In the Fall (c) copr all rights reserved 1995 by T.J.Hardman, Jr.

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This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to any persons living or dead
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The summer dragged on, and settled into fall. The crops came in, and every hand not holding a baby was dragooned into the harvest. Nobody minded, though it was very hard work; all knew that if they worked diligently, this would be an easy winter for them, so far as food was concerned. The stalks of wheat bowed heavy under their swollen heads, which fell before the scythes of the men, and behind them the women bundled sheaves, and behind them, the children gleaned. Back at Home, Granny supervised the canning of the late vegetables, and Hope's mother supervised the smoking of game. Like most semi-agricultural hunter-gatherer societies, the division of labor was somewhat skewed, with the men's strength being mostly reserved for such strength-intensive activities as battle and heavy construction, or hunting and timbering. The women were responsible for most of the daily maintenance and upkeep chores. They were very organized in this respect. Boy began to pay more attention to the women's skills, for awhile, and then found himself rousted away from the women's work areas. It appeared that they had secrets to keep, and had divined that he intended to learn some of them.

The crops came in, and were put away, and the days shortened and chilled, and as the first morning frosts appeared, everybody moved their lives inside insofar as was practicable. Boy didn't really feel like being cooped up in his room with Trouble (who was basically almost accepted, but was not welcome in the commons where the women had gathered their children for the winter), and so he sought out Wilson for company.

Wilson's mood was not exactly foul, but he was quite preoccupied with some project or another. Wilson told him to go find Hope, and this Boy did. First he escorted Trouble to the kitchens, where she was put to work tending fires. Hope was babysitting in the commons, but she was able to get another teener to take over active watch. Hope grumbled as she shrugged on a buckskin that was too small for her; she was growing like wildfire now, having added an inch a month over the summer. Soon, Boy knew, she'd begin to widen through the hips, and grow some breasts, and have to face her trial. For now though, she was simply ungainly, and clumsy to the point of silliness. She was also more moody these days. She continued to grumble as they made their way outside.

Once clear of the house, she quietly asked him what this was about. "I don't know," said Boy. "Wilson asked me to get you and to bring you up to the Library."

"Wow."

"I doubt he's going to let us in, you know."

"Well, that'd be a first time. We can hope, though."

"You can, Hope," said Boy, grinning. She shoved him and he stumbled a little. They clambered up the path that led from Home into what had once been a small town. The houses there were mostly burned-out wrecks, long since pillaged for anything usable. Most of the buildings around Home had been built from blocks salvaged from these wrecks. The path upon which they walked had once been a road of some size, leading from the great Road of the Before People into the center of town. Trees crowded close to the shoulders of the road. The Before People of this town had planted small trees along the edge of the road, and after they had died or moved on, the trees had grown into giants. Beyond their massive trunks stood the remnants of buildings, their roofs long gone in the fires that had swept through this place immediately after The Fall. Boy and Hope passed the time by reading the plaques that still clung, fire-blackened, to the walls of the buildings. "Builder, Brown, and Spencer, Attorneys-at-Law", said Hope. "A. Burnbaum, CPA," said Boy. "Kroger's," said Hope. Before Kroger's, a wire dangled from a pole. At the end was a rusted but still yellowish box with round glass eyes. They passed it without a glance. They'd seen it dozens of times. They laughed, though, as they always did, at the other yellow box which still hung on the pole. "No wonder they were crazy," said Boy.

"Walk Don't Walk," said Hope. "I guess they were sort of confused, huh?"

"Pharmacy," said Boy. The empty windows still bore a few shards of sharp glass. Inside was only wreckage. The pharmacy hadn't burned, but it was full of empty plastic jars, broken glass bottles, and windblown leaves. "First National Bank of Pennsylvania," said Hope. They walked on.

"Department of Public Works," said Hope. "Police," said Boy. "City Hall," said Hope, and together they chorused, "Public Library!"

The last three buildings shared a few features. They appeared to have never burned, and other than the bullet-holes in the front wall of the police station, they were undamaged. Also, all of their windows and doors were sealed with heavy blockwork, except for the Library, which had a huge metal door set into it. Atop the building, Boy knew (for he had helped to gather them), were pane after pane of photovoltaic cells, attached to wires that led into the building.

They called Wilson's name, loudly, a few times. Nothing answered but the wind, which whistled mournfully among the ruins. They walked around to the lee of the Library, and huddled for warmth. Winter was not fully here, but the wind blowing from the north came directly across the northern Great Lakes, and was wet with chill. Finally, they heard Wilson's voice, and went to meet him.

Wilson was carrying a full pack. He bade them wait while he approached the door, and did things to the lock. Finally he opened the door, and invited them to enter. Boy and Hope exchanged incredulous glances with each other, and then marched up the stairs to follow him inside.

