OTHERLAND
Volume One
City of Golden Shadow
Chapter 9
Mad Shadows
NETFEED/ENTERTAINMENT: "Concrete Sun" Highest Rated for May (visual: several explosions, man in white coat running) VO: The series-ending episode of "Concrete Sun" was the most watched net entertainment for the month of May -- (visual: man in white coat kissing one-legged woman) -- appearing in sixteen percent of homes worldwide. (visual: man in white coat carrying a bandaged dog through culvert) The story of a fugitive doctor hiding out in the squatter city of BridgeNTunnel is the highest rated linear drama in four years....
Renie turned her head sharply and the test pattern -- an unending domino-row of grids in contrasting colors -- jiggled. She grimaced. A touch against one of the dimples on the side of her headset brought up the pressure in the padding. She waggled her head; now the image stayed put.
She lifted her hands, then curled her right index finger. The front grid, a simple lattice of glowing yellow, remained where it was; all the other grids moved a little farther apart from each other, rippling out into the indeterminate distance, one full lockstep into infinity. She bent the finger farther and the distance between each grid shrank. She wagged the finger to the right and the entire array rotated, each a fraction of an instant behind the one before it, so that a neon spiral formed and then vanished as the grids came to rest once more.
"Now you do it," she told !Xabbu.
He carefully wove his hands through a complex series of movements, each of which marked different points of distance and attitude from the sensor affixed to the front of his visor like a third eye. The unending sequence of colored grids responded, spinning, shrinking, changing relationships like an exploding universe of square stars. Renie nodded in approval even though !Xabbu could not see her -- the test pattern and the all-surrounding blackness were the only visuals.
"Good," she said. "Let's try out your memory. Take as many of those grids as you want -- not from the front -- and make a polyhedron."
!Xabbu carefully withdrew his selections from the array. As the rest moved to fill the vacated space, he stretched those he had chosen and folded them in half along the diagonal, then rapidly assembled the paired triangles into a faceted ball.
"You are getting good." She was pleased. Not that she could take too much credit -- she had never taught anyone who worked as hard as !Xabbu, and he had a tremendous natural aptitude. Very few people could adapt themselves to the unnatural rules of netspace as quickly and completely as he had.
"Then may I put this away now, Renie?" he asked. "Please? We have been preparing all morning."
She flicked her hand and the test-pattern disappeared. A moment later they stood facing each other in a 360-degree ocean of gray, sim to unprepossessing sim. She bit back a nettled reply. He was right. She had been delaying, going over and over her preparations as though this were some kind of combat mission instead of a simple trip into the Inner District in search of information.
Not that, strictly speaking, there was such a thing as a simple trip into Inner District for outsiders like them. There might very well be barriers they could not pass no matter how well prepared they were, but she did not want to be unmasked and ejected because of some stupid, preventable mistake. Also, if there was something illegal and dangerous going on in Toytown, discovery of her investigation would put the guilty ones on guard and perhaps even lead them to destroy evidence that otherwise might save Stephen.
"I did not intend to be rude, Renie." !Xabbu's sim lifted its simple hands in a gesture of peace; a rather mechanical-looking smile curled the corners of its mouth. "But I think that you too will be happier when we are doing something."
"You're probably right. Disconnect and exit."
Everything vanished. She lifted the visor on her headset and the earnest but seedy ambience of the Poly's Harness Room surrounded her once more. The bushman pushed up his own visor and blinked, grinning.
Reflexively, she began one final run through her mental checklist. While !Xabbu had finished his exams -- which, the grapevine told her, he had handled with expected ease -- she had created not just aliases to get them into the Inner District, but several backups as well. If things went badly they could shuck off their first identities like old skin. But it had not been easy. Creating a false online identity was no different than creating one for RL, and was in many ways the same process. Renie had spent a good portion of her time in the last few days hunting through backwater areas of the net. There were lots of vaguely unsavory people lurking in Lambda Mall's equivalent of dark alleyways for whom setting up false identities was everyday work, but ultimately she had decided to do it herself. If her investigations of the Inner District struck something important, the offended parties would go looking for the bootleg identity merchants first; not a one of them would take a stand for privileged information when their livelihood and perhaps even health was at stake.
So, pumped up on caffeine and sugar, smoking an endless chain of theoretically non-carcinogenic cigarettes, she had set off to do a little akisu, as the old-timers called it. She had worked her way through hundreds of obscure infobanks, copying bits and pieces as it suited her, inserting false cross-check data on the systems whose defenses were outdated or weak enough. She had created a reasonably solid false identity for both of them, and -- she hoped -- even some insurance if things went very wrong.
