Susan gazed at him shrewdly. "Ah. You've seen my picture."
He nodded. Renie turned to see what they were talking about What she had thought was merely the wallscreen above the fireplace was actually a photographic print almost three meters wide, bigger than any she had seen outside a museum. It showed a painting on a natural rock wall, a primitively simple and graceful work. A gazelle was described in just a few lines, a group of dancing human figures on either side of it. The rock seemed to glow with a sunset light. The paint looked almost fresh, but Renie knew it was not.
!Xabbu was staring at it again. He was holding his shoulders in a strange way, as though something might be stalking him, but his eyes seemed full of wonder rather than fear.
"Do you know where it's from?" Susan asked him.
"No. But I know it is old, from the days when we Bushmen were the only people in this land," He reached out a hand as if to touch it, though it was a good ten feet from the couch on which he sat. "It is a powerful thing to see." He hesitated. "But I am not certain I am happy to see it in a person's house."
Susan frowned, taking her time. "Do you mean a white person's house? No, it's all right. I understand—or I think I do. I don't mean it to give offense. It does not have religious meaning to me, but I think it's a beautiful thing. I suppose I get spiritual value from it, if that doesn't sound presumptuous." She stared at the photo as if seeing it anew. "The painting itself, the original, is still on a cliff face at Giant's Castle in the Drakensberg Mountains. Will it bother you to see it, !Xabbu? I could ask Jeremiah to take it down. He won't be doing anything else much for the next few hours, but he's getting a salary anyway."
The small man shook his head. "There is no need. When I said I was not comfortable, I was speaking of my own thoughts, my own feelings. Renie knows that I have many worries about my people and their past." He smiled. "Their future, too. Perhaps it is better that some people can see it here at least. Perhaps they will remember . . . or at least wish they could remember."
They all three drank their coffee for a while in silence, looking at the leaping gazelle and the dancers.
"Well," the doctor said at last, "if you still want to show me something, Irene, we should get to it or we will miss lunch. Jeremiah does not take kindly to alterations in the schedule."
Renie had not explained much on the phone. Now, as she began to tell Susan about the mystery file, she found herself revealing more than she had intended. The doctor, trying to get at the context, asked questions for which it was hard to find partial answers, and Renie soon discovered that she had told her old teacher almost everything except the name of the online club and the reason they had gone there in the first place.
Old habits die hard, Renie thought Susan was looking at her expectantly, eyes bright, and it was possible to see not only the powerfully impressive woman she had been when Renie had first met her, but the sharp-witted and sharp-tongued girl she had been more than half a century ago. I never could lie to her worth a damn.
"But why in the name of God would anyone have a security system like that? What on earth could they be protecting?" The doctor's intent stare made Renie feel positively delinquent. "Have you gotten yourself involved with criminals, Irene?"
She suppressed a flinch at the hated name. "I don't know. I don't really want to talk about it yet. But if they're doing the kind of things I think they are, then the place should be burned out like a nest of poisonous snakes."
Susan sank back against the cushions of her wheelchair, her face troubled. "I'll respect your privacy, Irene, but I don't like the sound of this much. How did you get involved in such a thing?" She looked over at !Xabbu, as though he might be the cause.
Renie shrugged. "Let's say that I believe they've got something important to me and I want it back."
"Very well, I give up. I never had the patience for Miss Marple-ish guessing games. Let's see what you've got. Follow me."
She led Renie and !Xabbu down the hallway in her silent chair. What looked like an ordinary pair of French doors opened up to reveal a small freight elevator.
"Thank God I put this in for moving equipment," said the doctor. "Squeeze in tight, now. Since this hip nonsense, if I'd only had the stairs I wouldn't have been able to get down here for months. Well, maybe I could have made Jeremiah carry me. There's a picture."
The basement seemed to cover almost as much space as the house itself. A large part of it was taken up by the lab, which contained several rows of tables in typical laboratory array. "Mess and confusion," was how the doctor put it.
