City of Golden Shadow (6 page)

"You have shown me many things already, Ms. Sulaweyo. May we make something else now? Might I make something?"

"Creating in VR environments. . . ." she paused, trying to decide how to explain. "I can show you how to do things, make things-but you wouldn't really be doing the work. Not at this level. You'd just be telling some very sophisticated programs what you wanted and they'd give it to you. That's fine, but you should learn the basics first. It would be as if your grandfather did all but the last stroke of work on the spear and gave you that to do. You wouldn't have made it, and you wouldn't really have learned how to make one of your own."

"So you are saying that first I need to hunt the right kind of wood, learn how to see and shape the spearhead, how to decide where to put the first chip." He spread his simuloid arms in a comical way. "Yes?"

She laughed. "Yes. But as long as you realize there's a lot less dramatic work to be done before any of this is useful, I'll show you how to make something."

Under Renie's patient instruction, !Xabbu rehearsed the hand movements and body positions that commanded the microprocessors. He learned quickly, and she was reminded again of how children learned the net. Most adults, when confronted with a new task, tried to think their way through it, which often took them down blind alleys when their logical models failed to match the new circumstances. But for all his obvious intelligence, !Xabbu took to VR in a far more intuitive way. Instead of setting out to make a particular thing, and then trying to force the machinery to enact his ideas, he let the microprocessors and the software show him what they could do, then continued in the directions that interested him.

As they watched his first attempts to control shape and color appear and then disappear in midair, he asked her "But why all this labor and expense to . . . counterfeit-is that the word? Why should we counterfeit reality at all?"

Renie hesitated. "Well, by learning to . . . counterfeit reality, we can make things that cannot exist except in our imaginations, just as artists have always done. Or make something to show what we would like to create, as builders do when they draw a plan. But also, we can create for ourselves an environment that is more comfortable in which to work. Just as this program takes a hand gesture-" she waved her arm; a puff of white appeared in the sky overhead, "-and makes a cloud, it can take the same hand gesture and move a large amount of information from one place to another, or go and find some other information. Instead of hunching at a keyboard or a touchscreen, as we used to do, we can sit or stand or lie down, point or wave or talk. Using the machines on which our lives depend can be made as easy as. . . ." She paused, trying to find a simile.

"As making a fish spear." His voice was oddly inflected. "So we seem to have come in a full circle. We complicate our life with machines, then struggle to make it as simple as it was before we had them. Have we gained anything, Ms. Sulaweyo?"

Renie felt obscurely attacked. "Our powers are greater-we can do many more things. . . ."

"Can we talk to the gods and hear their voices more clearly? Or have we now, with all these powers, become gods?"

!Xabbu's change of tone had caught her off-balance. As she struggled to give him a reasonable answer, he spoke again.

"Look here, Ms. Sulaweyo. What do you think?"

A small and somewhat hard-angled flower had poked up from the simulated forest floor. It did not look like any flower she knew, but it had a certain vibrancy she found compelling; it seemed almost more a work of art than an attempt to imitate a real plant. Its velvety petals were blood red.

"It's . . . it's very good for a first try, !Xabbu."

"You are a very good teacher."

He snapped his clumsy gray fingers and the flower disappeared.

She turned and pointed. A shelf of volumes leaped forward so she could read the titles.

"Shit," she whispered. "Wrong again. I can't remember the name. Find anything with 'Spatial development or 'Spatial rendering' and 'child' or 'juvenile' in the title."

Three volumes appeared, floating before the library shelves.

"Analysis of spatial rendering in juvenile development," she read. "Right. Give me a list in order of most occurrences of. . . ."

"Renie!"

She whirled at the sound of her brother's disembodied voice, exactly as she would have in the real world. "Stephen? Where are you?"

"Eddie's house. But we're . . . having a problem." There was an edge of fear.

Renie felt her pulse speed. "What kind of problem? Something at the house? Somebody giving you trouble?"

"No. Not at the house." He sounded as miserable as when he'd been thrown in the canal by older kids on his way home from school. "We're on the net. Can you come help us?"

