City of Golden Shadow (64 page)

!Xabbu's voice came to her clearly on the Frenchwoman's private band. "What sights you have brought to me, Renie. Look!"

She could not have done anything else. The visual environment that had blasted away the darkness was like nothing she had ever seen.

There was no up and down-that was the first and most disorienting thing. The virtual structures of TreeHouse connected with each other at every conceivable angle. Neither was there a horizon. The ragged mesh of buildinglike shapes stretched away in all directions. It was, Renie realized, like standing in the imaginary center of an Escher print. She could see empty blue that might be sky peeping from between some of the odd structures, but the color was just as likely to appear below the level of her feet as above her head. In other places, gaps were filled with rain clouds, or swirls of snow. Many of the structures appeared to be virtual dwellings, formed in every conceivable size and shape, towering multicolored skyscrapers crossed like dueling swords, collections of pink bubbles, even a glowing orange mushroom the size of an aircraft hangar, complete with doors and windows. A few of these shifted and changed into something else even as she watched.

There were people, too, or things that might have been people-it was difficult to tell, since the embodiment codes of the net had apparently been abandoned here-but there were other moving things that barely fit the definition of "object," ripples of color, streaks of interference, whirling galaxies of pulsing spots.

"It's . . . it's just crazy!" she said. "What is it all?"

"It is whatever the people who belong here want it to be." Martine's voice, the source of irritation earlier, was now a sublimely familiar thing in a mad place. "They have rejected rules."

!Xabbu made a startled noise and Renie turned. A floating tugboat covered in leopardskin had suddenly popped into existence beside him. A figure resembling a child's rag doll leaned out of the captain's cabin, examined them for a moment, then shouted something in a language Renie didn't understand. The tugboat vanished.

"What was that?" Renie asked.

"I do not know." Her invisible companion sounded dryly amused. "Someone stopping to look at the new arrivals. It is possible to have my system translate the languages spoken here, but it takes a great deal of processing power."

A high-pitched screaming echoed above the muted babble on the hearplugs, cresting, then dying off. Renie winced. "I . . . how are we going to find anything here? This is insane!"

"There are ways to operate in TreeHouse, and it is not all like this," Martine assured her. "We will find one of the quieter places-this is public, like a park. Go forward and I will direct you."

Renie and !Xabbu headed toward one of the gaps between the buildings, rising above a troop of dancing paisley mice, then swerving to avoid contact with something that looked like a huge tongue protruding from the sweating side of one of the structures. At Martine's urging they sped up, and the bizarre tangle of shapes blurred. Despite their rapid progress, some things moved as fast as they did-TreeHouse residents, Renie guessed, coming to take a look at them. These curious folk appeared in such a strange and disturbing assortment of shapes and effects that after a while Renie could no longer bear to look back at them. A burble of sound washed through the gaps between Martine's directions, some of them clearly greetings.

Renie looked to !Xabbu, worried, but the little man's sim was gazing from side to side like any tourist new to the big city. He did not seem too upset.

A giant red flower of a sort she did not recognize hung upside down before them, as big as a department store. They slowed at Martine's urging, then rose up into the petals from beneath. As the forest of crimson banners enfolded them, the babble in her hearplugs dropped away.

Writing flashed in the air before them as they drifted upward, a greeting in several languages. The English section read "This is our property. All who enter remain here under our rules, which are whatever we decide they are at any given time. Most of them have to do with respecting other people. Permission to enter may be revoked without notice. Signed, The Ant Farm Collective."

"How can you have private property if this is all anarchy?" Renie complained. "Some anarchists!"

Martine laughed. "You would fit in here very well, Renie. People sit and argue about such things for hours and hours."

The inside of the flower-or the simulation connected to the simulation that looked like a flower, Renie reminded herself-was a vast grotto honeycombed with passages and small open areas. The whole of it was covered floor to ceiling in velvety red, and the light came from no particular source; Renie thought it was rather like being in someone's intestine. Conventional sims and their much less humanoid counterparts sat, stood, or drifted, with no greater attention to up and down than those in what Martine had called the "park." The roar of sound was more muted here, but clearly there were a lot of conversations going on.

