NETFEED/SITCOM-LIVE: Come to Buy Some "Sprootie"!
(visual: Wengweng Cho's dining room)
CHO: What is this? I thought someone went to get Sprootie! This is a very important meal! The regional governor is coming! You have all betrayed me!
(visual: Cho exits. Daughter Zia shoves Chen Shuo.)
ZIA: You are going to give my father a heart attack, Shuo!
SHUO: I hear that Sprootie is a good cure for that, too!
(audio over: laughter)
ZIA: He really believes there is such a thing! You are a very cruel man!
SHUO: is that why you love me? Or is it just because I am so beautiful?
(audio over: laughter and applause)
For a long time she lay on her back, staring up at the feverish green of the trees and the random multicolored bits of flame that she at last identified as butterflies. Where she could see it through the puzzle of leaves, the sky was awesomely deep and blue. But she could not remember who she was, or where she was, or why she should be lying on her back, so empty of knowledge. At last, as she idly watched a green bird making urgent little hooting noises on a green branch above her, a memory drifted up. There had been a shadow, a cold hand upon her. Darkness, terrible darkness. Despite the moist warmth of the air and the strength of the sun beyond the filter of leaves, she shivered.
I have lost someone, she thought suddenly. She could feel the space where that person should be. Someone dear to me is gone. An incomplete picture flitted through her thoughts, a small body, slender, a brown-skinned face with bright eyes.
Brother? she wondered. Son? Friend or lover? She knew all the words, but could not say exactly what any of them meant.
She sat up. The wind in the trees made a long sighing noise, an exhalation that surrounded her, as the trees themselves did, on all sides. What was this place?
Then, tickling her thoughts like a cough gathering in a throat, she began to hear a word. It was only a sound at first, but in her thoughts she could hear a woman's voice saying it, a sharp sound, a sound meant to get her attention: Irene! Irene!
Irene. It was her mother's voice, playing back from her memory like an old recording. Irene, put that down now. Girl, you tire me out sometimes. Irene. Irene Sulaweyo. Yes, Renie, I'm talking to you!
Renie.
And with her name, everything else came flooding back as well—her father's angry scowl and Stephen's sweet face gone slack in endless sleep, Pinetown, the wreckage of Doctor Van Bleeck's laboratory. And then the dark thing, the terrible blackness, and old Singh shrieking without any sound.
!Xabbu!
"!Xabbu?" There was no answer but the hooting green bird. She raised her voice and tried again, then remembered Martine and called her, too.
But that's foolishness. She wouldn't be here with me—she's in France, wherever. And this was clearly not France, and not the military base beneath the mountain either. This was . . . someplace else.
Where in God's name am I? "!Xabbu! !Xabbu, can you hear me?"
The vibrant jungle swallowed her voice; it died almost without echo. Renie stood on shaky legs. The experiment had clearly failed in some terrible way, but how had it resulted in this? Her surroundings were nothing like the arid Drakensberg Mountains—this looked like someplace in the north, like one of those rain forests in the West African Federation.
A thought, an impossible thought, kindled in her mind.
It couldn't be. . . .
She reached up to touch her face. Something was there, something invisible that nevertheless had form and texture beneath her probing fingers—something that even covered her eyes, although the green world before her demonstrated that nothing could be impeding her vision. . . .
Unless none of this was real. . . .
Renie grew dizzy. She sank slowly to her knees, then sat down. There was thick, soft soil beneath her, hot and alive with its own cycle of life—she could feel it! She could feel the serrated edge of a fallen leaf against the edge of her hand. The thought was impossible—but so was this place. The world around her was too real. She closed her eyes and opened them. The jungle would not go away.
Overwhelmed, she began to weep.
It's impossible. She had been walking for half an hour, struggling through thick vegetation. This quality of detail—and it goes on for miles! And there's no latency at all! It just can't be.
An insect hummed past. Renie threw out her hand and felt the tiny body smack against her knuckle and bounce off. A moment later, the bright, winged thing had struggled back into flight and was zigzagging away.
No discernible latency, even at this level of complexity. What did Singh say—trillions upon trillions of instructions per second? I've never heard of anything like this. Suddenly, she realized why the golden city had looked the way it did. At this level of technology, almost anything was possible.
"!Xabbu!" she shouted again. "Martine! Hello!" Then, a little more quietly: "Jeremiah? Is the line still working? Can you hear me? Jeremiah?"
Nobody answered her except birds.
So now what? If she was indeed in the network called Otherland, and if it was as big as Singh had said, she might be as horrendously far from anything useful as someone at the Antarctic would be from an Egyptian coffee house. Where had Singh meant to start?
The weight of hopelessness threatened for a moment to immobilize her completely. She considered just dropping offline, but rejected the thought after only short consideration. Singh had died in that . . . darkness (which was as much thought as she dared to give to what had happened) to get them here. It would be a terrible betrayal to do anything but go an. But go on where?
She ran through a quick set of exploratory commands without result. None of the standard VR control languages seemed to be in operation, or else there were permissions necessary for users to manipulate the environment that she simply didn't have.
Someone's spent an unimaginable amount of time and money to build themselves a world. Maybe they like playing God—maybe no one else gets to do anything but visit this place and take what they get.
Renie looked up. The tree-shadows had taken on a new angle, and the sky seemed just perceptibly darker. Everything else is just like RL, she thought. So maybe I better start thinking about a fire. Who knows what's going to be walking around here at night?
The impossibility of her situation once more threatened to overcome her, but beneath the shock and confusion and despair, there was also a tiny trace of sour humor. Who would ever have guessed that her precious, hard-earned college education, the thing that everyone had said would make her an integral part of the twenty-first century, would instead have led to her building imaginary fires in imaginary jungles to keep imaginary beasts at bay.
