City of Golden Shadow

  "Torture?" Renie knew she should keep quiet, but months of frustration and rage could not be ignored; she felt hardened and sharpened like a knife blade. "Firebombing people's apartments and putting children into comas and beating old women to death not satisfying enough?"

  "Renie. . . ." Martine began again, but was interrupted by Atasco's angry shout.

  "Enough!" His eyes had narrowed to slits. "Are you a madwoman? Who are you to come into my world and make such accusations?" He turned to Martine. "Are you her caretaker? If so, you have failed. The monkey has better manners."

  "The monkey is perhaps more patient," Martine said quietly. "Renie, !Xabbu, I think we may have made a mistake."

  "A mistake?" Renie was astonished. Perhaps Martine had developed some kind of amnesia because of her traumatic entry into this simworld, but she herself remembered Atasco's name only too well. In any case, she had only to look at the arrogant, aristocratic face that he had chosen to know everything about him. "I don't think there's any mistake except him thinking that we'll be polite about this."

  !Xabbu clambered up onto one of the chairs, and from there onto the surface of the vast table. "A question, Mister Atasco. Why did you bring us here?"

  He took in the talking monkey without comment. "I did not bring you here. You brought yourselves here, I would assume."

  "But why?" !Xabbu persisted. "You are the ruler of this fantastical place. Why are you spending time speaking to us? What do you think that we want?"

  Atasco raised an eyebrow. "You have been summoned here. I have let the person who summoned you use my city, my palace, for the sake of convenience—well, and because I share some of his fears." He shook his head as though it were all quite obvious; his high, feathered crown swayed. "Why am I speaking to you? You are guests. It is courtesy, of course—something you seem able to do without."

  "Are you saying. . . ." Renie had to stop for a moment to figure out just what he was saying. "Are you saying that you haven't brought us here to hurt us or threaten us? That you don't have anything to do with my brother being in a coma? With the people who killed Doctor Susan Van Bleeck?"

  Atasco stared at her for a long moment The handsome face was still imperially condescending, but she could sense a certain hesitation. "If the terrible acts you describe can be laid at the doorstep of the Grail Brotherhood, then I am not entirely without blame," he said at last. "It is because I fear I may have unwittingly contributed to that evil that I have made my beloved Temilún available as a gathering place. But I am not personally responsible for the things you suggest, for the love of God, no." He turned to look across the broad room. "Lord, these are odd times. Few strangers ever come here, and now there will be many. But, this is a time of change, I suppose." He turned back. "Do you know what tomorrow is? Four Movement. We inherited our dates from the Aztecs, you see. But that is a very significant day, the end of the Fifth Sun—the end of an age. Most of my people have forgotten the old superstitions, but of course that's because it's been a thousand years in their time."

  Is he crazy? Renie wondered. I'm talking about people killed and crippled, he's talking about Aztec calendars.

  "But you said we were 'summoned.' " !Xabbu spread his long arms. "Please, summoned by whom?"

  "You must wait for the others. I am the host, but I am not the one who has chosen you."

  Renie felt as though the world had abruptly reversed its spin. Were they just going to take this man's word for it that he was somehow on their side? If that were true, why all this vagueness? She picked at the knot, but could see no immediate solution. "So that's all you can tell us, even though you're the big chief around here?" she asked at last, earning a reproachful stare from !Xabbu.

  Atasco had not conquered his initial dislike, but he made an effort to answer her civilly. "The one who called you has labored long and with great subtlety—even I do not know everything he has done or thought."

  Renie frowned. She was not going to be able to make herself like the man, that seemed certain—he reminded her of some of the worst South African whites, the rich ones, subtle, secretive heirs of the ancien régime who never had to assert their superiority because they just assumed it was obvious—but she had to admit to herself that she might have misjudged him.

  "Okay. If I've been too quick to accuse, I apologize," she said. "Please understand, after the attacks we've survived, and then to find ourselves in this place, manhandled by police. . . ."