"Martine? Is that you? I was so happy to hear from you!"

!Xabbu and Renie turned at the stranger's faintly accented voice, which came strong and clear across the private band. The Bushman burst out laughing, and Renie was hard-pressed not to join him. The new arrival was a breakfast-a plate full of eggs and sausage hovering in midair, with silverware, cereal bowl, and a glass of orange juice orbiting around it like satellites.

"Are you laughing at my new sim?" The breakfast bounced gently in mock despair. "I'm shattered."

Martine's disembodied voice was warm. "Ali. It is good to meet you again. These are my guests." She did not use names; Renie, despite finding it hard to feel threatened by a floating meal, did not volunteer them.

The breakfast quite visibly looked them up and down, examining their rudimentary sims for a long moment. For the first time ever in VR, Renie felt self-conscious about the quality of her appearance. "Somebody must do something about what you're wearing," was the final verdict.

"That's not why we're here, Ali, but if they ever come back, I'm sure my friends will come to see you. Prince Ali von Al-ways-Laughing-Puppets was one of the first truly great designers of simulated bodies," Martine explained.

"Was?" Even his horror was arch. "Was? Good God, am I forgotten already? But I've gone back to just being Ali, dearest. Nobody's doing those long names at the moment-my idea, of course. Still, I'm ever so honored you remembered." The plate slowly rotated; the sausages gleamed. "Not that you've changed much, Martine dear. I suppose you've found the one way to avoid the entire fashion question entirely. Very minimal. And there is something to say for consistency." Ali could not entirely hide his disapproval. "Well, what brings you here again? It's been so long! And what shall we do? They're going to have some horrible ethics discussion here at Ant Farm tonight, and frankly I'd rather surrender to RL than endure that. But Sinyi Transitore is going to do a weather piece out of the conference center node. His things are always dreadfully interesting. Would your guests like to see that?"

"What is a weather piece?" asked !Xabbu. Renie was relieved to hear that he sounded quite calm. She had been wondering how he was holding up under all this strangeness.

"Oh, it's . . . weather. You know. You two must be African-so distinct, that accent. Do you know the Bingaru Brothers? Those clever fellows who shut down the Kampala Grid? They claim it was an accident, of course, but no one believes them. You must know them."

Renie and !Xabbu had to admit they did not.

"It sounds lovely, Ali," Martine cut in, "but we haven't come for entertainment. We need to find somebody, and I called you because you know everybody."

Renie was glad her own sim didn't show much in the way of facial expressions-it would be difficult to keep a straight face. She had never seen a breakfast swell with pride before.

"I do. But of course I do. Who are you looking for?"

"One of the older TreeHouse folk. His handle is the Blue Dog Anchorite."

The plate slowed its rotation. The fork and spoon drooped a little. "The Dog? That old crust? My goodness, Martine, what would you want with him?"

Renie could not contain her eagerness. "You know where to find him?"

"I suppose. He's out in Cobweb Corner with the rest of his friends."

"Cobweb Corner?" Martine sounded puzzled.

"That's just what we call it. Inside Founder's Hill. With the other old people." Ali's tone suggested that even to speak of it was to risk it, "My God, what is that?"

!Xabbu and Renie turned to follow what seemed to be the floating breakfast's line of sight. Two bulky Caucasian men were gliding past, surrounded by a cloud of tiny yellow monkeys. One of the men was dressed like something out of an extremely stupid netflick, sword and chain mail and long Mongol mustache.

"Thank you, Ali," said Martine. "We must go. It was lovely to meet you again. Thank you for answering my call."

Ali was still apparently riveted by the newcomers. "Heavens, I haven't seen anything like that in years. Someone should help them quickly." The assembly of flatware turned back to face them. "Sorry. The price we pay for freedom-some people will simply wear anything. So you're running off just like that? Martine, dearest, I am absolutely destroyed. Ah, well. Kiss." The fork and spoon did a complicated pirouette, then the breakfast began to drift leisurely after the two burly men and the cloud of monkeys. "Don't be strangers!" he called back at them.