She had also learned a few things about Mister J's along the way, which was one of the reasons she had been drilling !Xabbu all morning. The Inner District club had a very dark reputation, and interfering with its operation might have some unpleasant real world repercussions. Despite her initial impatience, she was glad !Xabbu had talked her into waiting for him. In fact, even another week to prepare wouldn't have gone amiss . . .
She took a breath. Enough. If she weren't careful she would turn into one of those obsessive-compulsives who turned back five times to make sure the door was locked.
"Okay," she said. "Let's get going."
They made a few final tests of their harnesses, both of which hung from the ceiling by an arrangement of straps and pulleys that would allow their users freedom of movement in VR, as well as prevent them from walking into real walls or hurting themselves with a fall. When the pulleys had hauled them aloft, they dangled side by side in the middle of the padded room like a pair of marionettes on the puppeteer's day off.
"Do what I say without questions. We can't afford to make mistakes -- my brother's life could be at stake. I'll give you answers afterward." Renie checked one last time to make sure none of the wires would be worked loose by the action of the harness straps, then pulled her visor back down; the visuals flicked on and the gray sparkle of the waiting net surrounded her. "And remember, even though the closed band is provided by the Inner District, not the club itself, once we get inside you'd better assume that someone is listening."
"I understand, Renie." He sounded cheerful, which was amazing considering that she had already given him the eavesdroppers speech twice before that morning.
She waved her hands and they went.
The crowd waiting at the Inner District Gateway was a brightly-colored, noisy blur. As the clamor of their multilingual pleading thundered painfully in her ears, she realized that in her anxiety not to miss any possible clues she had set the gain on her sensory inputs too high. A flick of the wrist and a circled finger brought them down to a manageable level.
After a wait that had Renie bouncing in place with impatience, they at last slid to the front of the line. The female functionary was polite and seemed remarkably uninterested in making trouble. She examined their false identification, then asked if the reason for their visit, submitted as part of the ID package, was still correct.
"It is. I'm examining an installation we've had a complaint about." Renie's alias showed her working for a large Nigerian programming company with !Xabbu as her trainee -- a gear company which, she had discovered, kept very sloppy records.
"And how much time will you need, Mister Otepi?"
Renie was astonished -- actual kindness! She was not used to tractability from net bureaucrats. She eyed the smiling sim carefully, wondering if she were dealing with some new kind of hyper-actualized Customer Service Puppet. "It's hard to say. If the problem is simple enough, I may fix it myself, but first I must run it through its paces to find out."
"Eight hours?"
Eight! She knew people who would pay several thousand credits for that long a period of access to the Inner District -- in fact, if she had any time left over when they finished, she was tempted to go find one of them. She wondered if she should try to get more -- maybe this Puppet was broken, a slot machine that would just pay and pay -- but decided not to press her luck. "That should be adequate."
A moment later they were through, floating just above ground level in monumental Gateway Plaza.
"You don't realize it," she told !Xabbu on their private band, "but you've just witnessed a miracle."
"What is that?"
"A bureaucratic system that actually does what it's supposed to do."
He turned to her, a half-smile illuminating the face of the sim Renie had arranged for the visit. "Which is to let in two disguised people who are pretending to have legitimate business?"
"Nobody likes a comedian," she pointed out, then exited from the private band. "We're clear. We can go anywhere we want to now, except private nodes."
!Xabbu surveyed the plaza. "The crowds seem different here than in the Lambda Mall. And the structures are more extreme."
"That's because you're closer to the center of power. People here do what they want because they can afford to." A thought came swirling up like a flake of hot black ash. "People who can get away with anything. Or think they can." Stephen was comatose in the hospital while the men who had hurt him enjoyed their freedom. Her anger, never completely cold, rekindled. "Let's go have a look around Toytown."
Lullaby Lane was far more crowded than the last time she had been there, almost choked with virtual bodies. Caught by surprise, Renie pulled !Xabbu into an alley so she could figure out what was happening.
