Rainbows End

Dr. Xiang's SHE

Shop class. It was by far Juan Orozco's favorite class. Shop was like a premium game; there were real gadgets to touch and connect. That was the sort of thing you paid money for up on Pyramid Hill. And Mr. Williams was no Louise Chumlig. He let you follow your own inclinations, but he never came around afterward and complained because you hadn't accomplished anything. It was almost impossible not to get an A in Ron Williams's classes; he was wonderfully old-fashioned.

Shop class was also Juan's best opportunity to make progess on Big Lizard's project, at least with the old farts and the do-not-call privacy freaks. He wandered around the big gadget tent looking like an utter idiot. Juan had never been any good at diplomacy games. And now he was schmoozing oldsters. Well, trying to.

Xiu Xiang was really a nice lady, but she just sat at the equipment bench and read from her view-page. She had the parts list formatted like some kind of hardcopy catalog. "Once I knew these things," she said. "See that." She pointed at a section in the museum pages: Xiang's Secure Hardware Environment . "I designed that system."

Juan came up with "You're world-class, Dr. Xiang."

"But… I don't understand even the principles of these new components. They look more like pond scum than self-respecting optical semiconductors." She read one of the product descriptions, stopped at the third line. "What's redundant entanglement?"

"Ah." He looked it up, saw pointers into jungles of background concepts. "You don't need to know about 'redundant entanglement,' ma'am. Not for this class." He waved at the product descriptions on Xiang's view-page. The image sat like carven stone, not responding to his gesture. "Go forward a few pages, you'll find the stuff we have available here in class. Look under" — jeez this was a pain, spelling out navigation in words — "look under 'fun functional compositions,' and go from there." He showed her how to use her view-page to ID local parts. "You don't need to understand everything."

"Oh." In a few moments she was playing with the possibilities, had downloaded half a dozen component gadgets. "This is like being a child. Doing, without understanding." But then she started putting Buildlt parts together, doing pretty well after Juan showed her how to find the interface specs. She laughed at some of the descriptions. "Sorters and shifters. Solid-state robots. I bet I could make a cutter out of this."

"I don't see it." Cutter? "Don't worry, you can't hurt anything." That wasn't quite true, but close enough. He sat and watched, made a few suggestions, even though he wasn't really sure what she was up to. Enough of establishing rapport; he marked that box in his diplomacy checklist and moved on to the next stage. "So, Dr. Xiang, do you keep in touch with your friends at Intel?"

"That was a long time ago. I retired in 2010. And during the war, I couldn't even get consulting jobs. I could just feel my skills rusting out."

"Alzheimer's?" He knew she was much older than she looked, even older than Winston Blount.

Xiang hesitated, and for a moment Juan was afraid he had made the lady really angry. But then she gave a sad little laugh. "No Alzheimer's, no dementia. You — people nowadays don't know what it was like to be old."

"I do so! All my grandparents are still alive. And I have a great-grandpa in Puebla. He plays a lot of golf. Great-Grandma, she does have dementia — you know, a kind they still can't fix." In fact, Great-Grandma had looked as young as Dr. Xiang. Everyone thought she had really lucked out. But in the end that only meant she lived long enough to run into something they couldn't cure.

Dr. Xiang just shook her head. "Even in my day, not everyone went senile, not the way you mean. I just got behind in my skills. My girlfriend died. After a while I just didn't care too much. I didn't have the energy to care." She looked at the gadget she was building. "Now, I have at least the energy I had when I was sixty. Maybe I even have the same native intelligence." She slapped the table. "And all I'm good for is playing with jacked-up Lego blocks!"

It almost looked like she was going to start crying, right in the middle of shop class. Juan scanned around; no one seemed to be watching. He reached out to touch Xiang's hand. He didn't have the answer. Ms. Chumlig would say he didn't have the right question.

There were still a few others to check out: Winston Blount, for instance. Not a jackpot case, but he ought to be worth something to the Lizard. In shop class, Blount just sat in the shade of the tent, staring off into space. The guy was wearing, but he didn't respond to messages. Juan waited until Williams went off for one of his coffee breaks. Then he sidled over and sat beside Blount. Jeez, the guy really looked old. Juan couldn't tell exactly where he was surfing, but it had nothing to do with shop class. Juan had noticed that when Blount wasn't interested in a class, he just blew it off. After a few minutes' silence, Juan realized that he wasn't interested in socializing either.

