City of Golden Shadow (43 page)

Renie threw open the car door, earning a sour look from the driver, who had been about to open it "Don't get up!" she cried, then hurried up the steps and hugged her, secretly shocked at how small and birdlike the old woman felt.

"Get up?" Susan laughed. "You don't have that much time, do you?" She pointed to the wheels on her chair, which had been obscured by the tartan blanket bundled over the doctor's knees.

"Oh, my God, what's wrong?" Renie was a little shocked. Susan Van Bleeck looked . . . ancient. She had already been in her late sixties when Renie had studied with her, so it wasn't entirely surprising, but it was still unnerving to see what just two more years had done.

"Nothing permanent-well, that's a dangerous thing to say at my age. Broke my hip, basically. All the calcium supplements in the world won't help you if you go down the stairs arse-first" She looked past Renie. "And this is the friend you said you might bring, yes?"

"Oh, of course, this is !Xabbu. !Xabbu, meet Doctor Van Bleeck."

The little man nodded and smiled gravely as he shook her hand. Dako, who had reappeared after parking the car off to one side of the driveway, muttered something as he walked past, apparently to himself.

"I'd hoped we could sit outside," said their host, frowning at the sky. "But of course the weather's being bloody." She lifted a frail hand to gesture at the cavernous porch. "You know how we Afrikaaners are-always out on the stoep. But it's just too cold. By the way, young man, I hope you're not planning to call me 'Doctor' all day. 'Susan' will do nicely." She pulled off the blanket and handed it to !Xabbu, who took it as though it were a ceremonial vestment; then without using any controls Renie could see, she turned the wheelchair toward the door and up and over a ramp built into the threshold.

Renie and !Xabbu followed her down the broad hallway. The wheels made squeaking sounds on the polished wooden floorboards as the doctor turned and rolled ahead of them into the living room.

"How does the chair work?" Renie asked.

Susan smiled. "Pretty slick, don't you think? It's quite clever, really. You can get the kind that's controlled directly from a shunt, but that seemed a little severe-after all, I intend to get out of the damn thing eventually. This one just works off skin-contact sensors reading my leg muscles. I flex, it goes. At first it had to be the old-fashioned, manually operated kind so the bone could heal, but now I can use this as a form of physical therapy-you know, keep the leg muscles in some kind of shape." She gestured to the couch. "Please sit down. Jeremiah will bring in some coffee soon."

"I have to admit I was surprised to hear you were still at the University," Renie said.

Susan pulled a face like an extremely wrinkled child trying spinach for the first time. "God, what else would I do? Not that I'm in there often-about once a month, really, for something euphemistically called 'office hours.' Mostly I do consultation work right from here. But I do have to get out of this place occasionally. There's only so much solitude I can stand, and as you may have noticed, Jeremiah isn't the world's most energetic conversationalist."

As if demon-summoned by the sound of his name, Dako appeared in the doorway carrying a coffee service and cafétiere on a tray. He put it down and pressed the plunger-the doctor's appreciation of modem technology apparently did not extend to coffee-making-then left the room again, but not without another odd and slightly covert look at !Xabbu. The Bushman, who was looking at the doctor's roomful of paintings and sculpture, seemed not to notice.

"He keeps staring," Renie said. "All the way up the hill he kept looking at !Xabbu in the mirror."

"Well, it might be that he fancies him," Susan said, smiling, "but I suspect it's a bit of a guilty conscience."

Renie shook her head. "What do you mean?"

"Jeremiah's a Griqua-what they used to call a half-caste in the bad old days, although he's as black as anyone else. A couple of hundred years ago they drove the Bushmen out of this part of southern Africa. Violently. Horribly. It was a terrible time. I suppose the whites could have done more to stop it, but the hard truth is they saw more potential in the Griqua man they did in the Bushmen. Those were days when having any white blood at all made you better than someone with none-but still nothing like a white." She smiled again, rather sadly. "Do your people remember the Griqua with hatred, !Xabbu? Or are you from a different part of the country entirely?"

The little man looked around. "I am sorry, I was not listening carefully to what you were saying."

Susan gazed at him shrewdly. "Ah. You've seen my picture."

