CHAPTER 1
A Circle of Strangers
NETFEED/NEWS: Net Gadfly Claims "Digital Divide" Still a Problem (visual: African school children watching wallscreen)
VO: Ansel Kleemer, who styles himself "an old-fashioned gadfly" who has devoted his life to being an irritant to economic and political power-players, is launching another protest to bring UN Telecomm's attention to the "digital divide" that Kleemer says is becoming a permanent gulf in world society. (visual: Kleemer in office)
KLEEMER: "It's simple, really-the net simply replicates world economic inequality, the haves versus the have-nots. There was a time when people thought information technology would bring advantages to everyone, but it's clear that unless things change, the net will continue to be like everything else-if you can afford it, you'll get it. If you can't, who cares about you?"
It was only a hand, fingers curled, protruding from the earth like a swollen pink-and-brown flower, but she knew it was her brother's hand.
As she bent and grasped it, she felt it move slowly, sleepily beneath her fingers, and was thrilled to know he lived. She pulled.
Stephen emerged from the clinging soil bit by bit-hand and wrist first, then the rest of his arm, like the root of a stubborn plant. At last his shoulder and head burst free in a shower of dirt. His eyes were closed, his lips curled in a tight, secretive smile. In a desperate hurry now to wrest him loose completely, she pulled harder, drawing out his torso and legs as well, but somehow his other arm, hidden from her view, still anchored him to the earth.
She yanked hard but could not pull the last inches of him out into the light. She planted her feet, bent her back, then put an even greater effort into another pull. The rest of Stephen abruptly jerked free of the ground, then stopped. Clutched in his trailing hand was another small hand whose owner still lay beneath the soil.
Increasingly aware that something was wrong, Renie kept pulling, frantic to dislodge Stephen, but now a chain of small dirty shapes lifted from the soil like the plastic pop-beads she had played with in her own childhood-a score of little children all connected hand to hand, the last still partially immured in the earth.
Renie could not see well-the sky was growing dark, or she had rubbed dirt into her own eyes. She made one last effort, the very hardest pull she could manage, so that for a moment it seemed she was in danger of tearing her own arms out at their roots. The last of the children came free of the soil. But this child's hand held another hand as well, only this last childish fist was the size of a small car, and the wrist loomed from the earth like a vast tree trunk. The very earth trembled as this last monstrous link in the chain, perhaps annoyed by Renie's insistent pulling, began ponderously to dig its way upward out of the dark, gelid soil toward the light of the surface.
"Stephen!" she screamed, "let go, boy! You must let go . . . !"
But his eyes remained tight shut and he continued to cling to the chain of other children, even as the earth heaved and the vast shape beneath it continued to rise. . . .
Renie sat up, gasping and shivering, to discover herself in the thin, unchanging gray light of the unfinished simworld, surrounded by the sleeping forms of her companions-!Xabbu, Florimel, Emily 22813 from the crumbling Oz simworld, and the armored silhouette of T4b stretched on the ground beside them like a fallen hood ornament. RenieÕs movement woke !Xabbu; his eyes flicked open, alert and intelligent. It was a surprise, as always, to see that gaze housed in an almost comical baboon face. As he began to rise from where he lay curled near her side, she shook her head.
"I'm okay. Bad dream. Get some more sleep."
He looked at her uncertainly, sensing something in the ragged tone of her voice, but after a moment shrugged a sinuous monkey-shrug and lay down again. Renie took a deep breath, then rose and walked across the hillside to where Martine sat, blind face turned to the skies like a satellite dish.
"Do you want to take a turn sleeping, Martine?" Renie asked as she sat down. "I feel like I'm going to be awake for a while." The complete absence in the environment of wind and ambient sound made it seem as though a thunderstorm was imminent, but they had been here for what seemed several days now without any weather whatsoever, let alone a storm.
Martine turned toward her. "Are you all right?"
It was strange, but no matter how many times Renie saw her companion's bland sim face, when she turned away again she could hardly remember it. There had been plenty of similar-looking sims in Temilœn whose faces were nevertheless full of life and individualism-Florimel had one, and even the false Quan Li had looked like a real person. Martine, though, seemed to have been given something out of a default file.
"Just a bad dream. About Stephen." Renie pawed at the oddly-textured ground. "Reminding myself how little I've done for him, perhaps. But it was a strange dream, too. I've had a few like it. It's hard to explain, but I feel like . . . like I'm really there when they're happening."
Martine nodded slowly. "I think I have had similar types of dreams since we have been on this network-some in which I felt I was seeing things that I have only experienced since I lost my sight. Perhaps it is to do with the change in our sensory input, or perhaps it is something even less explicable. This is a brave new world, Renie, in many ways. Very few humans have experienced such realistic input that was not actually real-very few who were not completely insane, that is."
Renie's smile was a sour one. "So we're all more or less having a continual schizophrenic episode."
"In a way, yes," Martine said thoughtfully. "The kind of thing usually reserved for madmen . . . or for prophets."
Like !Xabbu, Renie almost added, but was not sure what she meant. She looked back toward the rest of their comrades, and specifically to where !Xabbu lay curled, his slender tail pulled up near his muzzle. By his own standards, the Bushman was no more a mystic than he was a theoretical scientist or a philosopher: he was simply working with the laws of the universe as his people knew them.
And after all, Renie had to admit, who's to say they're wrong and we're right?
The silence stretched for a minute, then another. Although the strangeness of the dream still clung to her thoughts, especially the jangling terror of its last moments, she felt a kind of peace as well. "This backwater place we're in," she said at last. "What do you think it is, really?"
Martine frowned, considering. "You mean, do I think it's what it seems to be-something the Grail people haven't finished with yet? I don't know. That seems the most likely explanation, but there are . . . sensations I get from it, things I cannot describe, that make me wonder."
