Pathfinder (30 page)

A story. I want a story
.

Somewhere in Noospace there must be a story to settle her, to burrow into, and let her forget her worries and fears. Mara longs for Gorbals and his nighttime fire tales. A memory runs through her, and she sees the wide eyes of the Treenesters gazing through the firelight as Gorbals's story spins a comfort nest around them all. Mara dashes away tears and the memory too. She puts on a godgem and jumps deep into the chaotic patterns of the Noos.

She's just beginning to get the hang of the tonal voice-steering that by day fills the cybercath with its choral hum. Falteringly, Mara uses her voice to get to a Noosstation, one of the floating help platforms.

“I want a story,” she instructs the small glitter-ball of electronic energy that immediately bounces toward her.

The glittering search ball bounces high into Noospace and explodes in a million fragments—electronic questers—that scatter across the mutating patterns. Moments later, like a reverse explosion, the fragments zoom back into a ball, having searched the Noos to find what Mara wants.

Story as in floor, level in building?
the glitter-ball reports back.

“No,
S-T-O-R-Y
,” says Mara. “As in once upon a time.”

The search-ball explodes again.

Falsehood, lie
, it suggests, when it's back in one piece.

Mara sighs. “No. Try books.”

Boots?

“Books!”

The search-ball scatters yet again and takes a moment longer than usual to gather back the questers. Mara's hopes rise as she watches the glittering fragments gather back into a globe.

Defunct word
, it claims uselessly.

“I just want a
story
!” Mara bursts out.

She catches the eye of a guard at the door and quickly lowers her voice. “Story,” she mutters stubbornly. “I don't believe there isn't a single story in the whole of the Noos. Any kind of story will do—fairy tale, ghost story, adventure story, love story. You choose. I'll sit here all night and ask if I have to. Just find me a story.”

Store
, bounces back the search-ball, just as stubbornly.
Try stockpile, save, stash
.

A useless heap of words that are nothing to do with a story. Mara feels blank. She doesn't know what to do.
Hoard, treasure
, the search-ball chatters on.
Would you like to try any of these?

Oh, shut up
, thinks Mara, but something odd is happening. The heap of words reshuffle, sorting themselves into a pattern that becomes a flickering picture in her mind. A familiar, moving picture. A story.

Hoard, treasure
. Goosebumps prickle all over her body and the words seem to grow hot inside, flaming into a story she knows, the one Gorbals told on the night of the storm about the lost girl who followed a rainbow and found a hoard of treasure at the rainbow's end. The crock of gold.

“All right, I'll tell
you
a story,” Mara whispers to the little search ball, as she wriggles deeper into her hug chair. “Once upon a time,” she begins, but she has hardly breathed the words when there is a deep electronic shudder in the godgem that ripples out, disturbing the patterns of the Noos. The glitter-ball bounces off in fright.

“Hey, come back,” Mara calls after it. “Oh, all right, I don't care. Well, once upon a time…”

She falters. The familiar words sound so alien and empty in the vast loneliness of Noospace.

There's another electronic shudder. Then a voice that does not belong to the godgem or the search ball.

“Once upon a time,” echoes the voice.

Mara sits bolt upright in her seat. The words tingle inside her, and she shivers as if she's caught a cold. The low, wary voice has taken her back to a time and place that feels worlds away now. Mara is so shocked she can barely speak.

“Where—where are you?” she gasps at last. Then
jumps in surprise as she finds herself alone on the Noosstation platform, staring into the eyes of the cyberfox.

The fox is as still as a statue. All senses alert.

“Once upon a time,” says the fox. “I followed you. We met out in Nowhere, out beyond the Weave. You screamed for help then vanished. I've been searching for you ever since.”

Mara looks at the fox and the fox looks back. A tangle of Noos patterns reflect in its liquid, untamed eyes.

“You have?” breathes Mara.

The fox pads closer. And through her joy and disbelief cuts a sudden flash of panic, because Mara doesn't know if this cyberfox is friend or foe. She doesn't want her New World cover blown because then she's sunk. She wants to run and hide. But curiosity, and the pull of that other, deeper instinct is too strong. So Mara stays her ground, her eyes never leaving the fierce, vivid gaze of the fox.

Mara is thinking faster than she has ever thought before.

“I still need help,” she whispers. “But can I trust you?”

Who are you?
she wonders frantically.
Who?
She glances around the near-empty cybercath and reassures herself that Tony Rex has not returned. And the voice is not his. But if you can take on a new form in the Noos then surely you could assume a new voice? And there are mobile godgems, so he could be working from anywhere in New Mungo.

“Can I trust
you
?” says the fox, unexpectedly.

“Me?” exclaims Mara in surprise. Then lowers her voice as she senses someone stir in a work cupule several seats behind her. She steals a quick, fearful glance, but the Noosrunner's head is bent, engrossed in whatever he or she is working on.

“Okay, here's a story for you, a story from the old world,” Mara blurts out, because if it is Tony Rex, she's already caught. If it's not, she has to take a leap of faith. It's her only chance.

“Once upon a time there was a Weave-wizzer, an ace wizzer. For years she played in the old network called the Weave. This girl—I mean, the wizzer—had no idea that what she thought was everything was really just the ruin
of a dead old world and that a whole new electronic universe had sprung into life out beyond the patch of cyberspace she knew. One day she fell out of the Weave and saw what lay beyond it. And she met a cyberfox. But her whole world was about to fall apart. Her island in real-world was drowning…”

Mara pauses, swallowing hard. When she is able to speak, her voice cracks with emotion.