Congratulations, Renie. You are now an official imaginary primitive.
It was hopeless. Even with the trick !Xabbu had showed her, she could not manufacture a single spark. The wood had been too long on the damp ground.
Whoever made this bastard place had to be a stickler for detail, didn't he? Couldn't have left a few dry sticks around. . . .
Something rustled in the bushes. Renie jerked upright and seized one of the branches, hoping it would make a better club than it had a bonfire.
What are you so afraid of? It's a simulation. So some big old leopard or something comes out of the dark and kills you, so what?
But that would probably throw her out of the network, game over. Which would be another way of failing Singh, Stephen, everyone.
And this whole place feels too goddamn real, anyway. I don't want to find out how they'd simulate me being something's dinner.
The clear place in which she had settled was scarcely three meters wide. The moonlight filtering down through the trees was strong, but it was still only moonlight: anything big enough to harm her would probably be on her before she could react. And she couldn't even prepare herself for possible dangers, because she had no idea where she was supposed to be. Africa? Prehistoric Asia? Something completely imaginary? Whoever could dream up a city like that could invent a whole lot of monsters, too.
The rattle grew louder. Renie tried to remember the things she had read in books. Most animals, she seemed to remember, were more scared of you than you were of them. Even the big ones like lions preferred to avoid humans.
Assuming we have anything like real animals here.
Dismissing this bleak thought, she decided that rather than crouching in fear, hoping not to be discovered, she would be better off announcing her presence. She took a breath and began singing loudly.
"Genome Warriors!
Brave and strong
Battle Mutarr's evil throng
Separate the right from wrong
Mighty Genome Warriors. . . ."
It was embarrassing, but at the moment the children's show theme—one of Stephen's great favorites—was the only thing that came to her mind.
"When the mutant mastermind
Threatens all of humankind
Tries to sneak up from behind
And cut genetic ties that bind. . . ."
The rustling grew louder. Renie broke off her song and raised the club. A shaggy, strange-looking animal, somewhere between a rat and a pig in appearance and closer in size to the latter, pushed through into the clearing. Renie froze. The thing raised its snout for a moment and sniffed, but did not seem to see her. A moment later two smaller versions of the original bumbled out of the vegetation behind it. The mother made a quiet granting noise and herded her offspring back into the shrubbery, leaving Renie shaken but relieved.
The creature had looked vaguely familiar, but she certainly could not say she had recognized it. She still did not have any idea where she was supposed to be.
"Genome Warriors. . . !"
She sang again, louder this time. Apparently, at least judging by the pig-rat or whatever it was she had just met, the local fauna weren't aware that they were supposed to be afraid of humans.
". . . Bold and clean
With Chromoswords so sharp and keen
They'll fight the Muto-mix Machine
Mighty Genome Warriors!"
The moon had passed directly above her, and she had run through every song she could remember—pop tunes, themes from various net shows, nursery rhymes and tribal hymns—when she thought she heard a faint voice calling her name.
She stood, about to shout a reply, but stopped. She was no longer in her own world—she was very evidently trapped in someone else's dream—and she could not shake off the memory of the dark something that had killed Singh and handled Renie herself as though she were a toy. Perhaps this strange operating system, or whatever it was, had lost her when she slipped through, but was now looking for her. It sounded ridiculous, but the horrible living darkness followed by the overpowering realness of this place had shaken her badly.
Before she could decide what to do, something decided for her. The leaves rattled overhead, then something thumped down onto the floor of the clearing. The intruder had a head like a dog and yellow, moon-reflecting eyes. Renie tried to scream, but could not. Choking, she raised the thick branch. The thing skittered back and lifted surprisingly human fore-paws.
"Renie! It is me! !Xabbu!"
"!Xabbu? What . . . is that really you?"
The baboon settled onto its haunches. "I promise you. Do you remember the people who sit on their heels? I am wearing their shape, but behind the shape is me."
"Oh, my God." There could be no mistaking the voice. Why would anything that could copy !Xabbu's speech so perfectly bother to send an imposter in such a confusing shape? "Oh, my God, it is you!"
She ran forward and lifted the hairy animal body in her arms, and hugged it, and wept.
"But why do you look like that? Is it something that happened when we passed through that . . . whatever that was?"
!Xabbu was using his nimble baboon fingers to apply himself to fire-making. By climbing he had found some dead branches, comparatively dry because they had not yet fallen to the ground; a tiny wisp of smoke was now rising from the piece braced between his long feet.
"I told you that I had a dream," he said. "That it was time for all the First People to join together once more. I dreamed that it was time to repay the debt that my family owes to the people who sit on their heels. For that reason—and others that you would think more practical—I chose this as my secondary sim after a more ordinary human shape. But when I came through to this place, this was the body I had been given. I cannot find any way to make things change, so even when I did not wish to frighten you, I still had to remain in this form."
Renie smiled. Just being reunited with !Xabbu had lifted her spirits, and the sight of a smoldering red spot in the hollowed-out branch was lifting them higher still. "You had practical reasons for choosing that sim? What exactly is practical about being a baboon?"
!Xabbu gave her a long look. There was something inherently comical in the bony overhanging brow and canine snout, but the little man's personality still made itself felt. "Many things, Renie. I can get to places you cannot—I was able to climb a tree to find these branches, remember. I have teeth," he briefly bared his impressive fangs, "that may be useful. And I can go places and not be remarked upon because city-people do not notice animals—even in a world as strange as this, I would guess. Considering how little we know of this network and its simulations, I think those are all valuable commodities."
