He still wouldn't look up. "He's sick."
"I know that. But I want to find out what made him that way."
"We didn't do anything. I told you that."
"Not that night, maybe. But I know you and Stephen and Soki were messing around on the net, going places you shouldn't go. I know, Eddie, remember?"
"Yeah." He shrugged.
"So tell me about it."
Eddie twisted at the doll in his hands until Renie worried that he might pull it apart—the damn things were expensive, and she ought to know, having supplied Stephen with more Netsurfer Detectives figures than she wished to count. "Masker" was particularly prone to damage, since he had a fragile, arch-exotic plastic hairstyle at least half his own height.
"Everybody else did it," he said at last "We told you. Just tapping and napping."
"Everybody else did what? Got into Inner District?"
"Yeah,"
"What about that place—Mister J's? Does everybody go there, too?"
"Yeah. Well, not everybody. A lot of the older guys talk about it"
Renie sat back, giving up on her attempt to force eye contact. "And a lot of them are probably lying. What have you heard about the place that made you want to go there?"
"What kind of place is this?" !Xabbu asked.
"Not very nice. It's on the net—a virtual club, like that place I took you is a virtual café." She turned back to Eddie. "What do the older kids say about it?"
"That . . . that you can see stuff there. Get stuff." He looked over at his mother, and even though she seemed enthralled with the two sticky men smacking each other with long glowing poles, he fell silent.
Renie leaned forward. "What stuff? Damn it, Eddie, I need to find out"
"Guys say that you can . . . feel things. Even if you don't have the flack."
"Flack?" A new netboy term. They changed so quickly.
"The . . . the stuff so you can touch what's on the net"
"Tactors? Sensory receptors?"
"Yeah, the good stuff. Even if you don't have it there's things in Mister J's you can feel. And there's. . . . I don't know. Guys say all kinds of. . . ." He trailed off again.
"Tell me what they say!"
But Eddie was clearly uncomfortable talking to an adult about backroom netboy gossip. This time it was Renie who turned to Eddie's mother for help, but Mutsie had relieved herself of responsibility and was not going to take it back.
Several other lines of questioning produced little new information. They had gone into the club in search of some of these whispered-about experiences, and to "see" things—Renie assumed it was pornography of some kind, either sex or violence—but had instead gotten lost and wandered for hours through Mister J's. Parts of it had been very frightening and disorienting, others just interestingly weird, but Eddie claimed he could remember little of what they had actually seen. At last some men, including an unpleasant fat man—or a sim that looked like one—sent them downstairs to a special room. Soki had fallen into some kind of trap, and the other two had somehow escaped and called Renie.
"And you can't remember any better than that? Even if it might help Stephen get better again?"
For the first time all evening the boy met and held Renie's gaze. "I'm not dupping."
"Lying," she explained to !Xabbu. "I didn't say you were, Eddie. But I'm hoping you can remember a little better. Please try."
He shrugged, but now that she could see his eyes clearly, she saw something elusive in his gaze. Was she sure he was telling the truth? He seemed frightened, and they were long past the point when he should have feared punishment from Renie.
"Well, if you remember anything else, call me. Please, it's very important." She got up from the couch. Eddie started to move toward the hallway, head down again. "One other thing," she said. "What about Soki?"
Eddie turned to look at her, eyes wide."He got sick. He's at his aunt's."
"I know. Did he get sick because of what happened when you were on the net together? Tell me, Eddie."
He shook his head. "I don't know. He didn't come back to school."
Renie surrendered. "Go on." Eddie, like a cork held underwater and then finally released, almost sprang from the room. Renie turned to Mutsie, who lay on the carpet beside her daughters. "Do you have Soki's aunt's number?"
Mutsie clambered to her feet, sighing heavily, as though she had been asked to carry several hundredweight of stone up the Drakensberg Mountains.
"Maybe it's around here somewhere."
Renie looked at !Xabbu to share her exasperation, but the little man was staring at the wallscreen in reluctant fascination, watching one of the sticky men trying to catch, kill, and eat a live chicken. The sound of audience laughter, captured and processed until it echoed like the roar of machinery, filled the small room.
The last classes of the day were being released into the halls. Renie watched the kaleidoscopic movement of color across the office windows as she reflected on human beings and their need for contact.
Back at the end of the previous century, people had been predicting that school would be uniformly taught over video links, or even that teachers might be replaced entirely by interactive teaching machines and hypertext infobanks.
Of course, people had been wrong about that sort of thing before. Renie remembered something one of her university instructors had told her "When they marketed frozen food a hundred years ago, the professional predictors said people would never cook again. Instead, thirty years later they were growing their own herbs and baking their own bread from scratch in well-to-do suburbs all over the First World."
Similarly, it seemed unlikely that human beings would ever grow out of their need for personal contact. Live lectures and tutorials were not quite as large a part of the learning experience as they had once been, when books were the only form of stored information, but those who had claimed that such time- and resource-wasteful human contact would vanish had obviously been wrong.