When Wilson closed the door behind them, the darkness was complete. They heard some clicking sounds, and then another door opened, and Wilson ushered them inside. It was still black as night, but they heard the door close behind them, and then with another click, suddenly there was light, an odd light of a color they'd never seen before, vaguely pinkish with touches of blue, with a quick flickering quality. It seemed to come from square flat panels laid into squares of oddly-textured panelling which served as a ceiling.

Wilson stood near a wall, pulling his hand away from some sort of device in the wall, and behind him reaching from floor to ceiling, from wall to wall, were shelves full of books. Shelves filled the floor, each weighted with books. Boy stood as still as if he'd come upon an unexpected bear, and Hope stood as still, with her mouth wide open. Wilson grinned sourly, and doffed his pack. "Follow me," he said.

Boy followed like a zombie, staring with eyes gone round with wonder. Hope followed, reaching out tentatively as if to assure herself through touching that this was all real. Wilson simply led them into another room, and touched something on the wall, and the lights came on. Inside this inner room, they found stairs. Wilson led them upwards. Boy paused, as did Hope, to look back at the rooms full of books. Wilson paused himself, and then grumbled, "Come on. They'll still be there on the way out."

At the top of the stairs, there was another door, of steel, with a complex lock. Boy had never seen the like. He had, of course, seen the keypad before. Keypads didn't quite litter the landscape of the abandoned town, but everywhere you looked, inside a building, there was a keypad. Even outside of some of the buildings, there was the occasional box bearing a rusted keypad. On the wall of the bank, there was a large metal-and-glass window, or what remained of it, actually, and that had a keypad on it. Boy had never concerned himself with them, but now, he watched with fascination as Wilson's fingers danced a pattern on the keypad, and with a buzz and a click, the steel door swung open.

Inside the room, when the lights came on, was another sort of wonderland. Wilson had of course told them all about the Before People's arcane entertainments, but he had never before seen any of them. Now that he thought about it, by all rights the landscape of the town should have been covered with these things, and he sensibly decided that Wilson must have gathered them all here. Certainly there was a vast supply of devices, the likes of which he had never seen outside of the children's books that Wilson had given him to read. He stood gaping just inside the door, with Hope crowding close over his shoulder, afraid to enter this holy sanctuary. Wilson grinned back over his shoulder at him, and said, "Come on in. They don't bite unless you touch them." Cautiously, Boy came towards him, followed by Hope. "Have a seat," said Wilson, indicating some chairs around a massive oak table, which bore a strange box with a large blank window, to which was attached a very large oddly shaped keypad. Boy and Hope sat down carefully in the odd chairs, which seemed to have wheels at the bottom of the legs. The chairs squeaked as they adjusted beneath their loads. Hope looked nervously at Boy, but Boy's eyes were only upon Wilson as Wilson busied himself about another table, a waist-high bench loaded with odd devices. He reached for a box that had a square face with a window showing only a little pointer-arm similar to the hands of a watch, and he flipped a switch. The pointer swung hard to the right of its window, and small red lights began to glow around the table. Wilson did things to another couple of devices, and small hummings and whirrings began to come from them.

"Pretty spooky, huh?" said Wilson, and the two teens could only nod. Wilson seated himself at the table between them, rolling a chair around from the other side, and pulled the box on the table to face towards them. He did something to the back of it, and it too came to life. The window glowed for a moment, and then went blank again. Lights flickered on the box, and and then the machine squeaked. The two kids jumped, but Wilson didn't seem surprised. Suddenly, words marched down the window. Boy couldn't make any sense of them, and doubted that Hope could either. Who could read so fast? Soon enough, the verbiage stopped spilling across the screen, and after the last word, a little line flashed on and off. Wilson put his hands to the odd keypad, and his fingers flickered across it. Words appeared on the screen: "ForbrushWR", and then on a new line, Password:, and then more text flowed down the screen.

Welcome back to PlaNet.
Last login 22:54, November 14th 2155 from console 9441.
No mail found today.
PlaNet 9441:#~_

"What is that thing?" asked Hope.

"This," said Wilson, "Is a computer. It's a console attached to an antique 1999 UltraSparc with a 2019 Farallon patchboard, reading three BellCorp beltcoms, each with 20 gigabytes of optical ROM... but the exact details are not that important right this second."

"Oh," echoed Boy and Hope. "So what does it do?"

"Whatever I tell it to do. Mostly nothing of any real use, but you can write on it, and you can talk to it, though not right this second, and you can draw on it, and it can show you pictures, and all sorts of other things. Mostly what it can do, if you ask it the right questions, and ask it the right way, is it can tell you things. It can find answers a lot more quickly than you could. Um, look, I said the details weren't all that important?"

The kids nodded.

"Well, come over here..." and Wilson rose and led them to a corner of the room, where a large black box, large enough to contain an adult, stood sturdily braced upon extra timbering. Wilson evidently wanted to take no chances on it falling through the floor anytime this century. "This is an archive. This has, pretty much, the sum total of human knowledge, or at least a large chunk of that. Everything the Before People thought was really important is in this box... at least, what they thought about it and said about it is stored in this box. I can use the computer to read this archive for me, and I can ask it questions."

