City of Golden Shadow (30 page)

A chamber with an oven-hot floor and all the furniture made of metal.

A formal Korean garden, the bushes full of grunting naked shapes.

An open-air café beside the ruins of an ancient freeway.

A terraced garden jutting like a theater balcony from the side of a tall cliff. Beside it, a vast waterfall thundered down into the gorge. . . .

Dizzy, almost ill from the speed of her transitions, Renie paused on the terrace. She closed her eyes until the blur of colors stopped, then opened them again. A few of the dozen or so guests sitting at tables along the edge of the garden looked up incuriously, then turned back to their conversations and the spectacle of the waterfall.

"May I serve you?" A smiling, elderly Asian man had materialized beside her.

"I'm having trouble with my pad," she told him. "Can you connect me to your main switching center?"

"Done. Would you like a table while you conduct your business, Mister Otepi?"

Damn. She had stopped in one of the high-rent zones of the club, Of course they would have run her index as soon as she entered. At least they hadn't grabbed her, maybe Strimbello hadn't put out a general alert. Still, there was no sense pushing her luck. "Not yet, thank you. I may have to leave. Just a privacy shield, please."

The man nodded and then vanished. A circle of blue light appeared around her at waist level, demonstrating that she was shielded. She could still hear the roar of the great waterfall and watch it smashing down the rocks into the canyon, where it disappeared into a cloud of white spume; she could even see the other guests and hear the occasional snatch of conversation over the water noises-but they, presumably, could no longer see or hear her.

No time to waste. She forced herself to think calmly. She dared not leave unless !Xabbu had already gone offline, but if he had, she would have no way of knowing. If she stayed, she felt sure Strimbello would find her sooner rather than later. He might not have sounded a general alarm-even as an intruder, she was probably not very important in the larger scheme of things-but Strimbello himself, whether human or frighteningly realistic Puppet, did not seem the type to give up easily. She would have to find a way to stay inside the system until she either located !Xabbu or was forced to give up.

"Phone connect."

A gray square appeared before her, as though someone had taken a sharp knife to reality-rather, to imitation reality. She gave the number she wanted, then keyed in her pad's identification code. The square remained gray, but a small glowing dot appeared in the lower corner to tell her she'd connected with the one-shot access bank she'd prepared for just such an emergency.

"Carnival." She whispered, but it was only reflex: if the privacy shield was legitimate, she could scream the code word until her lungs ached without anyone hearing. If it wasn't, everything she had done was already known to her pursuers.

Nobody seemed to be watching. The access bank downloaded the new identity instantly. She was faintly disappointed that there was no sensation-surely shape-changing, a hallowed and ancient magical art, should feel like something? But of course her shape hadn't changed: she still wore the nondescript sim in which she'd entered, and behind that was still Irene Sulaweyo, teacher and part-time Net Bandit. Only her index was different. Mister Otepi from Nigeria had vanished. Mister Babutu from Uganda had taken his place.

She dissolved the privacy shield and surveyed the massive waterfall, the elegant formal garden. Waiters, or things that looked like waiters, were skimming from table to table like waterbugs. She could not hang about this place forever. In such a service-intensive sector of the club she would quickly attract attention again, and she did not want her new identity linked in any way with the old one. Someone would notice eventually, of course: she had entered as Otepi, and at the end of some arbitrary accounting period an expert system checking the records would notice that Otepi had never left. But that might be hours from now, or even days. A node with a turnover as large and constant as Mister J's would have a hard time locating the other half of the discrepancy, and with luck she would be long gone by the time they did. With luck.

With a word she shifted back to the main lounge, where she would pass unnoticed more easily in the large and active crowd. She was tired, too, and eager for the chance to stay in one place for a few minutes. But what about !Xabbu? He was so much less experienced. What effect would such stress be having on him if he wandered somewhere in this vast labyrinth, alone and frightened?

The lounge was still full of glaring lights and long shadows, of voices and wild music. Renie picked a bench sunk in the darkness at the base of one of the cyclopean walls and turned down the gain on her hearplugs. It was hard to know where to start. There were so many rooms here, so many public spaces. She herself had been in dozens, and she was sure she had only scratched the surface. And she could not even guess at how many people might be in the club-hundreds of thousands, perhaps. Mister J's was not a physical space. The only limitation was the speed and power of the equipment that lay behind it. Her friend could be anywhere.

