City folk, tending high-yield gardens and a few clip-wing ducks on the roof, loved pretending that made them rough and independent, blithely ignoring all the ways they still counted on society’s nurturing web, the tubes and ducts that piped in clean water, power, gas… and carried off a steady stream of waste. Ironically, few kids ever grew up better qualified to homestead a new frontier than Claire. And few had so little desire to do so.
After all, who in their right mind would want to live that way?
Oh, reducing your impact was moral and sensible, up to a point. Beyond which there was a lot to be said for labor-saving devices! Claire swore her own place would have a microwave-infrasound cooker. And an electric garbage disposal, oh please. And maybe, just for that first year of celebration — a licentious, never-ending gallon of store-bought ice cream.
Changing out of her sweaty work clothes in the privacy of her own room, Claire paused by a shelf of mementos brought by her father from trips all over the planet. A ten-million-year-old spider, encased in Dominican amber, lay next to fossils from the Afar desert and a beautiful hardwood dolphin, carved by a Brazilian engineer Logan had met in Belem.
Her mineral collection wasn’t exactly world class. But there was a lovely polished slab of bright green smithsonite, alongside its cousins jadeite and entrancing malachite. More yellowish than green, the hypnotic, translucent autainite had come from France, and the purple erythrite from deep in the Atlas Mountains of Morocco.
None of these minerals were particularly rare, not even the disk of glittering “star” quality quartz hanging over her mirror — where she let down her reddish-brown hair and checked for stray droplets from Tony’s pond. Picking up the crystal lens, she peered through it at her own image, wishing the highlights it gave her hair might somehow translate into the real world, where she so often envied other girls their shining locks.
As a child, she had thought the bit of quartz magical. But Logan had emphasized that it was a routine miracle. The Earth contained veins and seams and whole flows of beautiful mineral forms that took only a practiced eye to discover and a little skill to prepare. In contrast, Claire had been shocked when an uncle thought to please her one birthday with a “unique” gift — a slice of fossilized tree trunk. It had subsequently taken her weeks to investigate and discover its origins, then anonymously donate it back to the petrified forest it had been stolen from in the first place.
There was a difference, of course. Many common things could be beautiful, even magical. But in a world of ten billion people, true rarities shouldn’t be owned. At least on that point she, Logan, and Daisy all agreed.
Claire put the crystal back. Beside the mirror lay her favorite treasures, several beautiful chert arrowheads. Not archaeological relics, but even better. Logan had taught her to chip them herself, during one of their too infrequent camping trips. To be fair, Claire admitted both her parents had taught her useful things. Only Logan’s lessons always seemed much more fun.
Under the window, nesting in her neglected model of the Bonnet Carre Spillway, her pet mouse, Isador, twitched his nose as Claire stopped to pet him and feed him seeds.
The wall screens of her Net unit flickered on idle, showing new assignments from the remote-school in Oregon. But Claire first checked for personal messages. And sure enough, there was a blip from her father winking on her priority screen! At a spoken command, it lit up with a bright picture of Logan Eng standing atop a bluff overlooking a bay of brilliant blue water. To save power, she took the message in written form. Rows of letters shone.
HI MICRO-BIOTA. SAW AMAZING THINGS HERE IN SPAIN. SPELL THAT “UH-MAZING! “(□ SEE ATTACHED PIX.)
HAVE CRAZY THEORY TO EXPLAIN THESE EVENTS. WROTE A PAPER ABOUT IT FOR A SPEC-FACT SIC. IF I’M RIGHT, SOMETHING MIGHTY FISHY IS GOING ON!
ATTACHED A DRAFT (□) FOR YOU TO LOOK AT, IF YOU LIKE. A LITTLE TECHNICAL. NOTION’S PRO’BLY NONSENSE. BUT YOU MAY FIND THE ABSTRACT AMUSING.
MY BEST TO DAISY. SAY I’ll COME TO DINNER AFTER CLEARING PAPERWORK. I AM AT OFFICE.
LOVE YOU, HONEY. — DADDY □
Claire smiled. He wasn’t supposed to call himself “Daddy.” That was her affectation.
She touched the data appended tag and called up Logan’s speculative paper. Claire recognized the net-zine he was submitting it to… one where scientists could let their hair down without risking their reputations. She had a hunch Logan was really going to set off a ripe one this time.
Then she frowned. Suddenly suspicious, Claire queried her security program.
“Dumpit!” she cursed, stamping her feet in annoyance. Logan’s blip had been snooped since reception. And it didn’t take a genius to know who the snooper was. “Dumpit, Daisy!”
The older generation as a whole seemed to have no respect for privacy, but this was downright insulting. As a brilliant hacker, Daisy could have brushed aside her daughter’s simple security system and read Claire’s mail without leaving traces. That she hadn’t even bothered to cover her tracks showed either blithe indifference or straight contempt.
“Only half a year and I’m gone from here,” Claire told herself, repeating it like a mantra to calm down. “Only half a year.”
She wished, oh how she wished, that at sixteen, almost seventeen, that didn’t feel like eternity.
Meanwhile, in another room not far away, all four walls flickered with light and sound. And every glimmer found its own reflection in Daisy McClennon’s eyes.
To the left, a full-sized Davy Crockett — soot smeared and bloodied, but undaunted — defended the Alamo in color far more brilliant than ever imagined by the original director. Soon, sophisticated equipment under Daisy’s subtle guidance would add a third dimension and more. For the right price, she’d even intensify the experience with smell and the floor-rattling concussion of Mexican cannonballs.
Her best, most pricey enhancements were so good, in fact, they had to carry a truth-in-reality warning… a little pink diamond flashing in one corner, signifying “this isn’t real” to those with weak hearts or soft minds. While many called her an artist, Daisy did holo-augmentations for cash income, period. The other walls of her laboratory were devoted to her really important work.
Columns of data flowed like spume over a waterfall. Torrents — and yet mere samplings from the river, the ocean of information that was the Net. Daisy’s blue eyes skimmed scores of readouts at once.
Here a UNEPA survey assayed remaining rain-forest resources. Next to it rippled a project proposal by a major mining company. And over to the right, one of her subroutines patiently worked its way through a purloined list of antisabotage security procedures for the West Havana Nuclear Power Station… still apparently impregnable, but Daisy had hopes.
The visible portion of the flow was only a sliver, a fragment distilled and sent back to this nexus by her electronic servants — her ferrets and foxes, her badgers and hounds — data-retrieval programs euphemistically named after beasts, some now extinct but known in earlier times for their tenacity, hunger, and unwillingness to take “no” for an answer. All over the world, Daisy’s electronic emissaries searched and probed at her bidding, prying loose secrets, correlating, combining, devouring.
Daisy’s cover business helped explain her prodigious computing needs, her means. But actually, she lived and worked for ends. Into the universe of data she sent forth guerrillas, her personal contingents in the war against planet rapists.