Rainbows End Read Online Free Page A

time? Ah! Atop Montjuïc. He turned down an alley. Where he emerged on the far side, the crowds were thin… and a tourist auto was just arriving for him. Alfred sat back in the single passenger cockpit and let his mind roam. The Montjuïc fortress was not the most impressive in Europe, and yet he had not seen it in some time. Like its brethren, it marked the bygone time when revolutions in destruction technology took decades to unfold, and mass murder could not be committed with the press of a button.
    The auto navigated its way out from the octagonal city blocks of the Barcelona basin and ran quickly up a hillside, grabbing the latch of a funicular that dragged them swiftly up the side of Montjuïc. No tedious switchback roadway for this piece of automation. Behind him, the city stretched for miles. And then ahead, as they came over the crest of the hill, there was the Mediterranean, all blue and hazy and peaceful.
Alfred got out, and the tiny auto whipped around the traffic circle, heading for the cable-car installation that would take its next customer in an overflight across the harbor.
    He was at just the spot he had ordered on the tourist menu, right where twentieth-century guns faced out from the battlements. Even though these cannon had never been used, they were very much the real thing. For a fee, he could touch the guns and climb around inside the place. After sundown there would be a staged battle.
    Vaz strolled to the stone barrier and looked down. If he blocked out all the tourism fantasy, he could see the freight harbor almost two hundred meters below and a kilometer away. The place was an immensity of freight containers rambling this way and that, chaos. If he invoked his government powers, he could see the flow of cargo, even see the security certificates that proclaimed — in ways that were validated by a combination of physical and cryptographic security — that none of the ten-meter boxes contained a nuke or a plague or a garden-variety radiation bomb. The system was very good, the same as you would find for heavy freight anywhere in the civilized world. It had been the result of decades of fear, of changing attitudes about privacy and liberty, of technological progress. Modern security actually worked most of the time. There hadn’t been a city lost in more than five years. Every year, the civilized world grew and the reach of lawlessness and poverty shrank. Many people thought that the world was becoming a safer place.
Keiko and Günberk — and certainly Alfred — knew that such optimism was dead wrong.
    Alfred looked across the harbor at the towers beyond. Those hadn’t been here the last time he visited Barcelona. The civilized world was wealthy beyond the dreams of his youth. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, the rulers of modern states realized that success did not come from having the largest armies or the most favorable tariffs or the most natural resources — or even the most advanced industries. In the modern world, success came from having the largest possible educated population and providing those hundreds of millions of creative people with credible freedom.
But this Utopia was a Red Queen’s Race with extinction.
    In the twentieth century, only a couple of nations had the power to destroy the world. The human race survived, mostly by good luck. At the turn of the century, a time was in view when dozens of countries could destroy civilization. But by then, the Great Powers had a certain amount of good sense. No nation-state could be nuts enough to blow up the world — and the few barbaric exceptions were Dealt With, if necessary with methods that left land aglow in the dark. By the teens, mass death technology was accessible to regional and racial hate groups. Through a succession of happy miracles — some engineered by Alfred himself — the legitimate grievances of disaffected peoples were truly addressed.
    Nowadays, Grand Terror technology was so cheap that cults and small criminal