The crowd flowed past the alley mouth in one direction, shouting and singing. It seemed to be a parade of sorts. The sims were embodied in a variety of bizarre ways, oversized, undersized, extra-limbed, even divided into unconnected body parts that moved like coherent wholes. Some of the revelers shifted and changed even as she watched: one violet-haired, attenuated figure wore enormous bat wings which dissolved into traceries of fluttering silver gauze. Many reformed themselves every few moments, extruding new limbs, changing heads, spreading and curling into fantastic shapes like boiling wax dumped in cold water.
Welcome to Toytown, she thought. Looks like we arrived just in time for a reunion of the Hieronymous Bosch Society.
She took the Bushman up to rooftop level where they could get a better view. Several in the crowd bore glowing banners proclaiming "Freedom!", or spelled it out above their heads in fire; one group had even turned themselves into a walking row of letters that spelled out "Mutation Day". Although most of the parader's sims were extreme by design, they were also rather unstable. Some of them fell apart into unstructured planes and lines in a way that did not look intentional. Others flickered in midstep and occasionally disappeared entirely.
Home-cooked programming, she decided. Do-it-yourself stuff. "It's a protest, I think," she told !Xabbu.
"Against what person or thing?" He hung in the air beside her, a cartoon figure with a serious expression on its simple face.
"Embodiment laws, I would guess. But they can't be suffering much if they can afford to hang out here in the first place." She made a small noise of contempt. "Rich people's children complaining because their parents won't let them dress up. Let's go."
They beamed past the procession to the far end of Lullabye Lane where the streets were empty. Without the distraction of street theater the rundown quality of the neighborhood was immediately apparent. Many of the nodes seemed to have grown even more decrepit since her last visit; both sides of the street were lined with skeletal, colorless buildings.
A distant, skittery flare of music at last turned them toward a garish glow at the street's far end. In such dim surroundings, the awful, throbbing liveliness of Mister J's seemed even more sinister.
!Xabbu stared at the turreted sprawl and the giant carniverous grin. "So that is it."
"Private band," Renie snapped. "And keep it there unless you have to answer a question from someone. As soon as you finish answering, switch back. Don't worry about being slow to respond -- I'm sure they get lots of people in that place whose reflexes are not what they should be."
They slowly floated forward, watching the club's facade gleam and squirm.
"Why are there no people about?" asked !Xabbu.
"Because this isn't a part of the Inner District that invites much sightseeing. People who come to Mister J's probably beam in directly. Are you ready?"
"I believe so. Are you?"
Renie hesitated. The question seemed flippant, but that was not the bushman's way. She realized she was wound tight and hard, her nerves thrumming. She took several deep breaths, willing herself toward calm. The toothy mouth over the doorway flapped its red lips as through whispering a promise. Mister Jingo's Smile, this place had been called. Why did they change the name but keep that horrid grimace?
"It is a bad place," !Xabbu said abruptly.
"I know. Don't forget that for a second."
She splayed her fingers. An instant later they were in a shadowy antechamber, a place with gold-framed carnival mirrors instead of walls. As she turned to survey the room, Renie could see that the latency -- the tiny lag between initiation and action that characterized complex VR environments -- was very low here, a quite passable mimicry of real life. The detail work was also impressive. Alone in the antechamber, they were not alone in the mirrors: a thousand reveling ghosts surrounded them -- figures of men and women, as well as some more animal than human, all cavorting around the distorted reflections of their two sims. Their reflections appeared to be enjoying themselves.
"Welcome to Mister J's." The voice spoke oddly-accented English. There was no image to match it in any of the mirrors.
Renie turned to discover a tall, smiling, elegantly dressed white man standing close behind them. He lifted his gloved hands and the mirrors disappeared, leaving the three of them alone in a single pillar of light surrounded by infinite black. "So nice to have you with us." His voice crept in close, as though he whispered in her ear. "Where are you from?"
"Lagos," said Renie a little breathlessly. She hoped her own voice, processed an ocatve lower to match her masculine alias, did not sound as squeaky to him as it did to her. "We....we've heard a lot about this place."
The man's smile widened. He made a short bow. "We are proud of our worldwide reputation, and pleased to welcome friends from Africa. You are, of course, of legal age?"
"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, sparkling 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 look 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 modelled 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 luminscent 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 surpise. 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 Broederbund-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 sea-floor 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 the Bushman'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 supersitious 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 stricken him down was nothing so obvious.
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."
Renie shuddered. "Don't blame yourself. God, I wish you'd told me about that before I dragged you into the pool. That's where VR can cause harm, and no one disputes it -- where it touches on phobias or childhood fears. But because it's a controlled environment, they use it to cure those fears, too."
