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meant. By the rules of Alterre, played out on eleven million computers around the globe, whoever found a new species gave it his or her name. "They're not kronkaeurs any more. I went and registered them: they're mansooris!"
         Gunfire on Monday Tuesday Wednesday. They were working up to something; that was the pattern of it. (Dad Dad who are they this time, is it the Hindus? but his father had eyes and ears and arms only for Mom, full of thanks and praise to have him safe home from that fearsome city.) The Cantonment went to orange alert, but security was still unprepared for the ferocity of the assault. Bombers simultaneously attacked twelve Western-owned targets across Old and New Varanasi. The twelfth and final device was a car bomb driven at full speed across the Green Zone, impervious to automatic fire, its driver dead or ecstatic to die. Close-defense robots uncoiled from their silos and leaped, nanodiamond blades unsheathed, but the bombers had recced Cantonment's weaknesses well. Slashed, gashed, leaking oil and fuel, engine dead but still rolling under a heaving cancer of robots trying to cocoon it in impact-foam, the car rammed the inner gate and blew up.
         On the soccer pitch the referee had heard the general-alert siren, judged the distance to the changing room, and ordered everyone to lie flat in the goal. Kyle had just wrapped his arms around his head—Day One, Lesson One—when the boom lifted him off the ground by the belly and punched every breath of wind out of him. For a moment he thought he had gone deaf, then the sounds of sirens and RAV airdrones pushed through the numb until he was sitting on the grass beside Salim seemingly at the center of a vast spiral of roar. It was much bigger than the exploding cat. A column of smoke leaned over towards the south. Hummers were rushing past, security men on foot dodging between them. The football net was full of chunks of blast-foam and scraps of wire and fragments of shattered plastic robot shell and warning signs in three languages that this was a restricted area with security authorized for the use of deadly force. A shard of nanodiamond antipersonnel blade was embedded in the left upright. The referee stood up, took off his shirt, and wrapped it around the hand wedged under the crossbar. "Would you look at that?" Kyle said.
         There was a long green smear down the front of his fresh-laundered soccer shirt.
         "Salim's always welcome here," Mom called from the kitchen where she was blitzing smoothies. "Just make sure he calls home to let them know he's all right the moment the network comes back up. Now promise you'll do that."
         Of course they did and of course they didn't and the smoothies stood there forgotten and warming on the worktop while Mom edged about folding underwear and pillowcases but really keeping an eye on the rolling news. She was worried. Kyle knew that. Cantonment was locked down and would be until Coalition and Bharati forces had resecured the Green Zone: that was the way it was, Kyle had learned that. Locked-down was locked-out for Dad, and the SKYIndia hovercams were still showing towers of black plastic-smoke and ambulances being walked through the crowds of lost people and burned-out cars by Bharati policemen. The reporters were saying there were casualties, but they were also saying that the network wasn't fully restored and that was why he couldn't call; if there had been Western casualties, they would have said straight away because dead Bharatis didn't count and, anyway, it was inconceivable that anything could happen to Kyle's dad. No, in situations like this you kept your head down and got on with things while you waited for the call, so he didn't trouble Mom and fetched the smoothies himself from the kitchen and took them to join Salim in his world.
         On the house smartsilk screen you couldn't get that full-sensory drop from orbit or the feeling of walking like God over the