He allowed himself to settle back into his throne. "Otherwise, I am pleased with you, and it hurts me to upbraid you. Do not allow this to happen again. Find a less idiosyncratic way to slake your compulsions. If you please me, you will find that there are rewards you cannot even imagine. I do not exaggerate. Am I understood?"
The jackal head wagged as if its owner were exhausted. The god looked for a hint of defiance, but saw only fear and resignation.
"Good," he said. "Then our audience is finished. I look forward to your next progress report on the Sky God Project Next week?"
Anubis nodded but did not look up. The god crossed his arms and Death's Messenger disappeared.
Osiris sighed. The old, old man inside the god was weary. The interview with his underling hadn't gone too badly, but now it was time to talk to the dark one, the Other—the one creature in all the world that he feared.
Work, work, work, and none of it pleasant any more. Only the Grail could be worth such heartache, such suffering.
Death cursed sourly and got on with it.
CHAPTER 15
Friends in High Places
NETFEED/NEWS: Six Powers Sign Antarctica Pact
(visual: metal wreckage scattered across icefloe)
VO: The twisted wreckage of fighter jets will remain as a mute reminder of the short-lived but disastrous Antarctic Conflict. Representatives of the six powers whose disagreement over mineral rights began the conflict met in Zurich to sign a treaty reestablishing Antarctica as an international territory. . . .
She met !Xabbu on the bus at Pinetown Station, He sprang from his seat when he saw her, as though she had fainted in the aisle instead of merely stopping to take a breath after climbing the steps.
"Are you all right?"
She gestured for him to sit, then slid into the seat beside him. "I'm well. Just a little short of breath. I haven't been getting around much lately."
He frowned. "I would have come to meet you."
"I know. That's why I wouldn't let you. You've been all the way out to my flatblock three times now since I had my . . . since I got ill. All I had to do was catch a local bus to get here. Ten minutes." !Xabbu, of course, had probably been on the bus almost an hour already; the service from Chesterville was not particularly fast.
"I am worried for you. You have been very poorly." His concerned look was almost stern, as though she were a child playing in a dangerous place. She laughed.
"I told you, it wasn't a full-blown heart attack, just a temporary arrhythmia. I'm okay now."
Renie didn't want anyone worrying over her, even !Xabbu. It made her feel weak, and she didn't trust weakness. She was also growing uncomfortable about the burden of responsibility she had dropped on her small friend. He had completed his course work, so he was not losing study time, but what money he had must be running out while she was using up an unconscionable amount of his energies. Only the fact that his safety, too, now seemed compromised had convinced her to drag him along on this errand.
But it was my problems that exposed him to danger in the first place, she thought miserably.
"What are you going to do now that you've finished the course?" she asked. "Are you going to do a graduate program?"
A certain melancholy crept over his delicate features. "I do not know, Renie. I am thinking . . . there are things I do not know yet. I told you something of my plans, but I see now that I am far from being ready to make them real. Also. . . ." His voice dropped conspiratorially. He looked up and down the aisle of the bus as though checking for spies. "Also," he continued quietly, "I am thinking and thinking of the . . . experience I had. When we were in that place."
The rasp of gears changing as the bus cornered was deafening. Renie suppressed a smile. Any eavesdropper would have to be a lip-reader.
"If I can help in any way," she said, "please tell me. I owe you a lot. I could help you find a grant, maybe. . . ."
The Bushman shook his head vigorously. "It is not money. It is more difficult than that. I wish it were a city-problem—then I could ask my friends and find a city-answer. But in this place where I live now, I must discover the answer to this problem myself."
Now it was Renie's turn to shake her head. "I'm not sure I understand."
"Neither am I." !Xabbu smiled, banishing his own somber look, but Renie saw his conscious effort and felt a momentary pang of sadness. Was this what he had learned in Durban, and in the other places where what he called city-people lived? To dissemble, to hide his feelings and show a false seeming?