One of Renie's pre-law friends from university had married a policeman. Before she and the friend lost touch she had gone to dinner with them a few times, and she remembered the husband saying much the same thing about criminology: no matter how many gadgets were invented for discerning truth, analyzers of heartbeat, brainwaves, voice stress, or electrochemical changes to the skin, police always felt most secure when they could look a suspect in the eye and ask questions.
So the need for real contact was universal, it seemed. However many changes had taken place in the human environment—most of them authored by humanity itself—the human brain was still much the same organ that everyone's ancestors had carried around the Olduvai Gorge a million years ago. It imported information and tried to make sense of it. There was no discrimination between "real" and "unreal," not at the most basic, instinctual levels of fear and desire and self-preservation.
Renie had begun pondering these things because of Stephen's friend Soki. She had reached his mother on the phone early that morning, but Patricia Mwete—whom Renie had never known well—was adamant that Renie should not come to the house. Soki had been sick, she said, and was just starting to get better. It would upset him. After a long and somewhat heated discussion, Patricia had finally agreed to let her talk to Soki on the phone when he got back from some undefined "appointment" that afternoon.
At first Renie's chain of thought had been prompted by the unsatisfactory nature of phone contact compared to an actual meeting, but now, as she considered the larger issues, she began to realize that if she continued to search for the cause of Stephen's illness, especially if it stemmed from his use of the net, she was going to be spending a great deal of time trying to separate unreality from reality.
Certainly it was impossible at this point to even think of sharing her thoughts with the authorities, medical or legal. VR had received alarmist press from time to time, especially in the early days—all new technologies did—and there were certainly cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome in users of extre
mely violent simulations, but none of the accepted case histories looked anything like Stephen's. Also, despite her own not-quite-definable certainty that something had happened to him online, there was no real proof in the correlation of net usage to incidence of coma. A thousand other factors could, and would, be suggested as equally likely to establish the pattern.
But the even more frightening thing was the idea of trying to establish truth on the net itself. A police detective with the full weight of law and training on her side would have trouble working through the masks and illusions that net users constructed for themselves, not to mention their UN-mandated privacy rights.
And me? she thought. If I'm right, and that's where it takes me, I'll be like Alice trying to solve a murder in Wonderland.
A knock at her office door interrupted the gloomy thoughts. !Xabbu poked his head in. "Renie? Are you busy?"
"Come on in. I was going to mail you. I really appreciate you spending so much time with me yesterday. I feel very bad about taking you away from your home and your studies."
!Xabbu looked slightly embarrassed. "I would like to be your friend. Friends help other friends. Also, I must confess to you, it is a strange and interesting situation."
"That may be, but you have your own life. Don't you usually spend your evenings studying in the library?"
He smiled. "The school was closed."
"Of course." She made a face and pulled a cigarette from her coat. "The bomb threat. It's a bad sign when they get so common that I don't even remember we had one until someone mentions it. And you know something? No one else did until you. Just another day in the big city,"
There was another knock. One of Renie's colleagues, the woman who taught the entry-level programming classes, had come to borrow a book. She talked the whole time she was in the office, telling some drawn-out story about an amazing restaurant her boyfriend had taken her to. She left without ever looking at or addressing a remark to !Xabbu, as though he were a piece of furniture. Renie was chagrined by the woman's manners, but the small man appeared not to notice.
"Have you thought any more about what you learned last night?" he asked when they had the office to themselves. "I am still not quite sure what you think could have happened to your brother. How could something unreal have such an effect? Especially if his equipment was very basic. If something was harming him, what would prevent him from taking off the headset?"
"He did take it off—or at least he didn't have it on when I found him. And I don't have an answer for you. I wish I did." The difficulty, perhaps even the ridiculous impossibility, of finding the answers to Stephen's illness on the net suddenly made her terribly weary. She ground out her cigarette and watched the last of the smoke twisting toward the ceiling. "This could all be the hallucinations of a grieving relative. Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons. That's what makes people believe in conspiracies or religions—if there's any difference. The world is just too complicated, so they need simple explanations."
!Xabbu looked at her with what felt to Renie like mild disapproval. "But there are patterns to things. Both science and religion agree on that. So what is left is the honorable but difficult task of trying to decide which patterns are real and what they mean."
She stared at him for a moment, surprised again by his perceptiveness. "You're right, of course," she said. "So, I suppose I might as well keep looking at this particular pattern and see if it means anything. Do you want to sit in while I call Stephen's other friend?"
"If it will not interfere."
"Shouldn't. I'll tell her you're a friend from the Poly."
"I hope I am 'a friend from the Poly'."
"You are, but I'm hoping she'll think you're another instructor. You'd better take off that tie—you look like something out of an old movie."
!Xabbu looked a little disappointed. He was proud of what he saw as the formal correctness of his dress—Renie hadn't found the heart to tell him that he was the only person under the age of sixty she had ever seen wearing a tie—but he complied, then pulled over a chair and sat beside her, his back very straight.
Patricia Mwete opened the line. She regarded !Xabbu with open suspicion, but was mollified by Renie's explanation. "Don't ask Soki too many questions," she warned. "He's tired—he's been sick." She was dressed rather formally herself. Renie vaguely remembered that she worked in some kind of financial institution, and guessed that she had just come back from work.
