"I usually go in the evening. After work."
"May I come with you?"
Renie hesitated, wondering for the first time since they had sat down whether !Xabbu's interest was something other than mere comradeship. She lit a cigarette to cover the pause. Did he see himself becoming the man in her life, her protector? There hadn't been anyone significant since Del Ray, and that relationship (it was astonishing and somewhat frightening to realize) was years in the past. Except for brief moments of weakness in the small hours, she did not want anyone to take care of her. She had been strong all her life, and could not imagine giving responsibility over to someone else. In any case, she had no romantic feelings for this small young man. She looked at him for a long time as he, perhaps giving her a chance to do just that, examined the multicolored trucks ranked outside the dirty café window.
What are you afraid of, girl? she asked herself. He's a friend. Take him at his word until he proves otherwise.
"Yes, come along. It would be nice to have company."
He turned his gaze back to her, suddenly shy. "I have never been to a hospital—but that is not why I wish to accompany you," he said hurriedly. "I wish to meet your brother."
"I wish you could meet him, meet him the way he was . . . is." She blinked hard. "I sometimes find it hard to believe he's in there. It's so painful to see him like that. . . ."
!Xabbu nodded solemnly. "I wonder whether it is more difficult your way, where your loved one is far from you. Among my people, the sick ones stay with us. But perhaps the frustration would be greater if you had to watch him always, every day, remaining in this sad state."
"I don't think I could take it. I wonder how the other families deal with it."
"Other families? Of the sick?"
"Of children like Stephen. His doctor said there were quite a few other cases."
Something like a shock ran through her as she realized what she was saying. For the first time in several days the feeling of helplessness, which even !Xabbu's patient listening had not much affected, suddenly receded. "I'm not going to do it any more," she said.
!Xabbu looked up, startled by the change in her voice. "Not do what?"
"Just sit and worry. Wait for someone to tell me something, when I could be doing something myself. Why did this happen to Stephen?"
The little man was confused. "I am no city doctor, Renie."
"That's just it. You don't know. I don't know. The doctors don't know. But there are other cases—they said so. Stephen is being treated in a hospital that's under Bukavu 4 quarantine and the doctors there are being worked to exhaustion. Couldn't they have missed something? How much research have they had a chance to do? Real research?" She slid her card into the table, then thumbprinted the scuffed screen. "Do you want to come to the Poly with me?"
"But it is closed today."
"Damn." She replaced the card in her pocket "That's all right—the net access is still available. I just need a station." She considered her home system and balanced the convenience against the likelihood that her father would just now be staggering out into the kitchen. Even if, against all odds, he was not hung over and foul-tempered, she knew that bringing !Xabbu home with her would mean she would be hearing about a "Bushman boyfriend" for months.
"My friend," she said as she stood up, "we're going to visit the Pinetown Public Library."
"We could get most of this off my pad," she explained as the chubby young librarian unlocked the net room, "or yours, for that matter. But we'd be getting text and flat pictures, and I don't like working that way."
!Xabbu followed her in. The librarian eyed the Bushman over the top of his glasses, shrugged, then strolled back to the desk. The few old men watching the news on kiosk screens had already turned back to the full-color footage of the most recent maglev train accident on the Deccan Plateau in India. Renie closed the door, shutting out the distractions of crushed metal, sacked bodies, and the reporter's breathless commentary.
She pulled a sad tangle of cables out of the storage cabinet, then searched through the obsolescent headsets until she found two that were in reasonable shape. She slid her fingers into the squeezers and keyed up net access.
"I see nothing," !Xabbu said.
Renie pushed up her helmet, then leaned over and tinkered with !Xabbu's faceplate until she found the loose connection. She pulled her own helmet back on and the gray of raw net-space surrounded her.
"I have no body."
"You won't. This is an information-only ride, and quite stripped down at that—no force-feedback, so no sensation of touching anything. This is about what you get on a cheap home system. Like the kind an instructor at the Poly can afford."