I suppose I should be grateful he's not that good at it. Yet.
The bus was climbing an overpass. !Xabbu was staring out the window and down at the riverine expanse of National Route 3, at the cars packed into it even in mid-morning like termites in a split log.
Suddenly uncomfortable with the symptoms of modem life she normally took for granted, Renie turned away to examine their fellow passengers. Most of them were older black women, heading for Kloof and the other wealthy northeastern suburbs to work as domestics, just as they and their predecessors had for decades, both before and after liberation. The chubby woman nearest her, head wrapped in a traditional but now slightly old-fashioned headscarf, wore a look that someone less familiar with it than Renie would have called blank. It was not hard to see how white South Africans in the old Apartheid days, facing that expressionless stare, would have projected onto it any emotions they wished—sullenness, stupidity, even the potential for murderous violence. But Renie had grown up around such women, and knew that the expression was a mask that they wore like a uniform. At home, or in the shebeen or teashop, they would smile and laugh easily. But working for the volatile whites, it had always been easier to show nothing. If you showed nothing, the white boss could not take offense, or feel pity, or—as was sometimes worse—presume to a friendship that could never really exist under such inequality.
Renie had white colleagues at the Poly, and some she even socialized with after work. But as Pinetown had become a mixed neighborhood, the whites that could afford to had moved out—out to places like Kloof and the Berea ridgetop, always to the high places, as if their black neighbors and coworkers were not individuals, but part of some vast dark tide drowning the lowlands.
If institutionalized racism was gone, the dividing wall of money was as high as it had ever been. There were blacks in all industries now, and at all levels, and blacks had held most of the top jobs in government since the liberation, but South Africa had never quite climbed out of its Third World hole, and the twenty-first century had not been any kinder to Africa than had the twentieth. Most blacks were still poor. And most whites, for whom the transition to black rule had not been anywhere near as bad as they had feared, were not.
As she looked around, Renie's gaze was arrested by a young man a few seats behind her. Despite the overcast day, he was wearing sunglasses; he had been watching her, but when his eyes—or his lenses—met her stare, he turned quickly to look out the window. She felt a moment of reflexive fear, but then she saw the shunt at the base of his skull, just peeping from beneath his cap, and understood. She turned away, clutching her bag a little tighter to her lap.
After a moment she cautiously turned to look again. The chargehead was still staring out the window, fingers jittering on the seatback in front of him. His clothes were wrinkled and sweat-stained at the armpits. The neurocannula was a township job and the insertion had been cheap and dirty—she could see a gleam of suppuration around the edge of the plastic.
A slight pressure on her leg made her jump. !Xabbu raised his eyes, questioning.
"It's nothing," she said. "I'll tell you later." She shook her head. There had been a chargepit in one of the flats when she and Stephen and her father had first moved in, and she had more than once encountered its zombie denizens in the stairwell. They were generally harmless—extended use of charge-gear with its high-speed strobing and infrasound tended to make a person uncoordinated and passive—but she had never been com
fortable around them, however loopy and withdrawn they seemed. She had been violently pawed on a bus when she was a student by a man who clearly wasn't seeing her at all, but was reacting to some unimaginable vision induced by pounding his brain into jelly, and afterward she had never been able to laugh at chargeheads the way her friends did.
In fact, they had turned out not to be so harmless after all, but the police didn't seem capable of doing much, so after several of the older residents had been robbed and some of the flats had been burglarized, a vigilante group—her father had been part of it—had taken cudgels and cricket bats and kicked down the door. The skinny creatures inside had not put up much of a fight, but heads were still split and ribs were cracked. Renie had seen the chargeheads in nightmares for months after, tumbling down the stairs in slow motion, flapping their arms like drowning men and making hooting noises that sounded more animal than human. They had been almost incapable of defending themselves, as though this sudden eruption of anger and pain were only a further, if somewhat unsatisfactory, part of the charge.
