City of Golden Shadow (56 page)

She started from the beginning, staying as general as she could and skipping as lightly as possible over the several times she had misused her position at the Poly or subverted UNComm regulations. From time to time she asked !Xabbu to corroborate what she was saying and the small man did, although always with a somewhat distracted air. Renie could spare little attention, but she wondered briefly at his mood and what it might signify.

Del Ray was largely silent, breaking in only to ask specific questions. He seemed interested by the inner workings of Mister J's, but only shook his head, expressionless, when she told him of her speculations about the club.

When she had brought him up to the present, describing the fire in her flatblock and Susan's murder, he did not respond immediately, but sat watching a gull preen itself on a railing.

"I don't know what to say. The whole story is . . . astonishing."

"What does that mean?" A spark of anger flared. "Does that mean astonishingly crazy, or astonishing so you'll do whatever you can to help me?"

"I . . . I just don't know. It's a lot to absorb." He stared at her, perhaps trying to gauge how well he knew her after all these years without contact. "And I'm not quite sure what you want me to do either. I'm not part of UNComm security or law enforcement. I'm a business liaison, Renie. I help chain stores make sure their systems follow UN guidelines. I don't know anything about the stuff you're talking about."

"Damn it, Del Ray, you're part of the Politburo, as we used to call it-you're an insider! You must be able to do something, if only help me get information. Are these people under investigation at all? Has anyone besides me had weird experiences with this Happy Juggler Novelty Corporation? Who are they? I need answers from someone I can trust. I'm scared, Del Ray."

He frowned. "Of course, I'll do what I can. . . ."

"Also, I think I need to get into TreeHouse."

"TreeHouse? What in hell for?"

She briefly considered telling him of Susan's deathbed message, but decided against it. Susan's laborious last words were known only to her, !Xabbu, and Jeremiah Dako. She would keep them secret a while longer. "I just need to go there. Can you help me?"

"Renie, I never made it into TreeHouse when I was a hash-smoking, full-time student hacker." He smiled self-mockingly. "Do you think I could get within miles of it now that I'm part of the UNComm establishment? We're the enemy as far as they're concerned."

Now it was her turn to frown. "This isn't easy. You know I wouldn't ask if I didn't really really need help." She blinked hard. "Damn it, Del Ray, my baby brother . . . is. . . ." She stopped, unwilling to go any farther in that dangerous direction. She would die before she would cry in front of him.

He stood, then reached down to take her hand. He was still very handsome. "I'll check around, Renie. Really, I will. I'll see what I can find."

"Be careful. Even if you think I'm crazy, just pretend I'm not and make your mistakes on the side of caution. Don't do anything stupid, and don't be obvious."

"I will call you by the end of the week." He extended his hand to !Xabbu. "Nice to have met you."

The little man accepted the handshake. "Everything Ms. Sulaweyo spoke of is true," he said gravely. "These are bad people. You must not take this lightly."

Del Ray nodded, a little flustered, then turned back to Renie. "I'm truly sorry about Stephen. Give my regards to your father." He leaned forward and kissed her on the cheek, squeezed her once, then turned and walked back up the pier,

Renie watched him go. "When we broke up," she said at last, "I couldn't imagine life without him."

"Always things change," said !Xabbu. "The wind blows everything."

"I am frightened, Renie."

She looked up. He had been silent for most of the bus ride, staring up at the buildings as they traveled through the windowed canyons of downtown Durban.

"Because of what happened to Susan?"

He shook his head. "I mourn for her, yes, and I am angry at the people who did such a terrible thing. But I am frightened in a bigger way." He paused, looking down, his hands folded in his lap like a child threatened into good behavior. "It is my dreams."

"You said you dreamed of something bad happening to me the night Susan was attacked."

"It is more than that. Since we went into that place, that club, my dreams have been very strong. I do not know what I fear, exactly, but I feel that I am-no, that we are all-being stalked by something large and cruel."