"I've got a clean stand-alone system already, and I've finished the antiviral work I was doing with it," she said. "We might as well use that. You'd probably just as soon watch this on a monitor screen, wouldn't you?"
Renie nodded emphatically. Even with Doctor Van Bleeck around to help, she wasn't going to put herself in a surround environment to explore whatever gift the Mister J's folks had sent her. Nobody got to play that trick on her twice.
"Okay, then. Fire up your pad and let's go. Load these, so I can run some diagnostics before we try to move it onto the new system."
After several minutes, the doctor dropped her squeezers onto her lap robe and made another of her childlike faces. "I can't get into the damn thing. But you're right, it's very strange. Doesn't seem to make much sense as an anti-intrusion device. How are you punishing someone if you Trojan Horse something onto their system too big to be activated? Ah, well. You might as well hook up."
Renie connected her pad to the doctor's dedicated machine. Things started to happen very quickly.
"It's transferring itself. The same way it downloaded onto my pad in the first place."
"But it's not sending a copy, the whole thing is moving." Susan frowned as she watched the diagnostics flutter through their various calculations. Renie almost felt sorry for all the doctor's specialist programs, as though they were living things, tiny little scientists wringing their hands and arguing with each other as they tried to classify a completely alien object.
"I know," Renie said. "It doesn't make sense. . . ." She broke off, staring. The monitor screen was beginning to glow more brightly. The diagnostic level disappeared entirely, numbers and symbols and graphs vanishing as though burned away by fire. Something was forming on the screen.
"What in the hell is that?" Susan sounded irritated, but there was an edge of real disquiet in her voice.
"It's . . . a city." Renie leaned forward. A slightly hysterical laugh was building inside her. It was like stealing secret microfilm in some old spyflick and discovering it contained holiday snaps. "It's visual feed of some city."
"That's no place I've ever seen." Susan, too, was leaning forward, as was !Xabbu, standing behind her chair. The light from the monitor gilded their faces. "Look—have you ever seen cars like that? It's some kind of science fiction clip—some netflick."
"No, it's real." Renie couldn't say exactly how she knew, but she knew. If it had been a still photograph like Susan's cliff-painting, it would have been hard to tell. But movement increased the level of information to the eye—and the brain-exponentially; even the best effects people found moving objects harder to synthesize. Renie hadn't been in the VR business as long as Susan, but she had as good an eye as anybody, and better than most. Even in Mister J's, with the top of the line machinery they clearly had at their command, she had been able to spot subtle failures of coordination and naturalistic movement. But this city of golden towers, of rippling banners and elevated trains, had no such flaws.
"I think I have seen this somewhere," said !Xabbu. "It is like a dream."
Susan picked up her squeezers and made a few gestures. "It's just running on automatic. I can't find any information attached to it." She frowned. "I'll just—"
The picture vanished. For a moment the entire monitor went dark, then the screen came back up in a blizzard of flickering pixels.
"What did you do?" Renie had to look away—the juddering, sparkling light remi
nded her of the last unpleasant hour in the club.
"Nothing. The damn thing just turned itself off." Susan restarted the system, which came back up as if everything were normal. "It's gone."
"Turned itself off?"
"Gone. Gone! There's no trace of it at all."
Ten minutes later Susan dropped her squeezers again and rolled her chair back from the monitor. She had searched both her own computer and Renie's pad diligently, with no result. "My eyes hurt," she said. "Do you want a go at it?"
"I can't think of anything you haven't done. How could it just disappear?"
"Some kind of autophage. Played, then ate itself. Nothing left now."
"So all we had was some picture of a city." Renie was depressed. "We don't know why. And now we don't even have that."
"Ah, of course! I almost forgot." Susan pulled her chair back close to the screen. "I was taking a display sample when the thing went kerploonk—let's see what we got." She directed the machine's search. A few moments later the screen resolved into a gauzy golden abstract. "We got it!" The doctor squinted. "Kak. It was just losing resolution when I got the snapshot. My eyes aren't so good on close-up work, Irene. Can you see anything in it at all, or is it just random colored pixels?"
