City of Golden Shadow (19 page)

At last it ended-more from fatigue than any recovery of control, Renie noted with disgust. !Xabbu released her hands. She could not look at him yet, so she reached into her coat pocket and found a crumpled piece of tissue she had used earlier to blot her lipstick, then did her best to dry her face and wipe her nose. When she did meet her friend's eyes, it was with a kind of defiance, as though daring him to take advantage of her weakness.

"Is the sadness less painful now?"

She turned away again. He seemed to think it was perfectly natural to make an idiot of yourself out in front of the Durban Outskirt Medical Facility. Maybe it was. The shame had already diminished, and was now only a faint reproving voice at the back of her mind.

"I'm better," she said. "I think we missed our bus."

!Xabbu shrugged. Renie leaned over and took his hand in hers and squeezed it, just for a moment. "Thank you for being patient with me." His calm brown eyes made her nervous. What was she supposed to do, be proud of herself for breaking down? "One thing. One thing in that song."

"Yes?" He was watching her carefully. She couldn't understand why, but she couldn't take the scrutiny. Not now, not with swollen eyelids and a running nose. She looked down at her own hands, now safely back in her lap.

"Where it said, 'There were people, some people, who broke the string for me'. . . . Well, there are people-there must be."

!Xabbu blinked. "I do not understand."

"Stephen isn't just . . . sick. I don't believe that any more. In fact, I never really believed it, although I could never make sense out of the feeling. Someone-some people, like in the song-did this to him. I don't know who, or how, or why, but I know it." Her laugh was strained. "I guess that's what all the crazy people say. 'I can't explain it, I just know it's true.' "

"You think this because of the research? Because of what we saw in the library?"

She nodded, straightening up. She felt strength coming back. Action-that was what was needed. Crying was useless. Things had to be done. "That's right. I don't know what it means, but it has something to do with the net."

"But you said the net is not a real place-that what happens there is not real. If someone eats there, it does not nourish them. How could something on the net cause an injury, send a young child into a sleep from which he will not wake?"

"I don't know. But I'm going to find out." Renie suddenly smiled at how the most critical times in your life always threw you back onto clichés. That was the kind of thing people said in detective stories-it had probably been said at least once in the book she was reading to Stephen. She stood. "I don't want to wait for another bus and I'm sick of this bench. Let's go get something to eat-if you don't mind, I mean. You've wasted a whole day on me and my problems already. What about your work for class?"

!Xabbu showed her his sly grin. "I work very hard, Ms. Sulaweyo. I have already completed this week's assignments."

"Then come with me. I need food and coffee-especially coffee. I'll leave my father to fend for himself. It will do him good."

As she set off down the sidewalk, she felt lighter than she had for weeks, as though she had thrown off a soaking garment.

"There must be something we can learn," she said. "All problems have solutions. You just have to work at them."

!Xabbu did not reply to this, but sped his pace to keep up with her longer strides. The gray afternoon warmed as points of glowing orange bloomed all around them. The streetlights were beginning to come on.

Hello, Mutsie. May we come in please?"

Eddie's mother stood in the doorway, looking from Renie to !Xabbu with a mixture of interest and suspicion."What do you want?"

"I want to talk to Eddie."

"What for? Did he do something?"

"I just want to talk to him." Renie was beginning to lose her temper, which would not be a good way to start. "Come on, you know me. Don't keep me standing at your door like a stranger."

"Sorry. Come inside." She stepped aside to let them pass, then indicated the slightly concave sofa covered with a brightly colored throw rug. Renie nudged !Xabbu toward it. Not that there would be anywhere else to sit-the apartment was as cluttered as the night Stephen had gotten ill.

Probably the same clutter, Renie thought, then chided herself for mean-spiritedness.

"The boy's taking a bath." Mutsie didn't offer to bring them anything, and didn't sit down herself. The moment hung awkwardly. Eddie's two sisters lay prostrated like worshipers in front of the wallscreen, watching two men in brightly colored jumpsuits floundering in a vat of some sticky substance. Mutsie kept looking at it over her shoulder; she clearly wanted to sit down and watch. "I'm sorry about Stephen," she said at last. "He's a good boy. How is he?"

