City of Golden Shadow (20 page)

One of Renie's pre-law friends from university had married a policeman. Before she and the friend lost touch she had gone to dinner with them a few times, and she remembered the husband saying much the same thing about criminology: no matter how many gadgets were invented for discerning truth, analyzers of heartbeat, brainwaves, voice stress, or electrochemical changes to the skin, police always felt most secure when they could look a suspect in the eye and ask questions.

So the need for real contact was universal, it seemed. However many changes had taken place in the human environment-most of them authored by humanity itself-the human brain was still much the same organ that everyone's ancestors had carried around the Olduvai Gorge a million years ago. It imported information and tried to make sense of it. There was no discrimination between "real" and "unreal," not at the most basic, instinctual levels of fear and desire and self-preservation.

Renie had begun pondering these things because of Stephen's friend Soki. She had reached his mother on the phone early that morning, but Patricia Mwete-whom Renie had never known well-was adamant that Renie should not come to the house. Soki had been sick, she said, and was just starting to get better. It would upset him. After a long and somewhat heated discussion, Patricia had finally agreed to let her talk to Soki on the phone when he got back from some undefined "appointment" that afternoon.

At first Renie's chain of thought had been prompted by the unsatisfactory nature of phone contact compared to an actual meeting, but now, as she considered the larger issues, she began to realize that if she continued to search for the cause of Stephen's illness, especially if it stemmed from his use of the net, she was going to be spending a great deal of time trying to separate unreality from reality.

Certainly it was impossible at this point to even think of sharing her thoughts with the authorities, medical or legal. VR had received alarmist press from time to time, especially in the early days-all new technologies did-and there were certainly cases of post-traumatic stress syndrome in users of extremely violent simulations, but none of the accepted case histories looked anything like Stephen's. Also, despite her own not-quite-definable certainty that something had happened to him online, there was no real proof in the correlation of net usage to incidence of coma. A thousand other factors could, and would, be suggested as equally likely to establish the pattern.

But the even more frightening thing was the idea of trying to establish truth on the net itself. A police detective with the full weight of law and training on her side would have trouble working through the masks and illusions that net users constructed for themselves, not to mention their UN-mandated privacy rights.

And me? she thought. If I'm right, and that's where it takes me, I'll be like Alice trying to solve a murder in Wonderland.

A knock at her office door interrupted the gloomy thoughts. !Xabbu poked his head in. "Renie? Are you busy?"

"Come on in. I was going to mail you. I really appreciate you spending so much time with me yesterday. I feel very bad about taking you away from your home and your studies."

!Xabbu looked slightly embarrassed. "I would like to be your friend. Friends help other friends. Also, I must confess to you, it is a strange and interesting situation."

"That may be, but you have your own life. Don't you usually spend your evenings studying in the library?"

He smiled. "The school was closed."

"Of course." She made a face and pulled a cigarette from her coat. "The bomb threat. It's a bad sign when they get so common that I don't even remember we had one until someone mentions it. And you know something? No one else did until you. Just another day in the big city,"

There was another knock. One of Renie's colleagues, the woman who taught the entry-level programming classes, had come to borrow a book. She talked the whole time she was in the office, telling some drawn-out story about an amazing restaurant her boyfriend had taken her to. She left without ever looking at or addressing a remark to !Xabbu, as though he were a piece of furniture. Renie was chagrined by the woman's manners, but the small man appeared not to notice.

"Have you thought any more about what you learned last night?" he asked when they had the office to themselves. "I am still not quite sure what you think could have happened to your brother. How could something unreal have such an effect? Especially if his equipment was very basic. If something was harming him, what would prevent him from taking off the headset?"

"He did take it off-or at least he didn't have it on when I found him. And I don't have an answer for you. I wish I did." The difficulty, perhaps even the ridiculous impossibility, of finding the answers to Stephen's illness on the net suddenly made her terribly weary. She ground out her cigarette and watched the last of the smoke twisting toward the ceiling. "This could all be the hallucinations of a grieving relative. Sometimes people need reasons for things, even when there are no reasons. That's what makes people believe in conspiracies or religions-if there's any difference. The world is just too complicated, so they need simple explanations."