"I do not feel cured," said !Xabbu miserably.
"No, I'm not surprised." She squeezed his arm again, then got to her feet. Her muscles were sore -- just from the tension alone, she guessed. That and the pummeling !Xabbu had unwittingly given her. "Come on. We've burned an hour or so of our time already and we've barely seen anything."
"Where are we?" He, too, straightened and stood, then stopped as a sudden idea struck him. "Do we have to go out the same way when we leave?"
Renie laughed. "We most certainly do not. As a matter of fact, we can pull out directly any time we want. All you have to do is make the 'exit' command, remember?"
"I do now."
The corridor had been designed to carry on the motif of the boiling lake. The walls were the same black igneous stone, rough to the touch and dreary to look at. A sourceless red light suffused everything.
"We could wander aimlessly," she said, "or we can be a little more scientific about this." She paused for a moment, but saw nothing that looked suggestive. "Options," she said, loudly and clearly. A tracery of burning lines appeared on the wall beside them. She studied the list, many of which were unpleasantly suggestive, and picked one of the most neutral. "Stairs."
The corridor wavered, then dropped away before them like water running down a drain. They stood on a landing in the middle of a wide, curving staircase that stretched away above and below, each step a massive slab of glossy black stone. For an instant they were alone; then the air flickered and they were surrounded by pale shapes.
"By my ancestors...." breathed !Xabbu.
Hundreds of ghostly figures filled the stairwell, some trudging wearily, many burdened by heavy bags or other burdens. Others, less substantial, floated in tatters above the steps like mist. Renie saw a variety of ancient costumes from many cultures and heard a whispering babel of different tongues, as though these shades were meant to represent a cross-section of human history. She gestured to raise the sound on her hearplugs, but still could not quite understand any of them.
"More lost souls," she said. "I wonder if someone is trying to send us a message. 'Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,' or something like that."
!Xabbu looked uncomfortable as he watched a beautiful Asian woman float past, her weeping head cradled carefully between the stumps of her wrists. "What shall we do now?" he asked.
"Go down." It seemed obvious. "You have to go down before you can come out -- that's how these things always work."
"Ah." !Xabbu turned toward her, a sudden smile stretching his simulated face. "Such wisdom is not easily come by, Renie. I am impressed."
She stared at him for a moment. She had been talking about the endless dungeon games she had played as a netgirl, but she wasn't quite sure what he meant. "Come on, then."
She wondered at first whether there would be any resistance, or at least any scenarios to be played out, but the spirits of the staircase only eddied past on either side, as murmurously harmless as pigeons. One, a gnarled old man who wore nothing but a loincloth, stood stationary in the middle of the staircase, silently shaking with laughter or tears. Renie tried to walk around him, but his sudden convulsive movement brought him against her elbow; he instantly dissolved into smoky wisps, then reformed farther up the stairs, still bent, still shaking.
They walked for almost half an hour, companioned only by simulations of the restless dead. The staircase seemed endless, and Renie was considering choosing one of the doorways that led off each landing when she heard a voice cutting through the unhappy burble of the phantoms.
"....Like a she-dog. Breathing hard, growling, foam on her lips -- you shall see!"
The remark was followed by a chorus of raucous laughter.
Renie and !Xabbu rounded a bend. On the landing before them stood four men, all quite real, at least compared to the phantom bystanders. Three of them were dark-skinned, dark-haired demigods, tall and almost impossibly handsome. The fourth was not quite as tall but monstrously bulky, as though someone had dressed a hippopotamus in a white suit and given it a round, bald, human head.
Although his back was to them and their approach made no sound, the fat man turned to Renie and !Xabbu immediately. Renie felt the swift examination by his small bright eyes almost physically, like a series of probing finger jabs. "Ah, hello. Are you enjoying yourselves, gentlemen?" His voice was a work of genius, deep buttery tones like a viola da gamba.
"Yes, thank you." She kept a hand on !Xabbu's shoulder, uncertain.
"Is this your first time in the world-reknowned Mister J's?" asked the fat man. "Come, I am certain that it is -- no need to be ashamed. You must join us, for I know all the ins and outs of this strange and wonderful place. I am Strimbello." He pushed the tip of his blunt jaw toward his breastbone in a minimal bow; his chins flattened and bulged like gills.
"Pleased to meet you," Renie said. "I am Mr. Otepi, and this is my business associate Mr. Wonde."