Still in the midst of her idealistic student phase, Renie had been shocked when she discovered that her father and the other men had taken the equipment and gear they found there—cheap Nigerian stuff, mostly—and sold it, drinking up the returns over the succeeding week while retelling the story of their victory. As far as she knew, none of the building's robbery victims had ever received a share of the profits. Long Joseph Sulaweyo and the others had won the prerogative of conquerors, the right to divide the booty.
Actually, the effect she had suffered in Mister J's was not that different from charge, although far more sophisticated. Is that what they'd done? Found some way to hyperpower a charge high—supercharge it, as it were—then put in some kind of hypnotic shackle to keep the victims from breaking the loop?
"Renie?" !Xabbu patted her leg again.
She shook her head, realizing that she had been staring into space as fixedly as the man with the 'can in his head.
"Sorry. Just thinking about something."
"I would like to ask you about the person we are going to see."
She nodded. "I was going to tell you, I just got . . . sidetracked. She used to be a teacher of mine. At the University of Natal."
"And she taught you . . . what is your degree called? 'Virtual Engineering'?"
Renie laughed. "That's what they called it, all right. Sounds kind of quaint, doesn't it? Like being a Doctor of Electricity or something. But she was brilliant. I'd never met anyone like her. And she was a real South African, in the best sense of the word. When the rand dropped so badly all the other white professors—and even a lot of the Asian and black ones—were sending their CVs off to Europe and America, she just laughed at them. 'Van Bleecks have been here since the sixteenth century,' she always said. 'We've been here so long you can't pull the roots out. We're not bloody Afrikaaners—we're Africans!' That's her name, by the way—Susan Van Bleeck."
"If she is your friend," !Xabbu said solemnly, "then she will be my friend, too."
"You'll like her, I'm sure. God, I haven't seen her in person for a long time. It must be almost two years. But when I called her, she just said 'Come on up, I'll give you lunch.' Like I'd been dropping by every other week."
The bus was laboring now, climbing the steep hills into Kloof. The houses, so close together down below, seemed to be a little more snobbish here in the highlands, each keeping a careful distance from its neighbors, surrounding itself with a discreet drapery of trees. "The smartest person I know," Renie said.
There was a car waiting at the bus station, an expensive-looking electric Ihlosi. Standing beside it, dressed in immaculate casual clothing, was a tall middle-aged black man who introduced himself as Jeremiah Dako. He did not say much more before ushering Renie and !Xabbu into the car's back seat Renie suggested that one of them could ride in the front, but the man's only reply was a chilly smile. After her initial conversational volleys were returned with minimum effort on his part, she gave up and watched the scenery slide by.
Uninterested in chitchat, Jeremiah did seem interested in !Xabbu, or so Renie deduced from his frequent surveillance of the Bushman in his rearview mirror. He did not particularly seem to approve of the little man's presence, although what she had seen of Mr. Dako did not suggest he approved of much of anything. Nevertheless, his covert attention reminded her of her father's reaction. Perhaps this man, too, had believed the Bushmen to be only an old memory.
As they drove through the security gate (the swift way in which Dako typed in the code and applied thumb to sensor showing the smoothness of old routine) the house was suddenly visible at the end of the long tree-lined street, like something out of a dream—tall, clean, welcoming, and just as big as she remembered. Renie had visited Doctor Van Bleeck at home just a few times long ago, so she was inordinately pleased to find it so familiar. Dako entered the semicircular driveway and stopped in front of the pillared porch. The effect of its great size was mitigated by the lounger and lawn chairs scattered about on either side of the front door. Susan Van Bleeck was sitting on one of the chairs reading a book, her white hair bright as a candleflame against the dark background. She looked up as the car stopped, then waved.
Renie threw open the car door, earning a sour look from the driver, who had been about to open it "Don't get up!" she cried, then hurried up the steps and hugged her, secretly shocked at how small and birdlike the old woman felt.
