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.

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 s.p.a.ce 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 gla.s.s window, as if this thin membrane could ward off the world's suffering. Outside, tree branches sc.r.a.ped 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.

n.o.body 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 inst.i.tution 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 match?

At the age of six, Natch decided that escape was his only option. He ran away.

Serr Vigal received a panicked Confidential Whisper from Natch's proctors that morning. They wondered whether the boy had hopped the tube and found his way to Vigal's apartment, but the neural programmer had not seen his charge in weeks. He cancelled the morning's staff meeting and set out for the nearest tube station. The tube whisked him across metropolitan Omaha to a squat semi-circular building that did, in fact, look like a beehive.

What do you mean, he's missing? asked Vigal, perplexed, when he caught up to the anxious proctors. I thought you monitored the children here twenty-four hours a day.

The headmaster bowed his head. We do.

Vigal was not an excitable man by nature. Are you sure he didn't just wander onto another floor? he said, scratching the few lonely hairs on his head. You have security programs, don't you? Certainly he couldn't have gotten out of the building without you knowing it.

Theoretically, no, said the headmaster. But it appears he did.

Omaha was no place for an unattended boy. A curious soul like Natch could easily disappear in a cosmopolitan city of 22 million and never be heard from again. Broken families had been commonplace in the depths of the Economic Plunge, but even a recovering economy could not totally stem the trickle of missing children.

Natch was not oblivious to the dangers of the city, but he had already learned to discount fear as an unreliable emotion. Omaha seemed like a zoo to him; everywhere he turned, there were tantalizing new sights arrayed for his amus.e.m.e.nt. Buildings expanded and collapsed like breathing animals, often causing entire city blocks to shift a few meters this way and that. Tube trains criss-crossed the city like veins. And the streets were filled with millions of people holding silent conversations with acquaintances thousands of kilometers away.

Natch spent hours trying to figure out which of the pedestrians were real and which were multi projections. The proctors had taught the children about multi, of course; some of the proctors multied to the hive themselves from as far away as Luna. But children under eight were not allowed to project on the network, and thus they had very little first-hand knowledge of the subject. So Natch spent hours pivoting 360 degrees in the crowd, looking for people on the periphery of his vision who seemed fuzzy and indistinct until he focused on them. Then he would run up and toss a pebble. Those that the pebble bounced off were real (and sometimes irritated); those that the pebble pa.s.sed through were multi projections. Natch discovered to his astonishment that he could not tell the difference at all.

Once the initial fascination of the city wore off, Natch's experiences in the hive began to infect everything he saw. The belligerent street vendor shouting down his customer's haggling ... the timid woman walking two steps behind her companion like a housepet ... the down-and-out businessman being pressed out of his apartment by white-robed Council officers ... every interaction he saw was a substantiation of the eternal struggle between the Pushers and the Pushed.

Natch found a quiet corner in a public square and sat facing the wall. A viewscreen above him repeatedly screeched a popular footwear slogan every ten seconds. No matter where you go, there will be bullies and victims, Natch told himself. Which do you want to be?

Back at the hive, the proctors made a poor show of mobilizing to find Natch. The boy had been gone for most of the afternoon, and yet the headmaster had only just managed to circulate his name and description to the local L-PRACG security forces. Serr Vigal, for his part, was absorbed in solving the riddle of how Natch had made it through hive security. All simply gaped with astonishment when the boy appeared back in the hive that evening, seemingly out of nowhere. On his return, he had managed to elude their security apparatus as effortlessly as he had on his departure.

That was a nice trick you pulled, said the neural programmer with a hint of pride. And then, mindful of the proctors' angry stares: Is there anything you'd like to talk to us about?

Natch frowned, shook his head, and vanished into his room without a word.

The next day, a tangible change had come over the boy. He met the taunts and jeers of his hivemates with a cruel smile that made them uneasy. And then his enemies began to suffer from a series of unfortunate accidents.

