City of Golden Shadow (37 page)

She heard the front door opening. She struggled upright in the bed and drank some water, then tried to fluff herself into some appearance of normality. Even if you'd almost died, it was embarrassing to have bed-hair.

Unlike her father, the Bushman came into the sickroom with no hesitation. He stopped a few feet away from her, which she guessed was more from some strange sort of respect than anything else. Renie reached out her hand to draw him closer. His fingers were warm and reassuring.

"I am very happy to see you, Renie. I have been worrying about you."

"I'm doing pretty well, actually." She squeezed his hand and released him, then looked around for something for !Xabbu to sit on. The only chair was covered with clothes, but he seemed content to stand. "I had to fight like hell to get them to send me home from the emergency room. But if I'd gone into hospital, I would have been stuck in quarantine for weeks."

She would also have been close to Stephen, but she knew that would have been a bittersweet proximity at best.

"You are best at home, I think." He smiled. "I know that amazing things can be done in a modem hospital, but I am still one of my people. I would become even more sick if I had to stay in such a place."

Renie looked up. Her father was back in the doorway, staring at !Xabbu. Long Joseph had a very strange expression on his face; when he saw Renie, it changed to something like embarrassment.

"I'm going over to see Walter." He showed her his hat as proof. He took a few steps away, then turned. "You be all right?"

"I'm not going to die while you're gone, if that's what you mean." She saw the closing-up of his face and regretted her words. "I'll be fine, Papa. Don't you and Walter drink too much."

Her father had been looking at !Xabbu again, but he scowled at Renie. It was not particularly unpleasant, more of a general-purpose scowl. "Don't you worry about what I'm getting up to, girl."

!Xabbu was still standing patiently when the door closed behind Long Joseph, eyes bright in his small solemn face. Renie patted the edge of the bed.

"Please sit down. You're making me nervous. I'm sorry we couldn't talk before, but the drugs I've been taking make me sleep a lot."

"But you are better now?" He scrutinized her race. "You look healthy in your spirit to me. When we first came back from . . . from that place, I was very frightened for you."

"It was an arrhythmia-not really a full-fledged heart attack. In fact, I'm feeling enough better that I'm beginning to get really angry. I saw them, !Xabbu, the bastards who run that place. I saw what they do in that club. I still don't have the slightest idea why, but if we weren't both this close-" she held up her fingers, "-to having the same thing happen as Stephen and who knows how many others, I'll eat my hat." !Xabbu stared at her, confused. Renie laughed. "Sorry. That's an expression that means 'I'm certain I'm right.' Haven't you heard it before?"

The Bushman shook his head. "No. But I am learning more all the time, learning to think, almost, in this language. Sometimes I wonder what I am losing." He finally sat down. He was so light Renie barely felt the mattress give. "What do we do now, Renie? If what you say is true, these are bad people doing very bad things. Do we tell the police or the government?"

"That's one of the reasons I wanted to see you-to show you something." She reached down behind her pillows, feeling for her pad. It took her some moments to pull it from the gap between the mattress and the wall where it had been wedged. She was dismayed by how weak she still felt; even the small effort made her feel short of breath. "Did you bring the goggles? It's so much slower trying to work on a flat screen."

!Xabbu produced the cases stamped with the Polytechnic's logo. Renie took out both sets, neither much larger man a pair of sunglasses, found a Y-connector in the tangle of cables beside her, and jacked both the goggle-cable and a pair of squeezers into her pad.

When she handed one pair of goggles to !Xabbu, he did not immediately take them.

"What's wrong?"

He shook his head slowly. "I was lost, Renie. I failed you when we were in that place."

"We're not going anywhere near there-besides, this is just optical display and sound, anyway, not full wrap-around. We're just going to go visit the Poly's infobanks and a few other subnets. There's nothing to be afraid of."

"It is not so much fear that holds me back, although I would be a liar if I said I was not frightened. But there is more. There are things I need to tell you, Renie-things about what happened to me in that place."

