"Carnival." She whispered, but it was only reflex: if the privacy shield was legitimate, she could scream the code word until her lungs ached without anyone hearing. If it wasn't, everything she had done was already known to her pursuers.
Nobody seemed to be watching. The access bank downloaded the new identity instantly. She was faintly disappointed that there was no sensation—surely shape-changing, a hallowed and ancient magical art, should feel like something? But of course her shape hadn't changed: she still wore the nondescript sim in which she'd entered, and behind that was still Irene Sulaweyo, teacher and part-time Net Bandit. Only her index was different. Mister Otepi from Nigeria had vanished. Mister Babutu from Uganda had taken his place.
She dissolved the privacy shield and surveyed the massive waterfall, the elegant formal garden. Waiters, or things that looked like waiters, were skimming from table to table like waterbugs. She could not hang about this place forever. In such a service-intensive sector of the club she would quickly attract attention again, and she did not want her new identity linked in any way with the old one. Someone would notice eventually, of course: she had entered as Otepi, and at the end of some arbitrary accounting period an expert system checking the records would notice that Otepi had never left. But that might be hours from now, or even days. A node with a turnover as large and constant as Mister J's would have a hard time locating the other half of the discrepancy, and with luck she would be long gone by the time they did. With luck.
With a word she shifted back to the main lounge, where she would pass unnoticed more easily in the large and active crowd. She was tired, too, and eager for the chance to stay in one place for a few minutes. But what about !Xabbu? He was so much less experienced. What effect would such stress be having on him if he wandered somewhere in this vast labyrinth, alone and frightened?
The lounge was still full of glaring lights and long shadows, of voices and wild music. Renie picked a bench sunk in the darkness at the base of one of the cyclopean walls and turned down the gain on her hearplugs. It was hard to know where to start. There were so many rooms here, so many public spaces. She herself had been in dozens, and she was sure she had only scratched the surface. And she could not even guess at how many people might be in the club—hundreds of thousands, perhaps. Mister J's was not a physical space. The only limitation was the speed and power of the equipment that lay behind it. Her friend could be anywhere.
Renie turned to look at the revolving stage. The pale singer and her goblinish band were gone. Instead, a group of elephants, normal in every detail except for their straw hats, sun glasses, and strangely spiky instruments—and of course the delicate rosy pink of their baggy skins—were churning out slow, thumping dance music. She could feel the jar of the bass even through her lowered hearplugs.
"Excuse me." One of the shiny-faced waiters hovered before her.
"Nothing but rent for me," she told him. "I'm just resting."
"Fine with me, sir, I assure you. But I have a message for you."
"For me?" She leaned forward, staring. She felt her skin tingle. "That's not possible." He raised an eyebrow. His foot tapped on air. Renie swallowed. "I mean, are you sure?"
If the waiter was playing a game with her on behalf of her pursuers, he was doing a very convincing job. He practically seethed with impatience. "Oh, sweeze. You are Mister Babutu, aren't you? Because if you are, the rest of your party wants to meet you in the Contemplation Hall."
She recovered herself and thanked him; an instant later he was gone, a vanishing huff of silver.
Of course, it could be !Xabbu, she thought. She had told him the names of both emergency identities, his and hers. Then again, it might just as easily be Strimbello or some other, less broadly drawn, functionaries wishing to avoid a scene. !Xabbu or Strimbello, it had to be one or the other—Mister Babutu didn't really exist, so no one else would be looking for him.
What choice did she have? She couldn't ignore the possibility of finding her friend.
She picked Contemplation Hall out of the main menu and shifted. She thought she detected an almost infinitesimal hitch to the transfer, as though the system were experiencing unusually heavy usage, but it was hard to dispel the idea that the delay might mean she was going somewhere deep into the heart of the system, far from the metaphorical surface. Deep inside the beast.
