City of Golden Shadow

  "Of course." Even as she spoke, she knew that digital fingers were prying at the edge of her alias—but not prying too hard: deniability was all that a place like this needed. "I am showing my friend here some Inner District sights—he's never been before."

  "Splendid. You have brought him to the right place." The well-dressed man was finished distracting them, which meant their indexes had been passed. He made a theatrical flourish and a door opened in the darkness, a rectangular hole that bled smoky red light Noise spilled out, too—loud music, laughter, a wavecrash of voices. "Enjoy your visit," he said. "Tell your friends." Then he was gone and they were flowing forward into the scarlet glow.

  The music reached out to gather them in like the pseudopod of some immense but invisible energy-creature. Blaringly loud, it sounded like the bouncy swing jazz of the previous century, but it had strange hiccups and slurs, secret rhythms moving deep inside like the heartbeat of a stalking predator. It was captivating: Renie found herself humming along before she could even make out words, but those came quickly enough.

  "There's no call for consternation,"

  someone was singing urgently as the orchestra wailed and stomped in the background.

  "A smiling face is invitation enough— No bluff! So bring your stuff to the celebration. . . ."

  The lounge was impossibly huge, a monstrous, red-lit octagon. The pillars that marked its angles, each one broad as a skyscraper, stretched up to disappear in shadow far above; the vertical rows of lights that trimmed them grew closer together and at last shrank into continuous lines of radiance as distance squeezed them. Up where even those lights failed, up in the unspeakable heights of the ceiling, sparking fireworks zigged and caromed endlessly against the blackness.

  Spotlights wheeled through the smoky air, pushing fast-moving ellipses of brighter red across the velvet walls. Hundreds of booths sprawled between the pillars and filled the ringing balconies, which circled up at least a dozen floors before the swirling clouds of smoke made counting impossible. An almost endless mushroom forest of tables covered the shiny main floor, with silver-clad figures speeding between them like pinballs off bumpers—a thousand waiters and waitresses, two thousand, more, all moving swiftly and frictionlessly as beads of mercury.

  In the center of the enormous room the orchestra stood on a floating stage that sparkled and revolved like a sideways ferris wheel. The musicians wore black-and-white formal suits, but there was nothing formal about them. They were cartoonishly attenuated and two-dimensional. As the music squalled, their shapes wavered and flared like mad shadows; some grew until their rolling eyes peered directly into the highest balconies. Bright tombstone teeth snapped at the customers, who shrieked and laughed even as they scrambled for safer ground.

  Only the singer, perched at the farthest edge of the circling stage in a filmy white dress, did not change size. As the shadowy musicians billowed around her, she glowed like a piece of radium.

  "So toss away your trepidation,"

  she sang, her voice harsh yet somehow alluring, its quaver that of a child forced to stay up too late, watching the adults grow strange and drunken,

  "Slip into some syncopation—no fuss! The bus Will pro-pel us to Party Station. . . .

  The singer was only a spot of light in the midst of the cyclopean lounge and the crazily stretching orchestra, but for long moments Renie found that she could not see at anything else. Huge black eyes in a pale face made the woman look almost skeletal. Her fountain of white hair, half as tall as she was, combined with the white dress rippling beneath her arms to make her seem some kind of exotic bird.

  "Sit right down— Lose that frown! Mingle with the Toast of Toytown! Pick a song, Sing along, All that's upright will turn out wrong. . . ."

  The singer swayed back and forth, buffeted by the pounding beat like a dove in gale winds. The great eyes were closed now in something that might be exultation but didn't seem like it. Renie had never seen a human being look quite so trapped, and yet the singer glowed, burned. She might have been a light bulb channeling too much juice, her filament an instant away from explosive collapse.

  Slowly, almost unwillingly, Renie reached out for !Xabbu. She found his hand and closed her fingers on it "Are you okay?"

  "It . . . it is quite overwhelming, this place."