"I don't want to do anything that will upset him," Renie said. "But my brother is in a coma, Patricia, and no one knows why. I just want to find out anything I can."
The other woman's worried stiffness eased a little. "I know, Irene. I'm sorry. I'll call him."
When Soki arrived, Renie was a little surprised to see how very well he looked. He hadn't lost any weight—he had always been a little on the husky side—and his smile was quick and strong.
" 'Lo, Renie."
"Hello, Soki. I'm sorry to hear you've been ill."
He shrugged. His mother, just offscreen, said something Renie couldn't hear. "I'm okay. How's Stephen?"
Renie told him, and most of Soki's good humor evaporated. "I heard about it, but I thought maybe it was just for a little while, like that kid in our form who got a concussion. Is he going to die?"
She recoiled a little at the bluntness of the question. A moment passed before she could answer. "I don't think so, but I'm very worried about him. We don't know what's wrong. That's why I wanted to ask you some questions. Can you tell me anything about the things that you and Stephen and Eddie were doing on the net?"
Soki looked at her a little strangely, surprised by the question, then launched into a long description of various legitimate and quasi-legitimate netboy meanderings, punctuated every now and then by sounds of disapproval from his temporarily invisible mother.
"But what I really want to know about, Soki, is the last time, just before you got sick. When you three got into Inner District."
He looked at her blankly. "Inner District?"
"You know what that is."
"Certain. But we never got in there. I told you we tried."
"Are you saying you never went into the Inner District?"
The look on his young face hardened into anger."Did Eddie say we did? Then he's duppy—duppy major!"
Renie paused, taken aback. "Soki, I had to go in and get Eddie and Stephen out. They said you were with them. They were worried about you, because they lost you on the net. . . ."
Soki's voice rose. "They're dupping!"
Renie was confused. Was he putting this on just because his mother was around? If so, he was doing a very convincing job: he seemed genuinely indignant. Or had Eddie and Stephen lied to her about Soki being with them? But why?
His mother leaned into the screen. "You're getting him upset, Irene. Why are you calling my boy a liar?"
She took a deep breath. "I'm not, Patricia, I'm just confused. If he wasn't with them, why would they lie about it? It didn't get them off the hook—Stephen still lost his net privileges." She shook her head."I don't know what's going on, Soki. Are you sure you don't remember any of this? About getting into Inner District, about going to a place called Mister J's? About falling through some kind of door? Blue lights . . . ?"
"I've never been there!" He was angry, angry and scared, but he still didn't seem to be lying. A few drops of perspiration had appeared on his forehead. "Doors, blue lights . . . I never. . . !"
"That's enough, Irene!" said Patricia. "Enough!"
Before Renie could reply, Soki suddenly tipped his head back and made a strange gargling noise. His limbs became rigid and his entire body began to tremble violently; his mother grabbed at his shirt but failed to hold him as he slid off the chair and fell to the floor, thrashing. Staring at the screen, helplessly transfixed, Renie heard !Xabbu gasp beside her.
"God damn you, Irene Sulaweyo!" Patricia shouted. "He was getting better! You did this to him! Don't you ever c
all this house again!" She knelt beside her son and cradled his twitching head. A froth of spittle had already begun to form on his lips. "Disconnect!" she shouted, and the padscreen went dark. The last thing Renie saw were the white crescents of Soki's eyes. His pupils had rolled up beneath the lids.
She tried to phone back immediately, despite Patricia's angry words, but the line at Soki's aunt's house was accepting no incoming calls.
"That was a seizure!" Her fingers trembled as she pulled the flametab on a cigarette. "That was a grand mal seizure. But he's not epileptic—damn it, !Xabbu, I've known that child for years! And I had to play chaperone on enough field trips for Stephen's schools: they always tell you if one of the kids has major health problems." She was furious, although she didn't know why. She was also frightened, but the reasons for that were clear enough. "Something happened to him that day—the day I went to get them out of the Inner District. Then later it happened to Stephen, but worse. God, I wish Patricia would answer my questions."
!Xabbu's yellow-brown skin was a shade paler than usual. "We spoke before of the medicine trance," he said. "I felt I was witnessing such a thing. He had the look of someone meeting the gods."
"That was no trance, damn it, and there weren't any gods involved. That was a full-blown seizure." Renie was ordinarily careful not to tread on the beliefs of others, but just now she had very little patience for her friend's sorcerous notions. !Xabbu, apparently not offended, watched her as she stood and began pacing, rattling with anger and upset. "Something has interfered with that child's brain. A physical effect in the real world from something that happened online." She went to the office door and pushed it shut: Soki's collapse had intensified her feelings of being shadowed by some nameless danger. A more cautious part of her protested that she was leaping ahead much too fast, making far more assumptions than could be scientifically safe, but she wasn't listening to that part of herself at the moment.
She turned back to !Xabbu. "I'm going there. I have to."
"Where? To the Inner District?"