City of Golden Shadow, Page 77

  "I cannot say for certain, but it is smoke more modern than that of a wood fire—I smell metal in it, and oil."

  "We'll see. I hope you're right. If we've got a long search ahead of us, it would be nice if it took place somewhere with hot showers and warm beds."

  They fell silent, listening to the crackle of the fire. A few birds and something that sounded like a monkey called in the trees above.

  "What about Martine?" Renie asked suddenly. "Could you use this baboon nose of yours to find her?"

  "Perhaps, if we were close enough, although I do not know what smell she has in this simulation, but there is nothing that smells like you do—which is the only measure I have for a human scent—anywhere nearby."

  Renie looked past the fire into the darkness. Perhaps if she and !Xabbu had wound up reasonably close to each other, Martine would not be too far away. If she had survived.

  "!Xabbu, what did you experience when we were coming through?"

  His description brought back the gooseflesh, but told her nothing new.

  ". . . The last thing I heard Mister Singh say was that it was alive," he finished. "Then I had a sense of many other presences, as though I were surrounded by spirits. I woke up in the forest as you did, alone and confused."

  "Do you have any idea what that . . . thing was? The thing that caught us and . . . and killed Singh? I can tell you, it wasn't like any security program I've ever heard of."

  "It was the All-Devourer." He spoke with flat certainty.

  "What are you talking about?"

  "It is the thing that hates life because it is itself empty. There is a famous story my people tell, of the last days of Grandfather Mantis and how the All-Devourer came to his campfire." He shook his head. "But I will not tell it here, not now. It is an important story, but it is sad and frightening."

  "Well, whatever that thing was, I never want to go near it again. It was worse than that Kali creature in Mister J's." Although, as she thought about it, there had been certain similarities between the two, especially the way they apparently managed to effect physical changes through virtual media. What connection might there be, and could contemplating the Kali and what had happened inside the club help her understand what !Xabbu called the All-Devourer? Could anything help them understand?

  Renie yawned. It had been a long day. Her brain didn't want to work any more. She pushed herself back against a tree trunk. At least this tropical simulation wasn't too full of insects. Perhaps she'd actually be able to get some sleep.

  "!Xabbu, come over here closer, will you? I'm getting tired and I don't know how much longer I can stay awake."

  He looked at her for a silent moment, then walked on all fours across the small clearing. He crouched beside her for an awkward moment, then stretched out and lay his head across her thighs. She idly stroked his furry neck.

  "I'm glad you are here. I know that you my father and Jeremiah are really only a few meters away from me, but it still felt terribly lonely when I woke up by myself. It would have been much worse spending the whole night here alone."

  !Xabbu did not say anything, but extended one long arm and patted her on the top of the head, then lightly touched her nose with his hairless monkey finger. Renie felt herself drifting into welcome sleep.

  "I can see the edge of the forest," !Xabbu called, twenty meters up. "And there is a settlement."

  Renie paced impatiently at the foot of the tree."Settlement? What kind?"

  "I cannot tell from here." He walked farther out onto the branch, which swayed in a way that made Renie nervous. "It is at least a couple of kilometers away. But there is smoke, and buildings, too. They look very simple."

  He descended swiftly, then dropped to the spongy ground beside her. "I have seen what looks like a good path, but the jungle is very thick, I will have to climb up again soon and look some more or we will spend all day tearing our way through."

  "You're enjoying this, aren't you? Just because we happened to wind up in a jungle, your baboon idea looks brilliant. But what if we'd wound up in the middle of an office building or something?"

  "Come along. We have been in this place most of a day already." He loped away. Renie followed a little more slowly, cursing the thick vegetation.

  Some path, she thought.

  They stood, sheltering in the darkness of the forest's edge. Before them lay a descending slope of reddish mud, pimpled with the stumps of cut trees and scarred with the ruts of their removal.

  "It's a logging camp," Renie whispered. "It looks modem. Sort of."

