City of Golden Shadow (102 page)

"Martine. . . ?" She hurried forward. The woman's eyes fluttered open, the pupils roving, unfixed,

". . . The way . . . blocked!" Martine, if this was her, lifted her hands as though to ward off some looming danger. The voice was not familiar, and there was no French accent, but the next words dispelled any doubt. "No, Singh, do not. . . . Ah, my God, how terrible!"

Renie's eyes stung with tears as she watched her companion thrashing on the bed, apparently still in the grip of the nightmare that had awaited them at Otherland's shadowy border. "Oh, Martine." She turned to the foreman, who was watching the reunion with grave self-satisfaction. "Where did you find her?"

Tok explained that a party of tree markers had discovered her wandering dazedly at the edge of the jungle a short distance from the camp. "The men are superstitious," he said. "They think her touched by the gods," again the reflexive gesture, "but I suspected it was hunger and cold and fear, perhaps even a blow on the head."

The foreman returned to his work, promising that they could have a ride back with the next convoy of logs, leaving at twilight. Renie, overwhelmed by events, neglected to ask where "back" might be. She and !Xabbu spent the dwindling afternoon sitting beside the bed, holding Martine's hands and speaking soft words to her when the nightmares seemed to pursue her too closely.

The foreman Tok helped Renie up into the back of the huge, gleaming, steam-powered truck. !Xabbu clambered up by himself and sat next to her atop the chained logs. Tok made her promise that she and her "mad Temilúni friends" would not wander around in the wild country any more. She did, and thanked him for his kindness as the convoy pulled out of the camp and onto the broad muddy road.

Renie could have ridden in one of the other truck cabs, but she wanted the privacy to talk to !Xabbu. Also, Martine was belted into the passenger seat of this truck-whose driver, Renie had noticed with interest, was a broad-faced, broad-shouldered woman-and Renie wanted to stay close to their ill companion.

". . . So that's not Martine's voice because she's delirious and she's speaking French, I suppose," she said as they bumped out of camp. "But why do you have your voice and I have mine? I mean, you sound like you, even though you look like something out of a zoo."

!Xabbu, who was standing upright, leaning into the wind and sniffing, did not answer.

"We must have all been piggybacked on Singh's index," she reasoned, "and that index was marked 'English-speaking.' Of course, that doesn't explain why I kept this body, but you got your second-choice sim." She looked down at her own copper-skinned hands. Just as !Xabbu had wound up with a good body for jungle wandering, she had chosen one that seemed physically very close to the local human norm. Of course, if they had landed in a Viking village or in World War Two Berlin, she wouldn't have fit in quite so well.

!Xabbu clambered down and crouched beside her again, his erect tail curved like a strung bow. "We have found Martine, but we still do not know what we are searching for," he said, "Or where we are going."

Renie looked out at the miles of thick green jungle lying behind them in the dying light, and the miles that the strip of red road still had to cross. "You had to remind me, didn't you?"

They drove through the night. The temperature was tropical, but Renie soon learned that virtual logs made no better a bed than real ones. What was particularly annoying was knowing that her real body was floating in a V-tank full of adjustable gel, which could have been made to simulate the softest goosedown, if she could only work the controls.

As the sun came up, ending a darkness that had brought Renie very little rest, the trucks reached a town. It was apparently the home of the sawmill and processing facilities, and something of a jungle metropolis; even at first light, there were scores of people on the muddy streets.

A handful of Landrover-like cars rolled past as they drove down the wide main thoroughfare, some clearly powered by steam, others more mysteriously. Renie also spotted more of the objects that looked like satellite dishes, which seemed restricted to the largest buildings, but in many other ways the town looked as though it might have been transplanted whole from the set of some saga of the American West. The wooden sidewalks were raised above the clinging muck, the long, town-bisecting main street seemed designed for gunfights, and there were as many horses as cars. A few men even seemed to be having an early-morning brawl outside one of the local taverns. These men, and the other people Renie could see, were better dressed than the jungle workers, but except for the fact that many wore shawls of brightly dyed, woven wool, she still could not put her finger on anything definitive in their clothing styles.

