Mount Dragon (48 page)

At last, he set the laptop aside and massaged his back. Idly, he glanced at his watch, and was shocked to learn that an hour had gone by. One hour, and he hadn't moved from the platform he'd started on. The fascination of this computer environment was both amazing and alarming. But it was time to find Scopes.

As his hands returned to the laptop, Levine became aware of a low, sighing sound, almost like singing. It was coming from the same speakers the elevator had used to announce the floors. When it had started, Levine could not say; perhaps it had been there all along. He was unable to take even a remote guess at its purpose.

Levine found himself growing concerned. He had to find Scopes in this three-dimensional representation of GeneDyne cyberspace, reason with him, explain the desperate situation. But how? Clearly this cyberspace was too vast to just wander around in. And even if he found Scopes, how would he recognize him?

He had to think the problem through. Vast and complex as this landscape was, it had to serve some purpose, have some design. In the past several years, Scopes had been extremely secretive about his cyberspace project. Little was known beyond the fact that Scopes was creating it to make his own extensive journeys through the interconnected network of GeneDyne computers easier.

Yet it seemed obvious that everything—the surfaces, shapes, and perhaps sounds—represented the hardware, software, and data of the GeneDyne computer network.

Levine took a walkway at random and moved carefully along it, trying to accustom himself to the bizarre sense of motion imparted by the vast screen in front of him. He was on a bridge without a railing, tiled in its own complicated pattern. The pattern would mean something, but he had no idea what: different byte configurations, or sequences of binary numbers?

The walkway snaked between several buildings of differing shapes and sizes, ending at last in a massive silver door. He moved to the door and tried to go through it. The eerie, floating music seemed to get louder, but nothing happened. He returned to an intersection and took another walkway, which crossed one of the rivers of colored light that streamed between the buildings. He stepped into the river, and it became a torrent of hexadecimal code, streaming past at a dizzying rate. He quickly stepped out of the stream.

He had discovered one thing: The streams of light were data-transfer operations.

So far, he had used only the trackball and cursor keys of his laptop. The cypherspace program would certainly recognize keystrokes of one form or another: mnemonics, commands, or shortcuts. He typed the sentence universally used by coders trying out new computer languages: Hello, world.

When he hit the enter key, the words “Hello, world” sang out in a musical whisper from the speakers. They echoed and reechoed through the vast spaces until dying away at last beneath the strange musical sighing.

There was no answer.

Scopes! he typed. The word rang out, dying away like a cry. Again, no answer.

Levine wished Mime were there to help him. He looked at his watch again; another hour had passed, and he was just as lost now as he'd been at the beginning. He looked away from the screen, and around the tiny elevator. He did not have unlimited time to explore. He'd wandered about long enough. Now he had to think fast.

What did one do when one was stuck in an application? Or in a computer game?

One asks for help.

Help, he typed.

Ahead of him, the landscape changed subtly. Something formed out of nothing, appearing at the far end of the walkway. It circled, then stopped, as if noticing Levine. Then, it began moving toward him with remarkable speed.

When he felt he had put sufficient distance between himself and the basin, Carson released Roscoe's halter and climbed into the saddle. He found himself going over, again and again, his first confrontation with Nye in the desert. He remembered the cruel laughter that had floated over the sands toward him. He found himself waiting to hear that laugh again—much closer now—and the sharp sound of a rifle bullet snugging into its chamber. To distract himself he turned his thoughts back to his great-uncle and his stories about Gato. He remembered a story about his ancestor and the telegraph. When at last he'd figured out how it worked, Gato cut the wires, then strung them back up with tiny thongs of leather to conceal the break. It had driven the cavalry crazy, his great-uncle told him.

Gato had a lot of tricks to throw off trackers. He would ride down streams and then ride out of them backward. He would make phony horse trails across slickrock and into dangerous trap canyons. Or over cliffs, using a horseshoe and a stone…

Carson racked his brains.
What else?

