Weir Annadetcall
Weir rushed into the health-maintenance center of his clinic. Nurses engaged patients in all
stages of the Pattern for a Wholesome Visit, but he wasn't concerned with that right now. He was
looking for Okra.
Ford had just called: the Rendezvous of Futures wouldn't contract with them either.
Byukan-Hamil's lockout was complete. Now Weir's Crew-for-Selling could out-source locally only to
The Tangent, a combine always ready to serve, but very slow to reveal themselves — or he'd have to
reach across an ocean to the Crew-in-Support. So, Weir searched for Okra to clear up those matters
vital, matters of ignorance and dependence: Weir's ignorance of The Tangent, and his combine's
dependence thorough on it for critical services here in Ganj Dareh. Günter, Wier knew, would not
be happy about how he had lost control in those two areas.
To find Okra, he had to find Foxfire first, so he called to Sier at reception.
She spun toward him from her tall-desk. Per Reception-Welcomes-You, she stood open to all
visitors, soft chairs outlining her space, a server behind her wafting aromas of qahwah and
beygls.
Deliberately, he gave his attention to Sier for the moment. "How's it going?"
"Fine. We've got some repeaters in the 'Yoga for Beginners' class this afternoon."
That news plucked at his focus, diverting it. "Hey, our first sign of change in patterns
consumer!" Not now. He had clocked into his walkabout shift. "Tell Melha, would you? She's
riding the team-leader role right now."
Sier nodded, then raised her eyebrows as a sign of readiness for whatever Weir wanted.
"Where's Foxfire?" he said.
"Off to her training clinic. Some class she couldn't reschedule." She cast a thumb toward the
back of the house-row. "She usually takes that path."
"Appreciated." Weir took another moment and gave Sier one of his best grins. He'd found that they
worked better than words as acknowledgement of competence. She grinned back as though praised,
waved him on to his goal, and resumed work at her desk.
Released, Weir scooted out the backdoor. About twenty zhee-tely sat around the trim yard in asana
Ardhakurmakasana. He jogged past their half-tortoise pose, his eyes searching the path that curved
away from the clinic's entrance-room off to his left.
A flash of green uniform caught his attention. It zipped on two wheels along the other side of the
now-convalescing sward. Another moment and the Nurse-in-Training would disappear into the
neighborhood surrounding.
Weir halted, sucked air for a bellow, then used it to send Foxfire's name across the open space
dividing them. It worked. With a spurt of dust, she slid her bicycle to a halt, then raised her
head in his direction.
"Foxfire, wait!" he hollered. "I must talk with you!"
When Foxfire dismounted her cycle as a sign she'd heard, Weir hustled forward again.
His llevar flopped at his hip. He chose this hard-cased form of the device because it suited his
use of it as a tool, nothing more, but nothing less. It helped him do his job. In fact, he
sometimes preferred to work through it, rather than address some of the more people-based realities
of his duties. But the llevar never became part of him. He would never shmatte it, weaving it
into his clothes, much less insert some or all of its innards into his body, like some people in
this world. Especially when it had failed him.
Passive now, his llevar nonetheless contained the results disappointing from his
agent-for-multifaceted-queries. Weir had sent this proprietary agent, available to Gatogrebok
tacticians only, into the Mirnaya Direvnya two days before. He sicced it on data of all kinds,
formatted and unformatted, character-based and digitized, public and private, with access both
intelligent and brute.
Using Günter's imprimatur, he directed it to attend will-hears around the globe using other
tacticians' proxies.
He also invoked its capabilities crypto-analytic. The agent did not attempt to burgle any coag,
that is, hack its way into the data therein, but it did apply a thorough set of keys skeleton to
all coags it could find. These keys targeted common methods of encryption, all well-known and
-documented; anyone using these methods should expect their data to be as visible as an
ostrich-from-Gë hiding its head in sand.
Still and yet, the agent had produced only scraps of data about The Tangent, altogether
unsatisfactory and unhelpful:
* Applications for admissions to schools advanced and to societies professional and fraternal gave
addresses via a gateway/Em-Deh whose ownership property referenced The Tangent.
* Brute searchs of coags/Em-Deh, used for routing and administration, revealed the
text-string "The Tangent," but encryption prevented more understanding.
* The original manifest for the Escape from Mondonguillo showed twenty-three people who listed
their religious preference as "The Tangent."
Frustrated by machines, Weir now sought out people.
Puffing from the exertion extended, he ran up to Foxfire. He smiled and managed, "Off to class?"
Two heads shorter than Weir, she nodded with an expression both receptive and impatient, attending
to one boss, but worried about another.
Weir produced his point immediately. "Can you tell me where to find Okra?"
