"I am speaking of something greater. There is a poem that I was taught in school—an English poet, I think. It spoke of a beast slouching toward Bethlehem."
"I remember that, sort of. Blood-dimmed tides. Anarchy loose in the world."
He nodded. "An apocalyptic image, I was told. A vision of the end of things. I spoke a moment ago of Mantis and the All-Devourer. Grandfather Mantis was told in a vision that a great time of change was coming, and he prepared his people to leave the earth forever because their time upon it had finished." His small, fine-featured face was solemn, but she could see something in his eyes and the set of his mouth, a kind of feverish despair. He was terrified. "I feel that I am being granted such a vision, Renie. There is a great change coming, a . . . what were the words? A rough beast waiting to be born."
A chill ran across the surface of Renie's skin, as though the bus cabin's long-expired air-conditioning had suddenly sprung back to life. Was her friend going mad? He had said that city life had destroyed many of his people—was this obsession with dreams and the myths of his ancestors the beginnings of a religious mania that would eventually destroy him, too?
I've done this to him. Bad enough that he's had to adjust to a completely different kind of life. But now I've dragged him right in over his head, into the weirdest things our society has to offer. It's like dropping a young child onto a battlefield or into an S & M orgy.
"And what should we do?" she asked, struggling to remain at least outwardly calm. "Where is this threat corning from—do you know?"
He stared at her for a moment "Yes. I could not say what are its causes or what the results might be, but I do not need those things to sense the place the problem comes from—even a blind man can find the campfire. I told you that the club, Mister J's, was a bad place. It is, but it is not the heart of the shadow. I think it is like a hole in some very large nest of hornets—do you see? If you put your ear to that hole, you will hear the sound of things that fly and seize and sting, but even if you seal it with mud, the hornets are still alive in the darkness inside and they will find their way out of other holes."
"I'm confused, !Xabbu. I don't really know what you're saying."
He gave her a tiny, sad smile. "I do not know exactly myself, Renie. Just because I can see the shadow does not mean I can recognize what casts it. But there is more involved in this thing than merely your brother—more perhaps than even the lives of many other children like him. I smell it like I smell the approach of a storm. I may not be able to understand any more clearly than that, but it is enough to frighten me very badly."
They continued in silence until !Xabbu got off at his stop in Chesterville a few minutes later. Renie waved to him from the window as the bus pulled away, but his words had upset her. She was torn. It was hard to know which was worse, to believe that her friend might be going mad, or to think that he might truly know something that others did not, something dreadful.
The sun was going down as her bus headed toward Pinetown. The square, drab buildings cast long shadows. Renie watched the orange streetlamps kindle and tried to imagine what kind of beasts might wait in the darkness beyond the circle of light.
Del Ray was smiling, but he did not seem entirely happy to receive her call. Renie moved the exam she'd been preparing to one side of the screen, then enlarged Del Ray's window. "Have you found out anything?"
He shook his head. "This isn't a good time for me to talk."
"Then would you like me to meet you somewhere?"
"No. Look, I don't have much for you yet—it's a tricky situation. There's been a lot of interest in the corporation you asked about, but nothing obviously out of the ordinary. They own a bunch of clubs, some production companies, a couple of gear houses, mostly net-related stuff. There was one court case involving one of their other clubs that got as far as a lower court in China, filed by a woman named Quan."
"What do you mean, court case? What about?"
Again he shook his head. "A suit for negligence, something like that. It's probably nothing—the family dropped it before trial. Look, there's not much I can find out without getting access to sealed legal records. And it's not something I'm supposed to be doing, really." He hesitated. "How's Stephen? Any better?"
"No. Things have been pretty much the same for weeks now." She had dreamed of Stephen the night before, of him screaming for help at the bottom of a deep hole while she tried to explain the urgency to some kind of policemen or the petty official who was paying more attention to stroking a sleek dog. Just thinking about the dream made her angry. "So, is that all you're going to tell me—there's not much? What about the people who own that horrible place? There must be names on the licenses. Or is that too much trouble to find out?"
For a moment his professional composure slipped. "I don't have to do anything for you at all, you know."
"No." She stared at the screen, wondering what exactly she had once found so utterly engaging about him. He was just a nice-looking man in a suit "No, you don't"
"I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . . I want to help, Renie. Things are just. . . ." He hesitated. "Things are difficult for me at the moment."
She wondered if he was referring to his domestic life, or ordinary work crises, or something more sinister. "Well, I meant what I said. Be careful. And I do appreciate your help."
"I'll get you everything I can. It's . . . well, it's just not as easy as it sounds. Take care."
"I will. Thank you."
When he had hung up, she lit a cigarette, too unsettled to get back to work on the examination. It was hard to tell whether Del Ray's apparent agitation had to do with guilt over the way their relationship had ended, discomfort at having become embroiled in someone's bizarre conspiracy theory, or something else entirely. If it was the second thing, she couldn't really blame him. Six months ago, if someone had brought the same crazy story to her, she would have been doubtful, too. Even now a strong case could be made that she had merely hit a patch of bad luck and was finding a way to string it all together into a structure that made sense. Wasn't that the way someone said religions—and paranoid obsessions—got started? As an attempt to make sense of a universe too large and too random for human comprehension?