Hope asked, "You mean all of the books downstairs are in there, and they're, maybe, shrunk?"

"Hope, they're so shrunk that all of the books downstairs might make up this much" (his thumb and forefinger were about a millimeter apart) "of that whole box."

"You mean that for real?"

"Maybe less. This is the real library. And there are maybe a hundred others like it in the world. Three of them are online."

Boy's brow furrowed. It was a pretty new expression for his face. Wilson decided he liked it. "Online?" asked Boy.

Wilson led them back to the table, and poked at a wire running from the back of the "computer", and said, "This wire, or line, leads to another which leads to another, and words travel across it, to other computers. The other archives are attached to them."

"Where are those other 'computers'?" asked Hope.

"That's just it," said Wilson, "They won't tell." He sat down and motioned for the kids to do the same.

"You need to learn to use these things. You could read from books or you can read from this. If you're just reading it might as well be a book, but if you want to be able to search the book quickly it might as well be this. You all have to be schooled, and you already know pretty much all you'll need to get by in the real world, but this is some stuff you might as well learn for as long as it lasts."

Wilson turned and left them for a moment, and then returned, carrying two small boxes, each about three inches by one inch by eight inches, and gave one each to Boy and to Hope. "These are beltcom," he said. "Belt-comm, computer and communications."

Boy turned the box over, trying to figure out how it might be operated. It was mostly a featureless roughened black plastic laid over a metal surface, a commonplace of Before People objects of this size. One side of it, though, was a blank window of some clear plastic. Boy had seen this plastic before. Once when he had been out chunking rocks at windows, trying to knock loose the few remaining fragments of glass that clung to the frames, he'd found an entire unbroken window. Overjoyed at the prospect of being able to break an entire window, he'd pitched a rock at it and it had bounced off. He'd tried a bigger rock and then a bigger one. Eventually he'd walked right up to it and commenced whacking on it with a stick, and the plastic wasn't even scratched. When he had told Wilson, Wilson laughed and said that it'd take a lot more than a boy with a stick to break that stuff. Boy understood that this window of plastic on this little box was designed to keep things out of the inside of this box, and clear to let whatever was inside be seen... but it didn't go anywhere. It extended maybe a sixth of the way into the box and stopped against a featureless black background. He looked up, quizzically, at Wilson.

"I don't understand," said Hope. "Communications?"

"You can use it to talk to others like it," said Wilson. "Here, let me show you." He lifted his jacket a little and they could see that he had a box just like their own, clipped to his belt. He squeezed it at one end and it beeped, quietly, once. He held it out in front of himself, and looked at it as if it were a mirror. "Squeeze the end, kids," Wilson instructed, and then told Boy, as Hope's box beeped, "Other end, Boy." Boy did squeeze the other end and his box also beeped - and the window was no longer featureless. It seemed to have become a dull mirror, showing his face... only it couldn't be a mirror - everything was reversed from what a mirror would show him. He almost dropped the box. He looked closer and saw that there were tiny symbols scattered around the edge of the window.

"See the little picture of a telephone?"

"What's a telephone?" chorused Hope and Boy in unison. Wilson grinned and then dragged his chair over to sit between them with his back towards them. They crowded around to look at his hands on his own "beltcom". He pointed at a certain symbol and said, "that's a telephone, well, it's a symbol of one - the symbol is called an icon."

"Oh," chorused the kids, and then looked at Wilson blankly. "Um, heh," he said, chuckling. "Push it." The kids did and the reversed mirror of themselves was overlaid with a series of symbols, or "icons". Boy sensibly decided that he was going to try to remind himself to use whatever words Wilson taught him. "What do these do?"

"The one on the left is 'dev-net', which basically means anything in this room. The one in the center is 'localnet', which pretty much means anything in town, or at least in this part of town. Maybe as far as Home. The one on the right is 'internet', which is the rest of the world." A scowl momentarily clouded his face, and he said, "Well, used to be the rest of the world." Then the scowl vanished and he said very quietly, "Maybe someday soon, it will be again." He was silent for a moment that started to drag on and Boy and Hope looked at each other questioningly and that snapped Wilson out of his reverie. "Push on localnet," he said.

They did, and the icons faded instantly to be replaced by two others. On Boy's screen one was labelled "Wilson" in green and the other was labelled "Hope", in a different, lighter color of green. Boy, anticipating, pushed on the one labelled Hope, and in the mirror was not his own reflection, but Hope's reflection... as seen from about where her hand was. He realized it was no reflection, but that he was seeing what a single eye would have seen if it had been held in Hope's hand. And of course, he realized, that was what the beltcom was, an eye. He looked at Hope, who had assumed a remonstrative glare (she was getting very good at that these days) when Boy had pressed the icon without instruction. Wilson was grinning at Boy and told Hope, "It's okay for him to do that, Hope - these things were designed to be self-teaching. There's not a lot you could do to these that would hurt them. Go ahead... press the one labelled Adam."

