City of Golden Shadow (23 page)

"I understand, Renie." He sounded cheerful, which was amazing considering that she had already given him the eavesdroppers speech twice before that morning.

She waved her hands and they went.

The crowd waiting at the Inner District Gateway was a brightly colored, noisy blur. As the clamor of their multilingual pleading thundered painfully in her ears, she realized that in her anxiety not to miss any possible clues she had set the gain on her sensory inputs too high. A flick of the wrist and a circled finger brought them down to a manageable level.

After a wait that had Renie bouncing in place with impatience, they at last slid to the front of the line. The female functionary was polite and seemed remarkably uninterested in making trouble. She examined their false identification, then asked if the reason for their visit, submitted as part of the ID package, was still correct.

"It is. I'm examining an installation we've had a complaint about." Renie's alias showed her working for a large Nigerian programming company with !Xabbu as her trainee-a gear company which, she had discovered, kept very sloppy records.

"And how much time will you need, Mister Otepi?"

Renie was astonished-actual kindness! She was not used to tractability from net bureaucrats. She eyed the smiling sim carefully, wondering if she were dealing with some new kind of hyper-actualized Customer Service Puppet."It's hard to say. If the problem is simple enough, I may fix it myself, but first I must run it through its paces to find out"

"Eight hours?"

Eight! She knew people who would pay several thousand credits for that long a period of access to the Inner District-in fact, if she had any time left over when they finished, she was tempted to go find one of them. She wondered if she should try to get more-maybe this Puppet was broken, a slot machine that would just pay and pay-but decided not to press her luck. "That should be adequate."

A moment later they were through, floating just above ground level in monumental Gateway Plaza.

"You don't realize it," she told !Xabbu on their private band, "but you've just witnessed a miracle."

"What is that?"

"A bureaucratic system that actually does what it's supposed to do."

He turned to her, a half-smile illuminating the face of the sim Renie had arranged for the visit "Which is to let in two disguised people who are pretending to have legitimate business?"

"Nobody likes a comedian," she pointed out, then exited from the private band. "We're clear. We can go anywhere we want to now, except private nodes."

!Xabbu surveyed the plaza. "The crowds seem different here than in the Lambda Mall. And the structures are more extreme."

"That's because you're closer to the center of power. People here do what they want because they can afford to." A thought came swirling up like a flake of hot black ash. "People who can get away with anything. Or think they can." Stephen was comatose in the hospital while the men who had hurt him enjoyed their freedom. Her anger, never completely cold, rekindled. "Let's go have a look around Toytown."

Lullaby Lane was far more crowded than the last time she had been there, almost choked with virtual bodies. Caught by surprise, Renie pulled !Xabbu into an alley so she could figure out what was happening.

The crowd flowed past the alley mouth in one direction, shouting and singing. It seemed to be a parade of sorts. The sims were embodied in a variety of bizarre ways, oversized, undersized, extra-limbed, even divided into unconnected body parts that moved like coherent wholes. Some of the revelers shifted and changed even as she watched: one violet-haired, attenuated figure wore enormous bat wings which dissolved into traceries of fluttering silver gauze. Many reformed themselves every few moments, extruding new limbs, changing heads, spreading and curling into fantastic shapes like boiling wax dumped in cold water.

Welcome to Toytown, she thought Looks like we arrived just in time for a reunion of the Hieronymous Bosch Society.

She took the Bushman up to rooftop level where they could get a better view. Several in the crowd bore glowing banners proclaiming "Freedom!" or spelled it out above their heads in fire; one group had even turned themselves into a walking row of letters that spelled out "Mutation Day." Although most of the paraders' sims were extreme by design, they were also rather unstable. Some of them fell apart into unstructured planes and lines in a way that did not look intentional. Others flickered in midstep and occasionally disappeared entirely.

Home-cooked programming, she decided. Do-it-yourself stuff. "It's a protest, I think," she told !Xabbu.

"Against what person or thing?" He hung in the air beside her, a cartoon figure with a serious expression on its simple face.

