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your company over dinner."
    He straightened, the appeal to his vanity effective. "Chizz. What'd you make?"
    "Chicken and rice."
    He made a face, but was seated and pushing it into his mouth before she returned from the kitchen with a glass of beer for herself and a soft drink for him.
    "What blew up?" He chewed rapidly. "People killed?"
    "No one, thank God." She tried not to be disheartened by his clear look of disappointment. "But it destroyed the campanile-you remember, the tower in the middle of the campus."
    "Chizz major! Who did it? Zulu Mamba?"
    "No one knows. But it frightened me."
    "A bomb went off in my school last week."
    "What? You never said a word about that!"
    He grimaced in disgust, then wiped grease from his chin. "Not that kind. In SchoolNet. Sabotage. Someone said that some guys from Upper Form did it as a graduation prank."
    "You're talking about a system crash on the net." She wondered for a moment if Stephen understood the difference between the net and real life. He's only eleven, she reminded herself. Things outside of his narrow circle aren't very real yet. "The bomb that went off at the Poly today could have killed hundreds of people. Killed them dead."
    "I know. But the blowdown on SchoolNet killed a lot of Crafts and even some high-level Constellations, backups and all. They'll never come back again either." He reached out for the rice dish, ready for seconds.
    Renie sighed. Crafts, Constellations-if she were not a net-literate instructor herself, she would probably think her brother was speaking a foreign language. "Tell me what else you've been doing. Have you read any of that book I gave you?" For his birthday, she had downloaded, at not inconsiderable cost, Otulu's Marching Toward Freedom, the best and most stirring work she knew on South Africa's fight for democracy in the late twentieth century. As a concession to her young brother's tastes she had purchased the expensive interactive version, full of historical video footage and stylish "you-are-there" 3D re-enactments.
    "Not yet I looked at it. Politics."
    "It's more than that, Stephen. It's your heritage-it's our history."
    He chewed. "Soki and Eddie and me almost made it into the Inner District. We got this flowpast off a guy in Upper Form. We were almost downtown! Open ticket!"
    "Stephen, I don't want you trying to get to the Inner District."
    "You used to do it when you were my age." His grin was insolently disarming.
    "Things were different then-you can get arrested these days. Big fines. I'm serious, boy. Don't do it." But she knew the warning was useless. Might as well tell children not to swim in the old fishing hole. Stephen was already nattering on as though she hadn't said anything. She sighed. From the level of excitement, she knew she was in for a forty-minute discourse, full of obscure Junior Netboy argot.
    ". . . It was chizz major sampled. We dodged three Bully-boxes. But we weren't doing anything wrong," he said hurriedly. "Just tapping and napping. But it was so flared! We met someone who got into Mister J's!"
    "Mister J's?" This was the first thing she hadn't recognized.
    Stephen's look suddenly changed; Renie thought she saw something flicker behind his eyes. "Oh, just this place. Kind of like a club."
    "What kind of club? An entertainment place? Shows and stuff?"
    "Yeah. Shows and stuff." He toyed with his chicken bone for a moment "It's just a place."
    Something thumped on the wall.
    "Renie! Bring me a glass of water." Long Joseph's voice sounded groggy and stupid. Renie winced, but went to the sink. For now, Stephen deserved something like a normal home life, but when he was finally out on his own, things would change around here.
    When she got back, Stephen was finishing his third helping, but she could tell by his jittering leg and half-out-of-the-seat posture that he was aching to get back to the net.
    "Not so fast, young warrior. We've barely had a chance to talk."
    Now something almost like panic flashed across his