"Stephen, what is wrong? Tell me right now."

"We're in the Inner District. Come quick." The contact was gone.

Renie pressed her fingertips together twice and her library disappeared. For a moment, while her rig had no input to chew, she hovered in pure gray netspace. She quickly waved up her basic starting grid, then attempted to jump straight to her brother's present location, but she was blocked by a No Access warning. He was in the Inner District, and in a subscription-only area. No wonder he hadn't wanted to stay in contact very long. He had been running up connection time on someone else's tab-probably his school's-and any large access group kept an eye open for just such leakage.

"God damn that boy!" Did he expect her to hack into a big commercial system? There were penalties for that, and some of them could involve jail time for trespassing. Not to mention what the Polytechnic would think if one of its instructors were caught in that kind of undergraduate foolery. But he had sounded so frightened. . . .

"Damn," she said again, then sighed and started working on her alias.

Everyone entering Inner District was required to wear a simuloid: no invisible lurkers were allowed to trouble the net's elite. Renie would have preferred to have appeared in the bare minimum-a faceless, sexless object like a pedestrian on a traffic sign-but a rudimentary sim bespoke poverty, and nothing would attract attention faster at the Inner District Gateway. She settled for an androgynous Efficiency sim that, she hoped, had just enough in the way of facial expression and body articulation to make her appear some rich net baron's errand-runner. The expense, filtered through several layers of accounting, should wind up in the backwaters of the Polytechnic's operating budget; if she could get in and out fast enough, the amount shouldn't attract anyone's attention.

She hated the risk, though, and hated the dishonesty even more. When she found Stephen and dragged him out again, she was going to give him a serious scorching.

But he had sounded so frightened. . . .

The Inner District Gateway was a glowing rectangle set in the base of what appeared to be a mile-high wall of white granite, daylit despite the lack of a visible sun anywhere in the bowl of simulated black sky. A swirl of figures were waiting to be processed, some wearing wild body shapes and bright colors-there was a particular type of lurker who stood around the Gateway despite having no hope of entry, as though the Inner District were a club that might suddenly decide the house wasn't interesting enough that night-but most were as functionally embodied as Renie, and all of them were constrained to approximately human dimensions. It was ironic that where the concentration of wealth and power on the net was greatest, things slowed down to something like the restrictive pace of the real world. In her library, or in the Poly's information net, she could jump with a single gesture to any place she wanted, or just as quickly construct whatever she needed, but the Inner District and other centers of influence forced users into sims, and then treated the sims just like real people, herding them into virtual offices and checkpoints, forcing them to idle for excruciatingly long periods of time while their connection costs mounted and mounted.

If politicians ever find a way to tax light, she thought sourly, they'll probably set up waiting rooms for sunbeam inspection, too. She took up a position in line behind a hunched gray thing, a lowest-order sim whose slumped shoulders suggested an expectation of refusal.

After what seemed an insufferable wait, the sim before her was duly rejected and she at last found herself standing before one of the most cartoonish-looking functionaries she had ever seen. He was small and rodent-faced, with a pair of old-fashioned glasses pinching the end of his nose and a pair of small, suspicious eyes peering over them. Surely he must be a Puppet, she thought-a program given the appearance of humanity. No one could look so much like a petty bureaucrat, or if they did, would perpetuate it on the net, where one could appear as anything he or she desired.

"Purpose in Inner District?" Even his voice was tight as kazoo music, as though he spoke through something other than the normal orifice.

"Delivery to Johanna Bundazi." The chancellor of the Polytechnic, as Renie knew, kept a small node in the Inner District.

The functionary looked at her balefully for a long moment. Somewhere processors processed. "Ms. Bundazi is not in residence."

"I know." She did know, too-she had been very careful. "I've been asked to hand-deliver something to her node."

"Why? She's not here. Surely it would be better to send it to the node she is currently accessing." Another brief moment. "She is not available at the moment on any node."