Renie turned to look at the revolving stage. The pale singer and her goblinish band were gone. Instead, a group of elephants, normal in every detail except for their straw hats, sun glasses, and strangely spiky instruments-and of course the delicate rosy pink of their baggy skins-were churning out slow, thumping dance music. She could feel the jar of the bass even through her lowered hearplugs.

"Excuse me." One of the shiny-faced waiters hovered before her.

"Nothing but rent for me," she told him. "I'm just resting."

"Fine with me, sir, I assure you. But I have a message for you."

"For me?" She leaned forward, staring. She felt her skin tingle. "That's not possible." He raised an eyebrow. His foot tapped on air. Renie swallowed. "I mean, are you sure?"

If the waiter was playing a game with her on behalf of her pursuers, he was doing a very convincing job. He practically seethed with impatience. "Oh, sweeze. You are Mister Babutu, aren't you? Because if you are, the rest of your party wants to meet you in the Contemplation Hall."

She recovered herself and thanked him; an instant later he was gone, a vanishing huff of silver.

Of course, it could be !Xabbu, she thought. She had told him the names of both emergency identities, his and hers. Then again, it might just as easily be Strimbello or some other, less broadly drawn, functionaries wishing to avoid a scene. !Xabbu or Strimbello, it had to be one or the other-Mister Babutu didn't really exist, so no one else would be looking for him.

What choice did she have? She couldn't ignore the possibility of finding her friend.

She picked Contemplation Hall out of the main menu and shifted. She thought she detected an almost infinitesimal hitch to the transfer, as though the system were experiencing unusually heavy usage, but it was hard to dispel the idea that the delay might mean she was going somewhere deep into the heart of the system, far from the metaphorical surface. Deep inside the beast.

The hall was a very striking conception, a sort of Classical folly writ large. Tall columns covered in flowering vines held up a huge circular dome, part of which had cracked and fallen away. White shards, some as large as a suburban house, glinted like bones along the base of the columns, tucked in threadbare blankets of moss. A bright blue sky striped with wind-tattered clouds showed through the hole in the dome and between the pillared arches on each side, as though the hall stood atop Mount Olympus itself. A few sims, most of them far in the simulated distance, strolled about the wide grassy space inside the ring of stone.

She did not like the idea of leaving the outer edge and moving into the open space, but if the club's authorities had summoned her to this place, it wouldn't matter whether she tried to be inconspicuous or not. She shifted toward the center and turned to gaze around her, impressed with the completeness of the design. The stones of the massive folly seemed convincingly old, surfaces shot with cracks, columns surrounded and overgrown with vegetation. Rabbits and other small animals moved across the hummocky ground, and a pair of twittering birds were building a nest on one of the shards of the tumbled dome.

"Mister Babutu?"

She whirled. "Who are you?"

He was a tall, lantern-jawed man, made to seem even bigger by his baggy dark suit. He wore a tall and scuffed black top hat; a striped muffler hung loosely around his long neck. "I'm Wicket" He smiled broadly, tipping the hat. The shabbiness of his attire sat oddly with his quick, vigorous movements. "Your friend Mister Wonde sent me. You got a message from him?"

Renie eyed him. "Where is he?"

"With some of my mates. Come on-I'll take you to him." He pulled something from inside his coat. If he saw Renie flinch at the movement, he showed no sign, but instead lifted the battered flute to his lips and played a few piping bars, something that she could not identify but which seemed familiar as a nursery rhyme. A hole opened in the grass between them. Renie could see steps leading down.

"Why didn't he come himself?"

Wicket was already in the hole to his waist, which left the top of his black stove-pipe at about Renie's eye level. "Not feeling well, I think. He just asked me to fetch you. Said you might ask some questions, and to remind you about some game with string."

The string game. !Xabbu's song. Renie felt a weight of worry lift from her. No one but the Bushman could know about that. Wicket's hat was just vanishing below the surface of the ground. She climbed down after him.