"Just the same." Renie heard the tightness in her own voice. "The doctors don't know. He's just . . . asleep." She shook her head, then tried to smile. It wasn't Mutsie's fault She wasn't a great mother, but Renie didn't think what happened to Stephen had anything to do with that. "Maybe Eddie could come with me sometime to see him. The doctor said it would be good for him to hear familiar voices."

Mutsie nodded her head but looked uncertain. A moment later she went into the hallway. "Eddie! Hurry up, boy. Stephen's sister wants to talk to you." She emerged shaking her head, as though she had performed a difficult and thankless task. "He stay in there for hours. Sometimes I look around and say, 'Where is that boy? Is he dead or something?' " She stopped herself. Her eyes grew round. "Sorry, Irene."

Renie shook her head. She could almost feel !Xabbu's eyebrow lifting. She had never told him her real name. "It's okay, Mutsie. Oh, and I didn't introduce !Xabbu. He's my student. He's helping me do some research to see if we can find out something about Stephen's condition."

Mutsie cast an eye across the Bushman on her sofa. "What do you mean, research?"

"I'm trying to see if there's something the doctors missed-some article in a medical magazine, something." Renie decided to leave it there. Mutsie had no doubt already made up her mind who and what !Xabbu was to Renie: suggesting that they were trying to find out whether the net might have made Stephen ill would only make the story sound even more feeble. "I just want to do everything I can."

Mutsie's attention was drawn to the wallscreen again. The two men. covered with sticky ooze, were now trying to climb the sides of a rocking, transparent vat. "Of course," she said "You do everything you can."

Renie reflected on the worth of this wisdom, coming from a woman who had once sent her children on the bus to her sister's house for the weekend without remembering that her sister had moved across Pinetown. Renie knew because the children had fetched up on her own doorstep and she had wasted an entire weekend afternoon tracking down the aunt's new address and delivering them to it.

Oh, yes, Mutsie, you and me, we do everything we can.

Eddie appeared from the back, hair wet and close to his head, wearing a pair of striped pajamas that were far too big: the cuffs, rolled several times, still dragged on the floor. His head was held low, as though he anticipated a whipping.

"Come in here, boy. Say hello to Irene."

" 'Lo, Renie."

"Hello, Eddie. Sit down, will you? I want you to answer some questions for me."

"People from the hospital asked him all kinds of questions already," Mutsie said over her shoulder. She sounded almost proud. "Some man come, he took the food out of the refrigerator, made notes."

"I have other things I want to ask about. Eddie, I want you to think very carefully before you answer me, okay?"

He looked to his mother, begging her further intervention, but she had already turned back to the wallscreen. Eddie sat down on the floor in front of Renie and !Xabbu. He plucked one of his little sisters' action figures from the threadbare carpet and began to twist it in his hands.

Renie explained who !Xabbu was, but Eddie didn't seem too interested. Renie remembered how she had felt in these situations at the same age, that adults were to be considered part of a shapeless enemy mass until proven otherwise.

"I don't blame you for anything, Eddie. I'm just trying to find out what happened to Stephen."

He still wouldn't look up. "He's sick."

"I know that. But I want to find out what made him that way."

"We didn't do anything. I told you that."

"Not that night, maybe. But I know you and Stephen and Soki were messing around on the net, going places you shouldn't go. I know, Eddie, remember?"

"Yeah." He shrugged.

"So tell me about it."

Eddie twisted at the doll in his hands until Renie worried that he might pull it apart-the damn things were expensive, and she ought to know, having supplied Stephen with more Netsurfer Detectives figures than she wished to count. "Masker" was particularly prone to damage, since he had a fragile, arch-exotic plastic hairstyle at least half his own height.

"Everybody else did it," he said at last "We told you. Just tapping and napping."

"Everybody else did what? Got into Inner District?"

"Yeah,"

"What about that place-Mister J's? Does everybody go there, too?"