"I think so."
"There is a tower," !Xabbu said slowly. "There."
"Right. Then we'll need to move it onto the main system. Since I took the sample myself, we'll assume it's inert and therefore safe—although this whole thing has been strange enough to make me less than completely confident about anything. Ah, well." She had a quick talk with the household wiring; a few minutes later they were again staring at the golden smear, now stretched yards wide across the laboratory wall-screen.
"I have some image enhancement gear that might help," she said. "Some of the preliminary stages can work through while we have lunch—clean up the signal noise, rewind the de-resolution sequence as much as possible. Come along. Jeremiah's probably having a fit."
"!Xabbu?" Renie put her hand on his shoulder. The Bushman seemed entranced by the wallscreen image. "Are you okay?"
"This way, even distorted so, it still seems familiar to me." He stared at the shapeless swirls of amber, gold, and creamy yellow. "I have seen this somewhere, but it is not a memory so much as a feeling."
Renie shrugged. "I don't know what to say. Let's go have lunch. Maybe it will come to you."
He followed her almost reluctantly, stopping one last time in the elevator doorway to look back, his brow wrinkled in perplexity.
Susan had been right: Jeremiah was more than a little offended when the doctor and her guests trooped in twenty minutes late for lunch. "I did not poach the fish until I heard you coming," he said accusingly. "But I cannot promise anything about the vegetables."
In fact, the vegetables had survived very nicely, and the sea-bass was tender and flaky. Renie could not remember when she had eaten such a nice meal, and she took pains to tell Dako so.
His good humor slightly restored, the man nodded as he cleared the dishes. "Doctor Van Bleeck would rather have sandwiches every day," he said, an art dealer asked for paintings on black velvet.
Susan laughed. "I just never want to have to come upstairs and sit down when I'm working. The days when I don't work through lunch and sometimes dinner are the days I'm feeling my age. You don't want me to be old, do you, Jeremiah?"
"The doctor is not old," he said. "The doctor is stubborn and self-centered." He withdrew to the kitchen.
"Poor man." Susan shook her head. "He came to work for us when my husband was still alive. We used to have parties then, people from the university, foreign visitors. It was a more fulfilling household to run, I'm sure. But he's right—he doesn't see me most days after breakfast, unless there's some correspondence I have to sign. He leaves bitter little notes about all the things he's done that I haven't noticed. They make me laugh, I'm afraid."
!Xabbu had been watching Jeremiah with careful interest "He is like my mother's brother, I think—a proud man who could do more than he is asked to do. It is not good for the spirit"
Susan pursed her lips. Renie thought the doctor might be offended. "Perhaps you are right," she said at last "I have not set Jeremiah many challenges lately—I have rather drawn in on myself. But maybe that has been selfish of me." She turned to Renie. "He came to us at a time when things were still very unsettled, of course. He had been very poorly educated—you do not know how lucky you are, Irene. The school system was already much better by the time you came along. But I think Jeremiah would have done well in any number of things, given the opportunity. He is an extremely quick learner and very thorough." The doctor looked down at her hands, at the silver spoon held in her gnarled fingers. "I had hoped his generation would be the last to grow up damaged by what we did."
Renie could not help thinking of her own father, floundering in an ocean invisible to everyone else, unable to find solid ground on which to stand.
"I'll think about what you said, !Xabbu." Susan put down her fork and briskly wiped her hands. "It is possible to get too set in one's ways. Anyway, let's go see what we can do with our mystery city."
The imaging programs had restored the snapshot to something like a recognizable picture. The substance of the city was now visible as a garden of fuzzy vertical oblongs and triangles, with impressionist smears representing the roads and elevated rails. Renie and the doctor began to correct small areas, adding detail from their own memory that augmented the general patterns imposed by the enhancement gear. !Xabbu proved particularly helpful. His visual memory was excellent: where Renie and Susan might remember that there had been windows in the flat plane of a wall, !Xabbu could often tell them how many there had been and which had been illuminated.
