"Yeah, but not about what we need to know. Come on, Gardiner, we only have a couple of hours left and I'm going crazy." Fredericks abruptly stood up and waved one of his sim's stocky arms, as though hailing a cab. "Excuse me! Excuse me!"
The discussion group turned toward the source of the disruption with the uniformity of a flock of swallows banking against the wind. The Eiffel Tower, which had been explaining something controversial about visual information protocols, stopped and glared—inasmuch as a large plaid building could glare. In any case, it did not look like a happy building.
"Okay," Fredericks said. "I got their attention. Go ahead and ask 'em."
Orlando's well-honed Thargor reflexes urged him to brain Fredericks with a heavy object. Instead he rose to his feet, conscious for the first time of how . . . teenage the Thargor body looked, "Ummm . . . I'm sorry my friend interrupted," he said. "We're guests, and our time is running out, and we had some questions we need answered, and . . . and someone sent us to this meeting."
One of the points of light glittered angrily. "Who the hell are you?"
"Just . . . just a couple of guys."
"You're doing great, Gardino," Fredericks offered helpfully.
"Shut up." He took a breath and began again. "We just wanted to find out about some gear—some software. We heard that the people who worked on it hung out here."
There was a low hum of irritation from the group of programmers. "We do not wish to be interrupted," said someone with a distinctly Germanic accent.
One of the more rudimentary sims stood up, extending its hands as though to quiet the crowd. "Just tell us what you want," it said. The voice might have been female.
"Um, well, some gear that eventually wound up in a creature in the Middle Country simworld—the creature was a Red Gryphon, to be specific—is listed on all the InPro databases as being authored by someone called Melchior." There was a brief, but muted reaction, as though the name were familiar. Orlando went on, heartened. "From what we could learn, he or she hangs out here. So we'd like some help finding Melchior."
The basic sim that had quieted the crowd stood motionless for a moment, then lifted a hand and made a gesture. The world suddenly went black.
Orlando could see nothing, hear nothing, as though he had been abruptly flung into the vacuum of starless space. He tried to reach up to see what had blocked his vision, but his sim would not respond to his thoughts.
"You may be a guest here longer than you meant to be," a voice murmured in Orlando's ear—a distinctly menacing voice. "You and your friend have just made a really, really stupid mistake."
Sealed in darkness, Orlando raged. We were so close—so close! With a growing sense of having lost more than an opportunity, he pulled the ripcord and dumped them out of TreeHouse.
CHAPTER 23
Blue Dog Anchorite
NETFEED/BUSINESS: ANVAC Posts Record Profits
(visual: ANVAC corporate headquarters—featureless wall)
VO: ANVAC Security Corporation declared the highest business profit margin in fifty years. Zurich Exchange observers cite the ever-growing worldwide need for individual and corporate security, as well as ANVAC's ground-breaking line of "smart" biological weaponry, as reasons for the soaring profits.
(visual: ANVAC vice-president, face and voice disguised)
VP: "We fill a need. The world is a dangerous place. Overkill? That's easy—would you rather be morally right or alive?"
The Anchorite's 'cot—hacker slang for a virtual home-away-from-home—was the least impressive Renie had ever seen. With all of virtuality's prizes to choose from, he had created a decidedly uninspiring setting: with its tiny bed, poor-resolution wallscreen, and miserable flowers in a plastic jug on an institutional table, it looked very much like an old man's room in a nursing home. It also had the same curious real/unreal quality as the Anchorite's own sim. Renie, tired and frustrated, wondered if this old man could be any help to them at all.
"Do you want to sit down?" Singh asked. "I'll make chairs if you want some. Goddamn, I haven't had anybody in here for a long time." He lowered his sim onto the bed, which creaked convincingly, and Renie suddenly realized why both the old hacker and his room seemed so oddly lifelike. It was all real. He was using an actual real-time video of himself as a sim; the bed he was sitting on, the entire room, was probably real as well, a projection turned into a functional VR environment. She was looking at the Anchorite's actual face and body as they looked at this very moment.
