John Barnes by The Sky so Big & Black

Author:The Sky so Big & Black [Big, The Sky so & Black]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-12-11T23:53:05+00:00

the sky so big and black 111

Kindness shrugged as if he were losing patience. “Well, I like being out here in the roundings all by myself, to get my thinking done. Happens that some of what you’re talking about is things I’ve done a lot of thinking about.” He smiled at me. “And this probably bores poor Teri out of her mind. She knows that Earth got taken over by memes, and then just one meme, and that everybody here is afraid of memes, but I bet she’s never even talked with or seen a memed person.”

“They won’t let us see films of them in school. Parents think it would be too frightening for the kids.”

“That must be great,” Earl said, waving his spoon for emphasis. “Not to know anything about them, directly, I mean. I hope we never, never, never have any kids on Mars who know anything about memes.”

The noise suppressor shut off and Esther came back in. “Well,” she said, after all our worry, it was good news. They were able to save the whole Mohawk Valley this time. It turns out that for some years there were crews up in the hills building levees and dikes and a diversion channel to take the whole mess right under the Alleghenies and into the bed of the Old Hudson.

It’s even helping to sweep some of the silt out of New York harbor, and Manhattan and Long Island are temporarily islands again. So it all got solved; One True was just not telling them all about it because it wasn’t certain that it would all get done in time, and it was thought to be less stressful if everyone was redded up for a full evacuation right from the start.

“Other than that, it was just the usual—she’s sending along a few of my mom’s recipes, which I wanted to try for a little food booth next Gather, just to see if anyone still likes those flavors, and she couldn’t remember the rules to Red Rover, Run Sheep Run, or skipball—those were games we played when we were kids, and she wanted to teach her kids—and that was about it. But I bet all of you out here spent the whole time grilling poor Walter about the fact that I still talk to my sister.”

It was near enough to the truth for all of us to start a bit, but Esther Wang didn’t seem to be angry, or indeed even very concerned. “Really,” she 112 JOHN BARNES

said, “people worry too much. You need a tight feedback loop to get a meme into a brain; you can’t just ram it in there, you have to incorporate it with the rest of the mind, and to do that you’ve got to talk in real time. One True has never even been able to take over the Moon, just because of the second-and-a-half radio lag. That’s all the protection you need. And radio lag from Earth to out here is sometimes twenty minutes and never less than four.

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