He nodded. Renie turned to see what they were talking about What she had thought was merely the wallscreen above the fireplace was actually a photographic print almost three meters wide, bigger than any she had seen outside a museum. It showed a painting on a natural rock wall, a primitively simple and graceful work. A gazelle was described in just a few lines, a group of dancing human figures on either side of it. The rock seemed to glow with a sunset light. The paint looked almost fresh, but Renie knew it was not.

!Xabbu was staring at it again. He was holding his shoulders in a strange way, as though something might be stalking him, but his eyes seemed full of wonder rather than fear.

"Do you know where it's from?" Susan asked him.

"No. But I know it is old, from the days when we Bushmen were the only people in this land," He reached out a hand as if to touch it, though it was a good ten feet from the couch on which he sat. "It is a powerful thing to see." He hesitated. "But I am not certain I am happy to see it in a person's house."

Susan frowned, taking her time. "Do you mean a white person's house? No, it's all right. I understand-or I think I do. I don't mean it to give offense. It does not have religious meaning to me, but I think it's a beautiful thing. I suppose I get spiritual value from it, if that doesn't sound presumptuous." She stared at the photo as if seeing it anew. "The painting itself, the original, is still on a cliff face at Giant's Castle in the Drakensberg Mountains. Will it bother you to see it, !Xabbu? I could ask Jeremiah to take it down. He won't be doing anything else much for the next few hours, but he's getting a salary anyway."

The small man shook his head. "There is no need. When I said I was not comfortable, I was speaking of my own thoughts, my own feelings. Renie knows that I have many worries about my people and their past." He smiled. "Their future, too. Perhaps it is better that some people can see it here at least. Perhaps they will remember . . . or at least wish they could remember."

They all three drank their coffee for a while in silence, looking at the leaping gazelle and the dancers.

"Well," the doctor said at last, "if you still want to show me something, Irene, we should get to it or we will miss lunch. Jeremiah does not take kindly to alterations in the schedule."

Renie had not explained much on the phone. Now, as she began to tell Susan about the mystery file, she found herself revealing more than she had intended. The doctor, trying to get at the context, asked questions for which it was hard to find partial answers, and Renie soon discovered that she had told her old teacher almost everything except the name of the online club and the reason they had gone there in the first place.

Old habits die hard, Renie thought Susan was looking at her expectantly, eyes bright, and it was possible to see not only the powerfully impressive woman she had been when Renie had first met her, but the sharp-witted and sharp-tongued girl she had been more than half a century ago. I never could lie to her worth a damn.

"But why in the name of God would anyone have a security system like that? What on earth could they be protecting?" The doctor's intent stare made Renie feel positively delinquent. "Have you gotten yourself involved with criminals, Irene?"

She suppressed a flinch at the hated name. "I don't know. I don't really want to talk about it yet. But if they're doing the kind of things I think they are, then the place should be burned out like a nest of poisonous snakes."

Susan sank back against the cushions of her wheelchair, her face troubled. "I'll respect your privacy, Irene, but I don't like the sound of this much. How did you get involved in such a thing?" She looked over at !Xabbu, as though he might be the cause.

Renie shrugged. "Let's say that I believe they've got something important to me and I want it back."

"Very well, I give up. I never had the patience for Miss Marple-ish guessing games. Let's see what you've got. Follow me."

She led Renie and !Xabbu down the hallway in her silent chair. What looked like an ordinary pair of French doors opened up to reveal a small freight elevator.

"Thank God I put this in for moving equipment," said the doctor. "Squeeze in tight, now. Since this hip nonsense, if I'd only had the stairs I wouldn't have been able to get down here for months. Well, maybe I could have made Jeremiah carry me. There's a picture."

The basement seemed to cover almost as much space as the house itself. A large part of it was taken up by the lab, which contained several rows of tables in typical laboratory array. "Mess and confusion," was how the doctor put it.

"I've got a clean stand-alone system already, and I've finished the antiviral work I was doing with it," she said. "We might as well use that. You'd probably just as soon watch this on a monitor screen, wouldn't you?"

Renie nodded emphatically. Even with Doctor Van Bleeck around to help, she wasn't going to put herself in a surround environment to explore whatever gift the Mister J's folks had sent her. Nobody got to play that trick on her twice.