Renie's heart sped. She had dreamed something like that herself, hadn't she? Or was she remembering some dream of !Xabbu's, described by him then absorbed as her own? "I'm not surprised," she said carefully. "We had a terrible experience."

He shook his head sternly. "I am not speaking of that kind of dreaming, Renie. Those are the dreams that trouble individuals, made up of the things in their own lives-the dreams of city-people, if you will not take offense at my saying it. But I am speaking of something different, a kind of ripple in the dream that is dreaming us. I know the difference. What has come to me in the past days is the kind of dream my people have when the rain will soon fall after a long drought, or when strangers are approaching across the desert. This is a dream of what will be, not of what has been."

"You mean seeing the future?"

"I do not know. It does not seem that way to me, any more than seeing the shadow of something and knowing that the thing itself will follow is seeing the future. When Grandfather Mantis knew that his time on this earth was ending, when he knew that the time had come at last to sit down at the campfire with the All-Devourer, he had such dreams. Even when the sun is high, we know that it will sink again and night will come. There is nothing magical about such knowledge."

She didn't know how to respond. Ideas like that irritated her sense of the rational, but she had never found it easy to dismiss !Xabbu's concerns and insights. "Let's say I believe you, just for the sake of discussion. Something is stalking us, you said. What does that mean? That we have made enemies? But we know that already."

Outside the bus window, the gleaming security towers of the business district were being supplanted by an increasingly shabby landscape of jerry-rigged flatblocks and storefront businesses, each with its own garish squirt of chemical neon on the front. The street crowds seemed purposeless from her perspective, eddying randomly like an inanimate, liquid thing.

"I am speaking of something greater. There is a poem that I was taught in school-an English poet, I think. It spoke of a beast slouching toward Bethlehem."

"I remember that, sort of. Blood-dimmed tides. Anarchy loose in the world."

He nodded. "An apocalyptic image, I was told. A vision of the end of things. I spoke a moment ago of Mantis and the All-Devourer. Grandfather Mantis was told in a vision that a great time of change was coming, and he prepared his people to leave the earth forever because their time upon it had finished." His small, fine-featured face was solemn, but she could see something in his eyes and the set of his mouth, a kind of feverish despair. He was terrified. "I feel that I am being granted such a vision, Renie. There is a great change coming, a . . . what were the words? A rough beast waiting to be born."

A chill ran across the surface of Renie's skin, as though the bus cabin's long-expired air-conditioning had suddenly sprung back to life. Was her friend going mad? He had said that city life had destroyed many of his people-was this obsession with dreams and the myths of his ancestors the beginnings of a religious mania that would eventually destroy him, too?

I've done this to him. Bad enough that he's had to adjust to a completely different kind of life. But now I've dragged him right in over his head, into the weirdest things our society has to offer. It's like dropping a young child onto a battlefield or into an S & M orgy.

"And what should we do?" she asked, struggling to remain at least outwardly calm. "Where is this threat corning from-do you know?"

He stared at her for a moment "Yes. I could not say what are its causes or what the results might be, but I do not need those things to sense the place the problem comes from-even a blind man can find the campfire. I told you that the club, Mister J's, was a bad place. It is, but it is not the heart of the shadow. I think it is like a hole in some very large nest of hornets-do you see? If you put your ear to that hole, you will hear the sound of things that fly and seize and sting, but even if you seal it with mud, the hornets are still alive in the darkness inside and they will find their way out of other holes."

"I'm confused, !Xabbu. I don't really know what you're saying."

He gave her a tiny, sad smile. "I do not know exactly myself, Renie. Just because I can see the shadow does not mean I can recognize what casts it. But there is more involved in this thing than merely your brother-more perhaps than even the lives of many other children like him. I smell it like I smell the approach of a storm. I may not be able to understand any more clearly than that, but it is enough to frighten me very badly."

They continued in silence until !Xabbu got off at his stop in Chesterville a few minutes later. Renie waved to him from the window as the bus pulled away, but his words had upset her. She was torn. It was hard to know which was worse, to believe that her friend might be going mad, or to think that he might truly know something that others did not, something dreadful.