"Embodiment laws, I would guess. But they can't be suffering much if they can afford to hang out here in the first place." She made a small noise of contempt "Rich people's children complaining because their parents won't let them dress up. Let's go."

They beamed past the procession to the far end of Lullaby Lane where the streets were empty. Without the distraction of street theater the rundown quality of the neighborhood was immediately apparent. Many of the nodes seemed to have grown even more decrepit since her last visit; both sides of the street were lined with skeletal, colorless buildings.

A distant, skittery flare of music at last turned them toward a garish glow at the street's far end. In such dim surroundings, the awful, throbbing liveliness of Mister J's seemed even more sinister.

!Xabbu stared at the turreted sprawl and the giant carnivorous grin. "So that is it"

"Private band," Renie snapped. "And keep it there unless you have to answer a question from someone. As soon as you finish answering, switch back. Don't worry about being slow to respond-I'm sure they get lots of people in that place whose reflexes are not what they should be."

They slowly floated forward, watching the club's facade gleam and squirm.

"Why are there no people about?" asked !Xabbu.

"Because this isn't a part of the Inner District that invites much sightseeing. People who come to Mister J's probably beam in directly. Are you ready?"

"I believe so. Are you?"

Renie hesitated. The question seemed flippant, but that was not the Bushman's way. She realized she was wound tight and hard, her nerves thrumming. She took several deep breaths, willing herself toward calm. The toothy mouth over the doorway flapped its red lips as though whispering a promise. Mister Jingo's Smile, this place had been called. Why did they change the name but keep that horrid grimace?

"It is a bad place," !Xabbu said abruptly.

"I know. Don't forget that for a second."

She splayed her fingers. An instant later they were in a shadowy antechamber, a place with gold-framed carnival mirrors instead of walls. As she turned to survey the room, Renie could see that the latency-the tiny lag between initiation and action that characterized complex VR environments-was very low here, a quite passable mimicry of real life. The detail work was also impressive. Alone in the antechamber, they were not alone in the mirrors: a thousand reveling ghosts surrounded them-figures of men and women, as well as some more animal than human, all cavorting around the distorted reflections of their two sims. Their reflections appeared to be enjoying themselves.

"Welcome to Mister J's." The voice spoke oddly accented English. There was no image to match it in any of the mirrors.

Renie turned to discover a tall, smiling, elegantly dressed white man standing close behind them. He lifted his gloved hands and the mirrors disappeared, leaving the three of them alone in a single pillar of light surrounded by infinite black. "So nice to have you with us." His voice crept in close, as though he whispered in her ear. "Where are you from?"

"Lagos," said Renie a little breathlessly. She hoped her own voice, processed an octave lower to match her masculine alias, did not sound as squeaky to him as it did to her."We . . . we've heard a lot about this place."

The man's smile widened. He made a short bow. "We are proud of our worldwide reputation, and pleased to welcome friends from Africa. You are, of course, of legal age?"

"Of course." Even as she spoke, she knew that digital fingers were prying at the edge of her alias-but not prying too hard: deniability was all that a place like this needed. "I am showing my friend here some Inner District sights-he's never been before."

"Splendid. You have brought him to the right place." The well-dressed man was finished distracting them, which meant their indexes had been passed. He made a theatrical flourish and a door opened in the darkness, a rectangular hole that bled smoky red light Noise spilled out, too-loud music, laughter, a wavecrash of voices. "Enjoy your visit," he said. "Tell your friends." Then he was gone and they were flowing forward into the scarlet glow.

The music reached out to gather them in like the pseudopod of some immense but invisible energy-creature. Blaringly loud, it sounded like the bouncy swing jazz of the previous century, but it had strange hiccups and slurs, secret rhythms moving deep inside like the heartbeat of a stalking predator. It was captivating: Renie found herself humming along before she could even make out words, but those came quickly enough.

"There's no call for consternation,"

someone was singing urgently as the orchestra wailed and stomped in the background.

"A smiling face is invitation enough-

No bluff!