She tightened her fingers and the gray deepened into a blackness that, except for the absence of stars, might have been deep space. "I should have done this a long time ago," she said "But I've been so busy, so tired. . . ."
"Done what?" !Xabbu's tone remained calm, but she could sense a little tension underneath the patience. Well, she decided, he would just have to hang on. He was riding in her car.
"Done a little research myself," she said. "Twenty-four-hour access to the greatest information system the world has ever known, and I've been letting someone else do my thinking for me." She squeezed and a ball of glowing blue light appeared, like a propane sun at the heart of an empty universe. "This unit should have a fix on my voice by now," she said, then calmly enunciated: "Medical Information. Let's get cracking."
After she had issued a few more commands, a supine human form appeared, hovering in the empty space before them, a strangely vacant figure as rudimentary as an inexpensive sim. Threads of light snaked through it, illuminating the circulatory system as a calm female voice described clot formation and subsequent oxygen deprivation to the brain.
"Like gods." !Xabbu sounded slightly perturbed. "Nothing is hidden,"
"We're wasting time here," Renie said, ignoring him. "We know that there's no pathological indication in Stephen—even his brain chemical levels are normal, let alone anything as grossly obvious as a clot or a tumor. Let's get out of this Encyclopedia Britannica stuff and start looking for real information. Medical journals, today's date to minus 12 months. Keywords, and/or—'coma,' 'children,' 'juvenile,' what else? 'Brain trauma,' 'stupor'. . . ."
Renie had hung a glimmering time display just at the comfortable upper range of her vision. Most of the access calls were local, since most of the information was directly available on the main net infobanks, but some of the downloads were costing her, and the resource-starved Pinetown Library was going to add on a time-based surcharge. They had been online for over three hours, and she still had not found anything that made her feel the search had been worthwhile. !Xabbu had stopped asking questions at least an hour earlier, either overwhelmed by the dizzying, shifting displays of information or just bored.
"Only a few thousand cases like this altogether," she said. "Everything else known causes. Out of ten billion people, that's not many. Distribution map, reported cases in red. Might as well look at that again."
The array of glowing lines dissolved and was replaced by a stylized globe of the Earth shining with inner light—a fruit, round and perfect, falling through emptiness.
And how could we ever find another planet like this? she asked herself, remembering what she had said to !Xabbu about colonization. The greatest gift possible, and we have taken very poor care of it.
A series of glowing scarlet dots appeared across the globe, spreading like mold as they replicated the chronological onset of incidents. The sequence showed no pattern that she could see, appearing in what seemed like random order all over the simulated Earth with no reference to proximity. If it was an epidemic, it was a very strange one. Renie frowned. When all the dots were lit, the pattern still suggested nothing. The dots were thickest in the most populated areas, which was not surprising. In the First World countries of Europe, America, and the Pacific Rim, they were fewer in number, but scattered wid
ely over the land masses. Across the Third World the spots clustered almost entirely along the seacoasts and bays and rivers in hot red infestations that made her think of skin disease. For a moment she thought she might have discovered something, some link to polluted waters, discarded toxins.
"Environmental contaminant levels above UN-prescribed guidelines," she said. "Purple."
As the lavender dots ignited, Renie stared. "Shit."
!Xabbu's voice came to her from the darkness. "What is wrong?"
"The purple are sites of strong pollutant contamination. See how the coma cases are clustered along the seacoasts and riven here and in southern Asia? I thought there might be a link, but that pattern doesn't hold true in America—half the cases are far away from any high contaminant levels. The First World doesn't have anywhere near as many cases, but I find it hard to believe there'd be two separate causes, one for them, one for us." She sighed. "Purple off. Maybe there are two separate causes. Maybe there are hundreds." She thought for a moment "Population density, in yellow."
As the little yellow lights bloomed, she swore again. "That's what all the rivers and coastline cases were about—that's where most of the big cities are, of course. I should have thought of that twenty minutes ago."