!Xabbu looked at her with what felt to Renie like mild disapproval. "But there are patterns to things. Both science and religion agree on that. So what is left is the honorable but difficult task of trying to decide which patterns are real and what they mean."

She stared at him for a moment, surprised again by his perceptiveness. "You're right, of course," she said. "So, I suppose I might as well keep looking at this particular pattern and see if it means anything. Do you want to sit in while I call Stephen's other friend?"

"If it will not interfere."

"Shouldn't. I'll tell her you're a friend from the Poly."

"I hope I am 'a friend from the Poly'."

"You are, but I'm hoping she'll think you're another instructor. You'd better take off that tie-you look like something out of an old movie."

!Xabbu looked a little disappointed. He was proud of what he saw as the formal correctness of his dress-Renie hadn't found the heart to tell him that he was the only person under the age of sixty she had ever seen wearing a tie-but he complied, then pulled over a chair and sat beside her, his back very straight.

Patricia Mwete opened the line. She regarded !Xabbu with open suspicion, but was mollified by Renie's explanation. "Don't ask Soki too many questions," she warned. "He's tired-he's been sick." She was dressed rather formally herself. Renie vaguely remembered that she worked in some kind of financial institution, and guessed that she had just come back from work.

"I don't want to do anything that will upset him," Renie said. "But my brother is in a coma, Patricia, and no one knows why. I just want to find out anything I can."

The other woman's worried stiffness eased a little. "I know, Irene. I'm sorry. I'll call him."

When Soki arrived, Renie was a little surprised to see how very well he looked. He hadn't lost any weight-he had always been a little on the husky side-and his smile was quick and strong.

" 'Lo, Renie."

"Hello, Soki. I'm sorry to hear you've been ill."

He shrugged. His mother, just offscreen, said something Renie couldn't hear. "I'm okay. How's Stephen?"

Renie told him, and most of Soki's good humor evaporated. "I heard about it, but I thought maybe it was just for a little while, like that kid in our form who got a concussion. Is he going to die?"

She recoiled a little at the bluntness of the question. A moment passed before she could answer. "I don't think so, but I'm very worried about him. We don't know what's wrong. That's why I wanted to ask you some questions. Can you tell me anything about the things that you and Stephen and Eddie were doing on the net?"

Soki looked at her a little strangely, surprised by the question, then launched into a long description of various legitimate and quasi-legitimate netboy meanderings, punctuated every now and then by sounds of disapproval from his temporarily invisible mother.

"But what I really want to know about, Soki, is the last time, just before you got sick. When you three got into Inner District."

He looked at her blankly. "Inner District?"

"You know what that is."

"Certain. But we never got in there. I told you we tried."

"Are you saying you never went into the Inner District?"

The look on his young face hardened into anger."Did Eddie say we did? Then he's duppy-duppy major!"

Renie paused, taken aback. "Soki, I had to go in and get Eddie and Stephen out. They said you were with them. They were worried about you, because they lost you on the net. . . ."

Soki's voice rose. "They're dupping!"

Renie was confused. Was he putting this on just because his mother was around? If so, he was doing a very convincing job: he seemed genuinely indignant. Or had Eddie and Stephen lied to her about Soki being with them? But why?

His mother leaned into the screen. "You're getting him upset, Irene. Why are you calling my boy a liar?"

She took a deep breath. "I'm not, Patricia, I'm just confused. If he wasn't with them, why would they lie about it? It didn't get them off the hook-Stephen still lost his net privileges." She shook her head."I don't know what's going on, Soki. Are you sure you don't remember any of this? About getting into Inner District, about going to a place called Mister J's? About falling through some kind of door? Blue lights . . . ?"

"I've never been there!" He was angry, angry and scared, but he still didn't seem to be lying. A few drops of perspiration had appeared on his forehead. "Doors, blue lights . . . I never. . . !"