"Yeah. Well, not everybody. A lot of the older guys talk about it"

Renie sat back, giving up on her attempt to force eye contact. "And a lot of them are probably lying. What have you heard about the place that made you want to go there?"

"What kind of place is this?" !Xabbu asked.

"Not very nice. It's on the net-a virtual club, like that place I took you is a virtual café." She turned back to Eddie. "What do the older kids say about it?"

"That . . . that you can see stuff there. Get stuff." He looked over at his mother, and even though she seemed enthralled with the two sticky men smacking each other with long glowing poles, he fell silent.

Renie leaned forward. "What stuff? Damn it, Eddie, I need to find out"

"Guys say that you can . . . feel things. Even if you don't have the flack."

"Flack?" A new netboy term. They changed so quickly.

"The . . . the stuff so you can touch what's on the net"

"Tactors? Sensory receptors?"

"Yeah, the good stuff. Even if you don't have it there's things in Mister J's you can feel. And there's. . . . I don't know. Guys say all kinds of. . . ." He trailed off again.

"Tell me what they say!"

But Eddie was clearly uncomfortable talking to an adult about backroom netboy gossip. This time it was Renie who turned to Eddie's mother for help, but Mutsie had relieved herself of responsibility and was not going to take it back.

Several other lines of questioning produced little new information. They had gone into the club in search of some of these whispered-about experiences, and to "see" things-Renie assumed it was pornography of some kind, either sex or violence-but had instead gotten lost and wandered for hours through Mister J's. Parts of it had been very frightening and disorienting, others just interestingly weird, but Eddie claimed he could remember little of what they had actually seen. At last some men, including an unpleasant fat man-or a sim that looked like one-sent them downstairs to a special room. Soki had fallen into some kind of trap, and the other two had somehow escaped and called Renie.

"And you can't remember any better than that? Even if it might help Stephen get better again?"

For the first time all evening the boy met and held Renie's gaze. "I'm not dupping."

"Lying," she explained to !Xabbu. "I didn't say you were, Eddie. But I'm hoping you can remember a little better. Please try."

He shrugged, but now that she could see his eyes clearly, she saw something elusive in his gaze. Was she sure he was telling the truth? He seemed frightened, and they were long past the point when he should have feared punishment from Renie.

"Well, if you remember anything else, call me. Please, it's very important." She got up from the couch. Eddie started to move toward the hallway, head down again. "One other thing," she said. "What about Soki?"

Eddie turned to look at her, eyes wide."He got sick. He's at his aunt's."

"I know. Did he get sick because of what happened when you were on the net together? Tell me, Eddie."

He shook his head. "I don't know. He didn't come back to school."

Renie surrendered. "Go on." Eddie, like a cork held underwater and then finally released, almost sprang from the room. Renie turned to Mutsie, who lay on the carpet beside her daughters. "Do you have Soki's aunt's number?"

Mutsie clambered to her feet, sighing heavily, as though she had been asked to carry several hundredweight of stone up the Drakensberg Mountains.

"Maybe it's around here somewhere."

Renie looked at !Xabbu to share her exasperation, but the little man was staring at the wallscreen in reluctant fascination, watching one of the sticky men trying to catch, kill, and eat a live chicken. The sound of audience laughter, captured and processed until it echoed like the roar of machinery, filled the small room.

The last classes of the day were being released into the halls. Renie watched the kaleidoscopic movement of color across the office windows as she reflected on human beings and their need for contact.

Back at the end of the previous century, people had been predicting that school would be uniformly taught over video links, or even that teachers might be replaced entirely by interactive teaching machines and hypertext infobanks.

Of course, people had been wrong about that sort of thing before. Renie remembered something one of her university instructors had told her "When they marketed frozen food a hundred years ago, the professional predictors said people would never cook again. Instead, thirty years later they were growing their own herbs and baking their own bread from scratch in well-to-do suburbs all over the First World."

Similarly, it seemed unlikely that human beings would ever grow out of their need for personal contact. Live lectures and tutorials were not quite as large a part of the learning experience as they had once been, when books were the only form of stored information, but those who had claimed that such time- and resource-wasteful human contact would vanish had obviously been wrong.