There were ruddy hills near the edge of the world, and the winds blew delicately about. . . . Mars? It matched his memories of the historical tapes, though he'd never been there. . . . They drew closer, now only a hundred meters up, and he could see life, thin, scraggly vegetation, a dead bush rolling across the sand, in a place where the air was too thin for any wind to push such a mass. Was this the future then, after the planetary engineering projects had finished their task? No. It was too bleak. They moved into the east, and the sun rose, fat, orange, then bright. The color of the desert floor lightened and the sky turned to blue, andboth colors were of a searing intensity, as if the saturation level had been turned up. The mountains came up on them, low here, higher in the distance, the sun rising over them, and the colors changed. They were following a road, rutted deep into yellow soil. They crossed a steel bridge over a turbulent brown river and went into the mountains. They went into the canyon lands, where desert lay on the surface, still, but the deep gouges were filled with streams, and the streams brought life. Where? A soft voice, deep and sensual, started whispering in his ear, carried on the wings of a damp wind.
Do you remember? It's a long time ago, deep in your life, before the greater world called to you, before you stepped into the dark void. It is the time before you fell. . . . When? Go back. Stride gently into the forest. You were eight; and now you are thirty-eight. It must be 2067, then. Is that right?
Let it be. Dates do not matter. Only times. How did it happen? What were the beginnings? The past is remote, but it becomes less so when you remember, . . . The voice became drier, less personal, almost pedantic, telling a story of sorts, as the landscape slowly rolled past, waiting for the rim of that certain valley, following the ancient road.
. . . in the aftermath of the Data Control Insurrection that had nearly destroyed the world, when much of North America had to be rebuilt, the desert lands between the two great mountain ranges began to collect all the host of disconnected, self-directed people from the surrounding areas: kibbutzniks came, with a bright dream of society reborn; there were survivalists and nomadic communards, people intent on resurrecting something of the way this land had been used in the long centuries past. There were refugees from poverty-stricken California and the riot-torn Midwest. With a small horde of starving Canadian farmers, with the streams of Mexican peasants who were fleeing yet another mad dictatorship, they came to rebuild the deserts of dying America. In history books, it was the Second Reconstruction . . .
. . . they were unlike the previous pioneers. They came with the full support of a near-magical technology, a machine culture that had become increasingly portable, and the hardships were few—a flurry of brief years, then haciendas blossomed in the wasteland and communes were born, tenable, sensible, and secure. Communication made a mockery of their physical isolation. The communes joined to form enclaves, and when those were linked Deseret Enclave Complex came into existence. By then the world was, perhaps, sane again. . . .
In the beginning there were two brothers, Deron and Larry Sealock, born in the second decade of the twenty-first century, in the midst of everything, in what had been Grand Junction, Colorado, USA. They grew up unconscious of history and lived to see the Turnover as young men. When the localities were triumphant, they bid on the contract to run the Manti-La Sal substation of the Western Power Export Grid, a near-defunct utility, and won it.
Alix and Diana Cormier had appeared on the scene not long afterward. They were twin sisters, originally from St. Louis, who'd fled after the riots and lawlessness had gotten out of control, heading for the peaceful epicenter that was becoming Deseret. They met in the small town of Moab, more or less naturalistically, and, out of the quadruple-ring marriage ceremony, the Family had been born. Other men and women came to join them, until they were ten in number, and they all took a common surname. It was a normal thing in those days, the way communes became Lines, and soon children followed. By the time Brendan, son of Kathleen, was eight years old, there were fifteen of them.... Somehow, the Sealock children had subdivided into three groups—the adolescents, who interacted with the adults on their own level; the babies, whom the adults took care of; and a middle group, the half dozen ranging in age from six to ten who dealt mostly with each other. There were four boys and two girls, and their lives had evolved into a dream. . . .
The whispering voice drifted away, and Temujin Krzakwa fell into the world. . . . It was a sunny morning in late summer, and they were having breakfast on the balcony of the underground dining room, where it protruded from the hillside below the mainbody of the house. Brendan sat between his two favorites, ten-year-old Yuri and his sib-sister Lena, who was eight, eating a bowl of soggy Rice Crispies in hot, sugar-laden milk. In the relaxed life of the Line, they only went to "school" every other day, for, in the modern viewpoint, all work and no play made Jack an insane boy. . . . They shared a tutor, really little more than a materials coordinator, with Villa Tomasaki, on the other side of Mount Peale, and it was their turn to suffer with his idiotic notions. Scraping up a last spoonful of oatmeal and molasses, Yuri said, "What'll we do today? The Game?" They nodded their agreement, looking more serious than any adults making laws. Brendan hurriedly slurped down the last of his breakfast, tipping the bowl to his lips and scraping a crunchy syrup of wet sugar onto his tongue. It made his immunized teeth stick together, tackily, as he said, "To the Game, then, Yuri de Jane!" The sib-names had grown up with the evolution of the Game and were an important part of the way they related to each other.
Jean d'Iana stood up. "Where are we going?"
Brendan de Kathleen shrugged and looked over at Lena de Jane, who grinned at him, wiping syrupy lips on the back of her hand, leaving a shiny patch. "Valkyrdom?" she suggested.
"Yeah!" said Tom d'Alix, eight and tousled. "Let's go!" They dropped their dishes into a converter slot and ran back through the house, up past the main level, emerging as a group by the door nearest to the toy shed, where they kept their bicycles. They buckled on their homemade swords, pieces of stiff plastic cut to shape, with hilts of scrap rubber and tape, mounted their pedalable steeds, and were away.
They rode storm-swift down Via Fluviana, a narrow dirt path that followed the quick freshet of La Sal Creek, past the power plant named Taj Mahal, to Effervescentloch reservoir and beyond. They rode through the cultured forest of Anglewald until they came to the Wilds, where the trees and underbrush grew as they always had, since time immemorial. It was strange here on the interface, where the cacti of the desert and the evergreen of the mountains grew side by side.
Beneath the soaring cliff Aerhurst, where the shallow cave named Deep Trog lay, Valkyrdom rose proud, standing alone in the midst of a tangled maze of new and old technological debris that was Stalinwood.
They had to park their bikes outside the junkyard and pick their way in on foot, climbing over the rusted hulks of ancient vehicles, tramping on broken, corroded shapes that had once been machinery, as they walked toward the tree. Stalinwood was an amazing place, filled with a century of refuse from many sources. Though much of it was rubble from the construction of Manti-La Sal, there were many other things, from diverse sources. At the far end there was a military aircraft, an F-38 Sparrowhawk that had last seen service during the early days of the Insurrection, forty-seven years ago. The thing was a shambles, perhaps having made a forced landing here, its lower fuselage crushed in, and Brendan always regretted that the battery-powered fighter could not be made to fly again. Still, the cockpit was reasonably intact, its canopy warped but whole, and it was fun to sit in, to grip the stiff plastic of the two joysticks and twirl them about, making warlike noises, the whistling sound of electric turbines, the hiss of particle-beam weaponry. . . .