Rainbows End by Vinge Vernor Read Free Book Online Page A

was an exaggeration of Cara’s. Miri was very bright — probably smarter than her great-aunt. And Miri was already into the extreme independence and moral certainty of the other. I remember that persistent arrogance , thought Robert. That had been an enormous irritation; breaking her of it had been what drove them apart.
    Sometimes Miri had her little friends over. The boys and girls mixed pretty indescriminately at this age and in this era. For a few brief years they were almost matched for muscle. Miri loved to play doubles at Ping-Pong.
    He had to smile at the way she bossed her friends around. She had them organized into a tournament. And though she was scrupulously honest, she played to win . When her side got behind, her jaw set in angry determination, and there was steel in her eyes. Afterward she was quick to acknowledge her own failures, and just as quick to critique her playmates.
Even when her friends were gone physically, they were often still around, invisible presences like Robert’s doctors. Miri walked around the backyard talking and arguing with nobody — a parody of all the cellphone discourtesy that Robert remembered from his later years at Stanford.
    Then there were Miri’s grand silences. Those didn’t match anything in his recollection of Cara. Miri would push gently back and forth on the swing that hung from the only good-sized tree in the backyard. She would do that for hours , speaking only occasionally — and then to the empty air. Her eyes seemed to be focused miles away. And when he asked her what she was doing, she would start and laugh and say that she was “studying.” It looked much more like some kind of pernicious hypnosis to Robert Gu.
    Weekdays, Miri was off at school; a limo pulled up for her every morning, always at the moment that the girl was ready to go. Bob was gone nowadays, “to be back in a week or so.” Alice was home part of each day, but she was in a distinctly short-tempered mood. Sometimes he would see her at lunch; more often, his daughter-in-law was at Camp Pendleton until midafternoon. She was especially irritable when she came back from the base.
    Except for Reed Weber’s therapy sessions, Robert was left much to his own devices. He wandered around the house, found some of his old books in cardboard boxes in the basement. Those were almost the only books in the house. This family was effectively illiterate. Sure, Miri bragged that many books were visible any time you wanted to see them, but that was a half truth. The browser paper that Reed had given him could be used to find books online, but reading them on that single piece of foolscap was a tedious desecration.
    It was remarkable foolscap, though. It really did support teleconferencing; Dr. Aquino and the remote therapists were not just invisible voices anymore. And the web browser was much like the ones he remembered, even though many sites couldn’t be displayed properly. Google still worked. He searched for Lena Llewelyn Gu. Of course, there was plenty of information about her. Lena had been a medical doctor and rather well known in a limited, humdrum way. And yes, she had died a couple of years ago. The details were a cloud of contradiction, some agreeing with what Bob told him, some not. It was this damn Friends of Privacy. It was hard to imagine such villains, doing their best to undermine what you could find on the net. A “vandal charity” was what they called themselves.
    And that eventually got him into the News of the Day. The world was as much a mess as ever. This month, it was a police action in Paraguay. The details didn’t make sense. What were “moonshine fabs” and why would the U.S. want to help local cops close them down? The big picture was more familiar. The invading forces were looking for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Today they had found nuclear weapons hidden beneath an orphanage. The pictures showed slums and poor people, ragged children playing inscrutable games that somehow