Pathfinder (27 page)

Mara escapes the lumen and glances around for an empty seat. A girl with wispy blond hair and a dull, empty expression on her face sits alone at the end of a table. There's a spare seat next to her.
That'll do
, thinks Mara. And so will the wispy, dull girl. Dull is perfect. The duller, the more empty-headed, the better.

“Hi.” Mara tries to smile casually.

“Hi,” says the girl, without a flicker of interest. She's stroking a creature that's all purple hair, a ridiculous purple puffball. It's emitting annoying whining noises.

“Mind if I sit here?” asks Mara. The girl stares into space, munching on a plateful of brightly colored food. “I'm a visitor so I don't know many people around here.”

“Go ahead.”

Mara looks around. Does she just go up and pick something to eat?

“What's your name?” she asks the girl, stalling for time. Something dull no doubt.

“Dolores,” says the girl unexpectedly. The puffball yaps.

Far too exotic for you, thinks Mara. She doesn't ask the name of the puffball thing, just glances hungrily at the girl's bright food.

“Dol for short.”

Mara hides a smile. That's as near
dull
as you can get.

She watches people come into the canteen, insert their ration disks, collect a tray and choose a meal, and sit down. So that's all you do. Mara braves the food counter and, as she chooses from a vast array of exotic-looking dishes, she is willing Dol to be as vacant and dull-minded as she looks. Because that is what she needs—someone to give her answers, lots of answers, and ask as few awkward questions as possible.

“Don't you have zapeedos?” Dol asks in mild surprise, as they exit the bustling canteen into a chaotic, noise-filled tunnel.

Mara has told the girl she's newly arrived from another city and is feeling lost. Dol has unenthusiastically agreed to show her to the visitor accommodation area.

“You need zapeedos to get around the nexus.” Dol nods toward the tunnels. “Surely you zap in your city?”

“Uh-huh,” says Mara. “I just forgot to pack my, um, zapeedos.”

“You'll get mown down if you go about on foot, and you don't want to be stuck on the sky trains like a slo-ped.”

“Definitely not,” agrees Mara.

“Oh, well. Better switch off my power if you're walking, otherwise you'll never keep up.”

Dol flicks a switch on the heel of her power skates. Zapeedos, Mara notes, memorizing the term. And she called the tunnels the nexus. Now the girl taps the purple puff-ball on its head and, to Mara's relief, not only does that switch off the thing's stupid whining but makes it collapse as if it's been stomped on—something Mara has been itching to do. Dol stuffs the now flat animatronic pet in her trouser pocket.

Mara jogs to keep up with Dol's unpowered skating as they enter tunnels that are full of swirling, surging waves of electronic music. Mara remembers the similar-sounding music she used to find on the Weave—the music her mother liked because, she said, it both calmed and lifted your spirit.
Waltzes
, that's what they were called. It was waltz music she danced to, around and around the garden with little Corey, that last-ever day on the island. Now she watches zappers swarm through the silver tunnels, doing crazy zigzag antics up the sides, zooming around and around in floor-to-ceiling loops at incredible speeds, in time to the waltzes.

“Do you work in the cybercath?” Mara asks, worming for information.

Dol nods.

“What are you working on?”

Now Dol comes alive. She is a Noosrunner, she says proudly, and as she chatters excitedly Mara gathers that her guess about the trade network was right. New ideas and inventions, alongside more mundane, essential products are
the currency that the New World trades in. Dol prattles on about the teams of Ideators in each city who try to outdo each other in ingenuity, dreaming up ideas that will create yet further wonders for the New World—new forms of energy and communication and overseas travel, new bondings of sea chemicals, new metals and materials, foodstuffs, entertainment, and all sorts of gadgets and gimmicks—even some ideas that might, in time, take the New World far beyond Earth, out into space. Just as Candleriggs predicted, Mara remembers.

Noosrunners like Dol are specialized cybertraders. They search cyberspace for the best of these new ideas to buy and sell among the cities of the New World.

“I spotted a brand new alloy in one of the Chinasea markets,” Dol declares. “Hardly anyone else is on to it so I'm not telling you what it is, but if it takes off I could win a top bonus. Here we are.”

Dol skates out of the head of the tunnel into another wide, squat one. “These are the visitor sleep pods—there's bound to be a free one.”

Mara only just manages to keep up. The heels of Dol's zapeedos click together as she comes to a neat halt beside what looks like an empty pink pod.

The pod is part of a long honeycomb that crams the walls all the way down the squat tunnel. Some pods are sealed and gently glowing, others are open, dim, and empty.

“Sleep pods?” Mara's heart sinks. It will be like sleeping in a pink coffin.

Dol nods. For the first time a flicker of doubt disturbs her face. That was careless, Mara chastises herself. A visiting New World citizen would know these are sleep pods.

“Oh, we have much the same in my city,” Mara gabbles. “Just a different shape and color and we call them
coffins.” It doesn't sound right. She improvises. “Cozy coffins.” That's worse.

Dol nods again. She seems to swallow each lie with a stunning lack of interest. Mara remembers the hungry welcome for any visitors that came to Wing, even though they were only ever from the other islands. The Tree-nesters were intensely curious about her, longing for stories of the outside world. And though the netherworld is now far below and out of reach it still feels far more real and alive to Mara than this bright, bland, beautiful place.

