Portions of Furtoid remained quarantined for months. Four hundred forty-seven people died in those sections of the colony.
Including Lora.
Vigal went into a deep depression when he heard the news. The future had seemed so bright and his own ambitions so limitless. He was just starting to notice the void in his heart that men often discover in their thirties, a void that neither career nor accomplishment can fill. Lora had filled that void for Vigal. Now that she was gone, life seemed bleak and purposeless.
But when Vigal arrived at distant Furtoid to claim her body, he had a surprise waiting for him. Lora had left behind a child, ex utero, at the colony's hiving and birthing facility. The child had been there in the gestation chambers since soon after conception. Rumors abounded that Lora had taken a lover, but the hive had been unable to locate a father.
Suddenly, Vigal found himself standing on Lora's track, looking straight ahead at that long stretch of open country after the scheduled stop at career and before the end of the line. The distance seemed unimaginably vast. To Vigal, it did not seem to be part of the natural order of things for a man to travel such a long distance alone.
When the boy emerged from gestation, the neural programmer had himself appointed legal guardian. Then he transferred the child to a hive facility back on Earth, in Omaha.
He named the child Natch.
9
Many years later, Natch would say that his greatest skill was his knack for acquiring enemies. He was only half joking.
Natch made his first enemies before the age of five. He had not learned to speak until he was almost three- an eternity in an age of bio/logics-and this set him apart from the other children. The hive's larger boys took notice of his solitude and quiet demeanor, his propensity for sitting alone in corners. They decided to examine this odd child the only way they knew how: with their fists.
One morning, Natch emerged from his room and found five of his hivemates waiting. They were older boys, uglier than he, and sullen since birth. Natch instinctively knew what was about to happen and felt a split-second of astonishment. What did I do wrong? he thought. Then the boys jumped him. The next few minutes were a tumult of kicks, punches and scratches that left Natch reeling on the floor in pain.
He limped back into his room, having learned a valuable lesson: Always be on your guard, because the universe needs no reasons to inflict punishment.
Perhaps the boys were merely looking for a cringe or a whimper of fear, something that would validate their nascent theories of power and weakness. But Natch refused to give them this satisfaction. The next morning, he emerged from his room as always and marched without hesitation towards the waiting band of thugs. They gave him plenty of opportunity to flee, but the stubborn child refused to veer off his determined path. Instead, he waited silently while the bullies had their way with him. The beatings continued the next day, and the next, and the next.
The proctors were not blind. Natch's floor in the hive could barely contain four dozen children; no space remained for privacy. But bio/logic technology did not work in Natch's favor. The OCHREs floating in his bloodstream had been battle-tested for generations in much more rigorous environments than a suburban hive; they could heal minor cuts and bruises within minutes. The bullies could inflict little real damage on him until they were old enough to pull black code off the Data Sea.
The proctors decided to let the conflict play itself out.
But how can we just sit there and watch the boy suffer like that? argued one of the proctors in a staff meeting. We can't just let this go on forever.
Her superior was unsympathetic. We're not here to coddle these children. There are sixty billion people out there waiting to chew them up and spit them out. The headmaster nodded towards the flexible glass window, as if this thin membrane could ward off the world's suffering. Outside, tree branches scraped greedily against the window like claws. These children need to be tough in order to thrive.
So we're trying to create a generation of martyrs. Is that it?
Long pause. Have faith in the boy, Petaar. He's not getting hurt, is he? We won't let this go on forever, but let's give him a few more days to figure things out for himself before we intervene.
Nobody ever explained this decision to Natch, however, and to him the proctors' inaction felt like indifference. This was a greater blow than any the young bullies could deliver. Didn't the proctors drill into the children's heads every day that the world was run by logical, impartial laws? Everything happened for a reason, they said. Every effect was traceable to a root cause. But this daily punishment had no rational basis that Natch could see, and though the proctors could see him suffering, they remained mum. The boy pondered his dilemma for days on end, and spent his nights wrestling with cognitive dissonance.
One night, Natch awoke before dawn with his mind on fire.
The world around him dimmed and blanked out until all he could see were his hands in front of his face. And then the room exploded with colors. A frenzy of lights burned far away up over his head, while strange hollow voices began speaking to him of things he didn't understand. Random phrases in imaginary languages. The names of dead kings. Algorithms and encrypted messages. Natch lay quietly in the dark, consumed by fear, and let the vision wash over him.
When dawn arrived, he knew what he had to do.
Natch missed roll call that morning. The proctor Petaar scrambled to his room, fearing the worst. She found the boy on the floor, trapped beneath a heavy bureau and struggling to breathe.
The hive descended into pandemonium. After tending to Natch, the proctors quickly rounded up the thugs who had been tormenting him. They grilled the boys behind locked doors for two hours and extracted a number of tearful confessions. But the bullies were unanimous in insisting they had nothing to do with burying Natch under the bureau. And the toys missing from Natch's room? thundered Petaar. Did they run off by themselves? The boys had no explanation. The proctors weighed the evidence against the five bullies for much of the afternoon, and then summarily expelled them.
When he heard the news, Natch felt a cold thrill run up his spine. It was his first taste of victory, and he found it an intoxicating brew.
The boys had actually been innocent of their crime; the entire incident was a setup. Natch had contrived to trap himself beneath the bureau by propping it up with blocks and then slowly removing the supports. He had sketched out the details of his plan in the early morning hours with the zeal of a master draftsman, until no flaws were visible to the naked eye. He had long since forgotten the source of his inspiration.
But Natch's ploy succeeded in totally unexpected dimensions as well. The proctors who had ignored his plight now walked around with looks of guilt etched on their faces. Petaar went out of her way to accommodate Natch's every whim. Word of the episode even leaked out to his hivemates' parents and caused the institution no end of grief. Natch was astounded. He had vanquished his enemies and exposed his proctors' fallibility with a single blow.
The incident drove home another valuable lesson: With patience, cunning and foresight, anything is possible.
This was not the last hurdle Natch had to clear in the hive. Other children rushed to fill the void left by the departure of the bullies, and they were not so easily fooled. They tried to sabotage his homework, steal his belongings, and blame him for all their own mischief. Natch quickly realized he had made a tactical error hiding behind the proctors; by not dealing with his opponents directly, he had only reinforced the perception that he was weak.
He wondered if this would be a never-ending cycle. Was he doomed to spend the remainder of his life fighting battle after battle with a succession of enemies, each more capable than the last, until he finally met his