She did, and jumped a little bit when Boy's image appeared. Wilson kept grinning, and he said, "Now both of you, press the telephone again." They did, and again three icons appeared, and Wilson continued, "Now press localnet, and then Wilson. They did, and Boy was not all that surprised when the image of Hope suddenly shrank to fill the left half of his screen, and Wilson's grinning face appeared in the right half of the screen. "Communications," he said, and his voice came not only from right next to them but from the "beltcom" that each held. Hope looked up at Wilson and said: "We can use these to talk to each other! And we don't have to be in the same place!"

"That's the idea. And in fact, if you want to, you can aim it at anything, and see that - one of you could be someplace and show the other what was happening there."

"Wow," muttered Boy.

"And that's not all," said Wilson. "Push 'comm' again, oh, the telephone I mean. Let's just call that the 'comm icon' for now. Okay, push 'devnet'." Tiny, the numbers and the letters of the alphabet appeared layered across the window, in a pale yellow, laid out in rows in a strange pattern that read "qwertyuiop" across the top row.

"Push, um,"(Wilson thought for a moment) "push 'enn, one'. See, push the letters, push 'enn', push the number 'one'. Now that big one on the right that says "enter". There ya go. See? View north from the Library, outside." "Where's the eye, Wilson?" Hope looked a little baffled, and Wilson cocked an eyebrow at her. "I've looked all around the Library and haven't seen one of these" - she hefted the beltcom - " stuck to the wall or anything."

Wilson laughed. "Oh, you wouldn't see it. Not designed to be seen." He held up his hand and measured something tiny between his thumb and forefinger. "It's about this big. Now that's one thing I don't mind about the New World, in the Before Time the eyes were everywhere, and I mean everywhere. They're called 'cameras' by the way. You couldn't go anyplace in any of the cities or bigger towns without two orthree of them looking at you at any given moment."

"You mean with people watching? All of the time? How could anybody stand it?" hope looked fairly disgusted. Boy thought that actually it was an intriguing idea.

"A lot of people couldn't stand it," said Wilson. "But most people just didn't think about it much. Besides, most of the cameras weren't something that just anybody anyplace could watch at any time, they generally could only be used by the police, and usually they weren't looking at them all of the time, but if something happened, like if there was a crime, the cops would have a record of the incident."

"Cops?" asked Boy, and "Crime?" asked Hope, simultaneously.

'Yikes," said Wilson, "I should remember that everything dealing with the Before People only brings up ten other things. Okay, Boy, you know about the Police Station, right?" Boy nodded; after all it was right next to the Library. Wilson continued, "The job of the police, or the cops as they were sometimes called, was to fight Crime. Now Crime, that is a sort of interesting concept. Crime was, in the Before Times, basically Breaking The Law. The Law was this: somoene told you that you can't do something, or that you must do something, and that was it. You couldn't do that, or you had to do it. And if you broke the Law, the cops would come and get you and take you back to the police station and throw you in Jail. Jail was, well, you know how the police station has bars in the windows? Well, they had bars on the doors and the walls were made of bars and basically if they locked you up in jail you were not going to get out until they let you out.

"Law was sort of funny sometimes, they had some silly ones and I think that some of the silly ones might have had as much to do with The Fall of the Before People as did anything else. But be that as it may, most of the Law was very old, and was good and made sense. It was against the law to steal, and if someone stole something, the cops would come and get them and put them in jail. If someone killed someone, the cops would come and get them and put them in jail. It's all really a lot more complex than that. But those cameras were there simply because there were just too many before people, and not enough police. Actually they had enough police, but people didn't like to see them, because there were so many laws that almost everyone in the Before Time could have been taken away and locked up; you could hardly breathe without breaking the Law. So rather than have policemen everywhere and people being afraid all of the time, they had the cameras. And if a crime was committed and someone complained, the cameras served as the eyes of the police, and for a long time, the cameras were trusted. Maybe someone could get a cop to lie, and his lie could get a person locked up, who had done no real wrong, but a camera couldn't lie... well, not at first. Then people whose job it was to break the law and not get caught (these were called criminals) learned how to make the cameras lie, and then the cops learned how to detect lying cameras, and it was all very very strange by the time of The Fall."

"Sure sounds like it!" said Hope. "So that's what the bars are for at the Police Station? To keep people in, not keep animals out?" Wilson nodded. "Bad people?"

Wilson nodded. "Some of them were so bad that they were... - well, let's just say that some were a lot more dangerous than a big wild animal. More so because, well, if a bear decides to attack you, he just stands up and roars and charges and if he gets you that's it. Some of the bad people, well, they'd act like your friends, and then they'd stab you in the back. These were the people that the cops were there to catch. Them and the ones that were more like the wild animals - there were of course people who would just walk right up to you and pull out a weapon and take whatever you had."

