Then again, another rumor said he had his office decorated in chains and leathers, with his own private pillory in there and soundproof walls so you couldn't hear the screaming. And a third theory held he was really a closet case, and if you went into his office for a private session you'd sleep on your stomach for the rest of your life.

No, there was only one thing I knew for sure: I'd been called into the Colonel's office, and you didn't get called in unless you were in it deep.

Stopping outside the door, I did the shoulder squaring and teeth gritting bit, then opened it and limped in.

Chomsky, the Colonel's adjutant, sent me right on into the inner office. Another bad sign; it meant I was the most important problem on Von Schlager's job stack. Whatever'd hit the fan was both smelly and huge. I advanced into the holy of holies, cap in hand, trying to keep open a line of retreat ...

The Colonel sat at his desk, toying with the Lucite block that held the remains of my Starfire. He didn't seem to notice me, so I took a moment to survey the terrain.

The office was barer than I expected. A plain dark walnut bookcase in the corner, a green blotter and a plastic photocube on the dark wood desk, a few plaques and a red velvet thing holding a bunch of medals on the wall. I tried to lean closer and cop a look at the bra.s.s.

"Aren't we forgetting something?" Von Schlager rumbled without looking up. Hasty, I snapped to attention and saluted.

"Sir! Cadet Harris reporting as ordered, sir!"

"That's better. At ease." He set down the Lucite block, opened a drawer and pulled out a manila folder, then looked up at me with a sour expression on his face. "I've been going over your file," he said, at last.

"You were an Involuntary Admit. You flunked and repeated Grade One.

All your instructors say you've got a severe att.i.tude problem." His eyebrows went up as he read something in the folder, then he looked at me with an odd expression on his face. "It says here that you're a complete a.s.shole."176 He tapped the paper and read out loud, "'Cadet Harris is smartmouthed, insolent, and in short, a complete a.s.shole.'" He looked up at me, wonder in his eyes. "I've never seen that in someone's permanent record before." He closed the folder, dropped it on his desk, and looked up at me again. "Yet in the past month you've won a ComSurEx-in the process beating the S.I.'s favorite, I might add-and turned a midterm disaster into a solid B average. Can you explain this, Harris?"

"Sir, I-"

"That was a rhetorical question. You don't need to explain; I know your type." He looked at the photocube and got a kind of faraway look.

"Oh, do I know your type."

He snapped back to the Here & Now.

"Harris, you might be surprised to learn that I did not found this Academy just to inflict wanton pain on young men." To himself he added, "Lord knows, some of the staff would be surprised to learn that."

Gentle, he touched one face of the photocube, then turned it around so I could see. The picture was of a slimey-looking 40-ish guy in a white polyester suit, smiling and leaning against a big white Cadillac, his pinky rings glittering in the sun.

"This is my son, Gary," Von Schlager said. "I founded the Academy to make up for all the mistakes I made raising him." The Colonel picked up the photocube and looked at it again.

"You're a lot like him, Harris. Smart, probably too smart for your own good. You get bored, and that's what gets you started into trouble.

You don't think through to consequences, and that's what gets you in really deep.

"But dammit, you're smart enough to smarm your way out of it, and that's why you never learn!" He dropped the photocube, and looked at me.

"A lot of boys have come through here in the last fifteen years, Harris. Some of them have been very tough cases: boys the parents have given up on, boys who've gotten one too many slaps on the wrist from177 the JV courts. Boys who laugh at all authority. Some of them have been real yahoos." He looked sharp at me, flagged my blank expression, and stabbed a finger down on his intercom box. "Chomsky!" he barked out, "Remind me to add Gulliver's Travels to the required reading list!"

Back to me. "But, Harris, this academy has managed to turn most of these basket cases into pretty decent men. I'm proud to say that 90 percent of my boys are accepted for Officer Candidate School. Ninety percent!"

He calmed down. "I think this proves my point: I know how to deal with your type. The ComSurEx was a good start. What you need next is a problem so big you can't luck into a solution or beat it with panache alone. A challenge so big it'll either catalyze your sense of responsibility or stomp you into a little, wet, greasy smear."