Renie tried to keep her temper. This must be a Puppet-the simulation of bureaucratic small-mindedness was too perfect "All I know is that I was asked to deliver it to her Inner District node. Why she wants to make sure it has been directly uploaded is her affair. Unless you have contrary instructions, let me do my job."

"Why does the sender need hand-delivery when she's not accessing there?"

"I don't know! And you don't need to know either. Shall I go back, then, and you can tell Ms. Bundazi you refused to allow her a delivery?"

The functionary squinted as though he were searching a real human face for signs of duplicity or dangerous tendencies. Renie was glad to be shielded by the sim mask. Yeah, go ahead and try to read me, you officious bastard.

"Very well," he said at last. "You have twenty minutes." Which, Renie knew, was the absolute minimum access time-a deliberate bit of unpleasantness.

"What if there are return instructions? What if she's left a message dealing with this, and I need to take something else to somewhere in the District?" Renie suddenly wished this were a game and she could lift a laser gun and blast the Puppet to shards.

"Twenty minutes." He raised a short-fingered hand to stifle further protest. "Nineteen minutes, fifty . . . six seconds, now-and counting. If you need more, you'll have to reapply."

She began to move away, then turned back to the rat-faced man, occasioning a grunt of protest from the next supplicant, who had finally reached the Holy Land. "Are you a Puppet?" Renie demanded. Some of the others in line muttered in surprise. It was a very rude question, but one that law mandated must be answered.

The functionary squared his narrow shoulders, indignant "I am a Citizen. Do you want my number?"

Jesus Mercy. He was a real person after all. "No," she said. "Just curious."

She cursed herself for pushing things, but a woman could only take so much.

Unlike the careful mimicry of real life elsewhere in the Inner District, there was no illusion of passing through the gate: a few moments after her admission was confirmed Renie was simply deposited in Gateway Plaza, a huge and depressingly Neofascist mass of simulated stone, a flat expanse which appeared to be the size of a small country, surrounded by towering arches from which spoke-roads radiated into the distance in a deceptively straightforward-seeming way. It was an illusion, of course. A few minutes' walk down one would get you somewhere, but it wouldn't necessarily be anywhere you could see from the Plaza, and it wouldn't necessarily be a broad straight avenue, or even a street at all.

Despite its immense size, the Plaza was more crowded and more rambunctious than the waiting area beyond the Gateway. People here were inside, even if only temporarily, and it lent a certain air of purpose and pride to their movements. And if they had the leisure to travel through the Plaza at all, to imitate real life to that extent, they probably had good reason to feel proud: the lowest-level admittees like herself weren't given the time for anything but instantaneous travel to and from their destinations.

It was a place worth lingering in. The actual citizens of the Inner District, those who had the money and power to commandeer their own private space in this elite section of the net, did not have the same restraints on their sims as visitors. In the distance Renie could see a pair of naked men with incredibly bulging muscles who also both happened to be bright candy-apple red and thirty feet tall. She wondered what the upkeep on those must have been, just in taxes and connection costs alone-it was much costlier to move a nonstandard body through the simulations.

New rich, she decided.

On the few other occasions she had managed to get into Inner District-usually hacking in as a student netgirl, but twice as someone's legitimate guest-she had been delighted just to sightsee. Inner District was, of course, unique: the first true World City, its population (simulated though it might be) was made up of planet Earth's ten million or so most influential citizens . . . or so the District's clientele clearly believed, and they went to great lengths to justify that contention.

The things they built for themselves were wonderful. In a place without gravity or even the necessity of normal geometry, and with highly flexible zoning laws in the private sectors, human creative ingenuity had flowered in most spectacular ways. Structures that would have been buildings in the real world, and thus subject to mundane laws, could here dispense with such irrelevant considerations as up-and-down and size-to-weight ratios. They needed only to serve as nodes, and so blazing displays of computer design appeared overnight and often disappeared as quickly, wild and colorful as jungle flowers. Even now she paused for a moment to admire an impossibly thin, translucent green skyscraper rising high into the sky beyond the arches. She thought it quite beautiful and unusually restrained, a knitting needle of solid jade.