City of Golden Shadow (7 page)

If the things they built for themselves were spectacular, these denizens of the innermost circle of humanity, the things they made of themselves were no less so. In a place where the only absolute requirement was to exist, and only budget, good taste, and common courtesy limited invention (and some District habitués were notoriously long on the first and short on the other two), just the passersby promenading along the major thoroughfares made for an endless and endlessly varied show. From the extremes of current fashion-elongated heads and limbs seemed to be a current trend-to the replication of real things and people-Renie had seen three different Hitlers on her first trip to the District, one of them wearing a ballgown made of blue orchids-on out to the realms of design where the fact of a body was only a starting point, the District was a nonstop parade. In the early days, tourists who had bought their way in with a holiday package had often sat at sidewalk cafés gawping for hours until, like the most junior of netboys, their real meat bodies collapsed from hunger and thirst and their simulations froze solid or winked out. It was easy to understand why. There was always one more thing to see, one more fabulous oddity appearing in the distance.

But she was here today for only one purpose: to find Stephen. Meanwhile, she was running up a bill on the Poly's account, and she had now incurred the wrath of a nasty little man at the Gateway. Thinking of this, she programmed Chancellor Bundazi's delivery for Entry plus 19 minutes, since she knew Mister "I am a Citizen" would be checking up. The delivery was actually a piece of department mail addressed to the Chancellor, one of no import. She had swapped its bill of lading with something actually addressed for hand-delivery to one of Ms. Bundazi's other nodes, and she hoped the resultant confusion would be blamed on the mail room-actually a two decades out-of-date electronic mail system-which certainly could never be blamed too much. Trying to get something through the Poly's internal delivery system was like trying to push butter through stone.

After a moment's examination of Stephen's message coordinates, Renie jumped to Lullaby Lane, the main thoroughfare of Toytown, a backwater sector which housed the smaller and less successful creative firms and merchants, as well as the residential nodes of those clinging to Inner District status by their fingernails. A subscription to the Inner District net was very expensive, and so were the creative fashions necessary to retain one's place among the elite, but even if you couldn't afford a new and exotic sim every day, even if you couldn't afford to redesign your business or personal node every week, just keeping Inner District residency was still major social cachet in the real world. These days, it was often the last pretension that the downwardly mobile would relinquish-and they did not give it up easily.

Renie could not immediately locate the signal source, so she slowed herself down to what would have been a walking pace, except her stripped-down sim did nothing as expensively, uselessly complicated as walking. Toytown's fringe status was apparent everywhere around her. Most of the nodes were functional in the extreme-white, black, or gray boxes that served no other purpose than to separate one struggling Citizen's enterprise from another's. Some of the other nodes had been quite grand once, but now their styles were hopelessly outdated. Some were even beginning to disappear, the more expensive visual functions sacrificed so the owner could cling to the space. She passed one large node, built to resemble something out of Fritz Lang's Metropolis-ancient Science Fiction had been a District fad almost a decade ago-which was now entirely transparent, the great dome a polyhedral skeleton, all its detail work gone, its once-magnificent colors and textures switched off.

There was only one node on Lullaby Lane that looked both contemporary and expensive, and it was very near the source-point of Stephen's message. The virtual structure was a huge Gothic mansion covering an area the size of a couple of real-world city blocks, spiky with turrets and as labyrinthine as a termite nest. Colored lights flashed from the windows: deep red; dull chalky purple; and seizure-inducing white. A thick rumble of music advertised that this was some kind of club, as did the shifting letters that moved along the facade like gleaming snakes, spelling out in English-and apparently also in Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, and a few other alphabets-"MISTER J'S." In the midst of the writhing letters, appearing and then immediately vanishing as though the Cheshire Cat were having an indecisive day, was a vast, toothy, disembodied grin.

