The inside of the flower—or the simulation connected to the simulation that looked like a flower, Renie reminded herself—was a vast grotto honeycombed with passages and small open areas. The whole of it was covered floor to ceiling in velvety red, and the light came from no particular source; Renie thought it was rather like being in someone's intestine. Conventional sims and their much less humanoid counterparts sat, stood, or drifted, with no greater attention to up and down than those in what Martine had called the "park." The roar of sound was more muted here, but clearly there were a lot of conversations going on.
"Martine? Is that you? I was so happy to hear from you!"
!Xabbu and Renie turned at the stranger's faintly accented voice, which came strong and clear across the private band. The Bushman burst out laughing, and Renie was hard-pressed not to join him. The new arrival was a breakfast—a plate full of eggs and sausage hovering in midair, with silverware, cereal bowl, and a glass of orange juice orbiting around it like satellites.
"Are you laughing at my new sim?" The breakfast bounced gently in mock despair. "I'm shattered."
Martine's disembodied voice was warm. "Ali. It is good to meet you again. These are my guests." She did not use names; Renie, despite finding it hard to feel threatened by a floating meal, did not volunteer them.
The breakfast quite visibly looked them up and down, examining their rudimentary sims for a long moment. For the first time ever in VR, Renie felt self-conscious about the quality of her appearance. "Somebody must do something about what you're wearing," was the final verdict.
"That's not why we're here, Ali, but if they ever come back, I'm sure my friends will come to see you. Prince Ali von Al-ways-Laughing-Puppets was one of the first truly great designers of simulated bodies," Martine explained.
"Was?" Even his horror was arch. "Was? Good God, am I forgotten already? But I've gone back to just being Ali, dearest. Nobody's doing those long names at the moment—my idea, of course. Still, I'm ever so honored you remembered." The plate slowly rotated; the sausages gleamed. "Not that you've changed much, Martine dear. I suppose you've found the one way to avoid the entire fashion question entirely. Very minimal. And there is something to say for consistency." Ali could not entirely hide his disapproval. "Well, what brings you here again? It's been so long! And what shall we do? They're going to have some horrible ethics discussion here at Ant Farm tonight, and frankly I'd rather surrender to RL than endure that. But Sinyi Transitore is going to do a weather piece out of the conference center node. His things are always dreadfully interesting. Would your guests like to see that?"
"What is a weather piece?" asked !Xabbu. Renie was relieved to hear that he sounded quite calm. She had been wondering how he was holding up under all this strangeness.
"Oh, it's . . . weather. You know. You two must be African—so distinct, that accent. Do you know the Bingaru Brothers? Those clever fellows who shut down the Kampala Grid? They claim it was an accident, of course, but no one believes them. You must know them."
Renie and !Xabbu had to admit they did not.
"It sounds lovely, Ali," Martine cut in, "but we haven't come for entertainment. We need to find somebody, and I called you because you know everybody."
Renie was glad her own sim didn't show much in the way of facial expressions—it would be difficult to keep a straight face. She had never seen a breakfast swell with pride before.
"I do. But of course I do. Who are you looking for?"
"One of the older TreeHouse folk. His handle is the Blue Dog Anchorite."
The plate slowed its rotation. The fork and spoon drooped a little. "The Dog? That old crust? My goodness, Martine, what would you want with him?"
Renie could not contain her eagerness. "You know where to find him?"
"I suppose. He's out in Cobweb Corner with the rest of his friends."
"Cobweb Corner?" Martine sounded puzzled.
"That's just what we call it. Inside Founder's Hill. With the other old people." Ali's tone suggested that even to speak of it was to risk it, "My God, what is that?"
!Xabbu and Renie turned to follow what seemed to be the floating breakfast's line of sight. Two bulky Caucasian men were gliding past, surrounded by a cloud of tiny yellow monkeys. One of the men was dressed like something out of an extremely stupid netflick, sword and chain mail and long Mongol mustache.
"Thank you, Ali," said Martine. "We must go. It was lovely to meet you again. Thank you for answering my call."
