“What now?” she asked hopelessly.
Out of the vog, several anoles and their riders emerged. But they no longer exhibited any direction or purpose or malice. One ape clawed at his slave cap and succeeded in ridding himself of it.
Jizogirl suddenly stiffened. “Oh, no! I just thought—We need to get inland, quickly! Up on the lizard!”
The tractable anole allowed Storm to climb onboard, with an assist from Jizogirl. His broken bones throbbed. She got up behind him, grabbed him around the waist.
“How do we make this buggered thing go?”
Storm pulled his sword out and jabbed it into the anole’s shoulder. The lizard shot off, heading more or less into the interior.
“Can you tell me why this ride is necessary?”
“Tsunami! You prairie dwellers are so dumb!”
“But how?”
“The self-destruct information waves from the antisense bomb propagated faster than the physical collapse itself. When the instructions hit the furthest distal reaches of Mauna Loa out to sea, they rebounded back and met the oncoming physical collapse in mid-ocean. Result: tsunami!”
Up and up the anole skittered, leaving the Kau Desert behind and climbing the slopes of Mauna Loa. It stopped at last, exhausted, and no amount of jabbing could make it resume its flight.
Storm and Jizogirl dismounted and turned back toward the sea, the doe supporting the buck.
With the sea’s recession, the raw steaming seabed lay exposed for several hundred meters out from shore. They saw the
Then the crest of the giant wave materialized on the horizon, all spume and glory and destructive power.
“Are we far enough inland, high enough up?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.”
The tsunami sounded like a billion lions roaring all at once.
Storm turned his face to Jizogirl’s and said, “That kiss you gave me the other night— It was very nice. Can I have another?”
Jizogirl smiled and said, “If it’s not our last, then count on lots more.”
FARMEARTH
I couldn’t wait until I turned thirteen, so I could play FarmEarth. I kept pestering all three of my parents every day to let me download the FarmEarth app into my memtax. What a little makulit I must have been! I see it now, from the grownup vantage of sixteen, and after all the trouble I eventually caused. Every minute with whines like “What difference does six months make?” And “But didn’t I get high marks in all my omics classes?” And what I thought was the irrefutable clincher, “But Benno got to play when he was only eleven!”
“Look now, please, Crispian,” my egg-Mom Darla would calmly answer, “six months makes a big difference when you’re just twelve-point-five. That’s four percent of your life up to this date. You can mature a lot in six months.”
Darla worked as an osteo-engineer, hyper-tweaking fab files for living prosthetics, as if you couldn’t tell.
“But Crispian,” my mito-Mom Kianna would imperturbably answer, “you also came close to failing integral social plectics, and you know that’s nearly as important for playing FarmEarth as your omics.”
Kianna worked as a hostess for the local NASDAQ Casino. She had hustled more drinks than the next two hostesses combined, and been number one in tips for the past three years.
“But Crispian,” my lone dad Marcelo Tanjuatco would irrefutably reply (I had taken “Tanjuatco,” his last name, as mine, which is why I mention it here), “Benno has a different mito-Mom than you. And you know how special and respected Zoysia is, and how long and hard even she had to petition to get Benno early acceptance.”
Dad didn’t work, at least not for anyone but the polybond. He stayed home, cooking meals, optimizing the house dynamics, and of course playing FarmEarth, just like every other person over thirteen who wasn’t a maximal grebnard.
The way Dad—and everyone else—pronounced Zoysia’s name—all smug, reverential and dreamy—just denatured my proteome, and I had to protest.
“But Benno and I still share your genes and Darla’s! That’s ninety percent right there! Zoysia’s only ten percent.”
“And you share ninety-five percent of your genes with any random chimp,” said Darla. “And they can’t play FarmEarth either. At least not maybe until that new generation of kymes come online.”
I knew when I was beaten, so I mumbled and grumbled and retreated to the room I shared with Benno.
Of course, at an hour before suppertime he just had to be there, and playing FarmEarth.
My big brother Benno was a default-amp kid. His resting brain state had been permanently overclocked in the womb, so even when he wasn’t consciously “thinking” he was processing information faster than you or me. And when he really focused on something, you could smell the neurons burning.
But no good fairy ever gave a gift without a catch. Benno’s outward affect was, well, “interiorized.” He always seemed to be listening to some silent voice, even when he was having a conversation with someone. And I’m not talking about the way all of us sometimes pay more attention to our auricular implants and the scenes displayed on our memtax than we do to the person facing us.
Needless to say, puffy-faced Benno didn’t have much of social life, even at age sixteen. Not that he seemed to care.
Lying on his back on the lower bunk of our sleeping pod, Benno stared at some unknown landscape in his memtax, working his haptic finger bling faster than the Mandarin’s grandson trying to take down Tony Stark’s clone in
I tried to tap into his FarmEarth feed with my own memtax, even though I knew the dataflow was encrypted. But all that happened was that I got bounced to Benno’s public CitizenSpace.
I sat down on the edge of the mattress beside him, and poked him in the ribs. He didn’t even flinch.
“Hey, B-man, whatcha doing?”
Benno’s voice was a monotone even when he was excited about something, and dealing with his noodgy little brother was low on his list of thrills.
“I’m grooming the desert-treeline ecotone in Mali. Now go away.”
“Wow! That is so stellar! Are you planting new trees?”
“No, I’m upgrading rhizome production on the existing ones.”
“What kind of effectuators are you using?”
“ST5000 Micromites. Now. Go. Away!”
I shoved Benno hard. “Jerk! Why don’t you ever share with me! I just wanna play too!”
I jumped up and stalked off before he could retaliate, but he didn’t even bother to respond.
So there you have typical day in the latter half of my thirteenth year. Desperate pleas on my part to graduate to adulthood, followed by admonitions from my parents to be patient, then by jealousy and inattention from my big brother.
As you can well imagine, the six similar months till I turned thirteen passed by like a Plutonian year (just checked via memtax: 248 Earth years). But finally—finally!—I turned thirteen and got my very own log-on to FarmEarth.
And that’s when the real frustration started!
* * * *
Kicking a living hackysack is a lot more fun in meatspace than it is via memtax. You can feel muscles other than those in your fingers getting a workout. Your bare toes dig into the grass. You smell sweat and soil. You get sprayed with salt water on a hot day. You get to congratulatorily hug warm girls afterwards if any are in the circle with you. So even though all the kids gripe about having to leave their houses every day for two whole shared hours of meatspace schooling at the nearest Greenpatch, I guess that, underneath all our complaints, we really like being
