City of Golden Shadow (65 page)

"But that's just the point! It was all multinational by then!"

"Oh, McEnery, you are such a cabrón!" said another voice. "Chupa mi pedro!"

"Pardon me," said Renie when the argument had quieted for a moment. "We're looking for Blue Dog Anchorite. We were told he lives on Founder's Hill."

All the sims swiveled to look at her. One, a teddy bear with incongruously masculine characteristics, guaffawed in the cracked voice of an old man. "They're looking for the Dog. The Dog's got fans."

One of the other sims cocked a vestigial thumb toward the far corner of the room. "Overthere."

Renie looked, but could not make out any individuals at that distance. She beckoned for !Xabbu to follow her. He was staring at the teddy bear.

"Don't even ask me," Renie said.

There was indeed one sim sitting by itself in the corner, an odd one-a dark-skinned old man, with fierce eyes and a bristling gray beard who appeared strangely real in some ways and strangely unreal in others. He was dressed in the casual style of fifty years earlier, but with a turban and what Renie at first took to be some kind of ceremonial garment over the clothes. It was only after a few moments that she realized the outer wrap was an old bathrobe.

"Pardon me. . . ." she began, but the old man cut her off.

"What do you three want?"

It took Renie a moment to remember Martine, who was being unusually silent. "Are you . . . are you Blue Dog Anchorite?" Not only his sim was puzzling: there was something odd about his virtual chair, too.

"Who wants to know?" He had an unmistakable South African accent. Renie felt a surge of hope.

"We're friends of Susan Van Bleeck. We have reason to believe she spoke with you fairly recently."

The turbaned head came forward. The old hacker looked like a vulture startled in its nest. "Friends of Susan's? Why the hell should I believe that? How did you find me?"

"You have no cause to fear us," Martine said.

Renie cut in. "We need your help. Did Susan contact you about a golden city, something she couldn't identify. . . ?"

"Ssshhh! Good God!" The old man, startled for a moment out of bad temper, waved violently to silence her. "Don't make such a goddamn fuss. No names, no pack drill. And no talk here. We'll go to my place."

He moved his fingers and his chair rose. "Follow me. No, never mind, I'll give you the location and you can meet me there. Damn." He said this with some feeling. "I wish you and Susan had come to me sooner."

"Why?" Renie asked. "What do you mean?"

"Because it might have been early enough to do something then. But now it's too damn late."

He vanished.

CHAPTER 22

NETFEED/INTERACTIVES: GCN, Hr. 5.5 (Eu, NAm)-"HOW TO KILL YOUR TEACHER"

(visual: Looshus and Kantee in tunnel)

VO: Looshus (Ufour Halloran) and Kantee (Brandywine Garcia) are on the run, pursued by Jang (Avram Reiner), the assassin from the Educators' Union. 10 supporting characters open, audition for long-term role of Mrs. Torquemada. Flak to: GCN.HOW2KL.CAST

He was thinking hard, but not getting much of anywhere. "Beezle," he whispered, "find me that weird little snippet on 'bandit nodes.' See if you can get an address on the author."

His mother looked into the rearview mirror. "What did you say?"

"Nothing." He slumped lower in the seat, watching the perimeter fences move past the safety windows. He reached up to his neck, fondling the new wireless connector, a birthday gift he had bought himself through mail order. The telematic jack was light and almost unnoticeable-all that showed was a rounded white plastic button fitted over the top of his neurocannula. It seemed to work as well as the reviews had suggested, and it was an incredible pleasure to be able to go online without being tied to a cable.

"I've got the address," Beezle rasped. "Do you want to coil it now?"

"No. I'll deal with it later."

"Orlando, what are you doing? Who are you talking to back there?"

He brought his hand up to hide the t-jack. "Nobody, Vivien, I'm just . . . just singing to myself."

The matte-black cylinder of the guardhouse loomed up beyond the windshield, distracting her. She stopped at the inside checkpoint to beam in the security code, then, when the barrier dropped, drove forward to the guardhouse itself.

Orlando took his new wireless squeezers from his pocket.

Beezle-any messages? he typed.

"Just one." Beezle was right beside his ear-or at least it sounded like it. In fact, Beezle was pumping data directly into his auditory nerves. "From Elaine Strassman at Indigo Gear. She asked for an appointment."

"Who?" Orlando said out loud, then looked up guiltily. His mom was busy talking to the security guard, a burly figure whose black Fibrox anti-impact suit matched the tiles on the guardhouse. What's Indigo? he fingered.

"Small, very new technology company. They did a presentation on SchoolNet last semester."

It rang a bell, but only vaguely. He had been putting out a lot of feelers about TreeHouse, but couldn't think of any that might have wound up at Indigo, a ferociously trendy company based in Southern California, if he remembered their presentation correctly.

Go ahead and set up a meeting. Tonight after I get home or tomorrow morning when Vivien goes to class.

"Gotcha, boss."

"We should be back no later than four," his mother was telling the guard.

"If you want to stop and do some shopping, ma'am, you just call us and let us know and we'll set back your ETR." The guard, a young, round-headed blond, had his thumbs tucked into his belt; his fingers absently fondled the sidearm sitting high in its holster. "Don't want to get an alarm situation going if we don't need to."

"Thank you, Holger. We'll be back on time, I'm sure." She thumbed the window button and waited for a gap to open in the large external barrier before sliding through to the street." How are you doing, Orlando?" she called back.

"Fine, Vivien." In truth he was feeling a little achy, but it wouldn't help to mention it, and it would just make her feel she should do something. He straightened up in the seat as Crown Heights Community and its sheltering walls disappeared behind them.