He stared back at her, sneering. "Yeah, you guessed it I used to have the whole fancy kit—good-looking sim, forty-thousand-gallon aquarium for an office, full of sharks and mermaids—but I got tired of it. The only friends I had all knew I was a useless old bastard, so who was I fooling?"
Renie was not particularly interested in Singh's philosophy. "Did Susan Van Bleeck ask you about a golden city? And what did you mean when you told us it was 'too late'?"
"Don't hurry me, girl," the Anchorite said crossly.
"Don't 'girl' me. I need some answers, and soon. This isn't a locked-room murder mystery, this is my life we're talking about—more importantly, my little brother's life."
"I think Mister Singh is willing to speak to us, Renie." Martine's voice, simultaneously coming from everywhere and nowhere, might have been that of some offstage director. Renie did not like being directed.
"Martine, I'm tired of talking to the air. I'm sure this is terribly impolite, but would you put on a damn body so we at least know where you are?"
After a long silent moment, a large flat rectangle appeared in the corner of the room. The painted face wore a famously mysterious half-smile. "Is this acceptable?" asked the Mona Lisa.
Renie nodded. There might be an element of mockery to Martine's choice, but at least now they all had something to look at. She turned back to the old man in the turban. "You said 'too late.' Too late for what?"
The old man cackled. "You're a regular little Napoleon, aren't you? Or perhaps I should say 'a regular little Shaka Zulu'?"
"I'm three-quarters Xhosa. Get on with it. Or are you afraid to talk to us?"
Singh laughed again. "Afraid? I'm too bloody old to be afraid. My kids don't talk to me, and my wife's dead. So what could they do to me except shove me off the mortal coil?"
"They," said Renie. "Who are 'they'?"
"The bastards who killed all my friends." The old man's smile vanished. "And Susan's only the most recent. That's why it's too late—because my friends are all gone. There's only me." He raised his hand and gestured at the unprepossessing room as if it were the last place on earth, and he the world's only survivor,
Perhaps for Singh it was the last place on earth, Renie thought. She felt herself thawing a little, but she still wasn't sure whether she liked the old man or not. "Look, we desperately need information. Was Susan right? Do you know anything about the city?"
"One thing at a time, girl. I'll tell it in my own way." He spread his crooked fingers on the lap of his bathrobe. "It started happening about a year ago. There were only a half-dozen of us left—Melani, Dierstroop, some others—you don't care about names of old hackers, do you? Anyway, there were a half-dozen of us left. We'd all known each other for years—Komo Melani and I both worked on some of the early revisions of TreeHouse, and Fanie Dierstroop and I had been in school together. Felton, Misra, and Sakata all worked at Telemorphix with me. Several of them were TreeHouse regulars, but Dierstroop never joined—he thought we were a bunch of left-wing, New Age idiots—and Sakata gave up her membership over a rules committee disagreement. We all stayed in touch, sort of. We had all lost friends—when you get to be my age, that's a fairly familiar pain—so we were probably a little closer than any of us had been in a while, just because the circle was getting smaller."
"Please," said the Mona Lisa. "A question. You knew these people from different places, non? So, when you say, 'a half-dozen of us,' it is a half-dozen of . . . what?"
Renie nodded. She had been lo
oking for the connecting thread herself.
"Damn it, just hold your water." Singh scowled, but actually seemed to be enjoying the attention. "I'm getting there. See, I didn't realize at the time that there were just six of us, because I didn't see the link. I had other friends, too, you know—I wasn't such a miserable bastard as all that. No, I didn't see or think about the connection. Until they started to die.
"Dierstroop went first. A stroke, as far as anyone knew. I was sad, but I didn't think anything of it. Fanie always drank a lot, and I'd heard he got fat. I figured he'd had a pretty good innings.