"Perhaps you are tired, Renie," !Xabbu suggested. "It has been some time since you ate, and you have been working very hard. . . ."
"I'm just about to give up." She stared at the globe pocked with red and yellow lights. "But it's strange, !Xabbu. Even with population density, it still doesn't make sense. Almost all the cases in Africa, northern Eurasia, India are in heavily populated areas. But in the First World, they're a little thicker around the major metroplexes, but there are cases all over the place, too. Look at all those red dots across the middle of America."
"You are trying to find something that corresponds with the children who have gone into comas like Stephen's, yes? Something that people do or experience or suffer from which might have a connection?"
"Yes. But ordinary disease vectors don't seem to have anything to do with it. Pollutants don't either. There's no rhyme or reason I can see. I even thought for a moment it might have something to do with electromagnetic disturbances, you know, the kind you get from power transformers—but virtually all of India and Africa went through electrification years ago, so if EMD was causing these comas, why would they happen only in the urban areas? What do you get only around the urban metroplexes in the Third World, but all over the First World?"
The globe hung before her, the lights mysterious as words written in an unknown alphabet. It was hopeless—too many questions, no answers. She began to key the exit sequence.
"Another way to think of it," !Xabbu said suddenly, "is what things do you not find in the places that city dwellers call 'undeveloped'?" There was a forcefulness to his tone, as though he were conveying important information, and yet he sounded strangely distant, too. "Renie, what do you not find in places like my Okavango Delta?"
At first she did not understand what he meant. Then something moved through her like a cold wind.
"Show me areas of net usage." Her voice was only a little shaky. "Minimum one—no, two hours per day, per household. In orange."
The new indicators sparked into existence, a swarm of tiny flames that turned the globe into a spherical conflagration. At the center of almost every bright smear of orange was at least one angry red spot.
"Oh, my God," she whispered. "Oh, my God, they match."
CHAPTER 6
No Man's Land
NETFEED/FASHION: Mbinda Brings Street to Catwalk
(visual: Mbinda's spring show—runway models)
VO: Designer Hussein Mbinda has declared this "Street Year," and backed up those words with his spring showing in Milan, where the hammocks of the homeless and the "Chutes" identified with urban Goggleboys were recreated in the latest synthemorphic fabrics. . . .
(visual: Mbinda speaking from cardboard shanty)
MBINDA: "The street is with us, it is in us. You cannot ignore it."
Her breath was like cinnamon. Her long-fingered hand on his breast seemed to weigh no more than a leaf. He kept his eyes closed, afraid that if he opened them she would vanish, as she had so many times before.
"Have you forgotten?" A whisper, faint and sweet as bird-song in a far-off wood.
"No, I haven't forgotten."
"Then come back to us, Paul. Come back to us."
As her sadness swept through him, he lifted his arms to clutch her. "I haven't forgotten," he said. "I haven't. . . ."
An explosive crash jerked Paul Jonas upright. One of the German eleven-inchers had roared into life. The earth shook resentfully and the trench timbers creaked as the first shells struck, a quarter of a mile down the line. Very-pistol flares drifted across the sky, painting the shell trails bright red. A shimmer of rain spattered Paul's face. His arms were empty.
"I haven't. . . ." he said stupidly. He held his hands before him and stared at the flarelit mud that covered them.
"Haven't what?" Finch was hunched a yard away, writing a letter home. Scarlet flickered across the lenses of his spectacles as he turned toward Paul. "Having a good one, were you? Was she pretty?" The force of his stare belied his light tone.
Paul looked away in embarrassment. Why was his comrade looking at him like that? It had just been a dream, hadn't it? Another one of those dreams that plagued him so insistently. A woman, a sorrowful angel. . . .
Am I going mad? Is that why Finch stares at me?
