University of Delgado
Faculty Residence Wall
Quadrant Eight, Building Two
Kamele had a meeting. Again.
Theo sighed. She was still feeling . . . sharp . . . from dance—and she wanted to talk to Kamele about the Saltation. Maybe it would be good for her to go, she thought. It would show the Safety Office that she was taking her responsibilities to society seriously. And if she and Bek won a competition, then wouldn't that show them that she was getting better?
She'd put the argument to Kamele that way. If she ever came home.
Theo shoved her mumu into its pocket, and danced a few suwello steps on her way down the hall. In the kitchen, she drew a soy cheese sandwich and a cup of juice from the kaf and carried them back to her room.
Coyster was curled up in the center of the rug, more or less, snoring with his tail over his nose. Theo grinned and sat down at her desk. She had a response paper to write for Advertence and some math problems to finish up.
After that, she thought, touching the keys lightly, she'd have another go at finding the turn-off code for her mumu. That project had gotten so frustrating that she'd put it aside, to "let it grow some leaves," as Father said. She realized now that she'd started with the wrong set of assumptions. She'd expected it to be easy—and maybe it was, once you figured out the trick. But figuring it out—that had to be hard. If it wasn't, then everybody would turn their mumus off, and the Simple at the gate wouldn't have been fooled at all.
There was another suspicious circumstance, Theo thought darkly. Even though they'd had several Oktavi dinners together since the Simple called her name, Father hadn't once asked her about her progress with her mumu, though he must've known she'd try to find out how to turn it off.
Of course, she hadn't mentioned it, either. She was going to figure it out herself, and not ask Father for help.
Not that he was likely to tell her.
"Solos first," she said aloud, scrolling through what she'd already written while she had a bite of her sandwich. Father would say that it was disrespectful of the food to concentrate on work while one ate.
On the other hand, she thought, going back to double-check a secondary cite, Father had probably never tasted soy cheese out of the kaf.
The cite checked. Good. Halfway through Social Engineering, she'd been struck with the conviction that she'd flubbed it—or misunderstood the content. She put the sandwich back on its plate and began to type.
She was sipping juice and rereading her response, tweaking words and patching sentences, when a flicker of green tickled her peripheral vision. Frowning, she looked down at the bottom left corner of the screen, and the dark green Serpent of Knowledge.
Chewing her lip, Theo considered the icon. None of the rest of the Team had gotten a mystery assignment; she'd asked. She'd even gone back through Professor Wilit's public class notes, and there was no mention of solo assignments made on the date the Serpent icon had first showed up on her screen.
All that being so, and after giving it some careful thought, Theo had deleted the icon.
And now it was back, pulsating gently while it waited for her attention.
Well, she thought, it could just wait, that was what. She had other things in queue before it.
Determinedly, she turned her attention back to her response paper, finished the editing and saved it before opening her math solos.
Despite Lesset's repeated claims during their commute between classes, the problems weren't hard. In fact, Theo thought, as she double-checked her work, they'd been kind of boring. Sighing, she closed her math space.
The Serpent icon was still there at the corner of the main screen. Waiting. Theo stuck her tongue out at it. Pulling her mumu from her pocket, she dropped to the rug next to Coyster, who stretched out of his curl, and relaxed bonelessly, licking his nose, all without opening his eyes.
Theo tapped her mumu on and called up the advanced diagnostic. The one thing she had figured out, before she'd gotten too angry to think, was how to circumvent the self-test program. Which hadn't been particularly easy to do. If she'd been even a little advertent, that would have told her that the rest of the problem was going to be tricky.
"The thing is," she told Coyster, "that the trigger has to be something simple—on and off. Because, if you're never on the grid, somebody'll notice. So it needs to be fast, so you can go off-line immediately in an emergency—and come back just as fast. Or faster."
Coyster yawned. Noisily.
"You just feel that way because you don't have a collar that tells everybody where you are all the time. Think if you were a dog."
