"Was it a robbery?"
"They didn't take much—some jewelry. But they found Doctor Susan in her lab downstairs, so they must have known about the elevator. I think they tried to make her tell where she kept the money. They broke everything—everything!" He sobbed, then clenched his lips tightly and for a few moments drove in silence.
"They destroyed things in her lab?"
He scowled. "They smashed things. They are like animals. We keep no money in the house! If they wanted to steal, why did they not steal the machines? They are worth more than the few rands we keep around to tip delivery boys."
"And how did you know the doctor wanted to see me?"
"She told me, while we were waiting for the ambulance. She could not talk much." Another sob shook him. "She was just an old woman! Who could do such a thing?"
Renie shook her head. "Terrible people." She could not cry. The streetlights sliding past had lulled her into a sort of dream state, as though she were a ghost haunting her own body. What was going on? Why did dreadful things keep happening to those around her? "Terrible, terrible people," she said.
Asleep, Susan Van Bleeck looked like an alien creature. She was festooned with sensors and tubes, and only the mummifying bandages seemed to be holding her discolored and broken body in something like human form. Her breath wheezed in and out of her parted lips. Jeremiah burst into tears once more and slumped to the floor beside her bed, hands clasped at the back of his neck as if to keep his head from flying off with the force of his grief.
As horrifying as it was to see her friend and teacher this way, Renie was still in a state of cold removal. This was the second time today she had been in a hospital, standing over the body of a silent loved one. At least the Westville University Medical Center did not have a Bukavu quarantine.
A young black doctor wearing a stained smock and glasses with a taped nosepiece looked in. "She needs rest," he said, frowning. "Concussion, lots of bones broken." He gestured loosely down the ward full of sleeping patients. "And it's not visiting time."
"She asked to see me," Renie explained. "She said it was important."
He frowned again, already distracted by some other thought, and wandered out.
Renie borrowed a chair from beside one of the other beds. The patient in the bed, a cadaverously thin young man, blinked awake to watch her with a caged beast's eyes, but did not speak or move. She returned to the bed and adjusted herself in a comfortable position to keep vigil, taking the less-bandaged of Susan's hands in hers.
She had sagged into a half-sleep when she felt a pressure on her fingers. She sat up. Doctor Van Bleeck's eyes were open and moving from side to side, as though she were surrounded by fast-moving shapes.
"It's me, Renie." She gently squeezed. "Irene. Jeremiah's here, too."
Susan stared at her for a moment, then relaxed. Her mouth was open, but nothing came out past the tube except a dry sound like an empty paper sack being blown along a street. Renie stood to go in search of water, but Dako, kneeling beside her, pointed to the "Nothing By Mouth" sign hung on the bed-stand. "They put wire in her jaw."
"You don't need to talk anyway," Renie told her. "We'll just stay here with you."
"Oh, little grandmother." Jeremiah pressed his forehead to the tube-girded arm. "I should have been there. How could I let this happen?"
Susan pulled her hand free from Renie's grip and lifted it slowly until she could touch Dako's face. Tears from his cheeks ran into her bandages. Then she gradually and deliberately put her hand back into Renie's once more.
"Can you answer questions?"
A squeeze.
"Two squeezes for no, then?"
Another squeeze.
"Jeremiah said you wanted to see me."
Yes.
"About the thing we talked about? The city?"
Yes.
Renie suddenly wondered if she could be misinterpreting, since she hadn't received anything but single squeezes. Susan's face was so swollen it was hard even to be sure of her expression; only her eyes moved.
"Do you want me to go home now and let you sleep?"
Two squeezes, quite firm. No.
"Okay, let me think. Did you find the place in the picture?"
No.
"But you found out something about it."
The squeeze was gentle and prolonged.
"Maybe?"
Yes.
Renie hesitated. "Did the men who hurt you . . . did they have something to do with this? What we talked about?"
Another long, slow pressure. Maybe.
