City of Golden Shadow (52 page)

"Take care. I'll talk to you in person, later."

The line clicked. Renie stared at her pad, wishing that she could make it say more, feeling that if she could just push the right button, her teacher would come back on and tell her all the things she'd been holding back. Susan had talked to her in person later, which made the whole thing an even crueler joke.

Previous acquaintances. What could that mean? She had already tried the names of all of the doctor's colleagues she could remember.

Renie sent the computer searching through various educational guild records, trying to match the letters of Susan's message with the names of anyone at any of the institutions that had employed her. Her eyes were blurry from staring at the padscreen, but there was nothing else to do until it was time to go to work. There wasn't a chance in hell she would be able to catch any sleep in her current frame of mind. Besides, work made it easier not to worry about !Xabbu.

She was on her seventh or eighth cigarette since dawn and watching a coffee tab dissolve in her cup when someone tapped lightly on the front of the partition, near the curtain that served as the front wall. Startled, she held her breath for a moment. She looked around for something to use as a weapon, but the torch had disappeared somewhere. She decided that the cup of boiling water in her hand would have to suffice. As she moved quietly toward the curtain, her father coughed in his sleep and rolled over.

She jerked back the heavy cloth. !Xabbu looked up at her, slightly startled.

"Did I wake you. . . ?" he began, but did not finish his sentence. Renie stepped forward and hugged him so incautiously that she spilled coffee on her own hand. She swore and dropped the cup, which shattered on the concrete.

"Damn! Ow! Sorry!" She waved her singed hand.

!Xabbu stepped forward. "Are you well?"

"Just burned myself." She sucked her fingers.

"No, I mean. . . ." He stepped inside, pulling the curtain closed. "I . . . I had a fearful dream. I feared for you. So I came here."

She stared. He did look quite out of sorts, his clothes rumpled and clearly donned in haste. "You . . . but why didn't you call?"

He looked down at his feet "I am ashamed to say that I did not think of it. I awakened and was afraid, and set out to come here." He squatted beside the wall, a simple, lithe movement.

There was something about the way he did it that reminded Renie he was not entirely of her world, something that remained archaic despite his modern clothes. "I could not find a bus, so I walked."

"From Chesterville? Oh, !Xabbu, you must be exhausted. I'm fine-healthy, anyway-but bad things have happened."

She quickly told him about Doctor Van Bleeck, describing what she knew of the attack and its aftermath. Instead of growing wide with surprise at the news, !Xabbu's heavy-lidded eyes narrowed, as though he were being forced to look at something painful.

"This is very sad." He shook his head. "Ay! I dreamed that she shot an arrow at you and that it pierced your heart. It was a very strong dream, very strong." He clapped his hands softly together, then pressed them tight "I feared it meant that you had been injured in some way by something the two of you had done."

"She shot something to me, but I hope it will save people, not kill them." She curled her lip. "Or at least, I hope it will help us find out if I'm going mad or not."

When she had finished explaining the doctor's messages and her night's work, speaking swiftly but quietly so as not to bring her father into things any earlier than she had to, the little man remained squatting on the floor, his head down.

"There are crocodiles in this river," he said at last. In her weariness, it took her a moment to make sense of what he said. "We have pretended as long as we could that they were only rocks pushing above the surface, or floating logs. But we can ignore them no longer."

Renie sighed. She had sparked a bit in relief at seeing !Xabbu safe. Now she suddenly felt that she could sleep-sleep for a month, given the chance. "Too many things have happened," she agreed. "Stephen lost, Stephen's friend with some kind of brain damage, what happened to us in the club. Now our flatblock's been burned and Susan's been attacked and beaten. We'd be idiots not to believe something's very wrong here. But," she felt her anger turn sour and miserable, "we can't prove anything. Nothing! We'd have to bribe the police just to get them not to laugh out loud when we told them."

"Unless we find that city, and finding it teaches us something. Or unless we go back in again." His face was curiously blank. "To that place."

"I don't think I could ever go back in there," she said. She blinked, sleepiness pulling at her very hard. "No, I could-for Stephen. But I don't know what good it would do us. They'll just be waiting for us this time. Unless we could find some better, more secret way to hack in-" She stopped, thinking.

"Do you have an idea?" asked !Xabbu. "Surely a place like that would have very good . . . what is the word? Security,"

"Yes, of course. No. That's not what I was thinking. I was just remembering something Susan told me once. I had been involved in some stupid thing-messing with the college record systems, just for fun, something like that. Anyway, she was completely scorched, not because I'd done it, she said, but because I was risking my chance to make something of myself." Renie ran her fingers across her padscreen, calling up options. "She told me the thing itself was no big deal-all the students did it. She'd done it, she said, and lots worse. She'd been quite a daredevil in the early days of the net."

Long Joseph Sulaweyo grunted and sat up in bed, stared at Renie and !Xabbu for a moment with no sign of recognition, then fell back into his thin mattress, snoring again within seconds.

"So you are thinking. . . ."

"She said 'previous acquaintances, very previous.' What do you want to bet she's been talking to some of her ancient hacker buddies? What do you want to bet?" She stared at the screen. "Now, all I have to do is think up some kind of search criteria for retired online troublemakers, match it to what we've got in the way of letters, and just see if we don't come up with Doctor Susan's mystery source!"

It took fifteen minutes, but the hit, when it came, seemed conclusive.

"Mural Sagar Singh-and look at this guy's background! University of Natal, same time as Susan, then extended work with Telemorphix, S.A., and a bunch of smaller companies over the next twenty years or so. And there's a six-year gap just a few years after he got out of school-what do you want to bet he was working for the government or military intelligence?"