“She lost everything, her family and friends, everyone. But somehow she survived. And all the time, all through the nightmare that followed, she held on to the hope that she would find the cyberfox again—that he might help her.”

It's hard to go on. The fox says nothing, just stares at her. If a fox could cry, this one looks close to it.

“Do you understand?” Mara asks.

The fox nods. Mara is sure tears stand in its eyes.

She lets out an enormous breath she didn't know she has been holding. A sob shakes her. She glances around quickly but the Noosrunner behind her is still too deep in concentration to notice.

“It's a long story, too long to tell it all now, but amazingly I ended up here in your world,” Mara whispers to the fox. “I asked you for help once. I still need your help. Desperately. I need someone I can trust in realworld. I don't know if I trust you but …” Mara grinds to a stop. She must trust him. She has no choice. She looks into the unblinking fox eyes and takes a deep breath.

“Where exactly are you? Where can I find you?”

There's a long pause. Then the fox speaks.

“Turn around,” he says huskily. “I'm right behind you.”

Behind her? But he's here, in front of her, on the Noosstation platform. What does he mean? And then it
dawns on her. The shock of it rushes like a hot wave through her body. He means in realworld. The fox is here, right behind her, in the cybercath.

Mara turns around. The Noosrunner in the cupule several rows behind is looking straight at her. Mara stops breathing.

It's David, the ace Noosrunner. The boy she crashed into in the tunnel, who was so cold to her in the café tonight.

Or appeared to be.

Mara doesn't know what to do, so she turns back to her godgem, back to the cyberfox in the Noos. They stand staring at each other, a girl and a fox on a deserted platform with the chaos of the Noos swirling all around.

“How did you know?” she gasps.

“When I heard your name and the name of your island.” The fox looks electric; its hair stands on end. “You told me and I never forgot.”

“I thought I'd never find you. I couldn't think how I ever would.” Mara is trembling. “What do we do now?” she whispers into the godgem.

“Leave the cybercath,” says the fox, and suddenly Mara feels scared. “Go straight to the Leaning Bridge and I'll meet you there.”

Her heart pounds as she takes off the godgem. It feels unreal. After all this time, after all that has happened to her, she is going to meet the human being who is her old Weave-stalker, the fox. She stands up and tries to make her face as bland as a lumenbeing's. Fear and excitement are racing through her but she must be careful not to show it. In his work cupule, David seems deep in his work.

At the Leaning Bridge Mara pretends to gaze into the shimmering water of the Looking Pond. A noisy mob of zappers pass by, then silence falls and the tunnel is empty.
Out of the corner of her eye she sees David leave the cybercath and head toward her. Mara leans upon the mock-stone wall of the Leaning Bridge, so full of suspense she can hardly keep still. Her senses are so heightened she can hear the soft pad of the boy's feet as he nears the bridge.

The pad-pad of his feet stops. Mara waits. David has paused right behind her—she can hear his breath, light and fast. Her heart thuds painfully.

“Hello,” breathes the husky-voiced boy at her side. The fox, who is just a boy called David, leans over the edge of the bridge.

Mara turns and meets the untamed eyes of a dreamer. They gaze into hers through his mess of tawny hair. David gives her a wobbly smile.

“Hello,” Mara whispers back.

Neither seems to know what to do or say. Mara craves the safety of a cyberworld—some synthetic moment where she can cloak herself. Reality is far too raw, too naked.

“I want to know the rest of your story,” David-Fox says at last.

“But can I trust you?” pleads Mara.

“Can I trust
you
?” he repeats, and again Mara wonders what he means. Some zappers zip past and he pauses, watching her closely till they are gone. Then he seems to decide and nods with a sharp, foxy movement that is so at odds with his dreamy eyes.

“Okay,” he decides, but wary still. “Let's go to my place.”

Fox's place is one of the superior tower apartments that Dol talked of so enviously. He has a spacious round living room with walls that look strangely soft, as if they're melting in the gentle waves of color that ripple across them.

“Take a seat.”

Mara sits on an armchair so plush it feels as if she is perched precariously upon nothing—a sumptuous, enfolding nothingness that molds with amazing gentleness to every curve and fold of her body.

“Ooh, this is gorgeous. Would you, um, mind if I take off my shoes—they're too tight and my feet are killing me.”

“Make yourself at home,” he says, amused. Yet he sits tensely on the edge of his own seat.

She floats in the moment, in the blissful sensation of being held in invisible arms. But the moment shatters as she recalls Fox's riddle of words just a moment ago, as they zapped through the nexus to his apartment. She sits up.

“What did you mean just now when you said the New World has no past?”

“Just that.
The past is banished. It's been deleted. All anyone ever thinks of is here and now. “
There is only the power of now
,” he chants. “That's what we all believe,” he adds, drily.

“But now is only now when it's now. Then it's past. And right bang in front is the future,” says Mara. “It all knits together.”

“Well, no one sees it that way here,” says Fox.

“How come you live like this?” Mara demands, gazing around his luxurious apartment. “You must be a really ace Noosrunner to get promoted so highly so young!”

A quick, wry grin breaks across his face.

“I'm a pretty hot Noosrunner,” he responds. “But the truth is, I live like this because I'm the grandson of a Grand Father of All.
The
Grand Father of All, as it happens. Caledon, the Supreme Ideator, the creator of the New World—that's my grandpa.”

“Oh, so that's why all the girls—” Mara begins with a knowing smile, then stops in astonishment.

Caledon, creator of the New World. The Grand Father of All. Cal. The one who dreamed up the idea of a city in the sky. Cal, who threw Candleriggs out of the New World when she rebeled against the cruel empire it had become. Fox is his grandson?