City of Golden Shadow (27 page)

You try to speak, but you can't. The cold has you shivering. Jankel pulls the thin hospital blanket up to your chest, careful not to disturb the transparent tube fanged into your arm like a long glass snake. You nod instead. By God, you're not stupid. You understand the laws and how they work. If it hadn't been one, it would have been another. They make those laws to keep people like you away from what people like them have. So you nod, trying to say what your dry tongue and constricted throat cannot: I know why you want me dead. I don't need any more explanation than that.

The man in the gray suit smiles, a tight curved line, as though he recognizes the look in your eyes. He nods to the doctor, just once, and then tucks his folder under his arm and heads for the door, disappearing out of your sight beyond the curving line of Jankel's blue trousers.

You have just met the Angel of Death. He was a stranger. He is always a stranger.

Jankel gives your arm a squeeze, which means the doctor has turned the tap on the second line, but you don't look up to meet the guard's eye. You don't want your last sight on earth to be him. He's nobody-just a man who guarded your cage. A decent guy for a keeper in a human zoo, maybe, but no more than that.

A short time passes-thick, sluggish time that nevertheless harries. Your gaze slides up toward the fluorescent lights and they shimmer even more broadly than before. There are little fractures of color around the edges. Your eyes, you realize, are filling with tears.

At the same time, the room is growing warmer. You can feel your skin growing looser, your muscles unkinking. This isn't so bad.

But you're never coming back. Your heart speeds. They're pushing you out into the darkness. One passenger too many on the big ship, and you've drawn the short straw.

Some kind of animal panic races through you, and for a moment you strain against your bonds, or try to, but the whole thing is too far gone. A muscle twitches in your chest, that's all, a slow contraction like the early stages of labor. Like birth.

Wrong way, wrong way. You're going out, not coming in. . . .

The blackness is tugging you remorselessly, pulling you down, eroding your resistance. You're hanging by your fingernails over an ocean of warm velvet, and it would be so easy so easy so easy to let go . . . but there's something underneath all that softness, something harsh and final and oh so terrifyingiy lonely.

Gone, the light almost gone, just a fast-disappearing smear. Gone, the light gone.

A soundless scream, a spark sizzling through a final instant before being swallowed by the cold darkness.

Oh, God, I don't want to.

He was still shivering half an hour later.

"You're so scanny, Gardiner. Lethal injection-Jesus! You're a scanmaster!"

Orlando looked up, trying to focus. The dark saloon was full of shadows and trailing mist, but his friend's broad silhouette was hard to mistake.

Fredericks slipped into one of the crooked high-backed chairs and perused the menu of experiences that flickered across the black tabletop, an ever-changing abstract spiderweb of frost-white letters. He made a face of exaggerated disgust The defiant lift to his shoulders made his sim appear even more chesty and musclebound than usual. "What is it with you and these fringe trips, Gardiner?"

Orlando could never figure why Fredericks liked bodybuilder sims. Maybe in RL he was a scrawny little guy. It was impossible to know, since Orlando had never seen his friend in the flesh, and at this point it would be embarrassing even to ask. Besides, Orlando himself was not innocent of image-tampering: the sim he was wearing was, as usual, a well-crafted product, although not particularly handsome or physically impressive.

"The death rides? I just like them." He was having some difficulty composing his thoughts, legacy of that last slide down into nothingness. "They . . . interest me."

"Yeah, well, I think they're morbid major." A line of tiny skeletons conga-danced across the tabletop in front of Fredericks, each one dressed in full Carmen Miranda drag; they strutted, hip-shook, then vanished in a sequence of pops as they tumbled over the edge. The place was full of the things-miniature skeletons playing fireman's pole on the swizzle sticks and skating on the ice trays, an entire skeletal army performing acrobatics on the vast chandelier. Some in tiny Stetsons and chaps even rode on the bats flittering in the shadows beneath the high ceiling. The decor of the Last Chance Saloon traded heavily on its virtual proximity to Terminal Row. Most of its habitués, however, preferred the mock-Gothic of the club to the more unpleasant and more realistic experiences on sale at the next site over.

"You did the airplane crash with me," Orlando pointed out.