It was growing light in the eastern sky. At any moment Nye would discover them gone. That gave them a half hour's lead, at most. Unless Nye had learned of their deception already. He was too damn close; they
had
to make time.

As the light came up he scanned the horizon. With enormous relief, he made out the small figure of de Vaca, gray against black, trotting perhaps a quarter mile ahead of him. He turned toward her, urging Roscoe into an easy lope.

The real problem was that, even in lava, iron horseshoes left clear impressions on the stones. A horse weighed half a ton, and was balanced on four skinny iron shoes that left sharp white marks all over the rock. Once you knew what to look for, it didn't take any special talent to track a horse over rock; it was far easier, for example, than tracking a horse in shortgrass prairie. Nye had already demonstrated he had more than enough talent. But at least the lava would slow Nye down.

Carson slowed, matching the gait of de Vaca's horse. The image of his great-uncle returned: old Charley's face, laughing in the glow of the fire as he rocked back and forth. Laughing about Gato. Gato, the trickster. Gato, the bedeviler of white men.

“God, am I glad to see you,” de Vaca said. She grabbed his hand briefly as they trotted.

The warmth of her hand, the touch of another person after the long creeping journey in the dark, brought a surge of renewed hope to his soul. He scanned the lava flow that lay before them, a black, jagged line against the horizon.

“Let's move well into that lava,” he said. “I think I have an idea.”

The object stopped directly in front of him. Levine noticed with disbelief that it seemed to be a small dog, apparently a miniature collie. Levine stared, fascinated, marveling at the lifelike way with which the computer-generated animal wagged its tail and stood at attention. Even the black nose glistened in the otherworldly light that surrounded it.

This was getting Levine nowhere.
Why can't you help me?
he typed.

Levine nodded to himself. He wasn't surprised that the help system had never been completed; after all, Brent wouldn't need help himself, and nobody else was supposed to be wandering around his Cypherspace program. Probably Phido was one of the first elements Brent had put together, back in the early days before he'd decided to seal the lid of secrecy on his creation. Before he'd decided to keep this incredible world to himself.

He thought for a minute. Here was an object-oriented companion with artificial-intelligence links. Like the old pseudotherapeutic program ELIZA, taken to the ultimate limit. Phido. It was Scopes's idea of a cyberspace dog.

That made sense. Scopes would never lose his obsessive love of aphorisms.

Levine could feel his impatience growing. He was here to find Scopes, not bandy words with a program in this endless maze of cyberspace. He glanced at his watch: another half hour wasted. He followed the path to another juncture, then took one of the branching paths, wandering among the immense structures. The small dog followed silently at his heels.

Then Levine saw something unusual: a particularly massive building, set well apart from the others. Despite its immense size and central location, no colored bands of light played from its roof toward the other structures.

He looked at the building more closely. Although its lines were almost too perfect—the work of a computer's hand, within a cybernetic world—he recognized the famous silhouette without difficulty.

The GeneDyne Boston building.

An image of the building inside the computer. What did it represent? The answer came to him quickly: it was the cyberspace re-creation of the computer system inside the GeneDyne headquarters. The network, the home-office terminals, even the headquarters security system, would be inside that rendering. The buildings around him represented the various GeneDyne locations throughout the world. No streams of colored light were flowing from the headquarters roof because all outside communications with the other GeneDyne installations had been cut off. Had Mime been able to learn more about the workings of Scopes's program, perhaps he could have placed Levine inside, saving valuable time.

Levine approached the building curiously, taking a descending pathway to the base of the structure and approaching the front door. As he maneuvered himself against it, the strange music changed to an offensive buzz. The door was locked. Levine peered through the glass into the lobby. There, rendered in breathtaking detail, was the Calder mobile, the security desk. There were no people, but he noted with amazement that banks of CRT screens behind the security desk were displaying images from remote video cameras. And the feed he was viewing was undoubtedly live.

Levine thought for a moment, combing his spotty knowledge of modern computing techniques.