Burn | Page 4

temperature never varied from a scandalous twenty-three
degrees Celsius. No matter that outdoors the sun was blistering the rooftops of the
upsiders' Benevolence Park Number 5, indoors was a paradise where neither sweat nor
sweaters held sway. And then there was the food. Even though Spur's father, Capability
Roger Leung, was the richest man in Littleton, he had practiced stricter simplicity than
most. Spur had grown up on meat, bread, squash and scruff, washed down with cider and
applejack pressed from the Leungs' own apples and the occasional root beer. More
recently, he and Rosie would indulge themselves when they had the money, but he was
still used to gorging on the fruits of the family orchard during harvest and suffering

through preserves and root cellar produce the rest of the year. But here the patients
enjoyed the abundance of the Thousand Worlds, prepared in extravagant style.
Depending on his appetite, he could order lablabis, dumplings, goulash, salmagundi,
soufflés, quiche, phillaje, curry, paella, pasta, mousses, meringues or tarts. And that
was just the lunch menu.
But of all the hospital's guilty pleasures, the tell was his favorite. At home Spur could
access the latest bazzat bands and town-tunes from all over Walden plus six hundred
years of opera. And on a slow Tuesday night, he and Comfort might play one of the
simplified chronicles on the tiny screen in Diligence Cottage or watch a spiritual
produced by the Institute of Didactic Arts or just read to each other. But the screens of the
hospital tells sprawled across entire walls and, despite the Cooperative's censors, opened
like windows onto the universe. What mattered to people on other worlds astonished Spur.
Their chronicles made him feel ignorant for the first time in his life and their spirituals
were so wickedly materialistic that he felt compelled to close the door to his hospital
room when he watched them.
The search engine in particular excited Spur. At home, he could greet anyone in the
Transcendent State -- as long as he knew their number. But the hospital tell could
seemingly find anyone, not only on Walden but anywhere on all the Thousand Worlds of
the upside. He put the tell in his room to immediate use, beginning by greeting his father
and Gandy Joy, who was the village virtuator. Gandy had always understood him so
much better than Comfort ever had. He should have greeted Comfort as well, but he
didn't.
He did greet his pals in the Gold Squad, who were surprised that he had been able to
track them down while they were on active duty. They told him that the entire Ninth
Regiment had been pulled back from the Motu River burn for two weeks of CR in
Prospect. Word was that they were being reassigned to the Cloyce Memorial Forest for
some easy fire watch duty. No doubt the Cooperative was yanking the regiment off the
front line because Gold Squad had taken almost 40 percent casualties when the burn had
flanked their position at Motu. Iron and Bronze Squads had taken a hit as well, fighting
their way through the burn to rescue Gold.
To keep from brooding about Vic and the Motu burn and the firefight, Spur looked up
friends who had fallen out of his life. He surprised his cousin Land, who was living in
Slide Knot in Southeast and working as a tithe assessor. He connected with his childhood
friend Handy, whom he hadn't seen since the Alcazars had moved to Freeport, where
Handy's mom was going to teach pastoral philosophy. She was still at the university and
Handy was an electrician. He tracked down his self-reliance school sweetheart, Leaf
Benkleman, only to discover that she had emigrated from Walden to Kolo in the Alumar
system. Their attempt to catch up was frustrating, however, because the Cooperative's
censors seemed to buzz every fifth word Leaf said. Also, the look on her face whenever
he spoke rattled Spur. Was it pity? He was actually relieved when she cut their
conversation short.
Despite the censors, talking to Leaf whetted Spur's appetite for making contact with the

upside. He certainly wouldn't get the chance once he left the hospital. He didn't care that
everyone was so preposterously far away that he would never meet them in person. Dr.
Niss had been wrong: Spur understood perfectly the astonishing distances between stars.
What he did not comprehend was exactly how he could chat with someone who lived
hundreds of trillions of kilometers away, or how someone could beam themselves from
Moy to Walden in a heartbeat. Of course, he had learned the simplified explanation of
qics -- quantum information channels -- in school. qics worked because many
infinitesimally small nothings were part of a something, which could exist in two places
at the