"Get up?" Susan laughed. "You don't have that much time, do you?" She pointed to the wheels on her chair, which had been obscured by the tartan blanket bundled over the doctor's knees.
"Oh, my God, what's wrong?" Renie was a little shocked. Susan Van Bleeck looked . . . ancient. She had already been in her late sixties when Renie had studied with her, so it wasn't entirely surprising, but it was still unnerving to see what just two more years had done.
"Nothing permanent—well, that's a dangerous thing to say at my age. Broke my hip, basically. All the calcium supplements in the world won't help you if you go down the stairs arse-first" She looked past Renie. "And this is the friend you said you might bring, yes?"
"Oh, of course, this is !Xabbu. !Xabbu, meet Doctor Van Bleeck."
The little man nodded and smiled gravely as he shook her hand. Dako, who had reappeared after parking the car off to one side of the driveway, muttered something as he walked past, apparently to himself.
"I'd hoped we could sit outside," said their host, frowning at the sky. "But of course the weather's being bloody." She lifted a frail hand to gesture at the cavernous porch. "You know how we Afrikaaners are—always out on the stoep. But it's just too cold. By the way, young man, I hope you're not planning to call me 'Doctor' all day. 'Susan' will do nicely." She pulled off the blanket and handed it to !Xabbu, who took it as though it were a ceremonial vestment; then without using any controls Renie could see, she turned the wheelchair toward the door and up and over a ramp built into the threshold.
Renie and !Xabbu followed her down the broad hallway. The wheels made squeaking sounds on the polished wooden floorboards as the doctor turned and rolled ahead of them into the living room.
"How does the chair work?" Renie asked.
Susan smiled. "Pretty slick, don't you think? It's quite clever, really. You can get the kind that's controlled directly from a shunt, but that seemed a little severe—after all, I intend to get out of the damn thing eventually. This one just works off skin-contact sensors reading my leg muscles. I flex, it goes. At first it had to be the old-fashioned, manually operated kind so the bone could heal, but now I can use this as a form of physical therapy—you know, keep the leg muscles in some kind of shape." She gestured to the couch. "Please sit down. Jeremiah will bring in some coffee soon."
"I have to admit I was surprised to hear you were still at the University," Renie said.
Susan pulled a face like an extremely wrinkled child trying spinach for the first time. "God, what else would I do? Not that I'm in there oft
en—about once a month, really, for something euphemistically called 'office hours.' Mostly I do consultation work right from here. But I do have to get out of this place occasionally. There's only so much solitude I can stand, and as you may have noticed, Jeremiah isn't the world's most energetic conversationalist."
As if demon-summoned by the sound of his name, Dako appeared in the doorway carrying a coffee service and cafétiere on a tray. He put it down and pressed the plunger—the doctor's appreciation of modem technology apparently did not extend to coffee-making—then left the room again, but not without another odd and slightly covert look at !Xabbu. The Bushman, who was looking at the doctor's roomful of paintings and sculpture, seemed not to notice.
"He keeps staring," Renie said. "All the way up the hill he kept looking at !Xabbu in the mirror."
"Well, it might be that he fancies him," Susan said, smiling, "but I suspect it's a bit of a guilty conscience."
Renie shook her head. "What do you mean?"
"Jeremiah's a Griqua—what they used to call a half-caste in the bad old days, although he's as black as anyone else. A couple of hundred years ago they drove the Bushmen out of this part of southern Africa. Violently. Horribly. It was a terrible time. I suppose the whites could have done more to stop it, but the hard truth is they saw more potential in the Griqua man they did in the Bushmen. Those were days when having any white blood at all made you better than someone with none—but still nothing like a white." She smiled again, rather sadly. "Do your people remember the Griqua with hatred, !Xabbu? Or are you from a different part of the country entirely?"
The little man looked around. "I am sorry, I was not listening carefully to what you were saying."