"You are from Africa? Splendid, splendid." Strimbello beamed, as though Africa were a clever trick she and !Xabbu had just performed. "My other friends -- what a day for new friends this has been! -- are from the Indian subcontinent. Madras, to be specific. Please, may I introduce you to the brothers Pavamana."
His three companions gave fractional nods. They were practically triplets, or at least their sims were nearly identical. A lot of money had been spent on their handsome VR bodies. Renie decided that it was probably overcompensation -- in RL, the Pavamana brothers were doubtless pockmarked and sunken-chested. "Pleased to meet you," she said. !Xabbu echoed her.
"And I was just taking these excellent fellows to see some of the Inferno's more select attractions." Strimbello lowered his voice and winked; he had more than a little of the carnival barker about him. "Would you care to join us?"
Renie suddenly remembered that Stephen had mentioned a fat man. Her heartbeat grew swifter. Could it all happen so quickly, so easily? But if opportunity was here, so was danger. "You are very kind."
She and !Xabbu shared a glance as they fell into step behind the other group. Renie lifted a finger to her lips, warning him not to say anything, even on private band. If this man was part of the inner circle of Mister J's, it would be folly to assume anything about his capabilities.
As they floated down the great staircase -- Strimbello seemed uninterested in arriviste pursuits like walking -- the fat man regaled them with stories about the various ghosts, or the people the ghosts represented. One of them, a Frankish knight from the Crusades, had been cuckolded in an admirably devious manner at which even Renie and !Xabbu had to laugh. Without changing tone, Strimbello then described what had happened afterward, and pointed out the two legless, armless figures worming along the stairs several paces behind the armored phantom. Renie felt sick.
The fat man lifted his broad arms and raised his hands, palms up. The whole company suddenly floated away from the staircase and around another bend in the cavern wall, which abruptly dropped away. They were hanging above a great emptiness, a miles-deep well. The stairway spiraled down around its perimeter, vanishing in the dim red glow far beneath them.
"Too slow," Strimbello said. "And there is much, much to show you." He gestured again and they were falling. Renie felt her stomach drop alarmingly -- the visuals were good, but not that good, surely? Suspended in her harness and experiencing everything through the senses of her low-order sim, she should not be feeling this swift drop in such a....visceral way.
Beside her, !Xabbu had spread his arms as though to slow his descent. He looked slightly nervous, but there was a determined set to his narrow jaw that made Renie feel better. The little man was holding up well.
"We will, of course, land quite safely." Strimbello's round head seemed almost to blink like a lightbulb as the alternating levels of darkness and light strobed past. "I hope I don't sound patronizing, Mister....Otepi. Perhaps you have enjoyed such virtual experiences before."
"Nothing like this," said Renie truthfully.
Their fall ended, although they still hung in midair with a bottomless depth of well below them. At Strimbello's magisterial gesture they slid sideways through nothingness and alighted on one of the levels that ringed the pit like theater balconies. The Pavamana brothers grinned and pointed at the passersby. Their mouths moved without sound as they conversed on their own private band.
Doors were open all along the curving promenade, spilling noise and color and the sound of many voices and many languages, laughter, screams, and unintelligible rhythmic chanting. A variety of sims -- mostly male, Renie could not help noticing; she suspected the few female shapes were part of the entertainment -- moved in and out of the doorways and down the alleyways that radiated out from the central well. Some were embodied as handsomely as the Pavamana brothers, but many wore only the most basic forms: small, gray and almost faceless, they scuttled among their shining brothers like the pathetic damned.
Strimbello suddenly took her by the arm. His vast hand printed itself so powerfully on her tactors that she winced. "Come, come," he said, "it is time to see some of what you came here for. Perhaps the Yellow Room?"
"Oh, yes," one of the Pavamanas said. The other two nodded excitedly. "We have been told very much about that place."
"It is justifiably famous," said the fat man. He turned to Renie and !Xabbu, his sim face a perfect representation of shrewd humor. "And you are not to worry at the expense, my new friends. I am well known here -- my credit is good. Yes? You will come?"
Renie hesitated, then nodded.
"So be it." Strimbello waved his hand and the promenade seemed to bend around them. A moment later they were in a long, low-ceilinged room lit in various unpleasant shades of ochre and acid-lemon. Throbbing music filled Renie's ears, a monotonous percussive thumping. The fat man was still gripping her arm firmly: she had to struggle to turn and look for !Xabbu. Her friend was behind the Pavamanas, staring around the crowded room.