  "Manhandled? Is this true?"

  She shrugged. "Not violently. But they certainly didn't make us think we were honored guests either."

  "I will pass them a word. Gently, of course—they must have autonomy. If the God-King speaks too harshly, the whole system becomes perturbed."

  Martine had been looking as though she wished to speak for some time. "You have . . . built this place, no? It is yours?"

  "Grown it would perhaps be closer to the mark." His chilly expression softened. "You came in by bus, I understand. That is too bad—you did not see the splendid canals or the harbor. Would you like me to tell you something about Temilún?"

  "Yes, very much," Martine said hurriedly. "But first something else. I am having trouble filtering my input—the raw data is very strong. Could you . . . is there a way you could adjust it? I am afraid it is rather too much for me."

  "I should think so." He paused, but it was more than a pause; his body simply froze in place, with none of the small signs that a living but still human body shows. !Xabbu looked at Renie, who shrugged: she did not know what Atasco was doing, and wasn't quite sure what Martine was talking about either. Then, with no warning, Atasco's sim was alive again.

  "It can be done, I believe," he said, "but not easily. You are receiving the same quantity of information as the others, and since you are all on the same line, I cannot change yours without lowering their input as well." He paused, then shook his head. "We must find some way to bring you back on a different line. You should not do it, though, until you have spoken to Sellars. I do not know what he plans for you, and you might not be able to enter the network again in time."

  "Sellars?" Renie tried to keep her voice calm; this man obviously preferred his conversations politely formal. "Is he the one who . . . summoned us, as you said?"

  "Yes. You will meet him soon. When the others arrive."

  "Others? What. . . ?"

  Martine cut her off. "I will not enter the network again. Not if it means I must pass through the security system."

  Atasco inclined his head. "I could bring you in as my guest, of course—I could have brought you all in as my guests, and offered to do so—but Sellars was violently opposed to anything like that; it was something about the security system. You must speak to him about it, since I do not quite understand."

  "What was that thing?" Renie asked. "That so-called security system killed our friend."

  For the first time, Atasco seemed truly shocked. "What? What do you mean?"

  Renie, with interpolations from !Xabbu and Martine, told him what had happened. By the time she was finished, Atasco had begun to pace. "This is dreadful. Are you sure? Could he not simply have had an attack of the heart?" Under stress his English was a little more heavily accented, a little less precise.

  "It had us all," Renie said evenly. "Singh said that it was alive, and I don't know how else you could describe it. What is it?"

  "It is the neural network—the thing that underlies the Grail network system. It was grown as the simulations were grown, I believe. I do not know much about it—that was not my role. But it was not meant to . . . that is terrible. If what you say is true, then Sellars is not a moment too soon! My God! Terrible, terrible." Atasco had stopped pacing, and now looked agitatedly around him. "You must hear what he says. I will only confuse things. It seems he is right, though—we have lived in our own isolated world too long."

  "Tell us about this place you have . . . grown," said Martine.

  Renie was irritated. She wanted to hear more about th
is mysterious Sellars, about the thing that !Xabbu had named the All-Devourer, but it seemed Martine preferred a hobby lecture from a rich crank. She looked to !Xabbu for support, but he was giving Atasco a soulful and attentive look, particularly galling on the face of a baboon. She made a quiet noise of disgust.

  "Temilún?" Their host brightened a little. "Of course. You came from Aracataca, no? Down from the forests. What did you think of the people you saw? Were they happy? Well-fed?"

  Renie shrugged. "Yes. Seemed to be."

  "And not a word of Spanish. No priests—well, a few these days from overseas, but they have trouble finding people to come to their strange and unfamiliar churches. But no Catholicism to speak of. And all because of horses."

  Renie looked at !Xabbu, who also looked confused. "Horses?" she asked.

  "Oh, it is most elementary, my dear . . . what is your name?"

