Something like what? Do they try to sell you memberships to religious nodes? How bad could they be?
Orlando was having trouble keeping his mind on the simulation. He kept thinking of Fredericks—no, he realized, not about Fredericks so much as the gap where Fredericks used to be. He had thought once that it was strange to have a friend you'll never met. Now it was even stranger, losing a friend you'd never really had.
Olekov crawls toward you down the length of the trend. Her right arm is mostly gone; there is a raw-looking blister of heavy plastic just above her elbow where the suit has sealed off at the wound site. Through the viewplate, Olekov's face'd shockingly white. You cannot help remembering that planetfal on Dekkamer One. That had been a good time, you and Olekov and ten days' leave.
The memory rises up before you, Olekov as she emerged from a mountain lake, dripping, naked, her pale breasts like snowdrifts. You made love for hours with only the trees as witnesses, urging each other on, knowing that your time was short, that there might never be a day like this again. . . .
"Pun-yi . . . they got him," she moans. The terror in her voice snaps you back to the present. The atmosphere distortion is so great that even this close, you can barely hear her voice for the noise on the channel. "Horrible. . . !"
Dekkamer One is light-years away, forever lost. There is no time to help her, or even to humor her. "Can you shoot? Do you have any charge left in your gauntlet?"
"They took him!" she screams, furious at your seeming indifference. There is something irreparably broken in her voice. "They captured him—they've taken him down into their nest They were . . . they were putting something through his . . . his eyes . . . as they dragged him away. . . ."
You shudder. At the end, you'll save the last charge of the gauntlet for yourself. You've heard rumors of what these creatures do to their prey. You will not allow that to happen to you.
Olekov has slumped to the ground, her shivers rapidly becoming convulsive. Blood is dripping back from her injured arm into her helmet—the seals are not working properly. You pause, unsure of what to do, then your suit sensors begin to shrill again. You look up to see a dozen many-jointed shapes, each the size of a small horse, skittering toward you across the smoking, debris-strewn planetary surface. Olekov's sobbing has become a dying person's hitch and wheeze. . . .
"Boss! Hey, boss! Let those poor imitations alone. I gotta talk to you."
"Damn it, Beezle, I hate it when you do that. It was just starting to get good." And God knew, distraction had been hard enough to come by during the last week. He looked round at his 'cot with irritation. Even without the trophies it still looked pretty dismal. The decor definitely needed to be changed.
"Sorry, but you told me you wanted to know if you had a contact from that Wicked Tribe group."
"They're on the line?"
"No. But they just sent you a message. You want to see?"
Orlando suppressed his irritation. "Yes, damn it. Play it."
A congregation of yellow squiggles appeared in the middle of the room. Orlando frowned and brought up the magnification. At the point where he could see the figures clearly, they had very poor resolution; either way, squinting at the fuzzy forms made his eyes hurt.
The monkeys hovered in a small orbital cloud. As one of them spoke, the others went on smacking each other and flying in tight circles. "Wicked Tribe . . . will meet you," said the foreground simian, melodramatic presentation belied by the pushing and shoving in the background. The spokesmonkey wore the same cartoonish grin as all the others, and Orlando could not tell whether the voice was one he'd heard before or not."Wicked Tribe will meet you in Special Secret Tribe Club Bunker in TreeHouse." A time and node address flashed up, full of childish misprintings. The message ended.
Orlando frowned. "Send a return message, Beezle. Tell them I can't get into TreeHouse, so they either have to get me in or else meet me here in the Inner District."
"Got it, boss."
Orlando sat himself in midair and looked at the MBC window. The little digging-drones were still hard at work, pursuing their goals with mindless application. Orlando felt strange. He should have been excited, or at least satisfied: he had opened up a connection back into TreeHouse. But instead he felt depressed.
They're little kids, he thought. Just micros. And I'm going to trick them into doing . . . what? Breaking the law? Helping me hack into something? And what if I'm right, and there are big-time people involved in this? Then what am I getting them into? And for what?
For a picture—an image. For something he had seen for just a few moments and which might mean anything . . . or absolutely nothing.
But it's all I've got left.
It was a closet. He could tell that by the slightly musty scent of clothing, and the faint, skeletal lines of coat hangers revealed by the light seeping in from the crack beneath the door. He was in a closet, and someone outside was looking for him.
Long ago, when his parents still had visitors, his cousins had once come for Christmas. His problem had been less obvious then, and although they asked him more questions about his illness than he would have liked, in a strange way he had been pleased to be the center of attention, and had enjoyed their visit. They had taught him lots of games, the sort that solitary children like himself usually only played in VR. One of them was hide-and-go-seek.
It had made an incalculable impression on him, the feverish excitement of hiding, the waiting in the dark, breathless, while "it" hunted for him. On the third or fourth game he had found a place in the closet off his parents' bathroom—cleverly deceptive, because he had to remove and hide one of the shelves to fit into it—and had remained there, undiscovered, until the "Olly Olly Oxen Free" had been called. That triumphant moment, hearing the surrender of his distant enemy, was one of the few purely happy memories of his life.