So bring your stuff to the celebration. . . ."

The lounge was impossibly huge, a monstrous, red-lit octagon. The pillars that marked its angles, each one broad as a skyscraper, stretched up to disappear in shadow far above; the vertical rows of lights that trimmed them grew closer together and at last shrank into continuous lines of radiance as distance squeezed them. Up where even those lights failed, up in the unspeakable heights of the ceiling, sparking fireworks zigged and caromed endlessly against the blackness.

Spotlights wheeled through the smoky air, pushing fast-moving ellipses of brighter red across the velvet walls. Hundreds of booths sprawled between the pillars and filled the ringing balconies, which circled up at least a dozen floors before the swirling clouds of smoke made counting impossible. An almost endless mushroom forest of tables covered the shiny main floor, with silver-clad figures speeding between them like pinballs off bumpers-a thousand waiters and waitresses, two thousand, more, all moving swiftly and frictionlessly as beads of mercury.

In the center of the enormous room the orchestra stood on a floating stage that sparkled and revolved like a sideways ferris wheel. The musicians wore black-and-white formal suits, but there was nothing formal about them. They were cartoonishly attenuated and two-dimensional. As the music squalled, their shapes wavered and flared like mad shadows; some grew until their rolling eyes peered directly into the highest balconies. Bright tombstone teeth snapped at the customers, who shrieked and laughed even as they scrambled for safer ground.

Only the singer, perched at the farthest edge of the circling stage in a filmy white dress, did not change size. As the shadowy musicians billowed around her, she glowed like a piece of radium.

"So toss away your trepidation,"

she sang, her voice harsh yet somehow alluring, its quaver that of a child forced to stay up too late, watching the adults grow strange and drunken,

"Slip into some syncopation-no fuss!

The bus

Will pro-pel us to Party Station. . . .

The singer was only a spot of light in the midst of the cyclopean lounge and the crazily stretching orchestra, but for long moments Renie found that she could not see at anything else. Huge black eyes in a pale face made the woman look almost skeletal. Her fountain of white hair, half as tall as she was, combined with the white dress rippling beneath her arms to make her seem some kind of exotic bird.

"Sit right down-

Lose that frown!

Mingle with the Toast of Toytown!

Pick a song,

Sing along,

All that's upright will turn out wrong. . . ."

The singer swayed back and forth, buffeted by the pounding beat like a dove in gale winds. The great eyes were closed now in something that might be exultation but didn't seem like it. Renie had never seen a human being look quite so trapped, and yet the singer glowed, burned. She might have been a light bulb channeling too much juice, her filament an instant away from explosive collapse.

Slowly, almost unwillingly, Renie reached out for !Xabbu. She found his hand and closed her fingers on it "Are you okay?"

"It . . . it is quite overwhelming, this place."

"It is. Let's . . . let's sit down for a moment." She led him across the floor to one of the booths along the far wall-an RL journey that would have taken some minutes on foot, but which they made in seconds. All the musicians in the orchestra were singing now, clapping and hooting and stamping their mighty feet on the rocking stage; the music was so loud that it seemed the whole gigantic house might fall down,

"Free your heart of hesitation!

Eves and Adams of every nation-state,

Feel great!

When they create a federation. . . ."

The music swelled and the spotlights raced even faster, beams flickering across each other like fencers' foils. There was a cannonfire rattle of drums, a last explosive blare of horns, then the orchestra was gone. A hollow chorus of hoots and cheers wafted through the immense room.

Renie and !Xabbu had barely sunk into the deep velvet banquette when a waiter appeared before them, floating a few inches off the floor. He wore a chrome-colored, form-fitted tuxedo. His sim body appeared to have been modeled after some ancient fertility deity.

"Zazoon, creepers," he drawled. "What'll it be?"

"We . . . we can't eat or drink in these sims," Renie said. "Do you have anything else?"

He gave her an intensely knowing and slightly amused look, clicked his fingers, and vanished. A menu of glowing letters hung in the air behind him like a luminescent residue.