"Next Komo Melani died, also a stroke. Then Sakata went—fell down the stairs of her house outside Niigata. It felt a little like a curse, losing three old comrades in a matter of months, but I had no reason to be suspicious. But Sakata had a gardener who took care of her property, and he swore that he saw two men dressed in dark clothes drive out of her front gate somewhere around the time she must have died, so all of a sudden it didn't look quite so much like an old gear consultant having a simple accident. As far as I know, the Japanese authorities still haven't closed her case.
"Rilton died a month later. Keeled over in the London Underground. Heart failure. They had a memorial for him here at Founder's Hill. But I was beginning to wonder. Vijay Misra called me—he'd been wondering too, but unlike me, he'd put two and two together and come up with a nice round number. See, some of the people like Dierstroop I'd known for so long, I'd forgotten that there was only one time when all of us—me and Misra and the four people who'd just died—had worked together. There'd been others working there, too, but we six had been the last ones alive. And as Misra and I talked, we realized that we were the only two left. It wasn't a good feeling."
Renie was leaning forward. "Left from what?"
"I'm getting there, girl!"
"Don't shout at me!" Renie was in danger of losing her composure. "Look, I've been kicked out of my job, but I'm still using the school's equipment. Someone could call the police on me at any moment for God's sake. Everywhere I go for information, I get a song and dance and a lot of mystery."
Through the machineries of virtuality, she felt !Xabbu touch her arm, a homely reminder to stay calm.
"Well," Singh said, cheerful again, "beggars can't be choosers, girlie."
"Is this place secure?" Martine asked suddenly.
"Like a soundproof bunker in the middle of the Sahara." Singh laughed, revealing a gap in his teeth. "I should know—I wrote the security gear for this whole place. Even if there was a data-tap on one of your lines, I'd know it" He laughed again, a quite self-satisfied wheeze. "Now, you ask me to get on with it—let me get on with it. Misra was a security specialist, too . . . but it didn't do him any good. They got him as well. Suicide—a massive overdose of his anti-epilepsy medication. But I had just talked to him two nights before and he wasn't depressed, wasn't in the least suicidal. Frightened, yes—we had realized that the odds against us were getting worse and worse. So when he died, I knew for sure. They were killing off everyone that knew anything about Otherland."
"Otherland?" For the first time since Renie had met her—if that was the proper word—Martine sounded truly startled. "What does this have to do with the Otherland?"
A squirming chill traveled Renie's spine. "Why? What is it?"
The old man bobbed his head, pleased. "Ah, now you're interested! Now you want to listen!"
"We have been listening, Mister Singh—listening very carefully." !Xabbu spoke quietly, but with unusual force.
"Slow down," Renie demanded. "What is this Otherland thing? It sounds like an amusement park."
The painting rotated, the Mona Lisa's pale face swiveling toward her. "It is, of a sort—or so the rumors say. Otherland is even less known than TreeHouse. It seems to be some kind of playground for the rich, a large-scale simulation. That is all I have heard. It is privately owned and kept very quiet, so there is little information available." She leaned back toward Singh. "Please continue."
He nodded as though receiving his due. "We were contracted through Telemorphix South Africa. I was working for them then—this was nearly thirty years ago. Dierstroop actually managed the project, but he let me choose the people, which is why Melani and the others were involved. We put together a security installation for what I thought was some kind of business network—hush-hush, all very top secret, money no obstacle. Some huge corporate customer, that's all we knew. It was only as we worked at it that we found out it was actually a VR node, or rather a string of VR nodes on parallel supercomputers, the biggest, most high-speed VR net anyone had ever seen. The consortium that owned it was called TGB. That's all we knew about them. They were TGB, we were TMX." He barked a laugh. "Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy. It is now, anyway, I wish it had been then.