  A number of large vehicles were parked in the cleared area below. Small shapes moved among them, cleaning and adjusting them like mahouts tending elephants. The machinery was large and impressive, but from what Renie could see there were odd anachronisms as well. None of them had the tanklike treads she was accustomed to seeing on heavy construction equipment; instead, they had fat wheels covered with studs. Several of them also seemed to be powered by steam boilers.

  The row of huts beyond, however, clearly made from some prefabricated material, were indistinguishable from things she had seen on the outskirts of Durban. In fact, she knew people, some of them students of hers, who had lived their whole lives in such huts.

  "Just remember, stay close to me," she said. "We don't know how they feel about wild animals here, but if you hold my hand, they'll probably accept that you're a pet."

  !Xabbu was becoming quite adept at using the baboon face. His expression clearly said that she should enjoy this small reversal of fortune while she could.

  As they made their way down the slippery hillside beneath the gray morning sky, Renie for the first time had a view of the countryside. Beyond the camp a wide dirt road cut through the jungle. The land around it was largely flat; rising mist obscured the horizon and made the trees seem to stretch endlessly.

  The camp's inhabitants were dark-skinned, but not as dark as she was, and most that she could see had straight black hair. Their clothing gave no clues as to time or place, since most of them wore only pants, and their choice of footgear was hidden by red mud.

  One of the nearest workers spotted her and shouted something to the others. Many turned to stare. "Take my hand," she whispered to !Xabbu. "Remember—baboons don't talk in most places,"

  One of the workmen had ambled off, perhaps to alert the authorities. Or maybe to get weapons, Renie thought. How isolated was this place? What did it mean to be an unarmed woman in such a situation? It was frustrating to have so little knowledge—like being transported by surprise to another solar system and dumped off the starship with nothing but a picnic basket.

  A silent half-circle of workers formed as Renie and !Xabbu approached, but remained at a distance that might have been respectful or superstitious. Renie stared boldly back at them. The men were mostly small and wiry, their features vaguely Asian, like pictures she remembered of the Mongols of steppe country. Some of them wore bracelets of a translucent, jadelike stone, or wore amulets of metal and mud-draggled feathers on thongs around their necks.

  A man wearing a shirt and a wide-brimmed, conical straw hat bustled up from behind the gathering crowd of workers. He was thickly muscled, with a long sharp nose, and had a paunch that hung over his colorful belt. Renie guessed he must be the foreman.

  "Do you speak English?" she asked.

  He paused, looked her up and down, then shook his head. "No. What is it?"

  Renie's confusion passed in a moment. Apparently the simulation had built-in translation facilities, so she seemed to be speaking the foreman's language and he hers. As she continued the conversation, she saw that his mouth movements did not quite match his words, confirming her guess. She also noticed that he had a pierced lower lip with a small gold plug in it.

  "I am sorry. We . . . I am lost. I have had an accident." Inwardly she cursed. In all the time they had spent struggling through the jungle, she had given no thought to a cover story. She decided to wing it. "I was with a group of hikers, but I got separat
ed from them." Now she just had to hope the custom of walking for pleasure existed in this place.

  Apparently, it did. "You are far from any towns," he said, looking at her with a certain shrewd good humor, as though he guessed she hadn't told him the truth but wasn't too bothered about it. "Still, it is bad to be lost and far from home. My name is Tok, Come with me."

  As they walked across the encampment, !Xabbu still silent at Renie's side, uncommented-upon despite all the stares he received, she tried to get a better fix on what sort of place this was. The foreman looked as Asiatic or Middle Eastern as any of the laborers. On his belt was something that looked like a field telephone—it had a short antenna—but was cylindrical and covered with carvings. Something that very much resembled a satellite dish also stood atop one of the larger huts. It didn't add up to any recognizable pattern.

  The satellite hut proved to be Tok's office and home. He sat Renie down in a chair in front of his metal desk and offered her a cup of something that did not fully translate, which she accepted. !Xabbu crouched beside her seat, wide-eyed.