She remembered the name of the place-Stephen had mentioned it. This was what had drawn them into the Inner District, or at least into this part of it. She stared, appalled and fascinated. It was easy to see its allure-every carefully shadowed angle, every light-leaking window screamed out that here was escape, here was freedom, especially freedom from disapproval. Here was a haven where everything was permitted. The thought of her eleven-year-old brother in such a place sent a cold bolt of fear up her spine. But if that was where he was, that was where she would go. . . .

"Renie! Up here!"

It was a quiet cry, as though from somewhere close. Stephen was trying to narrowcast, but he didn't realize there was no such thing as narrowcasting in the District, unless you could pay for privacy. If someone wanted to hear, they'd hear, so speed was the only thing that mattered now.

"Where are you? Are you in this . . . club?"

"No! Across the street! In the building with the cloth thing on the front."

She turned to look. Some distance down, on the opposite side of Lullaby Lane from Mister J's, was what looked like the shell of an old Toytown hotel-a soothing simulation of a real-world resting place designed for District tourists, a spot to receive messages and plan day trips. They had been more popular in the early days, when VR was a slightly intimidating novelty. This one's heyday was obviously long over. The walls had lost color definition and were actually erased in some spots. Over its wide front door hung an awning, unmoving when it should have undulated in a simulated breeze, dulled like the rest of the structure to a state of minimal existence.

Renie moved to the doorway, then, after a brief survey suggested there was no longer anything in the way of security, moved inside. The interior was even more forsaken than the exterior, time and neglect having reduced it to a warehouse of phantom cubes stacked like discarded toy blocks. A few better-manufactured sim objects had maintained their integrity, and stood out in eerie contrast. The front desk was one of these, a shimmering block of neon blue marble. She found Stephen and his friend Eddie behind it.

"What the hell are you playing at?"

Both of them were wearing SchoolNet sims, scarcely even as detailed as hers, but she could still tell from Stephen's face that he was terrified. He scrambled up and grabbed her around the waist. Only the hands of her sim were wired for force-feedback, but she knew he was squeezing hard. "They're after us," Stephen said breathlessly. "People from the club. Eddie has a blanket shield and we've been using that to hide, but it's just a cheap one and they're going to find us soon."

"Since you told me you were in here, anyone who cares around here knows it, too." She turned to Eddie. "And where in God's name did you get a blanket? No, don't tell me. Not now." She reached down and carefully dislodged Stephen. It was strange to feel his slender arm between her fingers when she knew that their true bodies were on opposite sides of town in the real world, but it was that sort of miracle that had led her to the VR field in the first place. "We'll talk later-and I've got lots of questions. But for now we'll get you out of here before you get us all sent before a magistrate."

Eddie finally spoke. "But . . . Soki. . . ."

"Soki what?" Renie said impatiently. "Is he here, too?"

"He's still in Mister J's. Sort of." Eddie appeared to have run out of nerve. Stephen finished for him.

"Soki . . . he fell into a hole. Kind of a hole. When we tried to get him out, these men came. I think they were Puppets." His voice trembled. "They were real scary."

Renie shook her head. "I can't do anything about Soki. I'm running out of time and I'm not going to trespass in a private club. If he gets caught, he gets caught. If he tells who was with him, then you'll have to face the music. Netboy lesson number one: you get what you deserve."

"But . . . but they might hurt him."

"Hurt him? Scare him, maybe-and that's no more than you lot deserve. But no one's going to hurt him." She grabbed Eddie, so she now held both boys by the arm; back in the Poly's processors, her escape algorithm added two. "And we're going to. . . ."

There was a thunderous crash nearly as loud as the bomb at the Poly, so loud that at the apex of its roar Renie's hearplugs could not deliver it and went mercifully silent for an instant The front of the hotel dissolved into swirling motes of netstuff. A huge shadow loomed between them and the Toytown street, something far bigger than most normal sims. That was about all she could tell: there was something about it, something dark and arrhythmically wavery in its display pattern, that made it almost impossible to look at.

"Jesus." Renie's ears were ringing. That would teach her to leave the gain up on her plugs. "Jesus!" For a moment she stood frozen as the shape loomed over her, a brilliantly realized abstract expression of the concepts Big and Dangerous. Then she squeezed the boys tightly and exited the system.

