JDB
JDB controlled Dain's aircraft from a transparent, bulbous chamber at its very nose. What it
sacrificed in aerodynamics, it made up with view. The flight plan Kär had filed called for a long
curve that swung north before dropping into the Laetoli Valley. JDB planned a stop along the way.
JDB pictured Dain, off in his corner of their mind, meditating. This host personality, so
confident in his mastery of mind and body, thought he could go off on his mental travels and their
shared physical shell would just sit around, waiting.
Not hardly, snorted JDB. Maybe the other alters wouldn't dare come out without permission, but JDB
had things to do, an urge to satisfy, a mission to fulfill, another child to save from their
culture's overwhelming indifference.
From his vantage point ten kilometers high, JDB selected a small village that charted the junction
of three rail lines with orderly green streaks.
"Get clearance," he directed the craft's automata.
A moment later, permission scrolled over a foilscreen by his left knee. JDB applied feet and hands
to the controls and plunged his craft and himself toward the cruciform drome on the ground far
below.
#
JDB waved away offers of service as he strolled across the drome's apron toward the interchange
with local transport. He waited for a few moments, his full-length danshiki flapping idly in the
breeze, then rode a minibus toward the single urban finger that gathered the direvnya's buildings.
He found the school easily. Signs with course titles studded its family of entrances. The
four-story building, narrow and irregular, offered as many classrooms outside its ground story as
inside. The smooth, white plaster coating the walls wavered slightly as they ascended. JDB
pictured inexperienced townspeople as they tended the mechanical automata during construction. No
need for neatness, he acknowledged, when only durability counted.
He waited under a grape arbor that cast welcome shade on a bench provided with parents in mind. In
time, the bunched entrances released a flood of children. The youngest, with barely a Niner and a
half inside their skins, emerged first, clumping down stairs on legs just a little short. Then,
older ones, capable of more speed, burst out, around, and through. They erupted in bunches,
jabbering, taunting, laughing. Then, after the deluge, the trickle of loners, dreamers, and
misfits.
He picked out one, a girl, not yet on the verge of bloom, whose eyes skittered over the path, whose
hands, clutching a skein of infoplates, glared with fingernails bitten to the quick, whose teeth
even now nibbled on lips because the fingers were busy. He unfolded from the shade and trailed her
in the bright sun of the continent's interior.