Ali was still apparently riveted by the newcomers. "Heavens, I haven't seen anything like that in years. Someone should help them quickly." The assembly of flatware turned back to face them. "Sorry. The price we pay for freedom—some people will simply wear anything. So you're running off just like that? Martine, dearest, I am absolutely destroyed. Ah, well. Kiss." The fork and spoon did a complicated pirouette, then the breakfast began to drift leisurely after the two burly men and the cloud of monkeys. "Don't be strangers!" he called back at them.
"Why did that man choose to look like food?" !Xabbu asked a moment later.
Renie laughed. "Because he could, I suppose. Martine?"
"I am still here. I was checking the Founder's Hill directory for a listing, but I have no luck. We must go there."
"Let's go then." Renie surveyed the duodenal interior one last time. "Things can't get much stranger."
Founder's Hill, whatever it had once been, now displayed itself as nothing more complicated than a door, although it was a suitably large and impressive door, carefully rendered to resemble ancient, worm-eaten wood, with a huge, corroded brass knocker in the shape of a lion's head. An oil lantern hung from a hook overhead, filling the porch with yellow light. The doorstep of founder's Hill was also suitably quiet, like the forgotten place it resembled, although only moments before they had been in the full hurlyburly of TreeHouse life. Renie wondered if its appearance was the residents' sly joke at their own expense.
"Why do we not go in?" !Xabbu asked.
"Because I am doing the things that will enable us to go in." Martine sounded a little tense, as though she were trying to juggle and skip rope simultaneously. "Now you may knock."
Renie banged the knocker. A moment later the door swung open.
Before them stretched a long hallway, which was also lit by hanging lanterns. A succession of doors faced each other, continuing down both walls in file until the hallway dwindled into apparently infinite distance. Renie looked at the blank face of the nearest door, then put her hand on it. Writing appeared, as she had expected, but it was in a script she couldn't read that had the flowing look of Arabic. "Is there a directory?" she asked. "Or are we going to have to knock on every door."
"I am searching for a directory now," said Martine.
Renie and !Xabbu could only wait, although the small man seemed to bear it better than Renie did. She was cross again, not least at having to wonder what their invisible guide was doing.
What is her problem? Why is she so secretive? Is she damaged somehow? But that doesn't make sense. Her brain is obviously fine, and anything else wouldn't prevent her using a sim.
It was like traveling with a spirit or a guardian angel. So far, Martine seemed to be a good spirit, but Renie disliked having so great a reliance on someone about whom she knew so little.
"There is no directory," the guide announced."Not of individual nodes. But there are common areas. Perhaps we can find some help in one of those."
With no sensation of movement, they moved abruptly to a spot farther down the seemingly endless corridor, out of sight of the front entrance but still standing in front of one of the identical doors. It opened, as though pushed by Martine's invisible hand, and Renie and !Xabbu floated in.
The room, not surprisingly, was far bigger on the inside than the distance between doors in the corridor. It stretched for what seemed hundreds of yards, and was dotted with small tables, like the reading room of an old-fashioned library. It had a vaguely clublike feel, with picture
s hanging on the walls—when Renie looked more closely, she saw they were posters for ancient musical groups—and virtual plants everywhere, some of them claiming space quite aggressively. The windows on the far wall looked out over the American Grand Canyon as it would look if filled with water and inhabited by extremely alien-looking aquatic life; Renie wondered briefly if they had chosen the view by popular vote.
There were sims everywhere, huddled in groups around tables, floating lazily near the ceiling or hovering midway between the two in gesticulating, argumentative flocks. They seemed to lack the hubristic display of the other denizens of TreeHouse: many of the sims were only a little more complex than the ones Renie and !Xabbu were wearing. She guessed that if these were, as Ali had suggested, the colony's oldest residents, perhaps they were wearing the sims of their youth, as old people in RL still tended to sport the fashions of their young adulthood.
A fairly basic female sim drifted by. Renie raised a hand to catch her attention.
"Pardon me. We're looking for Blue Dog Anchorite."