The curls of leaves had now begun to burn. As !Xabbu used hands toward the warmth. "Have you tried to talk to Jeremiah?"
!Xabbu nodded his head. "I am sure you and I have made the same discoveries."
Renie leaned back. "This is all so hard to believe. I mean, it feels incredibly real, doesn't it? Can you imagine if we had direct neural hookups?"
"I wish we did." The baboon squatted, poking at the blaze. "It is frustrating not to be able to smell more things. This sim desires nose information."
"I'm afraid the military didn't think smells were very important. The V-tank equipment has a pretty rudimentary scent palette. They probably just wanted users to be able to smell equipment fires and bad air and a few other things, but beyond that. . . . What do you mean, anyway, 'nose information'?"
"Before entering into VR the first time, I had not realized how much I rely on my sense of smell, Renie. Also, perhaps because I am wearing an animal sim, the operating system of this network seems to give me slightly different . . . what words do you use? . . . sensory input. I feel I could do many things that I could never do in my other life."
A brief chill went through Renie at !Xabbu's mention of an "other life," but he distracted her by leaning close and snuffling at her with his long muzzle. The light touch tickled and she pushed him away. "What are you doing?"
"Memorizing your scent, or at least the scent our equipment gives you. If I had better tools, I would not even have to work at it. But now I think I will be able to find you even if you get lost again." He sounded pleased with himself.
"Finding me isn't the issue. Finding us, that's the difficult part. Where are we? Where do we go? We have to do something soon—I don't care about hourglasses and imaginary cities, but my brother's dying!"
"I know. We must find our way out of this jungle first, I think. Then we will be able to learn more." He rocked on his haunches, holding his tail in his hand. "I think I can tell you something about where we are, though. And when we are, too."
"You can't! How could you? What did you see before you met up with me, a road sign? A tourist information booth?"
He furrowed his brow, the very picture of cool simian indignation. "It is only a guess that I am making, Renie. Because there is so much we do not know about this network and its simulations, I may be wrong. But part of it is common sense. Look around us. This is a jungle, a rain forest like the Cameroon. But where are the animals?"
"I saw a few. And I'm sitting next to one."
He ignored this. "A few, indeed. And there are not as many birds as you would expect in such a place."
"So?"
"So I would guess that we are quite close to the edge of the forest, and that either there is a big city nearby or some kind of industry. I have seen it before, in the real world. Either one of those would have driven many of the animals away."
Renie nodded slowly. !Xabbu was emotionally perceptive, but he was also just plain clever. It had been easy to underestimate him sometimes because of his small stature and the quaintness of his clothes and speech. It would be even easier to make that mistake while he wore his present appearance. "Or, if this is an invented world, someone may just have made it this way," she pointed out.
"Perhaps. But I think there is a good chance we are not far from people."
"You said 'when,' as well."
"If the animals have been driven away, then I suspect that the technology of this . . . this world . . . is not too far behind our own, or even ahead. Also, there is a harsh scent in the air that I believe is part of this place, and not just an accidental product of our V-tanks. I only smelled it when the wind changed, just before I found you."
Renie, enjoying the surprisingly powerful comfort of the fire, was content to play Watson to the small man's Holmes. "And that scent is. . . ?"
"I cannot say for certain, but it is smoke more modern than that of a wood fire—I smell metal in it, and oil."
"We'll see. I hope you're right. If we've got a long search ahead of us, it would be nice if it took place somewhere with hot showers and warm beds."
They fell silent, listening to the crackle of the fire. A few birds and something that sounded like a monkey called in the trees above.
"What about Martine?" Renie asked suddenly. "Could you use this baboon nose of yours to find her?"
"Perhaps, if we were close enough, although I do not know what smell she has in this simulation, but there is nothing that smells like you do—which is the only measure I have for a human scent—anywhere nearby."
Renie looked past the fire into the darkness. Perhaps if she and !Xabbu had wound up reasonably close to each other, Martine would not be too far away. If she had survived.
"!Xabbu, what did you experience when we were coming through?"
His description brought back the gooseflesh, but told her nothing new.
". . . The last thing I heard Mister Singh say was that it was alive," he finished. "Then I had a sense of many other presences, as though I were surrounded by spirits. I woke up in the forest as you did, alone and confused."
"Do you have any idea what that . . . thing was? The thing that caught us and . . . and killed Singh? I can tell you, it wasn't like any security program I've ever heard of."
"It was the All-Devourer." He spoke with flat certainty.
"What are you talking about?"
"It is the thing that hates life because it is itself empty. There is a famous story my people tell, of the last days of Grandfather Mantis and how the All-Devourer came to his campfire." He shook his head. "But I will not tell it here, not now. It is an important story, but it is sad and frightening."
"Well, whatever that thing was, I never want to go near it again. It was worse than that Kali creature in Mister J's." Although, as she thought about it, there had been certain similarities between the two, especially the way they apparently managed to effect physical changes through virtual media. What connection might there be, and could contemplating the Kali and what had happened inside the club help her understand what !Xabbu called the All-Devourer? Could anything help them understand?
Renie yawned. It had been a long day. Her brain didn't want to work any more. She pushed herself back against a tree trunk. At least this tropical simulation wasn't too full of insects. Perhaps she'd actually be able to get some sleep.
"!Xabbu, come over here closer, will you? I'm getting tired and I don't know how much longer I can stay awake."
He looked at her for a silent moment, then walked on all fours across the small clearing. He crouched beside her for an awkward moment, then stretched out and lay his head across her thighs. She idly stroked his furry neck.
