City of Golden Shadow (69 page)

Renie was leaning forward. "Left from what?"

"I'm getting there, girl!"

"Don't shout at me!" Renie was in danger of losing her composure. "Look, I've been kicked out of my job, but I'm still using the school's equipment. Someone could call the police on me at any moment for God's sake. Everywhere I go for information, I get a song and dance and a lot of mystery."

Through the machineries of virtuality, she felt !Xabbu touch her arm, a homely reminder to stay calm.

"Well," Singh said, cheerful again, "beggars can't be choosers, girlie."

"Is this place secure?" Martine asked suddenly.

"Like a soundproof bunker in the middle of the Sahara." Singh laughed, revealing a gap in his teeth. "I should know-I wrote the security gear for this whole place. Even if there was a data-tap on one of your lines, I'd know it" He laughed again, a quite self-satisfied wheeze. "Now, you ask me to get on with it-let me get on with it. Misra was a security specialist, too . . . but it didn't do him any good. They got him as well. Suicide-a massive overdose of his anti-epilepsy medication. But I had just talked to him two nights before and he wasn't depressed, wasn't in the least suicidal. Frightened, yes-we had realized that the odds against us were getting worse and worse. So when he died, I knew for sure. They were killing off everyone that knew anything about Otherland."

"Otherland?" For the first time since Renie had met her-if that was the proper word-Martine sounded truly startled. "What does this have to do with the Otherland?"

A squirming chill traveled Renie's spine. "Why? What is it?"

The old man bobbed his head, pleased. "Ah, now you're interested! Now you want to listen!"

"We have been listening, Mister Singh-listening very carefully." !Xabbu spoke quietly, but with unusual force.

"Slow down," Renie demanded. "What is this Otherland thing? It sounds like an amusement park."

The painting rotated, the Mona Lisa's pale face swiveling toward her. "It is, of a sort-or so the rumors say. Otherland is even less known than TreeHouse. It seems to be some kind of playground for the rich, a large-scale simulation. That is all I have heard. It is privately owned and kept very quiet, so there is little information available." She leaned back toward Singh. "Please continue."

He nodded as though receiving his due. "We were contracted through Telemorphix South Africa. I was working for them then-this was nearly thirty years ago. Dierstroop actually managed the project, but he let me choose the people, which is why Melani and the others were involved. We put together a security installation for what I thought was some kind of business network-hush-hush, all very top secret, money no obstacle. Some huge corporate customer, that's all we knew. It was only as we worked at it that we found out it was actually a VR node, or rather a string of VR nodes on parallel supercomputers, the biggest, most high-speed VR net anyone had ever seen. The consortium that owned it was called TGB. That's all we knew about them. They were TGB, we were TMX." He barked a laugh. "Never trust people that like to call things by initials, that's my philosophy. It is now, anyway, I wish it had been then.

"Anyway, the TGB people-or at least some of their engineers-occasionally referred to this new network as the 'Otherland.' Like 'motherland' without an 'm.' I think it was a joke, but I never saw the point. Melani and I and some of the others used to try to guess what it was going to be used for-we figured it was meant to be some kind of huge VR theme park, an online version of that Disney monstrosity getting bigger every day over in Baja California, but it seemed pretty high-powered even for that. Dierstroop kept telling us we were wasting our time, that we should just shut up and collect our-admittedly-substantial paychecks. But there was something really weird about the whole project, and when a decade or so had gone by after we'd finished and there still hadn't been any announcement about it, we all pretty much admitted to ourselves that it wasn't a commercial property. I figured it was some kind of government thing-Telemorphix has always been really friendly with governments, especially the American one, of course. Wells has always known which side of his bread was buttered."

"So what was it, then?" Renie asked. "And why would someone kill your friends to keep it secret? And, more importantly to me, what does this have to do with my little brother? Susan Van Bleeck talked to you, Mister Singh-what did she say?"

"I'm almost there. Hang on for a moment" The old man reached out for nothing visible. A moment later a cup appeared in his hand. He took a long, shaky drink. "The whole room's not live," he explained, "just me. That's better." He smacked his lips. "Okay, now we come to your part of things.

