City of Golden Shadow (15 page)

!Xabbu seemed perfectly normal, except that he was wearing a very clean white shirt. Renie looked him up and down, confused and a little off-balance.

"I hope I am not disturbing you too much," he said, smiling. "I was at school early this morning. I like it when it is quiet. But then there was a bomb."

"Another one? Oh, God."

"Not a real one-at least, I do not know. But a telephone warning. They emptied the Polytechnic. I thought you might not know, so I decided I would save you a useless trip."

"Thank you. Hang on for a moment." She took out her pad and browsed the college system for mail. There was a general message from the chancellor declaring the Poly closed until further notice, so !Xabbu had saved her a trip, but she suddenly wondered why he had not merely called her. She looked up; he was still smiling. It was almost impossible to imagine deception lurking behind those eyes-but why had he come all the way out to Pinetown?

She noted the ironed creases in the white shirt and had a sudden disorienting thought. Was this romance? Had the little tribesman come out here to take her on some kind of date? She didn't know quite how she felt about that, but the word "uncomfortable" sprang to mind.

"Well," she said slowly, "since the Poly is closed, I guess you have the day off." Her use of the singular pronoun was intentional.

"Then I would like to take my instructor out for a meal. Breakfast?" !Xabbu's smile wavered, then flickered out, replaced by a look of disconcerting intensity. "You have been very sad, Ms . . . Renie. You have been very sad, but you have been a good friend to me. I believe it is you who now needs a friend."

"I . . . think. . . ." She hesitated, but could think of no good reason not to go. It was just half eight in the morning and the apartment seemed poisonous. Her little brother was lying in an oxygen tent, as unreachable as if he were dead, and the thought of being in the same kitchen with her father when he floundered to consciousness in a few hours made her neck and shoulders tighten like a pulled knot. "Right," she said. "Let's go."

If there was romance on !Xabbu's mind, he certainly didn't show it. As they walked down into Pinetown's business section, he seemed to be looking at everything but Renie, his half-closed eyes that could so easily look shy or sleepy flitting across peeling paint and boarded up windows, watching rubbish blow down the wide streets like cartoon tumbleweeds.

"It's not a very nice part of town, I'm afraid."

"My landlady's house is in Chesterville," he replied. "This is a little more wealthy, although fewer people seem to be on the streets. But what astonishes me-and I must confess, Renie, horrifies me a little-is the human-ness of it all."

"What does that mean?"

"Is that not a word, 'human-ness'? 'Humanity,' perhaps? What I mean is that everything here-all of the city that I have seen since leaving my people-is built to block out the earth, to hide it from sight and mind. The rocks have been scoured away, the bush burned off, and everything has been covered with tar." He slapped his thong-soled foot against the cracked street "Even the few trees, like that sad fellow there, have been brought here and planted by people. Humans turn the places they live into great crowded piles of mud and stone, like the nests termites build-but what happens when in all the world there are only termite hills left but no bush?"

Renie shook her head. "What else should we do? If this were bush country, there would be too many of us to survive. We would starve. We would kill each other."

"So what will people do when they finally run out of bush to burn?" !Xabbu bent and picked up a plastic ring, an already unclassifiable remnant of the current civilization. He squeezed his fingers together and slipped it over his wrist, then held his new bangle up and examined it, a sour half-smile on his lips. "Starve then? Kill each other then? It will be the same problem, but first we will have covered everything with tar and stone and cement and . . . what is it called, 'fibramic'? Also, when the killing comes, there will be many more people to die."

"We'll go into space." Renie gestured toward the gray sky. "We'll . . . I don't know, colonize other planets."

!Xabbu nodded. "Ah."

Johnny's Café was crowded. Most of the customers were truck drivers starting their hauling day on the Durban-Pretoria route, big friendly men in sunglasses and bright-colored shirts. Too friendly, some of them-in the time it took to squeeze through to an empty booth, Renie received a proposal of marriage and several less honorable offers. She clenched her teeth, refusing to smile at even the most harmless and respectful of the flirts. If you encouraged them, it just got worse.