What did she have, really? Her brother had mysteriously fallen ill, but strange, inexplicable illnesses were the stuff of historical record since time out of mind, and continued right up until the present day. There had been more sudden outbreaks of previously unknown viruses in the past fifty years than there had been in the five centuries before.
She and !Xabbu had discovered a seeming correlation between the incidences of coma and net usage, but there were dozens of other possible explanations for that.
Her flatblock had burned, and although there had been no definitive report, there were certainly whispers of arson. But that, too, was remarkably unremarkable. She had no idea of the statistics, but she was quite sure there must be hundreds of arson fires in Durban every year, not to mention the thousands of accidental ones.
The only things that even halfway held up as evidence were the murderous attack on Susan, the truly peculiar events surrounding Mister J's, and the appearance of that astonishing golden city. But even these things could be odd but explicable happenstance. Only the strong links between these apparent coincidences separated her certainty that she was onto something from the most pathetic examples of persecution mania.
Renie sighed. So, are !Xabbu and I legitimate whistle-blowers? Or are we turning into the kind of people you see on the tabnets claiming space aliens are beaming messages into their brains?
Susan hadn't thought so, or at least she had discovered something she thought was significant, even if Renie hadn't found a way to follow it up yet. Doctor Van Bleeck had not been the kind of person to indulge anything she judged unwarranted foolishness in even her closest of colleagues, let alone an ex-student she hadn't seen in years.
What did she find out? What if we can't locate this Murat Sagar Singh? Or what if we do, b
ut he doesn't know what it was that Susan thought was significant?
It was terrible to think she might have brought that dreadful attack onto her mentor, but it was also frustrating to think of the doctor working in her lab that night before it happened, perhaps discovering all manner of important things, even taking time to leave a message for her, but not bothering to record any of it. Who ever expected the world to change that rapidly? But it did.
Renie had been unsealing another pack of cigarettes, but now she dropped them on the desk and asked her pad to call Susan's house, hoping to reach Jeremiah Dako. The doctor's voice came on with her voicemail, dry and brisk.
"This is Susan Van Bleeck. I'm doing something interesting right now. Yes, at my age. Leave a message, please."
Renie found it hard to speak for a moment, but when she regained her voice, she asked Jeremiah to call her as soon as he could.
She picked up her cigarettes again and moved the exam template back to the center of the screen.
Jeremiah Dako hung back at the door of the elevator. "I cannot look at that place today." His eyes were red and he looked ten years older than the first time Renie had seen him. "It makes me too angry, too sad."
"That's no problem." Renie let !Xabbu step out and patted Dako's arm. "Thank you for letting us have a look. I hope we find something. We'll come back upstairs if we need you."
"The police have been here and gone. I suppose it doesn't matter what you touch anymore." He helped Renie lift her bags out onto the floor and then pushed the button. The door shut, the elevator hummed upward, and Renie turned for her first look at the lab.
"Oh, my God." Sour liquid rose in her throat and she swallowed hard. She had not expected the damage to be so extensive. The people who had beaten Susan so viciously had done a savagely thorough job on her workplace as well. "They must have brought sledgehammers with them."
Every single one of the long tables had been smashed to the ground and its contents pulverized. Hindered housings and shattered components made a carpet of plastic mulch half a foot deep across nearly the entire lab floor, a jigsaw puzzle without a solution. The screens on every wall had been shattered, too, their inner workings wrenched out through the jagged holes, cables dangling like the innards of a medieval torture victim.
!Xabbu looked up from where he squatted, sifting jagged bits of debris through his fingers. "Surely these men were not merely robbers. No robber would spend so much time ruining expensive equipment, even if they were looking for money instead."
"I can't imagine it. God almighty, look at this." The thoroughness of the ruin exerted a horrifying fascination—universal entropy demonstrated for beginners.
Pay attention, the wreckage seemed to declare. Some things cannot be undone, short of time pivoting in its groove and crawling back on itself.
Renie tried to imagine such a thing, like a video clip running in reverse, every ruptured piece flying back to its original site, equipment reforming, tables rising again like animals startled awake. And if she could run it all back, Susan would return, too, the spark of life leaping back into her cold body, her bones reknitting, the spatters of dried blood hidden under this wreckage liquescing and flowing together like mercury to leap from the floor and back into the doctor's closing wounds. Death itself would turn coward and flee.
Renie shuddered. She suddenly felt weak and sick. It was all too terrible, too hopeless.
She looked at !Xabbu as he idly handled the broken pieces of the doctor's work, at his slender, childlike back, and the weight of her responsibility returned to her. At this moment, it was not an unpleasant sensation. People needed her. Susan was gone and this horrible thing could not be undone—better to think about real things, problems that could be solved. She took a breath, unsnapped one of the equipment bags she'd borrowed from the Poly, and lifted out a small station node. Her hands were shaking. She cleared a place on the floor next to a wallport and jacked it in. "We'll just hope this station box has enough power to run the domestic system," she said, pleased with the steadiness of her voice. Crisis passed. "Jeremiah said he's had to turn the lights and everything else on and off manually, so they've disabled it somehow."
