I defined a five-kilometer cube of sky that would be remote enough, and high enough, that nobody could see me. Then, I programmed the sky-sling so that it would not leave those boundaries. I started with a speed of fifty kph, which turned out to be pretty tame – I guess because I had such a wide area of sky to play in. So, I upped the speed and randomized the sling’s movements it so that I couldn’t anticipate what was going to happen. Of course I had to field test my invention. I field-tested it a lot.
My most recent version of Upchuck flies me between 100 kph and 300 kph, straight up or straight down, or in a series of tight circles, in various kinds of loops, or right-side up or upside down, or in a rotational spin, or in a longitudinal tumble – all of this in the middle of a pitch-black sky. Now, THAT'S exciting. I haven’t christened the interior of the sky-sling with the name of the program yet, but I’ve had to build in a Stop flying if I lose consciousness command.
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From Izzy's journals: September 16, 2081.
Doc told Phlegm that he had heard rumours of women being pressured to become second wives and that he was planning some trips to the camps to verify if such was the case. Nobody would like that; Doc was too valuable to lose. Phlegm ordered an investigation and took dear mother with him. I had a clay copy of her storeroom key in my pocket just in case she lost hers on the trip.
Doc took over my class after I developed a potentially contagious stomach problem. Everyone gave my cabin a wide berth after they thought they saw me upchucking in front of it.
I found Phlegm’s stash on my first day of searching. From what I had seen of the carousing nights, I figured it was an oral form of brain pleasure chemical, but of course the nondescript container didn’t come with a label.
Confirming that Phlegm had some unknown substance hidden in the storehouse raised two questions. Dissidents have very little cash; we use the barter system to obtain supplies from friendly citizens; so, who was supplying the powder and what was Phlegm trading for it?
On the fourth day, I found a complete roster of Alberta’s dissidents. The list contained their location, marriage status, and number of children along with everyone’s real names, ages and physical descriptions. The information had been prepared within the last 6 months. Something this sensitive should never have been put on paper.
The missing DPS bots turned up on the fifth days. I made copies and returned the originals to their hiding place. I found nothing of any importance after that. Phlegm was bound to get suspicious of me sooner or later, so I made sure that I left the storeroom as I had found it and buried my key in the woods. I didn’t want Phlegm pawing through my clothes, but other than that, I didn’t care what he found or what he did in my cabin. Thinking that he might wonder what had happened to my music collection, I spent a day downloading. Hello Sonny; hello Cher; welcome home.
Two days before Phlegm was due to return, I put my life back to normal – teaching during the day and spending the evenings with Doc. Sort of. I spent most of my evenings in the clinic’s back room pouring through tons of data from six different DPS offices. In time, I might find it useful; fortunately, I had plenty of time.
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From Will's journals: September 23, 2081.
I now had a sky-sling that allowed me to fly in comfort while I read a bot or listened to music. If I wanted to move my camp, I could load everything and be off in less than fifteen-minutes. For faster travel without luggage, I could use the smaller sky-surfer. However, at high speed or high altitude, the sky surfer got quite cold, so I decided to save it for hauling luggage until I could make more filament to cover it.
I kept remembering Izzy’s comment about IOF citizens being unhappy. Here I was living contentedly with my full set of emotions. I think I had them pretty much under control. I did feel a little guilty about being able to live with emotions when nobody else could – I hadn’t learned to control that guilt yet. But, I didn’t have any great fits of anger anymore – probably because Izzy wasn’t around to provoke me. Unfortunately, without Izzy, I didn’t have to worry about being too happy either. My high-speed rides in my sky-sling were exciting at first, but after a while, my days became quite monotonous. I tried inventing some riddles, but asking yourself riddles doesn’t work when you’ve written them yourself. I tried playing NASA to Z-man, but that doesn’t work by yourself either.
I decided to see for myself if what Izzy had said about the people was true. I was old enough for my whiskers to appear and I was trying to grow a beard. It looked real scraggly – but that didn’t matter because it changed the outline of my face. Everyone would know I was just a young kid, so a scraggly beard was part of the territory. I cut my hair almost completely off, leaving myself only a centimeter or two. Izzy’s fake brain-band fit perfectly against my skull. I looked quite presentable, and nothing at all like the real me. I thought about changing the shape of my nose like Izzy had done, but didn’t have to. My nose looked like a thousand other noses. When I put on some old clothes, I found that I had bulked up a bit and may have even grown a bit. I might be taller than Izzy now. Again, this was enough of a difference to disguise me some more.
I did a test flight one night to see how fast my sky-sling could go. Obviously, all of my flights had to be by night. People might talk about seeing a kid flying through the air. I looked up the distance between Rocky Mountain House and Edmonton on one of Izzy’s geography bots. About 160 kilometers if I flew there directly. So, I took my sky-sling up to high altitude, put the fields on maximum and let it loose. The trip took about ten-minutes but the ski-sling was bucking the whole way. I realized that I had been approaching the speed of sound, which was probably not a good thing to do what with the sonic boom I would create. On the way back, I dialed it back, arrived in twenty-minutes and it was a much more comfortable flight. Now that I could travel in comfort anywhere I chose, all I had to do was decide where I wanted to go.