"I'm trying to think of yes or no questions. This is really difficult. Do you think you could write or type?"
A long pause, then two squeezes.
"Then is there someone I should talk to? Someone who gave you information and who could give me the same information."
No. Then, a moment later, an additional pressure. Yes.
Renie briskly named all of Susan's colleagues she could remember, but received a negative response to all of them. She worked her way through various police and network agencies, but had no better luck. As she despairingly considered the amount of time an elimination process carried out entirely in manual binary might take, Susan pushed her hand farther into Renie's and turned it so all her fingers were against Renie's palm. They moved fitfully, like the legs of a dying moth. Renie gripped the old woman's hand, trying to give comfort. Susan hissed at her.
"What?"
The doctor laboriously moved her fingers in Renie's palm again. Where the full-hand squeezes had been easy to interpret, these movements were so light and so cramped as to seem nothing more than wriggling. Renie was defeated. "This is terrible. There must be some better way—typing, writing notes."
"She can't type," Jeremiah said mournfully. "Even when she could still talk. I tried before. I gave her pad to her, when she said call you, but she couldn't push the squeezer keys hard enough."
Susan weakly bumped her hand against Renie's palm again, glaring from the purple and red mask. Renie stared.
"That's it. That's what she's doing! Typing!"
Susan opened her hand again and squeezed Renie's fingers.
"But only the right hand?"
Two squeezes. No. Susan bumped the heel of her hand against Renie's palm, then laboriously lifted her arm and moved it across her body. Renie gently caught it and brought it back.
"I get it. You push like that when it means you're switching typing hands. That's what you mean, isn't it?"
Yes.
It was still a laborious process. Susan had great difficulty making Renie understand what squeezer keys the fingers of her right hand would be touching if they belonged to her left. It took almost an hour, with frequent stops for yes-and-no editing and correction, before she had finished her message. Susan had grown weaker throughout, and during the last fifteen minutes had barely been able to move her fingers.
Renie stared at the letters she had jotted in the margin of the hospital diet sheet. "B-L-U-D-G-A-N-C-H-R-I-T-B-C-R-F-L. But it doesn't make sense. Some of it must be abbreviated."
A final, weary squeeze.
Renie stood and leaned over the bed to brush her lips against Susan's broken-veined cheek. "I'll figure it out, somehow. Now, we've kept you awake far too long. You need some sleep."
Jeremiah stood, too. "I'll give you a ride back." He leaned over the doctor. "Then I'll be right back, little grandmother. Don't you be scared."
Susan made a whistling noise that was almost a moan. He paused. She stared at him, clearly frustrated by her inability to speak, then at Renie. Her eyes blinked slowly, once, twice.
"Yes, you're tired. You sleep now." Dako also leaned and kissed her. Renie wondered if that was the first time he had ever done so.
On the way out to the car, she had a sudden feeling that she knew what those blinks had been meant to say. Good-bye.
By the time Dako dropped her off, it was past four in the morning. She was too full of furious, frustrated anger to
sleep, so she spent the hours before dawn staring at her pad, trying every way she could to find some shape behind the sequence of letters Doctor Van Bleeck had given her. The databanks of the net dumped back hundreds of names from all over the world—a dozen came from Brazil alone, and almost as many from Thailand—that actually contained most of the letters in sequence, but none of them seemed particularly likely. But if she couldn't turn up any better information, she would have to contact every one of them.
She watched as a codebreaking algorithm she had downloaded from the Polytechnic library assembled thousands of combinations that fit smaller segments of the letters, a dizzying assortment that made her eyes ache and her head buzz.
Renie smoked and watched the screen, punching in additional queries as they occurred to her. The day's first light began to leak in through the cracks in the roof. Her father snored happily in his bed, still wearing his slippers. Somewhere else in the shelter, some other early riser was playing a radio, bringing in news in an Asian language she didn't recognize.