  Renie hesitated. In for a penny, in for a pound, she decided. If he's faking this whole thing, these people are even farther out of our league than we guessed. And if the Grail Brotherhood could burn down her flatblock and freeze Jeremiah's credcards, her name wouldn't be news to anyone. "Irene Sulaweyo. Renie."

  ". . . Elementary, my dear Irene." Warming to what was obviously a favorite subject, Atasco seemed to have totally forgotten his earlier antipathy. "Horses. The one thing the Americas lacked. You see, the ancestral horse died out here—well, in the 'here' that is my real-life home, but not in the world of Temilún. When the great empires of the Americas arose in the real world—the Toltec, Aztec, Mayan, Inca, our own Muisca—they had several handicaps the civilizations of the Tigris Valley or the Mediterranean did not have—slower communications, no large wagons or sledges since there were no animals capable of hauling them, less need for broad flat roads, hence less pressure to develop the wheel, and so on." He began pacing again, but this time with an air of happy energy. "In the real world, the Spanish came to the Americas and discovered them ripe for plucking. Only a few hundred men with guns and horses subjugated two continents. Think of that! So I built America again. But this time the horse did not die out." He took off his feathered crown and set it on the table. "Everything was different here. In my invented world, Aztecs and others developed much broader empires and, after receiving trading visits from ancient Phoenicia, began reaching out down the sea-roads to other civilizations. When gunpowder came from Asia into Western Europe and the Middle East, the boats of the Tintoani—the Aztec emperor, if you will—brought it back to the Americas as well."

  "But . . . these people have cellular phones!" Against her better judgment, Renie found herself drawn into Atasco's fantasy. "How many years old is this civilization?"

  "This simulation is now only a little behind the real world. If there were an actual Europe on the far side of the ocean outside this palace, it would be experiencing the early part of the twenty-first century. But Christ and the western calendar never came here, so even though the Aztec Empire fell long ago, we still call this day Four Movement, the Fifth Sun." He smiled with childlike pleasure.

  "But that's what I don't understand. How could you have started back in the Ice Age or whatever and now be in the present day? Are you trying to tell me you've been watching this thing for like ten thousand years?"

  "Ah, I see. Yes, I have." Another self-satisfied smile. "But not all at regular speed. There is a macro level where the centuries hurry past and I can only gather data in large, general clumps, but when I wish to really understand something, I can slow the simulation down to normal speed, or even stop it."

  "You play God, in other words."

  "But how could you create every one of these people?" !Xabbu asked. "Surely each one would take a long time." He sounded quite convincingly interested; Renie at first thought he might be trying to prevent her from further antagonizing their host, but then she remembered the Bushman's own cherished goal.

  "You do not create separate individuals in a system like this," said Temilún's God-King. "Not one at a time, anyway. This simulation—and all the others in this entire network—are grown. The units of life begin as simple automata, organisms with very basic rules, but the more they are allowed to interact, adapt, and evolve, the more complex they become." His gesture encompassed himself and the other three. "As is true with Life itself. But when our automata get to a certain level of complexity, we can, as it were, file off the rough edges and have a sort of fractal seed for an artificial plant or animal—or even a human being—which will then grow as its own individual genetics and environment dictate."

  "That's pretty much what they do already on the net," said Renie. "All the big VR setups are based on data ecologies, one way or another.

  "Yes, but they do not have the power that we have." He shook his head emphatically. "They do not have the potential for complexity, for sophisticated individuality. But you know this now, do you not? You have seen Temilún. Is it not as true, as authentic in its variety as any place you have visited in the real world? You cannot accomplish that on the net, no matter how much money and effort you put in. The platform will not support it."

  "Yeah, but the security systems on the net don't kill people either."

  Atasco's high-boned face flushed with fury, but it lasted for only a moment, then a more doleful expression took its place. "I cannot defend it. I have spent so long watching the results, I fear I may have overlooked the price being paid."

  "But what is this place, really? Is it an art project, a science experiment—what?"

  "All of those things, I suppose. . . ." Atasco broke off, staring over their shoulders. "Excuse me for a moment."