But there were things Renie liked about Johnny's, and one of them was that you could get real food. So many of the small restaurants and coffee shops these days served nothing but American-style convenience food-waved beefburgers, sausages in rolls with gluey cheese sauce, and of course Coca-Cola and fries, the wafer and wine of the Western religion of commerce. But somebody in the kitchen here-perhaps Johnny himself, if there was such a person-actually cooked.

Besides the cup of strong, driver-fuel coffee, Renie decided on bread with butter and honey and a plate of fried plantains and rice. !Xabbu let her order him the same. When the wide platter came, he stared at it in apparent dismay.

"It is so large."

"It's mostly starch. Don't finish it if you don't feel comfortable."

"Will you eat it?"

She laughed. "Thanks, but this is plenty for me."

"Then what will happen to it?"

Renie paused. Distant stepchild to the culture of wealth, she had never thought much about her own patterns of consumption and waste. "I'm sure someone in the kitchen takes home whatever's left over," she offered at last, and felt guilty and shamed even as she said it. She had little doubt that the onetime masters of South Africa had made the same excuse as they watched the remains of another Caligulean feast being cleared away.

She was grateful that !Xabbu did not seem inclined to follow up the question. It was at moments like this that she realized how different his outlook truly was. He spoke better English than her father, and his intelligence and quick empathy aided him in understanding many very subtle things. But he was not like her, not at all-he might have dropped in from another planet. Renie, again with an obscure feeling of shame, realized that she shared more of her fundamental outlook with a rich white teenager living in England or America than with this young African man who had grown up a few hundred miles away.

After he had eaten a few mouthfuls of rice, !Xabbu looked up. "I have now been in two cafés," he said. "This, and the one in the Lambda Mall."

"Which do you prefer?"

He grinned. "The food is better here." He took another bite, then poked at a glistening plantain with his fork, as if to make sure it was dead. "There is something else, too. You remember I asked about ghosts on the net? I see the life there, but I cannot feel it, which makes me uneasy in spirit. It is hard to explain. But I like this place much better."

Renie had been a net habitué for so long that she sometimes did indeed think of it as a place, a huge place, but just as geographically real as Europe or Australia. But !Xabbu was right-it wasn't. It was an agreement, something people pretended was real. In some ways, it was a country of ghosts . . . but all the ghosts were haunting each other.

"There is something to be said for RL." As if to prove it to herself, she lifted her mug of very good, very strong coffee "No question."

"Now please, Renie, tell me what is troubling you. You said to me that your brother was ill. Is that it, or have you other problems as well? I hope I am not intruding too much."

Awkwardly at first, she described her last visit to Stephen and the latest version of her ongoing argument with Long Joseph. Once she began, it grew easier to talk, to describe the hopeless frustration of visiting Stephen every day when nothing ever changed, of the increasingly painful spiral of her relationship with her father. !Xabbu listened, asking questions only when she hesitated on the brink of some painful admission, but each time she answered the questions and found herself moving farther into revelation. She was not used to opening herself, to exposing her secret fears; it felt dangerous. But, as they dawdled through breakfast and the morning crowd slowly drifted out of the coffee shop, she also felt relief at finally being able to speak.

She was putting sweetener into her third cup of coffee when !Xabbu suddenly asked: "Are you going to see him today? Your brother?"

"I usually go in the evening. After work."

"May I come with you?"

Renie hesitated, wondering for the first time since they had sat down whether !Xabbu's interest was something other than mere comradeship. She lit a cigarette to cover the pause. Did he see himself becoming the man in her life, her protector? There hadn't been anyone significant since Del Ray, and that relationship (it was astonishing and somewhat frightening to realize) was years in the past. Except for brief moments of weakness in the small hours, she did not want anyone to take care of her. She had been strong all her life, and could not imagine giving responsibility over to someone else. In any case, she had no romantic feelings for this small young man. She looked at him for a long time as he, perhaps giving her a chance to do just that, examined the multicolored trucks ranked outside the dirty café window.