One boy who had constantly maligned Natch for his good looks found himself tripping down a long flight of stairs. A girl who liked to capsize Natch's lunch tray found herself locked in a spare pantry for an entire evening. And so on.

Each humiliation was carefully crafted to reach maximum exposure among the hive children. Natch instinctively knew that the punish ments he imposed should be both brutal and disproportionate to their crimes. This new brand of psychological warfare terrified the other children, who had not yet learned the art of subtlety, who still expressed their emotions with curled fists and running feet. Eventually, even the dullest child in the hive saw a pattern: if you bother Natch, you will pay for it.

Natch got his wish. The other children left him alone. He had learned another valuable lesson: Perception is everything.

Natch quickly outgrew his hive. Even the absent-minded Serr Vigal could see that, although it took an eye-opening conversation with the proctor Petaar for him to recognize it.

Children like Natch need something to focus on, she said. You'd better make sure he's pointed in the right direction, or he'll focus on the wrong things.

Vigal furrowed his brow. A man who spent his day working with the quadratics of neural science had little time for binary terms like "right" and "wrong". This new hive you suggest-they'll give him something to focus on?

Petaar nodded knowingly. And then some. Natch will get ten years of study-hard study and then a one-year initiation.

Initiation? The hives still do that?

This one does.

The neural programmer scrolled bewilderedly through page upon page of starchy marketing material. The tuition seems rather large ... and I'm afraid my Vault account is rather small at the moment ...

Which is why he can apply for a Prime Committee scholarship.

Days later, after an awkward farewell sermon from Petaar (and an even more awkward farewell embrace), Natch was shepherded off to the Proud Eagle hive in Cape Town. The Proud Eagle had a reputation for doing things differently. Unlike most other hives, they had no ges tation and birthing facilities, no counseling staff, and no social programs of any kind. Children came to the Proud Eagle because they had stretched beyond the boundaries of the traditional hive system and needed a challenge. The proctors delivered it to them in the form of ten-hour cla.s.ses, six days a week. This left very little time for idleness, boredom or mischief.

Natch did not miss the infantile games and simplistic moral lessons that had taken up his time at the old hive. Initiation lurked somewhere in his future, but he would deal with that challenge when it came. He took to his new surroundings like a fish to water and spent the next several years gulping down knowledge.

The history proctors taught him about the thinking machines that had nearly decimated humanity during the great Autonomous Revolt, about the dark times that followed, and about the golden age of scientific reawakening that Sheldon Surina's discipline of bio/logics had brought into being. They taught him about the evaporation and consolidation of the ancient nation-states, the rise of the L-PRACGs, the establishment of the Prime Committee and the Council, the neverending quarrel between governmentalism and libertarianism.

The ethics proctors taught him about the early religions, how their influence waned after the dawn of the Reawakening, and how the violent fanaticism of Jesus Joshua Smith drove most of their remaining adherents into seclusion in the Pharisee Territories. They taught him about the Surinas' philosophy of spiritual enlightenment through technology, and about the creeds that had sprung up during the modern era to preach community and responsibility. They taught him the tenets of Creed Objectivv, Creed Elan, Creed Tha.s.sel, Creed Dao, and many others.

The data proctors taught him about Henry Osterman and the Osterman Company for Human Re-Engineering (OCHRE), about the microscopic machines carrying Osterman's name that swarmed through his blood and tissue. They taught him how to summon data agents with a thought, how to run bio/logic programs that interacted with the machines and supplemented his body's natural abilities. They introduced him to the vast corpus of human knowledge available on the Data Sea. They explained to him how Prengal Surina's Universal Law of Physics allowed scientists to turn grains of sand, droplets of water, and molecules of air into quantum computers of almost limitless strength.

The business proctors taught him the basics of bio/logic programming. They showed him the holographic method of programming, which had long ago supplanted language-based systems of logic. They discussed the difference between market-driven fiefcorps and publicly funded memecorps. They put a set of bio/logic programming bars in his hands and set him loose in Minds.p.a.ce to demonstrate how to visualize and manipulate logical processes.