He sat up, grimacing. A puddle had formed beneath his boots as he slept, soaking his feet. If he didn't attend to them, he'd get trenchfoot. Bad enough to have people you didn't know and couldn't see tossing bits of exploding metal at you without having to watch your own extremities rot away before your eyes. He pulled off his boots and pushed them over to the tiny gas stove, tongues pulled down so they would dry faster.
But faster than never could still be awfully slow, he thought. The damp was an even more patient enemy than the Germans. It didn't take an evening off to celebrate Christmas or Easter, and all the guns and bombs the Fifth Army could deploy wouldn't kill it. It just seeped back in, filling trenches, graves, boots . . . filling people, too.
Trenchsoul, When all that makes you a person festers and dies.
His feet looked pale as skinned animals, ragged and soft; they were bruised blue along the toes where the blood wasn't circulating properly. He leaned forward to rub them and noted with a mixture of abstract interest and quiet horror that he couldn't feel either the toes or the fingers that squeezed them. "What day is today?" he asked.
Finch looked up, surprised by the question. "Strike me blind, Jonesie, how should I know? Ask Mullet. He's keeping track 'cause he's got leave coming."
On Finch's far side, Mullet's rounded bulk rose into view, a rhino disturbed at the waterhole. His close-cropped head turned slowly toward Paul. "What do you want?"
"I just asked what day it is." The bombardment had stuttered to a halt; his voice sounded unnaturally loud.
Mullet made a face, as though Paul had asked him the distance to the moon in nautical miles. "It's March twentieth, innit? Thirty-six more days until I go back to Blighty. What the hell do you care?"
Paul shook his head. It sometimes seemed that it had always been March, 1918, that he had always lived in this trench with Mullet and Finch and the rest of the grumbling remnants of Seventh Corps.
"Jonesie was having that dream again," Finch said. He and Mullet shared a brief look. They did think he was going mad, Paul was sure of it. "Who was she, Jonesie—that little barmaid from the estaminet? Or Missus Entroyer's little Madeleine?" He offered the names with his usual contempt for French pronunciation. "She's too young for you, old mate. Barely big enough to bleed, that one."
"For Christ's sake, shut up." Paul turned away in disgust He picked up his boots and moved them so that each side would receive an equal proportion of the scant warmth from the primus stove.
&nb
sp; "Jonesie's a romantic," Mullet brayed. He had teeth to complement his rhinoceroid physique—flat, wide, and yellow. "Don't you know that every man in the Seventh except you has had that Madeleine already?"
"I said shut up, Mullet. I don't want to talk."
The big man grinned again, then slumped back into the shadows beyond Finch, who turned to Jonas. There was more than a little anger in the slender man's voice as he said: "Why don't you just go back to sleep, Jonesie? Don't make trouble. There's plenty of that around already."
Paul took off his greatcoat, then pushed himself farther down the trench until he found a place where his feet would be less likely to get wet. He bundled the coat around his bare toes and leaned back against the duckboards. He knew he shouldn't get mad at his companions—hell, his friends, the only friends he had—but the threat of a last-ditch German assault had been hanging over all their heads for days. Between the constant barrages meant to soften them up, the anticipation of something worse to come, and the dreams that would not leave him alone . . . well, it was little wonder he felt like his nerves were on fire.
Paul stole a glance at Finch, who was bending over his letter again, squinting in the dim lantern light. Reassured, he turned his back to his trenchmates and pulled the green feather from his pocket. Although the Very-light was fading, the feather seemed to have its own faint radiance. He held it close to his face and breathed deeply, but whatever scent it had once held was gone, overwhelmed by the odors of tobacco, sweat, and mud.
It meant something, this feather, although he couldn't say what. He didn't remember picking it up, but it had been in his pocket for days. Somehow it reminded him of the angel dream, but he wasn't sure why—more likely the dreams were sparked by the possession of the feather.
And the dreams themselves were very strange. He remembered only fragments—the angel and her haunting voice, some kind of machine trying to kill him—but he felt somehow that even these fragments were precious, insubstantial good luck charms he could not afford to be without.