Tonight, the audience sat on the west side of the soccer field, leaving the east free for whatever grandiose imagery might be created.
Robert sat with Juan Orozco right down on the sidelines, with the other performers. They all knew the order of their execution, er, performance. Their private views hung little signs over the field showing how much time remained in the current demo and who was up next. There had been no democratic choosing of the performance order. Louise Chumlig and the other teachers had their own ideas, and they ruled. Robert smiled to himself. In this, his old people-sense hadn't deserted him. Even without knowing the details of each project, he knew who had a strong project and who did not. He knew who was the most frightened of getting out in public and in person So did Chumlig. Her play order was an orchestration, exercising each kid to his or her limits.
Amazingly, that ordering also produced a pretty good show.
The Radner twins started out. For these two, the east side of the campus was not enough. They had some kind of wacky suspension bridge it looked like the Firth of Forth Railway Bridge, but scaled up that put down steel caissons on each side of the bleachers, and then climbed higher and higher into the northeast till it broke into the departing daylight. Seconds passed and the construction reappeared out of the southwest , their nineteenth-century masterpiece making a virtual orbit of the Earth. The climax was the roaring passage of vast, steam-powered trains across the sky. The bleachers shook with the apparent power of the locomotives.
"Hey!" said Juan, and gave Robert a nudge. "That's new. They must have figured out some of the building maintenance protocols." If the Radners had not been targeted by the Library Riot rumor mill before, they were now. Robert guessed that would please the twins just fine.
Most of the demos were arty, visual things. But there were also students who had built gadgets. Doris Schley and Mahmoud Kwon had built a ground-effect vehicle that could walk up the steps of the bleachers. They tipped it over the top; there was an explosion of sound, and then it touched down without breaking anything. Juan stood up from his place at the bottom of the bleachers to turn and watch with his own eyes. He cheered Schley and Kwon, then plunked himself back down. "Wow, a ground-effect parachute. But I bet Ms. Chumlig doesn't give'm more than a B." His voice rose into a standard Louise Chumlig imitation: " 'What you did was scarcely more than off-the-shelf engineering.'" But he was still grinning. They both knew that a B was better than what most of the image plays were going to get.
There were even kids who tried for the cutting edge, projects that seemed a little like what Miri said her friends did. There were two new-materials demos, an extreme elastic band, and some kind of water filter. The elastic was not spectacular until you realized there was no trick imagery. Two boys that Robert hardly knew did the demo. They stood twenty feet apart, swinging a large doll between them. The mannikin was suspended from a strand of their magical glop. The strand wasn't simply a strong composite. Somehow the boys could change its physical characteristics by the way they squeezed the ends. Sometimes if behaved like a giant spring, whipping the doll back to the center line. Other times, it stretched like taffy, and they swung the dummy in wide arcs. Their demo got the biggest cheers of all.
On the other hand, the water-filter demo was just a magnified image of a garden hose feeding into the filter. Above them, the students had floated an enormous graphic that showed just how their programmable zeolite could search for user-specified impurities. There were no sound effects, and the graphics were slow-moving and crude. Robert looked up into the sky and then back at the girls. "They're going to get an A, aren't they?"
Juan rocked back on his elbows. He was smiling, but enviously. "Yeah. It's the sort of thing Chumlig likes." And then his basic honesty forced him to add, "Lisa and Sandi never bother to polish their graphics, but I heard they've got a buyer for that water filter. I bet they're the only vocational kids who make real money off their demo."
"We're next, kiddo," said Robert.
The only evidence that Juan understood was the way his gaze fixed on their private clock.
Xiu > Juan: <sm>You'll do fine, Juan.</sm>
Juan > Xiu: <sm>Is Miri watching?</sm>
Juan and Robert were last, the only part of the schedule that was really beyond Chumlig's control. That had not been due to any Juan/Robert cleverness. It had been a consequence of the fact that their demo involved outside groups who had their own scheduling problems.
Juan hesitated a second more. Then he was running out onto the soccer field, waving up a phantom stage parallel to and facing the bleachers. Their performers filed in from both sides of the stage. The imagery was subdued, with no impossibilities. These were real people and real musical instruments, as Juan's magnified voice explained to the audience.
"Hello, hello, hello !" Juan was huckster enthusiastic, and to Robert's ears clearly panicked out of his mind. Robert could have handled the emcee role, or they could have recorded this spiel, maybe have had Juan lip-synch it but that was just another way to lose points with Chumlig. So Juan made do with his live, cracking voice and words that came out with awkward pauses and forced bravado. "Ladies and gentlemen! Meet the Orchestra of the Americas, created especially for you this evening from the Charles River High School orchestra and chorus, cheapnet live from Boston and " he waved to his left " the Gimnasio Clasico de Magal-lanes, also cheapnet live but from Punta Arenas, Chile!"
Both sides of the stage were full now, two hundred teenagers in school uniforms of red on the north and checkered green on the south: students who had their own "far cooperation" requirements to satisfy. Altogether they comprised parts of two choruses and two orchestras, seven thousand miles apart, with only cheapnet in between. Persuading them to try this scheme had been a miracle in itself. Success would look mundane to outsiders, yet failure was a real possibility. Well, things didn't go too badly in rehearsal .
"And now " Juan grabbed for still greater import" and now, ladies and gentlemen, the Orchestra of the Americas will perform their very own adaptation of Beethoven's EU Anthem, with lyrics by Orozco and Gu, and network synchrony by Gu and Orozco!" He gave a hammy bow and ran back to the sidelines to sit by Robert. Sweat was streaming down his face, and he looked pale.
"You did good, kid," said Robert.
Juan just nodded, shaking.
The hybrid orchestra began to play. Now it was up to these kids and Robert's jitter algorithm. The sounds of cellos and basses rose from the young musicians in Boston and from the other end of the world. The kids' adaptation had a faster beat than the usual EU style. And every note came across hundreds of hops of randomly changing networkery, with delays that could vary by several hundred milliseconds.
There was the same synchronization problem that had made Winnie's choir at the library such a noisy affair.
Juan's lyrics climbed up, the chorus from the north singing his English version, and the one from the south his Spanish. Their student collaborators had created a flexible work with its own conductor interface; that helped some. Plus they were surprisingly good musicians and singers. But the performance still needed the magic of the adaptive delays that Robert's scheme injected into the transmissions (well, okay, and maybe also the far deeper magic that was Beethoven's).
Robert listened. His contribution was not perfect. In fact, this was worse than the rehearsals. Too many people were watching, and too suddenly . He'd been afraid this might happen. The problem was not bandwidth. He glanced at the variance plot he had put in his private view. It showed the presence of several million people suddenly observing, grabbing resources so fast that they confused his poor little prediction program and changed the nature of what was observed.