"I'm glad you are here. I know that you my father and Jeremiah are really only a few meters away from me, but it still felt terribly lonely when I woke up by myself. It would have been much worse spending the whole night here alone."
!Xabbu did not say anything, but extended one long arm and patted her on the top of the head, then lightly touched her nose with his hairless monkey finger. Renie felt herself drifting into welcome sleep.
"I can see the edge of the forest," !Xabbu called, twenty meters up. "And there is a settlement."
Renie paced impatiently at the foot of the tree."Settlement? What kind?"
"I cannot tell from here." He walked farther out onto the branch, which swayed in a way that made Renie nervous. "It is at least a couple of kilometers away. But there is smoke, and buildings, too. They look very simple."
He descended swiftly, then dropped to the spongy ground beside her. "I have seen what looks like a good path, but the jungle is very thick, I will have to climb up again soon and look some more or we will spend all day tearing our way through."
"You're enjoying this, aren't you? Just because we happened to wind up in a jungle, your baboon idea looks brilliant. But what if we'd wound up in the middle of an office building or something?"
"Come along. We have been in this place most of a day already." He loped away. Renie followed a little more slowly, cursing the thick vegetation.
Some path, she thought.
They stood, sheltering in the darkness of the forest's edge. Before them lay a descending slope of reddish mud, pimpled with the stumps of cut trees and scarred with the ruts of their removal.
"It's a logging camp," Renie whispered. "It looks modem. Sort of."
A number of large vehicles were parked in the cleared area below. Small shapes moved among them, cleaning and adjusting them like mahouts tending elephants. The machinery was large and impressive, but from what Renie could see there were odd anachronisms as well. None of them had the tanklike treads she was accustomed to seeing on heavy construction equipment; instead, they had fat wheels covered with studs. Several of them also seemed to be powered by steam boilers.
The row of huts beyond, however, clearly made from some prefabricated material, were indistinguishable from things she had seen on the outskirts of Durban. In fact, she knew people, some of them students of hers, who had lived their whole lives in such huts.
"Just remember, stay close to me," she said. "We don't know how they feel about wild animals here, but if you hold my hand, they'll probably accept that you're a pet."
!Xabbu was becoming quite adept at using the baboon face. His expression clearly said that she should enjoy this small reversal of fortune while she could.
As they made their way down the slippery hillside beneath the gray morning sky, Renie for the first time had a view of the countryside. Beyond the camp a wide dirt road cut through the jungle. The land around it was largely flat; rising mist obscured the horizon and made the trees seem to stretch endlessly.
The camp's inhabitants were dark-skinned, but not as dark as she was, and most that she could see had straight black hair. Their clothing gave no clues as to time or place, since most of them wore only pants, and their choice of footgear was hidden by red mud.
One of the nearest workers spotted her and shouted something to the others. Many turned to stare. "Take my hand," she whispered to !Xabbu. "Remember—baboons don't talk in most places,"
One of the workmen had ambled off, perhaps to alert the authorities. Or maybe to get weapons, Renie thought. How isolated was this place? What did it mean to be an unarmed woman in such a situation? It was frustrating to have so little knowledge—like being transported by surprise to another solar system and dumped off the starship with nothing but a picnic basket.
A silent half-circle of workers formed as Renie and !Xabbu approached, but remained at a distance that might have been respectful or superstitious. Renie stared boldly back at them. The men were mostly small and wiry, their features vaguely Asian, like pictures she remembered of the Mongols of steppe country. Some of them wore bracelets of a translucent, jadelike stone, or wore amulets of metal and mud-draggled feathers on thongs around their necks.
A man wearing a shirt and a wide-brimmed, conical straw hat bustled up from behind the gathering crowd of workers. He was thickly muscled, with a long sharp nose, and had a paunch that hung over his colorful belt. Renie guessed he must be the foreman.
"Do you speak English?" she asked.
He paused, looked her up and down, then shook his head. "No. What is it?"
Renie's confusion passed in a moment. Apparently the simulation had built-in translation facilities, so she seemed to be speaking the foreman's language and he hers. As she continued the conversation, she saw that his mouth movements did not quite match his words, confirming her guess. She also noticed that he had a pierced lower lip with a small gold plug in it.
"I am sorry. We . . . I am lost. I have had an accident." Inwardly she cursed. In all the time they had spent struggling through the jungle, she had given no thought to a cover story. She decided to wing it. "I was with a group of hikers, but I got separated from them." Now she just had to hope the custom of walking for pleasure existed in this place.
Apparently, it did. "You are far from any towns," he said, looking at her with a certain shrewd good humor, as though he guessed she hadn't told him the truth but wasn't too bothered about it. "Still, it is bad to be lost and far from home. My name is Tok, Come with me."
As they walked across the encampment, !Xabbu still silent at Renie's side, uncommented-upon despite all the stares he received, she tried to get a better fix on what sort of place this was. The foreman looked as Asiatic or Middle Eastern as any of the laborers. On his belt was something that looked like a field telephone—it had a short antenna—but was cylindrical and covered with carvings. Something that very much resembled a satellite dish also stood atop one of the larger huts. It didn't add up to any recognizable pattern.
The satellite hut proved to be Tok's office and home. He sat Renie down in a chair in front of his metal desk and offered her a cup of something that did not fully translate, which she accepted. !Xabbu crouched beside her seat, wide-eyed.
The room in which they sat offered no more definitive clues. There were a few books on a shelf, but the writing on their spines was in strange glyphs she could not read: apparently the translation algorithms served only for speech. There was also a shrine of some sort, a boxlike affair with a frame of colorful feathers, which contained several small wooden figures of people with animal heads.