So why then, as he crouched in the darkness while something fumblingly investigated the room outside, was he now so terrified? Why was his heart pattering like a jacklighted deer's? Why did his skin feel like it was trying to slide all the way around to the back of his body? The thing outside, whatever it was—for some reason he could not imagine it as a person, but only as a faceless, shapeless presence—surely did not know where he was. Otherwise, why would it not simply pull open the closet door? Unless it did know, and was enjoying the game, reveling in its power and his helplessness.
It was a thing, he realized. That was what terrified him so. It wasn't one of his cousins, or his father, or even some baroque monster from the Middle Country. It was a thing. An it.
His lungs hurt. He had been holding his breath without realizing it. Now he wanted nothing more than to gasp in a great swallow of fresh air, but he did not dare make a noise. There was a scraping outside, then silence. Where was it now? Standing just on the other side of the closet door, listening? Waiting for that one telltale noise?
And most frightening of all, he realized, was that other than the thing outside, there was no one else in the house. He was alone with the thing that was just now pulling the closet door open. Alone.
In the dark, holding a scream clenched tight in his throat, he closed his eyes and prayed for the game to end. . . .
"I brought you some painkillers, boss. You were jerking around a lot in your sleep."
Orlando was having trouble getting his breath. His lungs seemed too shallow, and when he did manage at last to draw deeply, a wet cough rattled his bones. He sat up, accidentally dislodging Beezle's robot body which rolled helplessly down onto the bedcovers, then struggled to right itself.
"I'm . . . it was just a bad dream." He sat up and looked around, but his bedroom didn't even have a closet, not that old-fashioned kind anyway. It had been a dream, just the kind of stupid nightmare he had on bad nights. But there had been something important about it, something more important even than the fear.
Beezle, now set on rubber-tipped legs once more, began to crawl away down the quilt, back toward its nourishing wall socket.
"Wait." Orlando lowered his voice to a whisper. "I . . . I think I need to make a call."
"Just let me lose the legs, boss." Beezle clambered awkwardly down the bed frame, heading for the floor, "I'll meet you online."
The doors of the Last Chance Saloon swung open. An ax-murderer politely dragged his victim to one side before returning to active dismemberment. The figure that stepped over the spreading puddle of blood had the familiar broad shoulders and thick, weight-lifter's neck. Fredericks also had what seemed to be a certain wariness on his sim face as he sat down.
He? Orlando felt a kind of despair. She?
"I got your message."
Orlando shook his head. "I . . . I just didn't want to. . . ." He took a breath and started again. "I don't know. I'm pretty scorched, but mostly in a weird way. Know what I mean?"
Fredericks nodded slowly. "Yeah. I guess."
"So—so what do I call you?"
"Fredericks. That was a tough one, huh?" A smile briefly touched the broad face.
"Yeah, but I mean . . . you're a girl. But I think of you as a guy."
"That's okay. I think of myself as a guy, too. When I'm stringing around with you."
Orlando sat quiet for a moment, sensing that this particular unexplored country might be treacherous. "You mean you're a transsexual?"
"No." His friend shrugged. "I just . . . well, sometimes I get bored being a girl. So when I first started going on the net, sometimes I was a boy, that's all. Nothing unusual, really." Fredericks did not sound quite as certain as he or she might have liked. "But it's kind of awkward when you get to be friends with someone."
"I noticed." He said it with his best Johnny Icepick sneer. "So do you like boys, or are you gay, or what?"
Fredericks made a noise of disgust. "I like boys fine. I have lots of friends who are boys. I have lots of friends who are girls, too. Shit, Gardiner, you're as bad as my parents. They think I have to make all these life decisions just because I'm growing breasts."
For a moment Orlando felt the world totter. The concept of Fredericks with breasts was more than he was able to deal with at the moment.
"So . . . so that's it? You're just going to be a guy? I mean, when you're online?"
Fredericks nodded again. "I guess. It wasn't a total lie, Orlando. When I'm hanging around with you . . . well, I feel like a guy."
Orlando snorted. "How would you know?"
Fredericks looked hurt, then angry. "I get stupid and I act like the whole world revolves around me. That's how."
Against his better judgment, Orlando laughed. "So what are we supposed to do? Just keep on being guys together?"
"I guess so." Fredericks shrugged. "If you can handle it."
Orlando felt his anger soften a little. There were certainly important things he hadn't told Fredericks, so it was hard to sustain much self-righteousness. But it was still difficult to wrap his mind around the idea.
"Well," he said at last, "I guess. . . ." He couldn't think of any way to end the sentence that wouldn't sound like a bad netflick. He settled for: "I guess it's okay, then." It was an incredibly stupid thing to say, and he wasn't sure it was okay, but he left it at that for now. "Anyway, this all started because I was trying to find you. Where have you been? Why didn't you answer my messages?"