So talk to him! It's just another kind of monster whacking . Juan mor-phed a buffoon image onto the guy, and suddenly it wasn't so hard to cold-start the encounter. "So, Dean Blount, what do you think of shop class?"

Ancient eyes turned to look at him. "I couldn't care less, Mr. Orozco."

O-kay ! Hmm. There was lots about Winston Blount that was public record, even some legacy newsgroup correspondence. That was always good for getting a grown-up's, um, attention.

Fortunately, Blount continued talking on his own. "I'm not like some of the people here. I've never been senile. By rights, I shouldn't be here."

"By rights?" Maybe he could score points just by imitating an old-time shrink program.

"Yes. I was Dean of Arts and Letters through 2012. I was on track to be UCSD Chancellor. Instead I was pushed into academic retirement."

Juan knew all that. "But you… you never learned to wear."

Blount's eyes narrowed. "I made it a point never to wear. I thought wearing was a demeaning fad." He shrugged. "I was wrong. I paid a heavy price for that. But things have changed." His eyes glittered with deliberate iridescence. "I've taken four semesters of this 'Adult Education.' Now my resume is out there in the ether."

"You must know a lot of important people."

"Indeed. Success is just a matter of time."

"Y-You know, Dean, I may be able to help. No wait — I don't mean by myself. I have an affiliance you might be interested in."

"Oh?"

He seemed to know what affiliance was. Juan explained Big Lizard's deal. "So there could be some real money in this." He showed him the payoff certificates, and wondered how much his recruit would see there.

Blount squinted his eyes, no doubt trying to parse the certificates into a form that Bank of America could validate. After a moment he nodded, without granting Juan numerical enlightenment. "But money isn't everything, especially in my situation."

"Well, um, I bet whoever's behind these certs would have a lot of angles. Maybe you could get a conversion to help-in-kind. I mean, to something you need."

"True." They talked a few minutes, till the place got busy. Some of the shop projects were finally showing results. At least two teams had made mobile nodes, swarm devices. Tiny paper wings fluttered all around. The other swarmer crawled in the grass and up the legs of the furniture and chairs. It stayed out of clothes, but it was awfully close to being intrusive. Juan zapped a few of them, but the others kept coming.

Orozco — > Blount: Can you read me?

"Of course I can," replied the old man.

So despite Blount's claims of withittude, he couldn't manage silent messaging, not even the finger tapping most grown-ups used.

The class period was almost over anyway. Juan looked up at the billowing tent fabric. He was a little discouraged. He had covered almost everyone on the list, and Winston Blount was the best he'd found: someone who couldn't even sming. "Okay. Well, keep my offer in mind, Dean Blount. And remember, there are only a limited number of people I'm allowed to take in." Blount rewarded this sales jabber with a thin smile. "Meantime, I-I have other possibilities." Juan nodded in the direction of the weird new guy, Robert Gu.

Winston Blount didn't follow Juan's gaze, but you could tell he was sneaking a peek sideways. For a moment the skin on his face seemed to tighten. Then the smile returned. "May God have mercy on your soul, Mr. Orozco."

Juan didn't get his chance at Robert Gu till Friday, right after Ms. Chumlig's other class. Creative Composition was almost always the low point of Juan's school week. Chumlig was flexible as to media, but students had to stand up and perform their own work. That was bad enough when you had to watch some other kid mess up, but unbearable when you were the performer. Order of appearance was decided at Ms. Chumlig's whim. Normally worrying about that would have occupied most of Juan's attention. Today, he had other concerns that mercifully blotted out the usual panic.

Juan skulked to the back of the class and slumped down, covertly watching the others. Winston Blount was here, which was a surprise. He blew off this class almost as often as he did shop. But he took me up on my offer . The Lizard's account showed that the old man had taken his first step toward signing on.

On the far side of the room, Robert Gu was surfing with his view-page. Even that looked like a struggle for the guy. But it turned out that Gu was part of a particular Marine Corps family — and when Juan had reviewed all of the affiliation instructions he had found that that was a big plus. If he could just interest Robert Gu in affiliation, he'd hit the top bonus level.

Chumlig's voice cut across his thought. "No volunteers for first up? Well — " she looked off into the air, and then turned to Juan.

¡Caray!

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