The sim watched her with the expressionless eyes of a painted mannequin, but did not speak. Renie was puzzled, English was usually the common language in most international VR environments.
She moved herself farther into the room, heading for a table where a loud discussion was in progress. As she drifted up, she heard fragments of conversation.
". . . Most certainly didn't. I was opping En-BICS just before they went full-bore, so I ought to know."
Someone responded in what sounded like an Asian language, evidently with some heat.
"But that's just the point! It was all multinational by then!"
"Oh, McEnery, you are such a cabrón!" said another voice. "Chupa mi pedro!"
"Pardon me," said Renie when the argument had quieted for a moment. "We're looking for Blue Dog Anchorite. We were told he lives on Founder's Hill."
All the sims swiveled to look at her. One, a teddy bear with incongruously masculine characteristics, guaffawed in the cracked voice of an old man. "They're looking for the Dog. The Dog's got fans."
One of the other sims cocked a vestigial thumb toward the far corner of the room. "Overthere."
Renie looked, but could not make out any individuals at that distance. She beckoned for !Xabbu to follow her. He was staring at the teddy bear.
"Don't even ask me," Renie said.
There was indeed one sim sitting by itself in the corner, an odd one—a dark-skinned old man, with fierce eyes and a bristling gray beard who appeared strangely real in some ways and strangely unreal in others. He was dressed in the casual style of fifty years earlier, but with a turban and what Renie at first took to be some kind of ceremonial garment over the clothes. It was only after a few moments that she realized the outer wrap was an old bathrobe.
"Pardon me. . . ." she began, but the old man cut her off.
"What do you three want?"
It took Renie a moment to remember Martine, who was being unusually silent. "Are you . . . are you Blue Dog Anchorite?" Not only his sim was puzzling: there was something odd about his virtual chair, too.
"Who wants to know?" He had an unmistakable South African accent. Renie felt a surge of hope.
"We're friends of Susan Van Bleeck. We have reason to believe she spoke with you fairly recently."
The turbaned head came forward. The old hacker looked like a vulture startled in its nest. "Friends of Susan's? Why the hell should I believe that? How did you find me?"
"You have no cause to fear us," Martine said.
Renie cut in. "We need your help. Did Susan contact you about a golden city, something she couldn't identify. . . ?"
"Ssshhh! Good God!" The old man, startled for a moment out of bad temper, waved violently to silence her. "Don't make such a goddamn fuss. No names, no pack drill. And no talk here. We'll go to my place."
He moved his fingers and his chair rose. "Follow me. No, never mind, I'll give you the location and you can meet me there. Damn." He said this with some feeling. "I wish you and Susan had come to me sooner."
"Why?" Renie asked. "What do you mean?"
"Because it might have been early enough to do something then. But now it's too damn late."
He vanished.
CHAPTER 22
Gear
NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 5.5 (Eu, NAm)—"HOW TO KILL YOUR TEACHER"
(visual: Looshus and Kantee in tunnel)
VO: Looshus (Ufour Halloran) and Kantee (Brandywine Garcia) are on the run, pursued by Jang (Avram Reiner), the assassin from the Educators' Union. 10 supporting characters open, audition for long-term role of Mrs. Torquemada. Flak to: GCN.HOW2KL.CAST
He was thinking hard, but not getting much of anywhere. "Beezle," he whispered, "find me that weird little snippet on 'bandit nodes.' See if you can get an address on the author."
His mother looked into the rearview mirror. "What did you say?"
"Nothing." He slumped lower in the seat, watching the perimeter fences move past the safety windows. He reached up to his neck, fondling the new wireless connector, a birthday gift he had bought himself through mail order. The telematic jack was light and almost unnoticeable—all that showed was a rounded white plastic button fitted over the top of his neurocannula. It seemed to work as well as the reviews had suggested, and it was an incredible pleasure to be able to go online without being tied to a cable.
"I've got the address," Beezle rasped. "Do you want to coil it now?"
"No. I'll deal with it later."
"Orlando, what are you doing? Who are you talking to back there?"