The hall was a very striking conception, a sort of Classical folly writ large. Tall columns covered in flowering vines held up a huge circular dome, part of which had cracked and fallen away. White shards, some as large as a suburban house, glinted like bones along the base of the columns, tucked in threadbare blankets of moss. A bright blue sky striped with wind-tattered clouds showed through the hole in the dome and between the pillared arches on each side, as though the hall stood atop Mount Olympus itself. A few sims, most of them far in the simulated distance, strolled about the wide grassy space inside the ring of stone.
She did not like the idea of leaving the outer edge and moving into the open space, but if the club's authorities had summoned her to this place, it wouldn't matter whether she tried to be inconspicuous or not. She shifted toward the center and turned to gaze around her, impressed with the completeness of the design. The stones of the massive folly seemed convincingly old, surfaces shot with cracks, columns surrounded and overgrown with vegetation. Rabbits and other small animals moved across the hummocky ground, and a pair of twittering birds were building a nest on one of the shards of the tumbled dome.
"Mister Babutu?"
She whirled. "Who are you?"
He was a tall, lantern-jawed man, made to seem even bigger by his baggy dark suit. He wore a tall and scuffed black top hat; a striped muffler hung loosely around his long neck. "I'm Wicket" He smiled broadly, tipping the hat. The shabbiness of his attire sat oddly with his quick, vigorous movements. "Your friend Mister Wonde sent me. You got a message from him?"
Renie eyed him. "Where is he?"
"With some of my mates. Come on—I'll take you to him." He pulled something from inside his coat. If he saw Renie flinch at the movement, he showed no sign, but instead lifted the battered flute to his lips and played a few piping bars, something that she could not identify but which seemed familiar as a nursery rhyme. A hole opened in the grass between them. Renie could see steps leading down.
"Why didn't he come himself?"
Wicket was already in the hole to his waist, which left the top of his black stove-pipe at about Renie's eye level. "Not feeling well, I think. He just asked me to fetch you. Said you might ask some questions, and to remind you about some game with string."
The string game. !Xabbu's song. Renie felt a weight of worry lift from her. No one but the Bushman could know about that. Wicket's hat was just vanishing below the surface of the ground. She climbed down after him.
The tunnel seemed to be something from a children's book, the home of some talking animal or other magical creature. Although within moments she and Wicket had moved far below what should have been the surface, the tunnel wall was pierced with small windows, and out of each she could see a scene of artificial beauty—riverlands, meadows, wind-groomed forests of oak and beech. Here and there along the downward spiral of the steps were small doors no higher than Renie's knee, each with a knocker and minute keyhole. The urge to open one was powerful. The place was like some wonderful dollhouse.
But she could not pause to look at anything. Although she herself was forced to keep one hand on the curving banister, Wicket, despite his long legs and broad shoulders, bounced down the stairway ahead of her at a rapid pace, still blowing on his flute. After a few minutes he had vanished down the twisting stairwell. Only thin musical echoes proved he was still in front of her.
The stairwell wound down and down. Occasionally she thought she heard high-pitched voices from behind the doorways, or caught a glimpse of a bright eye peering out through a keyhole. Once she had to duck to avoid garrotting herself on a laundry line which had been stretched right across t
he stairwell. Tiny calico dresses, none bigger than a slice of bread, slapped damply against her face.
Down they went, still farther. More stairs, more doors, and the continuous trill of Wicket's elusive music—Renie felt the fairy-tale charm of the place beginning to pall. She craved a cigarette and a glass of beer.
She ducked her head again to go under a low spot in the stairwell, and when she raised it, the light had changed. Before she could react, her foot met resistance too suddenly, giving her a jolt that would have been painful if her body were not in harness back at the Poly. She had reached level ground.
Stretching before her, as if in continuation of the storybook theme, was a Mystery Cave, the sort of place which jolly children discovered in jolly stories. It was long and low, all stone and soft earth. The ceiling was whiskery with roots, as though the cavern were some hollow space beneath forest earth, but tiny lights twinkled amid the tangle. The dirt floor was covered with piles of strange objects. Some—feathers and shiny beads and polished stones—looked as though they had been collected and abandoned by animals or birds. Others, like a pit filled with the limbs and heads of dolls, seemed purposeful and somewhat overwrought, a university art project on corrupted innocence. Other objects were just incomprehensible, featureless spheres and cubes and less recognizable geometric shapes scattered across the earthen floor. Some of these even seemed to glow with a faint light of their own.