"Susan had some luck researching that weird city of yours. The buildings had some odd little Aztec-type elements, according to this architecture gear she used on it-tiny details, things only an expert system would notice. So she started running searches on people who knew about such things, hoping to find someone who could maybe help her place your city."

"So why did she contact you?"

"She didn't, not until she'd run across a name in her list of experts that she remembered me mentioning to her. So she called me up. Startled the hell out of me. I recognized the bastard's name that she'd turned up, all right. He was one of the TGB muckamucks. We had to answer to him when we were doing the security for this Otherland thing of ours. Bolivar Atasco."

"Atasco?" Renie shook her head in befuddlement. "I thought he was an archaeologist"

"Whatever else he does, he was top man on the Otherland project," Singh growled. "I flipped out, of course. Because by now, I was the last one left, and I knew something was going on. I told Susan to get the hell away from it. I wish . . . I wish she'd called me sooner." For a moment, his stiff facade threatened to fall away. He fought for composure. "Those shits got her the same night. Probably within a few hours of her being on the phone with me."

"Oh, God. That's why she made that note and hid it," Renie said. "But why the book? Why not just his name?"

"What book?" asked Singh, nettled at losing the spotlight.

"A book on . . . Central American cultures. Something like that. Written by this Atasco. Martine and I both looked it over, and we couldn't make anything of it."

A window flashed open next to Martine. "This is it. But as Renie said, we have examined it carefully."

The old man squinted at the window. "Early Mesoamerica. Yeah, I remember he'd written some famous textbook. But that was a long time ago-maybe you have the wrong edition." He scrolled the book. "There's no author picture in this version, for one thing. If you want to get a look at this bastard, you ought to find an older printing of the book."

The window closed. "I will see what I can discover," Martine said.

"So, what do we know, exactly?" Renie closed her eyes for a moment, trying to shut out the dingy room and pull together the tangled threads of information. "Atasco headed up this Otherland project, and you think that the people who worked on it with you have been murdered?"

Singh grinned acidly. "I don't think, girlie, I know."

"But what does that . . . that city have to do with anything-the image someone planted in my computer? And why would these people have anything to do with my brother? I don't get it!"

Another window popped open in the middle of the room.

"You are right, Mister Singh," Martine said. "The earlier edition does have a photo of the author."

The entire contents of the book scrolled past in a waterfall of gray, then Renie was staring at a picture of Bolivar Atasco, a handsome, narrow-faced man on the far side of middle-age. He was sitting in a room full of leafy plants and old statues. Behind him, in a frame on the wall, was. . . .

"Oh, my God." Renie reached out a sim hand as though she could touch it. The picture behind him had none of the vibrancy of the original-it was only a sketch, a watercolor like an architect's rendering-but it was beyond any doubt the city, the impossible, surrealistic golden city. Beside her, !Xabbu made a clicking noise of surprise. "Oh, my God," she said again.

"I'm fine, !Xabbu. I just felt a little faint. This is a lot to take in." She waved her friend away. He retreated with a cartoonish worried look on his sim face.

"After your recent illness, I am concerned for you," he said.

"I'm not having a heart problem. More of a comprehension problem." She turned wearily to the old man and the Mona Lisa. "So what do we have here? I mean, let me get this straight. Some crazy archaeologist, maybe working for the CIA or something, builds a huge, superfast VR network. Then he starts killing off all the people who worked on it. At the same time, he puts my brother-and maybe a few thousand other kids-into a coma. Meanwhile, he's beaming me some kind of Aztec-influenced building designs. It all makes perfect sense."

"It is indeed very strange," Martine said. "But there must be a pattern."

"Tell me when you figure it out," Renie replied. "Why is this man sending me pictures of an imaginary city? Is this supposed to be a warning to back off? If so, it's the most damned obscure warning I can imagine. And I can believe-just barely-that there could be some project this TGB group, or whatever their name is, wants to keep hidden, even to the point of killing off a bunch of old programmers. But what does that have to do with my brother Stephen? He's lying unconscious in a hospital bed. I almost wound up the same, thanks to some bizarre horror movie with too many arms, but I'll just leave that out for now, to keep things simple." She snorted in disgust, the giddiness of fatigue threatening to overwhelm her. "What in the name of heaven does my Stephen have to do with an international plot?" She turned on Martine, who had been silent for some time. "And what do you know about all this? You've heard of Otherland before. What do you know about these people?"