After more than an hour a picture had taken shape that was recognizably the golden city which had burned on the screen for a few brief moments. It was less sharply defined, and there were areas in which the reconstruction was largely guesswork, but anyone who had seen such a place would recognize this as an image of it.
"So now we start searching." Susan tilted her head to one side. "Although it's still not quite right, somehow."
"It doesn't look real any more," said Renie. "It's lost that alive quality. Of course it has—it's a flat, unmoving, totally rebuilt version. But that was part of the effect of the original. It was like looking through a hole in the computer at a real city."
"I suppose you're right. Still, it's the strangest damn place I've ever seen. If it's real, it must be one of those prefab fibramic monstrosities they string up overnight in the Indonesian Archipelago or somewhere like that." She rubbed at her knees. "These damn sensors are starting to chafe my legs. I'm afraid I'm going to have to call it a day, my dear. But I'll start searching for a good match off the specialist nets—you're not back at work yet, are you? Then you might as well let me do it. I've got at least three contracts I could charge it off to—multinationals with million human-hour datacomb projects who'd never notice a little extra connection time. And I've got a friend—well, an acquaintance—named Martine Desroubins, who's an absolutely top-flight researcher. I'll see if she has anything to offer. Maybe Martine will even pitch in a little free help, since it's for a good cause." She looked at Renie, that shrewd, searching gaze again. "It is for a good cause, isn't it? This is something very important to you,"
Renie could only nod.
"Right, then. On your way. I'll call you if I get any hits."
Dako met them outside the elevator on the main floor. As if by magic, he had the car waiting at the front door.
Renie hugged Doctor Van Bleeck and pressed a kiss against her powdered cheek. "Thank you. It's been wonderful to see you."
Susan smiled. "You didn't have to wait until you were being chased by VR terrorists to come visit me, you know."
"I know. Thank you so much."
!Xabbu shook the doctor's hand. She held on to him for a few moments, her eyes bright "It's been a pleasure to meet you. I hope you
will come again."
"I would like that very much."
"Good. It's settled." She rolled her chair onto the porch as they climbed into the car, then waved to them from the shadows of the porch as Dako swung around the long driveway and out onto the tree-lined road.
"You look very sad." !Xabbu had been staring at her for a long uncomfortable time.
"Not sad. Just . . . frustrated. Every time I think I might be getting somewhere with this, I run into a brick wall."
"You should not say 'I,' but 'we.' "
His liquid brown eyes rebuked her, but Renie could not even find the strength to feel guilty. "You've helped me a lot, !Xabbu. Of course you have."
"I am not speaking of me, but of you. You are not alone—look, today we have spoken to that wise woman, your friend, and she will certainly help us. There is strength in companionship, in family." !Xabbu spread his hands. "We are all of us small when set against the great powers, against the thunder or the sandstorm."
"This is more than a sandstorm." Renie fumbled reflexively for a cigarette, then remembered she couldn't smoke on the bus. "If I'm not completely crazy, this is bigger and stranger than anything I've ever heard of."
"But that is just the time when you must call on those who will help you. In my family, we say 'I wish baboons were on this rock.' Except that we call them 'the people who sit on their heels.' "
"Call who?"
"The baboons. I was taught that all the creatures who live beneath the sun are people—like us, but different. It is not a familiar way to think among city-folk, I know, but to my family, especially my father's family, all living things are people. The baboons are the people that sit on their heels. Surely you have seen them and know it is so."
Renie nodded, a little ashamed that she had only seen baboons caged in the Durban Zoo. "But why did you say you wished there were baboons on a rock?"
"It means that it is a time of great necessity and we need help. Usually, my people and the people who sit on their heels were not friends. In fact, long ago the baboons committed a great crime against our Grandfather Mantis. There was a great war between his people and theirs."