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From Izzy's journals: September 23, 2081.
Phlegm returned from another victorious tour of the camps to announce that he had found no evidence of any pressure on women to marry against their will. As proof, several buddies even came back with soon-to-be second wives. Their first wives weren’t particularly overjoyed; they weren’t expecting this kind of “Honey, I’m back!” gift.
Doc objected to the lack of prior discussion between married couples but ruled that the first wife didn’t have a right to know in advance. What a man talked about with a second wife was privileged information between him and that second wife. Doc tried to involve dear mother figuring that a radical feminist would have something pungent to say. Dear mother was passed out in her cabin; couldn’t be roused; Doc moved her into the clinic.
When Doc refused to conduct second-wife marriages, Phlegm appointed Wannabee as the new marriage maker. As his first act, Wannabee married himself to a seventeen year old; then he married the other second wives to his buddies.
Little Patty spilled the beans about my lengthy illness. Phlegm acted concerned. How long was I away from school? How did I feel now? Was I bored spending all that time by myself with nothing to do? I heard in my head the soft rattle of a snake’s tail. Leaving my students unsupervised for a bit would be a good way to promote responsibility, right?
Phlegm didn’t make me watch him for long. My scope gave me a safe view of him sauntering over to the storage cabin and examining its exterior. He checked the padlock, entered, came out after a couple of minutes, strolled over to Wannabee’s cabin, and disappeared inside. After a couple of minutes, Phlegm reappeared, resumed his nonchalant pose, and strolled into the woods. What gave him away was Wannabee's big gawky body loping along behind, his head on a swivel like a chicken looking for an axe. Like that wouldn't be noticed?
With Wannabee clearly acting like a watchdog, make that a watch-chicken, it was obvious that Phlegm had something in the woods that he didn’t want revealed. He couldn’t have found any evidence
of my presence in the storeroom – I had even removed the mud plaster I had stuffed into the chinks between the logs. However, Phlegm was worried enough about my extended illness to not only check the storeroom but to also take a guarded trip into the woods.
I waited at least a full minute before taking the well-worn path to the women’s privies. These were in the opposite direction from Phlegm’s jaunt in the woods. With no risk of Wannabee being able to see me, I slipped into the trees behind the privies and ran to a vantage point that I thought would give me a view of Phlegm’s possible destination. No such luck. I searched for a while and found lots of tracks, but they could have been anyone’s so I returned to the privies. Wannabee’s dozy wife came out as I arrived, gave me a cold stare, and took the trail to her cabin.
Stupid, stupid, stupid!!! Me, not her.
That night, I found a DPS file that revealed five years of payments for Services rendered. The person receiving the payment, the amount that was paid, and the type of service that was rendered were coded. Such secrecy was quite unusual for DPS offices that apparently identified and recorded the minutest detail of their business operations. The file had been stolen from the DPS office closest to our base camp.
Several days later, I returned from school to find that my room had been searched. The search had been very careful; not careful enough.
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From Will's journals: September 30, 2081.
I was hovering in my sky-sling over a remote lake. I hadn’t decided where to set up my permanent camp yet because building up my food supply before winter was more important. Before inventing the sky-sling, I had gathered only enough food for a day or two. But now, I could catch a month’s supply of food, pop over to the top of a nearby mountain, and let it freeze. I had four filaments with worm-laden hooks trailing in the water as my sky-sling trolled above the lake in a pre-programmed route. I wasn’t paying too much attention to fishing.
I was tired of hiding from the DPS. Hiding wasn’t going to change anything. Sooner or later, I’d get sloppy and they’d catch me. So, perhaps I should make their life miserable first. The problem was: I didn’t know how to make their life miserable. That’s when the phrase Know your enemy popped into my mind. I had read that phrase in one of Izzy’s course bots weeks ago, but hadn’t thought much about it. So, I retrieved Izzy’s courses on military science and I was studying them while I fished.
One thing I realized right away was that Izzy had used military strategy when we had played our really long chess game. When I play chess, I build my offense slowly, moving pieces into positions that do not appear immediately threatening. Then, I move a single, innocuous little piece to trigger a trap. Since I plan eight to ten plays in advance, I am able to disguise my moves so that the trap is unexpected. I had just naturally assumed that my opponent was doing the same. Now I understood from what Izzy had said about me being smart, that this hadn’t been the case. In effect, I had always won because I could plan into the future further than my opponent.
But, when I played Izzy, she didn’t let me build up any overwhelming force so that I could trap her. Instead, just as I was getting my pieces in place, her queen would go on a solo run down an unguarded column of the board. It would look like a sacrifice play, but after I analyzed it, I could see that with a little support from other pieces, she could threaten my entire back row. I had to move some pieces back to prevent that, but I couldn’t relocate only a few pieces without leaving my forward positions exposed. I had to re-deploy my entire offense. I’d just get back into an impregnable defense when she’d remove her queen and I’d have to start all over again.