"Could ordinary criminals do that?"
"There's a lot of bootleg house-busting gear to be had these days, some of it very cheap. But I wouldn't think Susan would be the kind of person to leave her home vulnerable to that kind of assault, which suggests they must have had a pretty good package. I'll be able to tell you more if I can get into the house system."
!Xabbu frowned. "Did the police not investigate this?"
"Of course they did. Murder of a rich and well-known professor? Jeremiah said they were down here for three days—the private guard people, too. And you and I certainly answered enough questions about our last afternoon here. But even if they found something, they won't share it with us civilians—I tried, Jeremiah tried. About six months from now we might find out something useful. We can't wait that long." She turned on the station node, which blinked instantly to life. It was a very nice piece of Asian hardware which, if she dropped it anywhere between here and the Poly's lab, would cost her about half a year's salary to replace."Let's see what's left and what it can tell us."
Renie slumped into the chair. Dako poured tea for her.
"Will your friend want some?"
"I guess so." She stared at the steaming cup, too tired for the moment even to lift it.
Dako hesitated, then sat down across from her. "Did you find anything? Anything to catch those . . . murderers?" He held his own cup in trembling fingers. Renie wondered what it had been like for him to come back to this house the first time after the doctor's death.
"No. They put some kind of datakiller into the house system—I've tried every form of retrieval gear I could lay my hands on. It's a wonder anything still works here at all."
"The doctor made sure everything ran in parallel. That's what she called it. In case the system broke down." There was quiet pride in his voice.
"Well, those bastards did their work in parallel, too. Not only did they bomb the system, but they broke every piece of hardware they could get their hands on, too."
!Xabbu walked into the kitchen holding something in his hands. Renie looked up, heart quickening. "What's that?"
"I found this as I was leaving. Caught between a lab table and the wall. It means nothing that I can see."
Renie grabbed at the piece of paper and smoothed it Her own name, Irene, headed the page. Below, in Susan's unmistakable shaky handwriting, were the words Atasco and Early M.
"It doesn't mean anything to me," she said after some moments. "It could have been there for months, I suppose—it may be some other Irene entirely. But we'll check it out. It's something, anyway."
Jeremiah could make no sense of it either. Renie's momentary excitement began to fade.
!Xabbu sat down, his face solemn. "I saw the picture in the living room again as I passed," he said. "The rock painting." He stared at the cup before him. For a moment they were all silent. Renie thought they must look like they were conducting a seance. "I am very sorry," he continued abruptly.
"About what?"
"I fear that I made Doctor Van Bleeck feel uncomfortable about the picture on her wall. She was a good person. She valued it for what it meant, I think, even though it was not the work of her own people."
"She was so good. . . ." Jeremiah sniffed angrily and dabbed his eyes with a napkin, then wiped his nose. "Too good. She didn't deserve this. They should find these men and hang them, just like they did in the old days."
"She told us something important, anyway," Renie said. "And she may have left us this note. We'll do our best to find out what she learned. And if it leads us to the people that did that—" She paused, remembering the brutally impersonal thoroughness of the destruction below. "Well, I'll do whatever I can do—whatever I can do—to see them brought to justice."
"Justice." Dako said the word like it tasted bad. "When has anyone ever
gotten justice in this country?"
"Well, let's face the facts. She was rich and she was white, Jeremiah. If anyone's murder is going to be solved by the authorities, hers will."
He snorted, whether in disbelief or agreement, Renie couldn't tell.
They finished their tea while Jeremiah told them all the things that had to be done to prepare for the doctor's memorial service, and how much of the work had been left to him. A niece and nephew were flying in from America, and on past experience Jeremiah fully expected to be pushed aside without thanks. His bitterness was understandable but depressing. Renie ate a few biscuits, more from politeness than hunger, then she and !Xabbu stood up to go.
"Thank you for letting us look," she said. "I would have felt terrible if we hadn't at least tried."
Jeremiah shrugged. "No one will be punished for this. Not as they deserve. And no one will miss her as much as I will."
Something sparked in Renie's memory. "Hold on. Jeremiah, Susan mentioned a friend named Martine, a researcher. I can't remember the last name—Day-roo-something."
Dako shook his head. "I do not know the name."
"I know the house systems were purged, but might there be anywhere you could look? Did she keep an old-fashioned diary, a notebook, anything on paper?"
Jeremiah began to shake his head again, then paused. "We have a household accounts book. The doctor always worried that there might be tax problems, so we kept duplicate records. " He bustled out of the room, his body language showing his gratitude at having something to do.
Renie and !Xabbu sipped at cold tea, too tired to make conversation. After about a dozen minutes had passed, Jeremiah hurried back in carrying a leather-bound ledger, "There is one small payment from three years ago, credited as 'research,' to a 'Martine Desroubins.' " He pointed. "Could that be it?"
Renie nodded. "It certainly sounds right. Any net address or number?"
"No. Just the name and the amount paid."