“So now we put mini-nodes on them,” said Mike. “You did pretty well with the power configuration.” Without any online computation at all.
“Yeah!” She gave him a strange look. “But you got the stability in less than an hour. It would have taken me days to set up the simulations.”
“It’s easy with the right tools.”
She looked disbelieving.
“Hey, I’m near failing at bonehead math. Look Dr. Xu, if you learn to search and use the right packages, you could do all this.” He was beginning to sound like Chumlig. And this fits with the affiliance! “I-I could show you. There are all sorts of joint projects we could do!” Maybe she would always be one of those deep resource people, but if she found her place, that would be more than he could ever be.
He wasn’t sure if Dr. Xu really understood what he was talking about. But she was smiling. “Okay.”
MIKE was late walking home, but that was okay. Ralston Blount had signed onto the affiliance. He was working with Doris Nguyen on her project. Xiaowen Xu had also signed on. She was living at Rainbow’s End rest home, but she had plenty of money. She could buy the best beginner’s wearable that Epiphany made.
Big Lizard would be pleased, and maybe some money would come Mike’s way.
And maybe that didn’t matter so much. He suddenly realized he was whistling as he walked. What did matter… was a wonderful surprise. He had coordinated something today. He had been the person who helped other people. It was nothing like being a real top agent-but it was something.
The Radner twins were almost home, but they showed up to chat.
“You’ve been scarce, Mike.” They were both grinning. “Hey, we got an A from Williams!”
“For the Vancouver project?”
“Yup. He didn’t even check where we got it,” said Jerry.
“He didn’t even ask us to explain it. That would have been a problem!” said Fred.
They walked a bit in companionable silence.
“The hole we put in the Pyramid Hill fence is already repaired.”
“No surprise. I don’t think we should try that again anytime soon.”
“Yeah,” Fred said emphatically. His image wavered. The slime was still messing his clothes.
Jerry continued, “And we collected some interesting gossip about Chumlig.” The students maintained their own files on faculty. Mostly it was good for laughs. Sometimes it had more practical uses.
“What’s that?”
“Okay, this is from Ron Williams. He says he got it firsthand, no possibility of Friends of Privacy lies.” That’s how most FOP lies were prefaced, but Mike just nodded.
“Ms. Chumlig was never fired from Hoover High. She’s moonlighting there. Maybe other places, too.”
“Oh. Do the school boards know?” Ms. Chumlig was such a straight arrow, it was hard to imagine she was cheating.
“We don’t know. Yet. We can’t figure why Hoover would let this happen. You know those IBM Fellows they were bragging about? All three were in Chumlig’s classes! But she kinda drifted out of sight when the publicity hit. Our theory is there’s some scandal that keeps her from taking credit… Mike?”
Mike had stopped in the middle of the path. He shrugged up his record of this morning, and matched Big Lizard’s English usage with Chumlig’s.
He looked back at the twins. “Sorry. You… surprised me.”
“It surprised us, too. Anyway, we figure this could be useful if Jerry and I have serious grade problems in her class.”
“Yeah, I guess it could,” said Mike, but he wasn’t really paying attention anymore. It suddenly occurred to him that there could be something beyond top agents. There could be people who helped others on a time scale of years. Something called teachers.
HOW WE GOT IN TOWN AND OUT AGAIN by Jonathan Lethem
Here’s a wry but poignant look at an impoverished future America desperate for almost any kind of entertainment… and at the down-and-outers desperate enough to provide it for them…
Jonathan Lethem is one of that generation of talented young writers who came along in the ’90s and the Oughts to date, and whose reputation spreads far outside the usual genre limits. He has worked at an antiquarian bookstore, written slogans for buttons, and lyrics for several rock bands (including Two Fettered Apes, EDO, Jolley Ramey, and Feet Wet), and is also the creator of the Dr. Sphincter character on MTV. In addition to all these certifiably cool credentials, Lethem has also made sales to magazines as varied as Asimov’s Science Fiction and The New Yorker, as well as Interzone, The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and McSweeney’s Enchanted Chamber of Astonishing Stories. His first novel, Gun, With Occasional Music, won the Locus Award for Best First Novel as well as the Crawford Award for Best Fantasy Novel, and was one of the most talked-about books of the year. His other books include the novels Amnesia Moon, As She Climbed Across the Table, Girl in Landscape, and The Fortress of Solitude, and two collections of his short fiction, The Wall of the Sky, the Wall of the Eye and Men and Cartoons: Stories. His novel Motherless Brooklyn won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 2000. His most recent book is a nonfiction collection, The Disappointment Artist: Essays. Coming up is a new fiction collection, How We Got Insipid.
WHEN we first saw somebody near the mall Gloria and I looked around for sticks. We were going to rob them if they were few enough. The mall was about five miles out of the town we were headed for, so nobody would know. But when we got closer Gloria saw their vans and said they were scapers. I didn’t know what that was, but she told me.
It was summer. Two days before this Gloria and I had broken out of a pack of people that had food but we couldn’t stand their religious chanting anymore. We hadn’t eaten since then.
“So what do we do?” I said.
“You let me talk,” said Gloria.
“You think we could get into town with them?”
“Better than that,” she said. “Just keep quiet.”
I dropped the piece of pipe I’d found and we walked in across the parking lot. This mall was long past being good for finding food anymore but the scapers were taking out folding chairs from a store and strapping them on top of their vans. There were four men and one woman.
“Hey,” said Gloria.
Two guys were just lugs and they ignored us and kept lugging. The woman was sitting in the front of the van. She was smoking a cigarette.
The other two guys turned. This was Kromer and Fearing, but I didn’t know their names yet.
“Beat it,” said Kromer. He was a tall squinty guy with a gold tooth. He was kind of worn but the tooth said he’d never lost a fight or slept in a flop. “We’re busy,” he said.
He was being reasonable. If you weren’t in a town you were nowhere. Why talk to someone you met nowhere?
But the other guy smiled at Gloria. He had a thin face and a little mustache. “Who are you?” he said. He didn’t look at me.
“I know what you guys do,” Gloria said. “I was in one before.”
“Oh?” said the guy, still smiling.
“You’re going to need contestants,” she said.
“She’s a fast one,” this guy said to the other guy. “I’m Fearing,” he said to Gloria.
“Fearing what?” said Gloria.
“Just Fearing.”
“Well, I’m just Gloria.”
“That’s fine,” said Fearing. “This is Tommy Kromer. We run this thing. What’s your little friend’s name?”
“I can say my own name,” I said. “I’m Lewis.”
“Are you from the lovely town up ahead?”