  "It is. Let's . . . let's sit down for a moment." She led him across the floor to one of the booths along the far wall—an RL journey that would have taken some minutes on foot, but which they made in seconds. All the musicians in the orchestra were singing now, clapping and hooting and stamping their mighty feet on the rocking stage; the music was so loud that it seemed the whole gigantic house might fall down,

  "Free your heart of hesitation! Eves and Adams of every nation-state, Feel great! When they create a federation. . . ."

  The music swelled and the spotlights raced even faster, beams flickering across each other like fencers' foils. There was a cannonfire rattle of drums, a last explosive blare of horns, then the orchestra was gone. A hollow chorus of hoots and cheers wafted through the immense room.

  Renie and !Xabbu had barely sunk into the deep velvet banquette when a waiter appeared before them, floating a few inches off the floor. He wore a chrome-colored, form-fitted tuxedo. His sim body appeared to have been modeled after some ancient fertility deity.

  "Zazoon, creepers," he drawled. "What'll it be?"

  "We . . . we can't eat or drink in these sims," Renie said. "Do you have anything else?"

  He gave her an intensely knowing and slightly amused look, clicked his fingers, and vanished. A menu of glowing letters hung in the air behind him like a luminescent residue.

  "There's a list labeled 'Emotions,' " !Xabbu said wonderingly. "Sorrow: mild to intense. Happiness: tranquil contentment to violent joy. Fulfillment. Misery. Optimism. Despair. Pleasant surprise. Madness. . . ." He looked at Renie. "What are these? What do they mean?"

  "You can speak on public band. No one will be surprised that this is new to you—or to me, for that matter. Remember, we're just a couple of backwoods boys from Nigeria, come to the virtual big city to see the sights." She changed over. "I suppose these are sensations that they simulate. Eddie . . . I mean that fellow we know—told us that they could give you sensory experiences your equipment wasn't wired for. Or they claim they can."

  "What should we do now?" In the midst of the immense room, the Bushman's small sim looked even smaller, as though squeezed by the very weight of clamor and movement."Where do you wish to go?"

  "I'm thinking." She stared at the fiery letters hanging before them, a curtain of words that offered little privacy and no protection. "I'd like it to be a little less noisy, actually. If we can afford it, that is."

  It was still the same booth, but its colors had become muted earthtones, and it now sat in a small room along the Quiet Gallery. The arched doorway looked out on a wide blue pool set in the middle of stone cloisters.

  "This is beautiful," said !Xabbu. "And we came here . . . just like that." He snapped his sim fingers, but they made no noise.

  "And the money is flowing out of our account just like that, too. This has to be the only club in the VR world where it costs less to rent a back room than to turn the noise down at your table. I suppose they want to encourage people to use the services." Renie straightened herself. The pool was mesmerizing. Drops fell from the mossy ceiling, making circular ripples that spread and overlapped, throwing blurry reflections back against the torchlit walls. "I want to look around. I want to see what the rest of this place is like."

  "Can we afford to?"

  She flicked to private band. "I put some credits in the account that goes with this alias, but not many—they don't pay teachers that well. But we're only paying for this because we requested it. If we just wander around—well, I think they have to warn us before they charge our account."

  !Xabbu's face stretched in a sim smile. "You think the people who own this place capable of . . . of many things, but you do not
suspect them of cheating their customers?"

  Renie didn't like discussing what she thought them capable of, even on private band. "No one stays in business if they cheat everybody. That's a fact. Even one of those Broderbund-owned clubs on the Victoria Embankment—they may take a bit off the top, and deal to chargeheads and drug addicts in the back, but they still have to keep up pretenses." She stood and switched back over. "Come on, let's have a look around."

  As she and !Xabbu stepped through the arch onto the walkway that ringed the pool, a light began to glow deep beneath the placid waters.

  "That way." She moved toward it,

  "But. . . ." !Xabbu took a step after her, then stopped,

  "It's all illusion. Remember that. And unless they've abandoned the universal VR interface symbols, that shows us the way out." She took another step and hesitated, then bent her knees and dove. The descent took a long time. Back at the Poly her real body was being held horizontally, in harness, so she had no physical sensation of falling, but here in the Quiet Gallery she saw the glowing blue translucence come up to meet her, then saw her own splash create a vortex of bubbles around her. A circle of light glowed in the deeps. She headed toward it.