  The room in which they sat offered no more definitive clues. There were a few books on a shelf, but the writing on their spines was in strange glyphs she could not read: apparently the translation algorithms served only for speech. There was also a shrine of some sort, a boxlike affair with a frame of colorful feathers, which contained several small wooden figures of people with animal heads.

  "I can't figure this place out at all," she whispered. !Xabbu's small fingers squeezed her hand, warning her that the foreman was returning.

  Renie thanked him as she took the steaming cup, then lifted it to her face and sniffed it before remembering that, as !Xabbu had complained, the V-tank gave her a very limited sense of smell. But the mere fact that she had tried to smell it suggested that this place was already impairing her VR reflexes; if she didn't stay vigilant, she could easily forget that it wasn't real. She had to lift the cup carefully, feeling for her lips to make sure she was placing it correctly, since her mouth was the one spot where she had no sensitivity—it was like trying to drink after having been anesthetized at the dentist's office.

  "What sort of monkey is that?" Tok squinted at !Xabbu. "I have not seen one like it before."

  "I . . . I don't know. It was given to me by a friend who . . . who traveled a lot. It is a very faithful pet."

  Tok nodded. Renie was relieved to see that the word seemed to translate. "How long have you been lost?" he asked.

  Renie decided to stick close to the truth, which always made lying easier. "I spent one night in the jungle by myself."

  "How many? How many of you were there?"

  She hesitated, but her course had been set "There were two of us—not including my pet monkey—who got separated from the rest. And then I lost her as well."

  He nodded again, as though this jibed with some personal calculation. "And you are a Temilún, of course?"

  This was slightly deeper water, but Renie took a chance. "Yes, of course." She waited, but this also seemed to confirm the foreman's casual suspicions.

  "You people, you townfolk, you think you can just walk in the jungle like it was (some name she could not quite grasp) Park. But the wild places are not like that. You should be more careful with your life and health. Still, the gods are sometimes good to fools and wanderers." He looked upward, then muttered something and made a sign on his breast. "I will show you something. Come." He stood up and walked around the desk, beckoning Renie toward the door at the back of the office.

  On the other side was the foreman's living quarters, with a table, a chair, and a bed canopied by a curtain of mosquito netting. As he stepped toward the bed and pulled back the gauzy netting, Renie braced herself against the wall, wondering if he was expecting some kind of exchange of favors for her rescue, but there was already someone there. The sleeping woman was small and dark-haired and long-nosed like Tok, dressed in a simple white cotton dress. Renie did not recognize her. As she stood frozen, unsure of what to do, !Xabbu loped to the bed and jumped up beside the woman, then began to bounce up and down on the thin mattress. He was clearly trying to tell her something, but it took her a long moment to understand.

  "Martine. . . ?" She hurried forward. The woman's eyes fluttered open, the pupils roving, unfixed,

  ". . . The way . . . blocked!" Martine, if this was her, lifted her hands as though to ward off some looming danger. The voice was not familiar, and there was no French accent, but the next words dispelled any doubt. "No, Singh, do not. . . . Ah, my God, how terrible!"

  Renie's eyes stung with tears as she watched her companion thrashing on the bed, apparently still in the grip of the nightmare that had awaited them at Otherland's shadowy border. "Oh, Martine." She turned to the foreman, who was watching the reunion with grave self-satisfaction. "Where did you find her?"

  Tok explained that a party of tree markers had discovered her wandering dazedly at the edge of the jungle a short distance from the camp. "The men are superstitious," he said. "They think her touched by the gods," again the reflexive gesture, "but I suspected it was hunger and cold and fear, perhaps even a blow on the head."

  The foreman returned to his work, promising that they could have a ride back with the next convoy of logs, leaving at twilight. Renie, overwhelmed by events, neglected to ask where "back" might be. She and !Xabbu spent the dwindling afternoon sitting beside the bed, holding Martine's hands and speaking soft words to her when the nightmares seemed to pursue her too closely.