Wicket stood grinning before her. Even with his shoulders hunched, the top of his head loomed up among the twinkling fairy-lights. He lifted his flute and played again, doing a slow dance as he did so. There was something incongruous about him, some oddness that Renie couldn't quite name. If he was a Puppet, he was a work of real originality.
Wicket stopped and repocketed the flute. "You're slow," he said, mockery in his deep voice. "Come on—your friend's waiting."
He swept one hand to the side in a mock-formal bow and stepped back. Behind him on the far side of the long cavern, blocked from her sight until this moment, was the occluded glow of a campfire fenced by shadowy figures. Renie, again feeling the need for caution, moved forward. Her heart sped.
!Xabbu, or a sim that looked very much like his, was sitting in the midst of a group of much better-defined figures, all men in tattered finery similar to Wicket's. With his sketchy features and rudimentary body details, the Bushman seemed like nothing so much as a gingerbread man.
More fairy tales. Renie was feeling a little punchy.
"Are you okay?" she asked on private band. "!Xabbu! Is that you?"
There was no reply, and for a moment she was certain she'd been tricked. Then the sim turned toward her, and a voice that despite the distortion, was recognizably the Bushman's, said: "I am very glad my new friends have found you. I have been here such a long time. I was beginning to think you had left me behind."
"Talk to me! If you can hear me, just raise your hand."
The sim did not move, but sat regarding her with expressionless eyes.
"I wouldn't leave you," she said at last "How did you end up here?"
"We found him wandering around, lost and confused." Wicket drew up his long legs as he seated himself beside the fire. "My friends and me." He pointed to the others in the circle. "That's Brownbread, Whistler, and Corduroy." His companions were fat, thin, and thinner still. None was as tall as Wicket, but all seemed otherwise quite similar, full of nudges and restless energy.
"Thank you." Renie turned her attention back to !Xabbu. "We must be going now. We're really quite late."
"Are you sure you wouldn't rather stay with us for a while?" Wicket spread his hands before the flames. "We don't get many visitors."
"I would like to. I'm very grateful for your help. But we are running up too much connect time."
Wicket raised his eyebrow as though she had said something faintly off-color, but remained silent. Renie leaned forward and put her hand on !Xabbu's shoulder, conscious that back at the Poly she must be touching his real body. Despite the low quality of the force-feedback, it certainly felt like her friend's narrow, birdlike physique. "Come along. Let's go back."
"I do not know how." There was only a little sadness in his voice, but a great lassitude, as though he spoke from the edge of sleep. "I have forgotten."
Renie cursed to herself and triggered the exit sequence for both of them, but as the cavern around her began to blur and fade, she could see that !Xabbu was not shifting with her. She aborted the exit.
"Something's wrong," she said. "Something is holding him here."
"Perhaps you'll have to stay a little longer." Wicket smiled. "That'd be nice."
"Mister Wonde can tell us some more stories," said Brownbread, pleasure evident on his round face. "I wouldn't mind hearing the one about the Lynx and the Morning Star again."
"Mister Wonde can't tell you any more stories," Renie said sharply. Were these men simple-minded? Or were they just Puppets, enacting some strange looped tableau that she and !Xabbu had stumbled into? "Mister Wonde has to leave. Our time is up. We cannot afford to stay longer."
Greyhound-thin Corduroy nodded his head gravely. "Then you must call the Masters. The Masters see to all comings and goings. They will put you right."
Renie felt sure she knew who the Masters were, and knew she did not want to explain her problem to the club's authorities. "We can't. There . . . there are reasons." The men around the fire frowned. If they were Puppets, they might at any moment trigger some automatic message of breakdown to the club's troubleshooters. She needed time to figure out why !Xabbu could not be removed from the net. "There is . . . there is someone very bad pretending to be one of the Masters. If the Masters are summoned, then this bad one will find us. We cannot call them."