What are you afraid of, girl? she asked herself. He's a friend. Take him at his word until he proves otherwise.

"Yes, come along. It would be nice to have company."

He turned his gaze back to her, suddenly shy. "I have never been to a hospital-but that is not why I wish to accompany you," he said hurriedly. "I wish to meet your brother."

"I wish you could meet him, meet him the way he was . . . is." She blinked hard. "I sometimes find it hard to believe he's in there. It's so painful to see him like that. . . ."

!Xabbu nodded solemnly. "I wonder whether it is more difficult your way, where your loved one is far from you. Among my people, the sick ones stay with us. But perhaps the frustration would be greater if you had to watch him always, every day, remaining in this sad state."

"I don't think I could take it. I wonder how the other families deal with it."

"Other families? Of the sick?"

"Of children like Stephen. His doctor said there were quite a few other cases."

Something like a shock ran through her as she realized what she was saying. For the first time in several days the feeling of helplessness, which even !Xabbu's patient listening had not much affected, suddenly receded. "I'm not going to do it any more," she said.

!Xabbu looked up, startled by the change in her voice. "Not do what?"

"Just sit and worry. Wait for someone to tell me something, when I could be doing something myself. Why did this happen to Stephen?"

The little man was confused. "I am no city doctor, Renie."

"That's just it. You don't know. I don't know. The doctors don't know. But there are other cases-they said so. Stephen is being treated in a hospital that's under Bukavu 4 quarantine and the doctors there are being worked to exhaustion. Couldn't they have missed something? How much research have they had a chance to do? Real research?" She slid her card into the table, then thumbprinted the scuffed screen. "Do you want to come to the Poly with me?"

"But it is closed today."

"Damn." She replaced the card in her pocket "That's all right-the net access is still available. I just need a station." She considered her home system and balanced the convenience against the likelihood that her father would just now be staggering out into the kitchen. Even if, against all odds, he was not hung over and foul-tempered, she knew that bringing !Xabbu home with her would mean she would be hearing about a "Bushman boyfriend" for months.

"My friend," she said as she stood up, "we're going to visit the Pinetown Public Library."

"We could get most of this off my pad," she explained as the chubby young librarian unlocked the net room, "or yours, for that matter. But we'd be getting text and flat pictures, and I don't like working that way."

!Xabbu followed her in. The librarian eyed the Bushman over the top of his glasses, shrugged, then strolled back to the desk. The few old men watching the news on kiosk screens had already turned back to the full-color footage of the most recent maglev train accident on the Deccan Plateau in India. Renie closed the door, shutting out the distractions of crushed metal, sacked bodies, and the reporter's breathless commentary.

She pulled a sad tangle of cables out of the storage cabinet, then searched through the obsolescent headsets until she found two that were in reasonable shape. She slid her fingers into the squeezers and keyed up net access.

"I see nothing," !Xabbu said.

Renie pushed up her helmet, then leaned over and tinkered with !Xabbu's faceplate until she found the loose connection. She pulled her own helmet back on and the gray of raw net-space surrounded her.

"I have no body."

"You won't. This is an information-only ride, and quite stripped down at that-no force-feedback, so no sensation of touching anything. This is about what you get on a cheap home system. Like the kind an instructor at the Poly can afford."

She tightened her fingers and the gray deepened into a blackness that, except for the absence of stars, might have been deep space. "I should have done this a long time ago," she said "But I've been so busy, so tired. . . ."

"Done what?" !Xabbu's tone remained calm, but she could sense a little tension underneath the patience. Well, she decided, he would just have to hang on. He was riding in her car.

"Done a little research myself," she said. "Twenty-four-hour access to the greatest information system the world has ever known, and I've been letting someone else do my thinking for me." She squeezed and a ball of glowing blue light appeared, like a propane sun at the heart of an empty universe. "This unit should have a fix on my voice by now," she said, then calmly enunciated: "Medical Information. Let's get cracking."