"We . . . we got into Mister J's. Everybody does it at school."

Renie stared at her brother across the kitchen table. She had been worried for him, even frightened, but now anger was pushing the other emotions aside. Not only had he put her to a great deal of trouble, but then it had taken him an hour longer to get home from Eddie's flatblock than it had taken her to return from the Poly, forcing her to wait.

"I don't care if everybody does it, Stephen, and I seriously doubt that's true anyway. I'm really scorched! It's illegal for you to enter the District, and we truly couldn't afford the fines if you got caught. Plus, if my boss finds out what I did to get you out, I could get fired." She leaned forward and grabbed his hand, squeezing until he winced. "I could lose my job, Stephen!"

"Shut up, there, you fool children!" their father called out from the back bedroom. "You making my head hurt."

If there had not been a door between them, Renie's look might have set Long Joseph's sheets on fire.

"I'm sorry, Renie. I'm really sorry. Really. Could I try Soki again?" Without waiting for permission, he turned to the wall-screen and told it to call. No one answered at Soki's end.

Renie tried to rein in her temper. "What was this about Soki falling down a hole?"

Stephen drummed his fingers nervously on the table. "Eddie dared him."

"Dared him to do what? Damn it, Stephen, don't make me drag this out of you word by word."

"There's this room in Mister J's. Some guys from school told us about it. They have . . . well, there's things in there that are real chizz."

"Things? What things?"

"Just . . . things. Stuff to see." Stephen wouldn't meet her eyes. "But we didn't see it, Renie. We couldn't find it. The club is major big on the inside-you wouldn't believe it! It goes on forever!" For a moment his eyes sparkled as, remembering the glory that was Mister J's, he forgot that he was in serious trouble. A look at his sister's face reminded him. "Anyway, we were looking and looking, and we asked people-I think they were mostly Citizens, but some acted really weird-but no one could tell us. Then someone, this far major fat guy, said you could get in through this room down in the basement."

Renie suppressed a shiver of distaste. "Before you tell me any more, young man, I want one thing clear. You are never going back to this place again. Understand? Look me in the eye. Never,"

Reluctantly, Stephen nodded. "Okay, okay. I won't. So we went down all these windy stairs-it was like a dungeon game!-and after a while found this door. Soki opened it and . . . fell through."

"Fell through what?"

"I don't know! It was just like a big hole on the other side. There was smoke and some blue lights down deep inside it."

Renie sat back in her chair. "Someone's nasty, sadistic little trick. You all deserved to be scared, but I hope it didn't scare him too much. Was he using bootleg SchoolNet equipment like you two?"

"No, Just his home setup. A cheap Nigerian station."

Which was what their own family owned. How could kids be poor and still be so damn snobbish?

"Well, then there won't have been much vertigo or gravity simulation. He'll be fine." She stared narrowly at Stephen. "You did hear me, didn't you? You're never going there again, or you will have no station time and no visits to Eddie or Soki forever-instead of just for the rest of the month."

"What?" Stephen leaped up in outrage. "No net?"

"End of the month. You're lucky I haven't told Dad-you'd be getting a belt across your troublesome black behind."

"I'd rather have that than no net," he said sullenly.

"You'd be getting both."

After she sent Stephen grumbling and complaining to his room, Renie accessed her work library-making sure that her inbox contained no memos from Ms. Bundazi about defrauding the Poly-and called up some files on Inner District businesses. She found Mister J's, registered as a "gaming and entertainment club" and licensed strictly for adult visitors. It was owned by something called the "Happy Juggler Novelty Corporation," and had first been opened under the name "Mister Jingo's Smile."

As she waited for sleep that night, she was visited by images of the club's ramshackle facade, of turrets like pointed idiot heads and windows like staring eyes. Hardest of all to escape was the memory of the huge mobile mouth and rows of gleaming teeth that squirmed above the door-a gateway that only led inward.