City of Golden Shadow (89 page)

"Maybe as little as ten minutes, maybe a bit longer. Just to make sure we've got everything hooked up properly." She stared at the taped bundles of fiberlinks stretching between the two tanks and the old-fashioned processors. "Keep a close eye on the vital function readings, okay? I've tested everything as well as I can, but even with Martine and her schematics, there are so many damned hookups I'm not certain about anything." She turned to !Xabbu. who was rechecking his own tank, connection by connection, just as he had seen her do. "Are you ready?"

"If you are, Renie."

"Okay. What should we do? Some simple 3D manipulations, like the ones I used to teach you back at the Poly? Those should be comfortably familiar."

"Certainly. And then perhaps something else."

"Like what?"

"Let us wait and see." He turned away to unkink mask connectors which had surely been unkinked long before.

Renie shrugged. "Jeremiah? Can you turn on the tanks now? The main power switches?"

There was a click and then a quiet hum. For a brief instant the overhead lights flickered. Renie leaned forward to stare into the tank. What appeared to be hard translucent plastic filling three-fourths of the tank turned foggily opaque. A few moments later the substance went clear again, but now seemed to be a liquid. Tiny ripples appeared in its surface, thousands of them in concentric whorls like fingerprints, but before she could make out the larger pattern, the ripples subsided.

"How are the readings?" she asked.

Jeremiah opened a series of windows on the wallscreen. "Everything is right where you wanted it." He sounded nervous.

"Okay. Here we go." Now that the moment had come she was suddenly apprehensive, as though poised at the end of a high diving board. She pulled her shirt over her head and stood for a moment in bra and knickers, looking down from the edge of the tank. Despite the warmth of the room, she felt her skin go pebbly.

It's just an interface, she told herself. Just input-output, like a touchscreen. You let your father and his electricity-in-the-bathtub get to you, girl. Besides, this was going to be a lot easier than when they did it for real-no catheters, no IV lines, and only down for a short time.

She pulled the mask over her face, inserting the plugs into her nostrils and positioning the flexible bubble with its built-in microphone over her mouth. Jeremiah had already started the pumps: except for a faint metallic coldness, the air tasted and felt quite unexceptional. The hearplugs were easy, but it was a little more difficult to get the eyepieces centered properly. When she finally got them locked down, she lowered herself into the tank by touch.

The gel had reached stasis-skin temperature and the same density as her body, so that she floated, weightless. She slowly stretched out her arms to make sure she was centered. The edge of the tank was beyond the reach of both hands; she was hanging in the center of nothing, a small, collapsed star. The darkness and silence were absolute. Renie waited in emptiness for Jeremiah to trigger the initial sequence. It seemed a long wait.

Light leaped into her eyes. The universe suddenly had depth again, although it was an unmeasurable gray depth. She could feel a subtle pressure shift as the hydraulics tilted the V-tank upright to its working angle of ninety degrees. She settled slightly. She had weight, although not much: the floating sensation was replaced by a gentle sensation of gravity, although the gel could adjust that back to weightlessness or whatever else a simulation might call for.

Another figure appeared, hovering before her. It was a bare-bones sim, little more than an international symbol for humanoid.

"!Xabbu? How are you feeling?"

"Very strange. It is different from the Harness Room. I feel much more as though I am . . . in something."

"I know what you mean. Let's try it out." She flashed a few hand-commands and created a darker gray plane beneath them that stretched to a putative horizon, giving the empty space an up and down. They settled onto the plane and felt it flat and hard beneath their feet.

"Is that the bottom of the tank?" asked !Xabbu.

"No, it's just the gel hardening where the processors tell it to harden. Here." She summoned up a ball the same color as the ground. It felt quite substantial beneath her fingers. She deliberately softened it to the consistency of rubber: the processors obliged. "Catch!"

!Xabbu reached up and plucked the ball from the air. "And this, too, is the gel, hardening where we are supposed to feel an object?"

"That's right. It may not even make a whole object, but just give us the correct tactile impressions on our hands."