The same mix of high and low quality sims that filled the promenade lined the tables of the Yellow Room, bellowing cheerfully at the stage which filled one end of the room, pounding with their fists until virtual crockery rolled and shattered on the floor. The bilious light gave their faces a feverish look. A woman -- or what appeared to be a woman, Renie reminded herself -- stood on the stage doing a jerky striptease timed to the swiftly lurching music. Renie was briefly reassured to see something so old-fashioned in its benign naughtiness until her she realized that what the woman was peeling off was not clothing, but skin. Already a ballet skirt of translucent, paper-thin, red-spotted flesh dangled from her hips. Worst of all was the look of resigned misery on the woman's -- no, the sim's, Renie reminded herself -- slack face.
Unable to watch, Renie looked around again for !Xabbu. She could see the top of his head past the Pavamanas, who were bobbing and elbowing each other like a slapstick comedy team. She stole another glance at the stage, but the wincing performer was now revealing the first layers of muscle flexing across her stomach, so Renie concentrated on the crowd instead. That did little to relieve her growing sense of claustrophobic discomfort: the simuloid faces of the audience were all wide soulless eyes and gaping mouths. This was indeed the Inferno.
A movement at the edge of her vision caught her attention. She thought Strimbello had been watching her, but when she turned, he appeared to be engrossed in the performance, his head nodding as if in proprietary approval, a tight smile pulling at the corners of his wide, wide mouth. Did he suspect, somehow, that she and !Xabbu were not what they professed to be? How could he? They had done nothing unusual and she had worked very hard on their aliases. But whatever he thought of them, he made her terribly uncomfortable. Whoever or whatever lived behind those small, hard eyes would be a very dangerous enemy.
The throbbing music died. Renie turned back to the stage as a blare of horns signaled the departure of the stripper. A few desultory handclaps followed her as she limped toward the back of the stage, trailing a bridal train of tattered, glistening flesh. A deep orchestral hum signaled the next act.
Strimbello leaned his huge head near. "Do you understand French, Mister Otepi? Hmmm? This is what you would call 'La SpecialitŽ de la Maison' -- the Yellow Room's signature attraction." He wrapped a large hand around her arm again and gave her a little shake. "You are of legal age, are you not?" He laughed suddenly, revealing broad, flat teeth. "Of course you are! Just my little joke!"
Renie sought !Xabbu, a bit desperately this time -- they had to think about getting away from this man soon -- but her friend was hidden by the three Pavamanas, who had leaned forward in unison to watch the stage, false faces rapt.
The deep rumble of the music changed, taking on a processional air, and a group of people walked out, all but one dressed in dark robes with hoods drawn up. The unhooded exception, Renie was surprised to see, was the pale singer from the lounge. Or was it? The face, especially the huge, haunted eyes, looked the same, but this one's hair was a great curling auburn cascade, and she also seemed taller and longer-limbed.
Before Renie could make up her mind, several of the robed figures stepped forward and grabbed the pale woman, who did not resist. The music shuddered and a quickening beat began to make itself felt beneath the humming chords. The stage lengthened like a protruded tongue. The walls and tables and even the patrons also reshaped themselves, flowing around the woman and her attendants until the room surrounded the strange tableau like a hospital operating theater. The acid glow dimmed until everything was in shadow and the woman's bone-white face seemed the only source of light. Then her robes were torn away and her pale body leaped into view like a sudden flame.
Renie took a sharp breath. She heard louder, harsher inhalations on all sides. The young woman was not shaped like the dream-figure of male fantasy she would have expected in a place like this; her long, slender legs, delicate rib cage, and small mauve-tipped breasts made her seem little past adolescence.
The girl at last raised her dark eyes to look at the audience. Her expression was a mixture of reproach and fear, but something else lurked beneath, a kind of disgust -- almost a challenge. Someone shouted at her in a language Renie didn't understand. Close behind, another customer laughed explosively. With no sign of physical effort, the robed figures grabbed at the girl's four limbs and lifted her from the floor. She floated between them, extended and glowingly pale, something pure to be marked or shaped. The music dropped to a low, anticipatory hum.
One of the dark figures twisted the girl's arm. She writhed, dull dark veins and the bunching of tendons suddenly visible beneath the translucent skin, but did not make a sound. The arm was twisted and pulled farther. There was a gristly noise as something tore and the girl cried out at last, a choking, drawn-out sob. Renie turned away, her stomach lurching.