The sun was going down as her bus headed toward Pinetown. The square, drab buildings cast long shadows. Renie watched the orange streetlamps kindle and tried to imagine what kind of beasts might wait in the darkness beyond the circle of light.

Del Ray was smiling, but he did not seem entirely happy to receive her call. Renie moved the exam she'd been preparing to one side of the screen, then enlarged Del Ray's window. "Have you found out anything?"

He shook his head. "This isn't a good time for me to talk."

"Then would you like me to meet you somewhere?"

"No. Look, I don't have much for you yet-it's a tricky situation. There's been a lot of interest in the corporation you asked about, but nothing obviously out of the ordinary. They own a bunch of clubs, some production companies, a couple of gear houses, mostly net-related stuff. There was one court case involving one of their other clubs that got as far as a lower court in China, filed by a woman named Quan."

"What do you mean, court case? What about?"

Again he shook his head. "A suit for negligence, something like that. It's probably nothing-the family dropped it before trial. Look, there's not much I can find out without getting access to sealed legal records. And it's not something I'm supposed to be doing, really." He hesitated. "How's Stephen? Any better?"

"No. Things have been pretty much the same for weeks now." She had dreamed of Stephen the night before, of him screaming for help at the bottom of a deep hole while she tried to explain the urgency to some kind of policemen or the petty official who was paying more attention to stroking a sleek dog. Just thinking about the dream made her angry. "So, is that all you're going to tell me-there's not much? What about the people who own that horrible place? There must be names on the licenses. Or is that too much trouble to find out?"

For a moment his professional composure slipped. "I don't have to do anything for you at all, you know."

"No." She stared at the screen, wondering what exactly she had once found so utterly engaging about him. He was just a nice-looking man in a suit "No, you don't"

"I'm sorry. I didn't mean . . . I want to help, Renie. Things are just. . . ." He hesitated. "Things are difficult for me at the moment."

She wondered if he was referring to his domestic life, or ordinary work crises, or something more sinister. "Well, I meant what I said. Be careful. And I do appreciate your help."

"I'll get you everything I can. It's . . . well, it's just not as easy as it sounds. Take care."

"I will. Thank you."

When he had hung up, she lit a cigarette, too unsettled to get back to work on the examination. It was hard to tell whether Del Ray's apparent agitation had to do with guilt over the way their relationship had ended, discomfort at having become embroiled in someone's bizarre conspiracy theory, or something else entirely. If it was the second thing, she couldn't really blame him. Six months ago, if someone had brought the same crazy story to her, she would have been doubtful, too. Even now a strong case could be made that she had merely hit a patch of bad luck and was finding a way to string it all together into a structure that made sense. Wasn't that the way someone said religions-and paranoid obsessions-got started? As an attempt to make sense of a universe too large and too random for human comprehension?

What did she have, really? Her brother had mysteriously fallen ill, but strange, inexplicable illnesses were the stuff of historical record since time out of mind, and continued right up until the present day. There had been more sudden outbreaks of previously unknown viruses in the past fifty years than there had been in the five centuries before.

She and !Xabbu had discovered a seeming correlation between the incidences of coma and net usage, but there were dozens of other possible explanations for that.

Her flatblock had burned, and although there had been no definitive report, there were certainly whispers of arson. But that, too, was remarkably unremarkable. She had no idea of the statistics, but she was quite sure there must be hundreds of arson fires in Durban every year, not to mention the thousands of accidental ones.

The only things that even halfway held up as evidence were the murderous attack on Susan, the truly peculiar events surrounding Mister J's, and the appearance of that astonishing golden city. But even these things could be odd but explicable happenstance. Only the strong links between these apparent coincidences separated her certainty that she was onto something from the most pathetic examples of persecution mania.

Renie sighed. So, are !Xabbu and I legitimate whistle-blowers? Or are we turning into the kind of people you see on the tabnets claiming space aliens are beaming messages into their brains?