"Anyway, the TGB people—or at least some of their engineers—occasionally referred to this new network as the 'Otherland.' Like 'motherland' without an 'm.' I think it was a joke, but I never saw the point. Melani and I and some of the others used to try to guess what it was going to be used for—we figured it was meant to be some kind of huge VR theme park, an online version of that Disney monstrosity getting bigger every day over in Baja California, but it seemed pretty high-powered even for that. Dierstroop kept telling us we were wasting our time, that we should just shut up and collect our—admittedly—substantial paychecks. But there was something really weird about the whole project, and when a decade or so had gone by after we'd finished and there still hadn't been any announcement about it, we all pretty much admitted to ourselves that it wasn't a commercial property. I figured it was some kind of government thing—Telemorphix has always been really friendly with governments, especially the American one, of course. Wells has always known which side of his bread was buttered."
"So what was it, then?" Renie asked. "And why would someone kill your friends to keep it secret? And, more importantly to me, what does this have to do with my little brother? Susan Van Bleeck talked to you, Mister Singh—what did she say?"
"I'm almost there. Hang on for a moment" The old man reached out for nothing visible. A moment later a cup appeared in his hand. He took a long, shaky drink. "The whole room's not live," he explained, "just me. That's better." He smacked his lips. "Okay, now we come to your part of things.
"Susan had some luck researching that weird city of yours. The buildings had some odd little Aztec-type elements, according to this architecture gear she used on it—tiny details, things only an expert system would notice. So she started running searches on people who knew about such things, hoping to find someone who could maybe help her place your city."
"So why did she contact you?"
"She didn't, not until she'd run across a name in her list of experts that she remembered me mentioning to her. So she called me up. Startled the hell out of me. I recognized the bastard's name that she'd turned up, all right. He was one of the TGB muckamucks. We had to answer to him when we were doing the security for this Otherland thing of ours. Bolivar Atasco."
"Atasco?" Renie shook her head in befuddlement. "I thought he was an archaeologist"
"Whatever else he does, he was top man on the Otherland project," Singh growled. "I flipped out, of course. Because by now, I was the last one left, and I knew something was going on. I told Susan to get the hell away from it. I wish . . . I wish she'd called me sooner." For a moment, his stiff facade threatened to fall away. He fought for composure. "Those shits got her the same night. Probably within a few hours of her being on the phone with me."
"Oh, God. That's why she made that note and hid it," Renie said. "But why the book? Why not just his name?"
"What book?" asked Singh, nettled at losing the spotlight.
"A book on . . . Central American cultures. Something like that. Written by this Atasco. Martine and I both looked it over, and we couldn't make anything of it."
A window flashed open next to Martine. "This is it. But as Renie sa
id, we have examined it carefully."
The old man squinted at the window. "Early Mesoamerica. Yeah, I remember he'd written some famous textbook. But that was a long time ago—maybe you have the wrong edition." He scrolled the book. "There's no author picture in this version, for one thing. If you want to get a look at this bastard, you ought to find an older printing of the book."
The window closed. "I will see what I can discover," Martine said.
"So, what do we know, exactly?" Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the dingy room and pull together the tangled threads of information. "Atasco headed up this Otherland project, and you think that the people who worked on it with you have been murdered?"
Singh grinned acidly. "I don't think, girlie, I know."
"But what does that . . . that city have to do with anything—the image someone planted in my computer? And why would these people have anything to do with my brother? I don't get it!"
Another window popped open in the middle of the room.
"You are right, Mister Singh," Martine said. "The earlier edition does have a photo of the author."
The entire contents of the book scrolled past in a waterfall of gray, then Renie was staring at a picture of Bolivar Atasco, a handsome, narrow-faced man on the far side of middle-age. He was sitting in a room full of leafy plants and old statues. Behind him, in a frame on the wall, was. . . .
"Oh, my God." Renie reached out a sim hand as though she could touch it. The picture behind him had none of the vibrancy of the original—it was only a sketch, a watercolor like an architect's rendering—but it was beyond any doubt the city, the impossible, surrealistic golden city. Beside her, !Xabbu made a clicking noise of surprise. "Oh, my God," she said again.
"I'm fine, !Xabbu. I just felt a little faint. This is a lot to take in." She waved her friend away. He retreated with a cartoonish worried look on his sim face.
"After your recent illness, I am concerned for you," he said.