"I can't figure this place out at all," she whispered. !Xabbu's small fingers squeezed her hand, warning her that the foreman was returning.
Renie thanked him as she took the steaming cup, then lifted it to her face and sniffed it before remembering that, as !Xabbu had complained, the V-tank gave her a very limited sense of smell. But the mere fact that she had tried to smell it suggested that this place was already impairing her VR reflexes; if she didn't stay vigilant, she could easily forget that it wasn't real. She had to lift the cup carefully, feeling for her lips to make sure she was placing it correctly, since her mouth was the one spot where she had no sensitivity—it was like trying to drink after having been anesthetized at the dentist's office.
"What sort of monkey is that?" Tok squinted at !Xabbu. "I have not seen one like it before."
"I . . . I don't know. It was given to me by a friend who . . . who traveled a lot. It is a very faithful pet."
Tok nodded. Renie was relieved to see that the word seemed to translate. "How long have you been lost?" he asked.
Renie decided to stick close to the truth, which always made lying easier. "I spent one night in the jungle by myself."
"How many? How many of you were there?"
She hesitated, but her course had been set "There were two of us—not including my pet monkey—who got separated from the rest. And then I lost her as well."
He nodded again, as though this jibed with some personal calculation. "And you are a Temilún, of course?"
This was slightly deeper water, but Renie took a chance. "Yes, of course." She waited, but this also seemed to confirm the foreman's casual suspicions.
"You people, you townfolk, you think you can just walk in the jungle like it was (some name she could not quite grasp) Park. But the wild places are not like that. You should be more careful with your life and health. Still, the gods are sometimes good to fools and wanderers." He looked upward, then muttered something and made a sign on his breast. "I will show you something. Come." He stood up and walked around the desk, beckoning Renie toward the door at the back of the office.
On the other side was the foreman's living quarters, with a table, a chair, and a bed canopied by a curtain of mosquito netting. As he stepped toward the bed and pulled back the gauzy netting, Renie braced herself against the wall, wondering if he was expecting some kind of exchange of favors for her rescue
but there was already someone there. The sleeping woman was small and dark-haired and long-nosed like Tok, dressed in a simple white cotton dress. Renie did not recognize her. As she stood frozen, unsure of what to do, !Xabbu loped to the bed and jumped up beside the woman, then began to bounce up and down on the thin mattress. He was clearly trying to tell her something, but it took her a long moment to understand.
"Martine. . . ?" She hurried forward. The woman's eyes fluttered open, the pupils roving, unfixed,
". . . The way . . . blocked!" Martine, if this was her, lifted her hands as though to ward off some looming danger. The voice was not familiar, and there was no French accent, but the next words dispelled any doubt. "No, Singh, do not. . . . Ah, my God, how terrible!"
Renie's eyes stung with tears as she watched her companion thrashing on the bed, apparently still in the grip of the nightmare that had awaited them at Otherland's shadowy border. "Oh, Martine." She turned to the foreman, who was watching the reunion with grave self-satisfaction. "Where did you find her?"
Tok explained that a party of tree markers had discovered her wandering dazedly at the edge of the jungle a short distance from the camp. "The men are superstitious," he said. "They think her touched by the gods," again the reflexive gesture, "but I suspected it was hunger and cold and fear, perhaps even a blow on the head."
The foreman returned to his work, promising that they could have a ride back with the next convoy of logs, leaving at twilight. Renie, overwhelmed by events, neglected to ask where "back" might be. She and !Xabbu spent the dwindling afternoon sitting beside the bed, holding Martine's hands and speaking soft words to her when the nightmares seemed to pursue her too closely.
The foreman Tok helped Renie up into the back of the huge, gleaming, steam-powered truck. !Xabbu clambered up by himself and sat next to her atop the chained logs. Tok made her promise that she and her "mad Temilúni friends" would not wander around in the wild country any more. She did, and thanked him for his kindness as the convoy pulled out of the camp and onto the broad muddy road.
Renie could have ridden in one of the other truck cabs, but she wanted the privacy to talk to !Xabbu. Also, Martine was belted into the passenger seat of this truck—whose driver, Renie had noticed with interest, was a broad-faced, broad-shouldered woman—and Renie wanted to stay close to their ill companion.
". . . So that's not Martine's voice because she's delirious and she's speaking French, I suppose," she said as they bumped out of camp. "But why do you have your voice and I have mine? I mean, you sound like you, even though you look like something out of a zoo."
!Xabbu, who was standing upright, leaning into the wind and sniffing, did not answer.
"We must have all been piggybacked on Singh's index," she reasoned, "and that index was marked 'English-speaking.' Of course, that doesn't explain why I kept this body, but you got your second-choice sim." She looked down at her own copper-skinned hands. Just as !Xabbu had wound up with a good body for jungle wandering, she had chosen one that seemed physically very close to the local human norm. Of course, if they had landed in a Viking village or in World War Two Berlin, she wouldn't have fit in quite so well.
!Xabbu clambered down and crouched beside her again, his erect tail curved like a strung bow. "We have found Martine, but we still do not know what we are searching for," he said, "Or where we are going."
Renie looked out at the miles of thick green jungle lying behind them in the dying light, and the miles that the strip of red road still had to cross. "You had to remind me, didn't you?"
They drove through the night. The temperature was tropical, but Renie soon learned that virtual logs made no better a bed than real ones. What was particularly annoying was knowing that her real body was floating in a V-tank full of adjustable gel, which could have been made to simulate the softest goosedown, if she could only work the controls.
As the sun came up, ending a darkness that had brought Renie very little rest, the trucks reached a town. It was apparently the home of the sawmill and processing facilities, and something of a jungle metropolis; even at first light, there were scores of people on the muddy streets.
