City of Golden Shadow (5 page)

"Because I made you dinner, and I want you to eat it before it gets cold."

"I'll wave it when I'm done."

"No, you won't. Come on, Stephen. There was a bomb at school today. It was frightening. I'd like to have your company over dinner."

He straightened, the appeal to his vanity effective. "Chizz. What'd you make?"

"Chicken and rice."

He made a face, but was seated and pushing it into his mouth before she returned from the kitchen with a glass of beer for herself and a soft drink for him.

"What blew up?" He chewed rapidly. "People killed?"

"No one, thank God." She tried not to be disheartened by his clear look of disappointment. "But it destroyed the campanile-you remember, the tower in the middle of the campus."

"Chizz major! Who did it? Zulu Mamba?"

"No one knows. But it frightened me."

"A bomb went off in my school last week."

"What? You never said a word about that!"

He grimaced in disgust, then wiped grease from his chin. "Not that kind. In SchoolNet. Sabotage. Someone said that some guys from Upper Form did it as a graduation prank."

"You're talking about a system crash on the net." She wondered for a moment if Stephen understood the difference between the net and real life. He's only eleven, she reminded herself. Things outside of his narrow circle aren't very real yet. "The bomb that went off at the Poly today could have killed hundreds of people. Killed them dead."

"I know. But the blowdown on SchoolNet killed a lot of Crafts and even some high-level Constellations, backups and all. They'll never come back again either." He reached out for the rice dish, ready for seconds.

Renie sighed. Crafts, Constellations-if she were not a net-literate instructor herself, she would probably think her brother was speaking a foreign language. "Tell me what else you've been doing. Have you read any of that book I gave you?" For his birthday, she had downloaded, at not inconsiderable cost, Otulu's Marching Toward Freedom, the best and most stirring work she knew on South Africa's fight for democracy in the late twentieth century. As a concession to her young brother's tastes she had purchased the expensive interactive version, full of historical video footage and stylish "you-are-there" 3D re-enactments.

"Not yet I looked at it. Politics."

"It's more than that, Stephen. It's your heritage-it's our history."

He chewed. "Soki and Eddie and me almost made it into the Inner District. We got this flowpast off a guy in Upper Form. We were almost downtown! Open ticket!"

"Stephen, I don't want you trying to get to the Inner District."

"You used to do it when you were my age." His grin was insolently disarming.

"Things were different then-you can get arrested these days. Big fines. I'm serious, boy. Don't do it." But she knew the warning was useless. Might as well tell children not to swim in the old fishing hole. Stephen was already nattering on as though she hadn't said anything. She sighed. From the level of excitement, she knew she was in for a forty-minute discourse, full of obscure Junior Netboy argot.

". . . It was chizz major sampled. We dodged three Bully-boxes. But we weren't doing anything wrong," he said hurriedly. "Just tapping and napping. But it was so flared! We met someone who got into Mister J's!"

"Mister J's?" This was the first thing she hadn't recognized.

Stephen's look suddenly changed; Renie thought she saw something flicker behind his eyes. "Oh, just this place. Kind of like a club."

"What kind of club? An entertainment place? Shows and stuff?"

"Yeah. Shows and stuff." He toyed with his chicken bone for a moment "It's just a place."

Something thumped on the wall.

"Renie! Bring me a glass of water." Long Joseph's voice sounded groggy and stupid. Renie winced, but went to the sink. For now, Stephen deserved something like a normal home life, but when he was finally out on his own, things would change around here.

When she got back, Stephen was finishing his third helping, but she could tell by his jittering leg and half-out-of-the-seat posture that he was aching to get back to the net.

"Not so fast, young warrior. We've barely had a chance to talk."

Now something almost like panic flashed across his face, and Renie felt her stomach go sour. He was definitely spending too much recreation time plugged in if he was so desperate to get back. She would make sure he spent some time out of the house. If she took him to the park this Saturday, she could make sure he didn't just go over to a friend's, plug in, and spend the whole day lying on the floor like an invertebrate.