"Why did that man choose to look like food?" !Xabbu asked a moment later.

Renie laughed. "Because he could, I suppose. Martine?"

"I am still here. I was checking the Founder's Hill directory for a listing, but I have no luck. We must go there."

"Let's go then." Renie surveyed the duodenal interior one last time. "Things can't get much stranger."

Founder's Hill, whatever it had once been, now displayed itself as nothing more complicated than a door, although it was a suitably large and impressive door, carefully rendered to resemble ancient, worm-eaten wood, with a huge, corroded brass knocker in the shape of a lion's head. An oil lantern hung from a hook overhead, filling the porch with yellow light. The doorstep of founder's Hill was also suitably quiet, like the forgotten place it resembled, although only moments before they had been in the full hurlyburly of TreeHouse life. Renie wondered if its appearance was the residents' sly joke at their own expense.

"Why do we not go in?" !Xabbu asked.

"Because I am doing the things that will enable us to go in." Martine sounded a little tense, as though she were trying to juggle and skip rope simultaneously. "Now you may knock."

Renie banged the knocker. A moment later the door swung open.

Before them stretched a long hallway, which was also lit by hanging lanterns. A succession of doors faced each other, continuing down both walls in file until the hallway dwindled into apparently infinite distance. Renie looked at the blank face of the nearest door, then put her hand on it. Writing appeared, as she had expected, but it was in a script she couldn't read that had the flowing look of Arabic. "Is there a directory?" she asked. "Or are we going to have to knock on every door."

"I am searching for a directory now," said Martine.

Renie and !Xabbu could only wait, although the small man seemed to bear it better than Renie did. She was cross again, not least at having to wonder what their invisible guide was doing.

What is her problem? Why is she so secretive? Is she damaged somehow? But that doesn't make sense. Her brain is obviously fine, and anything else wouldn't prevent her using a sim.

It was like traveling with a spirit or a guardian angel. So far, Martine seemed to be a good spirit, but Renie disliked having so great a reliance on someone about whom she knew so little.

"There is no directory," the guide announced."Not of individual nodes. But there are common areas. Perhaps we can find some help in one of those."

With no sensation of movement, they moved abruptly to a spot farther down the seemingly endless corridor, out of sight of the front entrance but still standing in front of one of the identical doors. It opened, as though pushed by Martine's invisible hand, and Renie and !Xabbu floated in.

The room, not surprisingly, was far bigger on the inside than the distance between doors in the corridor. It stretched for what seemed hundreds of yards, and was dotted with small tables, like the reading room of an old-fashioned library. It had a vaguely clublike feel, with pictures hanging on the walls-when Renie looked more closely, she saw they were posters for ancient musical groups-and virtual plants everywhere, some of them claiming space quite aggressively. The windows on the far wall looked out over the American Grand Canyon as it would look if filled with water and inhabited by extremely alien-looking aquatic life; Renie wondered briefly if they had chosen the view by popular vote.

There were sims everywhere, huddled in groups around tables, floating lazily near the ceiling or hovering midway between the two in gesticulating, argumentative flocks. They seemed to lack the hubristic display of the other denizens of TreeHouse: many of the sims were only a little more complex than the ones Renie and !Xabbu were wearing. She guessed that if these were, as Ali had suggested, the colony's oldest residents, perhaps they were wearing the sims of their youth, as old people in RL still tended to sport the fashions of their young adulthood.

A fairly basic female sim drifted by. Renie raised a hand to catch her attention.

"Pardon me. We're looking for Blue Dog Anchorite."

The sim watched her with the expressionless eyes of a painted mannequin, but did not speak. Renie was puzzled, English was usually the common language in most international VR environments.

She moved herself farther into the room, heading for a table where a loud discussion was in progress. As she drifted up, she heard fragments of conversation.

". . . Most certainly didn't. I was opping En-BICS just before they went full-bore, so I ought to know."

Someone responded in what sounded like an Asian language, evidently with some heat.