Foxfire almost betrayed an exasperation justified, but catching herself, she waved at Weir's
llevar.
Weir shook his head negatively. "I tried that. He's no' in his office nor is he answering
requests for an immediate will-see nor is he available on auto-locate. He's virtually
disappeared." Weir felt a craving, awkward and demanding, for data only Okra, another tactician,
could supply. "Please, I know you're rushed, but I must talk with him right away."
"Let's go to your office then." Foxfire arrowed a hand at the house-row behind Weir. "I can find
out there."
He blinked in surprise as the petite young woman swung herself back on the bike.
"Hop on," she said, waving at the rack, broad and made of thin-metal spars, covering the rear
wheel.
Such a contraption, short and flimsy, couldn't support him. The whole vehicle didn't seem much
stronger. Foxfire, also frail, couldn't possibly balance him and herself too. She couldn't power
the bike with him on it either. How could she ask him to ride that way?
A chuckle burst from Foxfire, a whole-hearted sound that lit up her face. "Come on, Weir! You're
in a hurry. So am I! The quickest way back is on wheels, but we've got to go now."
She seemed comfortable with the vehicle, but he — "I've never ridden one of these," he said.
"I've always ... at least three wheels and, uh, and a motor." Why did he feel like he was
confessing a sin-of-omission never perceived before?
Foxfire stared a second, then let off another chuckle. "Surely, you can balance, a big guy like
you."
Still leery, Weir ventured, "Well, of course ..."
Abruptly, Foxfire took his elbow and dragged him toward the rack, leaving him no choice. He swung
a leg over, settled down, and found that, with his feet up and resting on the axle nuts, his perch
was uncomfortable and precarious. He clung to the bike's seat while they raced back along the
path, around the clinic's entrance-room, and up to his office without incident. Foxfire put down
her feet, flicked two switches on the bike's console, dismounted, then advanced straight toward the
frontdoor. Weir clambered free of the vehicle — it resisted his every bid to knock it over — and
hurried to follow.
He found her in the innermost room. He'd turned it into a storeroom to keep people away from the
backwall and its port to the virtual, unexplained, unresponsive, that he'd found behind the
wallpaper three days ago when they'd moved in. Foxfire peered expectantly at that wall, at that
very place. Oddly, she waved an ICES-pen at it — he'd heard of them, small enough to clip to a
pocket, a natural extension of a hand, capable of many functions llevar, but never used one — and
produced a minimal Em-Deh entrance.
A section of the wall glowed, its surface electrically tricked into acting as a primitive
foilscreen showing an embossed logo: two Ts, tightly coupled, plain, apparently cobbled together
of rough, aged wood, stood boldly before a varied background of airbrushed and textured pearl.
Then he discovered more lines imposed in the middle distance: an arc of smudged black, implying a
large circle, drawn with an erratic hand; a line of narrow, crisp black nudging the arc and leading
high and right toward and penetrating another circle, smaller, distant, wrought with an aching
purity of line and shape.
In a world laced with graphics evocative, this one employed the same tools in a manner most rare
and stirring. Yet another surprise in a day pounding with them.
Still the image had to be coming from somewhere. Entrances minimal portrayed an intelligence
remote, not their own. Weir snatched up his llevar and aimed it toward the port he'd left for
dead. When he flipped open his foilscreen, the agent-for-connection already struggled with the
interface.
"Hey!" Foxfire said. "This is private!" She brushed at his llevar, pushing it away. "You'll
shut it down." With a glare at once wounded and flippant, she added, "You broke it before, didn't
you? I had to ask for a hard ping to reboot it."
Weir closed the llevar, powered it down. Awkward, rattled, he watched her work.
A keyspace projected horizontally from the screen's bottom edge. Foxfire poked her ICES-pen
insistently into it: the holographic image shifted itself into a slate. She rested her hand on
the apparent surface and drew on it, resulting not in a picture, but in words. Somehow, her
scrawls converted to text showing on the foilscreen. Images there changed in reaction, asking
questions and showing maps.
Handwriting. Weir had read of it, particularly in older books from Gë, but he'd never seen it
practiced. Everyone he knew either typed or spoke to build text or instruct automata. Somehow,
this skill, added to everything else, didn't surprise him.
"I found Okra," Foxfire announced. "He's taking a can-feel at a restaurant called 'Knight of
Elizabeth' in Bromsgrove Neighborhood. He's due there in twelve-hundred, sixty seconds and plans a
nine-hundred-second meeting." With a graceful fillip, she dismissed the impromptu entrance and
looked around at Weir. "Is that all you need? I really have to get a move on."
"What was all that?" Weir waved at the wall, now-empty.
"Could you ask Okra, please? I'm late for a very important meeting of my own, and I have to change
clothes first."