He smiled at me, dangerous. Suddenly I flagged there were all kinds of secret things loaded in that smile, and I wasn't going to like any of them. "The lesson of ComSurEx," he said, soft, "is that you, and you alone, are ultimately responsible for your success or failure. For the last three weeks I've been trying to think of a way to make sure you've learned that lesson." Yeah, I could see now he'd been thinking about it, all right. Now that it was too late to run and hide. The Colonel rested his left hand on the intercom box, gave me one last evil smile, then thumbed down the intercom b.u.t.ton. "Chomsky, it's time. Send in Captain Nuttbruster."

Nuttbruster? Zutcakes! I never even heard a rumor about this guy, and that was maximum bad sign! From the name I could just picture him: some steroid-soaked s.a.d.i.s.t with a black belt in Abusive Education and a fondness for gelding straps!

"While we're waiting," the Colonel said offhand, and he tossed a copy of Leatherneck magazine at me. It was open to a full-page picture of two eyes peeking out from a bulbous wraparound head bucket.

"That's the Mark 32 helmet," he explained. "Full voice and data comm, built-in snapshot radar, laser rangefinder, and sonar motion detectors.

Audio enhancers that can learn to filter out friendly noise and recognize178 an unfriendly heartbeat at a hundred yards."

He reached across the desk and tapped the picture. "The faceplate is a gas and bioagent filter, and if you flip down the visor, you get IR vision and tactical map overlays." The colonel looked at the picture again, then sat back in his chair and snorted.

"In two years that helmet is going to be standard issue for infantry, Harris. For common infantry!" He screwed his face up into a nasty grimmace, and laughed, sort of. "You know how I feel about technology. War is a nasty, brutal business, and I seriously doubt the value of all of this c.r.a.p. But what you did during ComSurEx got me thinking.

"Harris, I will never go so far as to admit I was wrong, but maybe I haven't been 100 percent right. If it ever comes down to shooting, you boys are going to be fighting with M-4 hovertanks, Yamato Land Battleships, and M-830 Explosive Foxhole Diggers. Maybe I'm not doing you any favors by running a low-tech curriculum."

The inner door creaked open, and I jumped half out of my skin.

Nuttbruster already? Lord, take me now! But no, it was just some thin, spectacled old wheeze, so I detensioned a notch.

The wheeze tottered into the room, dragged his right arm up into a tired salute, and said, "Captain Nuttbruster reporting as ordered, sir." I wish I could have been outside of myself, watching the expression on my face. It must have been hilarious. Nuttbruster? Him?

The Colonel stood. "Cadet Harris, this is Captain Nuttbruster, the camp bursar. Nuttbruster? Harris."

Nuttbruster looked me over, speculative. "Is this...?"

"The cadet we've spoken of, yes."

The old wheeze continued looking me over a few more seconds, like I was a c.o.c.kroach on his lunch or something. Then he shrugged, and offered me a handshake. I took it, gentle; not 'cause I was feeling anything good about the old guy, but because I was afraid I might break his arm off.

After we'd shaken hands, Von Schlager pointed us into some chairs179 and we sat down. "Well, Colonel?" Nuttbruster said. His voice was like dry cornstalks rattling in the October wind.

"I've reached a decision," the colonel said, as he paced across the room. "The answer is, yes." Nuttbruster smiled, I think. Hard to tell; his mouth turned up at the corners, but it looked like a true smile would crack his face.

The Colonel turned to me. "For fifteen years, Charlie here -," he jerked a thumb at Nuttbruster, "-has been nagging me to buy a computer and enter, well, the twentieth century, anyway." Nuttbruster and the Colonel exchanged quick, secret smiles. "For fifteen years I've fought it. But thanks to you, Harris, he's finally worn me down."

Von Schlager walked back around behind his desk, flipped open my record folder, and pulled out a sheet of paper. Suddenly his voice was all cold hard authority. "Here's your summer project, Cadet Harris! Starting today, you report to Captain Nuttbruster! You will spend all of your available time designing, purchasing, and installing a computer network for the academy! The system will do tactical simulations, war gaming, and artillery plotting; it will enable our instructors to get their paperwork out on time-" (Aside, to Nuttbruster, "The accreditation board is b.i.t.c.hing about that again,") "-and if at all possible, it will emulate a M- 905 Field TactiComp!" The colonel turned, and shot Nuttbruster a wry little smile.

"Oh yes," he said in a fake-weary voice, "it's also got to do accounting." This time Nuttbruster smiled a real smile. I saw it. Honest.

Von Schlager handed my new orders to me. "The captain controls the purse strings, Harris. Your job is to provide the technical expertise.