"But we've done that," said Boy. "We took Trouble like that, we killed all of the ogres and took what was left, which was Trouble."

"You're not quite getting it, Boy," said Wilson. "The Law doesn't exist without The Word. When we killed the ogres, it's like we were the police. They committed a crime, they stole our babies, well, they stole babies from the other camp."

"So, if a crimer -" ("Criminal, interjected Wilson) "- okay, a criminal, if he takes a weapon and kills someone, that's bad, and if we're cops, and we take a weapon and kill all of Trouble's people, what's the difference between a cop and a criminal?"

Wilson sat there looking stumped, something boy didn't see all that often, and Boy exulted somewhat. Wilson finally spoke: "For a lot of the Before Times that I lived through, that was a damned good question and one that a lot of people asked - and most often, I don't think, for much of Those Times, that anyone had a good sensible answer to it. But for now, let's just say that a lot of the answer to that question probably depends on whether you were the person doing, or if you were the person done to. In the case of Trouble's people, well - you heard it from Trouble herself - they knew it was wrong, or at least most of them did - and Bitsy knew it was wrong, and she kept doing it. So Bitsy was definitely a criminal, she was what they called an "actor" which meant that she was the one who did the crime, and the others were what they called "enablers" or "aidors and abettors" and in the old days that was less of a crime, you got locked up for less time for that."

"Less time?" asked Hope, and Wilson sighed.

"Dang it all, I was hoping for this to be a beltcom lesson, and here we are getting into crime and punishment. Gimme a second and I'll try to tell you straight." He paused to gather his thoughts.

"Okay," he began, "the theory was that there were several classes of crime, one of which was the misdemeanor or civil offense, which basically meant that you just weren't acting like most folks though you should act. This could be just about anything, from not speaking respectfully to someone you should respect, to fighting in public, or drinking too much, or whatever. For this you might get locked up for a day or a week or a month. Short time. Other things, what they called a felony, those were things that everyone agreed were really bad offenses, major wrongness, and for that you could get locked up for a long time, hard time, maybe for the rest of your life. This would be things like invading someone's home, or stealing everything someone had, or crippling them. Other things were what they called capital crimes, and these were things for which they wouldn't just lock you up, but they'd kill you. That would be things like killing someone for personal gain, or just killing someone for no reason, that sort of thing."

Hope was eating this all up, but Boy was basically just not very interested - he'd really rather get back to the beltcom. She asked, "And who made these laws?"

Wilson just shook his head and pondered for a second, and then looked at Hope with a peculiar sort of measuring look, and then grinned and reached out and tousled her hair, to which she responded by grinning and pushing his hand away. Wilson grinned wider and said, "I think that I may have discovered your calling, Hope. I'll get some books out for you to read, later. But for now, back to the beltcom."

Wilson was a pretty good programmer when it came to pushing icons around, but he was not good at coding, since by the time he'd learned to use a beltcom, there was a vast resource of "Java-Beans", of mostly-preconfigured task icons and of self-modifying agenting code floating around loose in the NETS and after all, there was that damned Sphinx which was constantly writing and rewriting code, and lesser-class artificial intelligences had abounded, and were as a rule called automatically into play whenever they detected the fumblings of a mere mortal disrupting their orderly processes. Those days were, however, long gone and Wilson was effectively on his own when it came to hacking Archived code into new configurations. Wilson had been trying to teach himself objective codes for close to a hundred years, when not otherwise occupied, and his coding still stank. However, if you keep at something long enough, eventually you start to get somewhere.

Wilson was getting somewhere in his efforts to detect other online presences. He'd managed to get an intermittent uplink and downlink, from some still-functional geosynchronous satellite, almost certainly one of those that had been lofted immediately after The War. Those had doubtless been the latest generation of hardened military comsats and he expected that they'd been launched with fairly overpowered thrusters and probably oversized fuel reserves as well - the ability to maneuver rapidly would be required in the event of an attack with purely ballistic kinetic weapons. Evidently no such attack had ever come, and a century later there was still sufficient fuel to keep the bird on station. At any rate, once he'd been able to figure out the encryption scheme (it had taken nearly fourteen years of raw numbercrunching by the UltraSPARC, using an algorythm lifted from one of the Archive's math books and plugged-in through an adapted tutorial module running on one of the hardwired beltcoms) he'd managed to toggle the satellite into a mode that passed not only military but standard commercial comdata. If there was anyone anywhere who could aim a standard link dish at the comsat, they'd be able to get bounce from it just as he could.

He'd written a piece of code that was probably a hodgepodge kludge of a mess, but it was working, slowly of course, through the laborious process of pinging every single possible SUPERNet address. He had absolutely no way to tell what addresses might be gateways, or which addresses might be ubiquitous-computing devices - each ping that went out might be attempting to address a gateway mainframe or might be attempting to address a house thermostat controller somewhere. He just started from the base address of 000.000.000.000.000.000.000.001 and pinged it for a full minute, and if nothing came back, the program cycled to the next address. There was something of a pattern, but he was decidedly no mathematician nor logician, and couldn't figure out exactly what the pattern was. He was, however, easily able to log all of the returned data into a database, which was stored on the capacious read-write section of the Archive - a tiny fraction of the Archive's total capacity, but still several thousands of times more memory than the UltraSPARC and the beltcoms had available.