"So tell me more about the bomb," Stephen said suddenly. "Tell me all about it."

She did, and he listened carefully and asked questions. He seemed so interested that she also told him about her first meeting with her student !Xabbu, how small and polite he was, his odd, old-fashioned style of dress.

"There was a boy like him in my school last year," Stephen said. "But he got sick and had to leave."

Renie thought of !Xabbu as he had waved good-bye, his slender arm and sweet, almost sad face. Would he, too, get sick somehow, physically or spiritually? He had said that few of his people did well living in the city. She hoped he would prove an exception-she had liked his quiet sense of humor.

Stephen got up and cleared away the dishes without being asked, then plugged in again, but surprisingly accessed Marching Toward Freedom, disengaging from time to time to ask her questions about it. After he finally went to his room, Renie read term papers for another hour and a half, then accessed the newsbank. She watched reports about a variety of faraway problems-a new strain of the Bukavu virus forcing quarantines in Central Africa, a tsunami in the Philippines, UN sanctions on the Red Sea Free State, and a class-action suit against a childcare service in Jo'burg-and the local news as well, including lots of footage about the bomb at the college. It was strange to be on the net, watching in 360-degree stereoscope the same thing she had seen with her own eyes that morning. It was hard to tell which experience was more convincingly real. And these days, what did "real" mean anyway?

The headset began to feel claustrophobic, so she pulled it off and watched the rest of the news she wanted to see on the wallscreen. Full surround was a bit of a busman's holiday for her anyway.

It was only after she had made everyone's lunch for the next day, then set her alarm and climbed into her own bed, that the feeling which had nagged her all evening finally surfaced: Stephen had manipulated her somehow. They had been talking about something and he had changed the subject, then they had never got back to it. His subsequent behavior alone had been suspicious enough to suggest that he was avoiding something.

She couldn't for the life of her remember what they had been discussing-some netboy larking, probably. She made a mental note to speak to him about it.

But there was so much to do, so very much to do. And never enough hours in the day.

That's what I need. She was bleary with approaching sleep: even her thoughts felt heavy, like a burden she ached to put down. I don't need more net, more full-surround realism, more pictures and sounds. I just need more time.

"Now I have seen it." !Xabbu contemplated the apparently distant white walls of the simulation. "But I still do not understand precisely. You say this is not a real place?"

She turned to face him. Even though she herself was only vaguely human in appearance, beginners were comforted by retaining as many of the forms of normal interaction as possible. !Xabbu, in this beginner's simulation, was a gray human-shaped figure with a red "X" across his chest. Even though the "X" was a normal part of the simuloid, Renie had inscribed a complementary scarlet "R" across her own figure-again, anything to make the transition easier.

"I don't mean to be rude," she said carefully, "but I'm really not used to having this kind of session with an adult. Please don't be offended if I tell you something that seems very obvious."

!Xabbu's simuloid had no face, hence no facial expression, but his voice was light. "I am not easy to offend. And I know I am an odd case, but there is no net access in the Okavango Swamps. Please teach me what you would teach a child."

Again Renie wondered what !Xabbu wasn't telling her. It had become clear in the past few weeks that he had some kind of weird connections-no one else would be jumped into the Polytechnic's advanced networker program without any background. It was like sending someone to a Johannesburg University literature course to learn their ABC's. But he was smart-very smart: with his small stature and formal manner, it was tempting to think of him as a child or some kind of idiot savant.

Then again, she thought, how long would I survive naked and unarmed in the Kalahari? Not bloody long. There was still more to living in the world than net skills.

"Okay. You know the basics about computers and information processing. Now, when you say 'Is this a real place?' you're asking a very difficult question. An apple is a real thing, yes? But a picture of an apple is not an apple. It looks like an apple, it makes you think about apples, you can even choose one pictured apple over another in terms of which might taste better-but you can't taste either of them. You can't eat a picture-or at least, it isn't like eating a real apple. It's only a symbol, no matter how realistic-looking, for a real thing. Got that?"