You tell him what you need, and he'll tell you what you can afford. Any questions?"

I thought it over. Truth to tell, the whole thing was just starting to soak in. A computer net. I'd just been given the go-ahead to architect a computer net. By Woz, I wasn't just going to be a NetMaster, I was going to be a SystemG.o.d! Then it hit me full stream, and my face went flushed and hot. I could get any hardware I wanted-like a SatLink. I'd180 uplink to SatNet, downlink to NationNet, put through a long-distance patch to a certain CityNet... Mikey Harris was coming back on line! "No, sir," I said in a shaky voice.

"Good. Dismissed." Nuttbruster and I stood and saluted, and I hate to admit it, but I was so shaky with excitement the old wheeze beat me out the door. "Harris?" the colonel called out.

I stopped, and turned. "Yes, sir?"

He was looking down at my ankle brace. "When you get around to installation, remind me to detail a squad of summer boys to do the grunt work for you."

"Thank you, sir." I turned to leave again. Just as I got my hand on the doork.n.o.b, he remembered something else.

"Harris?"

"Yessir?"

He looked me in the face, full. I'd never caught before just how cold, blue, and serious his eyes were. "I want this thing up and running by fall quarter. Not 'in debugging' or 'looking promising' or '90 percent there,' or any of those other euphemisms you computer people use when you mean it's not done yet." His eyes suddenly went deadly, and it was like looking down the bore of a double-barrelled gun, one of those big Nitro Express things they used to use before AK-47s became the weapon of choice for elephant poachers. "Finish on time, Harris, and you'll be King of Grade Three. Screw up, and I will take a personal interest in making your life miserable. Understood?"

I understood. Oh boy, I understood.181

Chapter 17.

Sometimes I think my brain is a half-debugged inference engine.

The nIs' job was to dump in raw data by the ton, and my job was to sort through all the crud and pull out an inference. But I say the process is only half-debugged, because I kept pulling out the wrong inferences.

Not the ones my Instructors expected.

Or maybe they were the right ones. Maybe all of school is just a supersubtle Turing Test: You pull out the expected inference, you're a servicable average unit. But if you're genuinely intelligent (not just simulating the appearance of intelligence), you pull out the secret, hidden inference, and only you and the instructor know you got the true/true answer. And sometimes not even the instructor.

For example, History. The point of a history lesson was always supposed to be razor-sharp clear. If we didn't use the exact phrase Feinstein was looking for in discussion, he'd beat us over the head with The Moral Of The Story (just like back in the Peloponnesian War days) until we got it down cold and could repeat the words he wanted to hear like a bunch of obedient little robots.

But then, there'd be an other inference. Like this one: western civilization is descended from the Greeks. Not just ideas; not just political systems, or philosophy, or ethics. There is a real literal path you can trace that leads from Greece, to Rome, to the Holy Roman Empire, to Constantinople. Then, as the Moslem world expands, the refugess from Byzantium move north, and east, and around the Black Sea, and up the Dnepr valley. And the Greek Orthodox church evolves into Russian Orthodox. And the t.i.tle Caesar gets corrupted to Czar...

Meantime, your ancient, dusty, oh-so-remote Persia of Darius and182 Xerxes and Marathon begets the Sa.s.sanid Empire, which begets the Safavid, which begets the Pahlavi, who get swept away in the opening blasts of the First Jihad...

Until one day you sit up sudden, buzzing with the realization that when an airliner gets blown up over Scotland, it's just the latest round in the war between Greece and Persia. Three thousand years, and it's still going on. Flags, and kings, and faces of the dead have all changed a 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 partic.i.p.ant, 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 circ.u.mcision (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 everything183 feeding into one monolithic core processor. My net was radially symmetrical, like a starfish. (Left-handed inference, again! G.o.d, 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 G.o.d, 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 the184 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 b.i.t.c.h -and boy, did I have a lot to b.i.t.c.h about! Nuttbruster killed my SatLink plans, and fought every d.a.m.ned 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 s.p.a.ce 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 p.i.s.sing on the fire.

I still don't understand this one. I may never understand why Real Men always p.i.s.s 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 ent.i.tled 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 red185 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 b.i.t.c.h about how Nuttbruster argued over every d.a.m.n nickel and dime, or know how p.i.s.sed 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: n.o.body'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 a.n.a.log 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;186 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.