Renie was just about to call !Xabbu, who she knew got up with the dawn, and tell him the news about Susan, when she suddenly saw the obvious thing she had missed. The last five letters of the doctor's laborious message: B-C-R-F-L. Be Careful.
Her irritation at her own weary blindness was quickly pushed aside by a clench of fear. The doctor, in the hospital with critical injuries quite possibly given to her by the very people Renie had offended, had taken a great deal of effort to tell her old student something that should have gone without saying. Susan Van Bleeck was not someone who wasted effort at the best of times, let alone when struggling for every movement.
Renie set the code algorithm back to work minus the last five letters, then phoned !Xabbu. After some time his landlady answered, keeping the visual blacked out, and said crossly that he was not in his room.
"He said he sleeps outside sometime," Renie said. "Could he be out there?"
"That little man isn't anywhere here, I told you—not inside, not outside. Tell the truth, I don't think he came back last night at all." The line went dead.
Her fears rapidly multiplying, she checked her mail to see if !Xabbu had left her a message. He had not, but to her astonishment, there was a voicemail from Doctor Van Bleeck.
"Hello, Irene, I'm sorry it's taken me so long to get back to you." Susan's voice sounded strong and cheerful, and for a moment Renie was completely baffled. "I'll try to get hold of you later tonight directly, but I'm in the middle of something right now and don't have time to talk much, so I thought I'd just dump this quickly."
It had been recorded before the attack. It was a message from another world, another life.
"I haven't found anything definite yet, but I've got a few connections that may prove fruitful. Let me tell you, dear, this whole thing is very strange indeed. I can't find anything like an actual match with your picture anywhere, and I've had every single urban area on the globe under scrutiny. I know things about Reykjavik that even the Reykjaviktims, or whatever they call themselves, don't know. And, although I know you didn't agree, I've been running searches on image banks as well, just in case it was something cobbled up for a simworld or a netflick. No luck there either.
"But I have had some success with statistical similarity searches—nothing definite, just some intriguing clusters of hits. Martine should be calling back soon, and she may have some ideas, too. In any case, I won't say more until some of the calls I've put out get answered—I'm too old to enjoy looking foolish—but I'll just say I'm going to be renewing some previous acquaintances. Very previous.
"Anyway, dear, that's it. Just wanted to let you know I was working on it. I haven't forgotten. And I hope you haven't become so wrapped up in this yourself that you're skipping meals or sleep. You used to have a very bad habit of trying to make up for initial laziness with last-moment diligence. Not a good plan, Irene.
"Take care. I'll talk to you in person, later."
The line clicked. Renie stared at her pad, wishing that she could make it say more, feeling that if she could just push the right button, her teacher would come back on and tell her all the things she'd been holding back. Susan had talked to her in person later, which made the whole thing an even crueler joke.
Previous acquaintances. What could that mean? She had already tried the names of all of the doctor's colleagues she could remember.
Renie sent the computer searching through various educational guild records, trying to match the letters of Susan's message with the names of anyone at any of the institutions that had employed her. Her eyes were blurry from staring at the padscreen, but there was nothing else to do until it was time to go to work. There wasn't a chance in hell she would be able to catch any sleep in her current frame of mind. Besides, work made it easier not to worry about !Xabbu.
She was on her seventh or eighth cigarette since dawn and watching a coffee tab dissolve in her cup when someone tapped lightly on the front of the partition, near the curtain that served as the front wall. Startled, she held her breath for a moment. She looked around for something to use as a weapon, but the torch had disappeared somewhere. She decided that the cup of boiling water in her hand would have to suffice. As she moved quietly toward the curtain, her father coughed in his sleep and rolled over.
She jerked back the heavy cloth. !Xabbu looked up at her, slightly startled.
"Did I wake you. . . ?" he began, but did not finish his sentence. Renie stepped forward and hugged him so incautiously that she spilled coffee on her own hand. She swore and dropped the cup, which shattered on the concrete.