It's only pictures, she told herself. Not real. Not real.
Shapes hunched forward on either side, craning for a better view. People were shouting, their voices already hoarse; Renie could almost feel a kind of collective darkness flowing from the watchers, as though the room were filling with poisonous smoke. More things were happening on the stage, more movements, more gasping cries. She did not want to look. The brothers from Madras were rubbing their hands back and forth on their impressively-muscled thighs. Strimbello, sitting next to Renie, watched the action with his small fixed smile.
It went on for long minutes. Renie stared at the floor, struggling against the urge to scream and run away. These people were animals -- no, worse than animals, for what wild creature could dream of something so vile? It was time to take !Xabbu and get out. That wouldn't be enough to reveal their imposture -- surely not all patrons of even as foul a place as this wanted to see these kinds of things? She started to rise, but Strimbello's broad hand pushed down hard on her leg, trapping her.
"You should not go." His growl seemed to push its way deep into her ear. "Look -- you will have much to tell back home." He reached his other hand up and pulled her chin around toward the stage.
The girl's white limbs had been twisted into several impossible angles. One leg had been pulled to an obscene length, like a piece of taffy. The crowd was roaring now, so the girl's screams could no longer be heard, but her head snapped spastically from side to side and her mouth gaped.
One of the robed figures drew out something long and sharp and shiny. The clamor of the audience took on a different tone, a pack of dogs that had cornered some exhausted thing and now were baying for the kill.
Renie tried to pull away from Strimbello's implacable grip. A piece of something wet and gleaming flew past her, arcing out into the shadowed seats. Someone behind her caught it and lifted it to his expressionless sim face. He smeared it against his cheeks as though daubing a ceremonial mask, then pushed it into his idiot mouth. Renie tasted sour liquid as her stomach heaved again. She tried to look away, but all around her the patrons were lifting their hands, grabbing at other bits flung out from the stage. Horribly, she could hear the girl's shrieks even above the barking crowd.
She could not take this any longer -- she would go mad if she remained. If a virtual object could burn, then this place should be burned to its dark foundation. She thrust her hand out toward !Xabbu, trying frantically to get his attention.
The little man was gone. The spot he had occupied behind the Pavamanas was empty.
"My friend!" She tried to tug herself free of Strimbello, who was unconcernedly watching the stage. "My friend is gone!"
"No matter," said Strimbello. "He will find something he likes better."
"Then he is a fool," chortled one of the Pavamanas, grinning like a lunatic. Simulated blood gleamed on his cheeks like an old courtesan's rouge. "There is nothing like the Yellow Room."
"Let me go! I have to find him!"
The fat man turned to look at her, his grin widening. "You are not going anywhere, my friend. I know exactly who you are. You are not going anywhere."
The room seemed to bend. His dark eyes held her, small holes that offered a glimpse into something dreadful. Her heart was thumping as it hadn't even in Leviathan's pool. She almost dropped offline before remembering !Xabbu. Perhaps he was caught somehow in the way Stephen had been caught. If she bailed out of the system, she might find him in the same deathlike trance that had claimed her brother. He was an innocent, as much so as Stephen. She couldn't abandon him.
"Let me go, you bastard!" she shouted. Strimbello's grip did not loosen. Instead he pulled her closer, dragging her into his wide lap.
"Enjoy the performance, good sir," he said. "And then you will see more -- much more."
The crowd was shouting, an almost deafening roar of sound, but Renie could not think of the command to lower the volume. Something about the fat man submerged all her careful judgment in a flood of blind panic. She made a succession of gestures that accomplished nothing, then dredged up a command she hadn't used since her hacking days, splaying her fingers almost painfully wide and bowing her head.
For a moment the entirety of the Yellow Room seemed to freeze around her; a moment later, when it lurched back to life, she was several steps away from Strimbello, standing by herself on the floor before the stage. He stood, an expression of mild surprise on his broad features, and reached for her. Renie immediately moved herself out of the Yellow Room and onto the promenade.
Even the bottomless well looked normal compared to what she had left behind, but the Bushman's small sim was nowhere in sight. Strimbello would be on her in a moment.
"!Xabbu!" She shouted his name on the private channel, then boosted it and shouted again. "!Xabbu! Where are you?"
There was no answer. The little man was gone.
© OTHERLAND: City of Golden Shadow, Tad Williams, 1996.
All Rights reserved.