Stifling his curiosity, his need for information, Weir flapped his hand toward the door.
"Sure. Go on. Appreciated, Foxfire, appreciated highly."
After a smile perfunctory and a wave cut short, Foxfire ran from the room, through the archways of
the Long Thin House, and turned toward the front.
Weir fumbled his llevar back into action, moving quickly to abort its agent-for-connection as it
started up again about that odd port. Rather, a query showed him how to get to the Knight of
Elizabeth and estimated a travel time of one point eight hecto-seconds, even allowing for the
recent service degradation, fast enough to catch Okra if Weir hustled over to the interchange and
boarded a trolley now.
Hustled like the desperate man he was. Desperate because he'd allowed expediency to violate a
Pattern of Management, one of many patterns Günter had taken him through in recent seconds. Then,
he'd accepted its wisdom on its face, inherited from its place in a pattern language. Now, he
truly understood its truth, simple, persistent, endemic in human nature.
The Spread-the-Risk-of-Outsourcing Pattern said, "As ancient sea-men, dependent on primitive clocks
to find their way on oceans, vast and inscrutable, did not rely on one such clock, lest it break
down, or even two, lest they disagree without means to tell which was right, you should not depend
on one or even two contractors to guide you about acceptable levels of cost and quality and time
till delivery."
Yet what choice did he have? Even Günter had not realized how completely Byukan-Hamil dominated
business in Ganj Dareh, and every BH combine had refused to service his teams. Thankfully, they
allowed transactions volatile — paid on the spot, immediately profitable with no carry-over
obligations — or else nothing — matériel for construction, housing temporary, food even —
would've been possible. Even the out-of-work gathered at this Rendezvous of Futures had declined
their Geld. Only The Tangent had helped fill in the gaps in his Crew-for-Selling.
Out a back window, Weir saw Foxfire peddling furiously along the path, sweeping around the sward
and plunging into the neighborhood back there. Far too late, he remembered the speech she had
promised to deliver in the Ganj Dareh will-hear about his combine's proposal. He'd intended to
thank her again as he reminded her to get it done soon. Surprises, especially compounded ones,
sure derailed those plans.
A gurgle, somewhat south of his navel, rippled sound and motion through his gut, splintering his
thoughts. He could no longer ignore the hot, packed, muddy feeling down there. He'd
managed to stave it off by addressing The Tangent through automata, his supposedly trusty llevar.
But now ...
Ignorance and dependence, the catchwords he used to label his problems with The Tangent, problems
he could no longer ignore. Their void compacted his gut; it told him nothing about reliability,
about integrity, about depth and breadth of The Tangent's capability to service his combine.
Should he reach back to the Crew-in-Support and spend the money to import help from there? Did he
need to awaken Günter to his predicament? Or could he continue to depend on Okra and his people?
He should resolve this now: the walkabout phase provided time to round out their proposal, tie up
all the loose ends, smooth out the rough spots, tighten the chile with masa, and all those other
clichés that covered this part of the condition human. In a way, patterns are like clichés,
reminding us about things we do — or should do — over and over ... except they're consistent and
reinforcing. With clichés, you can find one to fit every situation.
So, the project plan offered him the chance to work on this ... this tangential issue.
Har-de-har, Weir, he thought and knew it was this very tangentiality, this
off-the-recognized-path-ness, that bothered him the most. He knew he could be flexible — he
prided himself on it — Günter had praised him about it — but he realized now that his flexibility
worked only within certain parameters, namely his defined job, circumscribed by patterns and
exposed to specific skills.
An inkling suggested he'd better work on that for the future — a future that was pounding its
surprising way into his present.
The llevar in his hand beckoned. It focused on the Knight of Elizabeth. With a simple command, he
could place a call there, try to catch Okra with a will-see. They could talk that way, exchange
data through cyberspace. That would be so easy ...
No! He used to prefer handling things that way, a pattern of his own, a habit he had thought
broken, left behind in his days pre-tactician. No more. I chose to become a tactician, a person
who accomplishes goals through other people, no' machines. I canno' go back now without failing
myself ... and my combine ... and Günter. So I won't.
Even if the unknowns made him nervous. Especially with Foxfire's surprises just now compounding
everything he hadn't known before. His lower gut surged with foreboding. If she packed so many
surprises, what is Okra hiding? What secrets does he keep?
Impulsively, Weir clapped his llevar shut, slapping away its temptation, shutting out misgivings,
committing himself to zhuhndí action. It felt good, a relief actually. He tucked the device away
on his hip and started toward the frontdoor. Foxfire's example pricked him, and he broke into a
jog. Once outside, he pushed himself to a run, rounding the entrance-room and fixing on the
trolley station.