"I know almost nothing," the French woman said. "But Mister Singh's story. combined with yours, makes me feel certain that there are larger concerns here, shapes that we have not fully understood."

Renie remembered !Xabbu's borrowed phrase. A rough beast. The little man met her eye, but the cut-rate sim kept his expression inscrutable. "Which means?" she asked Martine.

The Mona Lisa sighed, a fluting of breath out of keeping with the painted expression. "I have no answers to your questions, Renie, only information that raises perhaps more questions. The 'TGB' Mister Singh mentions is known to me, although I did not know before they were involved with Otherland. They call themselves The Grail Brotherhood, or sometimes simply The Brotherhood, although the group is reputed to have female members. There is no positive proof that the group even exists, but I have heard of it too many times from sources I trust. They are a very disparate collection, academics like Atasco, financiers, politicians. They are rumored to have other members of an even more unsavory nature. I know nothing else about them for certain, except that they are a magnet for . . . how do you say it? Theories of conspiracy. They are like the Bilderbergers or the Illuminati or the Masons. There are people who blame them every time the Chinese dollar drops, or a hurricane disrupts line service in the Caribbean. But what could they want with children? I have no idea."

This was the longest speech Renie had ever heard Martine make. "Could they be . . . pedophiles or something?"

"They seem to be going to a great deal of trouble without actually laying their hands on any children," Martine pointed out. "Surely rich and powerful people would not expend so much energy when they could procure victims much more simply. More likely, it seems to me that they are trying to frighten these children away from something important, and the illness is an accident, a . . . by-product"

"Organs," said Singh.

"What does that mean?" Renie stared at him.

"Rich people can have lousy health, too," the old man said. "Believe me, when you get to my age, you think a lot about what you could do with a couple of new lungs or kidneys. Maybe it's some kind of organ-harvesting thing. That would explain why they don't want to hurt them, just put them in comas."

Renie felt a cold pang, then a sense of helpless, scalded outrage. Could it be? Her brother, her almost-baby? "But that doesn't make any sense! Even if these children eventually die, the families still have to say the organs can be used. And hospitals don't just sell them to the highest bidder."

The old man's laugh was unpleasant. "You have a young person's faith in the medical establishment, girl."

She shook her head, giving up. "Maybe. Maybe they can bribe the doctors, get the organs. But what does that have to do with your friends and what they worked on, this . . . Otherland?" She turned and pointed to Early Mesoamerica, still hanging in the middle of Singh's room. "And why would Atasco the organ-robber send me a picture of this place? It just doesn't make sense."

"It makes sense to somebody," the old man said bitterly. "Otherwise, I wouldn't be the last security programmer on that project left alive." He sat up suddenly, as though he had been jolted with electrical current. "Just a minute." He remained silent for long moments as the others watched him, wondering. "Yeah," he said at last, speaking to someone not present. "Well, that's interesting, all right. Send me the information."

"Who are you talking to?" Renie asked.

"Some of my fellow TreeHouse residents-the Security Committee. Hold on." He went silent again, listening, then with a few terse sentences ended the conversation, "Apparently someone's been snooping around, asking about 'Melchior,' " he explained. "That was a handle for me and Felton-the one who had the so-called heart attack in the Underground. We used it for some gear contracts, stuff like that. These people came into the programming meeting and started asking for Melchior. Pretty arrogant of them, walking right into TreeHouse that way. Anyway, the programmers jumped on them."

Renie felt her skin bump into gooseflesh at the thought of their faceless enemies so close. "Them?"

"There were two. I'm getting a snapshot of them now. See, I'd posted a general message that anyone asking about any of my colleagues on the Otherland project should be viewed with extreme suspicion, and interrogated if possible."