A handful of Landrover-like cars rolled past as they drove down the wide main thoroughfare, some clearly powered by steam, others more mysteriously. Renie also spotted more of the objects that looked like satellite dishes, which seemed restricted to the largest buildings, but in many other ways the town looked as though it might have been transplanted whole from the set of some saga of the American West. The wooden sidewalks were raised above the clinging muck, the long, town-bisecting main street seemed designed for gunfights, and there were as many horses as cars. A few men even seemed to be having an early-morning brawl outside one of the local taverns. These men, and the other people Renie could see, were better dressed than the jungle workers, but except for the fact that many wore shawls of brightly dyed, woven wool, she still could not put her finger on anything definitive in their clothing styles.
The trucks rattled through town and lined up on the vast mud flat outside the sawmill. The driver of Renie's truck got out and, with a certain taciturn courtesy, suggested she and her sick friend and their pet monkey might as well stop here. As she helped Renie unload the semiconscious Martine from the cab, the driver suggested they could find a bus in front of the town hall.
Renie was relieved to know there was somewhere else beyond this place. "A bus. That's wonderful. But we . . . I don't have any money."
The truck driver stared at her. "You need money for city buses now?" she said at last "By all the lords of heaven, what shit will the Council think of next? The God-King ought to execute them all and start over."
As the driver's surprise had suggested, the buses were apparently free. Renie, with surreptitious assistance from !Xabbu, was able to help Martine stumble the short distance to the town hall, where they took a seat on the steps to wait. The Frenchwoman still seemed to be caught in those terrible moments when they had broken into the Otherland system and everything had gone so badly wrong, but she was able to move around almost normally when prompted, and once or twice Renie even felt a returned pressure when she squeezed Martine's hand, as though something inside was struggling toward the surface.
I hope so, Renie thought. Without Singh, she's the only hope we've got of making any sense of this. She looked out at the utterly foreign yet utterly realistic surroundings and felt almost ill. Who am I kidding? Look at this place. Think of the sort of minds and money and facilities it took to make this—and we're going to put the ringleaders under citizen's arrest or something? This whole venture was ridiculous from the very beginning.
The sensation of helplessness was so powerful that Renie could not summon the will to speak. She, !Xabbu, and Martine sat on the steps in silence, an oddly assorted trio that received its due in the covert stares and whispers of the local populace.
Renie thought the jungle might be thinning a little, but she wasn't positive. After watching an uncountable number of trees go by, hour upon hour, she was seeing the monotonous landscape slide past even when she closed her eyes.
The gold-toothed, feather-medallion-bedecked bus driver had not batted an eye at her two unusual companions, but when Renie had asked him where the bus went—whatever information was printed over the windscreen was illegible to her, like the foreman's books—he had stared as though she had asked him to make the battered old vehicle fly.
"Temilún, good woman," he had said, lowering his chunky sunglasses to examine her more closely, perhaps thinking that someone might ask him later to describe the escaped madwoman. "The city of the God-King—praise to his name—the Lord of Life and Death, He Who Is Favored Above All Others. Where else would it go?" He gestured to the single straight road leading out of the sawmill town. "Where else could it go?"
Now, with !Xabbu standing in her lap, his hands pressed against the window, and Martine sleeping against her shoulder, Renie tried to make sense of all she had learned. The place seemed to have nineteenth and twentieth century technologies mixed up together, so far as she could remember the differences between the two. The people looked something like Asians or Middle Easterners, although she had seen a few in the town who had fairer or darker appearances. The foreman hadn't heard of English, so that might indicate a great distance from English-speaking peoples, or a world in which there was no English at all, or just that the foreman was ignorant. They seemed to have at least one well-established religion and a God-King—but was that a person or a figure of speech?—and the truck driver had made it sound as if there were some kind of governing council.
Renie sighed miserably. Not much to go on at all. They were wasting time, precious, precious time, but she couldn't think of a single thing they could do differently. Now they were headed to Temilún, which apparently was an even larger town. And if nothing there brought them closer to their goal, then what? On to the next? Was this foray, for which Singh had paid with his life, going to be just bus trip after bus trip, one long bad holiday?
!Xabbu turned from the window and put his head next to her ear. He had been quiet during the journey so far, since there were passengers crammed into every possible space on all the seats and in the aisles, half-a-dozen at least just within a meter radius of Renie's cramped seat. Many of these passengers were also transporting chickens or small animals Renie couldn't quite identify, which explained the bus driver's disinterest in !Xabbu, but none of these creatures showed any inclination to talk, which was why the baboon in Renie's lap now whispered very quietly.
"I have been thinking and thinking what we must look for," he said. "If we are seeking the people who own this Otherland network, then we first must discover something of who wields the power in this world."
"And how do we do that?" Renie murmured. "Go to a library? I suppose they must have them, but we'll probably have to find a pretty large town."
!Xabbu spoke a bit louder now, because a woman seated in front of them had begun singing, a wordless chant that reminded Renie a little of the tribal odes her father and his friends sometimes sang when the beer had been flowing freely. "Or perhaps we will have to befriend someone who can tell us what we need to know."
Renie looked around, but no one was paying attention to either of them. Beyond the windows, she could see cleared farming land and a few houses, and thought they must be drawing close to the next town. "But how can we trust anyone? I mean, any single person on this bus could be wired right into the operating system. They're not real, !Xabbu—most of them can't be, anyway."
His reply was interrupted by a pressure on her arm. Martine was leaning toward her, clutching as though to save herself from falling. Her sim's eyes still wandered, unfocused, but the face showed a new alertness.