She paused, not wanting to push him. Despite his facility, she reminded herself, he was still very new to this-new to everything she took for granted, in fact. "I have things I need to show you, too. I promise you it will be no worse than working in the lab at the school. Afterward, I very much want to hear what you have to say." She offered the goggles again and this time !Xabbu accepted them.

The empty gray quickly became the ordered polygons of her personal system-a simple array resembling a home office, far less sophisticated than what she had available at the Poly. She had customized it with a few pictures on the wall and a tank of tropical fish, but otherwise it was a coldly functional environment, a system for someone who was always in a hurry. She couldn't see herself changing it any time soon.

"We were in that place for what, three hours? Four?" As she palpated the squeezers, one of the polygons became a window. After a moment, the Polytechnic's logo and advisory warning appeared. Renie keyed in her access code and immediately the library environment sprang into detailed existence. "Bear with me," she said. "I'm used to doing my work here with some kind of freehand capabilities, but today we're stuck with these squeezer things, which are pretty basic."

It was strange to be moving through such a familiar and realistic environment but not being able to react directly to anything; when she wanted to manipulate one of the symbolic objects, instead of reaching out toward it, she had to think about the quite different things needed to key in a direction.

"This is what I wanted you to see," she said when she'd finally opened the information window she wanted, "-the Poly's records for that day." Lines of numbers rolled rapidly upward in front of them. "Here's the Harness Room prefix, all the connections. There we are, signing in. That's my access code, right?"

"I see it" !Xabbu's voice was steady but distant.

"Well, scan this. That's our usage record. No connection except to the in-house school system."

"I don't understand."

"It means that, according to this, we never logged onto the net, never entered the commercial node called 'Mister J's' all. Everything we experienced, the pool, that sea-monster, that huge main room, none of it happened. That's what the Poly's records say, anyway."

"I am confused, Renie. Perhaps I am still not as wise about these things as I believed myself to be. How could there be no record?"

"I don't know!" Renie played the squeezers. Inside the goggle-universe, the Poly's records disappeared and another window opened up. "Look at this-my own personal accounts, even the ones I set up just for this, are zeroed. None of the connection time was charged to me, to the school-anywhere! There's not a single record of what we did. Nothing." She took a breath, reminding herself to stay calm. She still got a little dizzy now and then, but was feeling stronger every day, which made the whole thing even more frustrating. "If we can't find the records, we can't very well make a complaint, can we? You can just imagine what the reaction of the authorities would be: 'That's a very serious charge, Ms. Sulaweyo, especially since you've apparently never used the node in question.' It would be useless."

"I wish I could make some suggestion, Renie. I wish there was some help I could give, but this is beyond my very young knowledge."

"You can help. You can help me try to find out what happened. I don't have much stamina, and I get tired if I have to stare at anything too long. But if you can be my eyes, we can try a few things I haven't had a chance to do yet. I'm not giving up that easily. Those bastards have hurt my brother, and they damn near got you and me, too."

Renie was leaning back against the pillows. She'd taken her medicine, and as usual it was making her sleepy. !Xabbu was sitting cross-legged on the floor, his eyes hidden by the goggles, his fingers moving with surprising fluency on the squeezer keys.

"There is nothing like what you describe," he said, breaking a long silence. "No loops, no repetitions. All the loose ends are, as you would say, tied up."

"Shit." She closed her eyes again, trying to think of another way through the problem. Someone had wiped out all record of what she and !Xabbu had done, then fabricated a new one and inserted it seamlessly into place. The time they had spent in the club, all of it, was now as insubstantial and improvable as a dream.

"The thing that frightens me is not just that they've managed to do that, but the fact that they tracked back all my aliases and wiped them, too. There shouldn't be any way in hell they could do that"

!Xabbu was still moving through the data-world. The goggles looked like insect eyes on his narrow face. "But if they have found these false selves you constructed, can they not trace them back to you?"