  A moment later, !Xabbu was beside her. Unlike Renie, who had mimicked the head-forward, arms-outstretched posture of a diver, he sank downward while standing upright.

  "What. . . ." he began, then laughed. "We can talk!"

  "It's not water. And those aren't fish."

  !Xabbu chortled again as a great cloud of shimmering forms surrounded them, tails flicking, fins whirring like tiny propellers. One, its scales striped in bold patterns of black, yellow, and red, swam backward in front of the Bushman, its nose almost touching his. "Wonderful!" he said, and reached toward it. The fish spun and darted away.

  The doorway still glowed, but the water around them seemed to be getting darker. They had moved through into some other level of the pool, or rather of the simulation—Renie could see what looked like seafloor below, rocks and white sand and waving forests of kelp. She even thought she saw a glimpse of something almost human sheltering in the forest's shadow-tangled depths, something with hands and fingers and bright eyes, but with the muscular tail of an ocean predator. Behind the splashing noises pumped into her hearplugs was a deeper noise, a kind of singing. She found it disturbing; with a gesture, she hurried them to the gleaming exit.

  Up close, the ring was revealed to be a wreath of shining circles, each a different color.

  "Pick one," she told !Xabbu.

  He gestured and the red ring glowed more brightly. A calm, genderless voice murmured "Inferno and other lower chambers," into their ears.

  !Xabbu glanced at her, she nodded despite the sudden tingle of unease up the back of her neck. That would be the kind of place that would lure young boys like Stephen. !Xabbu touched the ring again and the whole wreath of circles turned molten red, then expanded, flowing over and past them so that for a moment they were in a tunnel of crimson light When the glare had faded, they were still under water, although it now had a murkier cast. Renie at first thought the gateway had malfunctioned.

  "Up there," said !Xabbu, pointing. Far above them hung another circle of light, this one a solid disk of red like a dying sun. "That is what the sky looks like from deep beneath the water." He sounded a little breathless.

  "Then let's go." She wondered briefly what !Xabbu, a native of the shallow delta rivers and marshes, knew about deep water, then dismissed it. Maybe he'd been swimming in the Durban public pools.

  They rose toward the red light, floating through more seaweed forests. These were black and thorny, drifting clumps of water brambles that sometimes blocked their view of the circle entirely and cast them into a strange undersea twilight. The water was cloudy, agitated by the steam vents which bubbled on the jagged ocean floor below them. All sign of where they had entered was gone, although she felt sure that if she and !Xabbu reversed direction, some indication of the route back into the Quiet Gallery pool would appear.

  She fingered one of the barbed strands of kelp, marveling anew at how its rough, rubbery texture could be manufactured from unphysical numbers and yet, when transmitted to the tactors, the force-feedback sensors in the glove of her simsuit, give every impression of palpable existence.

  !Xabbu reached out and snatched at her arm, jerking her sideways. "See!" He sounded genuinely panicked. She looked down, following his pointing finger.

  Something vast and dark was moving in the steaming depths. Renie could vaguely make out a smooth back and a strangely elongated head that seemed too big for the body, sliding along the rocky bottom near the spot where they had entered. The creature looked like some cross between a shark and a crocodile, but was far larger than either. The long, cylindrical body disappeared into the murk a dozen yards behind the questing muzzle.

  "It smells us!"

  She took his hand in hers and squeezed. "It's not real," she said firmly, although her own heart was beating very fast. The thing had ceased nosing at the vents and had begun lazily to move upward, its rising circular path taking it out of sight for the moment. She changed to private band. "!Xabbu Feel my hand? That's my real hand, under my glove. Our bodies are in the Harness Room at the Poly. Remember that."

  The eyes of !Xabbu's sim were shut tight. Renie had seen this before—a terrifying experience in a high-quality simulation could be just as overwhelming as in real life. She kept a tight grip on her friend's hand and accelerated their rise.