  He walked past them around the table. The great doors at the chamber's far end had opened and the guards were ushering through three more people. Two of them wore female bodies similar to Martine's, dark-complected and black-haired like Temilún's native inhabitants. The other was a very tall figure dressed from head to foot in extravagant, showy black, feathers, ruffles, and long pointed boots gave this newcomer the silhouette of some ancient court dandy; a skull-tight black leather hood covered all the stranger's head but for a bone white, sexually ambiguous face with blood-red lips.

  Looks like someone out of some horrible Ganga Drone band, Renie decided.

  Atasco greeted the new arrivals. Before he had finished, the apparition in black ostentatiously detached itself from the rest and sauntered to the room's far wall to examine the murals. Atasco showed the other two to chairs and returned to Renie and her friends.

  "Temilún is both science and art, I suppose," he continued as though the interruption had not happened. "It is my life's work. I have always wondered what my native land would have been like if the Spaniards had not conquered it. When I realized that for money, mere money, I could discover the answer, I did not hesitate. I have no children. My wife lives for the same dream. Have you met her?"

  Renie shook her head, trying to keep up with him. "Your wife? No."

  "She is around here somewhere. She is the genius with numbers. I can perceive a pattern, guess at an explanation, but she is the one who will tell me the hard facts, how many bushels of rice have been sold in the Temilún market, or what effect the drought is having on population emigration to the countryside."

  Renie wanted to go and talk to the other guests—if "guests" was the right word—but she had belatedly realized that she could also learn things from Atasco, for all his eccentricity. "So you've made an entire world? I wouldn't think there were enough processors in the universe to do that, no matter what kind of fancy new network architecture you had."

  He raised his hand, graciously condescending to point out what should have been obvious. "I have not created the entire world. Rather, what exists here," he spread his arms, "is the center of a greater world that exists only as data. The Aztecs, the Toltecs, they were only information that influenced Temilún in its growth, although for a while there were real Aztec overlords here." He shook his head in fond remembrance. "Even the Muiscas, who built this city during the
height of their empire, largely existed outside the boundaries of the simulation—their capital and greatest city was at Bogota, just as in the real world." He seemed to interpret Renie's look of general confusion as something specific. "The Muiscas? You may know them as the Chibchas, but that is the name of the language group rather than the people. No?" He sighed, a potter forced to work with faulty clay. "In any case, there are less than two million humanoid instruments in the simulation, and the rest of the world in which Temilún exists is only an extremely complicated system of algorithms without telemorphic representation." He frowned slightly. "You said you came from Aracataca, did you not? That, you see, is very close to the northern border of the world, as one might say. Not that you would see the edge of the simulation—it is not so primitive! You would see the water, of course, and some illusion of country beyond."

  "So all this network—this Otherland—is made up of such places?" Martine asked. "The dreams and conceits of wealthy men?"

  Atasco did not appear to take offense. "I suppose, although I have not traveled outside my own domain often—not surprising when you consider how much of my blood and sweat I have put into this place. Some of the other domains are . . . well, I find them personally offensive, but as our homes should be bastions of privacy, so should our worlds. I would be very displeased if someone came here to tell me how to manage Temilún."

  Renie was watching the stranger in black, who was very pointedly not paying attention to anyone else. Was this someone who had been summoned as she had? Why? What was the point of people being gathered in the irritatingly self-centered Atasco's virtual kingdom? And who in hell was Sellars?

  Renie's pondering was interrupted by the doors thumping open to admit several more people. One appeared to be under police restraint, for a caped guard stood on either side of him, but after a moment Renie saw that they were helping him to walk. He was tipped into a chair where he slumped like a sick child, odd because he wore the impossibly well-muscled body of an Olympic gymnast. A smaller friend huddled beside him, offering what looked like words of encouragement. These two, and a third who wore a shiny, robotic body, remained when the guards left. Bolivar Atasco left again to greet these latest arrivals.