"But this Sagar Singh-those letters do not match. . . ."

She grinned. "Ah, but look at this-he had a handle! That's a codename that hackers used, so they could sign their work without using their real names, which tends to get you prosecuted." She tilted the pad so !Xabbu could see it better. "Blue Dog Anchorite. The world must be full of Singhs, but she knew there wouldn't be many of those!"

!Xabbu nodded. "It seems that you have solved the puzzle. Where is this person? Does he still live in this country?"

"Well, that's a problem." Renie frowned. "The addresses kind of dry up about twenty years ago. Maybe he got into some sort of trouble and had to disappear. Of course, a gifted hacker can disappear in plain sight." She ran a few more criteria through and sat back to wait for an answer.

"Girl?" Long Joseph was sitting up again, this time eyeing !Xabbu with obvious suspicion. "What the hell's going on here?"

"Nothing, Papa. I'll get you some coffee."

As she poured water into a cup, guiltily remembering the shards of her own mug which were still scattered in front of their compartment where someone might step on them, !Xabbu stood over her pad.

"Renie," he said, eyeing a row of listings, "there is a word coming up here several times. Perhaps it is a place or a person? I have not heard of it."

"What?"

"Something called 'TreeHouse.' "

Before she could reply, the pad's phone light began to blink. Renie set down the cup and the package of coffee tablets and hurried to answer it.

It was Jeremiah Dako, and he was crying. Before he had even said an intelligible word, Renie already knew what had happened.

CHAPTER 18

NETFEED/PERSONALS: Your Dream Come True

(visual: picture of advertiser, M.J. [female version])

M.J.: "You see me. I'm your dream come true, aren't I? Look at these lips-don't you want me to bite you, just a little? Come visit me. I don't want little people with small ambitions-I want big boys with big ideas. We'll have such a lot to talk about and do. Just find my node and we'll play some games that you'll never, never forget. . . ."

Gally could barely stand. Paul stooped and lifted him in his arms and carried him out of the Oysterhouse. The boy was sobbing so convulsively it was difficult to hold him.

"No! I can't leave them! Bay! Bay's in there!"

"You can't help. We have to get out. They'll be coming back-the ones who did that."

Gally struggled, but weakly. Paul pushed out through the door and plunged into the forest without even looking to see if they were observed. Surprise and speed were their best hopes. The light was dying, and they could be well into the thick forest before anyone followed them.

He staggered for a long time with the boy in his arms. When he could run no farther, he set the boy down as carefully as he could and then slumped to the ground, cushioned by a thick carpet of leaves. The sky had turned the dark gray of a wet rock. The branches overhead were only wiry silhouettes.

"Where do we go?" When he got no response, he rolled over. Gally was curled like a woodlouse, knees tucked, head in hands. The boy was still crying, but most of the force was gone. Paul leaned over and shook him. "Gally! Where do we go? We can't just stay here forever."

"They're gone." It was a kind of astonishment, as though it were only now becoming clear to him. "Gone."

"I know. There's nothing we can do. If we don't find our way out, the same will happen to us." In fact, Paul knew that he would face worse things if his two pursuers ever caught him-but how could he know that, and how could it be true, in any case? The strangers had . . . cored the Oysterhouse children, torn out their insides.

"We belonged together." Gally spoke slowly, as though reciting a lesson he wasn't entirely sure of. "I don't remember a time when it was different. We crossed the Black Ocean together."

Paul sat up, "What ocean? Where? When did this happen?"

"I don't know." Gally shook his head. "I only remember traveling-that's the first thing I remember. And we were together."

"All of you? That can't have been very long ago-some of . . . some of them were only a few years old."

"We found the little'uns along the way. Or they found us. We're twice as many now as when I first remember. Twice as many. . . ." His voice trailed off and he began to weep again, a thin hitching noise. Paul could only put an arm around the boy's shoulders and draw him to his chest.

Why did this child remember more of his short life than Paul did of his own? Why did everyone seem to know more of the world than he did?

The boy calmed. Paul rocked him against his chest, awkwardly, but he had no better idea. "You crossed the black ocean? Where is that?"

"Far away." Gally's voice was muffled in his chest The day had almost failed now, and Paul could see only different forms of shadow. "I don't know-the big ones told me about it"

"Big ones?"

"They're gone now. Some stayed behind in places they liked, or they got stuck, but the rest of us moved on, 'cause we were looking for something. Sometimes the big ones just disappeared, like."

"What were you looking for?"

"The White Ocean. That's what we called it. But I don't know where it is. One day, the last one bigger than me was gone, and then it was my turn to lead. But I don't know where the White Ocean is. I don't know where it is at all, and now it doesn't matter."

He said this with a terrible, weary finality, and grew quiet in Paul's arms.

For a long time, Paul sat and held him, listening to the night noises, trying to forget-or at least to avoid reviewing-what he had seen in the Oysterhouse. Crickets ratcheted all around. The wind rustled the uppermost treetops. Everything was very calm, as if the universe had paused.

Paul realized there was no movement against his breast Gally was not breathing. Paul sprang up in a panic, rolling the boy onto the ground.

"What? What are you doing?" Gally's voice was sluggish with sleep, but strong.

"I'm sorry, I thought. . . ." He gently laid his hand on the boy's chest. There was no movement. Equally gently, moving with an instinct or memory he could put no name to, he slid his hand up to the hollow beneath the narrow jaw. He could feel no pulse. He tested himself. His own heart was beating rapidly.

"Gally, where do you come from?"

The boy mumbled something. Paul leaned closer. "What?"

"You're the big one, now. . . ." Gally murmured, surrendering again to sleep.