  Something huge rushed through the spot they had just occupied, immense and swift as a maglev train. Her heart lurched. She had a brief glimpse of a gaping mouth full of teeth and a glinting eye as big as her head, then the dark shiny body was passing endlessly beneath them. She added more speed to their upward movement, then chided herself for doing just what she had warned !Xabbu against—using RL logic. Just jump out, you fool! This isn't water, so you don't have to swim. Simulation or not, do you really want to find out what happens when that thing catches people?

  She gestured with her free hand and the red disk expanded dramatically; the surface seemed to fling itself down toward them. An instant later they were bobbing on a wide and unsettled lake in a chaos of steam and red rain. Still caught up in the experience, !Xabbu floundered, thrashing his arms in an attempt to stay afloat, though at that moment Renie's control rather than his own movements determined his position. A great shiny hump broke the surface, moving rapidly toward them. Renie squeezed !Xabbu's hand again and moved them instantaneously to the lake shore, two hundred yards distant.

  But there was no shore. The crimson-lit water splashed against black basalt walls and then flowed up, hissing and boiling in great sheets to the stalactite-studded ceiling before drizzling back down in a continuous, smoking rain. Almost blinded, Renie and !Xabbu hung in place at the lake's edge being violently bumped against painfully well-simulated stone.

  The hump splashed up into view again and this time kept rising until the head towered above the roiling steam as it wove from side to side, searching for its prey. Renie bobbed in place for a moment, stunned. What she had thought was a gigantic body was only the thing's neck.

  The head moved closer, sluicing water like a dredging crane. Leviathan, she thought, remembering her mother's Bible readings, and felt a moment of superstitious fear, followed by a wave of hysterical mirth at the thought that a simple VR entertainment should surprise her so badly. The laughter died when !Xabbu's hands clutched at her shoulders and neck. Her friend was panicking.

  "It's not real!" she shouted, trying to make herself heard over the roar of the boiling waters and the bubbling wheeze of the approaching beast, but the Bushman was caught up in his own private terror and did not hear her. The vast maw opened, looming through the spattering rain. Renie contemplated pulling the plug on the whole expedition, but they had learned nothing yet. Alarming though it was, this sort of thing was a roller-coaster ride for kids like Stephen—whatever had struck him down was nothing so obvio
us.

  The walls of the great cavern were covered with upward-flowing cataracts, but there were dozens of places where crimson light gleamed through the sheets of water as though there were open spaces beyond. Renie picked one at random and moved them to it, even as the beast plunged its head downward, snapping at the emptiness where they had floated a moment before.

  As they sped toward the glowing spot Renie saw that the cavern walls were lined with human forms, mouths agape, all writhing slowly just beneath the churning waters as though they had been partially absorbed by the stone. Fingers pushed through the cataracts, clawing toward her. The ceiling-bound water frothed from the stretching hands and dripped upward like strings of floating jewels.

  Renie and !Xabbu splashed through a curtain of water and fell forward onto a stone walkway as Leviathan's disappointed bellow shook the walls.

  "Inferno," said Renie. "They're playing games, that's all. It's supposed to be hell."

  !Xabbu still trembled—she could feel his shoulder shaking beneath her hand—but had ceased thrashing. The face of his sim was inadequate to express what she guessed was going on behind it.

  "I am ashamed," he said at last "I have behaved badly."

  "Nonsense." Her reply was purposefully swift. "It frightened me, and I do this for a living." Which was not quite true—very few of the VR environments she frequented had attractions of quite this order—but she didn't want the small man's spirit broken. "Join me on the other band. That thing gives you some kind of idea of the programming and processing power they've got here, doesn't it?"

  !Xabbu would not be so easily mollified. "I could not stop myself—that is why I am ashamed. I knew it was not real, Renie—I would not forget your teachings so easily. But when I was a child, a crocodile took me, and another took my cousin. I pulled free because it had a poor grip—I have the scars on my upper arm and shoulder still—but my cousin was not so lucky. When that crocodile was found and killed some days later, we found him in its belly, half-dissolved and white as milk."