Mara laughs to herself as she recalls Pollock and the cyberwizz. By now, that will be set in memory as a Tree-nester legend—the night the Face in the Stone magicked up a monster that chased boastful Pollock Halfgood into the bushes. Dol glances at her sharply now and Mara realizes she has laughed out loud.

“Cyberlag,” mumbles Mara. “I come from a different world zone. Thanks a lot, Dol. Um …” she hesitates, “you—you wouldn't have a spare pair of zapeedos, would you? Just till I sort myself out.”

“Sure,” Dol shrugs.

“See you tomorrow at the cybercath?” Mara calls after her, but Dol has zapped off.

Mara climbs up the ladder into an empty pink pod. Inside it's warm and soft, like a spongy nest. Once the sliding door of the pod is shut, Mara is enveloped in a comforting pink glow.

From Dol's chatter she has figured out that the New World pays its workers by disks that buy generous rations of food, clothes, and a vast range of entertainments. Bonus disks are won by the workers for good performance. The very best Noosrunners and Ideators are rewarded with superior accommodation, and Dol talks
enviously of these stylish apartments at the very top of the towers. Dol lives in much more basic accommodation, on a lower level of the central towers, but she's clearly ambitious to move right to the top.

I'll find out more tomorrow, Mara tells herself, and snuggles down inside her pink pod to read some more of
A Tale of Two Cities
. She groans with relief as she kicks off the young policewoman's shoes from her aching feet. They are far too tight and are giving her blisters. The sway of the city is more insistent now. She feels as if she is in a ship's cabin, far out upon the ocean. It must be windy tonight in the outside world. The Treenesters will be rocked hard in their nests, the boat people smashed about like so much flotsam and jetsam.

Mara sighs and the book falls from her hands.

“Time to settle down and sleep now,” a gentle, cajoling voice urges.

Mara jumps. She swivels around and yells in fright.

A large, motherly lumenbeing face glows like a soft nightlight on the shelf above her bed.

“Good night,” Mara snaps, hoping that's the code to get rid of it.

The face fades and the pink pod darkens. But the lumen eyes of the motherlight remain, glimmering and unblinking in the dark.

“Great,” groans Mara.

Now she is stuck in the dark, alone and unsleepy with a pair of creepy lumen eyes watching her. As she lies restlessly in the bed and pulls the spongy quilt around her, the eyes begin to haunt her with the memory of other eyes. Mara aches for those real mother eyes that would soothe her each night as a child when she was tucked into bed. Mara would wriggle and giggle under the covers, fighting
off sleep because she wanted yet another story, another song, another cuddle, another smile.

Those real mother eyes were always the last thing she saw at night before she closed her own. Mara tries to switch off their image but they burn on in her mind, far stronger than any lumen.

Mara dreams
.

Secret, sly dreams that she can never quite track. All night they prowl through her sleep, and she wakens sweaty and sticky in her pink pod. It's as if something is trying to sneak through a locked door in her mind, a door from another world. One that opens just a crack, only when she is asleep
.

All night, Mara dreams. Then wakes to yet another strange day
.

Next morning it takes Mara ages to search through the thousands of people in the cybercath, but at last she spots Dol muttering in tuneful, excited tones in a cupule near the back. She finds a free cupule nearby and settles down to pretend to work but really she's listening hard to Dol and the others around her. Halfway through the morning a bell rings and the cyberworkers stop for a break.

Mara sips the warm, frothy, bittersweet brew that has popped out of a hidden compartment in her cupule. She's not sure if she likes it but it seems to give her a much-needed buzz of energy. Dol is gesturing upward and Mara glances above her head at the Thought For Now slogan that beams above the heads of the workers in the cybercath. The huge No enemy in New Mungo slogan has started to scramble.

“Hackers,” grins Dol. “Watch.”

The letters scramble at top speed. The hum of the cybercath falls quiet as everyone holds their breath. A great cheer erupts as the letters settle and the workers break up in laughter at the Thought For Now, which proclaims there's No meeny in New Mungo.

Mara laughs too and settles in her hug chair till Dol is ready. She has agreed to give Mara a short training session.
It turns out that Dol is not as dull as she looks. Quite the opposite. The dullness is a veil of boredom, behind which lives an ace wizzer. Real life bores Dol, Mara now knows, after watching her come alive on the dive into cyberspace. With a pang she recognizes the fierce, feral excitement on the girl's face. It's what she used to feel in the Weave.

Perhaps Dol feels trapped inside the walls of New Mungo, just as Mara did inside the walls of her home in the storm season on Wing. Perhaps luxury means little when there's no real freedom in the world.

She has told Dol that she is a trainee cyberworker on an apprenticeship from New Wing, a northern city still under construction; that she has been sent here to get updated on the New World technology—she claims to have been stuck on an out-of-date system. Dol has questioned none of this story; she seems to have no interest in anything much beyond the cyberworld she works in. And Mara is anxious to learn about that as fast as she can. It's clear that the cybercath is the nerve center of New Mungo, so gaining access to the system is surely her best means of locating the slave workers and finding a way to rescue Gorbals and Wing.

“Put on your godgem and I'll help you link in,” Dol instructs.

Mara picks up the tiny box and the green gem. “I thought it was a godbox and headgem,” she says, eyeing the notice in her cupule.