The tunnel seemed to be something from a children's book, the home of some talking animal or other magical creature. Although within moments she and Wicket had moved far below what should have been the surface, the tunnel wall was pierced with small windows, and out of each she could see a scene of artificial beauty-riverlands, meadows, wind-groomed forests of oak and beech. Here and there along the downward spiral of the steps were small doors no higher than Renie's knee, each with a knocker and minute keyhole. The urge to open one was powerful. The place was like some wonderful dollhouse.

But she could not pause to look at anything. Although she herself was forced to keep one hand on the curving banister, Wicket, despite his long legs and broad shoulders, bounced down the stairway ahead of her at a rapid pace, still blowing on his flute. After a few minutes he had vanished down the twisting stairwell. Only thin musical echoes proved he was still in front of her.

The stairwell wound down and down. Occasionally she thought she heard high-pitched voices from behind the doorways, or caught a glimpse of a bright eye peering out through a keyhole. Once she had to duck to avoid garrotting herself on a laundry line which had been stretched right across the stairwell. Tiny calico dresses, none bigger than a slice of bread, slapped damply against her face.

Down they went, still farther. More stairs, more doors, and the continuous trill of Wicket's elusive music-Renie felt the fairy-tale charm of the place beginning to pall. She craved a cigarette and a glass of beer.

She ducked her head again to go under a low spot in the stairwell, and when she raised it, the light had changed. Before she could react, her foot met resistance too suddenly, giving her a jolt that would have been painful if her body were not in harness back at the Poly. She had reached level ground.

Stretching before her, as if in continuation of the storybook theme, was a Mystery Cave, the sort of place which jolly children discovered in jolly stories. It was long and low, all stone and soft earth. The ceiling was whiskery with roots, as though the cavern were some hollow space beneath forest earth, but tiny lights twinkled amid the tangle. The dirt floor was covered with piles of strange objects. Some-feathers and shiny beads and polished stones-looked as though they had been collected and abandoned by animals or birds. Others, like a pit filled with the limbs and heads of dolls, seemed purposeful and somewhat overwrought, a university art project on corrupted innocence. Other objects were just incomprehensible, featureless spheres and cubes and less recognizable geometric shapes scattered across the earthen floor. Some of these even seemed to glow with a faint light of their own.

Wicket stood grinning before her. Even with his shoulders hunched, the top of his head loomed up among the twinkling fairy-lights. He lifted his flute and played again, doing a slow dance as he did so. There was something incongruous about him, some oddness that Renie couldn't quite name. If he was a Puppet, he was a work of real originality.

Wicket stopped and repocketed the flute. "You're slow," he said, mockery in his deep voice. "Come on-your friend's waiting."

He swept one hand to the side in a mock-formal bow and stepped back. Behind him on the far side of the long cavern, blocked from her sight until this moment, was the occluded glow of a campfire fenced by shadowy figures. Renie, again feeling the need for caution, moved forward. Her heart sped.

!Xabbu, or a sim that looked very much like his, was sitting in the midst of a group of much better-defined figures, all men in tattered finery similar to Wicket's. With his sketchy features and rudimentary body details, the Bushman seemed like nothing so much as a gingerbread man.

More fairy tales. Renie was feeling a little punchy.

"Are you okay?" she asked on private band. "!Xabbu! Is that you?"

There was no reply, and for a moment she was certain she'd been tricked. Then the sim turned toward her, and a voice that despite the distortion, was recognizably the Bushman's, said: "I am very glad my new friends have found you. I have been here such a long time. I was beginning to think you had left me behind."

"Talk to me! If you can hear me, just raise your hand."

The sim did not move, but sat regarding her with expressionless eyes.

"I wouldn't leave you," she said at last "How did you end up here?"

"We found him wandering around, lost and confused." Wicket drew up his long legs as he seated himself beside the fire. "My friends and me." He pointed to the others in the circle. "That's Brownbread, Whistler, and Corduroy." His companions were fat, thin, and thinner still. None was as tall as Wicket, but all seemed otherwise quite similar, full of nudges and restless energy.