"That's enough, Irene!" said Patricia. "Enough!"

Before Renie could reply, Soki suddenly tipped his head back and made a strange gargling noise. His limbs became rigid and his entire body began to tremble violently; his mother grabbed at his shirt but failed to hold him as he slid off the chair and fell to the floor, thrashing. Staring at the screen, helplessly transfixed, Renie heard !Xabbu gasp beside her.

"God damn you, Irene Sulaweyo!" Patricia shouted. "He was getting better! You did this to him! Don't you ever call this house again!" She knelt beside her son and cradled his twitching head. A froth of spittle had already begun to form on his lips. "Disconnect!" she shouted, and the padscreen went dark. The last thing Renie saw were the white crescents of Soki's eyes. His pupils had rolled up beneath the lids.

She tried to phone back immediately, despite Patricia's angry words, but the line at Soki's aunt's house was accepting no incoming calls.

"That was a seizure!" Her fingers trembled as she pulled the flametab on a cigarette. "That was a grand mal seizure. But he's not epileptic-damn it, !Xabbu, I've known that child for years! And I had to play chaperone on enough field trips for Stephen's schools: they always tell you if one of the kids has major health problems." She was furious, although she didn't know why. She was also frightened, but the reasons for that were clear enough. "Something happened to him that day-the day I went to get them out of the Inner District. Then later it happened to Stephen, but worse. God, I wish Patricia would answer my questions."

!Xabbu's yellow-brown skin was a shade paler than usual. "We spoke before of the medicine trance," he said. "I felt I was witnessing such a thing. He had the look of someone meeting the gods."

"That was no trance, damn it, and there weren't any gods involved. That was a full-blown seizure." Renie was ordinarily careful not to tread on the beliefs of others, but just now she had very little patience for her friend's sorcerous notions. !Xabbu, apparently not offended, watched her as she stood and began pacing, rattling with anger and upset. "Something has interfered with that child's brain. A physical effect in the real world from something that happened online." She went to the office door and pushed it shut: Soki's collapse had intensified her feelings of being shadowed by some nameless danger. A more cautious part of her protested that she was leaping ahead much too fast, making far more assumptions than could be scientifically safe, but she wasn't listening to that part of herself at the moment.

She turned back to !Xabbu. "I'm going there. I have to."

"Where? To the Inner District?"

"To that club-Mister J's. Something happened to Soki there. I'm almost certain that Stephen tried to sneak back in while he was staying at Eddie's."

"If there is something bad there, something dangerous. . . ." !Xabbu shook his head. "What would be the point? What would the people who own this virtual club have to gain?"

"It may be a byproduct of one of their unpleasant little amusements. Eddie said they're supposed to have experiences for sale that transcend whatever equipment the users own. Maybe they've found some way to give the illusion of greater sensory receptiveness. They might be using compacted subliminals, ultrasonics, something illegal that has these terrible side effects." She sat down and began excavating the mess of papers on her desk in search of an ashtray. "Whatever it is, if I'm going to find out I'll have to do it myself. It would take forever to get anyone to investigate-UNComm is the world's worst bureaucracy." She found the ashtray but her hands were shaking so hard that she almost dropped it.

"But will you not be exposing yourself to danger? What if you are affected as your brother was?" The little man's usually smooth forehead was wrinkled in a deep frown of worry.

"I'll be a lot more alert than Stephen was, and a lot better informed. Also, I'll just be looking for possible causes-enough to build a case to take to the authorities." She crushed out the cigarette. "And maybe if I figure out what happened, we'll be able to find some way to reverse the damage." She curled her hands into fists. "I want my brother back."

"You are determined to go."

She nodded, reaching for her pad. She was filled with a high and even slightly giddy sense of clarity. There were many things to do-she had to construct an alias, for one thing: if the people who owned the club had something to hide, she would be foolish to walk in under her own name and index. And she wanted to do some more research into the club itself and the company that owned it. Anything she could learn before going in might improve her chances of recognizing useful evidence once she was on the inside.