The trucks rattled through town and lined up on the vast mud flat outside the sawmill. The driver of Renie's truck got out and, with a certain taciturn courtesy, suggested she and her sick friend and their pet monkey might as well stop here. As she helped Renie unload the semiconscious Martine from the cab, the driver suggested they could find a bus in front of the town hall.

Renie was relieved to know there was somewhere else beyond this place. "A bus. That's wonderful. But we . . . I don't have any money."

The truck driver stared at her. "You need money for city buses now?" she said at last "By all the lords of heaven, what shit will the Council think of next? The God-King ought to execute them all and start over."

As the driver's surprise had suggested, the buses were apparently free. Renie, with surreptitious assistance from !Xabbu, was able to help Martine stumble the short distance to the town hall, where they took a seat on the steps to wait. The Frenchwoman still seemed to be caught in those terrible moments when they had broken into the Otherland system and everything had gone so badly wrong, but she was able to move around almost normally when prompted, and once or twice Renie even felt a returned pressure when she squeezed Martine's hand, as though something inside was struggling toward the surface.

I hope so, Renie thought. Without Singh, she's the only hope we've got of making any sense of this. She looked out at the utterly foreign yet utterly realistic surroundings and felt almost ill. Who am I kidding? Look at this place. Think of the sort of minds and money and facilities it took to make this-and we're going to put the ringleaders under citizen's arrest or something? This whole venture was ridiculous from the very beginning.

The sensation of helplessness was so powerful that Renie could not summon the will to speak. She, !Xabbu, and Martine sat on the steps in silence, an oddly assorted trio that received its due in the covert stares and whispers of the local populace.

Renie thought the jungle might be thinning a little, but she wasn't positive. After watching an uncountable number of trees go by, hour upon hour, she was seeing the monotonous landscape slide past even when she closed her eyes.

The gold-toothed, feather-medallion-bedecked bus driver had not batted an eye at her two unusual companions, but when Renie had asked him where the bus went-whatever information was printed over the windscreen was illegible to her, like the foreman's books-he had stared as though she had asked him to make the battered old vehicle fly.

"Temilún, good woman," he had said, lowering his chunky sunglasses to examine her more closely, perhaps thinking that someone might ask him later to describe the escaped madwoman. "The city of the God-King-praise to his name-the Lord of Life and Death, He Who Is Favored Above All Others. Where else would it go?" He gestured to the single straight road leading out of the sawmill town. "Where else could it go?"

Now, with !Xabbu standing in her lap, his hands pressed against the window, and Martine sleeping against her shoulder, Renie tried to make sense of all she had learned. The place seemed to have nineteenth and twentieth century technologies mixed up together, so far as she could remember the differences between the two. The people looked something like Asians or Middle Easterners, although she had seen a few in the town who had fairer or darker appearances. The foreman hadn't heard of English, so that might indicate a great distance from English-speaking peoples, or a world in which there was no English at all, or just that the foreman was ignorant. They seemed to have at least one well-established religion and a God-King-but was that a person or a figure of speech?-and the truck driver had made it sound as if there were some kind of governing council.

Renie sighed miserably. Not much to go on at all. They were wasting time, precious, precious time, but she couldn't think of a single thing they could do differently. Now they were headed to Temilún, which apparently was an even larger town. And if nothing there brought them closer to their goal, then what? On to the next? Was this foray, for which Singh had paid with his life, going to be just bus trip after bus trip, one long bad holiday?

!Xabbu turned from the window and put his head next to her ear. He had been quiet during the journey so far, since there were passengers crammed into every possible space on all the seats and in the aisles, half-a-dozen at least just within a meter radius of Renie's cramped seat. Many of these passengers were also transporting chickens or small animals Renie couldn't quite identify, which explained the bus driver's disinterest in !Xabbu, but none of these creatures showed any inclination to talk, which was why the baboon in Renie's lap now whispered very quietly.

"I have been thinking and thinking what we must look for," he said. "If we are seeking the people who own this Otherland network, then we first must discover something of who wields the power in this world."