"And when I throw it," he lobbed it underhand back to Renie, "it is analyzing the arc that it should make, then recreating that, first in my tank, then in yours?"

"Right. Just like what we did in school, except with better equipment. Your tank could be on the other side of the earth, but if I can see you here, the substance in these tanks will make the experience fit."

!Xabbu shook his rudimentary head in appreciation. "I have said it before, Renie, but your science can indeed do wonderful things."

She snorted. "It's not really my science. Besides, as we've already seen, it can do some pretty dreadful things, too."

They created and arranged a few more objects, checking the calibration of the tactor system and the various effects-temperature, gravity-not available on the Poly's more primitive harness system. Renie found herself wishing she had a more sophisticated simulation to work with, something that would give her a real idea of how the tanks could perform. Still, it had been a good first day. "I think we've done what we needed to," she said. "Anything else you want to try?"

"Yes, actually." !Xabbu-or his featureless sim-turned to face her. "Do not worry. I have something to share with you." He waved several hand-commands. The gray universe disappeared, dropping them into blackness.

"What are you doing?" she asked, alarmed.

"Please. I will show you."

Renie held herself still, fighting hard against the urge to thrash around, to demand answers. She did not like letting someone else control things.

Just when the wait seemed interminable, a glow began to spread before her. It started as a deep red, then broke into marbled patterns of white and gold and scarlet and a deep velvety purple. Broken by this glaring brilliance, the darkness formed itself into strange shapes; light and dark swirled and commingled. The light grew steadily brighter in one spot, coalescing at last into a disk so bright she could not look at it directly. The dark areas took on shape and depth as they settled to the bottom of her field of vision like sand poured into a glass of water.

She stood in the middle of a vast, flat landscape painted in harshly brilliant light, broken only by stunted trees and the humps of red rocks. Overhead the sun smoldered like a white-hot ingot.

"It's a desert," she said. "My God, !Xabbu, where did this come from?"

"I made it."

She turned and her surprise deepened. !Xabbu stood beside her, recognizably himself. Gone was the impersonal sim from the military lab's operating system, replaced by something very close to her friend's own small, slim form. Even the face, despite a certain smooth stiffness, was his own. !Xabbu's sim wore what she guessed was the traditional garb of his people, a loincloth made of hide, sandals, and a string of eggshell beads around the neck. A quiver and bow hung from one shoulder and he held a spear in his hand.

"You made this? All of this?"

He smiled. "It is not as much as it seems, Renie. Parts of it are borrowed from other modules on the Kalahari Desert. There is much free gear available. I found some academic simulations-ecological models, evolutionary biology projects-in the University of Natal databanks. This is my graduate project." His smile widened. "You have not looked at yourself yet."

She looked down. Her legs were bare, and she, too, wore a loincloth. She had more jewelry than !Xabbu, and a sort of shawl of hide that covered her upper body, tied at the waist with rough twine. Remembering that they were supposed to be testing the V-tanks, she fingered it. The cured skin felt slithery and a little tacky, not unlike the thing it was supposed to be.

"That is called a kaross." !Xabbu pointed to the place where the shawl gaped at the back. "The women of my people use it as much more than a garment Nursing babies are carried there, and also forage discovered during the day."

"And this?" She held up the piece of wood clutched in her other hand.

"A digging stick."

She laughed. "This is astonishing, !Xabbu, Where did this come from? I mean, how did it get onto this system? You couldn't have done all this since we got here."

He shook his head, sim face grave. "I copied it from my storage at the Poly."

Renie felt a clutch of alarm. "!Xabbu!"

"I had Martine's help. Just to be safe, we shipped it through . . . what did she call it? An 'offshore router.' And I left you a message."

"What are you talking about?"

"While I was in the Poly's system, I left a message on your account there. I said that I had been trying to reach you, and hoped to speak to you soon about my studies and my graduate project."

Renie shook her head. She heard tinkling, and reached up to touch her dangling earrings. "I don't understand."

"I thought that if someone was looking for your contacts, it would be good if they thought I did not know where you were. Maybe then they would not persecute my landlady. She was not a pleasant person, but she did not deserve the sort of trouble we have had. But, Renie, I am unhappy."