Coyster opened one eye, glared at her pointedly, and closed it.
"Sorry." Theo turned her attention back to the mumu.
The key had to be in the advanced diagnostic, she told herself for the eighty-eighth time. She tapped the toolbox open and sat frowning at her choices:
ISOBIOS
Grid Calibration
Schedule
Unitize
Cloud Absorb
None of the sub-routines was helpfully labeled Turn-off ID emission. In fact, there was no mention of the ID-shouter at all, though every kid knew that their mother could track them through their mumu. You only had to be where you weren't supposed to be once, for that lesson to stick.
Frowning, Theo touched Schedule, even though she knew the list of sub-routines by heart. Schedule a self-test, schedule a back-up, schedule a grid calibration. Grumbling to herself, she chose schedule a self-test and glared down at the next set of choices: diagnostic or complete?
"Chaos-driven, nidjit programs . . ." Theo muttered—and froze. She'd been through this screen dozens of times. Why was it only now that she wondered what exactly a complete self-test was?
Cautiously, she made her choice.
Her mumu emitted a strident, drawn-out beep. Coyster flicked an ear and put his paw over his nose. On the screen, words appeared, limned in orange.
This diagnostic will thoroughly test every resident system. Several functions may be unavailable or taken off-line during diagnosis. These include any function that requires syncing with the local Cloud or Grid. Voice messaging will remain unaffected.
Theo held her breath.
Do you wish to continue? Yes/No
She touched yes.
The next screen was a configuration chart. She could, Theo quickly learned, instruct her mumu to conduct up to sixteen consecutive test sessions. She could also dedicate a key combination to initiate testing from outside of the diagnostic program, though she was warned to choose a nonintuitive combination, so that a test session would not begin in error.
"I found it," Theo breathed to Coyster, who greeted this information with no visible sign of awe, joy—or even consciousness.
She thought for a moment, staring at the mumu's keypad and thinking about combinations that were easy to code, but that she wouldn't likely hit by accident. Finally, and deliberately, she keyed in the trigger combo. After further consideration, she set the loop to nine consecutive checks, reasoning that she could hit the hot keys again, if she needed more time off-grid.
Needed for what was a question she had been studiously not asking herself, even as she had pursued the answer to the puzzle. Instead, she reminded herself that the Simple at the door would have taken her under study if Father hadn't been prepared. Being prepared was very close to thinking ahead, and it seemed to her that an advertent scholar—which Father demonstrably was—ought always to be prepared.
"I should test it," she said, holding the mumu in her hand. It wouldn't be thinking ahead if she just assumed it was going to work. In fact, it would be wishful thinking, which was almost as bad as making excuses.
"How?" she asked, putting the mumu on Coyster's side. His skin rippled in protest, and he flicked his ears, but he didn't bother to open his eyes.
Obviously, she didn't want to just vanish off the grid; even she could see that would be reckless. She might, she guessed, tell Kamele what she'd done and ask for her help, in the spirit of scholarly exploration.
On second thought, that wasn't such a good idea. Theo plucked the mumu off of Coyster and held it in her hand, staring down into the screen. She'd wait until Oktavi, she thought, and ask Father to check her. That was fair. In a sense, she'd gotten the assignment from him.
It wasn't the best solution—she wanted to test her work right now, and Oktavi was days away. On the other hand, it would have to do; and anyway, it wasn't like she planned on actually using it; it was only a precaution. In the meantime, she had more than enough to keep her busy—worrying about the Review Board for one, and why they'd asked for an extension to decide her case. Kamele seemed to think that the extended time for additional discovery and deliberation was good news. Theo—or, at least, her stomach—thought otherwise.
She could also, she told herself firmly, think about dance, work on her lace, and do extra-credit solos.
And, if she got bored, she could see about scrubbing the Serpent icon and the program that generated it from her school book.