"Martine? It's Renie. Can you hear me?"
"The . . . darkness. . . is very thick." She sounded like a lost child, but for the first time the voice was recognizably hers.
"You're safe," Renie whispered urgently. "We've come through. We're in the Otherland network."
The face turned, but the eyes did not make contact "Renie?"
"Yes, it's me. And !Xabbu's here, too. Did you understand what I just said? We've come through. We're in."
Martine's grip did not slacken, but the look of anxiety on her bony face softened. "So much," she said. "There is so much. . . ." She struggled to collect herself. "There has been much darkness."
!Xabbu was squeezing Renie's other arm. She was beginning to feel like the mother of too many children. "Can't you see us. Martine? Your eyes aren't focusing."
The woman's face went slack for a moment, as if she had been dealt an unexpected blow. "I . . . something has happened to me. I am not yet myself." She turned her face toward Renie. "Tell me, what has happened to Singh?"
"He's dead, Martine. Whatever that thing was, it got him. I . . . I swear I felt it kill him."
Martine shook her head miserably. "Me also. I had hoped I dreamed it."
!Xabbu was squeezing harder. Renie reached down to lift his hand away, but saw that he was staring out the window. "!Xabbu?"
"Look, Renie, look!" He did not whisper. A moment later, she, too, forgot her caution.
The bus had turned in a wide bend, and for the first time she could see a horizon beyond the trees. A flat band of silver lay along the distant skyline, a span of shimmering reflection which could only be water, a bay or an ocean by the size of it. But it was what lay before it, silhouetted against its metallic sheen in complicated arcs and needles, glittering in the afternoon sun like the largest amusement park that ever was, that had riveted the disguised Bushman and now brought Renie halfway out of her seat.
"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, look."
Martine stirred impatiently. "What is it?"
"It's the city. The golden city."
It took an hour to reach Temilún, crossing a great plain full of settlements—farming villages surrounded by fields of swaying grain at first, followed by thicker concentrations of suburban housing and ever-increasing modernity—shopping complexes and motorway overpasses and signs festooned with unreadable glyphs. And always the city grew larger on the horizon.
Renie made her way down the aisle toward the front of the bus so she could get a better look. She slid between a pair of pierce-lipped men who were joking with the driver, and hung swaying on the pole by the front door to watch a dream become reality.
It seemed in some ways a thing out of a story book, the tall buildings so completely different from the towerblocks and functional skyscrapers of Durban. Some were vast stepped pyramids, with gardens and hanging plants at every level. Others were filigreed towers of a type she had never seen, huge spires that nevertheless had been built to suggest piles of flowers or sheaves of grain. Others, as wildly uncategorizable as abstract sculpture, had angles and protrusions that seemed architecturally impossible. All were painted, the bright colors adding to the impression of floral profusion, but the single most common color was the flashing yellow of gold. Shining gold capped the tallest pyramids, and wound in barberpole stripes up the tall towers. Some of the buildings had been plated top to bottom, so even the darkest recesses, the most deeply gouged niches, still gleamed. It was everything the blurry captured image salvaged in Susan's lab had suggested and more. It was a city built by lunatics, but lunatics who had been touched by genius.
As the bus jounced through the outer rings of the metropolis, the tops of the tall buildings rose out of sight above the windows. Renie pushed through the crowding passengers and returned to her seat, breathless.
"It's incredible." She could not shake off what she knew to be a dangerous kind of exhilaration. "I can't believe we found it. We found it!"
Martine had been very quiet. Still without speaking, she reached out and took Renie's hand, pulling her thoughts in another direction. Here in the midst of the larger miracle was a small one: Martine, the mystery woman, the voice without a face, had become a real person. True, she was using a sim body in the way that a puppeteer used a marionette, and she was thousands of miles away from Renie's real body, and even farther away from this purely theoretical place, but she was here; Renie could feel her, could even tell something about her real physical self. It was as though Renie had finally met a treasured childhood pen pal.
Unable to express this odd happiness, she only squeezed Martine's hand.
The bus stopped at last, deep in the golden-shadowed canyons of the city. Martine could now walk fairly well under her own power. She and Renie and !Xabbu waited impatiently for the other passengers to file out before making their way down onto the tiled floor of the bus station, a vast, hollow pyramid braced with mammoth beams which rose level upon level like a kaleidoscopic spider web. They had only a few moments to appreciate its high-ceilinged magnificence before a pair of men in dark clothing stepped in front of them.
"Excuse me," one of them said. "You have just come on the bus from Aracataca, yes?"
Renie's mind raced, but to no useful purpose. They wore overcoats with small ceremonial capes, and both had a look of hard-faced professionalism. Any hope that they might be particularly stern ticket takers slipped away when she looked at the oddly ceremonial-looking clubs at their belts and their polished black helmets shaped like the heads of snarling jungle cats.
"Yes, we were. . . ."
"Then you will show me your identification, please."
Helplessly, Renie patted the pockets of her jumpsuit. Martine stared into space, her expression that of someone lost in a daydream.
"If the show is for our benefit, you may dispense with it" Beneath the high-crowned helmet, his head appeared to be shaved. "You are outsiders. We have been expecting you." He stepped forward and took Renie's arm. His partner hesitated for a moment, staring at !Xabbu. "The monkey will come with us, too, of course," the first policeman said. "I am sure none of you wish to delay any further, so let us go. Please, content yourself that you will be transported to the Great Palace with all dispatch. Those are our orders."
!Xabbu lowered his head, then took Renie's hand and followed docilely as the policeman walked them through the station toward the doors.