Fredericks eyed him, perhaps trying to decide if they had found a kind of equilibrium again. "I . . . I was scared, Gardiner. And if you think it's because I'm really a girl or some fenfen like that, I'm gonna kill you."
"Scared of what happened in TreeHouse?"
"Of everything. You've been weird ever since you saw that city, and it just keeps getting more and more scanny. What's next, we try to overthrow the government or something? We wind up in the Execution Chamber for the cause of Orlando Gardinerism? I just don't want to get into any more trouble."
"Trouble? What trouble? We got chased out of TreeHouse by a bunch of old akisushi."
Fredericks shook his head. "It's more than that and you know it. What's going on, Gardiner? What is it about this city that's got you so . . . so obsessed?"
Orlando weighed the choices. Did he owe something to Fredericks, some kind of honesty? But his friend had not told him anything of his own secret voluntarily—it had been Orlando who had ferreted out the truth.
"I can't explain. Not now. But it's important—I just know it is. And I think I've found a way to get us back into TreeHouse."
"What?" Fredericks shouted. The other patrons of the Last Chance Saloon, used to death rattles and agonized shrieks, did not even turn to look, "Go back? Are you scanning to the uttermost degree?"
"Maybe." He was finding it hard to get his breath again. He turned down the volume for another body-shaking cough. "Maybe," he repeated when he could speak again. "But I need you to come with me. You're my friend, Fredericks, whatever you are. In fact, I'll tell you one secret, anyway—you're not just my best friend, you're my only friend,"
Fredericks brought hands to face, as though to block out the sight of a world in pain. When he spoke, it was with doomful resignation. "Oh, Gardiner, you bastard. That's really unfair."
CHAPTER 29
Tomb of Glass
NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: Blackness Wins Palme D'Or
(visual: Ostrand accepting prize)
VO: Pikke Ostrand seemed unsurprised at winning the grand prize at this year's Nîmes Film Festival, although most of the other insiders on the beaches and in the bars were stunned. Ms. Ostrand's four-hour film, Blackness, which except for low-light effects and subliminal sonics contains nothing but the blackness of the title, was considered too miserabilist to please the usually conservative judges.
(visual: Ostrand at press conference)
OSTRAND: "It is what it is. If you tell some people about smoke, they want to see the fire, too."
One moment there was only the light of the fire !Xabbu had built, a soft red glow which left the corners and high places of the lab their mysteries. Then, following a series of clicks, the overhead fixtures sprang back on, washing white brilliance into every cranny.
"You did it, Martine!" Renie clapped her hands. "Every Pinetown resident's dream—free electricity!"
"I can't take all the credit." The humble deity's voice now echoed from the built-in wallspeakers, filling the room. "I could not have done it without Mister Singh. I had to get past some very formidable power company security before I could redistribute the electricity usage information to hide the trail."
"That's all very nice, but can I go now and do some goddamn work?" Singh sounded genuinely irritated. "This entire folly presupposes me being able to get through Otherland's defenses in the next few days, so if I don't manage to crack that, all this means is that you've found yourselves some really ugly-looking bathtubs."
"Of course," said Renie quickly. She definitely wanted and needed to stay on the old man's good side. She thanked him and Martine again, then let them disconnect.
"You can close the outside door and take the jack out of the Carphone," she announced to Jeremiah, who had been waiting on the now-functional phone at the entrance. "We have electricity and datalines now, and they should both be untraceable."
"I'm doing it, Renie." Even through the small pad speaker, she could hear the outside door beginning to grind down. A moment later he came back on. "I don't like seeing that door close. I feel like I'm being locked in the tomb."
"Not a tomb at all," she said, ignoring her own quite similar impressions. "Unless it's Lazarus' tomb you're talking about. Because this is where we're finally going to start fighting back. Come downstairs. We've still got a lot of work to do." She looked up to see her father watching her. She thought he looked scornful "Well, we are going to fight back. And we're going to see Stephen back among the living again, Papa. So don't give me that look."
"What look? God help me, girl, I don't know what you talking about sometimes."
As soon as the lights had come back on, !Xabbu had put out the fire. Now, as he stirred the
last few embers with a stick, he turned to Renie. "There have been many things happening," he said. "Happening very fast. Perhaps we should sit and talk, all of us, about what we will do next."
Renie considered, then nodded. "But not now. I'm really anxious to get these V-tanks checked out. Can we do it this evening, before bed?"
!Xabbu smiled. "If anyone is the elder upon whose wisdom we rely, Renie, here in this place it is you. This evening would be a good time, I think."
The preliminary news seemed to be better even than Renie had hoped. The V-tanks, although cumbersome compared to more recent interface devices, seemed to have the potential to do what she needed—allow her long-term access and much more sophisticated sensory input and output than anything she had used at the Poly. Only an actual implant would have been better in terms of responsiveness, but there were some advantages to the V-tanks that even an implant couldn't match: because they seemed to have been expressly developed for long-term use, the tanks were fitted out with feeding, hydration, and waste processing equipment, so that with only occasional assistance, the user could be almost completely independent.