"Damn! Ow! Sorry!" She waved her singed hand.
!Xabbu stepped forward. "Are you well?"
"Just burned myself." She sucked her fingers.
"No, I mean. . . ." He stepped inside, pulling the curtain closed. "I . . . I had a fearful dream. I feared for you. So I came here."
She stared. He did look quite out of sorts, his clothes rumpled and clearly donned in haste. "You . . . but why didn't you call?"
He looked down at his feet "I am ashamed to say that I did not think of it. I awakened and was afraid, and set out to come here." He squatted beside the wall, a simple, lithe movement.
There was something about the way he did it that reminded Renie he was not entirely of her world, something that remained archaic despite his modern clothes. "I could not find a bus, so I walked."
"From Chesterville? Oh, !Xabbu, you must be exhausted. I'm fine—healthy, anyway—but bad things have happened."
She quickly told him about Doctor Van Bleeck, describing what she knew of the attack and its aftermath. Instead of growing wide with surprise at the news, !Xabbu's heavy-lidded eyes narrowed, as though he were being forced to look at something painful.
"This is very sad." He shook his head. "Ay! I dreamed that she shot an arrow at you and that it pierced your heart. It was a very strong dream, very strong." He clapped his hands softly together, then pressed them tight "I feared it meant that you had been injured in some way by something the two of you had done."
"She shot something to me, but I hope it will save people, not kill them." She curled her lip. "Or at least, I hope it will help us find out if I'm going mad or not."
When she had finished explaining the doctor's messages and her night's work, speaking swiftly but quietly so as not to bring her father into things any earlier than she had to, the little man remained squatting on the floor, his head down.
"There are crocodiles in this river," he said at last. In her weariness, it took her a moment to make sense of what he said. "We have pretended as long as we could that they were only rocks pushing above the surface, or floating logs. But we can ignore them no longer."
Renie sighed. She had sparked a bit in relief at seeing !Xabbu safe. Now she suddenly felt that she could sleep—sleep for a month, given the chance. "Too many things have happened," she agreed. "Stephen lost, Stephen's friend with some kind of brain damage, what happened to us in the club. Now our
flatblock's been burned and Susan's been attacked and beaten. We'd be idiots not to believe something's very wrong here. But," she felt her anger turn sour and miserable, "we can't prove anything. Nothing! We'd have to bribe the police just to get them not to laugh out loud when we told them."
"Unless we find that city, and finding it teaches us something. Or unless we go back in again." His face was curiously blank. "To that place."
"I don't think I could ever go back in there," she said. She blinked, sleepiness pulling at her very hard. "No, I could—for Stephen. But I don't know what good it would do us. They'll just be waiting for us this time. Unless we could find some better, more secret way to hack in—" She stopped, thinking.
"Do you have an idea?" asked !Xabbu. "Surely a place like that would have very good . . . what is the word? Security,"
"Yes, of course. No. That's not what I was thinking. I was just remembering something Susan told me once. I had been involved in some stupid thing—messing with the college record systems, just for fun, something like that. Anyway, she was completely scorched, not because I'd done it, she said, but because I was risking my chance to make something of myself." Renie ran her fingers across her padscreen, calling up options. "She told me the thing itself was no big deal—all the students did it. She'd done it, she said, and lots worse. She'd been quite a daredevil in the early days of the net."
Long Joseph Sulaweyo grunted and sat up in bed, stared at Renie and !Xabbu for a moment with no sign of recognition, then fell back into his thin mattress, snoring again within seconds.
"So you are thinking. . . ."
"She said 'previous acquaintances, very previous.' What do you want to bet she's been talking to some of her ancient hacker buddies? What do you want to bet?" She stared at the screen. "Now, all I have to do is think up some kind of search criteria for retired online troublemakers, match it to what we've got in the way of letters, and just see if we don't come up with Doctor Susan's mystery source!"