He brought his hand up to hide the t-jack. "Nobody, Vivien, I'm just . . . just singing to myself."
The matte-black cylinder of the guardhouse loomed up beyond the windshield, distracting her. She stopped at the inside checkpoint to beam in the security code, then, when the barrier dropped, drove forward to the guardhouse itself.
Orlando took his new wireless squeezers from his pocket.
Beezle—any messages? he typed.
"Just one." Beezle was right beside his ear—or at least it sounded like it. In fact, Beezle was pumping data directly into his auditory nerves. "From Elaine Strassman at Indigo Gear. She asked for an appointment."
"Who?" Orlando said out loud, then looked up guiltily. His mom was busy talking to the security guard, a burly figure whose black Fibrox anti-impact suit matched the tiles on the guardhouse. What's Indigo? he fingered.
"Small, very new technology company. They did a presentation on SchoolNet last semester."
It rang a bell, but only vaguely. He had been putting out a lot of feelers about TreeHouse, but couldn't think of any that might have wound up at Indigo, a ferociously trendy company based in Southern California, if he remembered their presentation correctly.
Go ahead and set up a meeting. Tonight after I get home or tomorrow morning when Vivien goes to class.
"Gotcha, boss."
"We should be back no later than four," his mother was telling the guard.
"If you want to stop and do some shopping, ma'am, you just call us and let us know and we'll set back your ETR." The guard, a young, round-headed blond, had his thumbs tucked into his belt; his fingers absently fondled the sidearm sitting high in its holster. "Don't want to get an alarm situation going if we don't need to."
"Thank you, Holger. We'll be back on time, I'm sure." She thumbed the window button and waited for a gap to open in the large external barrier before sliding through to the street." How are you doing, Orlando?" she called back.
"Fine, Vivien." In truth he was feeling a little achy, but it wouldn't help to mention it, and it would just make her feel she should do something. He straightened up in the seat as Crown Heights Community and its sheltering walls disappeared behind them.
Not long after they rolled down off the curving hill-roads and onto level ground, leaving the wire-fenced tree preserve behind, the car began to shudder. Even expensive shock absorbers could do little to compensate
for potholes like moon craters. The State of California and local governments had been arguing for years about who had responsibility for the larger arterial roads. They hadn't resolved the disagreement yet.
"You're driving too fast, Vivien." He winced. He could feel each bounce in his bones.
"I'm fine. We're almost there." She spoke with clenched-teeth cheerfulness. She hated driving, and hated having to take Orlando down to the flats to see his doctor. He sometimes thought that one of the reasons she got mad at him was because he'd been stupid enough to have a disease that couldn't be treated remotely, or at the friendly and very secure Crown Heights Medical Center.
She also got mad because she was afraid for him. Vivien was very sensible, and so was his father, Conrad, but it was the kind of sensible that liked to throw reasonable arguments at things until they went away. If they didn't go away—well, Vivien and Conrad just sort of stopped talking about them.
It was strange to be out from under the trees and back into the flatlands. In Crown Heights, behind the green belt and its army of private guards, it was possible to believe that things hadn't changed much in the last couple of hundred years, that Northern California was still an essentially open place, a temperate paradise of redwoods and well-spaced, secure communities. Which, Orlando reflected, was probably why people like his parents lived in Crown Heights.
The San Francisco Bay Area metroplex had once been a discrete cluster of cities on the edge of the v-shaped bay, like fingertips delicately holding something of value. Now the cities had grown together into a single mass that clenched the bay and its connected waterways in a broad fist well over a hundred miles square. Only the fabulously valuable corporate farming land of the Central Valley had kept the metroplex and its southern rival, metastasizing around Los Angeles, from merging into a single uniform smear of dense urban growth.
As they passed under the cantilevered bulk of Highway 92, Orlando scrunched down in his seat so he could see the hammock city. He had long been fascinated by the multilevel shantytowns, sometimes called "honeycombs" by their residents—or "rats' nests" by the kind of people who lived in Crown Heights. When he had asked his parents about them, they had failed to tell him much more than the obvious, so he had searched the net for old news footage.