The pinger had been running for the last few years, and so far, as he'd expected, mostly nothing returned within the minute of pinging. Sometimes, though, things did come back.

One of his "big scores" (as a hacker would call it) had been another Archive, bafflingly still operating, calling itself the New Mexico State University Library. Insofar as he'd been able to determine, by random filesearches, it was basically an echo of his own Archive, which called itself the Pennsylvania State University Archive (Pittsburgh). A traceroute call had revealed that the ping basically went from his UltraSPARC through the Farallon through the military comsat, and through another Farallon to some machine that was an extremely "private" one, evidently a firewalling server, and thence to the Archive. The Archives themselves were, as best Wilson knew, mostly huge blocks of memory with no more processing ability than was needed to access the data within, mostly etched into read-only optical RAM. At any rate, whatever computer was serving the NMSU Archive to "the world" was itself not interested in accepting anything incoming, and was willing to participate in conversation only to the degree of allowing the outside to access the contents of the archive through the standard airtight protocols. As near as he could tell, it wouldn't even accept mail at the standard system administrator or postmaster addresses. The sum total of useful information he got from it that wasn't an echo of his own Archive's data was a list of class schedules, which was obviously way out of date. Wilson assumed that whatever the unknown intermediate machine was, it was way too small to harbor even a least-class artificial intelligence, and was quite probably just a dedicated webserver, with probably no more than a few hexadec megabytes of RAM.

Another "big score" was evidently a military mainframe somewhere, probably in a NORAD subterranean facility somewhere, since that was probably about the only possibility of a military facility having not gotten slagged in The War. This machine accepted encrypted telnet, as long as it came in via the military comsat's encryption band, but Wilson didn't have any idea what would be a proper login and certainly had no passwords. He certainly wasn't going to try to crack it under brute-force protocols, not with the museum-piece UltraSPARC; rumors abounded that military machines definitely had AI watchdogs that were extremely capable of backtracking any attempted cracker and doing things to the source machine and reputedly to any users. He'd heard stories... the truth of none of which he intended to learn for himself. He left the military machine alone, other than hitting its webpages, which told him nothing other than that he was reaching port 80 of a machine with nothing except an Archive public-mounted to the NETS. There wasn't even the usually-obligatory webmaster address to which he might send mail.

Other addresses had returned ping, and as near as he could tell he'd managed to contact a few solar-powered remote weather stations, which wasn't bad; he could use that information, which they were free in dispensing. He was also able to get some satellite imagery from a satellite which was unfortunately apparently tumbling slowly in space, on the last legs of a descent from orbit. Another satellite did indeed give a nice clean picture - of India. It was brown and bare and nothing grew there, from Mesopotamia clear to Indochina, or what he could see of it - the satellite was fairly tight-focussed and he had no idea of how to instruct the satellite on how to change zoom scale. Once this region had been a major cradle of civilization... and now there was nothing but an arid wasteland, and the dance of the whirlwinds across the sands.

He wound up discovering working SUPERNet addresses of assorted small appliances, mostly MILSPECed beltcom such as the one he and the kids were using, civilian models built to military specifications of durability, expensive models favored by adventurers and outdoorsmen. Those were often, like his own, solar-powered, and many had satlink capabilites. They were probably sitting in people's houses playing top-quality nothingness to uninhabited kitchens or dining rooms, patiently awaiting mail or voice calls that would never come. The enginers who built them would have been proud of their creations.

When Wilson had first been possessed of the mad idea to try to "liberate" a satlink, he had the idea of stealing a dish from the roof of some wealthy and deceased burgher's house, and had done so on several occasions. However, the increasing use of satellite-frequency bandwidth in interdevice communications had led to some interesting developments in tight-band transmissions and "digital polarization", and basically the earth-stations only worked where they'd been hardwired to work. The satlink that had already been atop the police station would have worked just fine, and for that matter, did - when you supplied it with power, which was supposed to come from either the city mains or a backup generator or a fail-safe UPS. Wilson had been able to adapt some solar cells to some UPS and had gotten the satlink running, and had done the same to enough of the ubiquitous-computing SUPERNet 2.5gigahertz microcellular repeaters to get them up and running reliably. His beltcom could have punched through to the comsats directly, at a power-consumption rate that would drain a full-day's solar charge in a matter of an half-hour or so. He presumed that the various beltcom that returned ping were probably solar-powered and were linking through SUPERNet that was also solar-powered. Towards the final days of the Before People, they'd been aggressively pursuing solar power for everything that didn't require 120v AC.