She was finding it hard to keep up. "Why, !Xabbu?"

"Because I realized as I was leaving the message that I was deliberately telling a lie. I have never done that before. I fear that I am changing. It is no surprise that I have lost the song of the sun."

Even behind the mask of his simulation, Renie could see the small man's discomfort.

This is what I was afraid of. She could think of no comfort to give him. With any other friend, she would have argued the ethics of the useful lie, the self-projecting falsehood-but no other friend would feel a lie as a sort of physical corruption; she could not imagine anyone else in her life despairing because he could not hear the sun's voice.

"Show me more." It was all she could say. "Tell me about this place."

"It is only just begun." He reached out and touched her arm, as though to thank her for the distraction. "It is not enough to make something that looks like the home of my people-it must feel like it as well, and I am not yet skilled enough for that." He began to walk, and Renie fell in beside him. "But I have made a small piece, in part to learn the lessons that come from mistakes. Do you see that?" He pointed to the horizon. Above the desert pan, just visible beyond a stand of thorny acacias, loomed a cluster of dark shapes,"Those are the Tsodilo Hills, a very important place for my people, a sacred place you would call it. But I have made them too easily visible, too stark."

She stared. Despite his discontent, there was something compelling about the hills, the only tall things in this wide, flat land. If the real ones were even remotely similar, she could understand the power they must hold over the imaginations of !Xabbu's people.

Renie reached up and stroked her earrings again, then touched the eggshell necklaces at her throat. "How about me? Do I look as much like me as you look like yourself?"

He shook his head. "That would have been presumptuous. No, my own sim was concocted from an earlier project at the Poly. I added to it for this, but at the moment I have only two other sims, male and female. They are made to look like a man and woman of my people." His smile was sad and a little bitter, "In this place, anyway, I shall make sure no one comes onto Bushman land but Bushmen."

He led her down a sandy slope, deeper into the pan. He hummed lazily. The sun was so fierce that Renie found herself longing for a drink of water, despite the fact that they had surely been in the tanks less than half an hour. She almost wished they had hooked up the hydration system, despite her dislike of needles.

"Here," said !Xabbu. He squatted on his heels and began to dig with the butt of his spear. "Help me."

"What are we looking for?"

He did not answer, but concentrated on digging. The work was hard, and the heat of the sun made it even more tiring. For a moment, Renie completely forgot that they were in a simulation.

"There." !Xabbu leaned forward. Using his fingers, he unearthed something that looked like a small watermelon from the bottom of the hole. He lifted it triumphantly. "This is a tsama. These melons keep my people alive in the bush during the season of drought, when the springs have no more water." He took his knife and cut the melon's top off, then took the butt of his spear, wiped it clean of dirt, and pushed it into the melon. He worked it like a pestle until the fruit's contents were a liquified pulp. "Now you drink it," he said, smiling.

"But I can't drink-or at least I can't taste anything."

He nodded. "But when my simulation is complete, you will have to drink, whether you can taste it or not. No one can live like my people if they do not struggle to find water and food in this harsh land."

Renie took the tsama rind and upended it over her mouth. There was a curious absence of sensation around her face, but she could feel little splatters of wetness down her neck and belly. !Xabbu took it from her, said something she could not understand, full of clicks and trills, and drank from the melon himself.

"Come," he said. "There are other things I wish to show you."

She stood, troubled. "This is wonderful, but Jeremiah and my father will be worried about us if we're on too long. I didn't tell him how to monitor our conversation, and I doubt he'd be able to figure it out on his own. They might even try to pull us out."

"Knowing I would show you this place, I told them we might be longer than you had planned." !Xabbu looked at her for a moment, then nodded. "But you are right. I am being selfish."

"No, you're not. This is wonderful." She meant it. Even if he had cobbled it together from other modules, he had an incredible flair for virtual engineering. She could only pray that his association with her ended happily. After seeing even this small piece, she thought it would be a crime if his dream went unfulfilled. "It's truly wonderful. I hope to spend a lot more hours here someday soon, !Xabbu."