"Yesterday I would have said 'Not in a million years,' but suddenly I'm not so sure. If they know it was someone at the Poly, they wouldn't have much trouble narrowing it down without even getting into internal records." She bit her lip, wondering. It was not a pleasant thought; she somehow doubted that the people who ran Mister J's would limit themselves to the kind of intimidation that came in a solicitor's letter. "I kept them as far from me as I could when I was setting up the aliases, went in through public nodes, everything I could think of. I never believed they could track me straight back to the Poly."

!Xabbu made a sudden noise, a small click of surprise. Renie sat up.

"What?"

"There is something. . . ." He paused and his fingers moved swiftly. "There is something here. What does it mean when an orange light flashes in your office? It is blinking like a lightning beetle! It just began."

"That's the antivirals kicking in." Renie leaned over, ignoring the moment of light-headedness, and picked the other pair of goggles up from the floor. She pulled the Y-connector tight between her and !Xabbu. "Someone's trying to get into my system, maybe." A shiver of unease moved through her. Had they tracked her already? Who were these people?

She was in the system's basic VR representation again, the three-dimensional office. A small vermilion dot was blinking on and off, a smoldering glow like a coal from a braai. She leaned and groped blindly across !Xabbu's knee, then tapped a couple of keys. Inside the virtual space, the dot of light exploded into a welter of symbols and text which filled much of the office.

"Whatever it is, it's already in the system, but it's still dormant. Probably a virus." She was angry that her system had been penetrated and perhaps hopelessly corrupted, but at the same time it seemed an oddly muted response from the kind of people who owned such a club. She set her Phage gear in search of the intruding code. It didn't have to hunt very long.

"What in hell. . . ?"

!Xabbu sensed her puzzlement "What is wrong, Renie?"

"That's not supposed to be there."

Hanging in virtual space before them, rendered much more realistically than the planar office furniture, was a translucent, yellow-glinting, faceted object.

"It looks like a yellow diamond." An image, as tenuous as a dream, floated up to her-a pure white shape, an empty person made of light-then it was gone again.

"Is it a computer sickness? Is it something those people have sent?"

"I don't know. I think I recall something about it from just before we went offline, but it's all very confused. I don't remember much of what happened after I went back to the cave to get you." The yellow gem hung before her, staring back like an emotionless golden eye.

"I really must talk to you, Renie." !Xabbu sounded unhappy. "I must tell you about what happened to me there."

"Not now." She quickly threw her analyticals at the gem-or at what the gem represented. When the results came back a few moments later, surrounding the foreign object like a system of tiny text planets orbiting a diamond-edged sun, she whistled between her teeth in surprise. "It's code, but it's been compacted until it's tight as a drum. There's an amazing amount of information packed in there. If it is some kind of destructive virus, it's got enough information to rewrite a system much bigger than mine."

"What are you going to do?"

Renie didn't answer him for several long moments as she hastily checked back through her earlier connections. "Wherever it came from, it's attached itself to my system now. But I don't see any trace of it remaining on my part of the Polytechnic's net, which is just as well. God, the pad is bulging-I hardly have any memory left." She cut her connection to the school. "I don't think I can even activate this thing on my little system here, so maybe it's effectively neutralized, although I can't imagine why someone would set up a virus that downloads itself to a system too small for it to operate. For that matter, I can't imagine why anyone would make a virus that big-it's like trying to use an elephant to do surveillance in a phone booth."

She turned off her system and removed the goggles, then slumped back on her bed. Small spots of yellow light like the diamond's smaller cousins jittered before her eyes. !Xabbu took off his own goggles and looked at the pad with suspicion, as though something unpleasant might crawl out of it. He then turned his worried look onto her.

"You look pale. I will pour you some water."

"I have to find a system that's powerful enough to let the thing activate," Renie said, thinking out loud, "but that's not connected to any other system-something big and isolated, sterile. I could probably set that up in one of the labs at the Poly, but I'd have to answer a lot of questions."

!Xabbu carefully handed her a glass. "Should you not destroy it? If it is something that those people made, the people of that terrible place, it must be a dangerous thing."