It took me hours to beat Izzy because she kept on finding a weakness on my board where I was vulnerable to that single powerful, sudden stroke. Now that I looked back on it, Izzy probably had been doing to me what she wanted the dissidents to do to the DPS. In our chess game, she had used a powerful, mobile piece to threaten a much larger, but slower force. That was a strategy that I could use against the DPS because I was now a mobile opponent. So, I was reading all about military strategy and thinking how I could use it to fight the DPS. I was also thinking how nice it would be to have another chess game with Izzy.
Sure, Izzy could be aggravating. But, that was when she had been scared, and I had been scared too. I thought we might actually be able to get along now that we knew each other better. I didn’t like arguing with her, but I did enjoy having fun with her. That got me humming a Sonny and Cher song, so I put one of Izzy’s music bots into my scalp plug and just let my mind drift along for a while. Izzy had given me not only all of her course bots, but all of her music bots too, which I thought was very nice of her because they meant a lot to her.
Izzy had done something that nobody had ever done before. Not any of the other students in my dorm, not my instructors, not my brain-band programmer, not my childcare attendant, not even my volunteer-parents. She had touched me with her hand.
You see, nobody touched anyone in the IOF. At least kids didn’t. I didn’t know about adults. We were taught that each person had a private space around him or her, and you mustn’t invade that space. You might brush somebody’s hand when you were passing food, but other than those kinds of necessary contacts, our brain-bands made sure that we didn’t touch each other.
Izzy was different. Not that she touched me a lot. She had touched my face when she was whispering to me in her pit, but she was sort of forced to do that because we were crammed in a tight space. She touched my face when we were hanging from a tree and had to talk quietly. She slapped me on the back when she told me she had gone crazy over chocolate too. She had held my arms a couple of times when we were arguing – just to calm me down. She touched me, and I touched her, when we were doing the hip-check game. Also, the Oops, you tripped game. We touched each other a lot when we were play wrestling. That made me remember of our last wrestling fight and I knew that I had to get that picture out of my mind, so I thought about her two best touches: when she put her arms around my waist and told me she had had a good day; and when she kissed me on the lips when I took my new name.
I was thinking about those touches when my sky-sling rocked in the air. A flock of Canada Geese was landing on my lake. One of them had bumped into my sky-sling and was wheeling away squawking like mad.
Blind geese, if there were any such animals, would not survive for long in the wild. They certainly wouldn’t be able to fly. Therefore, that irritated goose was not blind.
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From Izzy's journals: September 30, 2081.
Dear mother still ill; Doc found evidence of brain-chemical poisoning.
Early in the week, camp sentries reported possible intruders in the area. Phlegm took decisive action in face of this threat by banning all travel to satellite camps and ordering all non-military personnel confined to the main, fortified compound. I hadn’t realized Phlegm cared so much about my safety. Doc said that sarcasm wasn’t attractive on me; then, we laughed. I had learned sarcasm from Doc.
Phlegm’s fake intruder ploy wasn’t only to keep me out of the woods; it was also a follow-up to dear mother’s poisoning. Phlegm asked dear mother in a council meeting what would have happened if a more serious threat had emerged when she was ill? He wouldn’t have had the authority to act! Dear mother gave Phlegm full decision-making authority. I had underestimated Phlegm again.
Phlegm struck again a few days later. He told dear mother that he was concerned that those possible intruders could have lead to deaths in his militia. He wanted to leave a child behind if he had to give his life for the movement. Dear mother praised his nobility; said that he wouldn’t have to wait until I was eighteen; moved marriage up to October 21st – three weeks from now!!!
Doc complained about the wedding date at a council meeting; said that fifteen-year old children shouldn’t be married. Dear mother said that he wasn’t my parent – she was. Doc listed the dangers of cousin-cousin marriages; dear mother said that she didn
’t care how many two headed monsters I popped out, so long as they weren’t brown and weren’t cowards. Doc was banned from further executive council meetings for his constant criticism of the executive.
I really appreciated the council members who made a point of passing on what dear mother had said. Doc tried to console me. Dear mother’s words didn’t make me any sadder; already at max sadness about her; just made me more determined.
I searched though the DPS bots every spare minute I had – analyzing, cross-referencing, and looking for inconsistencies. By the end of September, I had managed to identify the DPS agent who had made the payments to the traitor. All I had was the agent’s code name. It wasn’t enough yet; not even close.
Only three weeks to the wedding. I shuddered every time I thought of pudgy Phlegm touching me; stored suicide crown in my mouth so that it couldn’t be stolen.
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Chapter 18
From Will's journals: Sunday, October 1.
The goose bouncing off my sky-sling could mean only one thing. Migration season was in full swing so I gave the hypothesis a good test the next day. Every time a flock of geese approached the lake, I put my sky-sling directly in their flight path. With the lid to the sky-sling closed, the geese either collided with me or came close. With the lid to the sky-sling open, the geese changed their flight path long before they came near. Was geese vision substantially different from human vision? I thought not, but there was a simple test.
I flew into Rocky Mountain House that night. I was dressed in my most presentable clothes in case I was seen. My beard was trimmed – sort of. It’s hard to trim tufts of scraggly, curly hair. I hovered the closed sky-sling in various locations, some of them quite busy. Nobody showed any signs of seeing me. In fact, I could speak to someone and they would look around trying to locate the voice.