"And how do we do that?" Renie murmured. "Go to a library? I suppose they must have them, but we'll probably have to find a pretty large town."

!Xabbu spoke a bit louder now, because a woman seated in front of them had begun singing, a wordless chant that reminded Renie a little of the tribal odes her father and his friends sometimes sang when the beer had been flowing freely. "Or perhaps we will have to befriend someone who can tell us what we need to know."

Renie looked around, but no one was paying attention to either of them. Beyond the windows, she could see cleared farming land and a few houses, and thought they must be drawing close to the next town. "But how can we trust anyone? I mean, any single person on this bus could be wired right into the operating system. They're not real, !Xabbu-most of them can't be, anyway."

His reply was interrupted by a pressure on her arm. Martine was leaning toward her, clutching as though to save herself from falling. Her sim's eyes still wandered, unfocused, but the face showed a new alertness.

"Martine? It's Renie. Can you hear me?"

"The . . . darkness. . . is very thick." She sounded like a lost child, but for the first time the voice was recognizably hers.

"You're safe," Renie whispered urgently. "We've come through. We're in the Otherland network."

The face turned, but the eyes did not make contact "Renie?"

"Yes, it's me. And !Xabbu's here, too. Did you understand what I just said? We've come through. We're in."

Martine's grip did not slacken, but the look of anxiety on her bony face softened. "So much," she said. "There is so much. . . ." She struggled to collect herself. "There has been much darkness."

!Xabbu was squeezing Renie's other arm. She was beginning to feel like the mother of too many children. "Can't you see us. Martine? Your eyes aren't focusing."

The woman's face went slack for a moment, as if she had been dealt an unexpected blow. "I . . . something has happened to me. I am not yet myself." She turned her face toward Renie. "Tell me, what has happened to Singh?"

"He's dead, Martine. Whatever that thing was, it got him. I . . . I swear I felt it kill him."

Martine shook her head miserably. "Me also. I had hoped I dreamed it."

!Xabbu was squeezing harder. Renie reached down to lift his hand away, but saw that he was staring out the window. "!Xabbu?"

"Look, Renie, look!" He did not whisper. A moment later, she, too, forgot her caution.

The bus had turned in a wide bend, and for the first time she could see a horizon beyond the trees. A flat band of silver lay along the distant skyline, a span of shimmering reflection which could only be water, a bay or an ocean by the size of it. But it was what lay before it, silhouetted against its metallic sheen in complicated arcs and needles, glittering in the afternoon sun like the largest amusement park that ever was, that had riveted the disguised Bushman and now brought Renie halfway out of her seat.

"Oh," she breathed. "Oh, look."

Martine stirred impatiently. "What is it?"

"It's the city. The golden city."

It took an hour to reach Temilún, crossing a great plain full of settlements-farming villages surrounded by fields of swaying grain at first, followed by thicker concentrations of suburban housing and ever-increasing modernity-shopping complexes and motorway overpasses and signs festooned with unreadable glyphs. And always the city grew larger on the horizon.

Renie made her way down the aisle toward the front of the bus so she could get a better look. She slid between a pair of pierce-lipped men who were joking with the driver, and hung swaying on the pole by the front door to watch a dream become reality.

It seemed in some ways a thing out of a story book, the tall buildings so completely different from the towerblocks and functional skyscrapers of Durban. Some were vast stepped pyramids, with gardens and hanging plants at every level. Others were filigreed towers of a type she had never seen, huge spires that nevertheless had been built to suggest piles of flowers or sheaves of grain. Others, as wildly uncategorizable as abstract sculpture, had angles and protrusions that seemed architecturally impossible. All were painted, the bright colors adding to the impression of floral profusion, but the single most common color was the flashing yellow of gold. Shining gold capped the tallest pyramids, and wound in barberpole stripes up the tall towers. Some of the buildings had been plated top to bottom, so even the darkest recesses, the most deeply gouged niches, still gleamed. It was everything the blurry captured image salvaged in Susan's lab had suggested and more. It was a city built by lunatics, but lunatics who had been touched by genius.