Given the grueling program of study, most of the children couldn't wait for long weekends and vacations to be with their families. But Natch had only Serr Vigal to go home to, and Vigal had never acted like family. The neural programmer treated him like a colleague instead of an adopted son. When they were not simply ignoring one another, they were having cordial conversations about current events. These conversations usually turned into Socratic discussions, with Vigal feeding him question after question as if skepticism were a form of dietary fiber.

I wish I knew something about children, Vigal would chuckle absentmindedly from time to time. But Natch was grateful he didn't. He looked forward to spending weekends alone at the hive, when all of the children were gone and Vigal was shuttling around the globe fundraising.

For a few years, the Proud Eagle seemed like paradise to Natch. He tore into his a.s.signments with gusto and asked for more, afraid to take this opportunity for granted because he knew it would not last forever.

The families started arriving at noon the day before initiation, and continued streaming into the Proud Eagle until long past sundown. From a corner, Natch watched his hivemates go off for private chats with fathers and mothers and uncles and cousins to hear one last bit of wisdom they could take with them to initiation. He conjured up a picture of Lora, the mother he had never met, and wondered what kind of advice she would be giving him right now.

Natch felt a hand on his shoulder. He whirled around expectantly, but it was only Horvil. Horvil, the most anxiety-p.r.o.ne child in the hive, not to mention the sloppiest and the largest. Horvil, Natch's only friend. "So do you think it's gonna be painful?" he said.

Before Natch had a chance to respond, an older boy stepped in. He was ruggedly handsome and knew it, with a face that could have been the Platonic Form of symmetry. "Of course it's going to be painful," teased Brone as he advanced on Horvil. "What's initiation without pain? What's life without pain?" He called up a static electricity program and tapped the other two boys on the side. Horvil yelped and scooted out of the way, but Natch quickly activated a grounding program to deflect the charge.

"I really hope it's not too painful," whimpered Horvil to himself. He turned on a.n.a.lgesic 232.5 to soothe his aching side. "I don't think I'll be able to stand a lot of pain." Brone and Natch stared at one another icily for a few moments without speaking.

Horvil and Brone's families arrived shortly thereafter, leaving Natch alone in the corner with his thoughts. Horvil disappeared into a gaggle of aunts and cousins who seemed determined to wedge their advice into him with a crowbar if necessary. Brone walked off with two picture-perfect parents, looking less like their progeny than a model from the same factory. He gave Natch one last evil grin before vanishing. "Horvil's not the only one who's going to feel pain," Brone fired off at him over Confidential Whisper.

Everyone knew what to expect from initiation, but the ramifications only seemed to multiply the closer the time came. The students would be separated by s.e.x and put in the wilderness for a year, where the OCHREs in their bloodstreams would be deactivated. The bio/logic programs that regulated their heartbeats, kept their calendars, and maximized the storage s.p.a.ce in their brains would be cut off. They would look at words without being able to instantly glean their meanings from the Data Sea. They would snuffle and sneeze and bruise and forget things. And the worst horror of all, they would wake up in the middle of the night with actual s.h.i.t oozing through their intestines....

"Human beings are only subroutines of humanity," said a voice.

Natch must have drifted off, because he hadn't noticed the middleaged man approaching him. The man's sand-colored robe was decidedly unfashionable (and poorly tailored at that), but his face was friendly: the non-specific goodwill of the perpetual cloud dweller. His almond-shaped eyes betrayed a hint of the Orient. Natch smiled politely at the multi projection of Serr Vigal.

"Sheldon Surina said that," Vigal continued gently.

"What did he mean?"

"Well, if you believe your proctors, Surina meant that everyone should experience the struggle of humanity from darkness to light. They think that Surina would have wanted you to see what life was like before the Reawakening. Make you appreciate the modern world more."

"And what do you think?"

The man stared off into the distance and tugged at his peppery goatee. "I don't know. I think maybe Sheldon Surina just wanted everyone to keep an open mind and be nice to each other."