As a matter of fact, she had an idea about that.
She rolled to her feet and approached the desk. The Serpent of Knowledge was still down in the left hand corner, still pulsing, oh-so-patiently waiting for her attention.
Sighing, Theo slid into the chair and tapped the icon. Once.
A menu bar appeared in the center of her screen.
• Theory, Annotated
• Safety Office History, Delgado University
• Surveillance History, Delgado
• Map, Interior
• Map, Exterior
• Timetable, Real Time
• Algorithm
Theo blinked.
Whatever it was, the Serpent had done exactly what she'd asked it to do, and more thoroughly than any search program she'd ever used. She bit her lip, one hand fisted on her knee, the other hovering over the selection key.
There isn't, she thought, any assignment.
On the other hand, she was interested in the information. So what if there wasn't an assignment? Information for its own sake was—
"Theo?" Kamele's voice echoed down the hallway. "I'm home! I hope you're hungry!"
"Admin has okayed the trip," Kamele said, sounding tired and relieved and anxious all at once. At least she was eating, Theo thought, helping herself to another slice of spice bread with veggie-paste stuffing. 'Course, it was hard to turn down spice bread.
"When will you be leaving?" Theo asked, trying to remember where Melchiza was, exactly, with reference to Delgado.
"The in-time to make the next outgoing liner—call it two days," Kamele murmured, and Theo put her bread down, staring.
"That's, um . . . really soon," she managed.
Kamele nodded. "It is. We're very fortunate that Vashtara is due in at the station, and has room for passengers."
Theo chewed her lip. "How long—how long will you be gone?" She'd stayed with Lesset for a day or two at a time when Kamele and Father had gone on short trips, just like Lesset had stayed with her when her mother went away.
At least twice, Theo had stayed with Aunt Ella in her cluttered apartment, while Kamele and Father traveled.
"The return trip may be a day or two sooner or later, depending on transition links. I thing we ought to assume most of two hundred days."
Theo sat back on the stool, a gone feeling in her stomach.
"Close your mouth, Theo. You look like one of Jen Sar's prize fish." Kamele had a bite of spice bread.
"You're going to be gone—" I'll miss you! Theo thought, and blinked her eyes to clear a sudden start of tears. She cleared her throat, and tried to sound calm and matter-of-fact. "I guess I'll be staying with Aunt Ella, then."
"Oh, no." Kamele shook her head and reached for her cup. "You'll be coming with me."
Theo gasped.
"Coming—to Melchiza?" she repeated. "I can't go to Melchiza!"
Kamele looked up. "Of course you can. Tomorrow, you'll file for solo studies from your teachers; I've already transmitted my authorization. I have an info packet from Vashtara, which I'll send along to you; they include guidelines for what and how to pack. Your immunizations are up-to-date, but they'll screen us on-station, anyway." She paused, looking at Theo consideringly. "Coyster will need to go live with Professor Kiladi. I'm afraid cats aren't allowed on cruise ships."
She was going to strangle, Theo thought, around the buzzing in her ears. Her chest was tight and she was suddenly very sorry that she'd eaten quite so much spice bread.
"But, I can't! Not for—what about dance? There's a freeform that I wanted to dance in on Venta, Bek—What about the Review Board? I—why can't I stay with Father, too?"
"Because you're not a cat," Kamele said crisply. "Really, Theo. You're behaving as if this were a punishment instead of an opportunity to learn."
"I don't," Theo said breathlessly, "want to learn."
That was stupid. She knew it the second the words tumbled out of her mouth. But of course, it was too late to call them back.
Kamele shook her head. "The situation is quite settled, Theo. Whining isn't going to change it. I must say, however, that I'd never expected to hear my daughter say that she doesn't want to learn."
Theo bit her lip. "Kamele—"
Her mother raised a hand. "It's a shock, I know. Very sudden. Unfortunately, there's nothing to be done. I suggest that you sleep on it."