He'd tried sending mail and voice requests to those beltcom, wherever they were, and he'd gotten nothing. In an age where cameras were everywhere, and it was suspected that beltcom could be remotely activated to transmit video, nobody would leave their beltcom set to answer-live-on-ring - and so Wilson got no images of those beltcoms' surrounds. On a positive note, he didn't get any notifications from his own beltcom's mailer-daemon, and so he was comforted to know that even though there could be none to read it, his mail was going through.

Wilson watched the kids absorbed in their reading, and continued forlornly to ping the world.

The people of Home were well provisioned. All the harvest was long past, and much deer was salted away, fish were smoked, and the drudgery of the winter months was upon them.

They lived rather well, all of the people of Home, for when winter came, all of those who had sought summer privacy and breathing room in the outlying areas of the former estate moved within the solid walls of the old stone buildings. Though Unspeaking, the Men and Women of Home had good memories and most had skilled hands, and when Wilson had shown them the essentials of thermosiphon solar central heating, they'd gone overboard in carefully dragging old water-heaters out of the surrounding abandoned houses, and installing them all through Home. Trouble and Boy were still sleeping in the same room, with Hope and another youngster (an Unspeaking one) in the next room. In the center of the building, on the next floor up, all of the youngest slept, guarded by several adults (who took rotations) and surrounded by tanks of heated water. It could be stifling in that room, if one was used to being out and about in the daytime cold, but it was warm comfort to the infants and l'il kids. In an adjacent and similarly comfortable room were more hot-water tanks and the elders and the infirm. The young and hale lived on the outside rooms and slept, as a rule, close to the inside walls through which at night radiated the heat the solar-thermal collectors had captured during the day. Whenever they might, Hope and Boy wandered off with Wilson, or crept off to some outlying building to study their beltcom. They seldom discussed their various discoveries with one another, for almost any time when it was safe to go to voice speech, it was safe to pull out the beltcom and study. Both were possessed of a deep hunger for knowledge, and as much as both had longed to be allowed to actually go into the Library and read to their heart's content, it was much more wonderful to be able to carry the Library with them. Wilson had some few years ago been able to locate, relocate, and solar-power many of the SUPERNet microcellular transcievers in the area around Home, and thus the kids were able to not only carry with them whatever them might download locally for the Archive, they could also get multimedia access while at Home. Trouble continued in her position as everybody's flunky. Hope's Mom continued in her role as Trouble's personal vengeful overseer, and Trouble spent a lot of time scrubbing clothing and floors. Boy saw little of her except when she was returned after long days at brisk labor, and they were both generally sufficiently tired so as to be interested in little other than sleep.

November passed into December with only a few fitful flurries of snow, and then one morning came to them full of the glorious and deadly sight of a full-bore blizzard with two feet of snow already on the ground. It howled on for the next three days, and since there was obviously not going to be a lot of solar energy incoming while the blizzard raged, Boy was dragooned, along with Hope, Trouble and Hope's roommate, into feeding the furnace that heated the central tanks' water when the sun was not heating.

It was a pretty monotonous job, and one that nobody wanted. However, it did have one benefit if one wanted to call it that - so long as the fuel lasted, there was no chance of being cold. Boy sweated like a pig, and so did the rest of them. They were all unknowingly probably rather thankful for the smoke which escaped the chimney and permeated the room. It was a straightforward system, with what Wilson called "the cool tank" on the floor above, and from that a pipe descended through the floor into the bottom of a sloping cylinder of a boiler, the higher end of which passed above the hearth which the kids stoked. The hot water rose through pipes in the chimney into the tops of the top-floor's tanks, and from there the cooler water was taken from the bottom of those tanks, and fed into the top of the cool tank. As it turned out, as cold as it was outside, it was correspondingly hotter in the furnace room as they increased their stoking to maintain temperature, and Hope's Roomate couldn't stand the heat, and was sent out. At last the three could talk - nobody ever volunteered to do furnace duty. They couldn't have signed all that much, being a bit too busy feeding the furnace, pumping the bellows, or shovelling in the coals from the basement. Nor could Boy or Hope mope through the Library via their beltcom, which had to be stashed away - they all worked stripped to the waist, covered with grime and sweat. One of the benefits of working the furnace, however, was an extra allocation of hot-water for bathing.

They were going to need it. Ordinarily Boy would have been quite fascinated to notice that Hope was at long last growing some breasts, or at least getting the beginnings. But for now he was too tired, too hot and above all Hope was far too dirty. Wilson had been pretty successful in his campaign to promote healthiness through aversion to filth; Boy's distaste for grime was fairly deeply ingrained. As for Trouble, while she'd continued to mature somewhat, and had lost some weight through being so heavily exercised by Hope's Mom (who used her as a bit of a dray-horse), Boy had after all had her sleeping at the foot of his bed for some months now. She was, after all, his by right of conquest, and also his personal responsibility, by Hope's Mom's decree which he was not about to forget for one single moment. She was not all that interesting to him, no more than were any of the kids he'd grown up sleeping next to, and at the moment she was less than appealing; she, like the rest of them, was sweating like a pig. He did have to admire her muscles though - she'd grown two inches taller since her capture and she was clearly stronger than him. When it was her turn to shovel, she made very short work of stoking the furnace. She dug the shovel into the pile of charcoals and turned around to wipe sweat from her face.