!Xabbu laughed. "I understand you so far."

"Well, the difference between an imagined something-a concept-and a real thing used to be fairly straightforward Even the most realistic picture of a house was only an image. You could imagine what it would be like to go inside it, but you couldn't actually go inside it. That's because it didn't fully replicate the experience of going into a real house, with all that entails. But what if you could make something that felt like a real thing, tasted like it, smelled like it, but wasn't that thing-wasn't a 'thing' at all, but only a symbol of a thing, like a picture?"

"There are places in the Kalahari Desert," !Xabbu said slowly, "where you see water, a pool of sweet water. But when you go to it, it is gone."

"A mirage." Renie waved her hand and a pool of water appeared at the far side of the simulation.

"A mirage," !Xabbu agreed. He seemed to be ignoring her illustration. "But if you could touch it, and it was wet-if you could drink it, and quench your thirst-then would it not be water? It is hard to imagine something that is real and not real."

Renie led him across the bare white floor of the simulation to the pool she had conjured. "Look at this. See the reflections? Now watch me." She knelt and scooped water with her simuloid hands. It ran out between her fingers, drizzling into the pool. Circular ripples crossed and recrossed each other. "This is a very basic setup-that is, your interface equipment, the goggles and sensors you just put on, are not very advanced. But even with what we have, this looks like water, does it not? Moves like water?"

!Xabbu bent and ran his gray fingers through the pool. "It flows a little strangely."

Renie waved her hand. "Money and time make it more realistic. There are external simulation rigs so well made that not only would this move just like real water, but you would feel it, cold and wet on your skin. And then there are 'cans'-neurocannular implants-which you and I won't get to use unless we wind up working for the top government labs. They let you pour computer-simulated sensations directly into your nervous system. If you had one of those, you could drink this water, and it would feel and taste just like the real thing."

"But it would not quench my thirst, would it? If I did not drink real water, I would die." He didn't sound worried, just interested.

"You would indeed. It's a good thing to remember. A decade or two ago you used to hear about a netboy or netgirl dying every couple of weeks-too long under simulation, forgot they needed real food and real water. Not to mention ordinary things like pressure sores. Doesn't happen much anymore-too many safeguards on the commercial products, too many restrictions and alarm routines on net access at universities and in business."

Renie waved her hand and the water disappeared. She waved again and a forest of evergreen trees suddenly filled the empty space around them, reddish rippled bark rising in tall columns and a blur of dark leafy greenness high above. !Xabbu's sudden intake of breath gave her a childish satisfaction. "It's all down to input and output," she said. "Just as someone used to sit in front of a flat screen and punch in instructions on a keyboard, now we wave our hands in a certain way and do magic. But it's not magic. It's just input, just telling the processing part of the machinery what to do. And instead of the result appearing on a screen in front of us, we receive the output as stereoscopic visuals-" she indicated the trees, "-sound-" she gestured again; a whisper of birdsong filled the forest, "-and whatever else you want, limited only by the sophistication of your processing machinery and your interface equipment."

Renie tweaked up a few details, placing a sun in the sky above the filigree of branches, carpeting the forest floor in grass and small white flowers. When she had finished, she spread her hands in a little flourish. "See, you don't even have to do all the work-the machines tidy up the details, angles and length of shadows, all that. This stuff is easy. You've already learned the basics-you'll be doing this yourself in a matter of weeks."

"The first time I watched my grandfather make a fishing spear," !Xabbu said slowly, "I thought that was magic, too. His fingers moved so fast that I couldn't see what they did, chip here, turn there, twist the cord-then suddenly there it was!"

"Exactly. The only difference is that if you want to make the best fishing spears in this environment, you have to find someone who'll pay for it. VR equipment starts with the simple stuff everyone has at home-everyone outside the Okavango Swamps, that is-" She wished he could see she was smiling; she hadn't meant the remark to be offensive. "But to get to the top of the line, you have to own a diamond mine or two. Or a small country. But even at a backwater college like this, with our creaky old equipment, I can show you many things."