"Okay, then. Fire up your pad and let's go. Load these, so I can run some diagnostics before we try to move it onto the new system."

After several minutes, the doctor dropped her squeezers onto her lap robe and made another of her childlike faces. "I can't get into the damn thing. But you're right, it's very strange. Doesn't seem to make much sense as an anti-intrusion device. How are you punishing someone if you Trojan Horse something onto their system too big to be activated? Ah, well. You might as well hook up."

Renie connected her pad to the doctor's dedicated machine. Things started to happen very quickly.

"It's transferring itself. The same way it downloaded onto my pad in the first place."

"But it's not sending a copy, the whole thing is moving." Susan frowned as she watched the diagnostics flutter through their various calculations. Renie almost felt sorry for all the doctor's specialist programs, as though they were living things, tiny little scientists wringing their hands and arguing with each other as they tried to classify a completely alien object.

"I know," Renie said. "It doesn't make sense. . . ." She broke off, staring. The monitor screen was beginning to glow more brightly. The diagnostic level disappeared entirely, numbers and symbols and graphs vanishing as though burned away by fire. Something was forming on the screen.

"What in the hell is that?" Susan sounded irritated, but there was an edge of real disquiet in her voice.

"It's . . . a city." Renie leaned forward. A slightly hysterical laugh was building inside her. It was like stealing secret microfilm in some old spyflick and discovering it contained holiday snaps. "It's visual feed of some city."

"That's no place I've ever seen." Susan, too, was leaning forward, as was !Xabbu, standing behind her chair. The light from the monitor gilded their faces. "Look-have you ever seen cars like that? It's some kind of science fiction clip-some netflick."

"No, it's real." Renie couldn't say exactly how she knew, but she knew. If it had been a still photograph like Susan's cliff-painting, it would have been hard to tell. But movement increased the level of information to the eye-and the brain-exponentially; even the best effects people found moving objects harder to synthesize. Renie hadn't been in the VR business as long as Susan, but she had as good an eye as anybody, and better than most. Even in Mister J's, with the top of the line machinery they clearly had at their command, she had been able to spot subtle failures of coordination and naturalistic movement. But this city of golden towers, of rippling banners and elevated trains, had no such flaws.

"I think I have seen this somewhere," said !Xabbu. "It is like a dream."

Susan picked up her squeezers and made a few gestures. "It's just running on automatic. I can't find any information attached to it." She frowned. "I'll just-"

The picture vanished. For a moment the entire monitor went dark, then the screen came back up in a blizzard of flickering pixels.

"What did you do?" Renie had to look away-the juddering, sparkling light reminded her of the last unpleasant hour in the club.

"Nothing. The damn thing just turned itself off." Susan restarted the system, which came back up as if everything were normal. "It's gone."

"Turned itself off?"

"Gone. Gone! There's no trace of it at all."

Ten minutes later Susan dropped her squeezers again and rolled her chair back from the monitor. She had searched both her own computer and Renie's pad diligently, with no result. "My eyes hurt," she said. "Do you want a go at it?"

"I can't think of anything you haven't done. How could it just disappear?"

"Some kind of autophage. Played, then ate itself. Nothing left now."

"So all we had was some picture of a city." Renie was depressed. "We don't know why. And now we don't even have that."

"Ah, of course! I almost forgot." Susan pulled her chair back close to the screen. "I was taking a display sample when the thing went kerploonk-let's see what we got." She directed the machine's search. A few moments later the screen resolved into a gauzy golden abstract. "We got it!" The doctor squinted. "Kak. It was just losing resolution when I got the snapshot. My eyes aren't so good on close-up work, Irene. Can you see anything in it at all, or is it just random colored pixels?"

"I think so."

"There is a tower," !Xabbu said slowly. "There."

"Right. Then we'll need to move it onto the main system. Since I took the sample myself, we'll assume it's inert and therefore safe-although this whole thing has been strange enough to make me less than completely confident about anything. Ah, well." She had a quick talk with the household wiring; a few minutes later they were again staring at the golden smear, now stretched yards wide across the laboratory wall-screen.