All the men nodded now, like superstitious savages in some Z-grade netflick. "We'll help you, then," said Wicket enthusiastically. "We'll help you against the Bad One." He turned to his companions. "The Colleen. The Colleen will know what to do for these fellows."
"That's right." Whistler's lisp betrayed the origin of his name. He spoke slowly and wore a lopsided grin. "She'll help. But she'll want something."
"Who's Colleen?" Renie struggled with fear and impatience. Something was seriously wrong with her friend, the club authorities were searching for her, and Strimbello had said he knew who she really was, but instead of taking !Xabbu and getting the hell out, she was being forced to participate in some kind of fairy-tale scenario. She looked at the Bushman. His sim sat motionless beside the fire, rigid as a chrysalis.
"She knows things," said Brownbread. "Sometimes she tells."
"She's magical." Wicket waved his long hands as if to demonstrate. "She does favors. For a price."
Renie could not help herself. "Who are you? What do you do here? How did you get here?"
"Those are some very, very good questions," Corduroy said slowly. He seemed to be the thoughtful one. "We'd have to give a lot of gifts to the Colleen to get the answers to all those."
"You mean you don't know who you are or how you got here?"
"We have . . . ideas," Corduroy said meaningfully. "But we're not sure. We argue about it some nights."
"Corduroy is the best arguer," Wicket explained. "Mainly because everyone else gets tired and quits."
They had to be Puppets, these men, but they seemed somehow lost, remote from the rest of the club's bright glare and knowing blandishments. Renie felt a chill at the idea of constructs, bits of coded gear, sitting around a virtual campfire and arguing about metaphysics. It seemed so . . . lonely. She looked up at the glittering lights snarled in the tangle of roots above. Like stars. Little flames to ameliorate the darkness above, as a campfire stands sentinel against the darkness of earth.
"Okay," she said at last "Take us to this Colleen."
Wicket reached down and plucked one of the burning brands from the fire. His three friends did the same, their faces suddenly full of solemnity. Renie couldn't help feeling that in some strange way this was all a game to them. S
he reached for the final piece of wood, but Corduroy waved his hand. "No," be said. "We always have to leave the fire burning. So we can find our way back."
Renie helped !Xabbu to his feet. He swayed slightly, as though almost faulting with weariness, but stood by himself when she took her hand away and turned to the men. "You said we'd have to take her a gift. I don't have anything."
"Then you must give her a story. Your friend Mister Wonde knows lots—he told us some." Brownbread smiled, remembering. "Good stories, they were."
Wicket took the lead, bending his neck to keep his head below the trailing roots. Whistler came last, holding his torch high so that Renie and !Xabbu were surrounded by light. As they walked, Renie experienced a faint blurring along the edges of her vision. She could never see it happening directly, but the place around them was changing. The feathery roots overhead became thicker and the tiny lights dimmed. The soft, loamy earth beneath their feet hardened. Before long, Renie realized that they were walking through a succession of caves with only the torches for light. Strange shapes covered the cavern walls, drawings that might have been done in charcoal and blood, primitive representations of animals and people.
They seemed to be moving downward. Renie reached out to !Xabbu, wanting mostly to be reassured of his presence. She was beginning to feel almost as much a part of this place as Wicket and the others. What section of the club was this? What was its purpose?
"!Xabbu, can you hear me?" There was still no response on private band. "How are you feeling? Are you okay?"
He was a long time answering. "I . . . I am having trouble hearing you. There are other presences, very close."
"What do you mean, other presences?"
"It is hard to say." His voice was listless. "I think the people of the Early Race are near. Or perhaps it is the Hungry One, the one burned by the fire."
"What does that mean?" She tugged at his shoulder, trying to break through his odd lethargy, but he merely tipped a little to one side and almost stumbled. "What is wrong with you?"