Fredericks snorted. "Yeah. Once. You've been on that one so many times they probably have your seat permanently reserved." His broad sim face flattened out for a moment, as though somewhere the real Fredericks had withdrawn from the system, but it was only his software's inability to show sullenness-unfortunate, since Fredericks was prone to it. "That was the worst. I thought I was really going to die-I thought my heart was going to stop. How can you do that kind of shit, Gardiner?"

"You get used to it." But he hadn't, really. And that was part of the problem.

In the conversational lull that followed, the vast doors at one side of the saloon creaked open and a painfully cold wind swirled through the room. Orlando absently turned down his susceptibility; Fredericks, using a less expensive interface, didn't even notice. Something with glowing red eyes loomed in the open doorway, confettied with whirling snow. A few of the patrons nearest the door laughed. One very feminine sim screamed.

"Someone told me that they record those simulations from real people dying," said Fredericks abruptly. "They take 'em right off real people's interface rigs."

"Nah." Orlando shook his head. "They're just good gear. Well-written." He watched as the red-eyed thing grabbed the screaming woman and dragged her off into the snowy night. The doors creaked shut again. "What, they just sent somebody off fitted with a gigaexpensive top-of-the-line teleneural recording rig, and it just happens to be running when a plane does a Manila? That's like a zillion to one chance, Frederico, and you wouldn't be getting it in some net arcade. Not to mention the fact that you can't record that kind of experience and play it back anyway, not like that. I've checked up on it, man. Real people recordings are just a jumble of stuff, a real monster mix. You can't interpret somebody else's experience through a different brain. It doesn't work."

"Yeah?" Fredericks did not sound entirely convinced, but he lacked Orlando's obsessive interest in VR and the net and generally didn't dispute him about such things.

"Anyway, that's not what I wanted to talk to you about" Orlando leaned back. "We've got more important things to deal with, and we need to talk in private. This place is dead, anyway. Let's go to my 'cot"

"Yeah. This place is dead." Fredericks giggled as two finger-length skeletons skittered across the table, playing frisbee with a bottlecap.

Orlando frowned. "That's not what I meant."

Orlando's electronic cottage was in Pace Corner, an upscale but Bohemian section of the Inner District inhabited mostly by well-to-do university students. His homebase in the virtual world was an almost stereotypical version of a boy's bedroom-the kind of room Orlando would have liked to have at home, but couldn't. A wall-wide screen showed a constant live video feed from the MBC Project, a vast swirling desert of orange. Orlando's visitors had to squint to see the armies of little constructor robots moving through the haze of Martian dust. On the far wall a broad window looked down on a simulation of a late Cretaceous waterhole. It was pretty lively for over-the-counter wallpaper, at the moment, a young Tyrannosaurus was messily devouring a duck-billed Hadrosaurus.

The interior was modeled on the Scandinavian-style beach house Orlando's parents had rented when he was a child. He had been very impressed with the multitude of nooks, stairs, and partially hidden alcoves, and if anything he had exaggerated the labyrinthine effect in his virtual reconstruction. Strewn everywhere about the multilevel space were souvenirs of his-and especially Thargor's-netgaming prowess. One corner of the room held a pyramid of simulated glass cases, each one containing a replica of the head of a vanquished enemy, rendered directly from a snapshot dump of the foe's final seconds whenever possible. At the summit of the pyramid Dieter Cabo's Black Elf Prince held pride of place, cross-eyed from the swordstroke that had just split his narrow skull. That battle had lasted three days, and had almost caused Orlando to fail his biology midterm, but it had been worth it. People in the Middle Country still spoke of the epic struggle with awe and envy.

Various other objects had niches of their own. There were cages of wrestling homunculi, the remnants of another enemy's misfired spell; the Aselphian Orb that Thargor had pulled from the brow of a dying god; even the skeletal hand of the wizard Dreyra Jarh. Thargor had not removed that himself, but he had filched it from a certain merchant of oddities only moments before its original (and somewhat irritated) owner arrived to reclaim it. Up the length of the staircase, in place of a banister, stretched the body of the unpleasant Worm of Morsin Keep. An hour wrestling with the thing in the Keep's brackish moat-and a certain respect for anything so stupid and yet so determined-had earned it a place in his collection. Besides, he thought it looked pretty detailed stretched out beside the stairs.