Not long after they rolled down off the curving hill-roads and onto level ground, leaving the wire-fenced tree preserve behind, the car began to shudder. Even expensive shock absorbers could do little to compensate for potholes like moon craters. The State of California and local governments had been arguing for years about who had responsibility for the larger arterial roads. They hadn't resolved the disagreement yet.

"You're driving too fast, Vivien." He winced. He could feel each bounce in his bones.

"I'm fine. We're almost there." She spoke with clenched-teeth cheerfulness. She hated driving, and hated having to take Orlando down to the flats to see his doctor. He sometimes thought that one of the reasons she got mad at him was because he'd been stupid enough to have a disease that couldn't be treated remotely, or at the friendly and very secure Crown Heights Medical Center.

She also got mad because she was afraid for him. Vivien was very sensible, and so was his father, Conrad, but it was the kind of sensible that liked to throw reasonable arguments at things until they went away. If they didn't go away-well, Vivien and Conrad just sort of stopped talking about them.

It was strange to be out from under the trees and back into the flatlands. In Crown Heights, behind the green belt and its army of private guards, it was possible to believe that things hadn't changed much in the last couple of hundred years, that Northern California was still an essentially open place, a temperate paradise of redwoods and well-spaced, secure communities. Which, Orlando reflected, was probably why people like his parents lived in Crown Heights.

The San Francisco Bay Area metroplex had once been a discrete cluster of cities on the edge of the v-shaped bay, like fingertips delicately holding something of value. Now the cities had grown together into a single mass that clenched the bay and its connected waterways in a broad fist well over a hundred miles square. Only the fabulously valuable corporate farming land of the Central Valley had kept the metroplex and its southern rival, metastasizing around Los Angeles, from merging into a single uniform smear of dense urban growth.

As they passed under the cantilevered bulk of Highway 92, Orlando scrunched down in his seat so he could see the hammock city. He had long been fascinated by the multilevel shantytowns, sometimes called "honeycombs" by their residents-or "rats' nests" by the kind of people who lived in Crown Heights. When he had asked his parents about them, they had failed to tell him much more than the obvious, so he had searched the net for old news footage.

Long ago, he had discovered, during the first great housing crisis at the beginning of the century, squatters had begun to build shantytowns beneath the elevated freeways, freeform agglomerations of cardboard crates, aluminum siding, and plastic sheets. As the ground beneath the concrete chutes filled up with an ever-thickening tide of the dispossessed, later arrivals began to move upward into the vaulting itself, bolting cargo nets, canvas tarpaulins, and military surplus parachutes onto the pillars and undersides of the freeways. Rope walkways soon linked the makeshift dwellings, and ladders linked the shantytown below with the one growing above. Resident craftsmen and amateur engineers added intermediary levels, until a marrow of shabby multilevel housing ran beneath nearly every freeway and aqueduct.

With the sun near noon, the underside of Highway 92 was dark, but the webwork city was full of movement. Orlando lowered the window to get a better view. A group of young children were chasing each other across a broad expanse of netting seventy feet above his head. They looked like squirrels, swift and confident, and he envied them. Then he reminded himself of their poverty, of the overcrowding and unsanitary conditions, and of the dangers that came purely from their environment. Besides the violence that always threatened urban poor, the residents of the hammock cities also had gravity to contend with: not a day went past without someone falling onto a freeway and being crushed, or drowning in a waterway. Just last year, the sheer weight of the Barrio Los Moches honeycomb had brought down a section of the San Diego Freeway, killing hundreds of residents and scores of drivers.

"Orlando? Why is that window open?"

"I'm just looking."

"Close it. There's no reason to have it open."

Orlando ran the window back up, putting both the children's voices and most of the sunlight on the other side of the smoked glass.

They crept along the El Camino Real, the broad main strip of neo-neon and holographed advertising images that stretched fifty miles down the peninsula from San Francisco. The sidewalks were full of people, half of whom seemed to be living in the doorways of buildings or lounging in informal congregation outside the sealed, card-activated bus stops. Orlando's mother was driving edgily, despite being hemmed in by shoals of smaller automotive fish, mopeds and minicars. Pedestrians walked past slowly at the intersections, studying the one-way windows of the Gardiners' car with the calculating faces of shoplifters observed on closed-circuit security video.

Drumming her fingers on the wheel, Vivien stopped the car at another traffic light. A group of young Hispanic men stood in a ragged circle on the near corner, the goggles pushed up on their foreheads making it seem they had extra sets of eyes. Even in the bright sun their faces seemed to pulse with light, although the implants-slender tubes of chemical neon beneath the skin, arranged in fetishistic tribal patterns-were far more impressive at night, under the dark concrete overhangs.

Orlando had heard his parents' friends talk about Goggle-boys with a mixture of fear and mythmaking relish, claiming they wore the distinctive eyewear to protect themselves from chemical spray reprisal when they were mugging people, but Orlando recognized most of the lenses they wore as flashy but low-power VR rigs, little more use than old-fashioned walkie-talkies. It was a trend, just a way of looking like you might have to pop into a virtual meeting at any moment, or take an important call, but in the meantime you were just hanging around on the corner.

One of the young men broke off from the group and headed toward the crosswalk. His long coat of magenta 'chute flapped in the wind behind him like a flag. A tattoo of a chain began in the hairline beside his temple and ran down to his jaw, and jumped into darker relief every few seconds as the implants pulsed the skin. He was smiling as though remembering something funny. Before he reached their car-before it was clear he was even approaching the car-Vivien accelerated through the red light, narrowly missing one of the battle cruisers euphemistically called a "family wagon," The other car's proximity lights blazed out like the warning flash of a cobra's hood.

"Vivien, you ran that signal!"

"We're almost there."

Orlando turned to look out the rear window. The young man stood on the corner staring after them, coat flapping. He looked as though he were waiting for the rest of the parade to show up.