Rainbows End by Vinge Vernor Read Free Book Online

the shoulder. “You know, I think we’ve made really good progress today. Now I’ve got to run.”
    In his former life, Robert Gu had paid even less attention to technology than he had to current events. Human nature doesn’t change, and as a poet his job was to distill and display that unchanging essence. Now… well, I’m back from the dead ! That was something new under the sun, a bit of technology somewhat too large to ignore. It was a new chance at life, a chance to continue his career. And where he should continue his art was obvious: with Secrets of the Ages . He had spent five years on the cantos of that sequence, poems such as “Secrets of the Child,”
“Secrets of the Young Lovers,”
    “Secrets of the Old.” But his “Secrets of the Dying” had been an arrant fake, written before he really started to die — no matter that people seemed to think it was the most profound canto of the sequence. But now… yes, something new: “Secrets of the One Who Came Back.” The ideas were coming and surely verse would follow.
    Every day there were new changes in himself, and old barriers suddenly removed. He could easily accept Reed Weber’s advice to be patient with his limitations. So much was changing and all for the better. One day he was walking again, even if it was a lurching, unstable gait. He fell three times that first day, and each time, he just bounced back to his feet. “Unless you fall on your head, Professor, you’ll be fine,” Reed said. But his walking got steadily better. And now that he could see — really see — he could do things with his hands. No more pawing around in the dark. He had never realized how important sight was to coordination. There are uncountable ways that things can lie and tangle and hide in three dimensions; without vision you’re condemned to compromise and failure. But not me. Not now . And two days after that…
    … he was playing Ping-Pong with his granddaughter. He remembered the table. It was the one that he’d bought for little Bobby thirty years ago. He even remembered Bob taking it off his hands when he finally gave up his home in Palo Alto.
    Today Miri was pulling her punches, lobbing the ball high and slow across the table. Robert moved back and forth. Seeing the ball was no problem, but he had to be very careful or he’d swing too high. Careful, careful went the game — until Miri had him down fifteen to eleven. And then he won five points, each stroke a kind of spastic twitch that somehow smashed the white plastic into the far edge of the table.
    “Robert! You were just fooling me!” Poor, pudgy Miri raced from one corner of the table to the other, trying to keep up with him. Robert’s slams had no spin, but she wasn’t an expert player. Seventeen to fifteen, eighteen, nineteen. Then his powerful swings got out of tune, and he was back to being a staggering spastic. But now his granddaughter showed no mercy. She racked up six straight points — and won the game.
    And then she ran around the table to hug him. “You are great! But you’ll never fool me again!” It didn’t do any good to tell her what Aquino had said, that the reconstruction of his nervous system would cause randomly spiky performance. He might end up with the reflexes of an athlete; more likely the endpoint would be something like average coordination.
It was funny, how he paid attention to the day of the week. That had stopped mattering even before he lost his marbles. But now, on the weekends, his granddaughter was around all day.
    “What was Great-Aunt Cara like?” she asked him one Saturday morning. “She was a lot like you, Miri.”
    The girl’s smile was sudden and wide and proud. Robert had guessed that this was what she wanted to hear. But it’s true, except that Cara was never overweight . Miri was like Cara, right in those last years of preadolescence when her hero worship for her older brother had been replaced by other concerns. If anything, Miri’s personality