"I didn't think you'd want to talk about it." Fredericks slid down onto the broad black leather couch. "I figured you'd be really upset"

"I am upset. But there's more to this than Thargor getting killed. Much more."

Fredericks squinted. Orlando didn't know what his friend looked like in RL, but he was pretty sure he wore glasses. "What does that mean, 'more to this'? You impacted, Thargor got killed. What did I miss?"

"You missed a lot. C'mon, Fredericks, have you ever seen me do something like that? Someone hacked my venture. Somebody got at me!"

He did his best to explain the arresting vision of the golden city, but found it was almost impossible to find words that would explain how vibrantly, unbelievably real it had been. ". . . It was like, like-like if I tore a hole in that window," he gestured to the Cretaceous gnashing and squawking on the far side of simulated glass, "and you could see the real world behind it. Not a video picture of the real world, not even with the best resolution you can imagine, but the real actual world. But it was some place I've never seen. I don't think it's a place on earth."

"You think Morpher did it? Or maybe Dieter? He was really scorched over the Black Elf thing."

"Don't you get it? Nobody we know could do this. I don't know if the government or Krittapong's top level research lab could do it." Orlando began to pace back and forth across the sunken room. He felt hemmed in. He made a quick gesture and the floorspace expanded, moving the walls and Fredericks' couch several yards back.

"Hey!" His friend sat up. "Are you trying to tell me it was UFOs or something? C'mon, Gardino, if someone was doing something that weird on the net, it would be in the news or something."

Orlando paused, then shouted, "Beezle!"

A door opened in the floor and a small something with rolling eyes and too many legs leaped out and hurried toward him. It tumbled to a stop by his feet, then tugged itself into an untidy heap and said, in a raspy Brooklyn accent, "Yeah, boss?"

"Do a news search for me on the phenomenon I just described, or any other major net anomalies. And find me the record of the final fifteen minutes of my last Thargor game."

"Doing it now, boss." Another door opened in the floor and Beezle popped into it. There was a cartoon-soundtrack noise of pots and pans crashing and things falling, then the creature reappeared, limbs flailing, dragging a small black square as though it were the anchor off a luxury liner. "Phew," the agent panted. "Lot of news to check, boss. Wanna look at this while I'm searching? It's the game record."

Orlando took the small square and stretched; it grew to the size of a beach towel and hung unsupported in space. He started to tilt it toward Fredericks, then smiled. Even with as much time as he spent on the net, he could still fall into a bit of RL-thinking when he was in a hurry. VR didn't work that way: if Fredericks wanted to see the sample, he'd see it no matter where he was sitting. But now he was thinking about angles; he rapped on the square with his finger and it expanded into the third dimension. "Run it, Beezle," he said. "Give me a viewpoint from somewhere outside the characters."

There was a moment's pause as the processors reconfigured the data, then the black cube was illuminated by the light of a torch flickering on two figures.

". . . Diamonds of imperial weight," he heard himself saying in his deepened Thargor-voice.

"Fifty! By the gods!"

"Yes. Now, shut your mouth."

Orlando surveyed the scene critically. It was strange to stand on the outside of Thargor like this, as though the barbarian were only a character in a netflick. "Too early. I haven't even dug into the tomb yet. Forward ten minutes."

Now he could see his alter-ego pushing through the upside-down thicket of roots, torch in one hand, runesword in the other. Suddenly, Thargor stood straight, Lifereaper lifted as if to ward off a blow.

"That's it!" said Orlando. "That's when I saw it! Beezle, give me POV so I can see the wall directly in front of Thargor."

The image blurred. An instant later, the viewpoint had moved to a place just behind the mercenary's right shoulder. The wall was fully visible, including the place where the burning crevice had appeared.

Except it hadn't appeared.

"What? This is scanny! Freeze it, Beezle." Orlando slowly rotated the shape, looking at the wall from different sides. His stomach lurched. "I don't believe this!"

"I don't see anything," said Fredericks.

"Thanks for pointing that out." Orlando made his agent change the viewpoint several times; he and Fredericks even froze the recorded simulation and entered it, but there was nothing out of the ordinary: Thargor was not reacting to anything visible.