  The foreman Tok helped Renie up into the back of the huge, gleaming, steam-powered truck. !Xabbu clambered up by himself and sat next to her atop the chained logs. Tok made her promise that she and her "mad Temilúni friends" would not wander around in the wild country any more. She did, and thanked him for his kindness as the convoy pulled out of the camp and onto the broad muddy road.

  Renie could have ridden in one of the other truck cabs, but she wanted the privacy to talk to !Xabbu. Also, Martine was belted into the passenger seat of this truck—whose driver, Renie had noticed with interest, was a broad-faced, broad-shouldered woman—and Renie wanted to stay close to their ill companion.

  ". . . So that's not Martine's voice because she's delirious and she's speaking French, I suppose," she said as they bumped out of camp. "But why do you have your voice and I have mine? I mean, you sound like you, even though you look like something out of a zoo."

  !Xabbu, who was standing upright, leaning into the wind and sniffing, did not answer.

  "We must have all been piggybacked on Singh's index," she reasoned, "and that index was marked 'English-speaking.' Of course, that doesn't explain why I kept this body, but you got your second-choice sim." She looked down at her own copper-skinned hands. Just as !Xabbu had wound up with a good body for jungle wandering, she had chosen one that seemed physically very close to the local human norm. Of course, if they had landed in a Viking village or in World War Two Berlin, she wouldn't have fit in quite so well.

  !Xabbu clambered down and crouched beside her again, his erect tail curved like a strung bow. "We have found Martine, but we still do not know what we are searching for," he said, "Or where we are going."

  Renie looked out at the miles of thick green jungle lying behind them in the dying light, and the miles that the strip of red road still had to cross. "You had to remind me, didn't you?"

  They drove through the night. The temperature was tropical, but Renie soon learned that virtual logs made no better a bed than real ones. What was particularly annoying was knowing that her real body was floating in a V-tank full of adjustable gel, which could have been made to simulate the softest goosedown, if she could only work the controls.

  As the sun came up, ending a darkness that had brought Renie very little rest, the trucks reached a town. It was apparently the home of the sawmill and processing facilities, and something of a jungle metropolis; even at first light, there were scores of people on the muddy streets.

  A handful of La
ndrover-like cars rolled past as they drove down the wide main thoroughfare, some clearly powered by steam, others more mysteriously. Renie also spotted more of the objects that looked like satellite dishes, which seemed restricted to the largest buildings, but in many other ways the town looked as though it might have been transplanted whole from the set of some saga of the American West. The wooden sidewalks were raised above the clinging muck, the long, town-bisecting main street seemed designed for gunfights, and there were as many horses as cars. A few men even seemed to be having an early-morning brawl outside one of the local taverns. These men, and the other people Renie could see, were better dressed than the jungle workers, but except for the fact that many wore shawls of brightly dyed, woven wool, she still could not put her finger on anything definitive in their clothing styles.

  The trucks rattled through town and lined up on the vast mud flat outside the sawmill. The driver of Renie's truck got out and, with a certain taciturn courtesy, suggested she and her sick friend and their pet monkey might as well stop here. As she helped Renie unload the semiconscious Martine from the cab, the driver suggested they could find a bus in front of the town hall.

  Renie was relieved to know there was somewhere else beyond this place. "A bus. That's wonderful. But we . . . I don't have any money."

  The truck driver stared at her. "You need money for city buses now?" she said at last "By all the lords of heaven, what shit will the Council think of next? The God-King ought to execute them all and start over."

  As the driver's surprise had suggested, the buses were apparently free. Renie, with surreptitious assistance from !Xabbu, was able to help Martine stumble the short distance to the town hall, where they took a seat on the steps to wait. The Frenchwoman still seemed to be caught in those terrible moments when they had broken into the Otherland system and everything had gone so badly wrong, but she was able to move around almost normally when prompted, and once or twice Renie even felt a returned pressure when she squeezed Martine's hand, as though something inside was struggling toward the surface.