"What are you doing with us?" Renie did not feel there was much purpose in it, but she did not want to give in without trying. "We haven't done anything. We were hiking in the country and got lost. I have my papers at home."
The policeman threw the door open. Parked just outside was a large panel track that vented steam like a sleeping dragon. The second policeman pulled open the doors at the back and helped Martine up into the shadowed interior.
"Please, good woman." The first policeman's voice was cold. "Everything will be better if you save your questions for our masters. We have been ordered days ago to wait for you. Besides, you should be honored. The Council seems to have special plans for all of you."
When Renie and !Xabbu had been ushered inside with Martine, the door was slammed shut. There were no windows. The darkness was complete.
"We've been here hours." Renie had paced the same figure eight across the small cell so many times that she was now doing it with her eyes closed as she struggled to make sense of things. All that she had seen, the jungle, the magnificent city, and now this bleak stone dungeon out of a bad horror story, swirled in front of her mind's eye, but she could make no sense of them. "Why all this show? If they're going to hypnotize us or whatever that Kali thing tried on me before, why not just do it? Aren't they afraid we'll just drop offline?"
"Perhaps we cannot," said !Xabbu. Soon after the policeman locked them in, he had climbed to the single high window, and after ascertaining that it was covered with a metal grate sufficiently fine to prevent a medium-sized monkey slipping through, had climbed back down and squatted in the corner. He had even slept there for a while, something that Renie found inexplicably annoying. "Perhaps they know something about it we do not. Do we dare to try?"
"Not yet," said Martine. "It might not work—they have already proved they can manipulate our minds in ways we do not understand—and even if we can, we will have admitted defeat."
"In any case, these are the people who we're looking for." Renie stopped and opened her eyes. Her friends looked up at her with what she felt sure was the near-indifference of the helpless, but she herself was struggling against mounting rage. "If I didn't know it already, I'd be able to guess just from the way those slick, self-satisfied policemen acted. These are the people who've tried to kill us, who did kill Doctor Van Bleeck and Singh and God knows how many others, and they're as proud of themselves as can be. Arrogant bastards."
"It will not help to be angry," Martine said gently.
"It won't? Well, what will help? Saying we're sorry? That we'll never interfere with their horrible goddamned games again, so please send us back with just a warning?" She balled her hands into fists and swung at the air. "Shit! I am so tired of being pushed and chased and scared and . . . and manipulated by these monsters!"
"Renie. . . ." Martine began.
"Don't tell me not to get angry! Your brother isn't lying in a quarantined hospital. Your brother isn't a vegetable kept alive by machines, is he? Your brother who counted on you to protect him?"
"No, Renie. They have not hurt my family as they have yours."
She realized she was crying and wiped at her eyes with the back of her hand. "I'm sorry. Martine, but. . . ."
The door to the cell clanked and then slid open. The same two policemen stood there, ominous black shapes in the shadowy corridor.
"Come along. He Who Is Favored Above All Others wants to see you."
"Why don't you run away?" Renie whispered fiercely. "You could hide somewhere and then help us break out. I can't believe you're not even going to try."
!Xabbu's look, even filtered through the baboon countenance, was pained. "I would not leave you, knowing as little as we do about this place. Besides, if it is our minds they seek to affect, then we are stronger together."
The first policeman looked over his shoulder at them, irritated by the whispering.
They climbed a long flight of stairs, then entered a wide hall with a polished stone floor. By the shape and the height of the roof, Renie guessed that they were inside another one of the pyramids she had seen from the bus. A crowd of dark-haired people in various kinds of ceremonial dress, most of which featured capes similar to those the police wore, bustled in all directions. This multitude, full of hurry and self-obsessed energy, paid no particular attention to the prisoners; the only ones who showed any real interest were the half-dozen armed guards standing before the doors at the far end of the hall. These bulky men had animal helmets even more garishly realistic than those of the police, long antique-looking rifles and very functional-looking clubs, and seemed as though they might enjoy the chance to hurt someone.
As Renie and the others approached, there was an anticipatory straightening of the ranks, but after examining the policemen's emblems with great care the guards reluctantly stepped aside and swung the doors open. Renie and her friends were pushed through, but their captors remained outside as the doors closed again.
They were alone in a chamber almost as large as the hall they had just left. The stone walls were painted with scenes of fantastical battles between men and monsters. At the center of the room, in the pool of light cast by an electrified chandelier of wide and grotesque design, stood a long table surrounded by empty chairs. The farthest chair was considerably higher than the others, and had a canopy of what looked to be solid gold in the form of the sun's disk blazing through clouds.
"The Council is not here. I thought you might be interested to see the meeting place, though."
A figure stepped from behind the massive chair, a tall youth with the same hawklike features as the rest of the inhabitants. He was naked above the waist except for a long cloak of feathers, a necklace of beads and sharp teeth, and a high crown of gold studded with blue stones.
"Normally I am surrounded by minions—'numberless as the sands' is how the priests put it, and they are nearly right." His accented English was softly spoken, but there was an unmistakable core of sharp, hard intelligence behind the cold eyes: if this man wanted something, he would get it. He was also clearly much older than he appeared. "But there are quite a few other guests expected, so we shall need our space—and anyway, I thought it best we have our conversation in private." He showed a wintry smile. "The priests would be apoplectic if they knew that the God-King was alone with strangers."
"Who . . . who are you?" Renie struggled to keep her voice steady, but the knowledge that she faced one of their persecutors made it impossible.
"The God-King of this place, as I told you. The Lord of Life and Death. But if it will make you more comfortable, let me introduce myself properly—you are guests, after all.
"My name is Bolivar Atasco."