"Like what?"
"As I said, I cannot describe them. But whatever it might be, it is definitely the first place of its sort I have entered, so my speculations do not mean much. It could be that because of the system the Grail Brotherhood employs, any unfinished place would give off the kind of . . ." again she frowned, ". . . the kinds of . . . intimations of vitality this place has." Before Renie could ask her to explain further, Martine rose. "I will take you up on your kind offer, Renie, if it still holds. The last few days have been impossibly difficult, and I find I am much wearier than I thought. Whatever else this place is, at least we are able to rest."
"Of course, get some sleep. We still have a lot ahead of us-a lot to decide."
"So much had to be said simply to bring each other up to date." Martine's smile was wry. "I am certain Florimel and T4b were not entirely unhappy we did not have time for their personal histories."
"Yes. But that's what today's for, whether they like it or not." Renie noticed she had dug a little trench with her fingers into the strange, soapy ground. Remembering the dream, she shivered and filled it in. "They're going to have to tell us. I won't stand any more secrets like that. That might be what killed William."
"I know, Renie. But do not be too fierce. We are allies trapped in a hostile environment and must take care of each other."
She fought down a small twinge of impatience. "Yes, of course. But that's all the more reason we have to know who's watching our backs."
T4B and Florimel were the last to return. By the time they appeared around the curve of the hillside, trudging toward the otherworldly campfire across terrain whose surface hue shifted subtly from instant to instant like the colors on an oil slick, Renie was beginning to feel nervously suspicious about their long absence. Still, even though they were the last two maintaining a mystery about their identities, they also seemed a fairly unlikely pair of allies-a fact underscored as T4b clanked into camp and blurted out their news, clearly irritating Florimel.
"Saw some kinda animal, us," he said. "Got no shape, seen? Just, like . . . light. But all bendy."
At first glance, Florimel's sim appeared little different than the one Martine wore, a woman of the Atascos' Temilun simworld, with a strong nose and a dark, reddish-brown complexion not unlike the Maya; but just as two people might wear the same clothes to totally different effect, where Martine's guise gave an impression of blankness that belied her dry wit and careful empathy, Florimel's small sim seemed to have the coiled intensity of a Napoleon, and her face did not look unfinished or general in the same way Martine's did.
Just another mystery, Renie thought wearily, and probably not one of the important ones.
". . . It wasn't an animal in any normal sense of the word," Florimel was saying. "But it's the first phenomenon we've seen that wasn't obviously part of the geography. It was very fluid, but T4b is correct-it was made of light, or was only partially visible to us. It appeared almost out of nowhere and moved around as though it were looking for something. . . ."
"Then it just zanged out, like into an airhole," T4b finished.
"A what?" Renie turned to Florimel for clarification.
"He means it just . . . well, it did seem to step into a hole in the air. It didn't simply vanish, it . . ." She stopped and shrugged. "Whatever happened, it is gone."
!Xabbu had finished poking up the fire. "And what else did you see?" he asked.
"Saw too much zero, me," said T4b, levering himself down to a seat by the campfire. The reflected flames made unusual, almost textured patterns on his armor.
"We saw a lot more of this," Florimel elaborated, gesturing to the hillside on which they stood. "A thousand variations, but all much the same . . ."
"Don't touch me!" Emily stood up and moved away from T4b.
"Didn't. You're dupped and trans-upped," he growled. "Trying to being friendly, me, all it is." If a warrior-robot could be said to sulk, he was clearly doing so.
Florimel let out a great sigh, as if to underscore what she had been forced to put up with all day. "Everywhere was like this-unfinished, disordered, silent. I do not like it, to tell you the truth." She made a dismissive gesture. "What was perhaps interesting, though, is that we found no sign of a river or anything similar, not even a river-of-air, as we had in the last place."
"William liked flying in that river so much," Martine said suddenly. "He was laughing and laughing. He said it was the first thing he'd found in the whole network that made him think the money was worth spending." Everyone fell silent for a moment. Sweet William's stiffened virtual body was only a short distance away, concealed in a sort of pit on the far side of a knoll swirling with evanescent colors. No one looked in that direction, but everyone was clearly thinking about it.
"So, no river," Renie said. "!Xabbu and I didn't find any trace of one either. Pretty much everything else we saw was as you said-more of the same. We didn't see anything I'd call an animal, though." She sighed. "Which means there isn't any obvious and easy way to travel through and out of this simworld."
"There is not even a way to know which direction we should take," Florimel added. "There is no sun, no sunrise or sunset, no directions at all. We only found our way back because I left a trail of broken . . . sticks, I suppose you would call them . . . behind us."
Like bread crumbs, Renie thought. Isn't that from "Hansel and Gretel"? We're living in a bloody fairy tale-except our story, like this world, hasn't been finished yet . . . and we might not be the folks who are going to be around at Happily Ever After time. Out loud, she said, "We had !Xabbu's nose and sense of direction, although I have to admit I was a little nervous-it all just looks the same to me."
"Did you find food?" asked Emily. "I'm very hungry. I'm going to have a baby, you know."
"Oddly enough," said Florimel, saving Renie the trouble, "we realized that, yes."
Once she had decided to do it, Florimel appeared impatient to start. They had barely settled themselves around the fire pit before she declared, ÒI was born in Munich. In the early Ô30s, during the Lockdown. The part of the city where my mother lived was an industrial slum. We shared a small rebuilt warehouse with a dozen other families. Later, I would realize that it was not all bad-many of the families were political, some of the adults were even wanted by the police for things they had done at the beginning of the Guestworker Revolt, and I was taught a great deal about how the world truly works. Too much, perhaps.Ó
She looked around as though someone might want to ask a question, but Renie and the others had been waiting too long to learn something of this companion-stranger to interrupt her.