Natch tried to refrain from rolling his eyes. It was typical of the advice he received from Serr Vigal: pleasant, inoffensive, and mostly useless. "I thought you couldn't come," he said. "I thought you were speaking at a conference."

Vigal frowned. "Yes, that's right. But I convinced one of my apprentices to cover for me. At least, I think she said she would cover for me...." Vigal's eyes searched the ground as if he might find answers woven into the Aztec patterns on the carpet. Finally, he gave a self-deprecating shrug. "Well, there's nothing I can do about it now." Natch noticed the neural programmer's baffled expression and stifled a smile. It was impossible to get mad at Serr Vigal. He might be hopelessly out of touch, but at least he had a sense of humor about it.

"Come," said the older man, clapping a virtual hand on Natch's shoulder. "Let's take a walk in the garden, and I'll give you the last bit of sentimental nonsense you'll have to endure for the next twelve months."

The Proud Eagle's garden was the envy of metropolitan Cape Town. Gargantuan sunflowers sat alongside lush poppies and forbidding cacti, all growing in the shadows of redwoods, bonsai and elm. Natch had been training himself for initiation by trying to identify things that would not exist without Sheldon Surina's science of bio/logics, and this improbable congregation of plants was one of them. It was easy to forget that bio/logics dealt not only with the programming of the human body, but with other organic structures as well.

Serr Vigal kept his silence for several minutes. Natch could feel the hair on the back of his neck standing at attention as his guardian gave him one of those world-weary stares. The boy put his hands in his pockets and did his best to ignore it.

Natch wondered for the millionth time what kind of relationship Vigal had really had with his mother. Had he loved her? Had they slept together? Would they be bonded companions now if Lora had not been infected by that epidemic in the orbital colonies? It was a pointless exercise. All Natch ever managed to pry out of Vigal was the skeletal structure of a life story. Sometimes Natch suspected the neural programmer was really his father, but Genealogy Sleuth 24.7 concluded that the differences in their DNA made such a relationship unlikely at best.

"I hear some of your hivemates are starting their own fiefcorps after initiation," said Vigal abruptly.

Natch nodded. "A few of them."

"Your friend Brone among them, I suppose."

A flurry of emotions washed through Natch's mind as he considered the visage of his hated rival. The two had spent most of their childhood warily circling one another like fencers, always testing and probing for weaknesses. Over the past year, Natch's compet.i.tion with Brone had turned into full-scale war. "Krone is not my friend," he said through gritted teeth.

Natch's malice pa.s.sed right over Vigal's head. "What about Horvil?"

"He doesn't know."

"And you? After the hive, after initiation, what then?"

There was a pause. "I've had ... a few meetings."

Vigal exhaled softly and pretended to study a hanging grapevine. "I see."

Another period of silence followed. Serr Vigal seemed to be marshaling the courage to say something. Meanwhile, Natch could see through the hothouse windows that the commotion in the hive building was dying down. Families were giving their sons and daughters one last virtual embrace before cutting their multi connections. Natch and his fellows would be on their way to initiation in just eighteen hours.

"Listen, Natch," said his guardian finally. "I'd like to give you some advice before you head out to initiation. It's just ... I'm not very good at this kind of thing. As you know, raising a child wasn't something I planned. It sort of fell in my lap by accident.... And now, after all this time, I'm not sure how to begin...." Vigal stopped and collected his thoughts, aware he had not exactly gotten off to an auspicious beginning. "Natch, I have tried to give you the education your mother would have wanted you to have. She believed her hive did not adequately prepare her for the world. And now I wonder if the same thing will prove to be the case with you, here at the Proud Eagle."

"That's ridiculous," snapped Natch, instantly on the defensive. "Everybody knows that this is one of the best hives in the world."

"And how does one measure that?"

"Well, the capitalmen seem to think so. Do you know how many programmers from last year's cla.s.s got funding for their own fiefcorps?"

"Too many, if you ask me."