "I have my view-page and these books. I'm trying to learn so many serious things, Miri. I don't have time to bother with wearing."

Miri almost forgot her mission. "Dr. Xiang, you're so wrong about wearables. I mean, hasn't Ms. Chumlig talked about that? Some analysis packages don't have traction if you run them with static video."

Newbie Xiang gave a reluctant nod. "She showed me BLAST9. But that just seems to be molecular design dressed up in game toy nonsense."

"But you've only run them on your view-page!" The younger witch hunched down. "I have so much to learn, Miri. I'm working through the simpler things, what I can run on the view-page." Lena watched the other woman for a second and then she seemed to wilt back into her wheelchair. She looked down at her granddaughter. "Poor Miri. You don't understand. You live in a time that thinks it can ignore the human condition." She cocked her head. "You never read Secrets of the Ages , did you?"

"Of course I've read it!"

"I'm sorry, Miri, I'm sure you have. After all, it's my beloathed ex-husband's most famous achievement. And I'll give him this; those poems are a work of genius. Their 'implacable weight' is all his hurtfulness turned to support great truths. But you can't see that, can you, Miri? You are surrounded by medical promises and halfway cures. It distracts you from the bedrock of reality." She paused and her head bobbed. It was almost like her old palsy, but maybe this was simply indecision, wondering whether to say more. "Miri, the truth is, if we are careful and lucky we live to be old, and weak, and very very tired. There comes an end to striving."

"No! You'll get better, Lena. You've just had bad luck. It's just a matter of time."

There was a whisper of a witchly cackle, and Miri remembered that "It's just a matter of time" was the mantra of Robert's poem cycle.

For a moment, grandmother and granddaughter glared certainty at each other. Then Lena said, "And this is about where I figured our chat would come. I'm sorry, Miri."

Miri bowed her head. But I just want to help ! Strange. That had been the Orozco kid's whine. To Miri. Okay, maybe he wasn't a complete jerk. And maybe he could help. But there was something else he'd said, and right now it was much more important… Yes! Suddenly Miri saw how she could turn defeat into victory. She looked up into her grandmother's face and smiled innocently. "Did you know, Lena… that You-Know-Who is learning to wear?"

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