"Dang it, it'ud be a'most better to freeze dontcha think?" It would be a reasonably comfortable sixty degrees Fahrenheit upstairs, warmer in the kids' and the old-folks' rooms.

"Well, I wouldn't mind some cool air right about now," said Boy, giving the bellows a few pumps. The fire puffed up as the charcoals lit and began to swirl around the pipe. Wilson had devised a helical fire-chase out of clay, inset with thick glass. When the bellows was pumped, it blew air and the top layer of the charcoals into the draft that swirled around the waterpipes. The clay and the glass insets glowed dully. Even here, he could feel the heat on his skin.

"Well, do you want to go out and play in the snow, perhaps?" Hope had become more precise in her speech since Wilson had given her the beltcom.

"No, thanks," chorused both Boy and Trouble. It was rather below zero outside. Even if the people of Home ran out of food for some reason, there would be plenty of winter-killed animals outside. They had no desire to get winter-killed themselves. It wouldn't take long, not with the fierce winds that blew out there.

"At leas' we can talk here, though," said Trouble. "You'uns ain't had much to say in the last while or two."

"Kind of hard to talk when we're all stuck inside, you know," said Boy. "And it's kind of hard to talk to you when Hope's Mom is standing right there."

"You could allus talk t'me when we's alone at night."

"I dunno about that," said Boy.

"You really should," said Hope.

Boy pumped on the bellows a few times, by way of a reponse.

"Well, you should," continued Hope.

"And why is that?" Boy asked.

"Well, jes' because," said Trouble. "Don't you think I get lonely?"

"Don't you think I get lonely?" Boy retorted.

"Not for me you don't. An' I'm right there."

Boy turned to Hope. No help there, she was giving him a look that defied interpretation. He turned back to Trouble. "What do you want from me?"

"Oh, I dunno," she said. "I only know that all of them women here gimme these looks alla time, like I jes' ain't no good at'all. Ain't you see'd how they looks at me? Ain't you seen the way they looks at you? I guess they don't know if it's your fault or its mine, that we ain't been together. An' you know it ain't like they could exactly ast either of us."

"Can't you tell 'em, Hope?"

Hope looked, not exactly smug, nor exactly disgusted, but she did say, "Well, they did send me to spy on you two, and I told them exactly what I saw, which was nothing. But you know as well as I that some concepts are way beyond pantomime. How can I tell them that you want someone else? Especially if you don't. All I can tell them is, more or less, that you don't want anybody and you're a little too old for anyone to believe that. You got to have someone, and it might as well be Trouble here."

"More coal, Trouble," said Boy, by way of passing the buck. Trouble gave him a withering look and slammed a few shovelsfull of charcoals into the furnace, and Hope examined the gauge, and began to work the pump that drew from the well outside, and replenished the drain-down tank on the second floor. Boy was trying to think of something to say as he worked the bellows and shot more coals into white fire spiralling up around the boiler pipes.

"Well, what if I don't want her? Or what if I do want her, but... well - I don't know how to put this, but whenever I've thought about her, well - like that - first thing I think of is your mom and that knife and that just about makes me forget the idea real quick."

"Well, if that's all that scares ya, maybe I can compete," said Trouble. Boy looked at her, and at Hope who was unsuccessfully smothering a grin. "Huh?" he said.

Trouble said, "Well, I could make it sorta hard for you to sleep," and Hope bit back a giggle. Trouble continued, "and I dunno, maybe if you don't sleep too well you can get cranky and then you could either maybe toss me out like I'm too much trouble for to you control, and I guess Hope's Mom wouldn't like that. You know, she can sneak up on you pretty quiet-like, does it to me alla time. Or I guess you could always give me to one of the other men, I reckon they'd like that, and I reckon they'd be giving you a lotta ribbing too. Or I guess you could always decide you got another girlfriend, and there ain't none unmarried around here asides me exceptin' Hope here."

"Hope ain't old enough yet, dammit!"

"Adam," said Hope, in a fairly sharp voice, "I am growing up, you know. Hadn't you noticed?" And so assumed a different pose and she wasn't just the bratty little tomboy that he tolerated mostly because he needed conversation. There was something new there, or at least something he'd never seen before. Beneath the grime, there in the flickering firelight stood a very young woman... and from what he could see of her eyes watching him looking at her, she was a very smart young woman... and he knew that she already knew a lot more about him than he knew about himself, and he also realized that as well as he might have ever thought he knew her, he had been grossly over-rating his understanding.

"Yeah," said Boy. "I notice."